Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  40

  The sleeping gorilla was a work of artistry; a button beneath its matted hair controlled the machinery that surged its chest, a lever concealed beneath its armpit unhinged the animal and revealed the cavity within. It was only during refuelling stops and on landing near Montreal that Raza needed to hide within the animal; during the rest of the journey he sat with the Kuwaiti pilots in the cockpit, incredulous at their tales of ferrying the whims of their Saudi employer from one corner of the globe to the other.

  When the plane reached the airstrip near Montreal, a forklift was waiting to lower the gorilla cage on to yet another pickup. Raza heard the animals and birds chittering and shrieking and squawking as the cage was lifted out; but there were no sounds of human protest.

  A thirteen-year-old boy hiding in a barn to escape his father’s drunken rage was the only one to see the pickup drive into the barn, where the driver got out and opened the cage at the back, resting one hand on the steadily moving chest of the beast within and then reaching under its arm to split the creature in two. The boy ducked his head into the straw, more afraid of the sight of entrails than of being discovered by the man of inhuman strength; when he looked up again, the gorilla was intact but lifeless, a second man standing beside the first, shaking his hand. The boy never spoke of this to anyone.

  ‘You owe me the remaining ten per cent,’ the driver, John, said to Raza as he drove the pickup away from the barn, Raza now more comfortably seated beside him.

  ‘I can give you just the ten per cent,’ Raza said, reaching into the knapsack, which was looking considerably more battered than it had at the start of his journey. He pulled out the requisite amount of money, then tipped the knapsack on to its side, so John could see the wads of notes that remained within. ‘Or I can give you everything that’s here.’

  ‘Keep talking.’

  ‘My friend Abdullah is supposed to leave Canada on a ship next month. Ruby Eye arranged it.’

  ‘Ruby Eye collected the money from his family in Afghanistan,’ John corrected. ‘I’m the one who arranged it.’

  ‘Good,’ Raza said calmly. ‘So you can arrange for him to fly back in the gorilla instead.’

  John glanced down again at the knapsack.

  ‘I suppose I could. I’ll tell him tomorrow when I meet him. Or you could go in my place and break the news yourself.’ He looked over at Raza and smiled. ‘Yeah, surprised you there, didn’t I, Taliban?’

  So it was Raza seated in the orange bucket chair, beside a Formica tabletop, who Abdullah saw when he walked into the fast-food restaurant near Montreal.

  ‘Raza Hazara!’ He spoke softly so as not to alarm any of the other diners, but his voice was warm as he pulled Raza to his feet and embraced him. When they drew apart neither of them spoke, each smiling and narrowing his eyes, tilting his head this way and that to find familiarity in the stranger across from him, and then Abdullah caught Raza’s ear and tugged on it.

  ‘I had no idea you would be here. Neither of them let on.’

  ‘Neither of who?’ His voice had deepened, Raza thought, but the eyes and smile were unchanged.

  ‘Your mother. And Kim Burton. You didn’t know? She just dropped me here.’ He took a step towards the window, and shook his head. ‘She’s gone. You really didn’t know?’

  Kim Burton? Raza shook his head. For the last six days he’d been wondering what she’d been told, what she believed.

  ‘She has a phone with her. You could call her.’ He held out his cell phone.

  ‘You have her number?’ Raza said.

  Kim Burton! Whatever they had told her, she would never believe Raza was involved with Harry’s death. He knew this. He thought again of the story of the spider. When the Prophet was on the run from Mecca to Medina, he stopped in a cave for the night because his friend and travelling companion, Abu Bakr, had been bitten by a snake and needed to rest. As he sat in the cave, knowing his pursuers would follow his tracks across the moonlit desert, all the way to the base of the rocky slopes, he saw a spider scuttling frantically across the mouth of the cave. Then he heard his pursuers’ footsteps outside and a voice said, ‘No, he’s not here. No one’s been here for a long time. Look . . .’ and as the moon emerged from behind a cloud the Prophet saw the cave mouth was entirely covered by the gleaming web of a spider.

  This story had passed hands between their two families for three generations. In Afghanistan, Harry had pointed this out and said, ‘You need to tell it to Kim. Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs – we are each other’s spiders.’

  Then he and Harry placed side by side the stories each knew of their families. Stories of opportunities received (Sajjad found, through Konrad, a way out of the constraining world of his family business), loyalty offered (Hiroko refused to back away from Konrad when her world turned him into an enemy), shelter provided (three times Ilse gave Hiroko a home: in Delhi, Karachi, New York), strength transferred (Ilse would never have left the life she hated if not for Hiroko), disaster elided (James and Ilse ensured Sajjad and Hiroko were well away from Partition’s bloodletting). And – this part Raza and Harry didn’t have to say aloud – second chances (at being a better father, a better son). Now Kim, too, was part of the stories. Whatever happened to him, Raza knew she would watch over his ageing mother as the spider dance proceeded.

  But Abdullah said, ‘Her number? No. I don’t have it.’

  Raza tried to hide his disappointment as he caught Abdullah’s sleeve and pulled him down into a chair.

  ‘You’ve met my mother?’

  ‘Yes, Raza Ashraf. She found me. You have her eyes. Now that I’ve met her I look at you and wonder how I ever saw a Hazara.’

  ‘I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m sorry I pretended to be an Afghan. It’s only very recently I realised how wrong it was to claim that.’

  Abdullah waved his hand in the air, not dismissing the matter so much as putting it to one side for the moment.

  ‘Before anything else, explain to me how we’re both here at the same time. This can’t be coincidence.’

  Raza told him everything, in as truncated a version as he could manage without confusing the narrative. When he finished, Abdullah laughed.

  ‘Your mother told me something of your life – your real life. So. Your mother lost her family and home to war; your father was torn away from the city whose poetry and history had nurtured his family for generations; your second father was shot dead in Afghanistan; the CIA thinks you’re a terrorist; you’ve travelled in the hold of a ship, knowing that if you died no one would ever know; home is something you remember, not some place you live; and your first thought when you reach safety is how to help a friend you haven’t seen in twenty years, and this is the part of your story you say the least about. Raza, my brother, truly now you are an Afghan.’

  Raza touched Abdullah’s hand lightly.

  ‘The Abdullah I knew twenty years ago would not have been so forgiving.’

  ‘That Abdullah was very young, and very foolish. He thought corpses spouting blood were decorations for the sides of trucks.’ He looked out towards the parking lot again. ‘I feel very bad, Raza. Your friend Kim – she did so much to help me, and I was . . . ungracious.’

  ‘My friend Kim.’ Raza shook his head. ‘We’ve never met. We’ve just been presences in each other’s lives for a very long time. What did you say to her? What’s she like?’

  ‘She has short hair. Like a boy,’ Abdullah said, his index fingers knocking against his jawline, just beneath the ear.

  ‘And we all know how much you Pathans like your pretty boys, walnut,’ Raza laughed.

  Abdullah cuffed him lightly.

  ‘Still the same Raza. I don’t know what I said to her. There’s something – don’t laugh at me when I say this – there is something open in her face. Some Americans have it, that openness. You think you could say anything to them. And we were both sitting in the front seat. Ten years of driving cabs every day, twelve hours a day, and this was something new
.’

  ‘You hit on her?’ Raza switched to English.

  Abdullah drew back.

  ‘What kind of man do you think I am?’

  ‘The kind of man I am. Go on, what did you do?’

  ‘I spoke to her. As I have never spoken to an American woman before. I wanted her to understand something, I don’t know what, about being an Afghan here. About war. Again and again war, Raza. And then. Then, I don’t know. She started attacking Islam. They’re all, everyone, everywhere you go now – television, radio, passengers in your cab, everywhere – everyone just wants to tell you what they know about Islam, how they know so much more than you do, what do you know, you’ve just been a Muslim your whole life, how does that make you know anything?’

  Raza put an arm on Abdullah’s.

  ‘Quiet, quiet. People are looking. Abdullah, Kim’s not like that. I know. She can’t be like that.’

  ‘She said heaven is an abomination because my brother is in it.’ He covered his face with his hands. ‘You hear them now all the time. Talking about how they won the Cold War, now they’ll win this war. My brother died winning their Cold War. Now they say he makes heaven an abomination.’

  ‘You’re tired,’ Raza said, holding Abdullah’s hands between his own. ‘Come with me. The car’s outside. You can sleep on the plane. Today, Abdullah, you make the journey home to your family.’

  ‘New York is home,’ he said brokenly. ‘New York is my home. The taxi drivers are my family.’

  Raza felt a curious sense of envy amidst his pity.

  ‘I know things are bad, but perhaps there wasn’t any need to run. Even now, it might not be too late. Kim and my mother will help. They’ll find you a lawyer. These things still matter, they must.’

  ‘You’re living in another world. My friend Kemal – he was picked up ten days ago. No one has heard from him since. New York now is nets cast to the wind, seeking for any Muslim to ensnare.’

  His words made Raza turn reflexively to look out of the window. No nets, but there was a police car in the parking lot which hadn’t been there a few seconds ago, and two policemen talking to a redhead whose hair reached her jawline. The woman turned towards the window, her finger pointing—

  Raza grabbed Abdullah’s shirt and yanked hard, ducking at the same time so neither of them could be seen from outside. He pressed his keys into Abdullah’s palm.

  ‘Go from the back door. The silver Mazda. Take it. Run. Trust me.’ He pushed Abdullah from his chair.

  ‘Raza, what—?’

  ‘For your son’s sake. Go quickly. Please.’ He picked up the baseball cap that had been resting next to his elbow and put it firmly on Abdullah’s head, handing him his jacket – Harry’s jacket – at the same time, and reached across to take the coat Abdullah had slung over his chair.

  ‘Allah protect you,’ Abdullah said, squeezing his hand, before walking very rapidly to the back door.

  But not rapidly enough. The policemen had entered; one pointed towards Abdullah, the other shrugged and called out, ‘Sir?’ in his direction.

  Raza stood up, wearing Abdullah’s grey coat, said ‘Allah-o-Akbar’ loudly enough to be heard. The diners seated next to him shrank into their seats; a man standing by the utensils picked up his child and held her protectively in his arms; someone called out to the policemen.

  Kim Burton crouched beside a car in the parking lot, the side-view mirror allowing her to see the door to the restaurant without being seen. She didn’t want him caught, she didn’t want him to escape, she didn’t want to be responsible either way. When the policemen exited, Abdullah in his grey winter coat handcuffed between them, she felt both sickened and relieved.

  And then she saw his shoulders, far too slight for the great bulk of the winter coat.

  41

  The policemen had identical grips. Each had hold of his upper arm with a pressure that was merely professional. One was left-handed, one right-handed, and Raza wondered if this had been a consideration in pairing them up. Did policemen, like opening batsmen, work well with a left-right combination?

  Pellets of ice were falling out of the grey sky. Raza was glad to be outside, away from the atmosphere of terror replaced by thrill – the diners had witnessed something, it would be on the evening news, they would tell all their friends to watch.

  A car in the parking lot was covered in snow; it would have been here since the previous night. He wondered if its owner had spent the night in the restaurant, hiding in the bathroom stalls until the closing-up shift departed, scavenging through the kitchens in the dregs of night, finding everything locked up save for condiments. Or perhaps someone was in that car – had been there for days, would stay there until the first spring thaw revealed the corpse of a man so defined by absence that no one noticed he was missing.

  His head was down so she wouldn’t see his face. He wasn’t actually looking at the car, was only recalling he had seen it as he entered the restaurant and had paid it no attention then. All he was looking at now was ice melting at every moment of impact – with paving, with shoes, with the soil in the otherwise empty flowerbeds near the restaurant door. Annihilated by contact, any contact.

  ‘Wait!’ he heard her shout. The policemen stopped, angled their bodies towards her.

  There was the spider, and there was its shadow. Two families, two versions of the spider dance. The Ashraf-Tanakas, the Weiss-Burtons – their story together the story of a bomb, the story of a lost homeland, the story of a man shot dead by the docks, the story of body armour ignored, of running alone from the world’s greatest power.

  Still he didn’t look up, but the space between one footfall and the next told him she was walking towards him in large strides. No other sound in the parking lot; the zip of cars on the highway was backdrop – and hope. Abdullah should have left through the exit around the back, he would be on the highway now, using his phone to call John and set up another meeting place. But it wasn’t enough to be out of the parking lot, he needed time to get away, time in which no one would know they should be looking out for a broad-shouldered, hazel-eyed Afghan.

  ‘I need to make sure that’s him,’ he heard Kim say.

  Raza raised his head and bellowed, ‘Chup!’, the end of the word half-strangled with pain as the policemen’s hands pressed down on his head, forced him to his knees.

  He saw Kim Burton’s eyes refuse to believe what they were seeing. Blood rushed to her face and for a moment she looked angry, furious – Harry’s quick temper manifest in her – as though the world was attempting to play a trick on her which she didn’t find even remotely entertaining. Then she was reaching a hand out to him, and Raza’s body jerked away from her touch.

  ‘Stand back,’ he heard one of the policemen say.

  Raza wasn’t sure she’d heard. She was staring at him as a child might stare at a unicorn or some other creature of legend whose existence she’d always believed in yet never expected to receive proof of.

  In any other circumstance he’d be reflecting her expression back at her. In the twenty years since Harry had handed him marshmallows on the beach and said Kim was asking if he had a girlfriend he’d been imagining and re-imagining their first meeting. Now his mouth twisted at how far his imagination had fallen short.

  His grimace brought her back to the moment. He saw her looking up towards the restaurant window, then at the winter coat . . . she took a step back. She would be wondering, he guessed correctly, if he had set her up from the beginning, from that first phone call from Afghanistan. Why had he recoiled from her touch and why had he said, ‘Chup!’ It was one of the Urdu words with which Harry most liberally seasoned his language – Raza would be aware she knew it meant ‘Be quiet.’ What did he think she was going to say? He saw Harry’s careful intelligence in her – looking at the pieces, trying to understand the picture.

  The ice was falling into her auburn hair, splinters winking as they dissolved. For a moment, he wavered. All he needed to do was allow her to say what she h
ad been about to say when he stopped her. She had only to say, ‘That’s not him,’ and they would let him go. And then – a bead of melted ice trailed down her face, following the route a tear might take – he and Kim Burton would finally sit down face to face, to talk about Harry, to talk about Hiroko, to talk about everything.

  But he would not do that to Abdullah. Not this Raza Konrad Ashraf – not the one who had lain in the hold of a ship bearing the weight of an Afghan boy, not the one who had floated in the dagger-cold sea looking up at Orion, promising himself he would not be as he was before. Every chance, every second, he could give Abdullah he would.

  He looked once more at the snow-covered car, the desolation of it, and wryly considered this new heroic persona he was trying to take on. Truth was, he didn’t have the temperament for this kind of running anyway; they’d catch him soon enough. Perhaps arrest Bilal, or his mother, or anyone else who might be termed accomplice. Kim Burton, too, if she walked with him out of this parking lot. What a gift, then, what a surprising gift, to be able to say the moment when freedom ended had counted for something. Finally, he counted for something.

  ‘Is it him?’ one of the policemen said.

  He looked straight at Kim.

  ‘Hanh,’ he said very softly. Hanh. Yes. Say yes.

  He saw her decision, though he didn’t know how or why she had come to it.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  The men nodded and lifted Raza to his feet. Her expression became frantic as she heard the jangle of his handcuffs.

  ‘I don’t know that he’s done anything wrong. He just looked suspicious. My father died in Afghanistan a few days ago. I’m not coping very well. There’s nothing he’s done wrong. Please let him go.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ the policeman said in the tone of voice men reserve for women they decide are hysterical. ‘We’re just going to ask him a few questions. And I’m sorry about your father.’