Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘You know his skill at deception. Come on, Harry. A seventeen-year-old boy from Karachi convinces the Afghans he’s one of them to the point that they take him to a muj camp. Better than that! They take a Hazara to a Pashtun camp. Unbelievable! And even now, no one except us knows, do they? Surrounded by Paks and no one knows he’s one of them.’

Steve was right — Raza Konrad had dinner every night with the Third Country Nationals, translating between them from Urdu to Bengali to Tamil, but never revealing that one of those languages contained in it the memory of his father and all his childhood friends. The men had privately decided his name was an alias — Raza Konrad. It made no sense.

In the pass beneath there grew a single tree, shaped by the wind that raced between the mountains — trunk bent, leafy branches streamlined in a flamelike formation, it was curiously frozen in the act of animation. Hiroko, Sajjad, Konrad, Ilse, Harry: history had blown all of them off course, no one ending — or even middling — where they had begun, but it was only in Raza that Harry saw reshaping as a reflexive act rather than an adaptive response.

‘What gives you the arrogance to think you alone see his true face? This is the guy who held you responsible for his father’s death twenty years ago. Hell, Harry, I hated my dad but if I thought anyone. ’

Harry raised a hand.

‘Enough.’

Steve made a gesture of surrender.

‘Just giving some friendly advice before I go.’

‘You’re leaving?’

‘The United States will play no part in your private incursions into Pakistani territory tomorrow.’ He grinned, extinguishing his cigarette on his arm where an old injury had left him without nerves. ‘Make sure you get the bastards, Burton. Uncle Sam is getting so bored of failure.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Harry said, saluting with a sneer. ‘But could you tell Uncle Sam to step up his efforts to cool temperatures in the neighbourhood. I had an uncle in Nagasaki — that’s one piece of family history I don’t want to relive.’

‘I’ll pass the word along.’ Steve gestured to Harry to lead the way down, hoping that when he was sixty-five he’d have enough of a life beyond work that he’d be content to retire instead of climbing mountains in war zones.

The sky was thick with stars by the time the convoy returned to the compound, and the temperature had plunged vertiginously. Raza was sitting in the doorway of the one-room structure he shared with Harry, huddled in a blanket.

‘Handprints getting to you tonight?’ Harry asked.

The interior walls of their room were covered in the grease-stained fingerprints of a child, level with Raza’s waist. More than once Harry had woken to see Raza walking around the room in the early morning, following the trail of prints, his fingertips skimming the grease stains. The compound had been deserted when the Americans arrived, its dust disturbed only by bird claws, and the locals were quick to relate the tale of the family who used to live here before the attack on this compound by a feuding tribe — the tribe had broken in to find one dead child and no one else. Some form of black magic had made the rest of the family disappear, the locals said — powerful black magic, conjured up with the blood of a child.

Raza shook his head.

‘Just felt claustrophobic in there, Uncle Harry.’

The last time he’d said ‘Uncle Harry’ was over two years ago in Kosovo, when the jeep taking them to a meeting with KLA commanders at a ‘secure location’ had driven past a mass grave.

Harry sat down, a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. Raza unwound the blanket and offered its warmth to Harry, who moved closer, his shoulder pressed against Raza’s, and pulled one half of the blanket tight around himself. It had been a long time since he had felt awkward around the Pakistani’s casualness with physical intimacy. Steve, stalking across the compound ground, thought sourly that they looked like a two-headed creature examining the world from the safety of a patterned cocoon.

‘One of your local stooges brought in a guy he claimed was Taliban,’ Raza said. ‘Two of the new A and G guys interrogated him. They wanted me to act as interpreter.’

‘Which two guys?’ Harry’s voice iced over.

‘Don’t worry. I told them I don’t take orders from the hired help. Anyway, they let him go. Eventually. He was just some guy with a long-standing enmity with your stooge. You ever interrogated anyone, Harry?’

‘Yes. But rarely in the way you mean. It’s largely ineffective.’

‘Is there anything you wouldn’t do if you thought it was effective?’ He recalled the day Harry had come to Dubai in search of him — Raza had asked if the CIA had ever even tried to find the man who shot his father. ‘I found him. And then I killed him,’ Harry had said, and even though Raza knew his father would have been appalled and his mother furious he couldn’t help but feel grateful to Uncle Harry for doing what he wanted done but would never have been able to accomplish himself.

‘What wouldn’t I do if it was effective?’ Harry said thoughtfully. ‘Almost nothing. Children are out of bounds, rape is out of bounds, but otherwise. what works, works. When I’m dead, Raza, and my daughter asks you what kind of man her father really was, don’t tell her I said that.’

Kim Burton. The much imagined Burton who he was now accustomed to thinking he’d seen every time a red-haired woman entered his field of vision. Somewhere, in a world very distant from this one, she was living with Hiroko. Raza crossed his arms on his knees and rested his head there. Heaven lies at the feet of the mother, his Islamiyat teacher in school once said, and Raza came home and searched between his mother’s toes with a magnifying glass, laughing. ‘This carpet is heaven? This ant?’ until his mother hauled him up by his collar and turned the magnifying glass on him saying, No here, here — she held the glass against her eye and looked at his smiling face. Here’s heaven.

Harry knew Raza’s silences well enough to know he was thinking of Hiroko. The adored and neglected mother. He rested his hand on Raza’s wrist. Impossible to believe Ilse was dead. Even in her very old age, she had seemed more alive to him than anyone else in the world. He wanted to tell Raza that one day he’d regret spending so little time with his mother simply because he didn’t want her to fully understand how devalued a being he had become, but he knew Raza would only hear Harry’s own regret in the words rather than understanding any wisdom in the advice. And perhaps there wasn’t any wisdom there.

‘I haven’t been able to find Abdullah,’ Raza said abruptly.

‘Who?’

‘Abdullah. The boy I went to the camps with in ’83. My cousin got me in touch with his old commander.’

Harry frowned, and shook his head.

‘Why are you. Whose side is his old commander on now?’

‘Could you please stop being an employee of A and G for a minute. I don’t know which side he’s on. I didn’t ask. But I didn’t tell him what I’m doing either. He thinks I’m with a relief organisation based in the Gulf.’

‘Hold on, Raza. Hold on. You really think it’s smart to call Afghans whose allegiance you know nothing about and announce you’re in the country?’

‘It’s a big country and I didn’t say which part of it I’m in.’ It had occurred to him that the Commander might remember him as the boy who worked with the CIA, but when he spoke to the man he discovered he was remembered quite differently: You’re the fainting Hazara who fooled a Pashtun boy into thinking you were important to the CIA just because a man who looked American held out a pair of shoes to you .