‘Now for the crab,’ Sajjad said, handing one of his bags to Harry. ‘So that there’ll be something at dinner that I can eat. Have you ever eaten raw fish, Henry Baba?’
‘Sushi? I love sushi.’
‘Really? Thirty-five years of marriage and she still hasn’t convinced me to put it in my mouth. All her other Japanese food I’ve learnt to appreciate. I say to her, whatever you cook, I’ll eat. But it must be cooked.’
Harry stepped round a boy who had dropped a fish on the floor and was trying to pick it up only to have it slither out of his grasp at every attempt.
‘The two of you – you know, when I was growing up, falling in love for the first time, listening to the kind of music guaranteed to make you feel sadder than any of the circumstances of your life merit, I used to think of the two of you as the greatest of all romantic couples.’
‘Oh, no no. We were just young and foolish. What did we know about each other? Almost nothing. It was luck, pure luck, that we discovered after marriage that our natures were so sympathetic to each other. And also’ – he stopped, twirled the polythene bag so it braided itself all the way up to his wrist – ‘we both had too much loss in our lives, too early. It made us understand those parts of the other which were composed of absence.’ He wrinkled his nose – it was a tic he’d picked up from his wife. ‘If she heard that she’d say it’s the melodramatic Dilli poet inside me. Look, oysters. I think we’ll take some. You can’t go wrong with an oyster. Open it up and you’ll either find a pearl or an aphrodisiac. You’re smiling, Henry Baba. I didn’t think you’d know the Urdu term for “aphrodisiac”. Quick, tell me why you know it. There must be a story behind this.’
How was it possible, Harry thought, to have such a man as this as your father and grow up as uncertain of your place in the world as Raza appeared to be. If you were Sajjad Ashraf’s son, how could you fail to regard the world as your oyster, regardless of whether you saw yourself as gemstone or mollusc?
At that moment, though, Raza didn’t see himself as either gemstone or mollusc but merely a boy whose shoes had been stolen from his feet as he slept. He didn’t see Harry’s shoes with socks stuffed into them in the driver-seat area as he rubbed his eyes to ensure he was properly awake before rolling up his shalwar to shin-height and stepping tentatively out of the car, cursing in German as his feet touched the cold, filthy road. No sign of any thief, just a truck parked a few feet away. Near fifteen feet above the ground a Pathan man was perched like a gargoyle on the frame of the truck’s container portion, watching the early-morning ocean traffic.
‘Anything exciting going on out there?’ Raza called up in Pashto – it was the only one of his languages that Hiroko hadn’t taught him; he’d learnt it instead during all the years he’d gone to and from school in a van driven by a sweet-natured Pathan who had insisted Raza sit up front with him ever since the boy, at the age of six, first expressed an interest in learning the driver’s first language. For nearly a decade of Raza’s life the van driver remained the finest of all his teachers.
The man shaded his eyes with his hands, almost saluting.
‘Are you Afghan?’
Raza touched his cheekbones reflexively. Until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan he’d never heard that question; but in the last four years, as increasing numbers of refugees made their way into Pakistan, it had become something less than unusual for Raza to be identified as an Afghan from one of the Mongol tribes.
‘Yes,’ he said, and felt the rightness of the lie press against his spine, straightening his back.
The man swung down from the container to look more closely at Raza.
‘Who are your people?’
‘Hazara,’ Raza said confidently. He knew that was what Harry Burton had assumed him to be.
‘Come, meet someone,’ the man said, hopping down on to the ground and placing his arm around Raza’s shoulder. ‘Abdullah! Wake up!’
The carved wooden driver’s-side door was kicked open by a pale foot, and a few seconds later a boy – no more than fourteen – jumped out of the cab. His wide, upturned mouth and the childish chubbiness of his cheeks did nothing to undercut the adult gaze he directed at Raza through his hazel eyes.
‘You have a brother here from Afghanistan,’ the man said. ‘A Hazara.’
The boy ignored Raza and twisted his features at the older man.
‘What does Pakistan do to people’s brains? Is it something in the air? Am I going to get stupider if I spend more time here? Since when are Hazaras and Pashtuns brothers?’
Pashtun, not Pathan, Raza noted.
The older man smiled as if recognising the insult as a form of love, and it was Raza who answered, just to assure himself that he wasn’t intimidated by a boy six inches shorter than him.
‘Since the Soviets marched into our house and we both had to escape through the window, that’s since when Hazaras and Pashtuns are brothers.’
The boy frowned.
‘How long have you been away from Afghanistan? You speak Pashto like this Pakistani here.’ He indicated the older man, who looked offended this time. ‘Is Dari your language?’
‘Raza!’ It was his father, walking towards the car, waving bags of fish at him while Harry pointed at Raza’s feet and made a gesture of distress before pointing to his own feet.
‘I have to go,’ Raza said.
‘Is that man American?’ Abdullah asked.
Raza smiled.
‘I have to go,’ he said again.
The boy nodded, his eyes still on Harry.
‘Where do you live? I haven’t seen you in Sohrab Goth.’
Raza had been about to walk away, but at mention of Sohrab Goth he paused, weighing up the possibility that his lies would expose him to humiliation against the usefulness of knowing someone in Sohrab Goth, where, one of the neighbourhood boys swore, it was possible to buy cassette-players and televisions and telephones with loudspeakers at a fraction of the lowest price anywhere else in the city. This boy, it was obvious, could bargain down an Afghan trader to a price Raza couldn’t demand without his voice conveying his own suspicion that he was insulting the seller.
‘I might be there soon,’ he said. ‘How can I find you?’ He didn’t even bother making up an answer to Abdullah’s query about where he lived. He had realised already that the boy didn’t ask questions for the purpose of being answered, but merely to maintain an interrogatory style that asserted control.
‘There’s a truck yard next to Bara Market. Just tell anyone there you want Abdullah – the one who drives the truck with the dead Soviet.’
Raza took a step back, alarmed, and then saw the boy pointing to the side of his truck, its wood panelling decorated with brightly painted birds and mountains and flowers and – Raza looked in the direction of the pointing finger – a miniature portrait of a man in Soviet Army uniform lying on the ground with blood gushing from his body as though it were a multispouted fountain.
The boy laughed.
‘Everyone knows me, and my truck.’ The older man made a noise deep in his throat and the boy said, ‘It’s actually this Afridi’s truck. But I’m the one who asked for the Soviet to be put there.’
Raza nodded.
‘Next time I’m there, I’ll ask for you,’ he said.
‘If I’m around,’ the boy said. ‘You never know. One day Karachi, one day Sargodha, one day Peshawar. I’ve seen everything in this country.’ He glanced over towards Harry, who had taken off his shoes and was walking, barefoot, towards Raza, holding them in front of him like an offering. ‘But I never thought I’d see that.’
Harry reached Raza, apologising profusely even as he went down on one knee and placed the shoes on the ground for Raza to step into. In normal circumstances, Raza would have objected, insisted Harry wear the shoes, brightened with embarrassment to be treated with such deference by anyone older than himself. But as he saw the look of awe in Abdullah’s eyes – a look not dissimilar to the ones his classmates used to direct at hi
m when he scored full marks in the most difficult of exams – he just winked at the younger boy and slipped his feet into the rubber shoes, his hand touching the air above the American’s head as though in benediction.
17
The fifteen-year-old American girl held out the pirated video to the man behind the counter, who was about to place it in a brown paper bag when he noticed the title, and frowned.
‘Not appropriate,’ he said, whisking the video into a cubbyhole beneath his desk. He offered her another video. ‘Why don’t you take this?’ The girl read the scrawled title and made a whistling sound of disgust through the little gap in her front teeth, her green, almond-shaped eyes looking squarely at him in a manner he found both unfamiliar and embarrassing.
‘If there’s a law against me taking that other movie, fine. But “appropriateness” is not something you get to decide about.’
He almost laughed at this strange hierarchy which placed the law above advice by an elder but something in those clear green eyes suggested this might not be a wise course of behaviour.
‘If your father says OK, then I will give it to you,’ he said in the manner of one who has found a compromise and expects gratitude for it.
The girl made a sound which was unfamiliar but clearly meant to convey disgust and walked out of his store, leaving him to wonder about this odd creature with her metal-studded leather jacket, her black lipstick, and her short, copper-coloured hair, from which one long strand extended like a rat’s tail curling beneath her shoulders.
‘Daddy Warbucks!’ Kim Burton called out to her father as she walked out of the shop. ‘He wants me to watch Annie. What kind of place is this?’
Harry held up a hand to his daughter to gesture she should go back into the video shop and wait for him, and continued talking to the man selling nuts and dried fruit from a wooden cart on wheels. Ignoring his directive, she walked closer to him, almost managing to be unbothered by the stares of passers-by in the busy commercial square – it was the women who stared more, she’d noticed in her four days in Islamabad, and several had actually come up to her and taken hold of the long, gelled strands of her hair using the word ‘chooha’, which her father had enthusiastically translated as ‘mouse’.
He carried on speaking to the other man in Urdu as she stopped next to him, slinging his arm across her shoulder to acknowledge he knew she was there. She felt such a rush of warmth and safety to be pulled in against him that it made her step away, scowling. He was different here. Looser somehow. He preferred it here, that’s what it was. Gran had said he would.
Later, when they were driving down a wide, tree-lined boulevard towards the vast mosque under construction at one end of it, a video of Tootsie in her lap (at the last moment she’d lost the nerve to tell him it was Porky’s she wanted), she said, ‘Why do you keep saying you hate Islamabad when you’re obviously so much happier here than even New York, never mind DC or Berlin?’
Harry Burton glanced in surprise at his daughter. Like her adored grandmother she had the ability to see things in him which he was sure no one else would guess. It made him nervous. Ilse Weiss was one thing – she’d known him his whole life – but to this girl he’d been a fleeting presence since she was four years old and divorce had ended familial life in DC, unshackling her parents from each other and from the city they both disliked, but which had proved a compromise between one’s insistence on raising her child in America, the other’s insistence on staying with his chosen career. He was a failed parent, he knew this, and so when Kim came to visit – formerly in Berlin, now here – or when he stopped for a few days in New York to see her he accepted her sulks and tantrums as his just deserts; but these moments of insight in which she showed him glimpses of the woman she could grow into once adolescence passed made him uneasy. There was too much he didn’t want her ever to know about him.
‘I do hate Islamabad,’ he said firmly.
He stopped at a traffic light, and the man on a bicycle who stopped beside him leaned slightly towards Harry’s open window, his head nodding in appreciation of the music from the car stereo. Harry ejected the cassette and handed it to the man – prompting a gasp of outrage from Kim, even though she had the master cassette at home and this was just the copy she’d made for the stereo, which was in the habit of chewing up tape. The man took the cassette, his tentativeness suggesting he couldn’t believe it was really meant for him, and directed the question ‘Amreekan?’ at Harry. When Harry nodded, the man stuck his pinky finger into one of the holes around which the tape spooled and held it up with an expression of amazement, turning his hand this way and that as if admiring an engagement ring. Then he removed a bagful of apples from his handlebar and passed it over to Harry before driving off, ringing his cycle bell, the cassette still wedged on to his finger.
‘I do hate the place,’ Harry said. ‘But I love the people. Not the ones in officialdom – the real people.’
‘Huh,’ Kim said, swallowing this piece of information. ‘That’s funny. I used to think the rule which said you can’t be President of America if you’re born somewhere else was really stupid because of course people who migrate in are going to be more loyal citizens than the ones who take it for granted. I thought that because of you – and how England means nothing to you. But I guess England’s not really the country you left behind, is it?’
‘England was a way station,’ Harry said, feeling some satisfaction in imagining Kim repeating this to her grandfather. James Burton would choke on the information. Ilse Weiss, on the other hand, would delight in it.
The story of Harry’s childhood was one Kim knew well – it was also one of the few stories Harry could be trusted to tell without any evasion, belonging, as it did, to that time in his life before secrecy and lies became necessary.
The only thing worse than leaving India was arriving in England. Harry would always start the story with that line. The war was still everywhere, the sun was nowhere, and all the boys at school laughed at his ‘Indian expressions’ (both verbal and physical) and wanted to know what his father had done in the war. And then the final horror: the only other boy who had just arrived from India, and who Harry had considered an ally, said, ‘His mother’s German.’ So, much of the first year was abject misery. Things only improved near Easter when one of the boys threw a cricket ball his way with the words, ‘Hey, Maharaja Fritz. Know how to bowl?’ Then the skills taught to him by Sajjad – he always looked somewhat wistful when he mentioned that name – turned him into something of a school hero.
Two years later, when his father announced over Easter break that his mother’s ‘short trip to New York’, which had commenced three months earlier, was going to be permanent, and Harry was to go there to join her, the eleven-year-old was torn. He wanted to be near his mother, but he knew his cricketing skills would get him nowhere in New York City. And what else did he have, after all? Nothing but another foreign accent. By now, India had left his speech, and what remained was ‘Marmite and sardines’, as his mother put it.
There was only one thing to be done, Harry decided. He would go to New York at the start of the summer, not the end of it as had been planned, and prepare. ‘Teach me to speak American,’ he said on his first day in New York to the beautifully dressed young man who had let him in to Uncle Willie’s Upper East Side flat. (‘It’s an apartment. That’s your first lesson.’) He resisted all attempts by his mother to introduce him to boys who would be his classmates (‘Don’t say “mate” ’) in the autumn (“fall”). He learnt the rules of baseball, the stats of all the Yankees players over the last twenty years, and found himself weeping as he stood in front of the recently unveiled Babe Ruth monument.
Even so, on the first day of school his foreignness overwhelmed him to the point of muteness. He mumbled his way through the first hours, keeping his head down and paying attention to no one but the teachers. It was only during recess, as he sat alone on a stone step listening to the boys around him, that he realised he was surround
ed by a group of immigrants. German, Polish, Russian. They were all, like him, bound by class in this exclusive public (‘Private, Henry, private’) school, and bound also by the fact that their parents, for one reason or another, wanted no more to do with Europe after the war.
Harry looked at the group, and then looked towards the boys lounging beneath a tree, no whiff of the Old World about them.
Standing up, he paused, realising he was about to take the first real risk of his life, then walked up to the second group of boys and said, ‘Hi, I’m Harry.’
That winter, in London, James Burton would tell his son that confidence gets you far in life – and that if Harry had been less insecure when he first arrived at boarding school in England he would have met with a friendly reception there, too. But Harry watched not only himself but also the other sons of immigrants as they made their way through the school year, and understood that America allowed – no, insisted on – migrants as part of its national fabric in a way no other country had ever done. All you had to do was show yourself willing to be American – and in 1949, what else in the world would you want to be? (‘And do all the Negro students at your school agree with this assessment, Henry?’ ‘I never said it’s a perfect country, Dad, just the best there is.’)
‘Huge sacrifice you’ve made,’ Kim said, closing her eyes to take in the fragrance of jasmine flowers which had leapt through the window in a rush. ‘Living outside the world’s best country in order to serve it.’
Burnt Shadows Page 17