Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘What’s the meeting about? I thought you’d negotiated everything about moving to the New York office?’

‘Oh, there’s always something else to iron out,’ Kim said, stretching her lean body, trying to get rid of the kinks that remained from the flight. ‘But it suits me fine to be here. The run-up to Christmas is the time for exes to get in touch and suggest giving things one last try and God knows I don’t need another one of those conversations with Gary. You do know I’m staying on until after Christmas, right?

‘Just because you’re terrible at communicating with everyone you’ve ever lived with doesn’t mean your grandmother and I have the same problem.’ Hiroko smiled. ‘Of course I know. And I’m delighted.’ She gestured towards the early-edition newspaper splayed on the coffee table next to Kim’s half-empty mug. ‘What’s going on out in the world?’

‘The last fire has almost burnt out.’ Kim pointed in the direction of the looming emptiness outside before coming to sit down on the sofa.

‘That’s not the world, it’s just the neighbourhood,’ Hiroko said sharply.

Kim’s eyebrows rose.

‘Right,’ she said, voice heavy with irony. ‘Just a neighbourhood fire.’

Hiroko raised a hand in apology.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.’

Kim took hold of her hand and squeezed it lightly.

‘What’s the matter, Roko?’

It seemed impossible sometimes, Kim Burton’s blindness. And yet more impossible to hold anything against a woman of such genuine warmth and charm, all the most appealing parts of Konrad, Ilse and Harry right there in the pressure of her fingertips, the concern in her open, guileless face, her desire to know what exactly it was she’d got wrong this time. Hiroko had quite fallen in love with her within minutes of their meeting.

‘Stupid posturing men, that’s the matter. As ever,’ Ilse Weiss said, walking out of her bedroom. She stopped beside the antique globe which rested on the drinks cabinet, and spun it slightly so the continents slid westwards and the unpartitioned mass of India was beneath her fingertips, HINDOOSTAN stamped across it. Very faint, the border which Harry had inked in when he was a young boy, to whom an outdated globe was a useless artefact.

‘You’re looking well, Gran.’

Ilse snorted, and came to sit between Hiroko and Kim, slapping down the leg Kim was resting on the coffee table.

‘At ninety-one the best you can hope for is to be well preserved. Which is just a synonym for looking pickled.’

True enough, Hiroko thought, not unkindly. But despite the gauntness that had once been a striking angularity, and the mass of wrinkles which called to mind the topographical map of a particularly varied terrain, Ilse’s aspect carried such a powerful memory of beauty with it that people still stopped to stare, and to imagine what might be revealed if you could only peel layers of time from her face.

‘I thought you said you were going to be dead by morning.’

Ilse smiled, turning to Hiroko.

‘It’s not quite morning yet.’

Hiroko caught Ilse’s wrist, pressed down against its veins.

‘Well, you have no pulse that I can detect. Perhaps we both died, and this is the what comes after. And Kim’s come visiting!’

‘Nonsense. I’ll get there before you. Like Delhi, like here.’ She removed the cigarette from between Hiroko’s fingers and took one short drag, before blowing out a strand of smoke with a schoolgirl’s smile of transgression. ‘But, you know, last night I really did feel that I’d be dead by morning.’

‘You feel that at least twice a week,’ Hiroko grumbled, retrieving her cigarette.

‘Well. Eventually I’m bound to be right.’ She tapped a finger on her granddaughter’s knee. ‘Don’t tell her about fires burning out as though that’s the world’s most significant event. She thinks Pakistan and India are about to launch themselves into nuclear war.’

‘Shit,’ Kim said. ‘Sorry, Hiroko.’

‘And don’t say “shit”, Kim. If you must swear, say “fuck”. It has a certain savage elegance to it.’

She said it primarily to amuse Hiroko enough to distract her but Hiroko only exhaled smoke, watching the cloud amass in front of her.

Ilse knew that look in her friend’s eyes. It had been there, lurking beneath the thrill of arrival, when Hiroko had come to New York in 1998. ‘Both times you’ve entered my home it’s been nuclear-related. Once was acceptable; twice just seems like lazy plotting,’ Ilse had said, with mock asperity, but that look of Hiroko’s — the one that was back again — had told her that the bomb remained the one thing in the world she would not laugh about.

Hiroko extinguished the half-smoked cigarette, and traced wings of ash on the ashtray with its tip.

‘Any news from Harry? Raza hasn’t been in touch in a few days.’

In the decade the two men had been working together she’d been grateful to have an alternate conduit of information about Raza’s life through Ilse, and Harry himself. Prior to that, in those first few years after Sajjad’s death, months would sometimes go by without any word about him. She had assumed at first he was angry with her or had just grown uncaring, but whenever they did speak or meet he was as devoted as ever — so she saw that it wasn’t lack of love that made him stay away, but something else, some guilt she brought out in him. Guilt about his father’s death. Guilt, perhaps, about his own life, she sometimes wondered, but what was there to be guilty about?

Perhaps she wasn’t enthusiastic enough about his profession, and he thought there was a judgement in there. It wasn’t a matter of judgement — she just wished she could understand why two men as intelligent as Harry and Raza would choose to work in ‘the administrative side of private security’ — how much satisfaction could there be in overseeing the surveillance systems of banks and assigning bodyguards to people of influence? At one point she had thought it was just another cover for working with the CIA, and the thought of Harry pulling Raza into that world had so incensed her she made both men swear on Sajjad’s grave that it wasn’t true. They had both looked so ashen as they swore, she’d known they weren’t lying. Then Ilse had firmly said, ‘Harry’s no longer with the CIA. I’d know if he was lying about that’ — and there was no question of asking Ilse to swear on anyone’s grave. She always said total honesty was one of the gifts of old age.

If only he was happy. That was all she had ever wanted for him. Perhaps that was an aspiration he felt he could never live up to. She pressed her hand against her heart — sometimes just thinking about him made her feel a crushing sense of devastation, quite out of proportion to the circumstances of his life.

Kim said, ‘I can’t even remember the last time Dad called me.’ She did remember it, of course. She always remembered. 31 October. He’d been in one of his nostalgic moods, recalling the Halloween she dressed up as World Peace — sticking maps of the world on to her clothes and a peace sign over each map. Except, she missed the third prong of the peace sign so instead she was, as Harry pointed out, World Mercedes-Benz. He laughed about it over the phone and Kim, wishing she could just laugh, so glad to hear his voice, found herself saying, ‘You only pointed it out months later when you saw the pictures. You weren’t there when it happened. As always.’ Too often around her father, she couldn’t stop being a teenager either in adulation or sullenness. And so she ensured he wouldn’t call again for a very long time. Though perhaps he wasn’t calling because she had a fairly certain idea of where he and Raza were, and he didn’t want her to know, but he could never lie to her without getting caught out.