Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  The man laughed.

  ‘The Americans aren’t very good at finding people they’re looking for in Afghanistan. Why do they think this? Were you involved with the murder of an American?’

  Raza thought of Harry laughing with him at the contractors in their body armour, which they only took off to sunbathe – at which vulnerable time the guards on the watchtower were doubled.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Well done. You came to find me to tell me this? That they’re looking for me? It’s no problem. I used a public call office – the man who runs it is an old friend. We bear scars from the same battle. Besides, this is Kandahar. No one here will help the Americans. We aren’t like you Hazara.’

  ‘You’re Taliban?’ It came out blunt and – to Raza’s ears – accusing.

  The man shrugged, something in the gesture calling Abdullah to mind.

  ‘I’m twenty years too old for them. I’m a farmer. Wait here—’ He entered the shrine, and Raza watched him pray by the grave of the Sufi – a sight that made him lower his own head and mumble ‘Surah Fateha’, though not for anyone who’d been dead hundreds of years.

  ‘You know who loves to come here?’ said Abdullah’s brother – Ismail, that was his name! ‘Abdullah’s son.’

  ‘He has a son?’

  ‘His name is Raza.’ Ismail nodded at Raza’s look of confusion. ‘Yes, named after the friend who Abdullah betrayed when he was just a boy. Raza – our Raza – has never met his father, but when they speak on the phone once a month Abdullah says tell me when your hand is big enough to fit around the largest Baba Wali pomegranate.’ He gestured towards the grove of pomegranate trees alongside the terrace. ‘So every week our Raza comes here, sometimes sneaks off on his own – though now that the bastards are back in power he’s forbidden to leave the house without being accompanied. He’s a very beautiful boy, praise be to Allah, though in these days perhaps that’s a curse.’

  ‘Why a curse?’

  ‘Our new governor and his men. These are the ones who were in power before the Taliban came and saved us from them. Neither women nor young boys were safe in those days – then the Taliban came, they rescued the kidnapped women, drove away the warlords who were fighting in the bazaar over a young boy.’

  ‘So you did support them? The Taliban?’ He was trying to find the man Abdullah might have grown into through this brother who he had once idolised.

  ‘I told you. I’m a farmer. I want to plant crops and harvest them. Do you understand? I need peace for this. I need security. In exchange for that, there’s much that I’ll give up.’ He rested his hand against the wall of the shrine. ‘This is what I fought for. The right to come back here with my family, to farm in the shadow of Baba Wali, and visit his shrine every Friday as my family has done for generations. To watch my sons measure hand-span against a pomegranate, not a grenade. But the Taliban – they don’t know Sufis or orchards. They grew up in refugee camps, with no memory of this land, no attachment to anything except the idea of fighting infidels and heretics. So when they came they brought laws different to the laws I grew up with. So what? Football is banned! I can live without football. Music is banned! This is painful, yes, but when I watch the crops growing or my sons walking down the street without fear at least there’s music in my heart.’

  ‘And what about your daughters?’

  ‘Hazara, my daughters are none of your concern.’

  Raza looked impassively at Ismail for a moment, then turned and stalked away. The Taliban – saviour of women’s honour! Well, he had done what he came here for – he had warned Ismail, and now it wasn’t his responsibility any more if Steve were to find him. Now he could head back, with a clear conscience, towards his two new Pathan friends who had promised they’d get him across the border without any hassle, via an unpatrolled route used by many of the Taliban fighters. Though what he’d do once inside Pakistan he still didn’t know.

  He would visit his father’s grave. At least he could do that.

  ‘Raza Hazara!’ Ismail caught Raza by the hand. ‘Please don’t go. Tell me about my brother. Have you found a way to get him to Canada?’ When Raza said nothing, Ismail stepped back, holding himself up very straight in the manner of a man who finds he’s about to beg, and can’t quite bring himself to do so.

  ‘You said he had to be in Canada by the tenth of February. Why?’

  ‘That’s the day the ship leaves.’

  ‘The ship?’

  ‘Yes. For Europe. From there he’ll go overland to Iran, across the desert, and then he’s home. Usually it’s my poppy crop travelling in one direction; this time it’s my brother coming home in the other direction.’

  ‘Could you . . . ?’ Raza stopped. Think it through, he heard Harry say. When the two Pathans said they could get him into Pakistan the offer had seemed too enticing to refuse, overthrowing all his earlier concerns. But his earlier thinking had been correct. Steve would expect him to go to Pakistan, expect him in Karachi at his father’s grave, in Lahore at his uncle’s house. The ISI would be asked to find him to prove their recemented friendship with the Americans and he was of no strategic value to the ISI – there was no reason why they shouldn’t find him. And they would. They were the ISI – of course they would find him (in all his dealings with A and G he’d never met anyone who terrified him as much as the man with the pink tissue paper).

  He pressed his head against a pillar of grey-and-white spirals, wishing Harry were here to separate the practical from the paranoid, the unexpected move from the ridiculous one.

  Ismail’s hand was on his back.

  ‘Are you unwell?’

  Raza held up a hand, asking only for a moment to think. His schoolfriend, Bilal, was in Canada. In Toronto, working as an engineer. His parents were there, too, living with Bilal and his wife and children – and when Hiroko needed to have her visa restamped to maintain her legal status in America, she would cross the border to visit Bilal’s mother, her old friend and neighbour. Every six months she crossed the border. There would be nothing suspicious, nothing unexpected, in her doing so again. And Bilal would welcome him in, he knew that. They’d met in Miami a few years ago, and their friendship was reaffirmed when Bilal threw an arm around Raza and said, ‘My sister told me how badly she treated you all those years ago. I wish she’d married you instead of that drummer in Prague with his tattoos.’ There was nothing in that sentence Raza could imagine with any degree of credibility.

  Raza turned to Ismail.

  ‘Can you get me into Canada?’

  ‘Why?’

  Why? How could he put in words this ache to see his mother? It was as if everything in his world had disappeared in a flash of light and only she remained – a beacon, a talisman, a reason to run somewhere instead of just running.

  ‘There’s only one person left in this world who I love. She can come to see me if I’m there.’ After that, after he’d seen her, he could decide what else, what next. But first he just needed to see her. There was nothing else. There was no one else.

  Ismail drew him into an unexpected embrace.

  ‘Everyone dead, except one? Allah, what have we Afghans done to deserve such sorrows?’

  Raza rested his head on Ismail’s shoulder, knowing that of all the embraces he had ever received this was the one he least deserved.

  37

  In one corner of the penthouse on Brickell Avenue, amidst boxes and more boxes, Kim Burton sat on the ground, head resting against the wall, glass of Scotch balanced on her knee. She never drank Scotch, certainly not in the middle of the morning, but the rare phone calls her father made to her from here almost always started with his salutation, ‘Keep me company while I have a drink?’ so there was a necessary pain in holding on to the glass on this her first visit to the apartment where her father had lived for a decade.

  Soon the movers would be here, to transport all Harry’s possessions into a storage facility. One day perhaps she’d be able to look through them, decide wha
t was worth retaining, what could be discarded of her father’s possessions. Not now. Now all she was taking with her was his laptop, the largest single folder on its hard drive filled with photographs of Kim, videos of Kim, scanned copies of Kim’s letters, her high-school reports, her university thesis. The most recent photograph of Kim and Harry together was nearly eight years old, and had been taken at Ilse’s insistence.

  The apartment was not as she had imagined. She didn’t think her father a man interested in interior design, expected an ordered efficiency of bookcases filled with non-fiction, furniture that was upmarket and entirely without character, bare walls, an empty fridge. Instead, there were floor cushions with paisleyed covers, thick Persian carpets, a beautiful antique sword mounted on the wall, a fridge stacked with sauces and condiments and capers and peppercorns, and bookshelves everywhere with poetry and fiction in English, German, Urdu. There were also at least eight copies of Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes.

  Which is to say, there had been these things when she arrived. Now there were boxes.

  Kim wondered what part of her would be lost now that her father was dead. With Ilse, it had been obvious; she knew precisely that version of herself – unreserved, slightly petulant, protective – which existed only in Ilse’s company, knew the conversations she could have with Ilse and no one else. But everything around her grief for Harry was nebulous – and crushing. She kicked at the laptop lying at her feet; how like him to accumulate evidence that he’d been paying attention rather than simply paying attention.

  A man’s footsteps, precise and measured, made their way through the tunnel between stacked boxes towards her and she found herself tensing, an image of a bearded man with a Kalashnikov springing from her imagination.

  ‘Ms Burton?’ It was Tom – the doorman. ‘I tried calling up.’ He looked over to the entryphone, its receiver dangling abjectly just inches above the ground, and then turned back to her, trying to pretend he hadn’t noticed the glass of Scotch. ‘The movers are here. Should I send them up?’

  ‘Sure.’ She stood up, wiping dust off her tank top and cargo pants. ‘Sorry, Tom.’

  ‘That’s no problem. Ms Burton, my brother works at A and G – Mr Burton got him a job there. He said your dad died in Afghanistan, looking for Osama. You should be proud.’

  Was pride supposed to temper grief? She wanted him alive. Why was this man standing here, talking as though there were ways of dying that rendered death bearable.

  ‘If your brother works at A and G maybe he could get one of the suits there to return my call.’ In the five days since Harry’s death there had been no further word from Raza – he got like this after Sajjad died, Hiroko had said. Running. It’s what he’s always done. He learnt it from me. But ever since Kim had walked into her father’s Miami flat she’d felt a powerful compulsion to talk to Raza. He was the only one who could tell her about the last few minutes of Harry’s life. Perhaps he was the only one who could tell her about Harry’s life, period. She had called on his satphone all day yesterday, all day today, and the lack of response was making her uneasy. Who was Steve and why had he answered Raza’s phone? She wasn’t about to say anything to Hiroko, but she’d called A and G repeatedly and left three messages about Raza for the men who’d pressed her hand and spoken with such feeling about Harry at his funeral.

  Tom looked as if she’d slapped him.

  ‘He’s just a driver. He doesn’t have that kind of pull.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Really, Tom. I’m just . . . you know? Angry.’

  ‘We’re all angry, Ms Burton.’

  While the movers removed Harry’s presence from the apartment, Kim stood out on the balcony from where it was possible to see the offices of A and G, just a few blocks away. Harry had once told her he hated this location. ‘Millionaires’ Row’ – the snobbery of James Burton’s son recoiled at the ostentation. But the CEO had urged him to live as near the office as possible, explaining that when you only had an hour or two between work days you didn’t want any kind of commute. And then Raza had moved in to the second-floor apartment and loved everything about the location – after that it was clear Harry never even considered moving.

  Kim had used the key marked ‘R’ in Harry’s cutlery drawer to enter Raza’s apartment. She didn’t ask herself why, she just did it. There she found the atmosphere she had expected of her father’s penthouse – lots of technology, no personality – though when she thought of Hiroko’s room with nothing adorning it except a faded painting of two foxes she wondered if Raza was just displaying a Japanese aesthetic. She didn’t know if that thought was racist and was too drained to work it out. She slid open his wardrobe door and the first thing she saw hanging from its railings was a beautiful cashmere jacket. She ran her fingers along its softness, and slipped it on to her own frame. It fitted almost perfectly – the sleeves only a little too long. When she slid her fingers inside the pockets the texture of desiccation made her jerk them out immediately. Gingerly, she reached in again and scooped out a handful of dried rose petals. She imagined Raza filling his pockets with the petals weeks or months earlier when roses were in bloom, enjoying the sensuous, velvety feeling each time his hands entered his pockets. Suddenly aware of how strange her behaviour was, she returned the jacket to its hanger and hurried out.

  Now she looked out towards the water and Miami Beach beyond, linked to downtown by the slab-and-girder MacArthur Causeway. Its foundations: eighty-four-inch drilled shafts in the water, forty-eight inches on land. And if a plane were to nose-dive into it? If men with dynamite on their chests overlaying the madness in their hearts . . . ? If one Afghan man with an AK-47 were to climb on to it and spray bullets? No, he could do no harm. Surely, he couldn’t send the world crumbling.

  One of the movers came out on to the balcony to say they were done.

  ‘You drink whisky? There’s a couple of bottles under the sink. I don’t want them.’

  The mover took two steps back and waved his hands in the air.

  ‘No, no. No.’

  She looked closer at him. She’d assumed he was Mediterranean, but now she saw he might be Arab.

  ‘You Muslim?’ She said it in a tone that wanted to convey it was OK, she wouldn’t hold that against him, she was sorry if anyone had these last crazy months.

  The man laughed, a short bark.

  ‘No, don’t say that. Don’t say that. We’re not allowed to take anything from the homes we’re working, not even when we’re offered. That’s why we can’t. Do I look Arab? I’m Italian.’

  ‘My mistake,’ she said.

  ‘No one else had better make that mistake.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with most Arabs,’ she found herself saying, and then wondered how that ‘most’ had slipped into the sentence.

  ‘Hey, I’m not being racist. It’s crazy enough being mistaken for a Cuban, but Arab! God help me. And Gitmo just across the water.’

  That thought hadn’t even crossed her mind all the while she’d been in Miami.

  What she needed, she decided on the flight back to New York, was to retreat. And she knew just where to do it – her mother’s cabin in the Adirondacks, a place without memories of Harry, where disputes over ownership of a moose carcass could push almost everything else off the front page of the newspaper. She had spent some part of every summer of her youth there, could point to the spot where she danced with a boy for the first time, saw the world from the top of a mountain for the first time, smoked a joint for the first time, ran a half-marathon for the first time, thought she’d lost her virginity for the first time. Her mother wasn’t there now – it was only during the summers or the height of fall that she thought to leave Paris for upstate New York’s mountains – but that only added to the appeal. To live alone, in the mountains, watching the snow fall on silent valleys while the fireplace roared, the local news channel filled with familiar faces . . . Her mother used to tell her she’d find such a life comforting by the time she was sixty and she’d always l
aughed; now here she was at thirty-five, desperate to sink into that world and be lost in it like a tear in a lake.

  Hiroko could come to visit, she thought, when she was in the elevator headed up to the Mercer Street apartment. Hiroko was about the one person in the world whose presence there wouldn’t be an intrusion.

  Her mood was almost cheerful when she opened the door to the apartment to announce her new plan to Hiroko.

  A man – hazel-eyed and broad-shouldered – sprang up from the sofa when Kim walked in.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Hiroko said. ‘It’s just Kim. Kim, this is Abdullah.’

  Kim looked from the man to Hiroko and back again. Through the haze of shock, habit took over and extended her hand to the Afghan man. He looked at it, and hesitated just long enough in responding to make Kim snatch it back.

  ‘Why is he here?’ she said to Hiroko.

  ‘I’m very sorry about your father,’ the Afghan man said. ‘But he is with Allah now.’

  ‘Does Allah accept unbelievers?’ she said, and the man lowered his eyes.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting you back yet,’ Hiroko said quietly. She added something in Urdu, and the Afghan nodded, said something in return, and let himself out of the apartment without looking at Kim again.

  ‘What?’ Kim said. ‘What are you doing? What did you say to him?’

  ‘There’s no need for you to get involved,’ Hiroko replied, picking up the book she’d been reading.

  ‘You’ve found someone to drive him to Canada, haven’t you?’

  Hiroko didn’t look up from her book. Kim threw her hands up in the air. If one of Hiroko’s friends was willing to get involved with such lunacy it was none of her business. She needed a long bath, and a glass of wine.

  Seconds later, she was pulling the book out of Hiroko’s grasp, standing in front of her with a car key dangling from her fingers.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  Kim held up the other hand which was grasping the paperwork from the car-rental company.