The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  When her outstretched fingers finally met the door she felt for the iron ring handle and twisted it. The door banged inwards, letting in a blast of wind and snow.

  She stumbled outside. The woman who had led her to her room had pointed out the guesthouse kitchen, but with the thick snow now masking all the low doors that enclosed the courtyard she had lost her sense of direction. She didn’t glance upwards, aware that the monastery walls loomed so threateningly overhead that they seemed ready to topple and crush the house on its precarious ledge. They would hardly have been visible now, in any case. Gusts of wind drove the snowflakes horizontally and even upwards, half blinding her as she ploughed through the drifts. She ducked under a ledge of snow that blanketed a rough porch, and saw a light.

  Another door crashed open and she fell inside, shaking off snow like a dog emerging from water. She put her shoulder to the door and managed to latch it behind her.

  ‘Hello, My,’ Lotus called out.

  The room was dimly lit by a single kerosene lantern. There were mattresses on the floor against three walls, and in the centre a small stove with a chimney pipe that oozed smoke into the chill, grease-scented air. The woman Mair had seen earlier was stooped in front of the stove, tossing pancakes of dried dung into its cold heart. Several men, probably truck drivers also stranded by the storm, sat hunched on two of the mattresses. They had been smoking and talking in low voices but now they broke off and stared at her. The third mattress was occupied by Bruno and Lotus. The little girl was zipped up in a padded sleep-suit and swathed in a blanket so that only her rosy face was showing. The whole cocoon of her was snugly held inside her father’s coat, her head tucked under his chin.

  Mair felt distinctly envious.

  Any warmth would be welcome in these circumstances, she told herself hastily.

  ‘Do a jump,’ Lotus begged. ‘S’il vous plaît?’

  ‘Lotus, it doesn’t really work indoors. You have to be outside.’

  ‘Go out,’ the child said, and pointed, as if this was so obvious it was hardly worth saying.

  ‘I’ll do one for you tomorrow,’ Mair promised.

  ‘It’s snowing, Lo, remember?’ Bruno told her. ‘We’re all staying right here, inside, where it’s warmer.’

  He moved aside and indicated a space on the mattress to Mair. She picked her way between a tower of blackened saucepans and a wicker coop containing a dispirited hen to sit down beside him. The men resumed their conversation and the woman slammed the stove door.

  Bruno said, ‘Karen’s got a migraine. She took one look at the bathroom and went straight to bed.’

  The bathroom was a couple of yards away, located just to the left of the door. It consisted of a metal drum with a tap, a drain-hole in the floor and a pink plastic soap-dish with a cake of grey soap. The lavatory, Mair had already discovered, was in a lean-to on the edge of the courtyard. It was a long-drop, with several hundred feet of air yawning between the foot-rests. At present, snow was bracingly blowing up through the hole.

  The guesthouse attached to the monastery was packed with a large group of German tourists whose bus had failed to get over the pass. The accommodation further down in Lamayuru village also was full of earlier fugitives from the weather, and the Beckers’ driver had done well to find this place for them. When they had first arrived, battling the ankle-deep iced mud of the paths, it had looked less like a dwelling than some roughly rectangular deposits of rocks and planks. But there were two slits of rooms in the warren that led off the courtyard, chipped into the rock like hermits’ cells. The driver had ushered them into this shelter and gone off to stay with his cousin, who apparently lived nearby. Any further victims of the storm would have to bed down on the mattresses in the kitchen.

  Mair asked, ‘Can I do anything for her?’

  He shook his head. ‘But thanks.’

  Mair added, ‘It’s not exactly luxurious but it’ll definitely be warmer than spending the night in the Toyota.’

  Bruno’s arms instinctively tightened round Lotus. ‘Yes. That would have been quite difficult.’

  Snow as heavy as this would have built up a drift against a stationary vehicle. Overnight the car might have been buried, and escape on foot on a road as isolated as the one they had just travelled would have been dangerous, maybe impossible.

  Mair shivered. Despite her show of optimism, she didn’t like this place, not for its lack of home comforts but because of the bleakness and the air of indefinable gloom that hung about it. But it was still a safe haven tonight. She glanced at Lotus’s pink cheeks. The little girl’s thumb was in her mouth. ‘We’ll be snug as bugs, won’t we, Lo?’ She smiled.

  A square of sacking that masked an inner door was pulled aside and another woman emerged. She was carrying a saucepan with a feeble wisp of steam rising from the contents.

  Bruno took the pan and thanked her. He sat upright and said gently, ‘Lotus, look, here’s your supper.’

  He began to feed her spoonfuls of warmed-up baked beans alternating with chunks of flatbread. She wriggled half out of her blanket cocoon and ate with relish, smearing her chin with orangey sauce.

  Over her head Bruno said, ‘We always carry a couple of cans of beans with us. Lotus will eat them day or night, whatever else goes awry.’ He dropped his voice. ‘We may find ourselves envying her later.’

  A blackened cauldron had been lowered on to the stove. The two women squatted on the earth floor and began to slice onions, tossing them into the pot and exchanging remarks with the group of truck drivers.

  ‘It’s only one night.’ Mair laughed.

  But Bruno didn’t laugh with her. ‘I hope you’re right.’

  She thought how forbidding he could look, with his dark face and the black eyebrows drawn together in a thick line. He and Karen seemed so markedly different that she could only conclude theirs was one of those partnerships of opposites.

  Lotus finished all the baked beans and caught at the pan to make sure that there wasn’t another spoonful in the bottom. Soot coated her hands and Bruno patiently cleaned them with his handkerchief, telling her that she couldn’t get into bed with Mummy and leave black handprints all over her, could she? He took an apple from his pocket, peeled and quartered it and fed that to Lotus as well. By the time she was on the fourth slow chunk, her eyelids were drooping.

  ‘Time for bed,’ Bruno whispered. He rearranged the child’s coverings so that only her eyes and nose were visible, before hoisting her in his arms. Then he slid a glance at the food preparations. ‘May I join you later for dinner?’ he asked Mair formally, but at the same time his black eyebrows rose in amusement.

  ‘Of course. I’d like some company,’ Mair answered.

  While he was gone she sat propped against the wall and watched the cooks at work. The stove was heating up and the smell of boiling vegetables hung in the air. Condensation dribbled down the tiny window panes, but the kitchen didn’t seem to have got any warmer. She was thinking that she could easily have ended up here with the Israeli boys for company rather than the Beckers, and offered a quick thanks to the gods of Lamayuru for the lucky escape.

  Fifteen minutes passed before Bruno returned. After brushing off the snow he took his place beside her on the mattress, watched by the drivers. He waited until they lost interest, then, from his well-stocked pocket, produced a flask. He rummaged again and brought out a pair of collapsible metal beakers, and waved a finger over them. ‘Cognac?’ he murmured, and poured.

  They clinked their beakers. Bruno took a long gulp from his. Mair followed suit and the alcohol instantly glowed through her chilled bones.

  ‘Aaah. How’s Karen?’

  ‘She’s lying in bed reading one of her Buddhist texts. I put Lotus in beside her – she instantly fell asleep.’ He added, after a moment, ‘She has great reserves of power and determination, my wife, so she suffers when we have a situation like tonight, when there is nothing even she can do to alter the circumstances. In fact, Karen’s brand of Buddhism
seems to involve a great deal of determination overall. You might even call it a need for control. I’m not quite sure how that aligns with the teachings. Technically speaking.’

  Their eyes met. Bruno’s manner was extremely dry but there was a strong reverberation of humour in him. He was Swiss but also quite un-Swiss. That made him interesting as well as attractive, Mair thought. ‘Are you religious?’ she asked.

  He shook his head decisively. ‘No. You?’

  ‘Not at all. But my grandfather was a missionary. He and my grandmother were out here in the 1940s, with the Welsh Presbyterian mission outreach to Leh.’

  ‘That’s why you’re here now?’

  ‘My father died recently. His parents were part of our lives because they lived nearby, but we never knew my maternal grandpa and grandma. My mother died when I was in my early teens so that part of the story was lost. I want to try to uncover some of it.’

  Mair rarely talked about her mother, even to Hattie. Her instinct was to protect the bruise that had been left by her death. So it was startling to find herself confiding to Bruno Becker this intimate detail, and to realise that since their first encounter and her explanation of the somersaults she hadn’t told Karen one thing about herself.

  She had begun to, she remembered, but something else had always intervened.

  But Karen was a bright flame, and everyone was drawn to her. It was only the strange circumstances, the snowstorm and their temporary captivity under the shadow of the monastery, that were making Mair talk so unguardedly to Karen’s husband.

  She took another hasty mouthful of cognac. Her hand was unsteady and the metal rim of the beaker rattled faintly against her teeth.

  ‘Go on,’ Bruno murmured.

  She told him about the shawl, and her discoveries in Changthang and Leh. He listened attentively, his black head tipped against the stone wall and his eyes on her face. The cook measured some scant handfuls of rice into another pan of water as the scent of mutton swirled through the kitchen.

  Bruno enjoyed the story of Tsering’s great-uncle, and the old man’s early memory of listening in amazement to the mission’s wireless set. ‘And now you’re following the shawl thread onwards to Srinagar,’ he said at length.

  ‘Yes. Who knows what I’ll find there?’ I will find out about the photograph, she thought.

  He unscrewed the cap of the flask and poured them both another drink. She sipped hers, stretching out her legs and letting her shoulders drop. The long day of bouncing over potholes had left her muscles aching.

  Bruno rotated his beaker, thoughtfully examining the reflections in the polished surface. ‘I am lucky in that both my parents are still alive. They divorced long ago and my mother remarried. She lives near us in Geneva now – she adores Lotus. My father is still physically strong but his memory has almost gone. My sister and I agreed that he would be safer and happier in a special hospital, which is not nearly as bad as it sounds, by the way.

  ‘When I went to see him just before we came out here, we were sitting on his balcony looking at the mountains and I was talking – I have to talk a lot on these visits. He likes to hear about the rest of the world and everyone’s lives, although I’m not sure how much of it he remembers. I was telling him about all the places we’d be visiting, and he seemed to be listening, nodding, the way he does.

  ‘Then he reminded me that an Indian friend of our family was originally from Kashmir. Memory is a strange commodity. He remembered the minute circumstances of the friend and her mother coming to Switzerland after the war, yet sometimes he can’t even quite recall who I am. He made me promise that I’d look up the daughter when we get to Delhi.’

  Mair nodded, recalling how her father in his last weeks had travelled further and further into the past.

  ‘The mother would have been the same generation as your grandparents. She was a Christian, a Roman Catholic. Perhaps they knew each other.’

  ‘Is that likely? It’s a long way from Leh to Srinagar.’

  Bruno sighed. ‘And that’s in good weather. Tonight Srinagar might as well be located in South America.’

  ‘I don’t actually know if my grandparents would ever have come this far west. But it’s not impossible.’ She thought of the photograph again.

  ‘It would do no harm to ask our friend. If we’re in Delhi at the same time, perhaps you could come with me to visit her.’

  Their eyes met again.

  ‘I’d like that,’ Mair said.

  They sat back, relaxed by brandy and conversation.

  The languid cooking of dinner continued and a small girl made a circuit of the mattress seats, dishing out metal plates and spoons. Bruno got up once and went to look out at the weather, coming back with a grave face. ‘Getting out of here is going to be difficult,’ he said.

  Deep snow would by now be blocking the mountain roads in either direction. Mair could envisage the scale of the work that would be involved in clearing it.

  One of the drivers looked across at Bruno. He gave a shrug and an expressive flutter of one hand. ‘Very bad. Very early,’ he called.

  Bruno nodded. ‘Very bad,’ he agreed. He folded himself on to the mattress again, telling Mair, ‘We’d have trouble dealing with a sudden huge snowfall like this in Switzerland, let alone here.’

  Remembering what Karen had told her, she asked, ‘Are you from Geneva originally?’

  Immediately his angular face lost some shadows and he leant closer, almost confidingly. Unwittingly Mair had touched something in him.

  ‘I have to live in horizontal Switzerland, these days, because that’s where my work is. I’m an engineer. But my home and my roots are in vertical Switzerland, in the mountains. I come originally from the Bernese Oberland, near Grindelwald. Do you know it?’

  ‘No.’ The claustrophobic room, the knowledge that they were all temporarily captive, made Mair long to be transported by a story. In her mind’s eye she saw a Heidi-picture of sunlit Alpine meadows and dark fir trees. ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘My people were farmers,’ he began. ‘In summer they took the cows up to the Alps to pasture. In winter there was snow.’

  She listened contentedly. She was warm at last, and Bruno’s description of home was familiar, not so much in the precise details but in the way he talked about the rhythms of farming and the small doings of rural valleys. She also clearly heard what he was not saying, in as many words, about his deep-rooted affection for the place and – she was certain – his longing for it. It made her think of her own home. She wasn’t homesick, as she had been in Leh, but rather sharply alive to the memories of a place that was lost.

  Bruno was telling her how the Swiss mountain farmers in the first half of the nineteenth century had known the hidden ways across the high passes connecting remote valleys. They were poor people, and when the first tourists had begun to arrive in the Alps, the Beckers and their neighbours had discovered they could earn good money by guiding visitors. Until then, he said, no one had ever explored the peaks and glaciers just for pleasure. To travel to the neighbouring valleys to find work or to sell their cheeses or even to make a pilgrimage to a mountain shrine, perhaps, but not for the mere satisfaction of it, or even for the sake of some obscure scientific observation. But then the gentlemen mountaineers and amateur scientists had arrived, and ventured up in the tracks of the local men, and after they had conquered their peaks, they rushed home to describe their triumphs and catalogue their discoveries.

  The news spread, and more and more of them flocked to the Alps. Soon the wealthy messieurs were arriving in their hundreds from all over Europe, and the Beckers were among the first to offer themselves for hire as professional mountain guides.

  ‘My great-grandfather, for example, he was Edward Whymper’s guide,’ Bruno said.

  Mair had never heard of Whymper, and admitted as much. Bruno raised an eyebrow. ‘He was British. He made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, with his Zermatt guides. There was a tragedy on the way down and four men died
, but Whymper himself survived. He came regularly to climb in the Oberland and he often took Christian Becker as his guide. In the next generation – that was in the twenties and thirties, my grandfather Victor and another client made an early attempt on the Eiger’s north face, only just escaping with their lives from a terrible storm. Victor saved the client’s life.’

  ‘You must be proud of that.’

  He gave a quick nod. ‘We are.’

  ‘I don’t know any mountaineers.’ But now another memory came to her. ‘I saw a memorial in Leh, in the European cemetery. Nanga Parbat.’ She could bring to mind the name of the mountain, but not that of the dead man.

  Bruno supplied it for her. ‘Matthew Forbes. He was a mathematician from Cambridge University, a brilliant young man.’

  ‘You saw the memorial too?’

  ‘I visited it, yes. That Nanga Parbat expedition was led by a Swiss named Rainer Stamm, and he was the man whose life was saved on the Eiger by my grandfather. The two of them were close friends from that day on.’

  So she and Bruno both had their reasons for visiting the cemetery. The link between them seemed significantly strengthened by this association of history. What with this and the snow, and the altitude-enhanced effects of the cognac, she could almost imagine how she might let her head tip sideways, gently and slowly, until it came to rest on Bruno Becker’s shoulder.

  And when she glanced at him she realised, with a faint shock of pleasure as well as a clutch of utter dismay, that he was imagining the same thing.

  She levered herself upright and pressed her spine into the cold stone. Bruno shifted his position too.

  They were further distracted by the presentation of a vat of mutton stew, the ladle held invitingly above it. Mair hunted for her tin plate and accepted a spoonful, and Bruno did the same. They took a simultaneous taste and Bruno pressed his lips together.

  ‘You were right.’ Mair giggled.

  The rice that accompanied the stew and a pot of dark brown dhal were slightly closer to being edible.