The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  ‘We may as well finish this off,’ Bruno remarked, unscrewing the cap of the flask once more. ‘I’ve told you more than enough about my people. Now it’s your turn.’

  By now, it seemed easy to do. She began at the first point that came into her head. ‘After my father died, my sister and brother and I decided to sell the old house, the one we grew up in. It was hard to do, but in a way it would have been harder to keep it on. Empty most of the time, just a holiday home, accumulating dust and cobwebs and melancholy. But I can still feel the thread connecting me to the place. It’s taut tonight.’

  ‘I understand that,’ Bruno said quietly. ‘Go on.’

  Mair began to tell him about her last morning at the house. She hadn’t tried to relate this to anyone else: if she had been asked she’d have said there was nothing to tell, not really.

  Eirlys and Dylan had both left early. Eirlys went first, her car loaded to the roof and her clipboard and master-list of lists placed next to her on the passenger seat. Dylan held the yard gate open and he and Mair waved to her as she drove away, leaving the home of her childhood as if she had been crossing off another item on her daily to-do list.

  When Dylan was ready, he and Mair stood in the yard. She noticed that a thrush’s nest was held in the twigs of the white lilac tree. Dylan took her hand. ‘Don’t be too sad,’ he said.

  ‘It’s a positive sort of sad,’ she replied. ‘It was a happy place, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Childhood?’

  As they stood there, the yard and the front garden seemed crowded with earlier versions of themselves.

  Mair answered her own question: ‘Yes, it was. I didn’t realise it at the time, though.’

  This made them both laugh. As a girl Mair had been blind to the charms of rural life.

  Dylan kissed her forehead, then he drove away too.

  She was glad to have a last hour alone. She walked through the empty rooms, closing the doors behind her. In the kitchen she rescued a trapped bumble bee, scooping it out to safety in her cupped hands. She followed it outside and leant on the stone wall of the garden. She took in the grey shape of the house, the blots of yellow lichen on the slate roof, the way the windows seemed punched into the thick walls and the whole structure hunkered down against the curve of the hill, so long settled into the ground that it had become as immutable as an outcrop of rock.

  There was just one more thing to do.

  She scrambled over the wall, using the same footholds she had adopted as soon as she was old enough to follow Dylan out into the fields to play. She walked on a diagonal through the soaking grass, away from the hill crest and the lambless grazing flock, and entered a little wood. The bluebells grew here and in that May week they were at their best, all the ground under the leaf canopy hazed with soft colour. Mair picked a small bunch, the stalks giving a familiar milky snap between her fingers and the scent rising around her. She wrapped the cool stems in a tissue from her pocket.

  The bunch of bluebells was the last thing she put into her car, placing it on the passenger seat where Eirlys had stationed her clipboard. She sat for a few moments, looking at the house and the hill behind it. Then she drove away, following her sister and brother down the lane.

  When she reached the village she stopped at the gate of the graveyard. On the other side of the street Tal Williams was coming out of the newsagent’s. It was his family that had farmed the hills behind the old house for more than a hundred years. He waved his folded paper awkwardly at her, his windburnt face turning redder. Twenty years ago Tal had been Mair’s first kiss.

  She waved back, but he didn’t come across the street. He had been at Huw’s funeral, scrubbed up in a black suit and a stiff white shirt, and he would guess what her errand must be today.

  She went on through the gate and walked along the path past a yew tree. Beside a tap in the wall she found a glass jam-jar and splayed the bluebells in it. Carefully, so as not to spill any of the water, she carried it across and put it on the mound of her parents’ grave.

  Then she sat on a sunny bench, reading the inscriptions on the nearby headstones although she knew them all by heart.

  Bruno was a good listener. When she stopped he ducked his head in a quick gesture of appreciation. By this time they had finished as much of their food as they could manage, and their fellow diners were swaddling themselves in ragged quilts and rolling over, ready to sleep.

  He said, ‘You could have stayed at home, never left that place – is that what you’re thinking? Perhaps you could have married your farmer and lived happily ever after.’

  Mair was amused. ‘No, I could not. He’s not mine and I never wanted him to be. He’s getting married to his long-time girlfriend this year. But still there’s a yearning for what might have been in all of us, don’t you think? There must be times when you think that you could have stayed in the mountains, and taken the cows up to pasture every spring.’ And married Heidi, maybe, instead of being drawn to Karen’s bright flame.

  Bruno’s eyes glinted with amusement too. Mair wondered how she had ever thought he was forbidding. ‘I do think that – you’re right. And, like you, I knew I didn’t really want to stay. It wouldn’t have suited me. We like the lives we’ve got, don’t we?’

  Mair said yes, because it was true.

  ‘Anyway, these days, instead of cows, my family’s pastures support several chair lifts and a high-speed gondola. Winter skiing, summer hiking,’ he added casually.

  Mair understood that the Beckers were therefore not too concerned about money. ‘Does Karen have a might-have-been home in her heart too?’

  Bruno said, ‘Ah, Karen’s a free spirit.’

  The men across the room had collapsed into a silent jumble of shrouded heads and crooked knees. It was time to brave the cold before trying to sleep. Bruno upended the flask to check that it really was empty, and Mair clambered to her feet.

  The floor tilted unexpectedly and she put out her hand to steady herself. Bruno caught it in his. With his free hand he clicked on his head-torch.

  ‘Oh dear.’ Mair laughed. ‘Good cognac.’

  ‘And good company,’ he added.

  The force of the blizzard hit them full in the face. The snow in the courtyard had drifted above knee-height and Bruno told her to follow in his footsteps as they battled their way to the opposite corner. The faint yellow cone of torchlight seemed solid with whirling flakes. The door leading to the cell rooms had blown open and a bank of snow was now piled in the freezing stone corridor. Bruno found a shovel in the angle behind the door and he dug furiously to clear a path while Mair directed the light. Working together they managed to force the door shut, and latched it securely with a wooden beam between two iron brackets. Their shadows wobbled on the stone walls.

  ‘Do you have a torch?’ he asked.

  ‘In the car,’ she confessed.

  ‘Take mine for now. We’ll retrieve yours in the morning.’

  ‘But …’ She stopped. It was obvious that they would be going nowhere tomorrow. She also realised that she didn’t mind all that much. Be careful, she warned herself. Don’t even begin to imagine.

  It was the drink affecting her, and the altitude, and the cold, nothing more. Tomorrow she wouldn’t even remember these inappropriate yearnings. She wasn’t a daydreaming schoolgirl, after all.

  ‘Get some sleep. I hope you won’t be too cold.’

  ‘Goodnight,’ Mair said firmly.

  The torch-beam glimmered on the damp stone wall beside her mattress. She took off the top layer of her clothes but kept everything else on, adding a fleece hat and mittens and a second pair of socks. She crawled under the covers, switched off the torch and closed her eyes, shivering. Immediately an image presented itself, of Karen and Bruno lying together with Lotus between them, the vivid threads of their hair all tangled. She pressed her mittens against her face, obliterating everything except cartwheels of torchlight imprinted in her retinas. She listened to the howling of the wind and eventually, interm
ittently, she dozed.

  She woke to early daylight the colour of lead. All she could see through the tiny window was a patch of featureless grey. Her bones were stiff and her feet and fingers numb. When she tried to move she realised also that she was parched with thirst, and a jagged bolt of pain shot through her head. She stretched out her arm, using extreme care, and found her water-bottle. The contents were frozen solid.

  It didn’t take long to dress. The courtyard was furrowed with paths dug through the night’s snowdrifts. The wind had dropped and in its place there was a blanketing fog, out of which spiralled a few lazy snowflakes. Still moving carefully, Mair plodded through the muffled chill. The kitchen seemed crowded but the figures hunched on the mattresses resolved themselves into the Beckers and last night’s drivers, restored once more to sitting positions. Bruno was talking to their own driver, who was gesticulating with his purple mobile phone. Decals glinted all over it. Everyone was grim-faced, except Lotus and Karen, who beamed identically at her.

  ‘Hi, I’m real sorry about last night. I was just laid out. I guess Bruno looked after you,’ Karen called. She was pale, but otherwise her usual self.

  Mair nodded. All she could think of was finding some water to drink. There was a plastic jug standing on a crate next to the bathroom, and even though she knew this was only filtered, not boiled, she jettisoned all her careful hygiene principles and swallowed two full mugs, straight off.

  Lotus was turning the pages of a picture book and telling herself the story in a low voice. Ringlets of pale hair spilt from under her hat and whenever the two indifferent cooks looked her way they smiled at her in spite of themselves.

  Mair was hunched over a bowl of warm rice porridge by the time Bruno finished his conference with the driver. He included her in his terse relaying of the latest news.

  ‘Gulam has just spoken to a friend of his down in Kargil. The roads are blocked but the army and the Border Roads crews are working to clear the route in both directions.’

  ‘So what does that actually mean?’ Karen sighed.

  ‘It means we wait it out. At least we’re safe here, and sheltered. There are some trucks and cars stranded, Gulam says. They’ll want to find those people.’

  ‘Have some porridge, honey.’ Karen passed Bruno a tin bowl.

  ‘I just wish I’d bought a Jammu and Kashmir mobile,’ he fretted. ‘Or a satphone.’ He turned his BlackBerry over and frowned at the sleek, dead screen. Mair understood his anxiety. The absolute isolation of this place struck her afresh. They were dependent on Gulam’s mobile for as long as its battery lasted, unless there was any power supply in Lamayuru with which to charge it. And without that fragile link, they were entirely cut off from the outside world.

  ‘How long does Gulam think it will take to clear the roads?’ Karen persisted.

  ‘Unless there’s a freak heatwave, it could be several days.’

  ‘Really? That long?’ Karen turned to Mair, collecting up her mass of hair as she did so and twisting it into a knot. ‘I hope you’ve got a good book to read,’ she said. ‘Or you could come with me up to the monastery. The wall paintings are magnificent.’

  A silence fell. Lotus found her doll among the damp clothing strewn on the mattress. She began crooning to her in French, her small voice rising into the cold air.

  Bruno said that he would go with Gulam and retrieve the rest of their luggage from the Toyota. It would mean digging the car out of the snow, he warned them, so it might take some time. Karen immediately jumped to her feet and Lotus scrambled up too.

  ‘We’ll come. We can have a walk in the snow.’

  ‘Make a snowman,’ Lotus gurgled. ‘Oui, Pappy?’

  Bruno said shortly that this wasn’t the park in Geneva.

  ‘Hey, don’t be so crabby,’ Karen rebuked him.

  She wasn’t going to be dissuaded. She wanted fresh air and exercise, she insisted – in fact, they all needed some if they were to be cooped up in this place for the rest of the day. She swung round to Mair. ‘You’ll come too, won’t you?’

  Mair reckoned that a blast of cold fresh air might help her hangover.

  In the end, Bruno agreed that they would all go. Armed with shovels borrowed from the guesthouse they set out into the cavernous mist. Gulam led the way and each step forwards took him deeper into the murk.

  The cold was raw and insistent. Keeping close to the wall, they sidestepped in a series of footprints that descended from the ledge. Lotus grasped her mother’s hand. She slipped once, her feet skidding from under her, but Karen swung her upright.

  ‘Again,’ Lotus chirped, launching herself off the next step. Her pink face shone and she seemed enviably unaffected by the cold.

  It was a long descent. A monk came climbing past them, his top half wrapped in an anorak and the hem of his robe soaked and dragging. His shaved head was covered with a bobble hat. An old woman followed, bent under a bundle of firewood almost as big as herself.

  Life at Lamayuru would go on, as it always had done, in conditions much worse than today’s.

  They came to the foot of the steps and reached a steep section of road that curled round the hill. Mair recognised none of this, but Gulam knew the way even in the disorientating mist. Gingerly they edged their way downwards to a point where the road widened and flattened. With every contour gentled by snow and the mist, a line of tumbledown sheds and a broken cart loomed with the eerie beauty of a winter still-life. Animal pawprints tracked the whiteness here and there. They rounded another corner, and in front of them appeared the mounds of several abandoned vehicles. The snow had been heavily trampled all round them and soiled heaps clogged the road margins where some of the cars had already been partly excavated. Beside the rear door of one were more animal prints and a dismembered bag of rubbish. Shreds of plastic and gnawed vegetable peelings stuck out of the dug-over snow.

  The Toyota was the furthest along the line of cars, still a pristine humped dome. Bruno and Gulam swung their shovels at it.

  Mair stopped to catch her breath. Something made her glance upwards just as a single gust of wind tore a hole in the mist. Far above, so high up that she had to tilt her head backwards to see them, a cluster of a dozen squat white domes topped with fantastic spirals of black and gold appeared to float in the sky. Ragged flags danced between the pinnacles before vanishing into streams of vapour. It was like a glimpse of another world, and even as she stared at it the mist closed everything out again.

  The clink of shovels carried to her, and she could hear voices shouting directions from somewhere below. A generator started up, coughed, and settled into a steady thrum. She stamped her feet and swung her arms to get the blood circulating, but a sense of detachment persisted. She felt that she was standing apart, watching the day unravelling and winding out of her grasp.

  The next moments would remain in her memory for ever.

  Karen seized a double handful of sticky snow. She compacted it with slaps of her mittened hands, then rolled it on the ground to make the beginnings of a snowman. Lotus scrambled in the churned snow at her mother’s feet, and behind them Bruno twisted and stretched with a loaded shovel. Mair’s visual memory of him was as a black query-shape printed on blankness. Lotus was darting towards her now, a shining grin showing her small teeth, her button nose runny and her hands lifted in the air.

  ‘Make a jump, My,’ she called. ‘Jump!’

  Mair glanced over her left shoulder. There was enough space, and the snow had been trampled in a rough circle. She gathered her muscles in readiness and took in a breath.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed an oncoming shadow. It slid from beneath one of the cars and flattened itself among the rubbish. But she was already in the air, the cars and the snow and the blank sky and the shadow itself revolving round her as she executed her back flip. She landed, and heard Lotus’s cry of delight.

  As she regained her balance the shadow swept in front of her.

  It sprang from the ground, straight at
Lotus.

  The child’s cry mutated from delight to a scream of terror, and then there was abrupt silence as she fell to the ground.

  The brindled dog straddled the small body, jaws wide to bite, its body shivering and jerking.

  Karen screamed and plunged forwards, but it was Bruno who reached the fallen child first. He kicked the dog in the head with such force that it was flung backwards into the air, a rope of saliva twisting from its jaw. Even before it landed Gulam was smashing at its skull with his shovel. The creature snarled and made to attack again, but one more shovel blow sent it skidding through the debris before it vanished into the mist.

  Bruno snatched Lotus up and held her in his arms.

  Her face was ice-blue and white, her mouth was stretched open but no sound emerged from it and her eyes made huge shocked circles. In the middle of one cheek was the dog’s bite. From the margins of torn skin the blood was beginning to spring, pinpricks of shocking crimson in the colourless world. Her hat had come off and her hair fell in pale threads over her father’s shoulder.

  Doors opened and people emerged. Where there had been emptiness there were faces and pointing fingers and a clamour of voices.

  Bruno was already running. His legs pumped as he raced through the snow, past the staring people, plunging up the steps the way they had come. Karen flung herself after him. Mair snatched up Lotus’s fallen hat and clenched her fist on the ball of soft wool. She ran too, hearing Gulam panting beside her and – a long way ahead now – the shiver of Lotus’s voice rising in the first thin wail of shock and pain.

  Bruno had reached the steps and instantly the mist swallowed him up. Mair had never seen anyone move so fast. She ploughed in his wake, her heart thumping and her breath coming in irregular gulps. Over the rushing of blood in her ears she could hear Lotus’s faint cries. At last she came to the top of the steps and the snow-shrouded guesthouse took shape just ten yards away. On collapsing legs she raced across the courtyard with Karen and Gulam at her heels.