Harry Burton glanced in surprise at his daughter. Like her adored grandmother she had the ability to see things in him which he was sure no one else would guess. It made him nervous. Ilse Weiss was one thing – she’d known him his whole life – but to this girl he’d been a fleeting presence since she was four years old and divorce had ended familial life in DC, unshackling her parents from each other and from the city they both disliked, but which had proved a compromise between one’s insistence on raising her child in America, the other’s insistence on staying with his chosen career. He was a failed parent, he knew this, and so when Kim came to visit – formerly in Berlin, now here – or when he stopped for a few days in New York to see her he accepted her sulks and tantrums as his just deserts; but these moments of insight in which she showed him glimpses of the woman she could grow into once adolescence passed made him uneasy. There was too much he didn’t want her ever to know about him.
‘I do hate Islamabad,’ he said firmly.
He stopped at a traffic light, and the man on a bicycle who stopped beside him leaned slightly towards Harry’s open window, his head nodding in appreciation of the music from the car stereo. Harry ejected the cassette and handed it to the man – prompting a gasp of outrage from Kim, even though she had the master cassette at home and this was just the copy she’d made for the stereo, which was in the habit of chewing up tape. The man took the cassette, his tentativeness suggesting he couldn’t believe it was really meant for him, and directed the question ‘Amreekan?’ at Harry. When Harry nodded, the man stuck his pinky finger into one of the holes around which the tape spooled and held it up with an expression of amazement, turning his hand this way and that as if admiring an engagement ring. Then he removed a bagful of apples from his handlebar and passed it over to Harry before driving off, ringing his cycle bell, the cassette still wedged on to his finger.
‘I do hate the place,’ Harry said. ‘But I love the people. Not the ones in officialdom – the real people.’
‘Huh,’ Kim said, swallowing this piece of information. ‘That’s funny. I used to think the rule which said you can’t be President of America if you’re born somewhere else was really stupid because of course people who migrate in are going to be more loyal citizens than the ones who take it for granted. I thought that because of you – and how England means nothing to you. But I guess England’s not really the country you left behind, is it?’
‘England was a way station,’ Harry said, feeling some satisfaction in imagining Kim repeating this to her grandfather. James Burton would choke on the information. Ilse Weiss, on the other hand, would delight in it.
The story of Harry’s childhood was one Kim knew well – it was also one of the few stories Harry could be trusted to tell without any evasion, belonging, as it did, to that time in his life before secrecy and lies became necessary.
The only thing worse than leaving India was arriving in England. Harry would always start the story with that line. The war was still everywhere, the sun was nowhere, and all the boys at school laughed at his ‘Indian expressions’ (both verbal and physical) and wanted to know what his father had done in the war. And then the final horror: the only other boy who had just arrived from India, and who Harry had considered an ally, said, ‘His mother’s German.’ So, much of the first year was abject misery. Things only improved near Easter when one of the boys threw a cricket ball his way with the words, ‘Hey, Maharaja Fritz. Know how to bowl?’ Then the skills taught to him by Sajjad – he always looked somewhat wistful when he mentioned that name – turned him into something of a school hero.
Two years later, when his father announced over Easter break that his mother’s ‘short trip to New York’, which had commenced three months earlier, was going to be permanent, and Harry was to go there to join her, the eleven-year-old was torn. He wanted to be near his mother, but he knew his cricketing skills would get him nowhere in New York City. And what else did he have, after all? Nothing but another foreign accent. By now, India had left his speech, and what remained was ‘Marmite and sardines’, as his mother put it.
There was only one thing to be done, Harry decided. He would go to New York at the start of the summer, not the end of it as had been planned, and prepare. ‘Teach me to speak American,’ he said on his first day in New York to the beautifully dressed young man who had let him in to Uncle Willie’s Upper East Side flat. (‘It’s an apartment. That’s your first lesson.’) He resisted all attempts by his mother to introduce him to boys who would be his classmates (‘Don’t say “mate” ’) in the autumn (“fall”). He learnt the rules of baseball, the stats of all the Yankees players over the last twenty years, and found himself weeping as he stood in front of the recently unveiled Babe Ruth monument.
Even so, on the first day of school his foreignness overwhelmed him to the point of muteness. He mumbled his way through the first hours, keeping his head down and paying attention to no one but the teachers. It was only during recess, as he sat alone on a stone step listening to the boys around him, that he realised he was surrounded by a group of immigrants. German, Polish, Russian. They were all, like him, bound by class in this exclusive public (‘Private, Henry, private’) school, and bound also by the fact that their parents, for one reason or another, wanted no more to do with Europe after the war.
Harry looked at the group, and then looked towards the boys lounging beneath a tree, no whiff of the Old World about them.
Standing up, he paused, realising he was about to take the first real risk of his life, then walked up to the second group of boys and said, ‘Hi, I’m Harry.’
That winter, in London, James Burton would tell his son that confidence gets you far in life – and that if Harry had been less insecure when he first arrived at boarding school in England he would have met with a friendly reception there, too. But Harry watched not only himself but also the other sons of immigrants as they made their way through the school year, and understood that America allowed – no, insisted on – migrants as part of its national fabric in a way no other country had ever done. All you had to do was show yourself willing to be American – and in 1949, what else in the world would you want to be? (‘And do all the Negro students at your school agree with this assessment, Henry?’ ‘I never said it’s a perfect country, Dad, just the best there is.’)
‘Huge sacrifice you’ve made,’ Kim said, closing her eyes to take in the fragrance of jasmine flowers which had leapt through the window in a rush. ‘Living outside the world’s best country in order to serve it.’
Harry glanced sideways at her, and sighed.
‘I do miss you, you know. And if there was any need for consular officers in New York, believe me, I’d be there in a heartbeat.’
‘Drop the consular-officer crap, Dad,’ Kim said, her eyes still closed.
There was a squealing sound as Harry swerved on to the side of the road and braked sharply.
‘Apologise,’ he said.
Kim opened her mouth to issue something other than an apology but then the thought came to her that his car might be bugged; someone who shouldn’t know the truth might learn it from her and that could hurt him.
She leaned sideways and wrapped her arms around Harry, startling him.
‘Sorry, Daddy. Sorry. I’m just mouthing off.’
Harry kissed the top of her head fiercely. It was the first glimpse he’d had of his child through the prickliness of adolescence since she’d arrived in Islamabad for her Christmas holidays. He wanted to say he wished he’d chosen differently but he had a horror of her recognising the lie. Right now, more than ever, he knew he was doing with his life precisely what most excited him. When had the shift occurred, he wondered, as Kim sat back in her seat, arms crossed, looking mortified at her outburst. When had it become about excitement rather than idealism? He felt himself only tenuously connected to the young man who in ’64 had stepped away from the path of academia and applied for another line of work entirely, explaining to the men who interviewed him that he wanted to join them because he believed fervently that Communism had to be crushed so that the US could be the world’s only superpower. It was not the notion of power itself that interested Harry, but the idea of it concentrated in a nation of migrants. Dreamers and poets could not come up with a wiser system of world politics: a single democratic country in power, whose citizens were connected to every nation in the world. How could anything but justice be the most abiding characteristic of that country’s dealings with the world? That was the future Harry Burton saw, the future of which he determined to be a part. And he would not be one of those men to stay out of a war while claiming to care passionately about its outcome.
Well, he cared just as passionately now, but it had been a long time since he’d thought about it in relation to justice, let alone dreamers and poets.
He pulled up next to the vast mosque, which had been under construction for twelve years now against the verdant backdrop of the Margalla Hills, and watched his daughter smile at the construction site as she smiled at nothing else in Islamabad.
‘What’s that thing shaped like an armadillo’s shell ringed in by four spears?’ she’d asked the first evening he’d taken her driving around Islamabad. It was the first sentence she’d spoken that didn’t contain the word ‘boring’.
Now he watched her shrug off the leather jacket and tuck the eyebrow-raising tail of hair into her T-shirt while wiping a tissue vigorously across the lips – and suddenly all the bristling attitude had gone out of her appearance, and she was just a young girl, eyes bright as she approached the contractor, who had become the one person in Islamabad in whom she showed any interest. Harry wondered which version – bristling or not – would have manifested itself in front of the Ashrafs if he had taken Kim to Karachi. Hiroko and Sajjad had both expressed a desire to meet her, but Harry had only to conjure a mental image of the differences between the considerate, polite boy the Ashrafs had raised and his own hellion offspring to know such a meeting might go disastrously wrong. And yet, in this moment, he wished he’d chosen differently – not least because he missed the Ashrafs, and saw how Christmas in their company might feel like a real family Christmas. Never mind – he would see them in a couple of weeks. Kim was leaving, and he’d arranged to get the keys to a beach hut in Karachi from a colleague at the Consulate there. He smiled, imagining how delighted Raza would be by the outing he’d organ ised. Then he glanced at Kim, and sighed. It was easy enough to delight someone else’s teenage child.
‘Can you tell him as we were driving up I saw how the roof is a tent, and not an armadillo’s shell,’ she said, indicating the contractor who was walking up to them with a smile. ‘Though the four minarets still look like spears.’
Harry translated partially, leaving out the part about the spears, which he suspected might not go down too well, even though he had a feeling the contractor knew enough English to understand a good part of what Kim had said. The contractor nodded, smiled, and ushered them inside the vast mosque; Harry’s hand hovered protectively above Kim’s head in the absence of any hard hats, but his daughter was too excited to react with the irritation she would otherwise have exhibited.
‘Wow,’ Kim kept saying, as the contractor walked them around – the first time he’d agreed to let them see the interior – and showed how the unusually shaped roof was supported on giant girders.
The tale of generations, Harry thought. James Burton watched with dismay the collapse of Empire; Harry Burton was working for the collapse of Communism; and Kim Burton only wanted to know how to build, one edifice at a time, the construction process being all that mattered, not whether the outcome was mosque or art gallery or prison. Of all of them, Harry thought with one of his sudden rushes of sentimentality, she alone could be counted on to engage with the world without doing any harm.
18
From a distance, it looked as if they were praying.
Harry Burton and Hiroko Ashraf knelt on either side of a rock pool, hands on their knees, neither looking left towards seagulls gliding above the water’s surface nor right towards the beach life on the sand: families sitting on shawls, eating oranges to counter the salty air; a group of boys rolling a tennis ball towards a group of girls, a piece of paper taped to the ball with something written on it which made the girls giggle and cluster together; camels with heavily mirror-worked seats eliciting screams from young passengers as they dipped forward and back in the see-saw of standing; Raza constructing an elaborate sand fort, because that’s what Harry said he used to enjoy doing at the beach in his youth, while Sajjad inscribed Urdu verses on the fort’s walls with the sharp end of a cuttlebone.
‘Sometimes you only know the salamanders are there because they stir up the mud. Their camouflage is slightly more effective than yours.’ Hiroko waved a hand in the direction of Harry’s hennaed hair, several shades brighter than its natural colour.
Harry laughed.
‘Don’t mock. Even the Pathans think I’m Pathan when I’m wearing a shalwar kameez. I tell them my name is Lala Buksh, and then my inability to say very much more in Pashto gives me away. Any idea what happened to him? The real Lala Buksh?’