Kamila Shamsie: Burnt Shadows

But that was childish dreaming. Or borrowed dreaming, really. She saw the way her mother sighed and laughed over stories of the modern girls and she imagined their world as the only mode of escape from a dutiful life. Though the older she got the more she was certain her mother — so devoted to husband and daughter and home — never really desired the escape, only enjoyed the idea that it existed in the world. That was where she and her daughter so sharply differed. For Hiroko, to know was to want. But that world glimpsed in magazines was known far less than the world she could reach out and grasp by the roots of its rust-coloured hair.

Now the childhood dreams are past. Now there is Konrad. As soon as the war ends, there will be her and Konrad. As soon as the war ends, there will be food and silk. She’ll never wear grey again, never re-use tea leaves again, never lift a bamboo spear, or enter a factory or bomb shelter. As soon as the war ends there will be a ship to take her and Konrad far away into a world without duty.

When will the war end? It cannot happen quickly enough.

He walks away from Azalea Manor, almost running.

He can hear Yoshi calling him to come back and wait for the all-clear, but all he can think is that if another New Bomb is to fall it will fall on Urakami: on the factories, on the people packed close together. The shelters won’t keep it out, not the thing Yoshi described. And if it is to fall on Hiroko, let it fall on him, too.

He picks up his pace, runs through memories of her: the gate through which she walked in search of him as soon as Yoshi’s nephew delivered the letter he had written, asking if she’d be interested in translating letters and diaries into German for a negotiable fee; the schoolyard where they used to meet every week for the first few months, the exchange of translations and money slipping further and further to the margins of their encounters; the road leading to the street-car, where she’d responded to his gloomy complaints about rationing by singing ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ and he discovered she spoke English as fluently as German; the Chinese quarter, where he made her laugh out loud for the first time, confessing the names he’d given to all the vegetables he didn’t recognise: windswept cabbage, knots of earth, fossilised flower, lanky potato; Megane-Bashi, or Spectacles Bridge, where they had been standing, looking into the water, when a small silver fish leapt out of Konrad’s reflected chest and dived into her reflection and she said, ‘Oh,’ and stepped back, almost losing her balance, so he had to put his arm around her waist to steady her. And here — he slows; the all-clear sounds; the threat has passed — the banks of the Oura, where he told her that his first winter in Nagasaki he had walked past the frozen river and seen splashes of colour beneath the surface.

‘I went closer to look. And what do you think I saw? A woman’s name. Hana. It had been written in red ink by someone — either a skilled artist or an obsessed lover — who knew how to paint on the water in the instant before the ice froze the characters into place.’

Instead of a shaking her head at him and offering up some entirely practical explanation for a name sealed in ice, as he had expected, she frowned.

‘Your first winter here was ’38. Why didn’t we meet sooner? What a waste.’

It was the first indication he had that she — bizarrely, wonderfully — went at least part-way to reciprocating his feelings.

He sets off again, panic replaced by purposefulness. Ever since Germany’s surrender he has told her it isn’t safe for her — a traitor’s daughter — to spend too much time with him. So they have been meeting only twice a week, for an hour at a time, always out in public, sometimes trailed by the military police — on those occasions they speak loudly, in Japanese, about the glorious history of Japan about which she pretends to instruct him. He has stopped his weekly practice of lending her books in German and English from his library, though it has formerly been one of his great pleasures to see the different expressions of delight with which she greets Yeats, Waugh, Mann; no matter the length or denseness she is done with the book — has sometimes read it twice — by the time the next week comes around. But now ‘books’ have joined the list of suspended intimacies between them. Each time they meet she complains that there’s too much rationing in the world as it is, but he is unyielding. After the war, he always says. After the war. Now he sees how much of Yoshi’s thinking has infected him.

Crossing into the valley, he looks up towards Urakami Cathedral with its stone figures that stand against the sky — on overcast days their greyness suggests each cloud is an incipient statue waiting for a sculptor to pull it down and hew it into solidity. And he, too, has been hewn into solidity — gone now those days of insubstantiality, not knowing what he’s doing in Japan, a fugitive from a once-beloved country he long ago gave up on trying to fight for or against. He knows entirely why he’s here, why here is the only place he can be.

Away from the river now, away from the Cathedral, he veers towards the slope she has described to him — with the denuded silver-barked tree painted black so that the moonlight doesn’t make a steel tower of it and draw enemy fire (and on the topmost branches someone has painted stars). There, the purple rooftops of her neighbourhood which remind her of his notebooks, so every day when she comes home from the factory she sees his birds, every night she falls asleep beneath their outstretched wings.

‘Konrad-san?’ She stands on the verandah of her house, looking at him with concern. What could have brought him to Urakami, for all her neighbours to see?

He smiles and makes a gesture of mock-despair. Months ago he asked her to call him ‘Konrad’ and she said, ‘It’s a nice name, but on its own it sounds naked.’ Then she gave him her wickedest smile. ‘One day, maybe that won’t be a problem.’

‘Is your father here?’

‘Out walking in the hills. Come.’

She opens the sliding door and he fumbles to take off his shoes before joining her inside. She is walking up the stairs before he’s in and he barely allows himself time to look around the small reception room, the focal point of which is an ink-and-brush painting of a Nagasaki seascape — her father’s work, he guesses correctly, feeling strangely unsettled at the thought of her father. Hiroko once said she learnt how to question the world’s rules from his example rather than his instruction, and Konrad can’t help but suspect Matsui Tanaka’s disengaged parenting will stop at the precise moment his daughter introduces him to the German she. what?. loves?

Upstairs, he enters a room in which a futon is rolled up, but hasn’t yet been put away. He tries not to stare at her bedding.

Hiroko steps out on to the balcony and leans on the railing. This house is far up the slope and though it is hemmed in on three sides by other homes the balcony looks out on to nothing but trees and hills. And nothing but trees and hills look on to it.

‘You never told me you live a single dive away from an ocean of liquid leaves,’ he says.

She touches his sleeve.

‘Are you all right? You look strange. And you’re here. Why?’

As ever their conversation moves between German, English and Japanese. It feels to them like a secret language which no one else they know can fully decipher.

‘I have to ask you something. I don’t want to wait until the war ends to hear the answer.’ In saying it he realises his purpose in coming here. ‘Will you marry me?’

Her response is swift. She pulls herself to her full height, hands on her hips.

‘How dare you?’