Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well done. You came to find me to tell me this? That they’re looking for me? It’s no problem. I used a public call office — the man who runs it is an old friend. We bear scars from the same battle. Besides, this is Kandahar. No one here will help the Americans. We aren’t like you Hazara.’

‘You’re Taliban?’ It came out blunt and — to Raza’s ears — accusing.

The man shrugged, something in the gesture calling Abdullah to mind.

‘I’m twenty years too old for them. I’m a farmer. Wait here—’ He entered the shrine, and Raza watched him pray by the grave of the Sufi — a sight that made him lower his own head and mumble ‘Surah Fateha’, though not for anyone who’d been dead hundreds of years.

‘You know who loves to come here?’ said Abdullah’s brother — Ismail, that was his name! ‘Abdullah’s son.’

‘He has a son?’

‘His name is Raza.’ Ismail nodded at Raza’s look of confusion. ‘Yes, named after the friend who Abdullah betrayed when he was just a boy. Raza — our Raza — has never met his father, but when they speak on the phone once a month Abdullah says tell me when your hand is big enough to fit around the largest Baba Wali pomegranate.’ He gestured towards the grove of pomegranate trees alongside the terrace. ‘So every week our Raza comes here, sometimes sneaks off on his own — though now that the bastards are back in power he’s forbidden to leave the house without being accompanied. He’s a very beautiful boy, praise be to Allah, though in these days perhaps that’s a curse.’

‘Why a curse?’

‘Our new governor and his men. These are the ones who were in power before the Taliban came and saved us from them. Neither women nor young boys were safe in those days — then the Taliban came, they rescued the kidnapped women, drove away the warlords who were fighting in the bazaar over a young boy.’

‘So you did support them? The Taliban?’ He was trying to find the man Abdullah might have grown into through this brother who he had once idolised.

‘I told you. I’m a farmer. I want to plant crops and harvest them. Do you understand? I need peace for this. I need security. In exchange for that, there’s much that I’ll give up.’ He rested his hand against the wall of the shrine. ‘This is what I fought for. The right to come back here with my family, to farm in the shadow of Baba Wali, and visit his shrine every Friday as my family has done for generations. To watch my sons measure hand-span against a pomegranate, not a grenade. But the Taliban — they don’t know Sufis or orchards. They grew up in refugee camps, with no memory of this land, no attachment to anything except the idea of fighting infidels and heretics. So when they came they brought laws different to the laws I grew up with. So what? Football is banned! I can live without football. Music is banned! This is painful, yes, but when I watch the crops growing or my sons walking down the street without fear at least there’s music in my heart.’

‘And what about your daughters?’

‘Hazara, my daughters are none of your concern.’

Raza looked impassively at Ismail for a moment, then turned and stalked away. The Taliban — saviour of women’s honour! Well, he had done what he came here for — he had warned Ismail, and now it wasn’t his responsibility any more if Steve were to find him. Now he could head back, with a clear conscience, towards his two new Pathan friends who had promised they’d get him across the border without any hassle, via an unpatrolled route used by many of the Taliban fighters. Though what he’d do once inside Pakistan he still didn’t know.

He would visit his father’s grave. At least he could do that.

‘Raza Hazara!’ Ismail caught Raza by the hand. ‘Please don’t go. Tell me about my brother. Have you found a way to get him to Canada?’ When Raza said nothing, Ismail stepped back, holding himself up very straight in the manner of a man who finds he’s about to beg, and can’t quite bring himself to do so.

‘You said he had to be in Canada by the tenth of February. Why?’

‘That’s the day the ship leaves.’

‘The ship?’

‘Yes. For Europe. From there he’ll go overland to Iran, across the desert, and then he’s home. Usually it’s my poppy crop travelling in one direction; this time it’s my brother coming home in the other direction.’

‘Could you.?’ Raza stopped. Think it through , he heard Harry say. When the two Pathans said they could get him into Pakistan the offer had seemed too enticing to refuse, overthrowing all his earlier concerns. But his earlier thinking had been correct. Steve would expect him to go to Pakistan, expect him in Karachi at his father’s grave, in Lahore at his uncle’s house. The ISI would be asked to find him to prove their recemented friendship with the Americans and he was of no strategic value to the ISI — there was no reason why they shouldn’t find him. And they would. They were the ISI — of course they would find him (in all his dealings with A and G he’d never met anyone who terrified him as much as the man with the pink tissue paper).

He pressed his head against a pillar of grey-and-white spirals, wishing Harry were here to separate the practical from the paranoid, the unexpected move from the ridiculous one.

Ismail’s hand was on his back.

‘Are you unwell?’

Raza held up a hand, asking only for a moment to think. His schoolfriend, Bilal, was in Canada. In Toronto, working as an engineer. His parents were there, too, living with Bilal and his wife and children — and when Hiroko needed to have her visa restamped to maintain her legal status in America, she would cross the border to visit Bilal’s mother, her old friend and neighbour. Every six months she crossed the border. There would be nothing suspicious, nothing unexpected, in her doing so again. And Bilal would welcome him in, he knew that. They’d met in Miami a few years ago, and their friendship was reaffirmed when Bilal threw an arm around Raza and said, ‘My sister told me how badly she treated you all those years ago. I wish she’d married you instead of that drummer in Prague with his tattoos.’ There was nothing in that sentence Raza could imagine with any degree of credibility.

Raza turned to Ismail.

‘Can you get me into Canada?’

‘Why?’

Why? How could he put in words this ache to see his mother? It was as if everything in his world had disappeared in a flash of light and only she remained — a beacon, a talisman, a reason to run somewhere instead of just running.

‘There’s only one person left in this world who I love. She can come to see me if I’m there.’ After that, after he’d seen her, he could decide what else, what next. But first he just needed to see her. There was nothing else. There was no one else.

Ismail drew him into an unexpected embrace.

‘Everyone dead, except one? Allah, what have we Afghans done to deserve such sorrows?’

Raza rested his head on Ismail’s shoulder, knowing that of all the embraces he had ever received this was the one he least deserved.

In one corner of the penthouse on Brickell Avenue, amidst boxes and more boxes, Kim Burton sat on the ground, head resting against the wall, glass of Scotch balanced on her knee. She never drank Scotch, certainly not in the middle of the morning, but the rare phone calls her father made to her from here almost always started with his salutation, ‘Keep me company while I have a drink?’ so there was a necessary pain in holding on to the glass on this her first visit to the apartment where her father had lived for a decade.

Soon the movers would be here, to transport all Harry’s possessions into a storage facility. One day perhaps she’d be able to look through them, decide what was worth retaining, what could be discarded of her father’s possessions. Not now. Now all she was taking with her was his laptop, the largest single folder on its hard drive filled with photographs of Kim, videos of Kim, scanned copies of Kim’s letters, her high-school reports, her university thesis. The most recent photograph of Kim and Harry together was nearly eight years old, and had been taken at Ilse’s insistence.