Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

The apartment was not as she had imagined. She didn’t think her father a man interested in interior design, expected an ordered efficiency of bookcases filled with non-fiction, furniture that was upmarket and entirely without character, bare walls, an empty fridge. Instead, there were floor cushions with paisleyed covers, thick Persian carpets, a beautiful antique sword mounted on the wall, a fridge stacked with sauces and condiments and capers and peppercorns, and bookshelves everywhere with poetry and fiction in English, German, Urdu. There were also at least eight copies of Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes .

Which is to say, there had been these things when she arrived. Now there were boxes.

Kim wondered what part of her would be lost now that her father was dead. With Ilse, it had been obvious; she knew precisely that version of herself — unreserved, slightly petulant, protective — which existed only in Ilse’s company, knew the conversations she could have with Ilse and no one else. But everything around her grief for Harry was nebulous — and crushing. She kicked at the laptop lying at her feet; how like him to accumulate evidence that he’d been paying attention rather than simply paying attention.

A man’s footsteps, precise and measured, made their way through the tunnel between stacked boxes towards her and she found herself tensing, an image of a bearded man with a Kalashnikov springing from her imagination.

‘Ms Burton?’ It was Tom — the doorman. ‘I tried calling up.’ He looked over to the entryphone, its receiver dangling abjectly just inches above the ground, and then turned back to her, trying to pretend he hadn’t noticed the glass of Scotch. ‘The movers are here. Should I send them up?’

‘Sure.’ She stood up, wiping dust off her tank top and cargo pants. ‘Sorry, Tom.’

‘That’s no problem. Ms Burton, my brother works at A and G — Mr Burton got him a job there. He said your dad died in Afghanistan, looking for Osama. You should be proud.’

Was pride supposed to temper grief? She wanted him alive. Why was this man standing here, talking as though there were ways of dying that rendered death bearable.

‘If your brother works at A and G maybe he could get one of the suits there to return my call.’ In the five days since Harry’s death there had been no further word from Raza — he got like this after Sajjad died, Hiroko had said. Running. It’s what he’s always done. He learnt it from me. But ever since Kim had walked into her father’s Miami flat she’d felt a powerful compulsion to talk to Raza. He was the only one who could tell her about the last few minutes of Harry’s life. Perhaps he was the only one who could tell her about Harry’s life, period. She had called on his satphone all day yesterday, all day today, and the lack of response was making her uneasy. Who was Steve and why had he answered Raza’s phone? She wasn’t about to say anything to Hiroko, but she’d called A and G repeatedly and left three messages about Raza for the men who’d pressed her hand and spoken with such feeling about Harry at his funeral.

Tom looked as if she’d slapped him.

‘He’s just a driver. He doesn’t have that kind of pull.’

‘I’m sorry. Really, Tom. I’m just. you know? Angry.’

‘We’re all angry, Ms Burton.’

While the movers removed Harry’s presence from the apartment, Kim stood out on the balcony from where it was possible to see the offices of A and G, just a few blocks away. Harry had once told her he hated this location. ‘Millionaires’ Row’ — the snobbery of James Burton’s son recoiled at the ostentation. But the CEO had urged him to live as near the office as possible, explaining that when you only had an hour or two between work days you didn’t want any kind of commute. And then Raza had moved in to the second-floor apartment and loved everything about the location — after that it was clear Harry never even considered moving.

Kim had used the key marked ‘R’ in Harry’s cutlery drawer to enter Raza’s apartment. She didn’t ask herself why, she just did it. There she found the atmosphere she had expected of her father’s penthouse — lots of technology, no personality — though when she thought of Hiroko’s room with nothing adorning it except a faded painting of two foxes she wondered if Raza was just displaying a Japanese aesthetic. She didn’t know if that thought was racist and was too drained to work it out. She slid open his wardrobe door and the first thing she saw hanging from its railings was a beautiful cashmere jacket. She ran her fingers along its softness, and slipped it on to her own frame. It fitted almost perfectly — the sleeves only a little too long. When she slid her fingers inside the pockets the texture of desiccation made her jerk them out immediately. Gingerly, she reached in again and scooped out a handful of dried rose petals. She imagined Raza filling his pockets with the petals weeks or months earlier when roses were in bloom, enjoying the sensuous, velvety feeling each time his hands entered his pockets. Suddenly aware of how strange her behaviour was, she returned the jacket to its hanger and hurried out.

Now she looked out towards the water and Miami Beach beyond, linked to downtown by the slab-and-girder MacArthur Causeway. Its foundations: eighty-four-inch drilled shafts in the water, forty-eight inches on land. And if a plane were to nose-dive into it? If men with dynamite on their chests overlaying the madness in their hearts.? If one Afghan man with an AK-47 were to climb on to it and spray bullets? No, he could do no harm. Surely, he couldn’t send the world crumbling.

One of the movers came out on to the balcony to say they were done.

‘You drink whisky? There’s a couple of bottles under the sink. I don’t want them.’

The mover took two steps back and waved his hands in the air.

‘No, no. No.’

She looked closer at him. She’d assumed he was Mediterranean, but now she saw he might be Arab.

‘You Muslim?’ She said it in a tone that wanted to convey it was OK, she wouldn’t hold that against him, she was sorry if anyone had these last crazy months.

The man laughed, a short bark.

‘No, don’t say that. Don’t say that. We’re not allowed to take anything from the homes we’re working, not even when we’re offered. That’s why we can’t. Do I look Arab? I’m Italian.’

‘My mistake,’ she said.

‘No one else had better make that mistake.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with most Arabs,’ she found herself saying, and then wondered how that ‘most’ had slipped into the sentence.

‘Hey, I’m not being racist. It’s crazy enough being mistaken for a Cuban, but Arab! God help me. And Gitmo just across the water.’

That thought hadn’t even crossed her mind all the while she’d been in Miami.

What she needed, she decided on the flight back to New York, was to retreat. And she knew just where to do it — her mother’s cabin in the Adirondacks, a place without memories of Harry, where disputes over ownership of a moose carcass could push almost everything else off the front page of the newspaper. She had spent some part of every summer of her youth there, could point to the spot where she danced with a boy for the first time, saw the world from the top of a mountain for the first time, smoked a joint for the first time, ran a half-marathon for the first time, thought she’d lost her virginity for the first time. Her mother wasn’t there now — it was only during the summers or the height of fall that she thought to leave Paris for upstate New York’s mountains — but that only added to the appeal. To live alone, in the mountains, watching the snow fall on silent valleys while the fireplace roared, the local news channel filled with familiar faces. Her mother used to tell her she’d find such a life comforting by the time she was sixty and she’d always laughed; now here she was at thirty-five, desperate to sink into that world and be lost in it like a tear in a lake.