Kamila Shamsie: Burnt Shadows

He steps back. How has he been so completely wrong?

‘How dare you suggest there’s a question attached to it? Last week when we talked about travelling around the world together after the war — in what capacity did you think I was agreeing to go with you, if not as your wife?’ The end of the sentence is muffled in his shirt as he pulls her to him.

Peace, she thinks. This is what peace feels like.

‘Not Delhi,’ he says.

They sit on the balcony, fingers tangling.

‘But I want to meet Ilse. She’s your sister; I have to meet her.’

‘Half-sister,’ he corrects. ‘And it’s been a long time since she was Ilse Weiss. Now it’s just Elizabeth Burton. And you will meet her — just not on our honeymoon. Frankly the only person worth meeting at Bungle Oh! is Sajjad — if he’s still there. Lovely Muslim boy who works for James. He’s the one who told me that story of the spider in Islam, remember?’

She moves her head away from his shoulder.

‘Bungalow?’

‘Bungle Oh! It’s a pun. Bungle Oh! Civil Lines, Delhi. Maybe you’re right — we should go. Who could resist an address like that?’

‘You’re not being serious,’ she grumbles.

‘That’s a new complaint.’ He kisses her head. ‘Ilse won’t want us there. I’ve told you how ashamed she is of what she refers to as her “German connections”. That’s what my father and I are reduced to. Connections. And that was before the war. Now, who even knows if she’ll acknowledge she knows me? She probably tells everyone she sprang fully formed from her mother’s Anglo-Saxon forehead.’

‘OK,’ she says. ‘No Delhi. What about New York?’

He wonders if she’s heard anything about this New Bomb. The thought of it makes him pull her even closer.

She decides not to point out that, despite the cloud cover, it’s far too hot for such bodily contact. Her mind leaps ahead to the further kinds of bodily contact which will be made necessary by marriage. She wonders if his knowledge of what happens on wedding nights is less vague than hers. Her curiosity about this is entirely abstract.

‘Your father will be back from his walk soon,’ Konrad says. Regretfully he stands up, pulling her along with him. ‘This is not how I want him to see his future son-in-law for the first time.’

‘Come back for dinner then. I’ll give you all you can eat of Urakami’s best miso-flavoured water.’

‘Sounds perfect.’

He’s looking at her now in a way that makes her put her hand up to her mouth to brush off whatever he sees clinging there. He laughs softly, puts his arms around her waist and kisses her.

He has kissed her before, of course. Many times. But always in a hurried manner, quickly quickly before anyone sees. Now he is different. She feels something moist. It’s his tongue. That should feel repellent, but it doesn’t. Anything but. She is amazed by what her body seems to know to do in response, how this can feel both strange and yet familiar.

When he pulls away she says, ‘Stay,’ and leans back into him.

He shakes his head at her in a way that doesn’t mean no, only not yet.

‘Stay.’

But he steps back. He suspects she does not fully understand what is promised in that demand, what is already just a single breath away from being inevitable.

‘I’ll be back for dinner.’ He steps backwards, his eyes never leaving her face.

In this manner he walks down the stairs, and she can’t help laughing. He looks as if he’s in a movie reel that has accidentally reversed itself.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I don’t know. Urakami Cathedral!’

‘Oh. Is that where we’re going to get married?’ Displeasure in her voice.

‘Of course not. You’re not even Catholic.’

‘That’s not the problem. I want to get married on a mountain, looking down at the sea.’

‘I’ll only be looking at you.’ His grin manages to make the statement sexual rather than sentimental.

This side of him really is entirely new, and she is surprised by her own sense of anticipation even as she swats the air as though to dispatch his absurd comment.

He has reversed himself all the way to the verandah now.

‘So why are you going to the Cathedral?’

‘Father Asano said he’d lend me some books. I don’t want the books, but since he’s one of the few people still willing to associate with me I don’t want to offend him.’

‘We’ll leave them all behind, Konrad. We’ll find an island where only the two of us have to live.’

It is the first time she has said his name without the honorific. He steps forward, presses his mouth against hers again — uncaring that the neighbours might see.

When he is gone, Hiroko races up to the stairs to see if she can watch him from the window as he descends the slope, but the angles of her house don’t allow it. She is suddenly, shockingly, aware of her own body. Such a mixture of heaviness and lightness — her limbs suffused with pleasure, exhausted by it, and yet it feels as though there are wings attached to her, on the verge of lifting her off the ground entirely.

In the corner of the room is a trunk in which her father keeps the most precious memories of his wife. She opens the trunk and reaches for the silk kimono which is folded beneath a seashell and an envelope filled with letters.

Hiroko removes the kimono from the trunk, and throws it up in the air. The silk shifts against itself and unfolds, so that what went up a square comes down a rectangle; again she throws it up, and it hits the ceiling lamp, catching on its shade before slithering down into her waiting arms. She closes her arms around the fabric that suggests being draped in a waterfall and thinks of holding Konrad, naked.

She undresses quickly, removing the hated grey monpe and the shirt that was once a gleaming white and is now just the colour of too many washes. Then she continues, removing every scrap of clothing. Something strange is happening inside her body which she doesn’t understand, but she knows she wants it to go on happening. Without care for underclothes, she slips one arm into the sleeve of the kimono, the silk electric against her skin.

Konrad walks across Urakami Valley, his heart folding in and in on itself.

Hiroko steps out on to the verandah. Her body from neck down a silk column, white with three black cranes swooping across her back. She looks out towards the mountains, and everything is more beautiful to her than it was early this morning. Nagasaki is more beautiful to her than ever before. She turns her head and sees the spires of Urakami Cathedral, which Konrad is looking up at when he notices a gap open between the clouds. Sunlight streams through, pushing the clouds apart even further.

Hiroko.

And then the world goes white.

The light is physical. It throws Hiroko forward, sprawling. Dust enters her mouth, her nose, as she hits the ground, and it burns. Her first response is a fear that the fall has torn her mother’s silk kimono. She raises herself off the ground, looks down. There is dirt on the kimono, but no tear. Yet something is wrong. She stands up. The air is suddenly hot and she can feel it on her skin. She can feel it on her back. She glides her hand over her shoulder, touches flesh where there should be silk. Moves her hand further down her back, touches what is neither flesh nor silk but both. She wonders if this has something to do with the burning she felt as she fell. Now there is no feeling. She taps the place that is neither flesh nor silk. There is no feeling at all.

Her neighbour comes out on to the verandah next door.

‘What was that?’ she says.

Hiroko can only think that her clothing is in shreds and she must go indoors to change. She hears the cry of her neighbour as she turns her back on the woman to enter the house. Hiroko runs her fingers along her back as she climbs the stairs down which, minutes earlier, she had followed Konrad. There is feeling, then no feeling, skin and something else. Where there is skin, there is feeling. Where there is something else there is none. Her fingers pluck at shreds embedded in the something else. Shreds of what — skin or silk? She shrugs off the kimono. It falls from her shoulders, but does not touch the ground. Something keeps it attached to her.