Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘You say you’re a translator? Did you know Konrad in a professional capacity or.?’ Elizabeth made a vague gesture that managed to capture her utter ignorance of Konrad’s life in Japan.

‘It’s how we met. Through translations for his book. He was. ’ Hiroko paused. She had not spoken about Konrad to anyone but Yoshi Watanabe, and with Yoshi there was much that didn’t need to be said. So now she had to take a second or two before giving words to the future she had lost. ‘If our world hadn’t ended he would have been my husband.’

Lala Buksh’s arrival with the tea removed all necessity for an immediate response. James just sat back in his chair, not bothering to hide his disbelief. And Elizabeth thought, I did not know him at all! Nothing in the image she had of her half-brother — a man enclosed in his own mind who viewed other people as irritants distracting from the beauty of a leaf or an idea — allowed her to imagine him holding the attention of a woman as spirited as this. She wondered what marriage meant to the Japanese. Did it involve love? She really couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t imagine Konrad and Hiroko Tanaka in love — and in early love, at that, when everything that matters in the world is distilled into two bodies. She was suddenly aware of James’s physical presence in a way she hadn’t been for a long time.

Who could resist such an address? James ran the odd sentence through his mind, while nodding at the Japanese woman — what was her name? — as though it was the news of her relationship to Konrad that he was taking in. Could it be that she had come here expecting to stay? Could she possibly imagine they would ask her to stay simply because she claimed to have been Konrad’s fiancée? Although, she hadn’t quite claimed that exactly. He glanced at her hands. No ring.

‘Terrible about Konrad,’ he said, realising Elizabeth was not going to be the first to speak. ‘Just an awful business, the whole thing. We hadn’t really been in touch with him for a while, Miss Tan. ’ He brought his teacup to his mouth to try and obscure his inability to recall the rest of her name. ‘But, of course, we’d like very much to know more about his life in Japan. You must come over for supper while you’re here. Will you be staying in Delhi a while?’

James, you bastard. Elizabeth felt a rush of protectiveness towards the Japanese woman who had clearly come here because there was nowhere else for her to go. Which was a ridiculous thing to do, of course, but that hardly justified the cutting dismissal with which James had just directed her towards the door.

But other than a bright spot of red on her cheek, Hiroko showed no sign of perturbation.

‘I have some money and no attachments. It means I don’t need to make plans.’ The truth was she had little money — the voyage from Tokyo had cut a swathe through her savings — but she had every confidence that her three languages and glowing references from the Americans would be sufficient to secure employment anywhere in the world. ‘How long I stay depends on how Delhi and I get along.’ She turned to Elizabeth, the slight repositioning of her shoulders dismissing James just as effectively as he’d dismissed her. ‘Could you tell me where I can find a respectable boarding house? I have references from the Americans in Tokyo, and from Yoshi Watanabe, grandson of Peter Fuller from Shropshire.’

Whether it was simple curiosity, a feeling of sympathy, or a desire to offend James, Elizabeth didn’t know, but she found herself saying, ‘Why don’t you stay here for a few days while we sort out further arrangements. Your luggage?’

‘I left it with the man outside.’ Hiroko tried to reconcile Konrad’s bitter comments about Ilse, the sister who had made him feel so unwelcome in Delhi, with this woman of warmth and hospitality. ‘But, please, I don’t want to impose.’

‘Elizabeth, a word.’ James stood up, and moved indoors. After a pause long enough only to contain within it a glance of reassurance, Elizabeth followed.

Hiroko pressed her fingers just beneath her shoulder blade. From Tokyo to here she had found momentum in momentum. She had not thought of destination so much as departure, wheeling through the world with the awful freedom of someone with no one to answer to. She had become, in fact, a figure out of myth. The character who loses everything and is born anew in blood. In the stories these characters were always reduced to a single element: vengeance or justice. All other components of personality and past shrugged off.

Hiroko had once spent an entire afternoon looking at a picture of Harry Truman. She did not know how to want to hurt the bespectacled man, though she suspected she would feel a certain satisfaction if someone dropped a bomb on him; as for justice, it seemed an insult to the dead to think there could be any such thing. It was a fear of reduction rather than any kind of quest that had forced her away from Japan. Already she had started to feel that word ‘hibakusha’ start to consume her life. To the Japanese she was nothing beyond an explosion-affected person; that was her defining feature. And to the Americans. well, she was not interested in being anything to the Americans any more. She pushed herself up from the chair, her arms wrapped across her chest, and walked down into the garden. Some days she could feel the dead on her back, pressing down beneath her shoulder blades with demands she could make no sense of but knew she was failing to meet.

She ran her knuckles across the bark of a tree. The faint sound of skin on bark was oddly comforting. It reminded her of something. something from Nagasaki, but she couldn’t remember what.

Sajjad walked out into the garden from James’s study. The Burtons had started arguing outside the study door — they knew nothing about this woman (said James), they couldn’t simply turn Konrad’s intended on to the street (said Elizabeth), she was clearly lying about her relationship to Konrad (James), it would take little effort to telegram that friend of Konrad — Yoshi What’s-his-name — and ask him about her, so why not just do that instead of being so unpleasant (Elizabeth), oh, I’m unpleasant, am I (James). Sajjad hated their arguments — not the fact of the arguments themselves but the sense both of the Burtons conveyed of restraining themselves, even at their most barbed, from saying what was most true and most hurtful until the unsaid words filled up the room and made Sajjad want to run away to his home, where even Allah was berated soundly and in ringing tones for all His shortcomings.

Surprisingly, the Burtons’ voices did not carry into the garden. So the newcomer, he saw, was entirely unaware of them. Unaware of all the world, it seemed, as she rubbed the back of her hand determinedly against the tree-bark with its knots and nodules.

‘Don’t,’ he said, suddenly appalled by how fragile she looked in the sunlight. She seemed not to hear him, so he ran across the grass to her, just as the blood started to well up beneath her broken skin, and pulled her hand away.

Lala Buksh walked out in time to see Sajjad’s hand encircle Hiroko’s wrist.

Trouble, he thought.

‘I don’t think it’s going to work out with the girl we were considering as your bride,’ Khadija Ashraf said, lowering herself on to the divan in the courtyard on which Sajjad was sitting, cross-legged, while sipping his morning cup of tea in the pre-dawn moments of in between.

Sajjad put an arm around his mother and whispered, ‘While the others are still asleep, you can admit it. You don’t think any of the girls in Dilli are good enough for you favourite son.’

Khadija Ashraf leaned back against the bolster-cushion after sweeping away the leaves that had fallen on it from the almond tree, and shook her head in exasperation at Sajjad’s seeming indifference.