Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

One of the men looked around the compound into which they’d driven, silent in the mid-afternoon sun.

‘It’s safe,’ he called out to the figure in the back seat.

The cloaked figure stumbled out, attempting to pull off the giant blue shuttlecock while disembarking, an endeavour which resulted in a sprawl on the mud floor and a cry of pain.

‘Slow down,’ one of the men laughed. ‘You’ve had it on for nearly ten hours. Another thirty seconds won’t kill you.’

Still in the dust, Raza pulled off the burkha — tugging furiously at its constricting grip around his head — and threw it to one side. Lying back on his elbows, he breathed in the air, choking slightly on it, but smiling all the same as his eyes swivelled this way and that and the slight breeze touched his skin.

‘Come. Have some tea,’ the taller of the men said, walking to one of the mud houses.

‘No, no. I don’t have time.’ He stood up, holding out the burkha to the shorter man. ‘Thanks for the disguise.’

‘Thanks for the lift,’ the man said. He gestured at the burkha. ‘Keep it. You may still need it.’

‘Thank you.’ Raza slung the cloth — so innocuous now — over his shoulder. ‘Though I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather be captured by the Americans.’

A woman dressed as Raza had been a few minutes ago stepped out of one of the houses, her head angled in Raza’s direction. He looked at her, imagined her chequered view of him, wondered if she had been watching from the window when he wrenched off the burkha and threw it into the dust — had there been an instant when she imagined it was the act of a woman? He looked quickly away before his glance could be misconstrued. Or correctly construed. He felt he might go mad if he didn’t soon see a woman’s face, or hear a woman’s voice.

‘After you’ve had some tea, I can drive with you to the shrine,’ the man beside him was saying. ‘Hazaras aren’t popular here, not even those who speak Pashto as beautifully as you.’

It was the first time the word ‘Hazara’ had entered the conversation. Near the start of his journey he had found the two men walking away from a car which had snapped its axle in a ditch and offered them a ride to their homes on the outskirts of Kandahar. After just a few minutes in their company he knew that he need only reveal he was hiding from the Americans in order to make allies of them.

‘You’ve been travelling long enough,’ Raza said. ‘But I’ll be back to take advantage of your offer of dinner.’

A few minutes later — after gulping down a cup of green tea; a quicker process than refusing a Pathan’s hospitality — he was driving out of the compound, tongue and throat burning, away from Kandahar. Twenty years ago, in Sohrab Goth, in highway restaurants, in the cab of the truck decorated with the dead Soviet, Raza had listened to Abdullah rhapsodise about the beauties of his city — the emerald in the desert whose fruit trees bore poems, whose language was the sweetness of ripe figs. But Raza’s brief glimpse of Kandahar had shown him only dust, fierceness and — a month after the Taliban’s defeat — not a single unshrouded woman.

The drive to the Baba Wali shrine was even more tortuous than the drive to Kandahar’s outskirts had been. Given a choice between seeing a woman and seeing an American-style highway Raza wasn’t sure which he would choose. Everywhere, remnants of the American bombing campaign — a door standing unsupported in a field of bricks as though it were a miracle crop; craters in the road, indiscriminate as a meteorite shower; black metal shaped like a jeep in a headstand. He wondered if a burkha-clad woman standing near the jeep when it scorched might have a mesh tattooed on her face. In these ways he had been thinking of his mother almost constantly on the road to Kandahar. For some reason she had become part of the ache of losing Harry, though he really couldn’t understand what one thing had to do with the other.

When he finally reached the shrine his first act, on getting out of the jeep, was to throw himself down on the ground and roll around. Grass! Actual green, tickling grass. He pulled a fistful out of the ground and rubbed it on his face, his arms, along the back of his neck before stepping on to the marble terrace which surrounded the airy shrine with its turquoise domes. Here, at last, a tiny glimpse of the world Abdullah held on to, the lost beauty which had allowed him to contemplate grotesque violence. It was not the shrine with the many-coloured tiles to which Raza paid attention — or of which Abdullah had talked when he spoke of coming here each Friday with his family before the Soviets cleft them from the body of the saint they had venerated for generations. Instead, Abdullah had talked about the surrounding orchards, the fleet river and the mountains beyond, which, his brothers used to tell him, were the ridged backs of slumbering monsters.

Raza removed his shoes and socks, and walked across the marble tiles, the shrine at his back and the Arghandab River before him. As opposed to Kandahar, there was still enough here to suggest what it might once have been. A chequerboard of green-and-brown fields, the green sharp and rich; beyond, the sunstruck river and, further, through the haze of the afternoon, mountains carved into a cloudless sky.

A policeman was the first to come up to Raza and ask who he was and what he was doing there.

‘The mujahideen who taught me how to fire a gun venerated Baba Wali,’ Raza said.

The policeman nodded, and left him alone.

A few minutes later, another man — half his face caved in — approached Raza.

‘You knew a mujahideen who came here?’

‘Yes. Can you help me find his family? I owe him a debt I must repay.’

The man scratched the cheek which still remained.

‘Perhaps. You’re Hazara?’

‘No. I’m not Afghan.’

The man stood waiting for more. Raza turned away from him and continued looking at the view.

‘His family were farmers near here. They came every Friday to this shrine. He was Abdullah Durrani, son of Haji Mohammed Durrani. There were five brothers, all of them mujahideen. The eldest became a martyr in the first year of the Soviet occupation when a MiG fired on the convoy of arms he was transporting.’ He knew how discourteous he was being in refusing to reveal anything about himself, but his mind was past sifting out what could and couldn’t be safely said.

The man went away, and Raza sat down on the cool tiles, shaded by the shrine, and thought of Harry.

The policeman came back to give him a cup of water.

He was watching a spider crawl across the floor — recalling Harry asking him about the story of the spider in Islam which Sajjad had told Konrad and Konrad had told Hiroko and Hiroko had told Ilse who told Harry — when someone called his name. It was a man with a hooked nose, steely hair and a full beard down to his chest.

‘Raza Hazara,’ the man said again, and Raza remembered the unexpected youthfulness of his smile the day he’d driven the two boys to the mujahideen camp. Now everything about him was old. ‘Why did you tell that man you’re not an Afghan?’

‘The Americans will be looking for you,’ Raza said, standing up to feel less intimidated. He was surprised to find he was taller than Abdullah’s brother. What was his name? ‘I mean, they’re looking for the man who called me. yesterday.’ It seemed much longer ago than that. ‘They think he — you, they think you are involved with the murder of an American.’

The man laughed.

‘The Americans aren’t very good at finding people they’re looking for in Afghanistan. Why do they think this? Were you involved with the murder of an American?’

Raza thought of Harry laughing with him at the contractors in their body armour, which they only took off to sunbathe — at which vulnerable time the guards on the watchtower were doubled.