Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows

Kim had thought the world was strange and wrong a few hours earlier. Now she understood she had only been approaching the precipice.

‘I didn’t know Raza was there. I called the police — yes, I did that; I had reasons — I called them because of Abdullah.’

‘What reasons?’ She still had her back to Kim, but both women could see each other captured, inches apart, in the window.

The van he was in drove over a pile of teddy bears. There was no way to explain the terror in the silence of the Afghan which conveyed that image to her. Kim waved a hand imploringly and it passed through Hiroko’s reflection.

‘I trusted my training. Don’t you understand? If you suspect a threat you can’t just ignore it because you wish — and I really really wish this — you lived in a world where all suspicion of Muslims is just prejudice, nothing more.’

‘And there it is,’ said Hiroko, finally turning to look at her.

‘No, there it is not. How can you? Over three years we’ve been constant in each other’s lives, and you think I’m a bigot? I’m sorry, but it wasn’t Buddhists flying those planes, there is no video footage of Jews celebrating the deaths of three thousand Americans, it wasn’t a Catholic who shot my father. You think it makes me a bigot to recognise this?’

‘I think you’re too scared and too angry to be allowed to make a judgement. What did you talk to him about? The orchards of Kandahar? The exaltation of being part of a successful cab strike and knowing this is how fights can be won, this is how they should be won? The fear of being a disappointment to his wife and son?’

Kim sat down where she was, all the way across the room, back pressed to the wall. The only light in the room was directed at Hiroko, standing up against an empty orange sky.

‘I’ve seen you angry, but never like this,’ she said in a small voice.

‘I don’t remember ever being like this. I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.’ She clenched her fists and shook them in front of her — a strange gesture that only stopped short of being foolish by its surprising venom. ‘Ilse once accused Sajjad of being a rapist. For all of two minutes she thought he was a rapist. She told me afterwards, those were two minutes in which she was lost. And look at you now, Ilse’s granddaughter. You don’t even know you’re lost.’

‘You can’t possibly compare! She’d known him for years.’

‘You’d known him for five minutes. That’s how long he said you spoke to each other for. Was he lying about that? No, he wasn’t, was he? You condemn a man based on five minutes of conversation. In its own way, that’s as much of a crime as what Ilse did. Five minutes! I spent one evening and almost all the next day talking to him. Do you think I would have let you get into a car with him if I thought. ’ She pulled short, her voice strange to her in its rage.

Kim stood up, and walked a few steps towards Hiroko.

‘If I did look at him and see the man who killed my father, isn’t that understandable? I’m not saying it’s OK, but you have to say you understand.’

‘Should I look at you and see Harry Truman?’

Kim’s eyes first widened, then narrowed. Was that supposed to be a trump card? Ridiculous, and insulting. Her own family had lost one of its own in Nagasaki; Konrad’s death was the most vivid story of terror she had grown up with.

‘Raza will be fine,’ she said, turning her back on Hiroko. ‘He’s got A and G’s lawyers on his side; there’s nothing he can’t get away with.’

‘Not even Harry’s murder?’

‘Hiroko, I’m too tired for this,’ she threw over her shoulder as she poured herself a glass of Scotch. Bath, drink, bed. Exactly what she’d wanted twenty-four hours ago before Hiroko had drawn her into this mad plan. Bath, drink, bed — and tomorrow she’d call the estate agents and find if there was any way to bring forward the start of her tenancy. ‘No one could think Raza is involved with Harry’s murder. Your Afghan is a liar, and I don’t know what besides.’

‘Come back here and sit down.’

‘I’m not one of your ten-year-old students, Mrs Ashraf.’

She was almost all the way to her bedroom when Hiroko spoke again.

‘When Konrad first heard of the concentration camps he said you have to deny people their humanity in order to decimate them. You don’t.’

Walk on, Kim told herself. Get into your bedroom and close the door. But she stayed where she was, cradling the glass of Scotch that put Harry in the room with her.

‘You just have to put them in a little corner of the big picture. In the big picture of the Second World War, what was seventy-five thousand more Japanese dead? Acceptable, that’s what it was. In the big picture of threats to America, what is one Afghan? Expendable. Maybe he’s guilty, maybe not. Why risk it? Kim, you are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb.’

The silence that followed was the silence of intimates who find themselves strangers. The dark birds were between them, their burnt feathers everywhere.

Kim was the first to speak. Not to Hiroko, though. She picked up the phone and dialled Canada. She spoke to someone, then someone else, insisted, pleaded, held on a very long time. Finally she was asked to leave her number and wait by the phone.

She and Hiroko sat on a sofa, side by side, unspeaking.

Within a few seconds one of the policemen from the parking lot called. Kim put the call on speaker phone.

‘I’m glad you called,’ he said. ‘I wanted you to know you did absolutely the right thing today.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, he did nothing wrong. I’m the one who broke the law.’ She would turn herself in. She would say the man she reported was a man she had smuggled across the border. She would say that after she reported him she started to worry he would reveal her complicity if arrested and so she identified the wrong man in the parking lot. She would say could she please speak to the arrested man and apologise in person.

‘There’s no law against reporting someone on a hunch. And he did a lot wrong,’ the policeman said. ‘I probably shouldn’t be telling you this. But I think you deserve to know. Your government has been searching for that man. They’re very glad to have him in their custody now. Miss, your father would be proud of you.’

Hiroko stood up and walked slowly over to the window. Outside, at least, the world went on.

Thanks to: Omar Rahim, Samina Mishra, Jaya Bhattacharji, Ruchir Joshi, for accompanying me ‘on location’ in Karachi and Delhi; Aamer Hussein, Mohammed Hanif, Elizabeth Porto, for comments on various drafts; David Mitchell, for his generosity in suggesting avenues of research to a stranger; Beatrice Monti della Corte, for the haven that is Santa Maddalena; Victoria Hobbs and Alexandra Pringle, for continuing to be my dream team; Gillian Stern, for her sharp editorial eye; Ali Mir, for Sahir Ludhianvi and walks through New York City; Bobby Banerjee, for introducing me to the world of private military contractors; Karin Gosselink and Rachel Holmes, for their intellectual and political rigour; Biju Mathew, for allowing me to pick his brain; the dinner group in Galle, for the title; my parents and sister, for continuing to be my greatest support; numerous friends — particularly Maha Khan-Phillips and Janelle Schwartz — for listening to me talk about this book, or pulling me away from my desk when I needed it; everyone at Bloomsbury and A. M. Heath; Frances Coady; Mark Pringle; finally, and most of all, the writers, journalists, film-makers and photographers whose works helped me imagine the worlds I’ve written about in this book.