Harry glanced sideways at her, and sighed.
‘I do miss you, you know. And if there was any need for consular officers in New York, believe me, I’d be there in a heartbeat.’
‘Drop the consular-officer crap, Dad,’ Kim said, her eyes still closed.
There was a squealing sound as Harry swerved on to the side of the road and braked sharply.
‘Apologise,’ he said.
Kim opened her mouth to issue something other than an apology but then the thought came to her that his car might be bugged; someone who shouldn’t know the truth might learn it from her and that could hurt him.
She leaned sideways and wrapped her arms around Harry, startling him.
‘Sorry, Daddy. Sorry. I’m just mouthing off.’
Harry kissed the top of her head fiercely. It was the first glimpse he’d had of his child through the prickliness of adolescence since she’d arrived in Islamabad for her Christmas holidays. He wanted to say he wished he’d chosen differently but he had a horror of her recognising the lie. Right now, more than ever, he knew he was doing with his life precisely what most excited him. When had the shift occurred, he wondered, as Kim sat back in her seat, arms crossed, looking mortified at her outburst. When had it become about excitement rather than idealism? He felt himself only tenuously connected to the young man who in ’64 had stepped away from the path of academia and applied for another line of work entirely, explaining to the men who interviewed him that he wanted to join them because he believed fervently that Communism had to be crushed so that the US could be the world’s only superpower. It was not the notion of power itself that interested Harry, but the idea of it concentrated in a nation of migrants. Dreamers and poets could not come up with a wiser system of world politics: a single democratic country in power, whose citizens were connected to every nation in the world. How could anything but justice be the most abiding characteristic of that country’s dealings with the world? That was the future Harry Burton saw, the future of which he determined to be a part. And he would not be one of those men to stay out of a war while claiming to care passionately about its outcome.
Well, he cared just as passionately now, but it had been a long time since he’d thought about it in relation to justice, let alone dreamers and poets.
He pulled up next to the vast mosque, which had been under construction for twelve years now against the verdant backdrop of the Margalla Hills, and watched his daughter smile at the construction site as she smiled at nothing else in Islamabad.
‘What’s that thing shaped like an armadillo’s shell ringed in by four spears?’ she’d asked the first evening he’d taken her driving around Islamabad. It was the first sentence she’d spoken that didn’t contain the word ‘boring’.
Now he watched her shrug off the leather jacket and tuck the eyebrow-raising tail of hair into her T-shirt while wiping a tissue vigorously across the lips – and suddenly all the bristling attitude had gone out of her appearance, and she was just a young girl, eyes bright as she approached the contractor, who had become the one person in Islamabad in whom she showed any interest. Harry wondered which version – bristling or not – would have manifested itself in front of the Ashrafs if he had taken Kim to Karachi. Hiroko and Sajjad had both expressed a desire to meet her, but Harry had only to conjure a mental image of the differences between the considerate, polite boy the Ashrafs had raised and his own hellion offspring to know such a meeting might go disastrously wrong. And yet, in this moment, he wished he’d chosen differently – not least because he missed the Ashrafs, and saw how Christmas in their company might feel like a real family Christmas. Never mind – he would see them in a couple of weeks. Kim was leaving, and he’d arranged to get the keys to a beach hut in Karachi from a colleague at the Consulate there. He smiled, imagining how delighted Raza would be by the outing he’d organ ised. Then he glanced at Kim, and sighed. It was easy enough to delight someone else’s teenage child.
‘Can you tell him as we were driving up I saw how the roof is a tent, and not an armadillo’s shell,’ she said, indicating the contractor who was walking up to them with a smile. ‘Though the four minarets still look like spears.’
Harry translated partially, leaving out the part about the spears, which he suspected might not go down too well, even though he had a feeling the contractor knew enough English to understand a good part of what Kim had said. The contractor nodded, smiled, and ushered them inside the vast mosque; Harry’s hand hovered protectively above Kim’s head in the absence of any hard hats, but his daughter was too excited to react with the irritation she would otherwise have exhibited.
‘Wow,’ Kim kept saying, as the contractor walked them around – the first time he’d agreed to let them see the interior – and showed how the unusually shaped roof was supported on giant girders.
The tale of generations, Harry thought. James Burton watched with dismay the collapse of Empire; Harry Burton was working for the collapse of Communism; and Kim Burton only wanted to know how to build, one edifice at a time, the construction process being all that mattered, not whether the outcome was mosque or art gallery or prison. Of all of them, Harry thought with one of his sudden rushes of sentimentality, she alone could be counted on to engage with the world without doing any harm.
18
From a distance, it looked as if they were praying.
Harry Burton and Hiroko Ashraf knelt on either side of a rock pool, hands on their knees, neither looking left towards seagulls gliding above the water’s surface nor right towards the beach life on the sand: families sitting on shawls, eating oranges to counter the salty air; a group of boys rolling a tennis ball towards a group of girls, a piece of paper taped to the ball with something written on it which made the girls giggle and cluster together; camels with heavily mirror-worked seats eliciting screams from young passengers as they dipped forward and back in the see-saw of standing; Raza constructing an elaborate sand fort, because that’s what Harry said he used to enjoy doing at the beach in his youth, while Sajjad inscribed Urdu verses on the fort’s walls with the sharp end of a cuttlebone.
‘Sometimes you only know the salamanders are there because they stir up the mud. Their camouflage is slightly more effective than yours.’ Hiroko waved a hand in the direction of Harry’s hennaed hair, several shades brighter than its natural colour.
Harry laughed.
‘Don’t mock. Even the Pathans think I’m Pathan when I’m wearing a shalwar kameez. I tell them my name is Lala Buksh, and then my inability to say very much more in Pashto gives me away. Any idea what happened to him? The real Lala Buksh?’
Hiroko shook her head. Turning her face towards the sea, she closed her eyes and smiled.
‘It’s such a pleasure to be here. We live so far inland I sometimes forget this is also a coastal city.’
‘Also?’
‘Like Nagasaki.’
She looked towards the three wooden fishing boats progressing in a line towards the horizon, no sails, and at this distance no sound of motors, so that they seemed to be propelled by the will of the sea. Nagasaki to Bombay. Bombay to Istanbul. Istanbul to Karachi. All that sea-travel in a single year, made more extraordinary by the fact that in the years preceding she’d never left Japan, and in the years that followed she had never left Pakistan. Rarely left Karachi, in fact – Sajjad sometimes took Raza to Lahore to see his brother Iqbal, or to Peshawar to see his sister, and once a decade or so they’d cross the border to visit the family that remained in Delhi, though those were always dispiriting trips. But Hiroko didn’t accompany them on these family trips, and Sajjad had long ago recognised that his Japanese wife would always be an outsider to his family, her presence reason for discomfort on every side, and he’d finally stopped asking her to come along. So every so often she would have these days alone in Karachi, and always there’d be a secret thrill of imagining she might dip into their savings and board a flight to somewhere – Egypt, Hong Kong, New York – returning in time to we
lcome her husband and son home.
‘Do you still think about it a lot? About Nagasaki?’ It was not the kind of question he would usually ask of someone he had first met only a couple of months earlier, but already Hiroko seemed like someone who had been in his life a very long time.
She touched her back, just above the waist.
‘It’s always there.’
Harry nodded, and looked down into the clear water of the rock pool, seeing his face with sea plants growing out of it.
‘How did you explain it to Raza? With Kim – the first time she asked about Konrad, I made an excuse and left the room. My mother told her something – I still don’t know what, except that it made her look terrifyingly grown-up when she walked out of the room. She was eight.’
Hiroko glanced over to Raza, his concentration intent upon his fort. In this moment, he was a child.
‘Fairy tales,’ she said. ‘I made up fairy tales.’
Harry shook his head, not understanding.
She took a deep breath.
‘I’ll tell you,’ she said, and he knew by her voice that he was going to hear something that she would speak of to almost no one else. ‘There was the one about the girl whose dying father slithers towards her in the shape of a lizard; she is so horrified by his grotesqueness it takes her years to understand that his final act was to come towards her, after a lifetime of walking away. The one about the boy shaken out of his life and told that was a dream, and so was everyone he loved in it – this charred world, this prison, this aloneness is reality. The one about the purple-backed bookcreatures with broken spines who immolate themselves rather than exist in a world in which everything written in them is shown to be fantasy. The woman who loses all feeling, fire entering from her back and searing her heart, so it’s possible for her to see a baby’s corpse and think only, There’s another one. The men and women who walk through shadow-worlds in search of the ones they loved. Monsters who spread their wings and land on human skin, resting there, biding their time. The army of fire demons, dropped from the sky, who kill with an embrace. The schoolteacher in a world where textbooks come to life; she cannot escape from the anatomy text, its illustrations following her everywhere – bodies without skin, bodies with organs on display, bodies that reveal what happens to bodies when nothing in them works any more.’
‘God. Hiroko.’
When he had applied to work at the CIA’s Directorate of Operations he had anticipated running into trouble over his foreign birth and the question of divided allegiances; but the India and England years rated little mention in his interview, and the only sticky moment occurred when he was asked his views on the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Acutely aware of the polygraph machine attached to him, he had said, ‘Like President Eisenhower, I believe we should not have done that.’
Now Pakistan was developing its nuclear programme. The CIA knew. And as far as Harry could make out all they were doing in response was gathering information that confirmed this was so and then funnelling more money into the country, making possible the huge expenditure that such a programme required. Harry had no memory of Konrad, but that hadn’t prevented him from dreaming of mushroom clouds on a regular basis since the day in 1945 when he found the magazine his mother had brought home with its pictures of atomic-bomb victims – he had looked from the photographs of burnt lumps of humanity to the picture of Uncle Konrad as a young boy, just a little older than Harry was himself, smiling at the camera with Harry’s own smile.
It was Ilse Weiss, not any of the CIA psychologists, who had suggested that at the very root of Harry’s determination to join the CIA at the height of the Cold War was the terror of nuclear war, the threat of which could only be eliminated by conclusively ending the battle between America and Russia. Harry had laughed dismissively – he always refused to acknowledge to his mother that he worked for the CIA, though she had somehow managed to work it out while he was still in training at the Farm; but ever since he had read a colleague’s report to Langley about the Pakistan nuclear project there had been times, while sitting across from the ISI officials, when Harry felt a rage that went beyond the usual mistrust and annoyances and anger that accompanied every step of the ISI–CIA alliance, and then he couldn’t help wondering if his mother might have had a point.
‘But I never told Raza the fairy tales,’ Hiroko said. ‘Not any of them. I kept thinking, One day he’ll be old enough. But why should I ever let my child imagine all that?’ She cupped water in her hand and drizzled it on Harry’s scalp, which was beginning to turn red in the sun. ‘He knows there was a bomb. He knows it was terrible, and that my father died, and the man I was engaged to died. He once received a history book for a birthday present which had a full page about Hiroshima, with a paragraph appended about Nagasaki. It showed a picture of an old Japanese man looking sad, and holding a bandage against his bloodied head. It looked as if he’d scraped it falling off the low branch of a tree. Raza showed it to me, nodded his head, and never said anything about it again.’
‘And the burns on your back?’
He was unprepared for the anger streaking across her face, the bite in her voice as she said, ‘Your mother had no business telling you about that.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ He found he was actually frightened of her displeasure, shaken by the unfamiliarity of her features without their customary good humour.
She brushed a hand over her face, as though wiping away the unpleasantness that had settled there, and reached out to pat Harry’s wrist.
‘Forgive my vanity. Sajjad is the one person in the world who I allow . . .’ She stopped, smiled in a way that told Harry that to continue would reveal details of intimacy between husband and wife, and added, ‘Actually, Raza’s never seen them.’
‘He hasn’t seen them?’ Impossible to keep the shock out of his voice.
‘Oh, he knows they’re there. He knows there are places without feeling. When he was a child he liked to sneak up behind me and tap against my back with a fork or a pencil, laughing when I carried on doing whatever I was doing, unaware. It made Sajjad so angry, but I was grateful he could approach it with such lightness.’ She looked amused by Harry’s continued expression of amazement. ‘This is not a world in which young boys see their mother’s bare backs, you know. I never made a conscious choice for him not to see it – I simply didn’t think I needed to go out of my way to show him what was done to me. And yes, Harry Burton, they’re ugly. And I am vain.’
He wanted – strangely, wildly – to apologise to her, to beg her forgiveness. The only thing that stopped him was the certainty that whatever he said would be inadequate, and embarrassing to her.
‘But I don’t want you to think my life is haunted by the past,’ Hiroko continued. ‘I’m told most hibakusha have survivor’s guilt. Believe me, I don’t. Here I am, breathing in the sea air, watching for salamanders and hermit crabs with a Weiss while my husband and son build forts on the sand. Yesterday, I picked up the ringing telephone and heard my old friend Ilse’s voice for the first time in thirty-five years.’ She smiled with a deep pleasure. It had been extraordinary, the way the intervening years had compressed into nothing, and they had talked without constraint for over an hour, Ilse’s voice happy in a way it had never been during the days of her marriage to James. ‘And tomorrow morning I will walk into the schoolyard with my neighbour and friend, Bilqees, who teaches with me, and my students will crowd around to tell me about their school trip to the zoo, so many of them chattering at the same time that I won’t understand a word any of them is saying. Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn’t make it any less valuable.’
She leaned back and sank her feet into the rock pool. She didn’t know how to tell him – without making him uncomfort able – that he had become part of all that was valuable in her life. The way he had entered their house in Nazimabad, entered their daily lives – there was something simply amazing in it. Earlier, watching Harry play cri
cket on the sand with Raza and a group of young boys, she realised that while Konrad would have determinedly wandered into parts of town which his sister stayed far from he would have done it self-consciously, aware of his own transgression. And Ilse, for all her years in New York, mingling with ‘people of all kinds’, as she put it, would still not be able to enter Sajjad’s presence without remembering he had been only one rung up from a servant – this much was obvious in the only stilted moment of their conversation, when Ilse said, ‘And how is your husband?’ But Harry’s attitude was simply one of gratitude for being welcomed.
Americans! she thought, watching Harry remove a tube of sunblock from the pocket of his shorts and apply some to the top of his head. In Tokyo, thirty-five years ago, she had decided their snobbery was not of class but of nation (‘The bomb saved American lives!’ Even now, even now, she could feel her face burning at the memory). But around Harry Burton she felt herself relent. He was a consular officer – Konrad’s nephew, a consular officer. It seemed entirely right. He was the gatekeeper between one nation and the next, and all she had seen of him these last weeks led her to believe he swung the gate open, wide.
‘Partition and the bomb,’ Harry said, interrupting her. ‘The two of you are proof that humans can overcome everything.’
Overcome. Such an American word. What really did it mean? But she knew he meant it generously, so it seemed discourteous to throw the word back in his face with stories of a ‘not right’ foetus which her body had rejected, or the tears Sajjad wept after his first visit to his collapsed world in Delhi.
Instead she said, ‘Sometimes I look at my son and think perhaps the less we have to “overcome” the more we feel aggrieved.’
The drifting sense of hopelessness that had taken over Raza’s life after his second failed attempt at his exam had sharpened into self-pity these last weeks in which Sajjad had started taking him each morning to work at the soap factory where he was general manager, while all Raza’s friends took the bus to their universities.
Burnt Shadows Page 18