Burnt Shadows (48 page)

       
When the boards lifted up and moonlight streamed in he didn’t understand what it meant until the captain’s head appeared.

       
‘Quiet!’ the captain warned in response to the ragged cheer that ran through the hold. ‘Raza Hazara, where are you? Come out. The rest of you stay here. We haven’t reached yet.’

       
Nothing in Raza’s life had felt as shameful, as much of a betrayal, as the moment when he identified himself as the man who was leaving. The boy on his chest, conscious again, clutched his shirt and said, ‘Take me with you,’ and Raza could only whisper brokenly, ‘I’m sorry.’ He reached into his knapsack, lifted out a bundle of hundred-dollar bills, and pressed it into the boy’s hand. ‘Don’t let anyone know you have this,’ he said, before crawling over the other men and holding out a hand for the captain to lift him out. For a moment he considered dropping the knapsack in the hold, but he knew there was something else he needed the money for so he looked away from the men in the hold breathing in as much fresh air and moonlight as they could before the boards came down again.

       
A small rowing boat was alongside the ship, and a voice emerged from it saying, ‘Raza Hazara? Hurry. The plane’s been delayed already for you.’

       
Raza climbed into the boat, but before he could sit down the man rowing swung an oar and knocked him into the water. He had barely enough presence of mind to throw his knapsack into the boat as he fell.

       
He emerged spluttering and bone-cold. The man with the oar held up a bag.

       
‘Clothes in here. Take those ones off. And use this—’ He threw a bar of soap at Raza.

       
Despite the man’s urgency to get going he allowed Raza a few moments to float, naked, in the cold cold water, looking up at the expanse of sky.

       
I will never be the same again
, Raza thought. He watched his vomit-slimed clothes float away, holding on only to Harry’s jacket, and changed that to,
I want never to be the same again
.

       
On the rowing boat there was water and food and a shalwar kameez only slightly too big for him. It was as much as he could bear – any further luxury would have been repellent.

       
Near dawn the boat reached shore. There, another blue and gleaming pickup truck was waiting. This time Raza didn’t attempt to speak to the driver and armed guard inside. He kept thinking of the boy whose head had rested on his chest, and wished he’d given him Hussein and Altamash’s number. Dubai was not so far from Muscat.

       
Beautifully paved roads lined with palm trees led to a private airstrip. A plane was on the runway.

       
One of the guards from the pickup accompanied Raza up the steps and grinned as he opened the plane door.

       
‘Welcome to the zoo,’ he said. The sounds issuing from the plane were extraordinary.

       
Raza stepped in, cautiously.

       
A blue heron unfurled its wings, a white peacock snap-closed its fantail, macaws squawked, a baby anteater fell off its mother’s back and protested shrilly, African wild dogs bared their teeth, winged things flew about under a black sheet, meerkats sat up on their hind legs and watched. And to one side, a baby gorilla slept.

       
The guard pointed to the cage with the gorilla in it.

       
‘You’ll be travelling inside the monkey,’ he said.

       
And that’s when Raza realised Ruby Eye had been right. His mind had definitely broken apart.

39

As the rented SUV approached border control, Kim Burton allowed herself to imagine the consequences if the Afghan hiding beneath blankets in the trunk were discovered. She skipped over the question of what would happen to either him or her, and instead envisioned a world in which ‘political profiling’ became customary at the borders, with immigration officials trained to identify Americans suffering liberal guilt.

       
She rolled down her window and smiled at the Canadian official, handing him her driver’s licence as she did so.

       
‘Not the most flattering picture of you,’ he said. ‘Staying long?’

       
‘Just a few hours.’

       
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re worth more of your time than that.’

       
‘Not in January, you aren’t. I’ll come back in the spring.’

       
‘I’ll look out for you,’ he said, handing back the licence and waving her through with a wink.

       
She wasn’t doing this because of liberal guilt, she reminded herself, though all along the journey she’d felt more than a pang of it as she found herself thinking about how she had always taken for granted her ability to enter and exit nations at will – those nations which required Americans to go through a visa-application process she’d simply never visited. It had come as a shock last year when she’d asked Hiroko and Ilse to go to Paris with her to discover how difficult it would be for Hiroko to get a visa – ‘Not worth the hassle,’ Hiroko had sadly concluded after looking at the list of requirements.

       
‘You can come out now,’ she said when the border was behind them and the surrounding landscape was snow-covered fields.

       
Abdullah clambered into the back seat.

       
‘Should I stay here or come forward?’ he asked with that careful politeness which disconcertingly blanketed his personality.

       
She pulled over on to the shoulder, so he could come around to the front in a dignified manner. He stepped out, walked a few steps to the field and bent to punch his fist through the snow. Kim gripped the wheel and considered pressing on the accelerator.

       
Abdullah got into the front seat, holding up his arm, which had snow clinging to it up to the elbow.

       
‘It’s deep,’ he said. ‘Last year in Central Park, my friends and I made snow angels.’ He didn’t look at her as he spoke.

       
‘Have you been outside New York much?’ she asked. It would take her approximately thirty minutes to get him to the fast-food restaurant near Montreal where he was due to meet the man who would take him onwards. Thirty minutes in a car with an Afghan. She glanced sideways as he carefully wiped snow off his black-gloved hand, and told herself there was no need to feel threatened.

       
‘Once,’ he said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully – or perhaps he was conscious that his accent wasn’t easy to follow. ‘My friend Kemal rented a van and took a group of us to Massachusetts, to a mosque there, during Ramzan. We were seven of us: two Turks, one Afghan, one Pakistani, two from Egypt, one from Morocco. All travelling together in America.’

       
‘Just once? In nearly a decade.’ Then she felt foolish for the incredulousness that revealed her inability to conceive of a life without holidays and travel.

       
‘Yes. It was amazing, the way America drives when it isn’t in New York city.’ He smiled. ‘The road signs! We laughed so much about the road signs.’

       
‘What’s so funny about road signs?’ She could feel her mouth position itself into a smile, wanting very much to find some shared moment of humour but unable to see how ‘road signs’ might lead to levity.

       
‘For everything, everything that is, everything that might happen, there’s a road sign.
DEER CROSSING
.
MOOSE CROSSING
.
OLD PEOPLE CROSSING
.
CHILDREN CROSSING
.
ROCK FALLING
. Only one rock? That one I don’t understand.’

       
At that, she did laugh, genuinely, relaxing her grip on the wheel slightly and becoming aware for the first time how stiff with tension her neck had become. She almost made some joke about Sisyphus.

       
Abdullah almost caught her eye as he smiled, and continued: ‘
BRIDGE AHEAD
.
COVERED BRIDGE AHEAD
.
SOFT SHOULDERS AHEAD
.
ROAD WIDENS
.
ROAD NARROWS
. My friend Kemal – he’s Turkish, very educated – he said what a thing it is, to live in a country where every possible happening is announced in bright glow-in-the-dark letters. We wondered what would happen if something unexpected happened in a country like this, without any warning.’

       
Kim glanced sharply at him, but he was leaning forward rotating his arm in front of the heating vents to dry off the sleeve of his grey winter coat and still not looking at her. She hadn’t noticed any of the road signs while driving up I-87. But she’d noticed flags. Despite these months of seeing so many of them in the city she’d still been taken aback by their profusion. Flags stuck on back windows of cars; flags on bumper stickers; flags impaled on antennae; flags on little flag poles adhered to side mirrors; flags hanging out of windows; flags waving a welcome at service stations; flags painted on billboards (with some company’s logo printed discreetly yet visibly at the bottom in a patriotically capitalistic gesture). They made her remember Ilse laughing that the phrase ‘God Bless America’ struck her as advertisement rather than imperative (
STUDENTS – BUY SCHOOL SUPPLIES HERE
.
MOMS – GIVE YOUR KIDS THE GIFT OF LOVE WITH HEARTY
2
SOUP. GOD BLESS AMERICA
.) And yet, though she knew both Ilse and Harry would have rolled their eyes at the display of patriotism she saw something moving in it. But she kept wondering what her Afghan passenger made of it.

       
‘Then we got our answer,’ he said. ‘To what America would do if something unexpected happened.’

       
‘Yes, you certainly did,’ she said, discovering all the tension in her body seemed to have moved to her jaw, making it difficult to get the words out.

       
This time he looked directly at her.

       
‘No, I didn’t mean . . .’ He shook his head, looked offended, made her feel apologetic, then irritated for being made to feel apologetic. ‘That night, on the way back to New York, I was half asleep when I realised that up ahead all cars were slowing, swerving around something. I woke up fully, and imagined someone dead in the middle of the highway. Then I heard Kemal laugh. There, in front of us, lit up by headlights, was a big pile of blue and pink toy animals – rabbits and bears.’

       
Kim saw it as he spoke in his soft voice, envisioned something almost reverential about the way all cars slowed and swerved, not daring to run over a little blue tail or a soft pink ear. It would have been a moment of silence, of wonder, she knew, uniting everyone on that dark dark highway.

       
‘And Kemal also swerved,’ she said.

       
It wasn’t a question, until Abdullah didn’t respond, turning instead to look out of the window at the unblemished whiteness.

       
He had cut right through the stuffed toys. Kim found the image grotesque, and knew she couldn’t indicate as much without appearing to suffer from misguided American empathy – cluster bomb the Afghans but for God’s sake don’t drive over the pink bunny rabbits!

       
Could he tell her, Abdullah wondered? Could he say he had asked Kemal to drive as close to the toys as possible and each of the men inside had taken armloads of rabbits and bears – their fur softer than anything the men had touched in years. Each of them had a child or a nephew or niece or young sibling to whom they would send the toys as a gift the next time one of the lucky ones with legal paperwork left New York and headed to whichever part of the world he had left behind. Abdullah’s son now slept with the soft blue bunny the father he’d never met had sent to him via a cabbie from Peshawar.

       
But if he told Kim Burton this she might think he was a thief – all of them, thieves – stealing fallen cargo.

       
‘Your English,’ Kim said, after a short silence. ‘It’s very good. Where did you learn?’

       
‘When I first arrived in America I only knew what I remembered from Raza’s classes. But my first week in Jersey City I went to the mosque there and asked the Imam to tell me where I could learn English. And he found a retired teacher, from Afghanistan, who said it would be his farz – you understand the word? No? It means religious obligation. It’s a very important word to us. He said it was his farz to teach a mujahideen. Not everyone forgot. What we had done, for Afghanistan, for the world. Not everyone forgot.’

       
‘I can’t really imagine what it was like,’ Kim said, carefully, mentally testing her own sentences before she spoke them for anything that might give offence. ‘All those years of fighting the Soviets.’

       
‘No. No one can. War is like disease. Until you’ve had it, you don’t know it. But no. That’s a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold which stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war – countries like yours they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. It’s why you fight more wars than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.’

       
In the silence of the SUV, with the heating on a fraction too high, she realised just how uncomfortable he was making her feel when she found herself unwilling to retort: ‘So what you’re saying is . . . the way to end wars is to have everyone fight them?’