Kamila Shamsie - A God in Every Stone

— What girl, what angel?

The lawyer stood up.

— Didn’t you see her, Qayyum? Yesterday, on the Street of Storytellers. A figure made of light stood on a balcony, dispensing water to the men on the street below; the water itself liquid light, a miracle. The English officers saw her standing there, a sign of Allah’s grace, and shot her with every single gun in their artillery. She plunged from the balcony, a falling star, and only when she landed, dead, did the light extinguish, and the men saw it wasn’t an angel against whose brightness they had closed their eyes even as they drank her blessing, but a Peshawari girl, blessed by the Almighty.

In the silence that followed the lawyer struck a match and in a completely different voice, flat, slightly cynical, added, That’s what the man who told me about it insisted, though I know he was hiding at home all day. He extended his arm, held the match against the spiked tip of a bulrush and stepped back. A circle of brightness flared; a string of gold unspooled from the circle, wrapped itself around the dense tip of the bulrush, and the flames caught. Within seconds there was a wall of fire, the shapes of individual bulrushes visible within it.

— Have you gone mad, the Municipal Commissioner shouted, backing away from the crackling light.

— No, just letting the people down below know you’re up here. You might as well go and try to explain things to them before they work out the route from your neighbour’s roof. I think you’ll find a way to control their passions. But I might be wrong.

With a great, spat-out curse the Municipal Commissioner descended the stairs into his house. The bulrushes were disintegrating but the night was breezeless, the flames stayed contained. A concentration of heat and brightness and beauty, unapproachable. So might an angel appear to a man, veiled in the fire of heaven.

— Which balcony was she on? Qayyum asked Abdul Hakim.

— There’s no need to say anything to anyone about the girl, the lawyer said, putting a hand on Qayyum’s arm. What can’t be denied we’ll admit, but let’s not start speaking about our allies giving dead girls into the hands of Englishmen. Understand?

— Was it the carpet-seller’s balcony?

— Yes.

Qayyum scooped up hot ash from the trough in cupped palms, and whispered a verse from the Qur’an, his breath scattering grey flecks.

— Their works are as ashes which the wind bloweth hard upon a stormy day. They have no control of aught that they have earned.

Walking through the train station and across the railway bridge Viv was able to consider the burqa as the Invisibility Cape she had longed for as a child. Beneath the white tent she moved in an entirely private sphere. Unknown, unseen. The policeman standing near the station lavatory who had taken note of Miss Spencer as she entered paid no attention to the woman in the burqa who emerged; the Englishwomen and children who waited on the platform for the train to evacuate them from Peshawar looked straight through her; Remmick who had personally accompanied her here from Dean’s was too busy sneezing loudly into his handkerchief to pay attention to a local woman whose steps didn’t falter as she walked past him though she ducked her head so that the shimmer of her blue eyes wouldn’t be visible beneath the face-mesh.

Beyond the bridge, at the end of a metalled road, Kabuli Gate was open, a doorway into a world entirely unlike the one she was leaving behind. Viv steadied herself against the railing of the bridge, looked over her shoulder towards the train station. She might just have enough time to return before anyone noticed she’d disappeared. Another few minutes, though, and someone would raise an alarm, the woman in the white burqa would be mentioned, Remmick would understand that she’d set out to betray him — to betray the Empire itself.

She tried to see if she could recognise Remmick among all the Englishmen gathered on the station with their wives but her latticed vision made it impossible. She pulled at the face-mesh so it was a few inches away from her eyes, squinted, cursed men, dropped her hand and continued on to Kabuli Gate.

It was true, all the troops had withdrawn from the Walled City, but the cry of ‘Peshawar has fallen’ which had sent everyone at the Club into such a panic the previous night seemed ridiculous as she walked through the wide-open gates and into the bustle of the Street of Storytellers. The smells of cooking meat, the calls of traders, the variety of turbans, it was all as before, but even so, something was off-kilter. It took a little while to decide that the difference was in her — in making her just another local woman, the burqa took away her very English right to be eccentric. Now she couldn’t stop and stare, point to things that struck her as unusual, ask questions, enter all-male domains, expect to be treated with a certain deference (she’d never known she’d expected this) simply by virtue of her race. So it’s me, she told herself. All that’s different is me. But she knew this wasn’t true.

She had left the Peshawar Club as soon as she was able to slip away from Remmick the previous night, returning to Dean’s to sit on the ledge of her bedroom window, smoking cigarettes and drinking gin from a bottle, listening to crickets and night-birds. If she closed her eyes she saw corpses laid on corpses, pale hands lifting the dead out of their own blood and throwing them like broken dolls into the back of a lorry. But what could she do about it? She was just a woman with no authority on either side of the city walls.

She held the gin bottle against her neck, the glass cool. There was a woman in the Walled City who would never have the chance to stand by the grave of someone she loved, or even to know where that grave was — if a tree grew above it, if children played near by, if a god no one believed in any more had left his mark just overhead. He was buried in Bodrum, beneath a cypress tree, and in 1917 I took his walking stick and Alice’s collar (she had died by then too) and interred them beneath the Split Rock of Zeus . Wilhelm had written this to Viv after the war, an act of kindness she’d never forget. There was nothing comparative she could offer the green-eyed woman — but she could give certainty where there might be doubt, knowledge where there might be confusion. Yes, there were lorries, a man named Caroe ordered it, and here is the reason why. Perhaps it would matter. After a loss every detail mattered, every acknowledgement of a wrong mattered. The War Office has nothing to do with that man’s death, Miss Spencer. I must ask you to stop sending those letters for the sake of your own reputation .

It was well after midnight when Remmick knocked on her door. He’d come to remind her all women and children were being evacuated next morning, and she must be ready to leave first thing. As he spoke he looked around her room in the manner of a man practised at finding anything out of place and, noticing the burqa slung over the back of a chair, walked up to it and stroked the white cotton.

— Put this on, he said.

— Why?

— Put it on and take your dress off.

— Get out or I’ll to scream the roof down.

He left, shrugging, but when he had gone Viv picked the burqa off the chair, and the fabric between her fingers felt like an answer.

But now she approached the carpet-seller’s house and the voice in her head grew louder — Stay out of it! And then this thought, these people are not your people. She looked down the long vista, and saw only Pathans. Despite the burqa she felt exposed, and turned sharply into a street so narrow the man walking in the other direction couldn’t pass her without contact. He flapped his hands at her as if she were a flock of pigeons, and she found herself reversing in rapid but tiny steps so she wouldn’t trip over the hem of her burqa. It was only when a doorway opened and she saw the woman standing there, garishly made up, that she realised what he feared wasn’t the contamination of her touch but a witness to what the men of the city did here. A street for everything in the Walled City. No map, only desire to steer you. The Street of Storytellers. The Street of Courtesans. The Street of Englishwomen. The Street of Inventive Guides. Her young Pactyike, her Herodotus of Peshawar, her Civilising Mission. He was the last person in the world she wanted to see.