Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

And that’s when Raza realised Ruby Eye had been right. His mind had definitely broken apart.

As the rented SUV approached border control, Kim Burton allowed herself to imagine the consequences if the Afghan hiding beneath blankets in the trunk were discovered. She skipped over the question of what would happen to either him or her, and instead envisioned a world in which ‘political profiling’ became customary at the borders, with immigration officials trained to identify Americans suffering liberal guilt.

She rolled down her window and smiled at the Canadian official, handing him her driver’s licence as she did so.

‘Not the most flattering picture of you,’ he said. ‘Staying long?’

‘Just a few hours.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re worth more of your time than that.’

‘Not in January, you aren’t. I’ll come back in the spring.’

‘I’ll look out for you,’ he said, handing back the licence and waving her through with a wink.

She wasn’t doing this because of liberal guilt, she reminded herself, though all along the journey she’d felt more than a pang of it as she found herself thinking about how she had always taken for granted her ability to enter and exit nations at will — those nations which required Americans to go through a visa-application process she’d simply never visited. It had come as a shock last year when she’d asked Hiroko and Ilse to go to Paris with her to discover how difficult it would be for Hiroko to get a visa — ‘Not worth the hassle,’ Hiroko had sadly concluded after looking at the list of requirements.

‘You can come out now,’ she said when the border was behind them and the surrounding landscape was snow-covered fields.

Abdullah clambered into the back seat.

‘Should I stay here or come forward?’ he asked with that careful politeness which disconcertingly blanketed his personality.

She pulled over on to the shoulder, so he could come around to the front in a dignified manner. He stepped out, walked a few steps to the field and bent to punch his fist through the snow. Kim gripped the wheel and considered pressing on the accelerator.

Abdullah got into the front seat, holding up his arm, which had snow clinging to it up to the elbow.

‘It’s deep,’ he said. ‘Last year in Central Park, my friends and I made snow angels.’ He didn’t look at her as he spoke.

‘Have you been outside New York much?’ she asked. It would take her approximately thirty minutes to get him to the fast-food restaurant near Montreal where he was due to meet the man who would take him onwards. Thirty minutes in a car with an Afghan. She glanced sideways as he carefully wiped snow off his black-gloved hand, and told herself there was no need to feel threatened.

‘Once,’ he said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully — or perhaps he was conscious that his accent wasn’t easy to follow. ‘My friend Kemal rented a van and took a group of us to Massachusetts, to a mosque there, during Ramzan. We were seven of us: two Turks, one Afghan, one Pakistani, two from Egypt, one from Morocco. All travelling together in America.’

‘Just once? In nearly a decade.’ Then she felt foolish for the incredulousness that revealed her inability to conceive of a life without holidays and travel.

‘Yes. It was amazing, the way America drives when it isn’t in New York city.’ He smiled. ‘The road signs! We laughed so much about the road signs.’

‘What’s so funny about road signs?’ She could feel her mouth position itself into a smile, wanting very much to find some shared moment of humour but unable to see how ‘road signs’ might lead to levity.

‘For everything, everything that is, everything that might happen, there’s a road sign. DEER CROSSING. MOOSE CROSSING. OLD PEOPLE CROSSING. CHILDREN CROSSING. ROCK FALLING . Only one rock? That one I don’t understand.’

At that, she did laugh, genuinely, relaxing her grip on the wheel slightly and becoming aware for the first time how stiff with tension her neck had become. She almost made some joke about Sisyphus.

Abdullah almost caught her eye as he smiled, and continued: ‘ BRIDGE AHEAD. COVERED BRIDGE AHEAD. SOFT SHOULDERS AHEAD. ROAD WIDENS. ROAD NARROWS . My friend Kemal — he’s Turkish, very educated — he said what a thing it is, to live in a country where every possible happening is announced in bright glow-in-the-dark letters. We wondered what would happen if something unexpected happened in a country like this, without any warning.’

Kim glanced sharply at him, but he was leaning forward rotating his arm in front of the heating vents to dry off the sleeve of his grey winter coat and still not looking at her. She hadn’t noticed any of the road signs while driving up I-87. But she’d noticed flags. Despite these months of seeing so many of them in the city she’d still been taken aback by their profusion. Flags stuck on back windows of cars; flags on bumper stickers; flags impaled on antennae; flags on little flag poles adhered to side mirrors; flags hanging out of windows; flags waving a welcome at service stations; flags painted on billboards (with some company’s logo printed discreetly yet visibly at the bottom in a patriotically capitalistic gesture). They made her remember Ilse laughing that the phrase ‘God Bless America’ struck her as advertisement rather than imperative ( STUDENTS — BUY SCHOOL SUPPLIES HERE. MOMS — GIVE YOUR KIDS THE GIFT OF LOVE WITH HEARTY2 SOUP. GOD BLESS AMERICA .) And yet, though she knew both Ilse and Harry would have rolled their eyes at the display of patriotism she saw something moving in it. But she kept wondering what her Afghan passenger made of it.

‘Then we got our answer,’ he said. ‘To what America would do if something unexpected happened.’

‘Yes, you certainly did,’ she said, discovering all the tension in her body seemed to have moved to her jaw, making it difficult to get the words out.

This time he looked directly at her.

‘No, I didn’t mean. ’ He shook his head, looked offended, made her feel apologetic, then irritated for being made to feel apologetic. ‘That night, on the way back to New York, I was half asleep when I realised that up ahead all cars were slowing, swerving around something. I woke up fully, and imagined someone dead in the middle of the highway. Then I heard Kemal laugh. There, in front of us, lit up by headlights, was a big pile of blue and pink toy animals — rabbits and bears.’

Kim saw it as he spoke in his soft voice, envisioned something almost reverential about the way all cars slowed and swerved, not daring to run over a little blue tail or a soft pink ear. It would have been a moment of silence, of wonder, she knew, uniting everyone on that dark dark highway.

‘And Kemal also swerved,’ she said.

It wasn’t a question, until Abdullah didn’t respond, turning instead to look out of the window at the unblemished whiteness.

He had cut right through the stuffed toys. Kim found the image grotesque, and knew she couldn’t indicate as much without appearing to suffer from misguided American empathy — cluster bomb the Afghans but for God’s sake don’t drive over the pink bunny rabbits!

Could he tell her, Abdullah wondered? Could he say he had asked Kemal to drive as close to the toys as possible and each of the men inside had taken armloads of rabbits and bears — their fur softer than anything the men had touched in years. Each of them had a child or a nephew or niece or young sibling to whom they would send the toys as a gift the next time one of the lucky ones with legal paperwork left New York and headed to whichever part of the world he had left behind. Abdullah’s son now slept with the soft blue bunny the father he’d never met had sent to him via a cabbie from Peshawar.