Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  But Sajjad hated the constriction of sheets, insisted they could only rest lightly upon him as he slept; if he started to feel his feet tangle with the bed coverings he would kick and flail. How often had she been woken up by his kicking and flailing?

  There was too much, too much that had been such a part of her life with him that it had become indistinguishable from the mere process of living. She had thought Nagasaki had taught her everything to know about loss but in truth it was only horror with which she had become completely familiar. At twenty-one it had been impossible for her to learn all the facets of loss. She couldn’t have known then what it was to lose the man you had loved for thirty-six years.

  Sitting on the divan, she touched a finger to the bullet wound in his chest. It seemed so small, so incapable of creating the exodus of blood which had drenched his clothes and skin as he lay in the hospital, waiting for her to claim him. Death had been instan­ taneous, they said, as if there were relief in that. She did not want death to have been instantaneous; she wanted to have at least held his hand as he lay dying and said goodbye to him in terms other than the, ‘Why are you going again? You’ll find nothing. Stay. Oh all right, go,’ that had been her farewell to him that morning.

  Stay. Stay. Stay. She should have repeated it like a madwoman, banged her head against the wall in a frenzy, hit him and wept. She should have said it just one more time, just a little more forcefully. She should have taken his dear, sweet head in her hands and kissed his eyes and forehead. Stay.

  His skin so cold, so unyielding, after a night in the hospital morgue. Sweat was running down her back despite the fan which was on full speed right above her head, but he who had always perspired so much more heavily than she was utterly dry. Bone-dry. She was repulsed by the expression.

  She could not bear to touch his belly, which had always had such a comfortable softness to it. Instead, she wrapped her hand around his penis, but the hardness there was even more unbearable than anywhere else. So she moved her hand up to his hair, the only part of him which still felt alive. She closed her eyes, ran her fingers through his hair, whispered endearments in Japanese – the only words of Japanese she ever taught him were words of love.

  Neither the closed door and shuttered windows nor her engulfing sorrow could keep out the clamour of the world. Her brother-in-law Iqbal, who flew down from Lahore last night after Hiroko said yes, she’d reimburse him for the ticket, had found an extension cord and taken the phone out of this room into the courtyard and she could hear him shouting into it, at Sikandar in Dilli: ‘What do you mean you can’t get a visa? He’s dead. You’re my only brother left. What am I supposed to do without Sajjad?’

  It was Iqbal who would climb into the grave with Sajjad and close his eyes, not Raza.

  She could not think of Raza without being overwhelmed by rage.

  Then there was another voice in the courtyard, and she raised herself off the divan. Harry Burton was here. Harry, whose driver Sher Mohammed shot Sajjad – the crane-operator who brought Sajjad to the hospital described the whole scene of the killing to Hiroko: Sajjad calling the man’s name, the gunshot, the man with the tattered ear-lobes yelling, ‘He’s CIA,’ to the ship’s captain before turning to run, both men probably halfway across the ocean by now, the police informed Hiroko.

  She wrapped a sheet – loosely – over Sajjad’s lower body and opened the door, and there was Harry, with the lost expression of a little boy. All the gathered mourners stood up as they saw her – the men in the centre of the courtyard, the women sitting under the overhang of the roof where there was shade. Hiroko looked only at Harry, beckoned him inside, then stepped across the room to look at the painting of the two foxes while Harry walked over to Sajjad’s body and whispered things she didn’t try to hear.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, when she heard him walk over to stand behind her.

  Harry wanted to embrace her, but didn’t. After Hiroko’s phone call woke him up early this morning he made call after call to his ISI contacts and the CIA station chief in Karachi, and well before his plane took off from Islamabad he had pieced together, almost precisely, what happened at West Wharf.

  ‘How exactly is it your fault that an irresponsible kid ran off and a thieving son of a bitch panicked and pulled a trigger?’ Steve had asked as he drove Harry to the airport, and Harry saw that his colleague was unable to recognise that it was grief, pure grief, not guilt at all, that had unmoored him so completely from his everyday aspect.

  ‘You think because he was Pakistani I couldn’t have loved him?’ he bellowed, and Steve said, ‘Hell,’ and nothing more for the rest of the journey.

  But Steve wasn’t entirely wrong, he realised now. It was guilt that kept his hands from reaching out to Hiroko, though it made no sense to him that he should feel guilt for this when he hadn’t for so many other things which by the standards of ordinary, little-picture morality should have had him sobbing in a bar or some other secular confessional.

  ‘Why did your driver shoot him?’ Hiroko asked, turning towards him. ‘Why would anyone shoot Sajjad?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ It was not any act of friendship that had prompted Steve to drive him to the airport, but a professional need to reiterate the importance of giving away nothing that needed to be concealed.

  ‘He thought Sajjad was CIA.’ She touched the mole beneath her eye, which had been untouched all day. ‘Because of you, I suppose,’ and Harry found he wanted her to guess the truth, but she was drifting off. ‘Sajjad and I used to joke about that sometimes. We’d joke you were a CIA agent. It’s what everyone assumes of Americans here, you know.’ She put a hand to her mouth. ‘Do you think Sajjad could have joked about that with Sher Mohammed? And maybe because of it . . . ?’ Her voice disappeared again and she shook her head and looked at the corpse, which Harry was deliberately keeping his back towards.

  ‘Maybe,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Maybe that’s got something to do with it.’

  In the courtyard the sound of men talking and women muttering prayers stopped, and then a different quality of noise started up. Hiroko paid no attention to it.

  It was Raza. He pushed open the front door to feel the word ‘home’ embrace him for the first time, and then saw the gathering and knew, instantly, that there was no home any more.

  His uncle Iqbal was the one who folded him in his arms and whispered in his ear, ‘Your father’s gone,’ and then there was a press of people around him, explaining in words that were disjointed because no one truly understood yet. But Raza heard, ‘And then he shouted, “He’s CIA,” ’ and he knew this was Harry Burton’s doing.

  He pushed aside the mourners, and entered the room where his father’s body lay.

  At first he wanted to laugh. It was a joke. Death couldn’t look so exactly like sleep. But when he shook Sajjad by the shoulder, the body was ice, and there was a puncture above his heart.

  ‘Raza,’ Harry said, because Hiroko seemed incapable of stepping forward and taking her weeping son in her arms.

  Raza was kneeling at the divan, clutching his father’s cold shoulder, but at Harry’s voice he stood, turned and raced forward, fists flying. Harry had him pinned on the floor in seconds.

  ‘You did this!’ Raza shouted. ‘You killed my father.’

  ‘Raza Konrad Ashraf!’ Hiroko pushed Harry away and dragged her son to his feet. ‘What bad manners are these?’

  ‘Ma, you don’t know.’ He caught hold of Harry’s shirt. ‘They told me all about you at the camps. He’s CIA. He’s been lying to us all along. Aba’s dead because of him.’

  Harry took Raza’s fist which was gripping his shirt and squeezed it.

  ‘He’s dead, you idiot, because he went to the harbour looking for you.’

  Raza reeled back. Somewhere in the explanation out in the courtyard, this detail missed him. He looked to his mother, and Hiroko saw that he would be haunted now, by this, for the rest of his life. He was too young for such pain, just a boy, her littl
e boy. She held open her arms and he rushed into them.

  Harry said, ‘Hiroko,’ and she shook her head, turning away so that even his shadow was out of her sight. He allowed himself to look at Sajjad for a moment – one long moment in which he saw the best part of his childhood and himself lying dead – and then he left.

  Hiroko’s hands stroked Raza’s back and hair, her eyes resting on Sajjad. It was nearly sunset. Soon they would take him away. She had only these minutes left now to remember every detail – the swoop of his collarbone, the tiny scar on his knuckle, the veins at his wrist.

  The Speed Necessary to Replace Loss

  New York, Afghanistan, 2001–2

  27

  Kim Burton pushed the tip of her tongue between the gap in her front teeth. Manhattan’s downtown skyline gaped back at her. She scraped her tongue along the sharp edge of a tooth. Jagged metal debris, eight storeys high. Three months on, everything was still reminder or testimonial. Thirty storeys above Mercer Street, it was possible now to stand at this window in her grandmother’s apartment, twelve feet across and four feet high, and look straight ahead without any human construction encroaching on the view. Instead, so much sky outside it could have been Montana.

  She cranked open the small side window – smoker’s window, her father called it – and dipped her head so she was looking down at the street, watching the thin stream of human traffic: graveyard shift workers returning home to lovers for a few precious minutes of shared sleep; NYU students bouncing with whatever stimulant was carrying them through the sleepless nights of finals week; a man carrying two buckets overflowing with flowers, their scent making him weep for a faraway country; a pair of transvestites, arms looped around each other’s waist, their stiletto heels keeping perfect time just as their boots had done in their former lives as military men.

  From this far up, it was possible to overlay any story on to the tiny figures below. Kim liked to think her stories revealed a certain largeness of spirit, though she suspected each one could be traced back to something she’d seen on television in the preceding week.

  Her eyes shifted their focus from the world outside to the window, and she grimaced at the angular face captured in the glass. Green eyes dulled with exhaustion, jet-black hair being overtaken by the copper roots long enough that she felt she should start calling them stalks, skin so pale and circles under her eyes so dark she was beginning to look less human than lunar. Red-eye flights, coffee and dreams of collapsing buildings weren’t the best of combinations for a glowing complexion.

  Looking away, she reached into the space behind the radiator, and extracted a packet of cigarettes and a little silver skull which opened its jaws and blew out a steady flame when she depressed its occipital bone. She had carried this lighter through her life for nearly twenty years now, since one of the Marine guards at the Embassy in Islamabad with whom she’d conducted a minor flirtation to irritate her father had given it to her as a farewell present. Once she had the lighter it was necessary to take up smoking. Later that year, Grandpa James had found her lighting up in the back garden of his house in London and said, ‘I suppose your grandmother encouraged you to do that just to annoy me.’ It seemed to give him a measure of satisfaction to think he was still significant enough to Elizabeth – he never called her Ilse – to prompt her into such behaviour, though they hadn’t met since Kim’s parents’ wedding.

  She took a drag on her cigarette and found herself wondering what Grandpa James would make of the world if he were still alive. Would his air of condescension about all things American other than Lauren Bacall and his granddaughter have diminished or augmented over the last few months? Would he still look with dismay at Harry’s life and wonder which of its wrong turns he could have forestalled, which of its failures bore the stamp of DNA? And what would he make of Gran’s flatmate, whose late husband’s name had only to be mentioned to cause him to change the subject with an air of guilt that was otherwise quite absent from his life?

  ‘Spare cigarette?’

  Kim’s body jerked; a spark landed on her black T-shirt and burnt away, unnoticed.

  ‘Since when do you smoke?’

  ‘Since 1945. Thanks to an American in a Tokyo bar.’

  Laughing, Kim handed Hiroko her cigarette.

  ‘Take this. I’ve quit. Who was the American?’

  ‘Just a GI.’ Hiroko lowered herself on to the sofa, and saluted smartly. ‘When did your flight get in? I thought you weren’t leaving Seattle until this afternoon.’ She dragged on her cigarette and exhaled very slowly in the careful manner of someone having her only smoke of the year.

  ‘Meeting got moved up to today so I took the red-eye,’ Kim said, carefully watching the other woman.

  There was a certain frailty about Hiroko that hadn’t existed three and a half years earlier when she first entered this apartment with a manner that suggested she knew she was late – by about half a century – but that she would be forgiven for it. Surely it was ridiculous, Kim told herself, not to accept a certain brittleness of someone Hiroko’s age. And yet it was hard to give credence to such a thought – there was something so youthful in her posture, legs tucked under her body, elbow resting on sofa-back while her hand propped up her chin and a cigarette glowed between two fingers. The shadows in her corner of the unlit apartment conspired to make it seem just a short-circuiting of the mind to think this woman in silk pyjamas with stylishly short hair was seventy-seven years old.

  Kim switched on a lamp and shallow lines etched themselves all across Hiroko Ashraf’s face. The mole which used to rest above her cheekbone had slipped, just slightly. But the single green streak in her ivory hair attested to that which hadn’t changed at all: her continued willingness to enter into new experiences without too much concern for whether anyone else might consider it either foolishness or frivolity.

  ‘What’s the meeting about? I thought you’d negotiated everything about moving to the New York office?’

  ‘Oh, there’s always something else to iron out,’ Kim said, stretching her lean body, trying to get rid of the kinks that remained from the flight. ‘But it suits me fine to be here. The run-up to Christmas is the time for exes to get in touch and suggest giving things one last try and God knows I don’t need another one of those conversations with Gary. You do know I’m staying on until after Christmas, right?

  ‘Just because you’re terrible at communicating with everyone you’ve ever lived with doesn’t mean your grandmother and I have the same problem.’ Hiroko smiled. ‘Of course I know. And I’m delighted.’ She gestured towards the early-edition newspaper splayed on the coffee table next to Kim’s half-empty mug. ‘What’s going on out in the world?’

  ‘The last fire has almost burnt out.’ Kim pointed in the direction of the looming emptiness outside before coming to sit down on the sofa.

  ‘That’s not the world, it’s just the neighbourhood,’ Hiroko said sharply.

  Kim’s eyebrows rose.

  ‘Right,’ she said, voice heavy with irony. ‘Just a neighbourhood fire.’

  Hiroko raised a hand in apology.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.’

  Kim took hold of her hand and squeezed it lightly.

  ‘What’s the matter, Roko?’

  It seemed impossible sometimes, Kim Burton’s blindness. And yet more impossible to hold anything against a woman of such genuine warmth and charm, all the most appealing parts of Konrad, Ilse and Harry right there in the pressure of her fingertips, the concern in her open, guileless face, her desire to know what exactly it was she’d got wrong this time. Hiroko had quite fallen in love with her within minutes of their meeting.

  ‘Stupid posturing men, that’s the matter. As ever,’ Ilse Weiss said, walking out of her bedroom. She stopped beside the antique globe which rested on the drinks cabinet, and spun it slightly so the continents slid westwards and the unpartitioned mass of India was beneath her fingertips, HINDOOSTAN stamped across it. Very faint, the border whic
h Harry had inked in when he was a young boy, to whom an outdated globe was a useless artefact.

  ‘You’re looking well, Gran.’

  Ilse snorted, and came to sit between Hiroko and Kim, slapping down the leg Kim was resting on the coffee table.

  ‘At ninety-one the best you can hope for is to be well preserved. Which is just a synonym for looking pickled.’

  True enough, Hiroko thought, not unkindly. But despite the gauntness that had once been a striking angularity, and the mass of wrinkles which called to mind the topographical map of a particularly varied terrain, Ilse’s aspect carried such a powerful memory of beauty with it that people still stopped to stare, and to imagine what might be revealed if you could only peel layers of time from her face.

  ‘I thought you said you were going to be dead by morning.’

  Ilse smiled, turning to Hiroko.

  ‘It’s not quite morning yet.’

  Hiroko caught Ilse’s wrist, pressed down against its veins.

  ‘Well, you have no pulse that I can detect. Perhaps we both died, and this is the what comes after. And Kim’s come visiting!’

  ‘Nonsense. I’ll get there before you. Like Delhi, like here.’ She removed the cigarette from between Hiroko’s fingers and took one short drag, before blowing out a strand of smoke with a schoolgirl’s smile of transgression. ‘But, you know, last night I really did feel that I’d be dead by morning.’

  ‘You feel that at least twice a week,’ Hiroko grumbled, retrieving her cigarette.

  ‘Well. Eventually I’m bound to be right.’ She tapped a finger on her granddaughter’s knee. ‘Don’t tell her about fires burning out as though that’s the world’s most significant event. She thinks Pakistan and India are about to launch themselves into nuclear war.’

  ‘Shit,’ Kim said. ‘Sorry, Hiroko.’