Harry raised a hand.
‘Enough.’
Steve made a gesture of surrender.
‘Just giving some friendly advice before I go.’
‘You’re leaving?’
‘The United States will play no part in your
private
incursions into Pakistani territory tomorrow.’ He grinned, extinguishing his cigarette on his arm where an old injury had left him without nerves. ‘Make sure you get the bastards, Burton. Uncle Sam is getting so bored of failure.’
‘Yes, sir,’ Harry said, saluting with a sneer. ‘But could you tell Uncle Sam to step up his efforts to cool temperatures in the neighbourhood. I had an uncle in Nagasaki – that’s one piece of family history I don’t want to relive.’
‘I’ll pass the word along.’ Steve gestured to Harry to lead the way down, hoping that when he was sixty-five he’d have enough of a life beyond work that he’d be content to retire instead of climbing mountains in war zones.
The sky was thick with stars by the time the convoy returned to the compound, and the temperature had plunged vertiginously. Raza was sitting in the doorway of the one-room structure he shared with Harry, huddled in a blanket.
‘Handprints getting to you tonight?’ Harry asked.
The interior walls of their room were covered in the grease-stained fingerprints of a child, level with Raza’s waist. More than once Harry had woken to see Raza walking around the room in the early morning, following the trail of prints, his fingertips skimming the grease stains. The compound had been deserted when the Americans arrived, its dust disturbed only by bird claws, and the locals were quick to relate the tale of the family who used to live here before the attack on this compound by a feuding tribe – the tribe had broken in to find one dead child and no one else. Some form of black magic had made the rest of the family disappear, the locals said – powerful black magic, conjured up with the blood of a child.
Raza shook his head.
‘Just felt claustrophobic in there, Uncle Harry.’
The last time he’d said ‘Uncle Harry’ was over two years ago in Kosovo, when the jeep taking them to a meeting with KLA commanders at a ‘secure location’ had driven past a mass grave.
Harry sat down, a hand on the younger man’s shoulder. Raza unwound the blanket and offered its warmth to Harry, who moved closer, his shoulder pressed against Raza’s, and pulled one half of the blanket tight around himself. It had been a long time since he had felt awkward around the Pakistani’s casualness with physical intimacy. Steve, stalking across the compound ground, thought sourly that they looked like a two-headed creature examining the world from the safety of a patterned cocoon.
‘One of your local stooges brought in a guy he claimed was Taliban,’ Raza said. ‘Two of the new A and G guys interrogated him. They wanted me to act as interpreter.’
‘Which two guys?’ Harry’s voice iced over.
‘Don’t worry. I told them I don’t take orders from the hired help. Anyway, they let him go. Eventually. He was just some guy with a long-standing enmity with your stooge. You ever interrogated anyone, Harry?’
‘Yes. But rarely in the way you mean. It’s largely ineffective.’
‘Is there anything you wouldn’t do if you thought it was effective?’ He recalled the day Harry had come to Dubai in search of him – Raza had asked if the CIA had ever even tried to find the man who shot his father. ‘I found him. And then I killed him,’ Harry had said, and even though Raza knew his father would have been appalled and his mother furious he couldn’t help but feel grateful to Uncle Harry for doing what he wanted done but would never have been able to accomplish himself.
‘What wouldn’t I do if it was effective?’ Harry said thoughtfully. ‘Almost nothing. Children are out of bounds, rape is out of bounds, but otherwise . . . what works, works. When I’m dead, Raza, and my daughter asks you what kind of man her father really was, don’t tell her I said that.’
Kim Burton. The much imagined Burton who he was now accustomed to thinking he’d seen every time a red-haired woman entered his field of vision. Somewhere, in a world very distant from this one, she was living with Hiroko. Raza crossed his arms on his knees and rested his head there. Heaven lies at the feet of the mother, his Islamiyat teacher in school once said, and Raza came home and searched between his mother’s toes with a magnifying glass, laughing. ‘This carpet is heaven? This ant?’ until his mother hauled him up by his collar and turned the magnifying glass on him saying, No here, here – she held the glass against her eye and looked at his smiling face. Here’s heaven.
Harry knew Raza’s silences well enough to know he was thinking of Hiroko. The adored and neglected mother. He rested his hand on Raza’s wrist. Impossible to believe Ilse was dead. Even in her very old age, she had seemed more alive to him than anyone else in the world. He wanted to tell Raza that one day he’d regret spending so little time with his mother simply because he didn’t want her to fully understand how devalued a being he had become, but he knew Raza would only hear Harry’s own regret in the words rather than understanding any wisdom in the advice. And perhaps there wasn’t any wisdom there.
‘I haven’t been able to find Abdullah,’ Raza said abruptly.
‘Who?’
‘Abdullah. The boy I went to the camps with in ’83. My cousin got me in touch with his old commander.’
Harry frowned, and shook his head.
‘Why are you . . . Whose side is his old commander on now?’
‘Could you please stop being an employee of A and G for a minute. I don’t know which side he’s on. I didn’t ask. But I didn’t tell him what I’m doing either. He thinks I’m with a relief organisation based in the Gulf.’
‘Hold on, Raza. Hold on. You really think it’s smart to call Afghans whose allegiance you know nothing about and announce you’re in the country?’
‘It’s a big country and I didn’t say which part of it I’m in.’ It had occurred to him that the Commander might remember him as the boy who worked with the CIA, but when he spoke to the man he discovered he was remembered quite differently:
You’re the fainting Hazara who fooled a Pashtun boy into thinking you were important to the CIA just because a man who looked American held out a pair of shoes to you
.
‘What else did he say?’ Harry asked.
Raza looked up towards the sky, while his fingers traced constellations in the sand.
‘That the last he heard of Abdullah he was at a camp in Afghanistan which the Russians decimated.’
Harry tried to put aside his feelings of hurt that Raza had sought out this boy without telling him he was doing so.
‘I’m sorry. I know you once considered him a friend. But that was a long time ago.’
‘After my father died, I went to my mother and begged her forgiveness. She said it wasn’t my fault. I could not have known anything like that would happen, there was no part of me that was responsible. And then she said but if you know of any way to get that boy Abdullah out of the camps, you must do it. What happens to him there, that is your responsibility. You made him go when you could have told him not to.’
‘You’re not the reason he became a mujahideen,’ Harry said.
‘Yes, I am. If it hadn’t been for me he would have been driving a truck instead of standing in the path of Russian bombs. And, whatever my mother might have said to the contrary, my father would still be alive.’ In the sand he connected the stars of Orion – belt, bow, knees.
Harry leaned his weight slightly against Raza. He wished more than anything that he had not been the one to tell Raza that Sajjad had gone to the docks looking for him. He would have been willing to live with the blame Raza had cast at him the day they stood over Sajjad’s body if that had spared the younger man – but years ago Raza had decided the responsibility for his father’s death was his alone.
‘Abdullah’s brothers were all mujahideen – he grew up knowing it was his next step the way you knew tenth grade follows ninth grade.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Raza’s voice was tough with anger. ‘I convinced myself of that, too. And I did nothing for Abdullah. I didn’t even stop to think if there was anything I could do for him. Twenty years, I’ve hardly even thought of him.’
‘And you were right to put it out of your mind. God knows I adore your mother, but she doesn’t know the realities of war.’ As soon as the words were out, he stopped, red with shame at what he’d said.
‘When you don’t know the realities of war, that’s when you can put things like this out of your head. But coming here, being in this place, seeing all the young men who have been old men almost their entire lives, it does something to you. It must do something to you, Harry. Don’t you feel any responsibility at all?’
‘Sometimes I listen to these liberals in America and marvel at their ability to trace back all the world’s ills to something America did, or something America didn’t do. You’ve got the disease on a personal rather than a national level. You’re not responsible for Abdullah. And as for your father—’
‘As for my father, he would have wept to know the kind of men you and I have become.’ Raza swept the palm of his hand across the ground and buried the Hunter. ‘How long ago was it that you decided to justify your life by transforming responsibility into a disease?’ He stood up gracefully, the blanket a cast-off chrysalis, and walked away in the direction of the radio broadcasting music from a Pakistani channel.
Good, Harry thought, picking up the blanket and trudging inside. Feeling superior to Harry was Raza’s way of quietening his own conscience. Now he’d stop staring at handprints and searching out a past he’d ignored for twenty years, and get his head back in the game.
32
When Hiroko Ashraf had arrived in New York three summers ago, the immigration official – a man with a peace sign tattooed on his forearm – looked quizzically from her face to her Pakistani passport, then heaved a great sigh as he opened the passport and saw her place of birth scrawled beneath her husband’s name.
‘It’s OK,’ he said, stamping her passport without asking a single question. ‘You’ll be safe here.’
What surprised her even more than his hand reaching out to squeeze hers was his obliviousness to irony. She did not share it. A week after India’s nuclear tests, with Pakistan’s response in kind looming, she didn’t see the ache in her back as a result of the long plane ride but rather a sign of her birds’ displeasure that she should have chosen this, of all countries, as her place of refuge from a nuclear world.
When she stood in line at the taxi rank, aware that everything was familiar from the movies except the tactile quality of the early-summer air and the run-down look of everything from terminal to taxis to travellers, it occurred to her that Pakistan might have tested its bomb while she was flying from continent to continent. So when the cab drew up and a young man who could have been either Indian or Pakistani got out of the driver’s seat to help her load her luggage, she blurted out instantly, in Urdu, ‘Has Pakistan tested yet?’
The man drew back in surprise, and then started laughing.
‘You speak Urdu!’ he said. ‘No, no. We haven’t tested yet. Not yet. How do you know Urdu?’
‘I’ve lived in Pakistan since ’47,’ she replied, feeling strangely flirtatious. ‘I am Pakistani.’
‘Amazing!’ He held the door open for her. ‘You’re Pakistani, and I’m American. Became a citizen just last week.’ He switched to English to say, ‘Welcome to my country, aunty.’
His name was Omar. He was from Gujranwala, but he’d once been to visit distant relatives in Karachi, in Nazimabad.
‘It’s a good thing you didn’t arrive yesterday,’ he told Hiroko as they drove past boys playing cricket near a large silver globe – a sight enormously cheering to Hiroko. ‘Major cab strike. 98 per cent of yellow-cab drivers took part. 98 per cent!’
She smiled at his tone of voice – she had heard it from many of her former students in 1988 when boys who had once sat at the back of the class were out on the streets, waving the flags of their political party and singing songs of victory. The details of the cab strike remained slightly mysterious to her but through her jet lag, and attempts to keep up with Omar’s rapid-fire delivery, one thing struck her.
‘Many of the cab drivers are Indian, aren’t they?’ Omar nodded at her in the rear-view mirror. ‘And many are Pakistani?’
‘No, no, please,’ Omar said. ‘Don’t ask how it’s possible that we can strike together when our countries are in the middle of planning for the Day of Judgement. It’s what all the journalists ask. Aunty, we are taxi drivers, and we’re protesting unjust new rules. Why should we let those governments who long ago let us down stop us from successfully doing that?’
Hiroko opened the window and let in the New York air, laughing as if she were part of a victory when a turbanned cabbie drew up alongside and reached out to clasp Omar’s hand.