Burnt Shadows (28 page)

       
‘Abdullah . . . the truck with the dead Soviet,’ he kept repeating to the men who walked past (the women, covered-up, he felt it best to ignore). Some shrugged, others ignored him, but there were enough men who knew who he meant to direct him through the maze of homes – the sturdier ones of mud, the rest flimsy constructions of jute and sackcloth – until he came to a mud hut with a rope bed outside it on which Abdullah was seated next to a very young girl, his finger moving slowly over the words in a picture book, his mouth making encouraging sounds as she slowly read out the syllables and pieced them into words.

       
‘Abdullah?’

       
The boy looked up and smiled.

       
‘Raza Hazara!’ he said without any hesitation, as if he’d revisited the memory of their meeting so often that he’d kept Raza’s image sharp in his mind through the intervening weeks. That look in his eyes – the gleam of awe that replicated the one with which he’d watched Harry Burton kneel in front of Raza – made Raza stand up straighter, reshape his expression from that of a boy who needed help with bargaining to that of a man condescending to stop by and greet a young acquaintance.

       
Abdullah touched the girl’s arm and whispered something and she slid off the bed and ran into the mud house.

       
‘Your sister?’ Raza said.

       
‘Yes, but not by blood. I live with her family here. We’re from the same village.’

       
Raza nodded, wondering where Abdullah’s real family was.

       
‘I didn’t know if I’d find you here. I’m glad I did.’

       
The boy seemed genuinely pleased by that.

       
‘I’m glad, too. Afridi’s taken the truck to Peshawar but I had to stay here to look after the women. My brother, whose house this is, has gone away for a few days. Sit.’

       
Raza picked up the picture book as he sat. There had been something intriguing in the concentration of the girl’s face as she translated shapes into sound; he had always slipped into syntax and vocabulary with such ease that he was unable to see it as any kind of accomplishment.

       
‘Did you go to school?’ Abdullah asked.

       
‘What? Today?’

       
‘Don’t be funny.’ Abdullah took the book from Raza’s hand and placed it reverently aside. ‘Ever. Before this.’

       
It had never occurred to Raza that someone might imagine him uneducated. He wondered if it were because in this boy’s world education was never assumed, or if something in the lexicon of the van driver who had taught him Pashto revealed itself as unlettered.

       
‘Yes,’ he said, finding this was not something he was prepared to lie about. ‘Before this.’

       
‘I used to come first in class,’ Abdullah said, leaning back against the mud wall. ‘You lived in the north?’

       
The young girl pushed aside the cloth which acted as doorway and Raza had a brief glimpse of movement – which he understood to be female, and various – within the house, before he quickly looked away. The girl handed him a cup of green tea, smiled shyly at his words of thanks and ran back inside.

       
Raza swallowed hard.

       
‘I don’t want to offend you, but I can’t tell you anything about my life before I came here. I made an oath. When the Soviets killed my father.’ Abdullah said nothing, placing a hand on Raza’s shoulder. His kindness was shaming, but it was too late to stop. ‘I don’t even speak my own language any more, only this borrowed tongue. I will not speak the language of my father, I will not speak my father’s name, or the name of my village, or claim my kinship to any other Hazara until the day the last Soviet leaves Afghanistan. And I will be the one to drive out that last Soviet.’

       
In the silence that followed, Raza wondered if Abdullah had watched the television show that had gripped him a few months earlier, with Kashmiris and Indians in place of Hazaras and Soviets; and if yes, what was the price of lying in this place where codes filled the vacuum where there should have been laws?

       
Abdullah tightened his grip on Raza’s shoulder.

       
‘We may fight over which one of us gets to drive out that last Soviet. But until that fight, we’re brothers.’

       
Raza grinned.

       
‘Brother Abdullah, will you help me buy something? I have a feeling the traders here know they can’t cheat you.’

       
Abdullah crossed his arms.

       
‘Does “something” come from the poppy fields?’

       
‘What? No. No!’

       
Abdullah smiled at Raza’s vehemence.

       
‘Oh. The other “something”. Wait here.’ He called out, ‘I’m coming in,’ and went into the hut.

       
Raza traced the outline of the bundle of ten-rupee notes in his pocket as he looked around. Hardly anyone had looked twice at him since he’d stepped off the bus. It was a curious feeling, almost disappointing. He had seen one boy with features that looked as though they could have been cast from the same mould as his and had wanted to cry out, ‘Impostor.’ He ran his hand over his face. Raza Hazara. He ran the name backwards and forwards in his mind. Razahazara. Arazahazar. There was a balance to the name. More balance certainly than in Raza Konrad Ashraf. He took another sip of tea and felt glad he was wearing his oldest, most worn kurta shalwar.

       
‘Here.’ Abdullah came out cradling something, a piece of cloth covering it. ‘Hold out your arms.’ Raza complied, worried there was something alive under there.

       
It was cold metal and smooth wood, heavier than he’d expected from the ease with which Abdullah carried it. He ran his fingers along its straight lines, leaned forward and felt the curve of the magazine jut against his stomach. Abdullah plucked the cloth off, like a magician, and the AK-47 gleamed – polished steel and plywood.

       
‘You haven’t held one before,’ Abdullah said.

       
Raza shook his head, careful not to let his wandering hands approach the trigger.

       
‘You can’t drive out the last Soviet without knowing how to use this,’ Abdullah said, lifting the semi-automatic from Raza’s hand, and bracing it against his shoulder. He looked heroic. Smiling jauntily, he held it out to Raza.

       
Raza Konrad Ashraf wiped his hands on his shalwar and stood up. But it was Raza Hazara who took the AK-47 in his arms and learnt how everything about a man could change with that simple act. He hoisted the semi-automatic in the air, feeling the thud of it against his shoulder as he imitated Abdullah’s stance, and Abdullah cheered, and Raza knew, he
knew
, how it felt to be Amitabh Bachchan or Clint Eastwood. A group of children ran on to the path, as if Raza’s handling of the AK-47 had set off a beacon, and Raza pivoted, pointed the gun at them and laughed as they ran off, squealing in terrified delight.

       
Abdullah allowed him to pose and pivot for a while, then took the gun from him and within seconds had it dismantled.

       
‘I’ll show you how to put it back together, if you tell me what you were doing with the American.’

       
Raza picked up the magazine section of the gun, and tried to twirl it casually but ended up dropping it on to the ground. Abdullah swatted him on the leg, picked up the magazine and ran the cloth over it in slow, gliding motions.

       
‘I can’t tell you what I was doing with the American,’ Raza said, in an attempt to recover some ground. ‘But there are ways of driving out Soviets without directly handing Kalashnikovs. If you see what I mean.’ He settled back on the rope bed, leaning on his elbows, pleased with Abdullah’s look of near reverence.

       
‘Does he speak Pashto? Your American?’

       
‘A little. Mostly we speak in English.’

       
‘You speak English?’

       
Raza shrugged, as though it were nothing.

       
‘Will you teach me?’

       
Languages had always come easily to Raza, but that didn’t mean he was unaware of the weight attached to language lessons. His mother would never have met Konrad Weiss (the German man she wanted to marry! The thought didn’t get any less strange over the years) if she hadn’t taught German to Yoshi Watanabe’s nephew. And she would not have gone to India to find the Burtons if not for Konrad Weiss. In India, it was language lessons that brought Sajjad and Hiroko to the same table, overturning the separateness that would otherwise have defined their relationship. And all the tenderest of his recollections of childhood were bound up in his mother’s gift of languages to him – those crosswords she set for him late each night when he was growing up, the secrets they could share without lowering their voices, the ideas they could express to each other in words particular to specific languages (‘no wabi-sabi’ they would sometimes say to each other, when rejecting a poem or a painting lacking in harmony that Sajjad held up for praise, and it would amaze Raza how his father still hadn’t quite been able to understand the concepts of wabi and sabi which seemed as natural to Raza as an understanding of why being udaas in Urdu was something quite different to feeling melancholic in English).

       
‘Walnut,’ he said to Abdullah.

       
Abdullah repeated the English word slowly.

       
‘What does it mean?’

       
Raza told him and Abdullah threw back his head, laughing.

       
‘I’ve never understood why they call us that.’

       
‘Because a walnut looks like a little brain, you witless Pashtun.’

       
Abdullah smiled broadly.

       
‘If you weren’t my brother I’d kill you for saying that.’

       
‘I am your brother. And your teacher. Bring me a pencil and paper. We’ll start with the alphabet.’

       
Abdullah stood up, gathering the pieces of the AK-47 in his arms as he did so.

       
‘You teach me, and I’ll give you one of these free of charge. No one notices if one or two go missing. The next shipment, I’ll get you one.’

       
Raza held back his questions, and his objections. How could you tell a boy who had promised you an AK-47 that all you wanted from him were the bargaining skills needed to procure a cheap but top-quality cassette-player so that Sajjad Ali Ashraf could listen to the sound of the sarangi reverberating through the house, encapsulating the principles of wabi-sabi and evoking udaas?

21

Harry Burton tilted his whisky glass towards his mouth and wondered, not for the first time since his arrival in Pakistan, if the paper napkins wrapped around the glasses were designed to prevent condensation forming and turning fingers clammy or to keep the contents of glasses masked in the capital of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. He unwrapped the glass and used the napkin to wipe the drip of sweat which was meandering from his temples down to his cheek with the sluggishness that seemed to infect everything in this stultifying heat.

       
He looked briefly towards the glass doors which separated him from the bulk of the party crowded into the air-conditioned living room of whichever influential businessman’s home this was – somewhere in the course of the evening he had shaken hands with someone who declared himself ‘your host’, but all he could recall of the man was the awkwardly soft plumpness of his palm. The air-conditioning inside was tempting, but the press of people was not. He was happier, on balance, out in the garden with the smell of kababs and smoke drifting over from the driveway, which was lined with buffet tables and perspiring men cooking meat on skewers. He could close his eyes, concentrate on the smell, and remember accompanying Sajjad to the Old City in his childhood.

       
Sajjad. Harry sighed deeply. It had been four months since that dinner in the Ashraf courtyard when Sajjad had asked him to leave and Hiroko had walked him to the front door, and pressed his hands tightly in hers.

       
‘Raza’s still a child in many ways – he gets too caught up in the stories he makes up about his life. And as for Sajjad – his anger doesn’t know how to last beyond a few minutes. Call us next time you’re coming to Karachi. And don’t bring any more sake.’ She kissed him on the cheek before he walked out into the emptiness of the street.

       
He’d had no intention then of staying away so long, but there had been no opportunity of late even to consider his personal life. On the subject of which – there, walking out into the garden, was a beautiful woman, who held his gaze just long enough to signal interest.

       
‘Look away, Burton,’ said a voice at his elbow. ‘She’s on the payroll of the I-Shall-Interfere.’

       
The woman looked over her shoulder at Harry, who immediately turned his back to her, though not without a curse that contained an irritation more professional than personal.

       
‘I prefer It’s-Sorta-Islamic,’ he said to the stocky blond man standing next to him.

       
His colleague Steve raised a glass to the comment. One of Steve’s pleasures in life was to come up with alternative names for the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

       
‘What do you think?’ Steve said. ‘Does the ISI do a better job of spying on us than we do on them? You think they know yet they might soon have Israel to thank for supplying arms to their Holy Warriors?’