‘Walnut,’ he said to Abdullah.
Abdullah repeated the English word slowly.
‘What does it mean?’
Raza told him and Abdullah threw back his head, laughing.
‘I’ve never understood why they call us that.’
‘Because a walnut looks like a little brain, you witless Pashtun.’
Abdullah smiled broadly.
‘If you weren’t my brother I’d kill you for saying that.’
‘I am your brother. And your teacher. Bring me a pencil and paper. We’ll start with the alphabet.’
Abdullah stood up, gathering the pieces of the AK-47 in his arms as he did so.
‘You teach me, and I’ll give you one of these free of charge. No one notices if one or two go missing. The next shipment, I’ll get you one.’
Raza held back his questions, and his objections. How could you tell a boy who had promised you an AK-47 that all you wanted from him were the bargaining skills needed to procure a cheap but top-quality cassette-player so that Sajjad Ali Ashraf could listen to the sound of the sarangi reverberating through the house, encapsulating the principles of wabi-sabi and evoking udaas?
21
Harry Burton tilted his whisky glass towards his mouth and wondered, not for the first time since his arrival in Pakistan, if the paper napkins wrapped around the glasses were designed to prevent condensation forming and turning fingers clammy or to keep the contents of glasses masked in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. He unwrapped the glass and used the napkin to wipe the drip of sweat which was meandering from his temples down to his cheek with the sluggishness that seemed to infect everything in this stultifying heat.
He looked briefly towards the glass doors which separated him from the bulk of the party crowded into the air-conditioned living room of whichever influential businessman’s home this was – somewhere in the course of the evening he had shaken hands with someone who declared himself ‘your host’, but all he could recall of the man was the awkwardly soft plumpness of his palm. The air-conditioning inside was tempting, but the press of people was not. He was happier, on balance, out in the garden with the smell of kababs and smoke drifting over from the driveway, which was lined with buffet tables and perspiring men cooking meat on skewers. He could close his eyes, concentrate on the smell, and remember accompanying Sajjad to the Old City in his childhood.
Sajjad. Harry sighed deeply. It had been four months since that dinner in the Ashraf courtyard when Sajjad had asked him to leave and Hiroko had walked him to the front door, and pressed his hands tightly in hers.
‘Raza’s still a child in many ways – he gets too caught up in the stories he makes up about his life. And as for Sajjad – his anger doesn’t know how to last beyond a few minutes. Call us next time you’re coming to Karachi. And don’t bring any more sake.’ She kissed him on the cheek before he walked out into the emptiness of the street.
He’d had no intention then of staying away so long, but there had been no opportunity of late even to consider his personal life. On the subject of which – there, walking out into the garden, was a beautiful woman, who held his gaze just long enough to signal interest.
‘Look away, Burton,’ said a voice at his elbow. ‘She’s on the payroll of the I-Shall-Interfere.’
The woman looked over her shoulder at Harry, who immediately turned his back to her, though not without a curse that contained an irritation more professional than personal.
‘I prefer It’s-Sorta-Islamic,’ he said to the stocky blond man standing next to him.
His colleague Steve raised a glass to the comment. One of Steve’s pleasures in life was to come up with alternative names for the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
‘What do you think?’ Steve said. ‘Does the ISI do a better job of spying on us than we do on them? You think they know yet they might soon have Israel to thank for supplying arms to their Holy Warriors?’
In Harry’s mind, there was a map of the world with countries appearing as mere outlines, waiting to be shaded in with stripes of red, white and blue as they were drawn into the strictly territorial battle of the Afghans versus the Soviets in which no one else claimed a part. When he arrived in Islamabad, it had been a three-way affair: Egypt provided the Soviet-made arms, America provided financing, training and technological assistance, and Pakistan provided the base for training camps. But now, the war was truly international. Arms from Egypt, China and – soon – Israel. Recruits from all over the Muslim world. Training camps in Scotland! There was even a rumour that India might be willing to sell on some of the arms they had bought from their Russian friends – even though it might prove to be little more than a rumour Harry couldn’t help enjoying the idea of Pakistan, India and Israel working together in America’s war.
Here was internationalism, powered by capitalism. Different worlds moving from their separate spheres into a new kind of geometry. With a mix of satisfaction, irony and despair he raised his glass to the ghost of Konrad Weiss.
Across the country in Karachi, Hiroko Ashraf was also thinking of Konrad as she lay in bed, reading a letter from Yoshi Watanabe which said he was retiring as principal of the school housed in what was once Azalea Manor. After the war, Konrad’s former tenant, Kagawa-san, had claimed the property as his own – hadn’t he been living there for years just prior to the bombing? Whose house was it if not his own? And though Yoshi had written to Ilse to inform her of what was happening, no Weiss or Burton family member attempted to contest Kagawa-san’s claim. But when the Kagawa children had inherited the property in 1955 they had asked Yoshi, who became a teacher after the war, to run the International School they were establishing on the premises in memory of Konrad Weiss. It was the only indication they ever gave of any guilt about those final months of Konrad’s life when they crossed the street to avoid him.
I hope the new principal will continue the tradition of taking the schoolchildren to the International Cemetery where Konrad’s rock is buried.
Hiroko set down the letter, pressing her hand against her back. One day perhaps she would take Raza to Nagasaki. And Sajjad, too. She glanced at the sleeping form of her husband beside her as she picked up the photograph Yoshi had sent of himself standing in the grounds of Azalea Manor with a group of schoolchildren kneeling in front of him. This was the group about to set off to America for an exchange visit with a school near Los Alamos. She wondered how Raza would interact with a group of Japanese schoolchildren of near his own age. It didn’t bother her in the least to know she would always be a foreigner in Pakistan – she had no interest in belonging to anything as contradictorily insubstantial and damaging as a nation – but this didn’t stop her from recognising how Raza flinched every time a Pakistani asked him where he was from.
Sometimes Konrad entered her mind as an abstraction, and she wondered what their lives would have been if he’d lived. Would they have visited James and Ilse in Delhi, and would she and Sajjad have met and felt a glimmer of the life that might otherwise have been . . . ? No, of course not. Of course not. Nothing was inevitable in that way, no relationship, no confluence of events – some things just ended up seeming that way. She rested her fingers on Sajjad’s mouth, one fingertip lightly scratching at the softness of his silver-grey moustache.
No, nothing was inevitable, everything could have been different. Their daughter might have lived. The one she miscarried in the fifth month, the one the bomb killed (the doctor never told her precisely what was so wrong with the foetus, she only said some miscarriages were acts of mercy). She would have been thirty-five now. As the years went on the deaths of Konrad and her father had receded from her heart, but the child who she had known only as a stirring within, a series of hiccups and kicks – her loss still remained, occasionally rising up in a great wave of anger which Hiroko never knew how to express, where to place; only the company of her son would allow it to pass. If the first had been born – Hiroko thought of her as Hana after the bright-red nam
e Konrad had seen frozen beneath the ice – there would have been no Raza. Somehow she knew that to be true.
The front door opened, setting up a cross-breeze which rustled the leaves in the courtyard, and Hiroko smiled at the perfect timing.
‘Where are you coming from, my prince?’ she said, meeting her son halfway across the courtyard.
Raza touched his hand to her cheek.
‘I told you I’d be late. You haven’t been worrying, have you?’
Something in him had opened up these last few weeks, releasing the sweetness of his boyhood. Sajjad thought it was merely the relief of sitting for his exams once more and finding that Harry Burton’s strategies for combating test anxiety really did allow his pen to fly across the page with an ease that bordered on disdain, but Hiroko had seen the openness begin well before last month’s exams, and suspected that it, rather than Harry Burton’s advice, had allowed Raza to walk into the exam hall with confidence and walk out in triumph.
‘I’ve been looking at that book of American universities,’ she said. Sher Mohammed the rickshaw driver had delivered the book to them just days after Sajjad had told Harry to leave their house; Hiroko had insisted Raza write Harry a note of thanks – he had, spending more time over the letter than any of the love notes he had written to Salma during the course of their romance, and was so relieved it was almost embarrassing when Uncle Harry called from Islamabad to say he hoped the book helped and that they’d talk more about university the next time he was in Karachi.
Raza waved a hand in dismissal.
‘It’s so complicated, all that applying and tests and recommendations.’ He wouldn’t fool himself again into thinking an American university was a possibility for him – particularly not after he’d looked at the financial-aid forms and realised just how much money he’d need to ask for.
‘All right.’ Hiroko was more relieved than she’d admit to know he wasn’t planning to leave the country. ‘So you’ll go to university here. Good. Later on, postgraduate, if you want to go abroad then maybe we can find a way.’
Raza hesitated, then put his arms around her.
‘I’ll make you proud,’ he said, his hand resting by habit on what he knew to be the space between her burns.
‘And what does that mean?’ she said, pulling back. ‘You smile and laugh these days, Raza Konrad Ashraf, and never get angry, and this is starting to worry me very much. Where do you go every day? I met Bilal this morning. He says he hasn’t seen you in weeks.’
Raza’s arms dropped away from her.
‘If you want me to get angry, this is the right way to go about it. Bilal and all the others are busy with their university lives and I’ve made new friends. I’m happy. Don’t spoil it.’ He stepped back, bowed – which always made her smile, and didn’t fail this time – and turned to walk into his room, leaping up as he went, his fingers straining towards the star-printed sky.
22
For months now, Raza had been living two lives. In one, he was plain Raza Ashraf, getting plainer each day as his friends’ lives marched forward into university and he remained the failed student, the former factory worker, the boy marked by the bomb. In the other, he was Raza Hazara, the man who would not speak his language – or speak of his family or past, not even to other Hazaras – until he had driven the last Soviet out of Afghanistan, the man for whom an American took off his own shoes, which could only signal that somehow, in some way – though Raza would only look mysterious when questioned about it – he was of significance to the CIA (every American in Pakistan was CIA, of course).
While Raza Ashraf’s greatest pride came from the joy with which his father turned on his new cassette-player from Sohrab Goth every evening after work, Raza Hazara learnt to measure pride in the decreasing number of seconds it took him to take down and reassemble an AK-47. Raza Ashraf spent more and more time alone, locked in a world of books and dreams, while Raza Hazara was greeted with cries of delight each time he entered the slums of Sohrab Goth to teach English to an ever-expanding group of students. Raza Hazara never had to duck his head forward so his hair would hide his features.
It was exhilarating, it was thrilling – it was wearying.
As he spent an increasing amount of time with the Afghans in Sohrab Goth, Raza found, surprisingly, that he missed his own life. He missed a world free of guns and war and occupied homelands. He missed being able to answer any question about his life without thinking twice about how best to construct a lie. He missed a world less fraught about honour and family than this world of men who recited poetry about mountains. He missed women, though he’d hardly ever thought of them as being a significant presence in his life.
So some days, weeks even, he stayed in Nazimabad, played cricket with the neighbourhood boys, studied for his exam. And found that each time he started to worry about what would happen in the examination hall he needed only to bring to mind the memory of assembling an AK-47, that satisfying click as the piece came together, and all his anxieties would dissipate. Then he would be restless to return to the life of the Hazara once more, and he’d take the now familiar bus route to Sohrab Goth to find Abdullah – and in his absence, any one of the Afghans who now welcomed him as a respected teacher – and if queried about his long absence he’d give that same mysterious smile which he directed at all enquiries about the American who gave him the shoes off his feet.
But he knew there was no living in two worlds, not for any length of time. And the day he walked out of the examination hall, knowing he’d performed to excellence, it was entirely obvious which world he was going to give up. Who chooses borrowed dreams over the dreams they’ve grown up with? The dream Raza had thought he’d lost – of excelling academically, of feeling knowledge propel him forward through the world – had become possible once more. The Intermediate exams had demanded little more than exercises in memorisation – but beyond was another world, of following clues and making connections, of analysis and argument. He didn’t need America! He would be a lawyer, as his father had always wanted. All those months of thinking he would never get into law college had made the prospect of studying law exciting for the first time.
He didn’t see quite how much his newly acquired confidence and the re-emergence of his love for learning owed to the hours he had spent in the shady patch in Sohrab Goth where he conducted his English classes, with Afghan boys of different ages sitting cross-legged on the ground before him, riveted by every word he said as though it were a promise of a previously unimagined future; but even so, he felt, as he sauntered from the examination hall, a great burst of affection towards Abdullah, who had made possible the life of Raza Hazara, and then the thought that he was planning to simply vanish from the life of the young Afghan without explanation or words of farewell struck him as a travesty in a way that his daily lies to Abdullah were not.
Thinking all this, he was unusually preoccupied – unusually for Raza Hazara, that is – as he sat with Abdullah at a kerbside eating place favoured by truck drivers, eating chapli kababs. He recalled Uncle Harry pointing out a similarly constructed ‘restaurant’ as Harry had called it (and though Raza knew that a restaurant was grand, and that this was merely a ‘hotel’, he had picked up the American’s usage, never considering the possibility that he knew the names of things in Karachi better than Harry did) – Harry had said he loved the way the absence of an outer wall made it possible to imagine passers-by might trip over their own feet on the narrow bustling pavement, fall into a chair inside the restaurant, and simply stay on for a meal with whoever was already sitting around the table. But as Raza sat across from Abdullah he wished he didn’t have to look at the world jostling around, which only served to remind him that his presence in it was a lie. Today the exam results had been announced. Raza had done as well as he’d expected. And the time for choosing one life over the other suddenly seemed to be at hand.
Afridi, the truck driver, walked up to their table – he’d been involved in a protracted conversation w
ith a group of men outside – took hold of Raza’s chair-back and jerked it down a few inches, laughing at Raza’s cry of fright before righting it again.
‘Stop fighting now. Talk to each other,’ he said, smacking Abdullah on the back of the head before wandering out again.
Both Abdullah and Raza looked up in surprise at each other. Each had been too caught up in his own silence to notice the other’s lack of conversation.
‘What’s wrong?’ they said in tandem.
‘Nothing,’ Raza said. ‘You’re so quiet I thought maybe I’ve offended you.’
Abdullah’s hazel eyes crinkled.
‘How could you offend me, Raza Hazara?’ Very slowly, in English, he said, ‘You only can call me “walnut”.’
Raza looked guiltily down at his plate. He had never known such generosity as Abdullah extended him with an air that suggested Raza was the one doing him the favour in being pulled in so completely, so unreservedly, into his life. A few weeks ago Raza had arrived in Sohrab Goth after an eight-day absence, and there was no recrimination from Abdullah, only a broad smile of delight at Raza’s return. It was Afridi who told him, accusingly, that Abdullah had to be forcibly dragged out of the environs of Sohrab Goth on the days Raza was absent – ‘Otherwise he just stays, waiting for his teacher to arrive.’ Raza hadn’t missed a day since then.
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