Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

Her accent — Karachi mingled with something else — countered the improbability of what she was saying. Also, Abdullah had heard what the other man said about Afghans and women and now he saw the hand resting on his arm as a refusal to accept that analysis.

He moved his chair forward once more.

‘But Raza’s in Afghanistan.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

She shook her head, made a gesture which didn’t only imply a lack of understanding but also failure. It had never occurred to her that her son would enter wars.

When Abdullah continued to look at her with a suspicion that obviously wanted itself overturned she pointed at the double-paged photograph he had been looking at.

‘Beautiful,’ she said.

‘Kandahar. Before the wars.’ He ran his palm across the photograph, as though he could feel the texture of the ripening pom egranates pushing up against his skin. ‘First they cut down the trees. Then they put landmines everywhere. Now—’ He bunched his fingers together and then sprang them apart. ‘Cluster bombs.’

He turned the page to a picture of a very old couple, the woman vibrant in multicoloured clothes, the man resting his hand on her shoulder as they walked across sand dunes as if he knew his drabness would become part of the desert floor if he didn’t stay moored to the woman’s column of brightness. The sky was impossibly blue.

‘Light,’ Abdullah said. ‘The light in Afghanistan. Like nowhere else.’

Hiroko nodded, touching the page as reverently as Abdullah had. It was difficult to find photographs of Nagasaki that preceded the bomb, but Kim had presented her with what remained in the Burton family of George Burton’s old pictures — Azalea Manor, the bund, Megane-Bashi when the river was high — and when she looked at them she was surprised by how strong a grip childhood had on her ageing mind.

Abdullah continued to turn the pages of the book, stopping briefly on some pictures, lingering over others. Occasionally he’d point out a detail to Hiroko — a goat rearing on its hind legs in the corner of one photograph with the poise of a dancer, a kite flying high above a dome painted an identical green which made the kite appear an escaping roof tile. Sometimes he’d point to an object and identify it in Pashto — she’d repeat the word, pleased when she found any overlap with Urdu and delighted when she found resemblance to the Hindko words she had learnt while in Abbottabad.

When they came to the end of the book, Abdullah closed it and said, ‘That’s where I want to live.’

‘Afghanistan?’

‘Afghanistan then.’

He said very little beyond that until he and Hiroko exited the library into the dull light of late afternoon. The cold had nothing of the savageness of which it was capable at this time of year, but even so Abdullah pulled a wool hat low over his eyes and wrapped a broad scarf around his neck.

‘He was not even an Afghan and he came to fight with us. Not a Pashtun, and he knew our language. And I had him sent away.’ Hiroko didn’t know who he was talking about. ‘But instead of hating me, he still tries to help me.’

Understanding, Hiroko turned her face away, wishing she had raised a son who could fit such a glorified image. She didn’t know whether or not to tell Abdullah the truth — her son was a mercenary, all he had done to help Abdullah was make one phone call to a woman he’d never met to try and pass all responsibility on to her, and despite his promises to the contrary he hadn’t returned for Harry’s funeral and hadn’t even bothered to explain why. That final failure was the one which most convinced her that her relationship with her son was entirely comprised of lies — she still felt betrayed as she recalled her final conversation with him, just hours after Harry’s death, when he said in a tone of voice she believed completely, ‘Ma, I have to come to bury him. I have to see you. I have to see you.’ But when Kim called his satphone to find out when he was flying in, and if he’d agree to read something at the funeral, a man called Steve had answered the phone and said Raza wouldn’t be coming back to New York for the funeral, or at any time in the near future; for security reasons, he couldn’t say anything more.

Kim had ended the call, shaking her head.

‘Dad really moulded Raza in his image, didn’t he?’ When Hiroko tried to protest, there must be some other explanation, Raza had insisted he’d come for the funeral, Kim sat Hiroko down in front of the computer and explained to her, with the aid of the Internet, the real business of A and G. While Hiroko was still struggling to overlay the world of private military contractors on to her image of her son’s life, Kim added, as if it were a matter of little consequence, ‘And on top of all that, he wanted me to smuggle some Afghan across the border.’

‘When I asked my brother to see if Raza — his name is really Raza? — knew someone who could get me across the border I didn’t mean he should tell his mother,’ Abdullah said, patting a stone lion’s paw with the familiarity of ritual as he walked down the library steps. ‘I don’t want to get you into any trouble.’

‘You won’t,’ Hiroko said, longing to be back in the sanctuary of books. She spent so much of her life in and around the Village that the regimented yet frenzied intersections of midtown made her feel as though she were stuck in a deranged crossword grid. ‘Do you know if your brother has spoken to Raza since—’ She almost said ‘since Harry died’. ‘Again, I mean. Has he spoken to him again?’

‘I don’t know. I will call him in three days.’ Almost apologetically he added, ‘He doesn’t have a phone. Once a week he goes to the call office.’ He took a cell phone out of his pocket and looked wistfully at it. ‘So many things you promise yourself you won’t get used to, and then you do.’

‘How long have you been in New York?’ She had come here not knowing what kind of man she would find, certain only that she had to see this mysterious piece of her son’s life. But now she couldn’t see the boy who drew Raza into a life of violence but only a man who understood lost homelands and the impossibility of return. He had looked at the photographs of Kandahar’s orchards as Sajjad used to look at pictures of his old moholla in Dilli.

‘I was with the mujahideen until the Soviets left. But then, peace never happened. And Afghan fighting Afghan, Pashtun against Hazara. no. So I went back to Karachi. Yes, for four years.’ He switched to Urdu. ‘I was a truck driver. Every time I went to the fish harbour I’d have one eye watching for Raza Hazara. But my brothers said one of us had to go to America where you can earn a real living. I was the youngest, the most fit — I had the best chance of making the journey across. And I was just married, so there was only a wife to leave behind and no children.’

‘You have a wife?’

‘Yes,’ he said, taking a long stride forward and bodily lifting up a drunk who was weaving towards Hiroko and setting him down again, out of her path, with a quick pat on the shoulder. He was unaware she had seen his entire character in that gesture. ‘It wasn’t easy to leave her, but my brothers were all fighting or trying to farm between the landmines and I couldn’t earn enough in Karachi for everyone. So ’93 I came here. And I haven’t seen any of them since. My brothers, my wife. She had a son six months after I said goodbye to her. She knew it was happening before I left, but she didn’t want to make it harder for me to go. So it’s not so bad, leaving. I’ll see my son, my wife. The light of Afghanistan. It’s not so bad?’

He looked uncertainly at Hiroko, who found herself wanting to cry.

Three days earlier, just outside Kandahar, two Pathan men stepped out of a jeep, reaching for the guns beneath its seats before their feet had touched the ground. To the passenger in the back seat, head moving side to side, the men appeared sectioned into many pieces — the effect as disorienting as it was disturbing.