Burnt Shadows Part 26

'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 DEER CROSSING. MOOSE CROSSING MOOSE CROSSING. OLD PEOPLE CROSSING OLD PEOPLE CROSSING. CHILDREN CROSSING CHILDREN CROSSING. ROCK FALLING 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 COVERED BRIDGE AHEAD. SOFT SHOULDERS AHEAD SOFT SHOULDERS AHEAD. ROAD WIDENS ROAD WIDENS. ROAD NARROWS 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 b.u.mper 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 'G.o.d Bless America' struck her as advertis.e.m.e.nt rather than imperative (STUDENTS BUY SCHOOL SUPPLIES HERE. MOMS GIVE YOUR KIDS THE GIFT OF LOVE WITH HEARTY MOMS GIVE YOUR KIDS THE GIFT OF LOVE WITH HEARTY2 SOUP. G.o.d BLESS AMERICA SOUP. G.o.d 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 pa.s.senger 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 cl.u.s.ter bomb the Afghans but for G.o.d'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 cla.s.ses. 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?'

But why should she feel uncomfortable? She was the one making all the effort. Abdullah seemed to feel he owed her nothing. This morning when she met him at the street corner he and Hiroko had picked the evening before he had thanked her, very politely, and insisted that he would stay hidden under blankets as long as they were in America; if the car were searched at the border he would say he climbed into the back at a service station on I-87 when he discovered the SUV unlocked. But beyond that he had offered nothing, hadn't even acknowledged she was breaking her nation's laws for someone whose innocence she had no reason to take for granted.

The snow from his jacket had melted into a stain of water, which he was attempting to dry, very carefully, with a handkerchief. What reason was there to believe the story his brother told Raza? How did they know the FBI knocked on his door for no reason except that he was an Afghan? How did they know he had run for no reason except panic about his migration status? That he was an Afghan didn't make him a liar or a terrorist, of course not; but wasn't it just as absurd condescending almost to a.s.sume that because an Afghan he couldn't be a liar or a terrorist? If his story were true he should just have gone to the FBI. No matter how bad things had become in the name of security no one no one was going to be detained indefinitely for just being an illegal migrant worker. Come on! New York would shut down if that become a crime anyone cared about. And if the FBI did turn him over to the INS, what of it? He'd be deported. To Afghanistan. In the comfort of a plane!

She cracked open the window, and let the racing wind whistle through, though Abdullah huddled into his coat and put his hands over his ears whether to cut off the sound or the cold she didn't know.

It had all happened so fast. Less than ten hours between the time she met him and the time they left the city.

'What's the point of waiting?' Hiroko had said when Kim queried the need for such haste. 'The FBI's already been to the garage from where he leases the cab, and to the home of the man who takes the cab on its night s.h.i.+ft to ask if they know where he is. This afternoon he called this person in Canada who's arranging things to say he'll meet him tomorrow, so tomorrow he's going. I told you, I'll take him.'

Hiroko made everything seem inevitable this journey, the timing of it, his innocence. And so Kim had gone against everything in her training, hadn't even considered the points of stress under which Abdullah's story might buckle, and had simply curled up in her bed and fallen asleep as soon as Hiroko had agreed to let her drive the car. The truth, she now realised, was that she was so busy looking at ways of keeping Hiroko from smuggling an Afghan across the border that no other threats had been visible.

'Hiroko's an amazing woman, isn't she?' Kim said, rolling up the window, trying one last time to establish common ground.

'Raza has a place in heaven because of her,' Abdullah replied. 'Imagine knowing your whole life you have a place in heaven.'

'I don't understand.'

'She converted to Islam. The one who converts another is guaranteed a place in heaven for himself and his children and grandchildren and so on down for seven generations. I think it's wrong only to honour Raza's father the man who did the converting. The convert should also be honoured. It's because of Raza's mother also not only his father that he's going to heaven. And his children and grandchildren after him. Even martyrs who die in jihad can't do so much for their family. It's written in the Quran.'

'Have you read the Quran?'

'Of course I have.'

'Have you read it in any language you understand?' Suddenly the traffic seemed to have thickened; a rea.s.suring number of people were driving alongside, and no fear of giving offence could possibly match her indignation at listening to Hiroko being reduced to a launch pad for her husband and son's journey to a paradise in which she didn't appear to have secured a place for herself in this Afghan's mad system of belief.

'I understand Islam,' he said, tensing.

'I'll take that to mean no. I've read it in English. Believe me, the Quran says nothing of the sort. And frankly, what kind of heaven is heaven if you can find shortcuts into it? Seven generations!'

'Please do not speak this way.'

'Tell me one thing. One thing.' Unexpectedly, such a rage within her, overpowering everything. 'If an Afghan dies in the act of killing infidels in his country does he go straight to heaven?'

'If the people he kills come as invaders or occupiers, yes. He is shaheed. Martyr.'

How slowly, unwillingly, her fist had opened to drop the first clod of earth on to Harry's coffin. It was the moment when her heart truly understood that all the imagined tomorrows of their relations.h.i.+p Delhi, conversations without recrimination, days of hearing the other's stories in full would never come. Because of just one man with a gun. She had always thought it would take so much more than that to bring Harry down. But it was just one Afghan with a gun who never stopped to think of Harry Burton as anything but an infidel invader whose death opened up a path to Paradise.

'He is a murderer. And your heaven is an abomination.'

'We should not speak any more.'

'No, we should not.'

There was not another word between them the tension almost suffocating until she pulled into the parking lot of the fast-food restaurant. But as he opened the car door to leave he said something in Arabic in which she only caught the word 'Allah' and followed it up with, 'I won't forget what you've done.'

What had she done? She watched him walk across the parking lot, his stride that of a man walking into freedom, a family with two children entering the restaurant behind him.

40.

The sleeping gorilla was a work of artistry; a b.u.t.ton beneath its matted hair controlled the machinery that surged its chest, a lever concealed beneath its armpit unhinged the animal and revealed the cavity within. It was only during refuelling stops and on landing near Montreal that Raza needed to hide within the animal; during the rest of the journey he sat with the Kuwaiti pilots in the c.o.c.kpit, incredulous at their tales of ferrying the whims of their Saudi employer from one corner of the globe to the other.

When the plane reached the airstrip near Montreal, a forklift was waiting to lower the gorilla cage on to yet another pickup. Raza heard the animals and birds chittering and shrieking and squawking as the cage was lifted out; but there were no sounds of human protest.

A thirteen-year-old boy hiding in a barn to escape his father's drunken rage was the only one to see the pickup drive into the barn, where the driver got out and opened the cage at the back, resting one hand on the steadily moving chest of the beast within and then reaching under its arm to split the creature in two. The boy ducked his head into the straw, more afraid of the sight of entrails than of being discovered by the man of inhuman strength; when he looked up again, the gorilla was intact but lifeless, a second man standing beside the first, shaking his hand. The boy never spoke of this to anyone.

'You owe me the remaining ten per cent,' the driver, John, said to Raza as he drove the pickup away from the barn, Raza now more comfortably seated beside him.

'I can give you just the ten per cent,' Raza said, reaching into the knapsack, which was looking considerably more battered than it had at the start of his journey. He pulled out the requisite amount of money, then tipped the knapsack on to its side, so John could see the wads of notes that remained within. 'Or I can give you everything that's here.'

'Keep talking.'

'My friend Abdullah is supposed to leave Canada on a s.h.i.+p next month. Ruby Eye arranged it.'

'Ruby Eye collected the money from his family in Afghanistan,' John corrected. 'I'm the one who arranged it.'

'Good,' Raza said calmly. 'So you can arrange for him to fly back in the gorilla instead.'

John glanced down again at the knapsack.

'I suppose I could. I'll tell him tomorrow when I meet him. Or you could go in my place and break the news yourself.' He looked over at Raza and smiled. 'Yeah, surprised you there, didn't I, Taliban?'

So it was Raza seated in the orange bucket chair, beside a Formica tabletop, who Abdullah saw when he walked into the fast-food restaurant near Montreal.

'Raza Hazara!' He spoke softly so as not to alarm any of the other diners, but his voice was warm as he pulled Raza to his feet and embraced him. When they drew apart neither of them spoke, each smiling and narrowing his eyes, tilting his head this way and that to find familiarity in the stranger across from him, and then Abdullah caught Raza's ear and tugged on it.

'I had no idea you would be here. Neither of them let on.'

'Neither of who?' His voice had deepened, Raza thought, but the eyes and smile were unchanged.

'Your mother. And Kim Burton. You didn't know? She just dropped me here.' He took a step towards the window, and shook his head. 'She's gone. You really didn't know?'

Kim Burton? Raza shook his head. For the last six days he'd been wondering what she'd been told, what she believed.

'She has a phone with her. You could call her.' He held out his cell phone.

'You have her number?' Raza said.

Kim Burton! Whatever they had told her, she would never believe Raza was involved with Harry's death. He knew this. He thought again of the story of the spider. When the Prophet was on the run from Mecca to Medina, he stopped in a cave for the night because his friend and travelling companion, Abu Bakr, had been bitten by a snake and needed to rest. As he sat in the cave, knowing his pursuers would follow his tracks across the moonlit desert, all the way to the base of the rocky slopes, he saw a spider scuttling frantically across the mouth of the cave. Then he heard his pursuers' footsteps outside and a voice said, 'No, he's not here. No one's been here for a long time. Look . . .' and as the moon emerged from behind a cloud the Prophet saw the cave mouth was entirely covered by the gleaming web of a spider.

This story had pa.s.sed hands between their two families for three generations. In Afghanistan, Harry had pointed this out and said, 'You need to tell it to Kim. Weiss-Burtons and Tanaka-Ashrafs we are each other's spiders.'

Then he and Harry placed side by side the stories each knew of their families. Stories of opportunities received (Sajjad found, through Konrad, a way out of the constraining world of his family business), loyalty offered (Hiroko refused to back away from Konrad when her world turned him into an enemy), shelter provided (three times Ilse gave Hiroko a home: in Delhi, Karachi, New York), strength transferred (Ilse would never have left the life she hated if not for Hiroko), disaster elided (James and Ilse ensured Sajjad and Hiroko were well away from Part.i.tion's bloodletting). And this part Raza and Harry didn't have to say aloud second chances (at being a better father, a better son). Now Kim, too, was part of the stories. Whatever happened to him, Raza knew she would watch over his ageing mother as the spider dance proceeded.

But Abdullah said, 'Her number? No. I don't have it.'

Raza tried to hide his disappointment as he caught Abdullah's sleeve and pulled him down into a chair.

'You've met my mother?'

'Yes, Raza Ashraf. She found me. You have her eyes. Now that I've met her I look at you and wonder how I ever saw a Hazara.'

'I'm sorry I lied to you. I'm sorry I pretended to be an Afghan. It's only very recently I realised how wrong it was to claim that.'

Abdullah waved his hand in the air, not dismissing the matter so much as putting it to one side for the moment.

'Before anything else, explain to me how we're both here at the same time. This can't be coincidence.'

Raza told him everything, in as truncated a version as he could manage without confusing the narrative. When he finished, Abdullah laughed.

'Your mother told me something of your life your real life. So. Your mother lost her family and home to war; your father was torn away from the city whose poetry and history had nurtured his family for generations; your second father was shot dead in Afghanistan; the CIA thinks you're a terrorist; you've travelled in the hold of a s.h.i.+p, knowing that if you died no one would ever know; home is something you remember, not some place you live; and your first thought when you reach safety is how to help a friend you haven't seen in twenty years, and this is the part of your story you say the least about. Raza, my brother, truly now you are an Afghan.'

Raza touched Abdullah's hand lightly.

'The Abdullah I knew twenty years ago would not have been so forgiving.'

'That Abdullah was very young, and very foolish. He thought corpses spouting blood were decorations for the sides of trucks.' He looked out towards the parking lot again. 'I feel very bad, Raza. Your friend Kim she did so much to help me, and I was . . . ungracious.'

'My friend Kim.' Raza shook his head. 'We've never met. We've just been presences in each other's lives for a very long time. What did you say to her? What's she like?'

'She has short hair. Like a boy,' Abdullah said, his index fingers knocking against his jawline, just beneath the ear.

'And we all know how much you Pathans like your pretty boys, walnut,' Raza laughed.

Abdullah cuffed him lightly.

'Still the same Raza. I don't know what I said to her. There's something don't laugh at me when I say this there is something open in her face. Some Americans have it, that openness. You think you could say anything to them. And we were both sitting in the front seat. Ten years of driving cabs every day, twelve hours a day, and this was something new.'

'You hit on her?' Raza switched to English.

Abdullah drew back.

'What kind of man do you think I am?'

'The kind of man I am. Go on, what did you do?'

'I spoke to her. As I have never spoken to an American woman before. I wanted her to understand something, I don't know what, about being an Afghan here. About war. Again and again war, Raza. And then. Then, I don't know. She started attacking Islam. They're all, everyone, everywhere you go now television, radio, pa.s.sengers in your cab, everywhere everyone just wants to tell you what they know about Islam, how they know so much more than you do, what do you know, you've just been a Muslim your whole life, how does that make you know anything?'

Raza put an arm on Abdullah's.

'Quiet, quiet. People are looking. Abdullah, Kim's not like that. I know. She can't be like that.'

'She said heaven is an abomination because my brother is in it.' He covered his face with his hands. 'You hear them now all the time. Talking about how they won the Cold War, now they'll win this war. My brother died winning their Cold War. Now they say he makes heaven an abomination.'

'You're tired,' Raza said, holding Abdullah's hands between his own. 'Come with me. The car's outside. You can sleep on the plane. Today, Abdullah, you make the journey home to your family.'

'New York is home,' he said brokenly. 'New York is my home. The taxi drivers are my family.'

Raza felt a curious sense of envy amidst his pity.