Burnt Shadows (37 page)

       
‘Does the ISI have a record of whether anyone in the camp was told anything about me? My name, what the ISI believed I was doing there?’

       
Sajjad shook his head.

       
‘It’s unlikely. The ISI doesn’t give out information to anyone unless it’s necessary. Certainly not to the Afghans. But I wouldn’t get too hopeful about this man in Kabul. Even if he remembers your friend Abdullah – Raza bhai, what are the chances he’s alive?’

       
And even if he is, then what? Raza thought as he drove back to base. What if he’s become one of them – the black-turbanned men who banned everything of joy, blasted ancient prophets out of mountain-faces. Abdullah, he couldn’t help remember, had talked of the carvings along the road to Peshawar as the work of infidels. And women – Abdullah at fourteen knew exactly what a woman’s place in the world was, and it was nothing that Hiroko’s son could understand. Then it hadn’t really mattered, to be honest – but now, just two weeks in this country and the sight of women shrouded as though they were the walking dead made him want to scream. In Miami as in Dubai it was women who kept his life from becoming that of a drone – sex the habitat in which he was most at home, its balance of intimacy and transience perfectly suited to his temperament. He fell in love, briefly but intensely, with all the women who invited him into their beds, never seeing that what he truly loved was the version of himself which manifested itself in their company – a version comprised of his father’s lightness and his mother’s boldness.

       
At sunset, he was driving past a mosque, and the sky-blue beauty of its dome made him get out of his Humvee and prostrate himself on the ground as the muezzin’s call wheeled across the plain. The sound was drowned out by the whup-whup of a chopper, which swooped closer to the ground to investigate the stationary Humvee. Raza jumped up, waved at the pilot, and stepped back into the vehicle just as a group of elderly men came out of the mosque to see what was happening.

       
‘Sorry for the interruption,’ Raza said in Pashto, leaning out of the window, but the men only looked accusingly from the American vehicle to the man whose features suggested tribes unfriendly to the Pashtuns. One of the men unslung a Kalashnikov from his shoulder – Raza remembered Abdullah lifting a piece of cloth like a magician to reveal the gleaming gun beneath – and another said, ‘Go away from here.’

       
Last time I’m travelling in this beast, Raza thought as he drew up to the compound, waving away the warnings of the Sri Lankan guard who had witnessed Harry’s fury when he discovered the Humvee was missing.

       
‘Who came in the chopper?’ he asked.

       
‘American.’ The man shrugged, as if to say anyone else would have travelled by road.

29

‘Did I ever tell you I was so determined when I arrived in New York to cast off the shackles and constraints of life as Mrs Burton that I swore to myself I wouldn’t be shocked by anything in my cousin Willie’s life – even though he kept sending me letters before my arrival warning me that his social circle was not what I was used to?’ Ilse burrowed down into the sofa cushions, arms wrapped around a cushion resting on her stomach.

       
So many late nights in Delhi had unfolded just like this: Ilse in this very position on the living-room sofa, Hiroko sitting in an armchair beside her sipping a cup of jasmine tea, chatter going back and forth between them. Then, as now, Hiroko always pretended the stories she’d already heard were new to her because she enjoyed the animation with which Ilse retold her favourite anecdotes.

       
‘So my very second day in New York I walked into the kitchen in Willie’s flat in the middle of the night to get some water, and there he was with this beautiful young man – naked! – doing something I had never seen done before, not even in a photograph. And I had so steeled myself to take everything in my stride that I said, “Don’t mind me,” and walked right past them to the fridge. Poor Willie almost fainted with embarrassment, and the young man caught a bus back home to Iowa the next morning and never returned!’

       
‘Well, no wonder I stopped getting your letters in Karachi all those years ago,’ Hiroko laughed. ‘If you were writing things like that the censors must have been framing them on their office walls!’

       
‘Oh I was so desperately in need of all that liberation,’ Ilse said, kicking her foot up in the air. ‘New York after the war. It was the most wonderful madness. I kept wishing you were here with me.’

       
‘I was where I wanted to be,’ Hiroko said quietly.

       
Ilse reached out her arm and caught Hiroko’s wrist.

       
‘I do know that. I used to wish it for my sake, not yours.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Well, all right. Maybe a little for yours. I place much too high a premium on material comforts, always have. I don’t have your stoical Japanese spirit.’

       
‘You talk such incredible nonsense,’ Hiroko said, with as much affection as asperity.

       
The flung-open front door, the sound of Kim’s voice shouting out Ilse’s name, sucked all tranquillity from the room.

       
‘Dad, have you heard from Dad? I can’t get hold of him.’

       
‘Kim, what’s the matter?’ Ilse tried to sit up, but her body was too ensconced in the sofa cushions and she only managed to raise her head a little before it, too, fell back, to her sharp cry of impatience.

       
‘Haven’t you heard the news? A man tried to light a bomb inside his shoe on a flight. To Miami. And I can’t get hold of Dad.’ She pulled Ilse upright as she spoke, and thought senility might have finally caught up with her grandmother when Ilse’s only response was to pat her cheek as if she was a child who had just lost her favourite toy.

       
‘There are hundreds of flights to Miami every day, and your father is almost never on any of them,’ she said.

       
‘And everyone on the plane is fine,’ Hiroko added. ‘Other than that stupid man. Was he still wearing the shoe while trying to set it on fire? The news report didn’t make that clear.’

       
Kim looked from Ilse to Hiroko, not believing how unconcerned they were.

       
‘It was a plane,’ she said. ‘Another suicide attack on a plane.’

       
‘Come here.’ Ilse pulled her down on to the sofa, and put her arm around her. ‘Stop doing what you’re doing. Stop trying to imagine precisely what would happen to a plane mid-air if a bomb went off inside it.’

       
Kim closed her eyes.

       
‘I’m not trying to imagine it, Gran. I can’t help imagining it.’ She had trained to be a structural engineer because she’d always wanted to know how to keep things from falling, from breaking apart. Only these last months had she seen how much she’d had to learn about falling, about breaking, in order to do it.

       
‘Let’s try getting hold of your father,’ Ilse said, dialling Harry’s satphone number. He answered almost immediately.

       
‘Have you been in the vicinity of any flammable loafers today?’ Ilse asked.

       
‘What?’ Harry shouted over the roar of something that sounded like helicopters. ‘You mean that shoe guy on the flight? No, of course not. Is that why Kim called? I’ve just got to my phone and seen three missed calls from her.’

       
Ilse passed the phone to Kim, who shouted into it, ‘When you see three missed calls, you might want to try calling right back.’

       
‘I was about to!’

       
And there they went, Ilse thought, exchanging an exasperated glance with Hiroko who just said, ‘Love to him and Raza,’ before slipping away to the kitchen.

       
‘I hate this,’ Kim said, after hanging up the phone. She rested her head on Ilse’s shoulder, but lightly, aware how frail the old woman’s bones were. ‘I hate that it felt familiar, trying to get hold of him. Those hours I couldn’t get through to you on 9/11  . . .’

       
‘It was minutes, not hours,’ Ilse said. ‘Look, your skin is so young compared to mine we could be creatures from different species.’ She rested her hand on Kim’s, gently patting it.

       
‘I just want the world to be as it was.’ Ilse said nothing, just carried on patting her hand. Only with Gran was it possible to be this way, to feel herself sinking into peace. Her father would have responded with some CIA-style political analysis about shifting geopolitical trends. And – worse – her mother with her cod psychology would be saying, ‘Now, Kim, darling, you know this is bringing up those suppressed feelings of loss and vulnerability around your father and my divorce. I know you chose this profession of yours because in some way you’re trying to atone for what you see as your own inability to hold our marriage together. So when anything threatens to collapse or crumble it brings back that sense of personal failure you felt when the marriage broke up.’ And she always emphasised the words ‘broke up’ as though they conclusively proved her point that Kim’s passion for engineering was really all about her.

       
‘I’ve lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid, God knows what. The world will survive this, and with just a tiny bit of luck so will everyone you love. But it is entirely possible you’ll need some kind of holiday before that happens.’ Ilse rapped Kim’s hand firmly at the final sentence. Kim had said she was only coming to New York for a meeting about ironing out details of her relocation and would be on vacation after that until the Christmas holidays ended, but somehow she’d ended up working on a project out of the New York office instead.

       
Kim made a non-committal noise deep in her throat.

       
‘I don’t know how I managed to never worry about Dad all those years he was with the CIA. But now—’ She stopped as Ilse pinched her and gestured her head towards the kitchen where their voices might easily travel. They had never spoken of it, but silently both had agreed on a pact to allow Hiroko to continue believing Raza and Harry’s euphemisms about administrative work in security. Lowering her voice she said, ‘Everything in the world is so scary, nothing more than the thought of where he might be, what he’s doing. I’m frightened all the time, all the time. And I hate it. It must make me so amazingly tedious to be around.’

       
‘Your conversation has been somewhat limited of late,’ Ilse said. ‘Sometimes I wish I had been in London during the war simply so I could pull you up with stories of the spirit of the Blitz.’

       
‘Oh, don’t beat yourself up over it. It wouldn’t have worked.’ She gave her grandmother a resounding kiss on the cheek.

       
‘I mean what I said about the holiday.’ Ilse spoke with that voice of gravity which she only brought out when she was very seriously concerned about Kim.

       
‘I know you mean it. But right now, I need some place to go at least five days a week where I feel a sense of control.’

       
Ilse, who knew her granddaughter far better than either of Kim’s parents did, had long ago recognised it was the need for control rather than atonement for her inability to hold together a marriage at the age of four which had drawn her into the profession she’d chosen. She still remembered the expression of fierce accomplishment – almost defiance – on Kim’s face the day she came home from university for her winter holidays and said, ‘I know how to make a building earthquake-proof.’ Earthquake-proof! As if there was anything to be done in defence if the world opened up beneath you.

       
Poor Gary! Ilse found herself thinking in unexpectedly sympathetic terms about the man who she’d never thought good enough for her granddaughter. Kim had only chosen him to begin with because she knew he’d never make her feel uncontrolled. She had enough of that around her father – had always wanted to summon up indifference to both his absences and his presence, and grew so enraged when everything but indifference was what she felt. And, of course, she’d always ultimately break up with the Garys of the world simply because her basic nature was too passionate to settle for someone towards whom she could feel so completely lukewarm. One day, Ilse thought, one day someone will come along and knock her sideways. It will either be the best or the worst thing of her life.

       
‘What were you and Hiroko talking about before I whirled in like a banshee?’ Kim had kicked off her boots and curled up on the sofa, her body pliant with relief now that Harry was OK.

       
‘The “Willie in the kitchen” story.’ Ilse laughed.

       
‘If there is a heaven, Uncle Willie will be glaring down at you from it,’ Kim said, shaking her head as if disapproving, though Ilse knew Kim loved this bawdy side to her, and would often encourage her to say the most outrageous things with a single smile or glimmer of the eye.

       
‘Nonsense. If there is a heaven, Willie is doing exactly what he was doing in the kitchen. Otherwise it’s not heaven. Not for Willie.’ Suddenly she cackled. ‘Imagine if those suicide bombers end up in Willie’s heaven. Imagine the looks on their faces.’

       
‘Gran, that isn’t funny.’

       
‘It’s hilarious! Hiroko, isn’t it hilarious?’

       
Hiroko, re-entering the room, handed Kim a cup of something steaming-hot.

       
‘When I knew her first, she was very well behaved. I promise you, she was.’

       
Ilse’s laughter was clear and unconstrained – the laugh of a woman who knew how fortunate she had been to get a second life.