Burnt Shadows (23 page)

       
‘For what?’

       
‘Everything.’ Sajjad smiled.

       
‘Yeah. I do that myself. Something about him makes it so easy. You don’t blame him any more?’

       
‘Now I say this is my life, I must live it.’

       
‘Muslim fatalism?’

       
‘No, no. Pakistani resignation. It’s a completely different thing.’ He made a gesture of enquiry at the man whose catch he’d been inspecting and the bargaining started again. Harry caught the eye of a fisherman smoking a cigarette, and the fisherman inclined his head in Harry’s direction in a knowing fashion. Harry wasn’t sure if something beyond a greeting was being signalled. How many of the men in this harbour, he wondered, were involved in smuggling arms bought by the CIA and transported by the ISI from the Karachi docks to the training camps along the border?

       
There was a certain freedom about being in Karachi, and knowing no local assets other than Sher Mohammed. A certain freedom, also, in being known to no one – though, of course, every Pakistani assumed that all Americans in their country were CIA operatives. Harry looked at Sajjad, who now had two blue polythene bags dangling off his wrists, fish squashed inside the packaging, one glassy eye pressed against the thin blue material, reminding Harry of an early-winter frost and a garden pond with fish frozen beneath a skin of ice. He wondered if the reason none of the Ashrafs had asked him any details about his position as consular officer at the Embassy was that they suspected it was a CIA cover. Absurdly, it bothered him to think he might be suspected of lying by the family with whom he had spent part of each of the last three weekends. He was already beginning to regret the spring thaw in Afghanistan when things would pick up pace in America’s proxy war and there would be few opportunities for casual leave.

       
‘Now for the crab,’ Sajjad said, handing one of his bags to Harry. ‘So that there’ll be something at dinner that I can eat. Have you ever eaten raw fish, Henry Baba?’

       
‘Sushi? I love sushi.’

       
‘Really? Thirty-five years of marriage and she still hasn’t convinced me to put it in my mouth. All her other Japanese food I’ve learnt to appreciate. I say to her, whatever you cook, I’ll eat. But it must be cooked.’

       
Harry stepped round a boy who had dropped a fish on the floor and was trying to pick it up only to have it slither out of his grasp at every attempt.

       
‘The two of you – you know, when I was growing up, falling in love for the first time, listening to the kind of music guaranteed to make you feel sadder than any of the circumstances of your life merit, I used to think of the two of you as the greatest of all romantic couples.’

       
‘Oh, no no. We were just young and foolish. What did we know about each other? Almost nothing. It was luck, pure luck, that we discovered after marriage that our natures were so sympathetic to each other. And also’ – he stopped, twirled the polythene bag so it braided itself all the way up to his wrist – ‘we both had too much loss in our lives, too early. It made us understand those parts of the other which were composed of absence.’ He wrinkled his nose – it was a tic he’d picked up from his wife. ‘If she heard that she’d say it’s the melodramatic Dilli poet inside me. Look, oysters. I think we’ll take some. You can’t go wrong with an oyster. Open it up and you’ll either find a pearl or an aphrodisiac. You’re smiling, Henry Baba. I didn’t think you’d know the Urdu term for “aphrodisiac”. Quick, tell me why you know it. There must be a story behind this.’

       
How was it possible, Harry thought, to have such a man as this as your father and grow up as uncertain of your place in the world as Raza appeared to be. If you were Sajjad Ashraf’s son, how could you fail to regard the world as your oyster, regardless of whether you saw yourself as gemstone or mollusc?

       
At that moment, though, Raza didn’t see himself as either gemstone or mollusc but merely a boy whose shoes had been stolen from his feet as he slept. He didn’t see Harry’s shoes with socks stuffed into them in the driver-seat area as he rubbed his eyes to ensure he was properly awake before rolling up his shalwar to shin-height and stepping tentatively out of the car, cursing in German as his feet touched the cold, filthy road. No sign of any thief, just a truck parked a few feet away. Near fifteen feet above the ground a Pathan man was perched like a gargoyle on the frame of the truck’s container portion, watching the early-morning ocean traffic.

       
‘Anything exciting going on out there?’ Raza called up in Pashto – it was the only one of his languages that Hiroko hadn’t taught him; he’d learnt it instead during all the years he’d gone to and from school in a van driven by a sweet-natured Pathan who had insisted Raza sit up front with him ever since the boy, at the age of six, first expressed an interest in learning the driver’s first language. For nearly a decade of Raza’s life the van driver remained the finest of all his teachers.

       
The man shaded his hands with his eyes, almost saluting.

       
‘Are you Afghan?’

       
Raza touched his cheekbones reflexively. Until the Soviets invaded Afghanistan he’d never heard that question; but in the last four years, as increasing numbers of refugees made their way into Pakistan, it had become something less than unusual for Raza to be identified as an Afghan from one of the Mongol tribes.

       
‘Yes,’ he said, and felt the rightness of the lie press against his spine, straightening his back.

       
The man swung down from the container to look more closely at Raza.

       
‘Who are your people?’

       
‘Hazara,’ Raza said confidently. He knew that was what Harry Burton had assumed him to be.

       
‘Come, meet someone,’ the man said, hopping down on to the ground and placing his arm around Raza’s shoulder. ‘Abdullah! Wake up!’

       
The carved wooden driver’s-side door was kicked open by a pale foot, and a few seconds later a boy – no more than fourteen – jumped out of the cab. His wide, upturned mouth and the childish chubbiness of his cheeks did nothing to undercut the adult gaze he directed at Raza through his hazel eyes.

       
‘You have a brother here from Afghanistan,’ the man said. ‘A Hazara.’

       
The boy ignored Raza and twisted his features at the older man.

       
‘What does Pakistan do to people’s brains? Is it something in the air? Am I going to get stupider if I spend more time here? Since when are Hazaras and Pashtuns brothers?’

       
Pashtun, not Pathan, Raza noted.

       
The older man smiled as if recognising the insult as a form of love, and it was Raza who answered, just to assure himself that he wasn’t intimidated by a boy six inches shorter than him.

       
‘Since the Soviets marched into our house and we both had to escape through the window, that’s since when Hazaras and Pashtuns are brothers.’

       
The boy frowned.

       
‘How long have you been away from Afghanistan? You speak Pashto like this Pakistani here.’ He indicated the older man, who looked offended this time. ‘Is Dari your language?’

       
‘Raza!’ It was his father, walking towards the car, waving bags of fish at him while Harry pointed at Raza’s feet and made a gesture of distress before pointing to his own feet.

       
‘I have to go,’ Raza said.

       
‘Is that man American?’ Abdullah asked.

       
Raza smiled.

       
‘I have to go,’ he said again.

       
The boy nodded, his eyes still on Harry.

       
‘Where do you live? I haven’t seen you in Sohrab Goth.’

       
Raza had been about to walk away, but at mention of Sohrab Goth he paused, weighing up the possibility that his lies would expose him to humiliation against the usefulness of knowing someone in Sohrab Goth, where, one of the neighbourhood boys swore, it was possible to buy cassette-players and televisions and telephones with loudspeakers at a fraction of the lowest price anywhere else in the city. This boy, it was obvious, could bargain down an Afghan trader to a price Raza couldn’t demand without his voice conveying his own suspicion that he was insulting the seller.

       
‘I might be there soon,’ he said. ‘How can I find you?’ He didn’t even bother making up an answer to Abdullah’s query about where he lived. He had realised already that the boy didn’t ask questions for the purpose of being answered, but merely to maintain an interrogatory style that asserted control.

       
‘There’s a truck yard next to Bara Market. Just tell anyone there you want Abdullah – the one who drives the truck with the dead Soviet.’

       
Raza took a step back, alarmed, and then saw the boy pointing to the side of his truck, its wood panelling decorated with brightly painted birds and mountains and flowers and – Raza looked in the direction of the pointing finger – a miniature portrait of a man in Soviet Army uniform lying on the ground with blood gushing from his body as though it were a multispouted fountain.

       
The boy laughed.

       
‘Everyone knows me, and my truck.’ The older man made a noise deep in his throat and the boy said, ‘It’s actually this Afridi’s truck. But I’m the one who asked for the Soviet to be put there.’

       
Raza nodded.

       
‘Next time I’m there, I’ll ask for you,’ he said.

       
‘If I’m around,’ the boy said. ‘You never know. One day Karachi, one day Sargodha, one day Peshawar. I’ve seen everything in this country.’ He glanced over towards Harry, who had taken off his shoes and was walking, barefoot, towards Raza, holding them in front of him like an offering. ‘But I never thought I’d see that.’

       
Harry reached Raza, apologising profusely even as he went down on one knee and placed the shoes on the ground for Raza to step into. In normal circumstances, Raza would have objected, insisted Harry wear the shoes, brightened with embarrassment to be treated with such deference by anyone older than himself. But as he saw the look of awe in Abdullah’s eyes – a look not dissimilar to the ones his classmates used to direct at him when he scored full marks in the most difficult of exams – he just winked at the younger boy and slipped his feet into the rubber shoes, his hand touching the air above the American’s head as though in benediction.

17

The fifteen-year-old American girl held out the pirated video to the man behind the counter, who was about to place it in a brown paper bag when he noticed the title, and frowned.

       
‘Not appropriate,’ he said, whisking the video into a cubbyhole beneath his desk. He offered her another video. ‘Why don’t you take this?’ The girl read the scrawled title and made a whistling sound of disgust through the little gap in her front teeth, her green, almond-shaped eyes looking squarely at him in a manner he found both unfamiliar and embarrassing.

       
‘If there’s a law against me taking that other movie, fine. But “appropriateness” is not something you get to decide about.’

       
He almost laughed at this strange hierarchy which placed the law above advice by an elder but something in those clear green eyes suggested this might not be a wise course of behaviour.

       
‘If your father says OK, then I will give it to you,’ he said in the manner of one who has found a compromise and expects gratitude for it.

       
The girl made a sound which was unfamiliar but clearly meant to convey disgust and walked out of his store, leaving him to wonder about this odd creature with her metal-studded leather jacket, her black lipstick, and her short, copper-coloured hair, from which one long strand extended like a rat’s tail curling beneath her shoulders.

       
‘Daddy Warbucks!’ Kim Burton called out to her father as she walked out of the shop. ‘He wants me to watch
Annie
. What kind of place is this?’

       
Harry held up a hand to his daughter to gesture she should go back into the video shop and wait for him, and continued talking to the man selling nuts and dried fruit from a wooden cart on wheels. Ignoring his directive, she walked closer to him, almost managing to be unbothered by the stares of passers-by in the busy commercial square – it was the women who stared more, she’d noticed in her four days in Islamabad, and several had actually come up to her and taken hold of the long, gelled strands of her hair using the word ‘chooha’, which her father had enthusiastically translated as ‘mouse’.

       
He carried on speaking to the other man in Urdu as she stopped next to him, slinging his arm across her shoulder to acknowledge he knew she was there. She felt such a rush of warmth and safety to be pulled in against him that it made her step away, scowling. He was different here. Looser somehow. He preferred it here, that’s what it was. Gran had said he would.

       
Later, when they were driving down a wide, tree-lined boulevard towards the vast mosque under construction at one end of it, a video of
Tootsie
in her lap (at the last moment she’d lost the nerve to tell him it was
Porky’s
she wanted), she said, ‘Why do you keep saying you hate Islamabad when you’re obviously so much happier here than even New York, never mind DC or Berlin?’