Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

But if he told Kim Burton this she might think he was a thief — all of them, thieves — stealing fallen cargo.

‘Your English,’ Kim said, after a short silence. ‘It’s very good. Where did you learn?’

‘When I first arrived in America I only knew what I remembered from Raza’s classes. But my first week in Jersey City I went to the mosque there and asked the Imam to tell me where I could learn English. And he found a retired teacher, from Afghanistan, who said it would be his farz — you understand the word? No? It means religious obligation. It’s a very important word to us. He said it was his farz to teach a mujahideen. Not everyone forgot. What we had done, for Afghanistan, for the world. Not everyone forgot.’

‘I can’t really imagine what it was like,’ Kim said, carefully, mentally testing her own sentences before she spoke them for anything that might give offence. ‘All those years of fighting the Soviets.’

‘No. No one can. War is like disease. Until you’ve had it, you don’t know it. But no. That’s a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold which stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war — countries like yours they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. It’s why you fight more wars than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.’

In the silence of the SUV, with the heating on a fraction too high, she realised just how uncomfortable he was making her feel when she found herself unwilling to retort: ‘So what you’re saying is. the way to end wars is to have everyone fight them?’

But why should she feel uncomfortable? She was the one making all the effort. Abdullah seemed to feel he owed her nothing. This morning when she met him at the street corner he and Hiroko had picked the evening before he had thanked her, very politely, and insisted that he would stay hidden under blankets as long as they were in America; if the car were searched at the border he would say he climbed into the back at a service station on I-87 when he discovered the SUV unlocked. But beyond that he had offered nothing, hadn’t even acknowledged she was breaking her nation’s laws for someone whose innocence she had no reason to take for granted.

The snow from his jacket had melted into a stain of water, which he was attempting to dry, very carefully, with a handkerchief. What reason was there to believe the story his brother told Raza? How did they know the FBI knocked on his door for no reason except that he was an Afghan? How did they know he had run for no reason except panic about his migration status? That he was an Afghan didn’t make him a liar or a terrorist, of course not; but wasn’t it just as absurd — condescending almost — to assume that because an Afghan he couldn’t be a liar or a terrorist? If his story were true he should just have gone to the FBI. No matter how bad things had become in the name of security no one — no one — was going to be detained indefinitely for just being an illegal migrant worker. Come on! New York would shut down if that become a crime anyone cared about. And if the FBI did turn him over to the INS, what of it? He’d be deported. To Afghanistan. In the comfort of a plane!

She cracked open the window, and let the racing wind whistle through, though Abdullah huddled into his coat and put his hands over his ears — whether to cut off the sound or the cold she didn’t know.

It had all happened so fast. Less than ten hours between the time she met him and the time they left the city.

‘What’s the point of waiting?’ Hiroko had said when Kim queried the need for such haste. ‘The FBI’s already been to the garage from where he leases the cab, and to the home of the man who takes the cab on its night shift to ask if they know where he is. This afternoon he called this person in Canada who’s arranging things to say he’ll meet him tomorrow, so tomorrow he’s going. I told you, I’ll take him.’

Hiroko made everything seem inevitable — this journey, the timing of it, his innocence. And so Kim had gone against everything in her training, hadn’t even considered the points of stress under which Abdullah’s story might buckle, and had simply curled up in her bed and fallen asleep as soon as Hiroko had agreed to let her drive the car. The truth, she now realised, was that she was so busy looking at ways of keeping Hiroko from smuggling an Afghan across the border that no other threats had been visible.

‘Hiroko’s an amazing woman, isn’t she?’ Kim said, rolling up the window, trying one last time to establish common ground.

‘Raza has a place in heaven because of her,’ Abdullah replied. ‘Imagine knowing your whole life you have a place in heaven.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘She converted to Islam. The one who converts another is guaranteed a place in heaven for himself and his children and grandchildren and so on down for seven generations. I think it’s wrong only to honour Raza’s father — the man who did the converting. The convert should also be honoured. It’s because of Raza’s mother also — not only his father — that he’s going to heaven. And his children and grandchildren after him. Even martyrs who die in jihad can’t do so much for their family. It’s written in the Quran.’

‘Have you read the Quran?’

‘Of course I have.’

‘Have you read it in any language you understand?’ Suddenly the traffic seemed to have thickened; a reassuring number of people were driving alongside, and no fear of giving offence could possibly match her indignation at listening to Hiroko being reduced to a launch pad for her husband and son’s journey to a paradise in which she didn’t appear to have secured a place for herself in this Afghan’s mad system of belief.

‘I understand Islam,’ he said, tensing.

‘I’ll take that to mean no. I’ve read it — in English. Believe me, the Quran says nothing of the sort. And frankly, what kind of heaven is heaven if you can find shortcuts into it? Seven generations!’

‘Please do not speak this way.’

‘Tell me one thing. One thing.’ Unexpectedly, such a rage within her, overpowering everything. ‘If an Afghan dies in the act of killing infidels in his country does he go straight to heaven?’

‘If the people he kills come as invaders or occupiers, yes. He is shaheed. Martyr.’

How slowly, unwillingly, her fist had opened to drop the first clod of earth on to Harry’s coffin. It was the moment when her heart truly understood that all the imagined tomorrows of their relationship — Delhi, conversations without recrimination, days of hearing the other’s stories in full — would never come. Because of just one man with a gun. She had always thought it would take so much more than that to bring Harry down. But it was just one Afghan with a gun who never stopped to think of Harry Burton as anything but an infidel invader whose death opened up a path to Paradise.

‘He is a murderer. And your heaven is an abomination.’

‘We should not speak any more.’

‘No, we should not.’

There was not another word between them — the tension almost suffocating — until she pulled into the parking lot of the fast-food restaurant. But as he opened the car door to leave he said something in Arabic in which she only caught the word ‘Allah’ and followed it up with, ‘I won’t forget what you’ve done.’

What had she done? She watched him walk across the parking lot, his stride that of a man walking into freedom, a family with two children entering the restaurant behind him.

The sleeping gorilla was a work of artistry; a button beneath its matted hair controlled the machinery that surged its chest, a lever concealed beneath its armpit unhinged the animal and revealed the cavity within. It was only during refuelling stops and on landing near Montreal that Raza needed to hide within the animal; during the rest of the journey he sat with the Kuwaiti pilots in the cockpit, incredulous at their tales of ferrying the whims of their Saudi employer from one corner of the globe to the other.