Burnt Shadows (44 page)

       
The old man with crumpled features sitting opposite Hiroko raised his eyebrows at her.

       
‘Afghan. They don’t like women,’ he said.

       
Hiroko smiled politely and made her way down the table to one of the empty seats beside the Afghan man with the hazel eyes and the chin several shades lighter than the rest of his face. He ignored her, and carried on looking down at the photograph of lush orchards against a backdrop of mountains in his oversized book.

       
‘Abdullah. I’m Raza’s mother.’

       
His instant reaction was to push his chair back from the table with a loud scraping sound his expression one of disbelief. She put her hand on his arm, and he paused, seeing Raza in her features.

       
‘Raza’s not Hazara. I’m Japanese. And his father was Pakistani. Originally from Delhi. He and I moved to Karachi in ’47.’

       
Her accent – Karachi mingled with something else – countered the improbability of what she was saying. Also, Abdullah had heard what the other man said about Afghans and women and now he saw the hand resting on his arm as a refusal to accept that analysis.

       
He moved his chair forward once more.

       
‘But Raza’s in Afghanistan.’

       
‘Yes.’

       
‘Why?’

       
She shook her head, made a gesture which didn’t only imply a lack of understanding but also failure. It had never occurred to her that her son would enter wars.

       
When Abdullah continued to look at her with a suspicion that obviously wanted itself overturned she pointed at the double-paged photograph he had been looking at.

       
‘Beautiful,’ she said.

       
‘Kandahar. Before the wars.’ He ran his palm across the photograph, as though he could feel the texture of the ripening pom­ egranates pushing up against his skin. ‘First they cut down the trees. Then they put landmines everywhere. Now—’ He bunched his fingers together and then sprang them apart. ‘Cluster bombs.’

       
He turned the page to a picture of a very old couple, the woman vibrant in multicoloured clothes, the man resting his hand on her shoulder as they walked across sand dunes as if he knew his drabness would become part of the desert floor if he didn’t stay moored to the woman’s column of brightness. The sky was impossibly blue.

       
‘Light,’ Abdullah said. ‘The light in Afghanistan. Like nowhere else.’

       
Hiroko nodded, touching the page as reverently as Abdullah had. It was difficult to find photographs of Nagasaki that preceded the bomb, but Kim had presented her with what remained in the Burton family of George Burton’s old pictures – Azalea Manor, the bund, Megane-Bashi when the river was high – and when she looked at them she was surprised by how strong a grip childhood had on her ageing mind.

       
Abdullah continued to turn the pages of the book, stopping briefly on some pictures, lingering over others. Occasionally he’d point out a detail to Hiroko – a goat rearing on its hind legs in the corner of one photograph with the poise of a dancer, a kite flying high above a dome painted an identical green which made the kite appear an escaping roof tile. Sometimes he’d point to an object and identify it in Pashto – she’d repeat the word, pleased when she found any overlap with Urdu and delighted when she found resemblance to the Hindko words she had learnt while in Abbottabad.

       
When they came to the end of the book, Abdullah closed it and said, ‘That’s where I want to live.’

       
‘Afghanistan?’

       
‘Afghanistan then.’

       
He said very little beyond that until he and Hiroko exited the library into the dull light of late afternoon. The cold had nothing of the savageness of which it was capable at this time of year, but even so Abdullah pulled a wool hat low over his eyes and wrapped a broad scarf around his neck.

       
‘He was not even an Afghan and he came to fight with us. Not a Pashtun, and he knew our language. And I had him sent away.’ Hiroko didn’t know who he was talking about. ‘But instead of hating me, he still tries to help me.’

       
Understanding, Hiroko turned her face away, wishing she had raised a son who could fit such a glorified image. She didn’t know whether or not to tell Abdullah the truth – her son was a mercenary, all he had done to help Abdullah was make one phone call to a woman he’d never met to try and pass all responsibility on to her, and despite his promises to the contrary he hadn’t returned for Harry’s funeral and hadn’t even bothered to explain why. That final failure was the one which most convinced her that her relationship with her son was entirely comprised of lies – she still felt betrayed as she recalled her final conversation with him, just hours after Harry’s death, when he said in a tone of voice she believed completely, ‘Ma, I have to come to bury him. I have to see you. I have to see you.’ But when Kim called his satphone to find out when he was flying in, and if he’d agree to read something at the funeral, a man called Steve had answered the phone and said Raza wouldn’t be coming back to New York for the funeral, or at any time in the near future; for security reasons, he couldn’t say anything more.

       
Kim had ended the call, shaking her head.

       
‘Dad really moulded Raza in his image, didn’t he?’ When Hiroko tried to protest, there must be some other explanation, Raza had insisted he’d come for the funeral, Kim sat Hiroko down in front of the computer and explained to her, with the aid of the Internet, the real business of A and G. While Hiroko was still struggling to overlay the world of private military contractors on to her image of her son’s life, Kim added, as if it were a matter of little consequence, ‘And on top of all that, he wanted me to smuggle some Afghan across the border.’

       
‘When I asked my brother to see if Raza – his name is really Raza? – knew someone who could get me across the border I didn’t mean he should tell his mother,’ Abdullah said, patting a stone lion’s paw with the familiarity of ritual as he walked down the library steps. ‘I don’t want to get you into any trouble.’

       
‘You won’t,’ Hiroko said, longing to be back in the sanctuary of books. She spent so much of her life in and around the Village that the regimented yet frenzied intersections of midtown made her feel as though she were stuck in a deranged crossword grid. ‘Do you know if your brother has spoken to Raza since—’ She almost said ‘since Harry died’. ‘Again, I mean. Has he spoken to him again?’

       
‘I don’t know. I will call him in three days.’ Almost apologetically he added, ‘He doesn’t have a phone. Once a week he goes to the call office.’ He took a cell phone out of his pocket and looked wistfully at it. ‘So many things you promise yourself you won’t get used to, and then you do.’

       
‘How long have you been in New York?’ She had come here not knowing what kind of man she would find, certain only that she had to see this mysterious piece of her son’s life. But now she couldn’t see the boy who drew Raza into a life of violence but only a man who understood lost homelands and the impossibility of return. He had looked at the photographs of Kandahar’s orchards as Sajjad used to look at pictures of his old moholla in Dilli.

       
‘I was with the mujahideen until the Soviets left. But then, peace never happened. And Afghan fighting Afghan, Pashtun against Hazara . . . no. So I went back to Karachi. Yes, for four years.’ He switched to Urdu. ‘I was a truck driver. Every time I went to the fish harbour I’d have one eye watching for Raza Hazara. But my brothers said one of us had to go to America where you can earn a real living. I was the youngest, the most fit – I had the best chance of making the journey across. And I was just married, so there was only a wife to leave behind and no children.’

       
‘You have a wife?’

       
‘Yes,’ he said, taking a long stride forward and bodily lifting up a drunk who was weaving towards Hiroko and setting him down again, out of her path, with a quick pat on the shoulder. He was unaware she had seen his entire character in that gesture. ‘It wasn’t easy to leave her, but my brothers were all fighting or trying to farm between the landmines and I couldn’t earn enough in Karachi for everyone. So ’93 I came here. And I haven’t seen any of them since. My brothers, my wife. She had a son six months after I said goodbye to her. She knew it was happening before I left, but she didn’t want to make it harder for me to go. So it’s not so bad, leaving. I’ll see my son, my wife. The light of Afghanistan. It’s not so bad?’

       
He looked uncertainly at Hiroko, who found herself wanting to cry.

36

Three days earlier, just outside Kandahar, two Pathan men stepped out of a jeep, reaching for the guns beneath its seats before their feet had touched the ground. To the passenger in the back seat, head moving side to side, the men appeared sectioned into many pieces – the effect as disorienting as it was disturbing.

       
One of the men looked around the compound into which they’d driven, silent in the mid-afternoon sun.

       
‘It’s safe,’ he called out to the figure in the back seat.

       
The cloaked figure stumbled out, attempting to pull off the giant blue shuttlecock while disembarking, an endeavour which resulted in a sprawl on the mud floor and a cry of pain.

       
‘Slow down,’ one of the men laughed. ‘You’ve had it on for nearly ten hours. Another thirty seconds won’t kill you.’

       
Still in the dust, Raza pulled off the burkha – tugging furiously at its constricting grip around his head – and threw it to one side. Lying back on his elbows, he breathed in the air, choking slightly on it, but smiling all the same as his eyes swivelled this way and that and the slight breeze touched his skin.

       
‘Come. Have some tea,’ the taller of the men said, walking to one of the mud houses.

       
‘No, no. I don’t have time.’ He stood up, holding out the burkha to the shorter man. ‘Thanks for the disguise.’

       
‘Thanks for the lift,’ the man said. He gestured at the burkha. ‘Keep it. You may still need it.’

       
‘Thank you.’ Raza slung the cloth – so innocuous now – over his shoulder. ‘Though I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather be captured by the Americans.’

       
A woman dressed as Raza had been a few minutes ago stepped out of one of the houses, her head angled in Raza’s direction. He looked at her, imagined her chequered view of him, wondered if she had been watching from the window when he wrenched off the burkha and threw it into the dust – had there been an instant when she imagined it was the act of a woman? He looked quickly away before his glance could be misconstrued. Or correctly construed. He felt he might go mad if he didn’t soon see a woman’s face, or hear a woman’s voice.

       
‘After you’ve had some tea, I can drive with you to the shrine,’ the man beside him was saying. ‘Hazaras aren’t popular here, not even those who speak Pashto as beautifully as you.’

       
It was the first time the word ‘Hazara’ had entered the conversation. Near the start of his journey he had found the two men walking away from a car which had snapped its axle in a ditch and offered them a ride to their homes on the outskirts of Kandahar. After just a few minutes in their company he knew that he need only reveal he was hiding from the Americans in order to make allies of them.

       
‘You’ve been travelling long enough,’ Raza said. ‘But I’ll be back to take advantage of your offer of dinner.’

       
A few minutes later – after gulping down a cup of green tea; a quicker process than refusing a Pathan’s hospitality – he was driving out of the compound, tongue and throat burning, away from Kandahar. Twenty years ago, in Sohrab Goth, in highway restaurants, in the cab of the truck decorated with the dead Soviet, Raza had listened to Abdullah rhapsodise about the beauties of his city – the emerald in the desert whose fruit trees bore poems, whose language was the sweetness of ripe figs. But Raza’s brief glimpse of Kandahar had shown him only dust, fierceness and – a month after the Taliban’s defeat – not a single unshrouded woman.

       
The drive to the Baba Wali shrine was even more tortuous than the drive to Kandahar’s outskirts had been. Given a choice between seeing a woman and seeing an American-style highway Raza wasn’t sure which he would choose. Everywhere, remnants of the American bombing campaign – a door standing unsupported in a field of bricks as though it were a miracle crop; craters in the road, indiscriminate as a meteorite shower; black metal shaped like a jeep in a headstand. He wondered if a burkha-clad woman standing near the jeep when it scorched might have a mesh tattooed on her face. In these ways he had been thinking of his mother almost constantly on the road to Kandahar. For some reason she had become part of the ache of losing Harry, though he really couldn’t understand what one thing had to do with the other.

       
When he finally reached the shrine his first act, on getting out of the jeep, was to throw himself down on the ground and roll around. Grass! Actual green, tickling grass. He pulled a fistful out of the ground and rubbed it on his face, his arms, along the back of his neck before stepping on to the marble terrace which surrounded the airy shrine with its turquoise domes. Here, at last, a tiny glimpse of the world Abdullah held on to, the lost beauty which had allowed him to contemplate grotesque violence. It was not the shrine with the many-coloured tiles to which Raza paid attention – or of which Abdullah had talked when he spoke of coming here each Friday with his family before the Soviets cleft them from the body of the saint they had venerated for generations. Instead, Abdullah had talked about the surrounding orchards, the fleet river and the mountains beyond, which, his brothers used to tell him, were the ridged backs of slumbering monsters.