Burnt Shadows (25 page)

       
Hiroko shook her head. Turning her face towards the sea, she closed her eyes and smiled.

       
‘It’s such a pleasure to be here. We live so far inland I sometimes forget this is also a coastal city.’

       
‘Also?’

       
‘Like Nagasaki.’

       
She looked towards the three wooden fishing boats progressing in a line towards the horizon, no sails, and at this distance no sound of motors, so that they seemed to be propelled by the will of the sea. Nagasaki to Bombay. Bombay to Istanbul. Istanbul to Karachi. All that sea-travel in a single year, made more extraordinary by the fact that in the years preceding she’d never left Japan, and in the years that followed she had never left Pakistan. Rarely left Karachi, in fact – Sajjad sometimes took Raza to Lahore to see his brother Iqbal, or to Peshawar to see his sister, and once a decade or so they’d cross the border to visit the family that remained in Delhi, though those were always dispiriting trips. But Hiroko didn’t accompany them on these family trips, and Sajjad had long ago recognised that his Japanese wife would always be an outsider to his family, her presence reason for discomfort on every side, and he’d finally stopped asking her to come along. So every so often she would have these days alone in Karachi, and always there’d be a secret thrill of imagining she might dip into their savings and board a flight to somewhere – Egypt, Hong Kong, New York – returning in time to welcome her husband and son home.

       
‘Do you still think about it a lot? About Nagasaki?’ It was not the kind of question he would usually ask of someone he had first met only a couple of months earlier, but already Hiroko seemed like someone who had been in his life a very long time.

       
She touched her back, just above the waist.

       
‘It’s always there.’

       
Harry nodded, and looked down into the clear water of the rock pool, seeing his face with sea plants growing out of it.

       
‘How did you explain it to Raza? With Kim – the first time she asked about Konrad, I made an excuse and left the room. My mother told her something – I still don’t know what, except that it made her look terrifyingly grown-up when she walked out of the room. She was eight.’

       
Hiroko glanced over to Raza, his concentration intent upon his fort. In this moment, he was a child.

       
‘Fairy tales,’ she said. ‘I made up fairy tales.’

       
Harry shook his head, not understanding.

       
She took a deep breath.

       
‘I’ll tell you,’ she said, and he knew by her voice that he was going to hear something that she would speak of to almost no one else. ‘There was the one about the girl whose dying father slithers towards her in the shape of a lizard; she is so horrified by his grotesqueness it takes her years to understand that his final act was to come towards her, after a lifetime of walking away. The one about the boy shaken out of his life and told that was a dream, and so was everyone he loved in it – this charred world, this prison, this aloneness is reality. The one about the purple-backed bookcreatures with broken spines who immolate themselves rather than exist in a world in which everything written in them is shown to be fantasy. The woman who loses all feeling, fire entering from her back and searing her heart, so it’s possible for her to see a baby’s corpse and think only, There’s another one. The men and women who walk through shadow-worlds in search of the ones they loved. Monsters who spread their wings and land on human skin, resting there, biding their time. The army of fire demons, dropped from the sky, who kill with an embrace. The schoolteacher in a world where textbooks come to life; she cannot escape from the anatomy text, its illustrations following her everywhere – bodies without skin, bodies with organs on display, bodies that reveal what happens to bodies when nothing in them works any more.’

       
‘God. Hiroko.’

       
When he had applied to work at the CIA’s Directorate of Operations he had anticipated running into trouble over his foreign birth and the question of divided allegiances; but the India and England years rated little mention in his interview, and the only sticky moment occurred when he was asked his views on the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Acutely aware of the polygraph machine attached to him, he had said, ‘Like President Eisenhower, I believe we should not have done that.’

       
Now Pakistan was developing its nuclear programme. The CIA knew. And as far as Harry could make out all they were doing in response was gathering information that confirmed this was so and then funnelling more money into the country, making possible the huge expenditure that such a programme required. Harry had no memory of Konrad, but that hadn’t prevented him from dreaming of mushroom clouds on a regular basis since the day in 1945 when he found the magazine his mother had brought home with its pictures of atomic-bomb victims – he had looked from the photographs of burnt lumps of humanity to the picture of Uncle Konrad as a young boy, just a little older than Harry was himself, smiling at the camera with Harry’s own smile.

       
It was Ilse Weiss, not any of the CIA psychologists, who had suggested that at the very root of Harry’s determination to join the CIA at the height of the Cold War was the terror of nuclear war, the threat of which could only be eliminated by conclusively ending the battle between America and Russia. Harry had laughed dismissively – he always refused to acknowledge to his mother that he worked for the CIA, though she had somehow managed to work it out while he was still in training at the Farm; but ever since he had read a colleague’s report to Langley about the Pakistan nuclear project there had been times, while sitting across from the ISI officials, when Harry felt a rage that went beyond the usual mistrust and annoyances and anger that accompanied every step of the ISI–CIA alliance, and then he couldn’t help wondering if his mother might have had a point.

       
‘But I never told Raza the fairy tales,’ Hiroko said. ‘Not any of them. I kept thinking, One day he’ll be old enough. But why should I ever let my child imagine all that?’ She cupped water in her hand and drizzled it on Harry’s scalp, which was beginning to turn red in the sun. ‘He knows there was a bomb. He knows it was terrible, and that my father died, and the man I was engaged to died. He once received a history book for a birthday present which had a full page about Hiroshima, with a paragraph appended about Nagasaki. It showed a picture of an old Japanese man looking sad, and holding a bandage against his bloodied head. It looked as if he’d scraped it falling off the low branch of a tree. Raza showed it to me, nodded his head, and never said anything about it again.’

       
‘And the burns on your back?’

       
He was unprepared for the anger streaking across her face, the bite in her voice as she said, ‘Your mother had no business telling you about that.’

       
‘I’m so sorry.’ He found he was actually frightened of her displeasure, shaken by the unfamiliarity of her features without their customary good humour.

       
She brushed a hand over her face, as though wiping away the unpleasantness that had settled there, and reached out to pat Harry’s wrist.

       
‘Forgive my vanity. Sajjad is the one person in the world who I allow . . .’ She stopped, smiled in a way that told Harry that to continue would reveal details of intimacy between husband and wife, and added, ‘Actually, Raza’s never seen them.’

       
‘He hasn’t seen them?’ Impossible to keep the shock out of his voice.

       
‘Oh, he knows they’re there. He knows there are places without feeling. When he was a child he liked to sneak up behind me and tap against my back with a fork or a pencil, laughing when I carried on doing whatever I was doing, unaware. It made Sajjad so angry, but I was grateful he could approach it with such lightness.’ She looked amused by Harry’s continued expression of amazement. ‘This is not a world in which young boys see their mother’s bare backs, you know. I never made a conscious choice for him not to see it – I simply didn’t think I needed to go out of my way to show him what was done to me. And yes, Harry Burton, they’re ugly. And I am vain.’

       
He wanted – strangely, wildly – to apologise to her, to beg her forgiveness. The only thing that stopped him was the certainty that whatever he said would be inadequate, and embarrassing to her.

       
‘But I don’t want you to think my life is haunted by the past,’ Hiroko continued. ‘I’m told most hibakusha have survivor’s guilt. Believe me, I don’t. Here I am, breathing in the sea air, watching for salamanders and hermit crabs with a Weiss while my husband and son build forts on the sand. Yesterday, I picked up the ringing telephone and heard my old friend Ilse’s voice for the first time in thirty-five years.’ She smiled with a deep pleasure. It had been extraordinary, the way the intervening years had compressed into nothing, and they had talked without constraint for over an hour, Ilse’s voice happy in a way it had never been during the days of her marriage to James. ‘And tomorrow morning I will walk into the schoolyard with my neighbour and friend, Bilqees, who teaches with me, and my students will crowd around to tell me about their school trip to the zoo, so many of them chattering at the same time that I won’t understand a word any of them is saying. Yes, I know everything can disappear in a flash of light. That doesn’t make it any less valuable.’

       
She leaned back and sank her feet into the rock pool. She didn’t know how to tell him – without making him uncomfort­ able – that he had become part of all that was valuable in her life. The way he had entered their house in Nazimabad, entered their daily lives – there was something simply amazing in it. Earlier, watching Harry play cricket on the sand with Raza and a group of young boys, she realised that while Konrad would have determinedly wandered into parts of town which his sister stayed far from he would have done it self-consciously, aware of his own transgression. And Ilse, for all her years in New York, mingling with ‘people of all kinds’, as she put it, would still not be able to enter Sajjad’s presence without remembering he had been only one rung up from a servant – this much was obvious in the only stilted moment of their conversation, when Ilse said, ‘And how is your husband?’ But Harry’s attitude was simply one of gratitude for being welcomed.

       
Americans! she thought, watching Harry remove a tube of sunblock from the pocket of his shorts and apply some to the top of his head. In Tokyo, thirty-five years ago, she had decided their snobbery was not of class but of nation (‘The bomb saved American lives!’ Even now, even now, she could feel her face burning at the memory). But around Harry Burton she felt herself relent. He was a consular officer – Konrad’s nephew, a consular officer. It seemed entirely right. He was the gatekeeper between one nation and the next, and all she had seen of him these last weeks led her to believe he swung the gate open, wide.

       
‘Partition and the bomb,’ Harry said, interrupting her. ‘The two of you are proof that humans can overcome everything.’

       
Overcome
. Such an American word. What really did it mean? But she knew he meant it generously, so it seemed discourteous to throw the word back in his face with stories of a ‘not right’ foetus which her body had rejected, or the tears Sajjad wept after his first visit to his collapsed world in Delhi.

       
Instead she said, ‘Sometimes I look at my son and think perhaps the less we have to “overcome” the more we feel aggrieved.’

       
The drifting sense of hopelessness that had taken over Raza’s life after his second failed attempt at his exam had sharpened into self-pity these last weeks in which Sajjad had started taking him each morning to work at the soap factory where he was general manager, while all Raza’s friends took the bus to their universities.

       
‘At least let him work in the office building,’ Hiroko had said, after the first day, when Raza came home filthy with machinery grime, and refused to wash his hands because the smell of soap made him sick.

       
‘I’ve told him he will work in the factory until the day he decides to take his exam again. Don’t you understand I want him to hate the work enough that he chooses the only way out? You just let him mope at home all day. Give him time, you said. Well, he’s had time. Now please allow me to try my way. The exam is only a few weeks away.’

       
Hiroko was sufficiently worried about her son’s state of torpor that she acceded, shaking her head against Raza’s pleas to intervene with Sajjad on his behalf even as she made sure there was always a pile of ash and lemon-wedges next to the sink for Raza to scrub with in place of soap when he returned from the factory. She remembered acutely the stench of the munitions factory, how she carried it in her nostrils all through the day.

       
‘I don’t understand,’ Harry said. ‘He’s incredibly smart. What’s the problem?’

       
She tried to explain to him, as much as she understood from Raza’s muttered comments, about words disappearing into bursts of light, fingers unable to hold on to a pen, and – worst of all – the brief flashes of clarity when the answers appeared in his mind, one fact leading inevitably to the other, so all he needed was to catch hold of the first one and the rest would follow like a row of dancers with arms interlocked – and somewhere in the journey from his mind to the pen the facts scattered, whirling apart from each other without discernible pattern.

       
‘Is that it?’ Harry said. He stood up, scrubbing at his knee where it was imprinted with the pattern of the rocks. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I need a word with your son.’