Burnt Shadows (49 page)

       
But why should she feel uncomfortable? She was the one making all the effort. Abdullah seemed to feel he owed her nothing. This morning when she met him at the street corner he and Hiroko had picked the evening before he had thanked her, very politely, and insisted that he would stay hidden under blankets as long as they were in America; if the car were searched at the border he would say he climbed into the back at a service station on I-87 when he discovered the SUV unlocked. But beyond that he had offered nothing, hadn’t even acknowledged she was breaking her nation’s laws for someone whose innocence she had no reason to take for granted.

       
The snow from his jacket had melted into a stain of water, which he was attempting to dry, very carefully, with a handkerchief. What reason was there to believe the story his brother told Raza? How did they know the FBI knocked on his door for no reason except that he was an Afghan? How did they know he had run for no reason except panic about his migration status? That he was an Afghan didn’t make him a liar or a terrorist, of course not; but wasn’t it just as absurd – condescending almost – to assume that because an Afghan he couldn’t be a liar or a terrorist? If his story were true he should just have gone to the FBI. No matter how bad things had become in the name of security no one – no one – was going to be detained indefinitely for just being an illegal migrant worker. Come on! New York would shut down if that become a crime anyone cared about. And if the FBI did turn him over to the INS, what of it? He’d be deported. To Afghanistan. In the comfort of a plane!

       
She cracked open the window, and let the racing wind whistle through, though Abdullah huddled into his coat and put his hands over his ears – whether to cut off the sound or the cold she didn’t know.

       
It had all happened so fast. Less than ten hours between the time she met him and the time they left the city.

       
‘What’s the point of waiting?’ Hiroko had said when Kim queried the need for such haste. ‘The FBI’s already been to the garage from where he leases the cab, and to the home of the man who takes the cab on its night shift to ask if they know where he is. This afternoon he called this person in Canada who’s arranging things to say he’ll meet him tomorrow, so tomorrow he’s going. I told you, I’ll take him.’

       
Hiroko made everything seem inevitable – this journey, the timing of it, his innocence. And so Kim had gone against everything in her training, hadn’t even considered the points of stress under which Abdullah’s story might buckle, and had simply curled up in her bed and fallen asleep as soon as Hiroko had agreed to let her drive the car. The truth, she now realised, was that she was so busy looking at ways of keeping Hiroko from smuggling an Afghan across the border that no other threats had been visible.

       
‘Hiroko’s an amazing woman, isn’t she?’ Kim said, rolling up the window, trying one last time to establish common ground.

       
‘Raza has a place in heaven because of her,’ Abdullah replied. ‘Imagine knowing your whole life you have a place in heaven.’

       
‘I don’t understand.’

       
‘She converted to Islam. The one who converts another is guaranteed a place in heaven for himself and his children and grandchildren and so on down for seven generations. I think it’s wrong only to honour Raza’s father – the man who did the converting. The convert should also be honoured. It’s because of Raza’s mother also – not only his father – that he’s going to heaven. And his children and grandchildren after him. Even martyrs who die in jihad can’t do so much for their family. It’s written in the Quran.’

       
‘Have you read the Quran?’

       
‘Of course I have.’

       
‘Have you read it in any language you understand?’ Suddenly the traffic seemed to have thickened; a reassuring number of people were driving alongside, and no fear of giving offence could possibly match her indignation at listening to Hiroko being reduced to a launch pad for her husband and son’s journey to a paradise in which she didn’t appear to have secured a place for herself in this Afghan’s mad system of belief.

       
‘I understand Islam,’ he said, tensing.

       
‘I’ll take that to mean no. I’ve read it – in English. Believe me, the Quran says nothing of the sort. And frankly, what kind of heaven is heaven if you can find shortcuts into it? Seven generations!’

       
‘Please do not speak this way.’

       
‘Tell me one thing. One thing.’ Unexpectedly, such a rage within her, overpowering everything. ‘If an Afghan dies in the act of killing infidels in his country does he go straight to heaven?’

       
‘If the people he kills come as invaders or occupiers, yes. He is shaheed. Martyr.’

       
How slowly, unwillingly, her fist had opened to drop the first clod of earth on to Harry’s coffin. It was the moment when her heart truly understood that all the imagined tomorrows of their relationship – Delhi, conversations without recrimination, days of hearing the other’s stories in full – would never come. Because of just one man with a gun. She had always thought it would take so much more than that to bring Harry down. But it was just one Afghan with a gun who never stopped to think of Harry Burton as anything but an infidel invader whose death opened up a path to Paradise.

       
‘He is a murderer. And your heaven is an abomination.’

       
‘We should not speak any more.’

       
‘No, we should not.’

       
There was not another word between them – the tension almost suffocating – until she pulled into the parking lot of the fast-food restaurant. But as he opened the car door to leave he said something in Arabic in which she only caught the word ‘Allah’ and followed it up with, ‘I won’t forget what you’ve done.’

       
What had she done? She watched him walk across the parking lot, his stride that of a man walking into freedom, a family with two children entering the restaurant behind him.

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.’