Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

Hiroko could come to visit, she thought, when she was in the elevator headed up to the Mercer Street apartment. Hiroko was about the one person in the world whose presence there wouldn’t be an intrusion.

Her mood was almost cheerful when she opened the door to the apartment to announce her new plan to Hiroko.

A man — hazel-eyed and broad-shouldered — sprang up from the sofa when Kim walked in.

‘It’s all right,’ Hiroko said. ‘It’s just Kim. Kim, this is Abdullah.’

Kim looked from the man to Hiroko and back again. Through the haze of shock, habit took over and extended her hand to the Afghan man. He looked at it, and hesitated just long enough in responding to make Kim snatch it back.

‘Why is he here?’ she said to Hiroko.

‘I’m very sorry about your father,’ the Afghan man said. ‘But he is with Allah now.’

‘Does Allah accept unbelievers?’ she said, and the man lowered his eyes.

‘I wasn’t expecting you back yet,’ Hiroko said quietly. She added something in Urdu, and the Afghan nodded, said something in return, and let himself out of the apartment without looking at Kim again.

‘What?’ Kim said. ‘What are you doing? What did you say to him?’

‘There’s no need for you to get involved,’ Hiroko replied, picking up the book she’d been reading.

‘You’ve found someone to drive him to Canada, haven’t you?’

Hiroko didn’t look up from her book. Kim threw her hands up in the air. If one of Hiroko’s friends was willing to get involved with such lunacy it was none of her business. She needed a long bath, and a glass of wine.

Seconds later, she was pulling the book out of Hiroko’s grasp, standing in front of her with a car key dangling from her fingers.

‘What’s this?’

‘I have no idea.’

Kim held up the other hand which was grasping the paperwork from the car-rental company.

‘Your signature is on here. Who rents out a car to a seventy-seven-year-old woman with a Pakistani driver’s licence?’

‘This is New York,’ Hiroko answered with great satisfaction. ‘Everything’s available for a price.’

‘Oh Christ, Hiroko. You can’t be thinking of taking him yourself.’

‘Stay out of this, Kim.’

‘You have a Pakistani passport. They’re not going to just wave you over the border.’ She could hear the rising panic in her voice. ‘You’ve never driven on the right-hand side of the road and you’ve no experience with highway driving. Exactly how much craziness are you capable of?’

‘You Americans have very timorous notions of craziness.’

‘Timorous!’ Kim stuffed the keys into the pocket of her jacket. ‘If you were anyone but you I’d suspect you of manipulation.’

‘What manipulation? Give me those keys, Kim Burton.’

‘No. I’ll drive him across. You stay here. And don’t — do not, Hiroko Ashraf, start arguing with me. Raza was right. They won’t search a car driven by anyone who looks like me.’

Hiroko looked at Kim with an expression which pulled together all her life’s experience at conveying scepticism.

‘You think he should be smuggled across the border?’ Kim was the first person Hiroko had ever known with an unshakeable faith that she lived in a world that allowed all protests, all acts of discontentment, to take place within a legal framework. Moving out of that framework was simply grandstanding.

‘If I promise you I’ll take him, that means I’ll take him. Why should anything else matter?’

‘I won’t be the reason for you to go against things you believe in.’ She felt about people who believed in the morality of their nations exactly as she felt about those who believed in religion: it was baffling, it seemed to defy all reason, and yet she would never be the one to attempt to wrestle the comfort of illusory order away from someone else.

‘You’re not,’ Kim lied. ‘Now, do you want him to have the best chance of being safe or not?’ Though the argument continued on for a while that was the moment she knew she’d won — though, of course, she had no way of knowing Hiroko would wake up the next morning, too late, remembering with a sense of unease that James Burton used almost exactly the same words to convince Sajjad Ali Ashraf to leave Delhi for Istanbul.

By the time he was in Muscat, Raza decided the man with blood in his eye had been right: he didn’t have the mental strength for this journey; his mind had broken apart

‘Like this,’ the man with blood in his eye said, smashing a pomegranate against a table-top. He delicately plucked out one ruby-encased seed from the fractured fruit and held it out to Raza, winking as he did so — the red tear in his cornea disappearing from Raza’s vision just as the ruby seed entered it.

‘He’s going to help Abdullah get into Canada,’ Ismail said. He had clearly been uneasy since bringing Raza to this spartan room near the central bazaar in Kandahar.

The ruby-eyed man waved his hand dismissively.

‘I’m not interested in that. Abdullah made the journey once; if he’s lucky he’ll make it again. This one, this one is a different matter. Leave me alone with him.’

When Ismail was gone, Ruby Eye motioned for Raza to sit down.

‘The way you’re clutching that bag of yours it either contains love letters or money. For your sake, I hope it’s the second. You’re not nearly desperate enough to survive the journey of the destitute.’

Raza relaxed. Now he was in a world he understood — where anything was possible for the right price.

‘From Iran to Muscat, though, you have to travel as they do—’

Many cups of tea later Ruby Eye waved his hand in the direction of the man who was traversing the room on his haunches, picking up, one by one, the pomegranate seeds which Ruby Eye had been flicking off the walls while he and Raza haggled over price. ‘You just missed the first-class trip out of Iran. Though if you wait a few weeks—’

‘No,’ Raza said, standing up, his knapsack considerably lighter than it had been when he entered, though he could see Ruby Eye’s look of amazement at the extent to which it was still weighed down. ‘I’ll leave now. It’s not so far from Iran to Muscat.’

Ruby Eye smiled.

‘The sea crossing alone will seem the furthest distance any man has ever been asked to travel.’

Raza left Kandahar at sunrise in a pickup truck, squeezed between the driver and an armed guard. His own jeep he left with Ismail, along with a promise — only partially believed by both him and Ismail — that he’d find a way to bring Abdullah into Canada. Ismail had offered him hospitality for the night, but he’d stayed with the two Pathan men instead; Ruby Eye had laughingly warned him that Ismail had not even a blanket to spare after he’d sold everything to raise the money for Abdullah’s voyage back to Afghanistan. In the glove compartment of the jeep Raza placed a thousand dollars. It felt generous, but it made no discernible difference to the weight of his knapsack.

The guard and driver in the pickup were taciturn, showing no more interest in Raza’s attempts to engage them in conversation than they did in the NATO convoys that hulked past as they made their way out of Kandahar. He slept, and when he woke there was no road, only sand and at least a dozen pickups — each one identical in its tinted glass, its gleaming blue paint. More armed guards had appeared from somewhere and had taken position at the back of the pickup. The vehicles raced across the desert at unnerving speeds — a pack of animals evolved in a world where nothing mattered but chase and escape.

‘All this for me?’ Raza said to the guard beside him.

The men gestured to the back where the other guards sat on gunny sacks piled on top of each other, and Raza thought of the effete quantities of heroin which he used to deliver personally to the most valued hotel guests in Dubai as part of his duty to give them whatever it took to ensure they returned.