Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

When the plane reached the airstrip near Montreal, a forklift was waiting to lower the gorilla cage on to yet another pickup. Raza heard the animals and birds chittering and shrieking and squawking as the cage was lifted out; but there were no sounds of human protest.

A thirteen-year-old boy hiding in a barn to escape his father’s drunken rage was the only one to see the pickup drive into the barn, where the driver got out and opened the cage at the back, resting one hand on the steadily moving chest of the beast within and then reaching under its arm to split the creature in two. The boy ducked his head into the straw, more afraid of the sight of entrails than of being discovered by the man of inhuman strength; when he looked up again, the gorilla was intact but lifeless, a second man standing beside the first, shaking his hand. The boy never spoke of this to anyone.

‘You owe me the remaining ten per cent,’ the driver, John, said to Raza as he drove the pickup away from the barn, Raza now more comfortably seated beside him.

‘I can give you just the ten per cent,’ Raza said, reaching into the knapsack, which was looking considerably more battered than it had at the start of his journey. He pulled out the requisite amount of money, then tipped the knapsack on to its side, so John could see the wads of notes that remained within. ‘Or I can give you everything that’s here.’

‘Keep talking.’

‘My friend Abdullah is supposed to leave Canada on a ship next month. Ruby Eye arranged it.’

‘Ruby Eye collected the money from his family in Afghanistan,’ John corrected. ‘I’m the one who arranged it.’

‘Good,’ Raza said calmly. ‘So you can arrange for him to fly back in the gorilla instead.’

John glanced down again at the knapsack.

‘I suppose I could. I’ll tell him tomorrow when I meet him. Or you could go in my place and break the news yourself.’ He looked over at Raza and smiled. ‘Yeah, surprised you there, didn’t I, Taliban?’

So it was Raza seated in the orange bucket chair, beside a Formica tabletop, who Abdullah saw when he walked into the fast-food restaurant near Montreal.

‘Raza Hazara!’ He spoke softly so as not to alarm any of the other diners, but his voice was warm as he pulled Raza to his feet and embraced him. When they drew apart neither of them spoke, each smiling and narrowing his eyes, tilting his head this way and that to find familiarity in the stranger across from him, and then Abdullah caught Raza’s ear and tugged on it.

‘I had no idea you would be here. Neither of them let on.’

‘Neither of who?’ His voice had deepened, Raza thought, but the eyes and smile were unchanged.

‘Your mother. And Kim Burton. You didn’t know? She just dropped me here.’ He took a step towards the window, and shook his head. ‘She’s gone. You really didn’t know?’

Kim Burton? Raza shook his head. For the last six days he’d been wondering what she’d been told, what she believed.

‘She has a phone with her. You could call her.’ He held out his cell phone.

‘You have her number?’ Raza said.

Kim Burton! Whatever they had told her, she would never believe Raza was involved with Harry’s death. He knew this. He thought again of the story of the spider. When the Prophet was on the run from Mecca to Medina, he stopped in a cave for the night because his friend and travelling companion, Abu Bakr, had been bitten by a snake and needed to rest. As he sat in the cave, knowing his pursuers would follow his tracks across the moonlit desert, all the way to the base of the rocky slopes, he saw a spider scuttling frantically across the mouth of the cave. Then he heard his pursuers’ footsteps outside and a voice said, ‘No, he’s not here. No one’s been here for a long time. Look. ’ and as the moon emerged from behind a cloud the Prophet saw the cave mouth was entirely covered by the gleaming web of a spider.

This story had passed hands between their two families for three generations. In Afghanistan, Harry had pointed this out and said, ‘You need to tell it to Kim. Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs — we are each other’s spiders.’

Then he and Harry placed side by side the stories each knew of their families. Stories of opportunities received (Sajjad found, through Konrad, a way out of the constraining world of his family business), loyalty offered (Hiroko refused to back away from Konrad when her world turned him into an enemy), shelter provided (three times Ilse gave Hiroko a home: in Delhi, Karachi, New York), strength transferred (Ilse would never have left the life she hated if not for Hiroko), disaster elided (James and Ilse ensured Sajjad and Hiroko were well away from Partition’s bloodletting). And — this part Raza and Harry didn’t have to say aloud — second chances (at being a better father, a better son). Now Kim, too, was part of the stories. Whatever happened to him, Raza knew she would watch over his ageing mother as the spider dance proceeded.

But Abdullah said, ‘Her number? No. I don’t have it.’

Raza tried to hide his disappointment as he caught Abdullah’s sleeve and pulled him down into a chair.

‘You’ve met my mother?’

‘Yes, Raza Ashraf. She found me. You have her eyes. Now that I’ve met her I look at you and wonder how I ever saw a Hazara.’

‘I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m sorry I pretended to be an Afghan. It’s only very recently I realised how wrong it was to claim that.’

Abdullah waved his hand in the air, not dismissing the matter so much as putting it to one side for the moment.

‘Before anything else, explain to me how we’re both here at the same time. This can’t be coincidence.’

Raza told him everything, in as truncated a version as he could manage without confusing the narrative. When he finished, Abdullah laughed.

‘Your mother told me something of your life — your real life. So. Your mother lost her family and home to war; your father was torn away from the city whose poetry and history had nurtured his family for generations; your second father was shot dead in Afghanistan; the CIA thinks you’re a terrorist; you’ve travelled in the hold of a ship, knowing that if you died no one would ever know; home is something you remember, not some place you live; and your first thought when you reach safety is how to help a friend you haven’t seen in twenty years, and this is the part of your story you say the least about. Raza, my brother, truly now you are an Afghan.’

Raza touched Abdullah’s hand lightly.

‘The Abdullah I knew twenty years ago would not have been so forgiving.’

‘That Abdullah was very young, and very foolish. He thought corpses spouting blood were decorations for the sides of trucks.’ He looked out towards the parking lot again. ‘I feel very bad, Raza. Your friend Kim — she did so much to help me, and I was. ungracious.’

‘My friend Kim.’ Raza shook his head. ‘We’ve never met. We’ve just been presences in each other’s lives for a very long time. What did you say to her? What’s she like?’

‘She has short hair. Like a boy,’ Abdullah said, his index fingers knocking against his jawline, just beneath the ear.

‘And we all know how much you Pathans like your pretty boys, walnut,’ Raza laughed.

Abdullah cuffed him lightly.

‘Still the same Raza. I don’t know what I said to her. There’s something — don’t laugh at me when I say this — there is something open in her face. Some Americans have it, that openness. You think you could say anything to them. And we were both sitting in the front seat. Ten years of driving cabs every day, twelve hours a day, and this was something new.’

‘You hit on her?’ Raza switched to English.

Abdullah drew back.