Omar of Gujranwala was the first New Yorker whose number she wrote down in her address book. ‘I work the day shift,’ he said. ‘Any time you know in advance that you need a cab between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., just call me.’ And his smiling ‘Welcome to my country, aunty’ marked the start of her love affair with New York.
A city in which she could hear Urdu, English, Japanese, German all in the space of a few minutes. The miracle of it! Sometimes she rode the subways, overheard conversations her only destination. It was the young Japanese women who intrigued her most of all – their unabashed laughter, their vocabulary peppered with words she didn’t understand, forcing her to recognise that her own Japanese belonged to ‘Grandmother’s generation’. Nothing foreign about foreignness in this city. ‘Like Mary Poppins’ handbag’, Ilse had said to explain how much the little island of Manhattan could hold within it. She felt she had been waiting all her life to arrive here.
And when the buildings fell, she found herself caught up in a feeling of solidarity quite unfamiliar, utterly overwhelming. She stood beside Kim – who had driven across from Seattle – in the early-morning hours, handing out food to emergency workers; later, she demanded to be allowed to give blood – what did it matter if she was old? She didn’t need so much blood – and retreated only when told firmly she was from a malarial country, her blood was unacceptable regardless of age. She didn’t take that personally – was touched to be given a badge announcing she’d donated blood, ‘because intention matters’, the exhausted Red Cross woman had told her. When Hiroko said the Prophet Mohammad made exactly that point – surprising herself by the need to say such a thing – the woman smiled and said, ‘I’m sure he did.’
But then, things shifted. The island seemed tiny, people’s views shrunken. How could a place so filled with immigrants take the idea of ‘patriotism’ so seriously? Ilse had laughed and said, ‘The zeal of the convert.’ And that phrase spoken by a smiling young man in Tokyo kept returning to her: ‘American lives.’ It was a talisman, that phrase, the second part of it given weight by the first part.
All this she had thought and uncomfortably felt for weeks, but today, finally, mid-January in New York, the world felt different as Hiroko sat with a cup of jasmine tea and the morning crossword at a West Village bistro in that rare space of time between the breakfast and lunch crowd when lingering at a table didn’t feel uncivic. She looked up as the bistro’s only other customer opened the door to depart; cold air and voices rushed in – a man irritable on his cell phone, a dog’s bark, a truck trundling past on the cobblestones – then the door closed and she was once more sealed into the silence disrupted only by the waitress tapping her pencil on a counter top.
It would be overstating things to say this felt like peace; but at least it felt like space in which to exhale. For the first time in over a month there seemed a movement away from, rather than towards, nuclear war and Hiroko felt a swoop of affection towards everything in the world – from New York and its inhabitants to a dictator half a world away. Not that she’d ever had faith in leaders – not in Pakistan any more than in Japan. She remembered lying on her stomach on the floor of a Nagasaki hospital, watching a young boy use a pair of chopsticks to lift maggots out of the pulsating redness that was his mother’s breast – he was the only one not riveted by the sound of the Emperor’s voice, heard by his public for the first time, announcing Japan’s surrender on the radio. Despite all the iconoclasm she’d learnt from her father, she was dismayed by how high-pitched and feeble the Emperor’s voice was. She felt betrayed by that voice more than by anything it said.
‘Seven across?’ The waitress held up her copy of the crossword.
‘ “QWEET” isn’t a word, is it?’
‘Honey, it should be.’ The waitress pointed to the door. ‘I’m stepping out for a smoke. You’ll be OK in here.’ It was an assertion rather than a question.
Once more, there was the open door, the rush of winter and sound – and again, silence.
Hiroko took her cell phone out of her handbag. She knew who she had to call to celebrate this step back from the nuclear brink. For a moment she wondered if she should get home first and make a cheap call using the landline – largely she retained her frugal habits despite the vast sums of money Raza kept depositing into her account – but then a feeling of wild glee ran through her, and she punched the necessary buttons.
At first she didn’t recognise Yoshi Watanabe’s voice. He sounded nothing like the man who had arrived in Pakistan three years ago with a group of hibakusha, determined to say what he could to turn Pakistan away from the idea of nuclear tests. Hiroko had translated the words of the hibakusha into Urdu through the press conference, spent an afternoon filled with tears and laughter with Yoshi afterwards, and then boarded the plane to New York.
‘It is me,’ he said. ‘My voice . . . that’s the cancer you’re hearing.’
‘Yoshi-san!’
‘It’s everywhere. There’s nothing anyone can do.’
She was surprised by the tears burning her eyes. In Nagasaki he had only been someone she knew very vaguely, Konrad’s friend who betrayed Konrad. And then she became, to him, atonement. Following that, through all the years of letters exchanged, he was her one remaining link to Nagasaki.
‘You’re calling to celebrate, I suppose,’ he said, his voice slightly peevish. ‘About that mad country of yours. It will survive incineration, it seems.’
‘You don’t think this is cause for celebration?’
He lowered his voice.
‘Hear my confession, Hiroko-san. I was diagnosed a month ago, and in my brain there was a mad logic which said if there is nuclear war in the sub-continent then I’ll survive. Them or me. Them or me. And every day these last weeks I’ve turned on the television wanting so much to see mushroom clouds in the news.’ Her exclamation of horror only made him raise his voice. ‘Between the dead cells mushrooming inside my body and those out there, annihilating a section of the world, there is no choice. There is not even a question of a choice.’
There was the sound of a small struggle, and a woman came on to the phone.
‘The cancer has reached his brain,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t mean any of this.’
In the background, Yoshi was shouting, ‘I mean every word!
Hiroko ended the call, hands shaking. Throwing money down on the table, she left the bistro in a hurry. The wind cut through her. She had forgotten her hat and gloves inside. Never mind. She couldn’t go back to that funerary atmosphere.
She walked, half blind with tears, towards the West Side Highway unable to keep herself from imagining the congestion of Karachi manifest in a post-bomb landscape by shadows overlying shadows overlying shadows. She needed to stand at the edge of the island and look towards the water. She needed room to breathe.
Sajjad
, she kept repeating, trying to invoke something of his presence, his ability to make her feel everything could be borne. His optimism.
When the phone rang, she almost didn’t answer it, but it was Kim, so she did. Within ten minutes of hearing the tone of her voice, Kim was slamming a cab door behind her, hurrying towards Hiroko – the lone figure at the edge of a pier, white hair whipping around her face. Her bare hands were resting on the railing and Kim said nothing until she had peeled her own gloves off her hands and eased Hiroko’s stiff fingers into them.
Then she said, ‘No one should get pneumonia looking at New Jersey,’ as she wrapped her scarf around Hiroko’s head.
‘I want the world to stop being such a terrible place,’ Hiroko said.
Kim didn’t know what to say in response. She was feeling so weighed down by it herself – the terribleness of the world. Every morning she’d read the newspaper, word leaking through of casualties in Afghanistan, and think of Harry. Then to work – always before a place of refuge for her. The psychology of structural engineers! She often used to laugh about it with her friends at university. We anticipate disasters, calculate stress with mathematical precision. The messier our personal lives the better we are at designing structures that withstand the pressure they’ll inevitably – or potentially – endure. Bring on your storms, bring on your earthquakes. We’ve done our calculations. And lovers, take note – here the joke which was not a joke reached its climax – when we break up with you it’s because we’ve modelled the situation, run the simulations, we know which way things are headed.
But now even work was smeared by what was happening in the world. Earthquakes and floods were one thing – but to start having to calculate the effect of a bomb or an aeroplane, that was something else entirely. What size of plane? What weight of a bomb? If a man walked into a lobby with dynamite strapped to his chest? If chemical gas was released into the ventilation system?
‘It is not part of my job to imagine this!’ she had shouted yesterday at the architect she was working with.
‘The world won’t get more or less terrible if we’re indoors somewhere with a mug of hot chocolate,’ Kim said. ‘Though it’s possible it will seem slightly less terrible if there are marshmallows in the hot chocolate.’
‘I’ll go indoors soon,’ Hiroko said, patting her hand. ‘I’m sorry – I didn’t know you were going to run out of work to come here. I feel quite foolish now.’
‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ Kim said, burrowing her hands into the pockets of her winter coat.
‘Fairy tales,’ Hiroko replied, watching the river rush past. A few degrees colder and it would freeze. Were there lovers or artists standing by ready to paint a beloved’s name under the ice? Hana. Her lost daughter. She glanced sideways at the woman standing next to her. ‘When Raza was young I didn’t want him to know what I had lived through but I wanted him to understand the awfulness of it. Does that make sense? So I invented all these stories, terrible stories. Too terrible to tell my son, in the end. I keep thinking of them these days.’
Kim nodded.
‘My father told me about them once. You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No. I wish now I’d told Raza. Told everyone. Written it down and put a copy in every school, every library, every public meeting place.’ She frowned, as though trying to unpick some minor knot of confusion. ‘But you see, then I’d read the history books. Truman, Churchill, Stalin, the Emperor. My stories seemed so small, so tiny a fragment in the big picture. Even Nagasaki – seventy-five thousand dead; it’s just a fraction of the seventy-two million who died in the war. A tiny fraction. Just over .001 per cent. Why all this fuss about .001 per cent?’
‘You lived it,’ Kim said. ‘Your father died in it. Your fiancé died in it. There’s no shame in putting all the weight in the world on that.’
It was the wrong answer.
Hiroko turned to her, face bright with anger.
‘Is that why? That’s why Nagasaki was such a monstrous crime? Because it happened to me?’ She pulled the gloves off and threw them at Kim. ‘I don’t want your hot chocolate,’ she said and stalked away.
Kim picked a glove off the ground and slapped herself with it. Hard.
33
‘Raza Hazara?’
Raza spun away from the group of Afghan men whose words he’d been translating, satellite phone pressed to his ear.
‘Raza Hazara?’ the voice on the other end said again.
Steve snapped his fingers in Raza’s direction.
‘I said, tell whoever it is you’ll call back.’
‘Who is this?’ Raza said in Pashto.
‘Are you Raza Hazara?’
‘Yes, yes. Who is this?’
Steve caught Raza by the arm.
‘You’re on company time here.’ He gestured towards the delegation of Afghan men who had come to pledge allegiance to the Americans. ‘Now tell them I’ll need some proof of their loyalty.’
‘Do any of you speak Urdu?’ Harry cut in. One of the men raised his hand quickly as if he were a student trying to curry favour. ‘Finish your call, Raza. I’ve got this.’
‘Make sure you get a percentage of his pay cheque,’ Steve grumbled.
‘Who is this?’ Raza said again, walking quickly away from the Americans and Afghans.
‘Ismail. Abdullah’s brother. Do you still have the pattusi I gave you twenty years ago at the camp?’
Raza leaned his weight against the trunk of the broad-leafed tree which grew in the compound.
‘Is Abdullah alive?’
‘Yes.’
Raza put one arm around the trunk and rested his head against it.
‘He said to tell you first that he’s sorry.’
For nearly twenty years Raza had imagined Abdullah felt betrayed by him – he had never returned to Sohrab Goth, never attempted to contact Abdullah through Afridi or any of the other Afghans he knew there. And it seemed inevitable that, when the reality of war made itself known to him, Abdullah would have seen that Raza’s greatest betrayal was in pushing him towards the camp instead of agreeing he should stay in Karachi. But here was Abdullah’s brother saying, ‘He knows that, whether or not you had a connection to the CIA, you came to the camp with him as a brother; and for twenty years he’s lived with the shame of knowing that in a moment of anger he told the Commander you were an American spy and had you sent away.’