She took a drag on her cigarette and found herself wondering what Grandpa James would make of the world if he were still alive. Would his air of condescension about all things American other than Lauren Bacall and his granddaughter have diminished or augmented over the last few months? Would he still look with dismay at Harry’s life and wonder which of its wrong turns he could have forestalled, which of its failures bore the stamp of DNA? And what would he make of Gran’s flatmate, whose late husband’s name had only to be mentioned to cause him to change the subject with an air of guilt that was otherwise quite absent from his life?
‘Spare cigarette?’
Kim’s body jerked; a spark landed on her black T-shirt and burnt away, unnoticed.
‘Since when do you smoke?’
‘Since 1945. Thanks to an American in a Tokyo bar.’
Laughing, Kim handed Hiroko her cigarette.
‘Take this. I’ve quit. Who was the American?’
‘Just a GI.’ Hiroko lowered herself on to the sofa, and saluted smartly. ‘When did your flight get in? I thought you weren’t leaving Seattle until this afternoon.’ She dragged on her cigarette and exhaled very slowly in the careful manner of someone having her only smoke of the year.
‘Meeting got moved up to today so I took the red-eye,’ Kim said, carefully watching the other woman.
There was a certain frailty about Hiroko that hadn’t existed three and a half years earlier when she first entered this apartment with a manner that suggested she knew she was late – by about half a century – but that she would be forgiven for it. Surely it was ridiculous, Kim told herself, not to accept a certain brittleness of someone Hiroko’s age. And yet it was hard to give credence to such a thought – there was something so youthful in her posture, legs tucked under her body, elbow resting on sofa-back while her hand propped up her chin and a cigarette glowed between two fingers. The shadows in her corner of the unlit apartment conspired to make it seem just a short-circuiting of the mind to think this woman in silk pyjamas with stylishly short hair was seventy-seven years old.
Kim switched on a lamp and shallow lines etched themselves all across Hiroko Ashraf’s face. The mole which used to rest above her cheekbone had slipped, just slightly. But the single green streak in her ivory hair attested to that which hadn’t changed at all: her continued willingness to enter into new experiences without too much concern for whether anyone else might consider it either foolishness or frivolity.
‘What’s the meeting about? I thought you’d negotiated everything about moving to the New York office?’
‘Oh, there’s always something else to iron out,’ Kim said, stretching her lean body, trying to get rid of the kinks that remained from the flight. ‘But it suits me fine to be here. The run-up to Christmas is the time for exes to get in touch and suggest giving things one last try and God knows I don’t need another one of those conversations with Gary. You do know I’m staying on until after Christmas, right?
‘Just because you’re terrible at communicating with everyone you’ve ever lived with doesn’t mean your grandmother and I have the same problem.’ Hiroko smiled. ‘Of course I know. And I’m delighted.’ She gestured towards the early-edition newspaper splayed on the coffee table next to Kim’s half-empty mug. ‘What’s going on out in the world?’
‘The last fire has almost burnt out.’ Kim pointed in the direction of the looming emptiness outside before coming to sit down on the sofa.
‘That’s not the world, it’s just the neighbourhood,’ Hiroko said sharply.
Kim’s eyebrows rose.
‘Right,’ she said, voice heavy with irony. ‘Just a neighbourhood fire.’
Hiroko raised a hand in apology.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.’
Kim took hold of her hand and squeezed it lightly.
‘What’s the matter, Roko?’
It seemed impossible sometimes, Kim Burton’s blindness. And yet more impossible to hold anything against a woman of such genuine warmth and charm, all the most appealing parts of Konrad, Ilse and Harry right there in the pressure of her fingertips, the concern in her open, guileless face, her desire to know what exactly it was she’d got wrong this time. Hiroko had quite fallen in love with her within minutes of their meeting.
‘Stupid posturing men, that’s the matter. As ever,’ Ilse Weiss said, walking out of her bedroom. She stopped beside the antique globe which rested on the drinks cabinet, and spun it slightly so the continents slid westwards and the unpartitioned mass of India was beneath her fingertips,
HINDOOSTAN
stamped across it. Very faint, the border which Harry had inked in when he was a young boy, to whom an outdated globe was a useless artefact.
‘You’re looking well, Gran.’
Ilse snorted, and came to sit between Hiroko and Kim, slapping down the leg Kim was resting on the coffee table.
‘At ninety-one the best you can hope for is to be well preserved. Which is just a synonym for looking pickled.’
True enough, Hiroko thought, not unkindly. But despite the gauntness that had once been a striking angularity, and the mass of wrinkles which called to mind the topographical map of a particularly varied terrain, Ilse’s aspect carried such a powerful memory of beauty with it that people still stopped to stare, and to imagine what might be revealed if you could only peel layers of time from her face.
‘I thought you said you were going to be dead by morning.’
Ilse smiled, turning to Hiroko.
‘It’s not quite morning yet.’
Hiroko caught Ilse’s wrist, pressed down against its veins.
‘Well, you have no pulse that I can detect. Perhaps we both died, and this is the what comes after. And Kim’s come visiting!’
‘Nonsense. I’ll get there before you. Like Delhi, like here.’ She removed the cigarette from between Hiroko’s fingers and took one short drag, before blowing out a strand of smoke with a schoolgirl’s smile of transgression. ‘But, you know, last night I really did feel that I’d be dead by morning.’
‘You feel that at least twice a week,’ Hiroko grumbled, retrieving her cigarette.
‘Well. Eventually I’m bound to be right.’ She tapped a finger on her granddaughter’s knee. ‘Don’t tell her about fires burning out as though that’s the world’s most significant event. She thinks Pakistan and India are about to launch themselves into nuclear war.’
‘Shit,’ Kim said. ‘Sorry, Hiroko.’
‘And don’t say “shit”, Kim. If you must swear, say “fuck”. It has a certain savage elegance to it.’
She said it primarily to amuse Hiroko enough to distract her but Hiroko only exhaled smoke, watching the cloud amass in front of her.
Ilse knew that look in her friend’s eyes. It had been there, lurking beneath the thrill of arrival, when Hiroko had come to New York in 1998. ‘Both times you’ve entered my home it’s been nuclear-related. Once was acceptable; twice just seems like lazy plotting,’ Ilse had said, with mock asperity, but that look of Hiroko’s – the one that was back again – had told her that the bomb remained the one thing in the world she would not laugh about.
Hiroko extinguished the half-smoked cigarette, and traced wings of ash on the ashtray with its tip.
‘Any news from Harry? Raza hasn’t been in touch in a few days.’
In the decade the two men had been working together she’d been grateful to have an alternate conduit of information about Raza’s life through Ilse, and Harry himself. Prior to that, in those first few years after Sajjad’s death, months would sometimes go by without any word about him. She had assumed at first he was angry with her or had just grown uncaring, but whenever they did speak or meet he was as devoted as ever – so she saw that it wasn’t lack of love that made him stay away, but something else, some guilt she brought out in him. Guilt about his father’s death. Guilt, perhaps, about his own life, she sometimes wondered, but what was there to be guilty about?
Perhaps she wasn’t enthusiastic enough about his profession, and he thought there was a judgement in there. It wasn’t a matter of judgement – she just wished she could understand why two men as intelligent as Harry and Raza would choose to work in ‘the administrative side of private security’ – how much satisfaction could there be in overseeing the surveillance systems of banks and assigning bodyguards to people of influence? At one point she had thought it was just another cover for working with the CIA, and the thought of Harry pulling Raza into that world had so incensed her she made both men swear on Sajjad’s grave that it wasn’t true. They had both looked so ashen as they swore, she’d known they weren’t lying. Then Ilse had firmly said, ‘Harry’s no longer with the CIA. I’d know if he was lying about that’ – and there was no question of asking Ilse to swear on anyone’s grave. She always said total honesty was one of the gifts of old age.
If only he was happy. That was all she had ever wanted for him. Perhaps that was an aspiration he felt he could never live up to. She pressed her hand against her heart – sometimes just thinking about him made her feel a crushing sense of devastation, quite out of proportion to the circumstances of his life.
Kim said, ‘I can’t even remember the last time Dad called me.’ She did remember it, of course. She always remembered. 31 October. He’d been in one of his nostalgic moods, recalling the Halloween she dressed up as World Peace – sticking maps of the world on to her clothes and a peace sign over each map. Except, she missed the third prong of the peace sign so instead she was, as Harry pointed out, World Mercedes-Benz. He laughed about it over the phone and Kim, wishing she could just laugh, so glad to hear his voice, found herself saying, ‘You only pointed it out months later when you saw the pictures. You weren’t there when it happened. As always.’ Too often around her father, she couldn’t stop being a teenager either in adulation or sullenness. And so she ensured he wouldn’t call again for a very long time. Though perhaps he wasn’t calling because she had a fairly certain idea of where he and Raza were, and he didn’t want her to know, but he could never lie to her without getting caught out.
‘I spoke to Harry yesterday,’ Ilse said. She gave her granddaughter a slightly disapproving look. ‘It does work to call him, you know. You shouldn’t always wait for him to make the effort.’ When there was no response to this other than a shrug she addressed herself to Hiroko. ‘They’re both fine. He didn’t say where they are, but there’s no need for you to start thinking they’re in India or Pakistan. They could very well be on their way back to Miami.’ That was where their company’s head office was, but a few weeks ago they’d both said they were travelling on a year-end junket to see various clients in different parts of the globe, and satellite phones would be the only way to contact them until further notice. Only Hiroko had believed this line.
Hiroko’s nod lacked all conviction.
‘I’ve tried calling Sajjad to ask him what’s going on along the border, but I can’t get through to him.’
‘Perhaps you need a better medium. Sajjad’s been dead for years. Oh Hiroko, you can’t go senile before me. You promised.’
I wish I were old, Kim thought, watching the two women. Really old. Old enough to have left everything troublesome behind – careers, lovers, regrets. Fathers. Mothers. Were you ever old enough for that?
Hiroko patted Ilse’s arm.
‘I don’t mean my Sajjad. His nephew – Iqbal’s youngest son.’
‘Iqbal? Oh yes. The dissolute brother. I saw him once – he came to Bungle Oh! to tell Sajjad their father had died. It was winter – he wore a fabulous cloak. I suppose you’ve told me a dozen times who his son is, but you’ll have to repeat it.’
Sometimes when presented with the increasing acuity of Ilse’s recollection of the past Hiroko wondered if her own memory would undergo a slow dissolve, executed with perfect linearity, so that she would recede backwards through her life until there was nothing after the bomb in her remembrances – nothing of survival except the evidence of her body, so incredibly intact other than the charred tattoos between her shoulders and waist.
She made a quick gesture of impatience with her fingers.
‘He’s the one in the Army.’
‘Oh yes. Indian Army?’
‘Pakistan Army, Ilse. Sikandar’s the one who stayed in India, not Iqbal.’
‘Well, I’m just glad you’re here, not there.’
Hiroko didn’t answer. Today she felt acutely her initial unease about living in this luxurious apartment – if you were this high up, you should be in the hills. Abbottabad, that hill station with its echoes of Mussoorie, had become home in the years after Sajjad’s death. Within a year of his funeral she had sold the house, taken early retirement from the school, and accepted the offer from her old friend Rehana – who had lived in Tokyo and Karachi before widowhood returned her to her childhood home – to come and live with her in the hills of Abbottabad, away from the chaos of a city which was so emptied of joy without Sajjad and Raza that to live in it was to live in regret.