The Kashmir Shawl

by Rosie Thomas

  Piecing everything together in the quiet evenings, the conclusion Mair eventually reached was that Zahra had most probably been Caroline’s child, but that the circumstances surrounding the birth had been kept secret even from her husband. Zahra had in some way been entrusted to Rainer’s care, and then the two of them had disappeared.

  If this theory was correct, then Zahra was almost certainly dead. That Aruna had rebuked Mair for upsetting Mrs Bowen because she had lost her daughter long ago seemed to confirm this.

  For the right dates, she found nothing under Rainer’s name but brief and confusing mentions in some books on magic tricks (could this be a different man?) and a pre-war collection of mountaineering anecdotes.

  There was nothing more.

  During the long hours in the quiet bookshop, Mair related instalments of the incomplete history of the shawl to Mandy, her bookseller friend.

  ‘It’s really interesting,’ Mandy said, over the rim of her coffee mug, before Mair went into the back room to unpack a new delivery of books. ‘You’ve put such a lot of time into investigating it, going to Kashmir and everything. Maybe you should write about it.’

  Mair looked about her. The books lay in tiers and slabs, their jackets like so many coloured leaves, bright and imploring. There were plenty of them, more than enough, and the shawl story was private, her own history. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  Spring came, late but exuberant. Business in the bookshop picked up a little.

  Mair took a week’s holiday and went walking in Spain with some friends. A month later she was in Birmingham for Eirlys’s thirty-ninth birthday party. (‘I’m not mentioning next year’s event,’ Eirlys said.) She and Dylan had both been interested to read Nerys’s letters, and they looked at the picture of the three women on the houseboat in this new light. They listened politely to Mair’s account of her subsequent discoveries.

  ‘Mental institutions were quite barbaric in those days,’ Eirlys agreed. ‘When Caroline’s husband died and psychiatric care improved, they were probably relieved to be able to discharge her as mentally fit. Once the hospital was given notice to close, that would have been the convenient option anyway. How did she seem when you met her in Kashmir?’

  ‘Frail,’ Mair said, conjuring up the quiet room in Srinagar as she spoke. ‘Forgetful. But not insane.’

  Eirlys nodded, sombre with the weight of medical insight.

  In June, during a spell of hot weather, Hattie called Mair to say that she would be coming round to Mair’s flat to have a glass of wine with her after work. The door to the fire escape stood open and they took two kitchen stools out on to the metal platform, squeezing them in side by side. There was a faint breeze in the trees. Mair took a sip of her wine and waited.

  ‘Ed and I are going to get married,’ Hattie said.

  Mair exclaimed, and hugged her friend. She said that they were made for each other, she was so happy that Hattie was going to do it, and Ed was lucky to have her. All this was true, and the dazzle of joy in Hattie’s face was the best picture Mair had seen for a long time. ‘Am I to be a bridesmaid?’ she demanded.

  ‘Just try to get out of it. I’m thinking of a pink theme, by the way.’

  ‘I’d really prefer to be in turquoise.’

  ‘Don’t start being difficult. You have to do what I want. It’s my ego trip, remember.’

  ‘Fine, Bridezilla.’

  Mair had a bottle of champagne in her fridge. They drank it, and in the end Hattie had to leave her car behind and ring for a taxi to take her home.

  After she had gone Mair sat down in her accustomed place at the computer. The shawl caught her eye. She was just drunk enough for the snag of an idea in her mind to embed itself and become a full-blown intention within seconds.

  She went into her email list and found the one message she had received and saved from Bruno Becker, eight months before. She didn’t look at the contents because she didn’t need to.

  At Lamayuru he had mentioned the name Rainer.

  The click she had first heard when Caroline uttered the same name repeated in her head, just as loudly.

  Here was the real link, she was suddenly convinced, not archives or records offices. Several times in the past months she had thought of contacting him, but she had always dismissed the idea. Bruno and Karen were mourning their daughter, and she had felt too diffident to approach them, either with further condolences or superficial questions about family history. There had been no response to her message; neither had she expected one. What was there to say, in threadbare words, in the face of such a loss?

  But now, she judged, flushed with champagne certainty, now was the perfect time to write.

  She began to type, quickly and nervously, unsure as to what extent she was using the query about Rainer to shield her real wish, which was to have news of the Beckers themselves. Thick-fingered, she made a series of typing errors and urgently corrected them, altering the wording until she was satisfied with the result. The final message was just a few lines long. She wrote that the two of them were often in her thoughts and she wondered how they were now. If they felt able, she would very much like to hear from them. Then she added that Bruno had once mentioned the mountaineer called Rainer, whom she believed from discoveries in Srinagar and recent researches might have a strange connection to her own family. Could he perhaps give her any more information?

  She hesitated, then typed simply With love from Mair.

  There was no question that Bruno and Karen wouldn’t remember who she was. She didn’t imagine that those days of waiting were ever far from their minds.

  She pressed send. Then she sat staring at the screen for several minutes, as if a response might come immediately.

  Nothing happened for two weeks.

  Hattie and Ed were planning to get married just before Christmas.

  ‘A winter wedding,’ Hattie said dreamily. ‘Perhaps a little cloud of a cream fur jacket with a stand-up collar. Ivy and mistletoe and sparkling frost.’ From being an average-to-advanced cynic, she was melting into a dewy romantic. Mair humoured her, with equal parts of love and amusement.

  Then, after an author reading event in the bookshop followed by a book signing featuring a free iced cupcake with every purchase, she came home late from the shop and found a reply from Bruno in her inbox.

  He apologised for the late response, then said it had been good to hear from her and added that he had been away in the mountains. He thanked her for her kind thoughts, and said there had been some black times but he was doing all right, more or less, and so was Karen. About Rainer Stamm he knew little, only that he might have been killed in a motor accident in Kashmir in 1945. But no body or bodies had ever been found.

  There were some other things he could tell her, but perhaps it would be simpler if she telephoned him. He gave a Swiss number. Best wishes, Bruno.

  Mair looked automatically at the clock. It was an hour later in Switzerland, she was almost certain. Too late to call now, and also too eager-seeming. She smiled to herself about having become a lonely spinster bookseller. Right on cue the cat belonging to the people downstairs appeared in the doorway to offer her his company.

  She waited until the following evening, then dialled the Swiss number.

  Bruno answered, just one word, but she knew his voice at once. The receiver seemed slippery in her hand.

  ‘It’s Mair.’

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  Afterwards she didn’t remember the sequence of their conversation, just that it seemed to continue from where it had broken off in Lamayuru. He spoke more slowly than before, with a suggestion of hesitancy, as if all that had once been certain was no longer to be taken for granted. When she asked about Karen the pause was even longer.

  ‘She is living in a consciousness-raising collective for the bereaved, in New Mexico.’

  Mair groped for a response. ‘A Buddhist one?’

  To her relief, Bruno laughed. ‘I’m not sure. Could be a one-size-fits
-all-faiths sort of set-up. Karen and I split up, Mair.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Thank you. It happened very quickly after Lotus died. Her death was like – an explosion, I suppose. Silence, then shock waves, falling masonry, shards of glass piercing what hadn’t been crushed.’ She could hear the rise and fall of his breathing. ‘It became obvious almost immediately that Karen and I couldn’t help each other at all. That forced us to acknowledge we’d have to separate. It was sad, but there wasn’t too much animosity. Neither of us had the strength to be angry at that point. I expect Karen’s working through her anger now. It’s not unusual, I’ve heard, for couples to be blown apart by the death of a child.’

  ‘What have you been doing?’ Mair asked gently.

  ‘I resigned from my job. I didn’t know how to – to be a clockwork person. I came up here to the mountains. I’m surviving in a sort of cabin. I walk a lot. Sometimes I take a tent and some supplies and go even higher up to camp. That’s where I’ve been for the last couple of weeks. It’s beautiful. You … should see the view I’m looking out at. It would remind you of Ladakh.’

  ‘You sound as if you’re doing better than surviving,’ Mair told him. She didn’t know whether she was more impressed by his honesty or the route to survival that he had chosen.

  ‘I don’t know. Sometimes it feels like less than that. She was so perfect. And she is so very conclusively and absolutely gone.’ There was a silence. Then he said, ‘Tell me why and what you want to know about Rainer Stamm.’

  Mair collected herself, with difficulty. She explained as succinctly as she could.

  Bruno broke in to say he remembered everything she had told him about tracing the history of her grandmother’s Kashmir shawl.

  Mair added, ‘There are some letters. It turns out that Rainer knew my grandmother in Srinagar, and two of her friends. The shawl belonged to one of them – her name was Caroline. I met her, she’s living in Srinagar again now. At the end of the war Rainer disappeared, taking a child with him. I think that child might have been Caroline’s.’

  There was a silence.

  Then Bruno said, ‘Prita died fifteen years ago, you know.’

  ‘I didn’t know. I haven’t heard about anyone called Prita.’

  ‘Prita was Rainer’s Indian wife. She brought Zahra up as her own daughter.’

  Mair thought she might have misheard. ‘Zahra?’

  ‘That’s right. Prita Stamm and the little girl were more or less bequeathed to my parents’ care when they reached Switzerland after the end of the war. I knew them all the time I was growing up.’

  Mair’s thoughts tumbled over each other. Here was the link at last. Here was the continuous thread … Her eyes widened as she realised the significance. ‘Is Zahra still alive?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She’s in her late sixties now. Prita and she went back to India after Zahra graduated from university here. We keep in touch, but it’s only a card now and again. We’d planned to visit her on the way home last year.’

  Mair listened to the echo of his words. There was still too much to take in, and too much to try to say on the telephone. She said, on a sudden impulse, ‘Bruno, may I come out to see you?’

  ‘Of course,’ he answered.

  The train journey from Zürich airport took almost four hours on four different trains, but every connection worked to the minute. The last leg of it was on a little cog railway that took her up the side of a mountain through pine forests and past lush Alps dotted with brown cows. Through the open window flooded huge draughts of sweet-scented air carrying the jingle of cowbells. Mair craned her neck to look up at snow-covered peaks that brought to mind lake reflections in Srinagar and the circle of mountains enclosing Leh. She felt as if she had travelled back a year in time.

  At last the train reached the end station. She stepped off in a shoulder-high tide of Japanese tourists wearing sun visors, and a surprising contingent of Hassidim in long black coats and wide-brimmed hats.

  Beyond a little cluster of station buildings and hotels, the earth slipped away into blue air ahead and behind her, but to the right and left it was as if it had been grasped by a giant’s hand and twisted up into vast monuments of rock and ice. A glacier slashed with huge crevasses hung over a dizzy rock-fall of moraine.

  Mair stood still and gazed.

  ‘Hey,’ a voice said. A hand lightly touched her shoulder.

  She swung round to see Bruno. His weatherbeaten face was noticeably thinner than the last time she had seen it, but he was familiar in a way she hadn’t expected.

  ‘You look surprised,’ he said.

  ‘This scenery? Awestruck would be closer.’

  He nodded, his dark eyes on her face. Suddenly she heard the chop of rotor blades and saw him with Lotus in his arms, running towards the helicopter.

  ‘Welcome to the Oberland,’ he said. He hoisted her bag and swung it over his shoulder. ‘Can you walk up the hill? There’s no other way to get to the cabin, I’m afraid.’

  They left the Japanese and the Hassidim milling between café sunshades and souvenir stalls and began to climb. A ribbon of path zigzagged over the hillside towards a scree slope.

  Mair put her head down and followed on Bruno’s heels. Leaves and long grasses brushed her ankles – she saw now that the entire hillside was thick with wild flowers: blue campanula bells and starry marguerites, yellow doronicum, tangle-headed wisps of Alpine anemone and baroque spires of giant thistle. Dark blue veronica edged the path. If this was really the way to Bruno’s house it was the loveliest station commute she could imagine.

  The path angled vertiginously across the scree.

  She was glad when they reached the shoulder and Bruno stopped to hoist her bag to his other side.

  ‘Thank you for carrying my stuff.’

  ‘It’s steep. You’re pretty strong.’

  She was pleased by this. Turning back to look at the way they had climbed, Mair’s breath was taken away again. Below them lay the station and the little green train, like a child’s toy, winding its way back down to the valley. Across the saddle the giant peaks now seemed close enough to reach out and touch.

  Bruno pointed. ‘Jungfrau, Mönch and Eiger,’ he said.

  The face presented to them by the mountain called the Eiger was a black pyramid of concave rock rising sheer for thousands of feet. The sight of it made Mair shiver.

  ‘That’s the Nordwand,’ Bruno said. ‘North face.’

  ‘At Lamayuru you told me about Rainer attempting to climb that.’

  ‘Yes. His guide was my grandfather. They both came very close to death, and their survival forged a friendship.’

  They stood shoulder to shoulder, staring across at the rock wall.

  ‘Come,’ Bruno said at length. ‘It’s not far from here.’

  Downhill now, at an angle, winding deeper into a remote landscape of empty air over rolling turf with a pile as velvety as the finest Kashmir carpet. Far down in the valley Mair could see clusters of chalets and the glint of traffic on threadlike roads.

  They scrambled over a ridge and a tiny lake of extreme blue appeared just below them, set like a sapphire in a green ring of ground. At the opposite bank, on a broad wedge of land, a small cabin stood among the flowers. There were four windows, two by two, each with a window box spilling scarlet geraniums.

  In the doorway, Bruno bowed. He seemed more Swiss here in his own setting.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said again.

  The cabin was constructed of logs, and there was a low pitched roof of wooden shingles. The eaves projected a long way all round, and in the shade at the front there was a wooden platform with two benches, one on either side of the door. To the left-hand side there was a flat wall of logs, stacked with such intricate attention that it would have been difficult to slide a finger between the cut faces.

  Inside there were wide wooden floorboards and a square metal stove. At the windows were red and white gingham curtains and on a solid wooden table stood a bl
ue jug of flowers.

  ‘It’s quite primitive,’ Bruno said. ‘Lake water, earth closet, candles or oil lamps. I’ve rigged solar panels on the roof, though. They heat a small hot-water tank for washing. I could make it more comfortable, of course, but I rather like it as it is.’

  ‘Don’t change it too much. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen,’ Mair said.

  To her surprise, he smiled with pleasure. It was the first time this afternoon that she had seen him do so.

  ‘Do you think so? My father used to bring me here every summer. It’s just a shepherd’s hut, really.’

  He showed her the way up a ladder through a trapdoor in the corner of the beamed ceiling. Up here two small rooms were separated by a rough plank wall. Mair’s had a single mattress on the floor, made up with white sheets and a patchwork quilt. There was a faded rag rug, and a row of wooden pegs on the wall, nothing more. The window was at knee height. She was touched to see a pale blue towel laid on the quilt, neatly folded with one corner doubled back. Bruno had prepared a welcome for his guest.

  He withdrew his head from the trapdoor and she unpacked her few things and hung them on the pegs. As she climbed down again she glimpsed his room. There were piles of books, another single mattress, hardly more clothes on his row of pegs than she had brought with her for a stay of three days. It was clear that he lived simply.

  Downstairs Bruno showed her out to the neat kitchen with its stone sink and modern bottled-gas cooker. A row of pots and enamel plates and two glasses stood on a wooden shelf. Outside in a lean-to was the lavatory. A tiny porthole cut in the door gave a circular view of a clenched fist of ice and snow high on the Nordwand.

  A kettle whistled on the gas and Bruno made tea. Looking around her, Mair noticed a wind-up radio, a laptop computer. On a shelf of new-looking wood there was a photograph of Lotus in a Perspex frame. Her hair blew off her face like a cloud of white candyfloss. Bruno’s gaze slid across it.

  ‘Most days I walk down to the station buffet the way we came,’ he said. ‘My friend Christoph’s the boss there. I drink an espresso and read the newspaper and they let me charge my phone and computer.’