Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  It was one of those friendships which quickly came to seem inevitable, and unbreakable. And then in a conversation of less than a minute, it ended.

  They come increasingly to check on me, Konrad. My mother’s family name was Fuller. You know what that means. I can’t give them any other reason to think I have divided loyalties. Until the war ends, I’m staying away from all the Westerners in Nagasaki. But only until the war ends. After, after, Konrad, things will be as before.

  If you had been in Germany, Joshua, you’d say to your Jewish friends: I’m sorry I can’t hide you in my attic, but come over for dinner when the Nazi government falls.

  ‘Why are you here?’

  Yoshi looks up from the fan of cards in his hand.

  ‘I was at home when the sirens started. This is the nearest shelter.’ At Konrad’s raised eyebrow he adds, ‘I know. I’ve been going to the school house’s shelter these last few weeks. But with this New Bomb . . . I didn’t want to risk the extra minutes out in the open.’

  ‘So there are risks in the world greater than being associated with a German? That’s comforting. What New Bomb?’

  Yoshi puts down his cards.

  ‘You haven’t heard? About Hiroshima? Three days ago?’

  ‘Three days? No one’s spoken to me in three days.’

  In the shelter at Urakami, Hiroko is packed in so tightly between her neighbours she cannot even raise a hand to wipe the sweat damping her hairline. It hasn’t been so crowded in here since the early days of the air-raid sirens. What could have provoked the Chairman of the Neighbourhood Association into such a frenzy about rounding up everyone in his path and ordering them to the shelter? She exhales through her mouth and turns her head slightly towards the Chairman’s wife, who responds by turning quickly away from Hiroko. It is impossible to know if this is guilt or disdain.

  The Chairman’s wife had been a close friend of Hiroko’s mother – she recalls the two of them giggling together over the newest edition of Sutairu, in the days before war brought an end to the magazine: no place in wartime Japan for a publication that advised women on the etiquette of wearing underwear with Western dresses. As she was dying, Hiroko’s mother had called the Chairman’s wife to her bedside with a single request: protect my husband against himself. There was even less place in wartime Japan for an iconoclastic artist than for magazines about modern girls. For a long time, the Chairman’s wife had carried out her promise, persuading her husband to regard Matsui Tanaka’s outbursts against the military and the Emperor as a symbol of a husband’s mourning that was so profound it had unhinged him. But in the spring, Matsui Tanaka had been walking past a neighbourhood house and saw the cherry blossom festooning it to commemorate the sacrifice of the fifteen-year-old boy who had died in a kamikaze attack. Without saying a word to Hiroko who was walking silently beside him Matsui Tanaka darted forward, pulling out a book of matches from the pocket of his trousers, and set fire to the cherry blossom.

  Seconds later he lay bloodied on the ground, the dead boy’s father struggling against the neighbourhood men who had finally decided to restrain him, and Hiroko, bending down over her father, found herself pulled up by the Chairman’s wife.

  ‘Report him yourself,’ said the woman who had been like an aunt to her. ‘That advice is the only protection I can give you now.’

  She hadn’t listened, of course – the privations of wartime may have loosened up her scruples, but not her loyalty – and the next day three things happened: the military police came to take her father to prison, where he stayed for over two weeks; the principal of the school where she taught German told her she was dismissed, there was no room in his school for the child of a traitor and no need for the students to learn a foreign language anyway (the principal’s body curling into itself as he spoke, as though he thought that if he occupied less space there wouldn’t be so much of him to despise); and when she returned home, the Chairman was waiting to tell her she had been conscripted to work at one of the munitions factories.

  She wants now to signal to the Chairman’s wife that she knows the woman did her best, for so long; but in part she wants to signal this in order to shame her.

  Someone new enters the shelter, and everyone else is squeezed back even further, though there is nothing but polite murmurs of apology to signal the indignity of being so closely pressed up to the armpits and groins of strangers. Hiroko finds herself moving back into a gap which has opened up from necessity rather than any physical possibility, and finds herself beside two boys. Thirteen, maybe fourteen years old. She knows them, these Nagasaki boys. Not these ones exactly, but she knows that look of them. She guesses the taller one with the arrogant tilt of the head is in the habit of wooing girls or catching the attention of young teachers with tales of the thoughts he knows he’ll have on his one-way flight into the bridge of a US carrier (soon, very soon, the youngest of the pilots are not much older than him), all the while implying that the female towards whom he’s leaning will be central to those final, heroic thoughts.

  ‘You’re lying,’ the shorter boy whispers.

  The taller one shakes his head.

  ‘Those who were close, it stripped to the bone so they were just skeletons. The ones further away, it peeled off their skin, like grapes. And now that they have this New Bomb the Americans won’t stop until we’re all skeletons or grapes.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Hiroko says, in her teacher’s voice. ‘Stop telling these lies.’

  ‘They’re not . . .’ the boy starts to say, but her raised eyebrow silences him.

  One of her former students – Joseph – really had piloted his Ohka into a US carrier. He told her once that on the final flight he would take with him two pictures – one of his parents standing beneath a cherry tree, and one of Myrna Loy. A picture of Myrna Loy, she said, as you destroy a US warship? But he couldn’t see any irony in that. He was the neighbourhood boy whose death had propelled her father into burning the cherry blossom – perhaps he did it for her. The only way he knew of saying he understood her grief and fury, held inarticulate inside. She doesn’t know which she is more surprised by – the possibility that this could be true, or the fact that it hasn’t occurred to her earlier. Since her mother’s death she has taken to interpreting the silence from her father as an absence of anything worth communicating rather than an inability to form a new configuration with his daughter now his beloved wife is no longer around to serve as the voice to his thoughts.

  ‘Skeleton or grape?’ the tall boy whispers. She can smell the fetidness of stale breath.

  Outside are air and trees and mountains. It’s worth any risk.

  She shoulders her way forward, and all those who were polite in allowing more people in are outraged by her attempts to leave.

  ‘What are you doing . . . there’s no room . . . keep back, keep back . . .’ An elbow collides with her ribs.

  ‘My father,’ she calls out. ‘I must find my father.’

  Some of the women in the shelter start to make room for her to exit, lifting their children up in their arms.

  A voice says, ‘Her father is Matsui Tanaka, the traitor,’ and there’s a ripple of unpleasantness around the shelter, more people making space for her but in a way that suggests they don’t want her here.

  She doesn’t care. She is out now, gulping in the fresh air which almost seems cool by comparison.

  She walks quickly to get away from the shelter, and then slows, aware of the emptiness around her. Under a pale-leafed tree she holds her arms up to be patterned with drifting spots of sun and shadow as the branches sway in a breeze that isn’t perceptible at ground-level. She glimpses her hands as she holds them up – blistered from the combination of factory work and bamboo-spear drills. This was not how she imagined twenty-one. Instead, she imagined Tokyo – Hiroko Tanaka in the big city, wearing dresses, leaving lipstick marks on wine glasses in jazz clubs, her hair cut just below the ear – single-handedly resurrecting the lifestyle of the ‘modern girl’ of th
e twenties whose spirit had lived on in Sutairu through the thirties.

  But that was childish dreaming. Or borrowed dreaming, really. She saw the way her mother sighed and laughed over stories of the modern girls and she imagined their world as the only mode of escape from a dutiful life. Though the older she got the more she was certain her mother – so devoted to husband and daughter and home – never really desired the escape, only enjoyed the idea that it existed in the world. That was where she and her daughter so sharply differed. For Hiroko, to know was to want. But that world glimpsed in magazines was known far less than the world she could reach out and grasp by the roots of its rust-coloured hair.

  Now the childhood dreams are past. Now there is Konrad. As soon as the war ends, there will be her and Konrad. As soon as the war ends, there will be food and silk. She’ll never wear grey again, never re-use tea leaves again, never lift a bamboo spear, or enter a factory or bomb shelter. As soon as the war ends there will be a ship to take her and Konrad far away into a world without duty.

  When will the war end? It cannot happen quickly enough.

  He walks away from Azalea Manor, almost running.

  He can hear Yoshi calling him to come back and wait for the all-clear, but all he can think is that if another New Bomb is to fall it will fall on Urakami: on the factories, on the people packed close together. The shelters won’t keep it out, not the thing Yoshi described. And if it is to fall on Hiroko, let it fall on him, too.

  He picks up his pace, runs through memories of her: the gate through which she walked in search of him as soon as Yoshi’s nephew delivered the letter he had written, asking if she’d be interested in translating letters and diaries into German for a negotiable fee; the schoolyard where they used to meet every week for the first few months, the exchange of translations and money slipping further and further to the margins of their encounters; the road leading to the street-car, where she’d responded to his gloomy complaints about rationing by singing ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’ and he discovered she spoke English as fluently as German; the Chinese quarter, where he made her laugh out loud for the first time, confessing the names he’d given to all the vegetables he didn’t recognise: windswept cabbage, knots of earth, fossilised flower, lanky potato; Megane-Bashi, or Spectacles Bridge, where they had been standing, looking into the water, when a small silver fish leapt out of Konrad’s reflected chest and dived into her reflection and she said, ‘Oh,’ and stepped back, almost losing her balance, so he had to put his arm around her waist to steady her. And here – he slows; the all-clear sounds; the threat has passed – the banks of the Oura, where he told her that his first winter in Nagasaki he had walked past the frozen river and seen splashes of colour beneath the surface.

  ‘I went closer to look. And what do you think I saw? A woman’s name. Hana. It had been written in red ink by someone – either a skilled artist or an obsessed lover – who knew how to paint on the water in the instant before the ice froze the characters into place.’

  Instead of a shaking her head at him and offering up some entirely practical explanation for a name sealed in ice, as he had expected, she frowned.

  ‘Your first winter here was ’38. Why didn’t we meet sooner? What a waste.’

  It was the first indication he had that she – bizarrely, wonderfully – went at least part-way to reciprocating his feelings.

  He sets off again, panic replaced by purposefulness. Ever since Germany’s surrender he has told her it isn’t safe for her – a traitor’s daughter – to spend too much time with him. So they have been meeting only twice a week, for an hour at a time, always out in public, sometimes trailed by the military police – on those occasions they speak loudly, in Japanese, about the glorious history of Japan about which she pretends to instruct him. He has stopped his weekly practice of lending her books in German and English from his library, though it has formerly been one of his great pleasures to see the different expressions of delight with which she greets Yeats, Waugh, Mann; no matter the length or denseness she is done with the book – has sometimes read it twice – by the time the next week comes around. But now ‘books’ have joined the list of suspended intimacies between them. Each time they meet she complains that there’s too much rationing in the world as it is, but he is unyielding. After the war, he always says. After the war. Now he sees how much of Yoshi’s thinking has infected him.

  Crossing into the valley, he looks up towards Urakami Cathedral with its stone figures that stand against the sky – on overcast days their greyness suggests each cloud is an incipient statue waiting for a sculptor to pull it down and hew it into solidity. And he, too, has been hewn into solidity – gone now those days of insubstantiality, not knowing what he’s doing in Japan, a fugitive from a once-beloved country he long ago gave up on trying to fight for or against. He knows entirely why he’s here, why here is the only place he can be.

  Away from the river now, away from the Cathedral, he veers towards the slope she has described to him – with the denuded silver-barked tree painted black so that the moonlight doesn’t make a steel tower of it and draw enemy fire (and on the topmost branches someone has painted stars). There, the purple rooftops of her neighbourhood which remind her of his notebooks, so every day when she comes home from the factory she sees his birds, every night she falls asleep beneath their outstretched wings.

  ‘Konrad-san?’ She stands on the verandah of her house, looking at him with concern. What could have brought him to Urakami, for all her neighbours to see?

  He smiles and makes a gesture of mock-despair. Months ago he asked her to call him ‘Konrad’ and she said, ‘It’s a nice name, but on its own it sounds naked.’ Then she gave him her wickedest smile. ‘One day, maybe that won’t be a problem.’

  ‘Is your father here?’

  ‘Out walking in the hills. Come.’

  She opens the sliding door and he fumbles to take off his shoes before joining her inside. She is walking up the stairs before he’s in and he barely allows himself time to look around the small reception room, the focal point of which is an ink-and-brush painting of a Nagasaki seascape – her father’s work, he guesses correctly, feeling strangely unsettled at the thought of her father. Hiroko once said she learnt how to question the world’s rules from his example rather than his instruction, and Konrad can’t help but suspect Matsui Tanaka’s disengaged parenting will stop at the precise moment his daughter introduces him to the German she . . . what? . . . loves?

  Upstairs, he enters a room in which a futon is rolled up, but hasn’t yet been put away. He tries not to stare at her bedding.

  Hiroko steps out on to the balcony and leans on the railing. This house is far up the slope and though it is hemmed in on three sides by other homes the balcony looks out on to nothing but trees and hills. And nothing but trees and hills look on to it.

  ‘You never told me you live a single dive away from an ocean of liquid leaves,’ he says.

  She touches his sleeve.

  ‘Are you all right? You look strange. And you’re here. Why?’

  As ever their conversation moves between German, English and Japanese. It feels to them like a secret language which no one else they know can fully decipher.

  ‘I have to ask you something. I don’t want to wait until the war ends to hear the answer.’ In saying it he realises his purpose in coming here. ‘Will you marry me?’

  Her response is swift. She pulls herself to her full height, hands on her hips.

  ‘How dare you?’

  He steps back. How has he been so completely wrong?

  ‘How dare you suggest there’s a question attached to it? Last week when we talked about travelling around the world together after the war – in what capacity did you think I was agreeing to go with you, if not as your wife?’ The end of the sentence is muffled in his shirt as he pulls her to him.

  Peace, she thinks. This is what peace feels like.

  ‘Not Delhi,’ he says.

  They sit on the ba
lcony, fingers tangling.

  ‘But I want to meet Ilse. She’s your sister; I have to meet her.’

  ‘Half-sister,’ he corrects. ‘And it’s been a long time since she was Ilse Weiss. Now it’s just Elizabeth Burton. And you will meet her – just not on our honeymoon. Frankly the only person worth meeting at Bungle Oh! is Sajjad – if he’s still there. Lovely Muslim boy who works for James. He’s the one who told me that story of the spider in Islam, remember?’

  She moves her head away from his shoulder.

  ‘Bungalow?’

  ‘Bungle Oh! It’s a pun. Bungle Oh!, Civil Lines, Delhi. Maybe you’re right – we should go. Who could resist an address like that?’

  ‘You’re not being serious,’ she grumbles.

  ‘That’s a new complaint.’ He kisses her head. ‘Ilse won’t want us there. I’ve told you how ashamed she is of what she refers to as her “German connections”. That’s what my father and I are reduced to. Connections. And that was before the war. Now, who even knows if she’ll acknowledge she knows me? She probably tells everyone she sprang fully formed from her mother’s Anglo-Saxon forehead.’

  ‘OK,’ she says. ‘No Delhi. What about New York?’

  He wonders if she’s heard anything about this New Bomb. The thought of it makes him pull her even closer.

  She decides not to point out that, despite the cloud cover, it’s far too hot for such bodily contact. Her mind leaps ahead to the further kinds of bodily contact which will be made necessary by marriage. She wonders if his knowledge of what happens on wedding nights is less vague than hers. Her curiosity about this is entirely abstract.