Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

  ‘Sorry to wander off for so long. I wouldn’t have heard the end of it from James if I hadn’t spent some time discussing themes for the Easter Ball with the Harridan. Her husband looks poised to further justify James’s chess-playing lifestyle.’

  Hiroko had already learnt that it was best to keep quiet when either of the Burtons spoke about the other, but she determined right then to find a way past Sajjad’s barrier of loyal silence in all matters related to James Burton and find out why exactly a solicitor could be allowed to sit on his verandah, drinking tea and occasionally moving chess pieces around a board, without anyone raising the slightest objection. The rich! Ridiculous! she found herself thinking and shook her head about all that didn’t change no matter where in the world you went.

  The truth of it was that since the very start of his legal career James’s foremost, and unparalleled, ability had been the charm, social connections and air of command which combined to convince clients and – more importantly – prospective clients that James Burton was a man to rely on. He brought those in need of legal counsel to the offices of Burton, Hopkins and Price and once they were there he left all those with particularly thorny problems in the hands of his colleagues, who were able enough to ensure that the clients did not regret their choices. Since he’d broken his leg he had been unable to navigate the stairs up to the third-floor law offices but he’d been unflagging in his social obligations, making adept use of the sympathy his injury garnered to the betterment of his practice.

  Once a week Sajjad went to the office and brought back work with which James could occupy himself, but everyone understood that was little more than a façade; though the leg was considerably healed no one had bothered to enquire when he could return to work, so it seemed foolish for James to broach the subject himself. Just as it had seemed foolish to broach the subject of returning to the upstairs bedroom when he found himself able to manage the stairs. The difference in the two situations was that he didn’t particularly want to return to the office.

  Only Hiroko’s collapse on her second day in Delhi had finally restored James to the marital bed; she had to be moved to the downstairs room and Elizabeth had told Lala Buksh to transfer James’s belongings ‘upstairs’. The command was vague enough for James to wonder if she meant ‘the upstairs guest bedroom’ but Lala Buksh had not interpreted it that way, much to James’s relief. On their first night in the same bed after a space of over two months it had seemed far too pointed to do anything other than make love, but it had been an awkward, unsatisfying business, the awfulness of the whole thing made worse by James patting Elizabeth on the head just before turning away to curl against his pillow as, long ago, he used to curl against his wife. In the middle of the night he’d woken up to find his body aching with demands; as silently as possible he’d taken care of his needs, thinking of Elizabeth as he did so, though she, lying awake yet immobile next to him, was convinced that wasn’t so.

  Elizabeth linked arms with Hiroko as they stepped away from the lanterns and torches. Earlier, when James’s Bentley had approached the ruined complex of Hauz Khas, Elizabeth was appalled at her insensitivity in bringing Hiroko to such a place, reminding her that time and neglect should be the only cause of such devastation. We want to speed up everything in our modernity, she had thought, even destruction. But Hiroko had looked around the moonlit ruins in wonder, and stepped out from the Bentley towards the torchlight as though entering a fairy tale.

  ‘Sometimes I forget the enchantments of Delhi,’ Elizabeth said, sitting on the raised floor of a small stone structure, its pillars topped with a cupola. ‘Then there’s a night like this, and I almost believe I’ll miss this place when all this is over.’

  Hiroko sat down next to her.

  ‘You don’t mind, then? That the British have to leave?’

  Elizabeth laughed softly.

  ‘I’ll tell you something that I’ve never told anyone, not even James. The British Empire makes me feel so . . .’ She glanced at Hiroko as though considering how much she could be trusted, and then admitted, ‘German.’ She reached into the silver bag that hung off her wrist and pulled out a cigarette.

  Hiroko accepted the cigarette with a wry smile. Elizabeth didn’t smoke, but took a certain pleasure from seeing Hiroko doing so in front of James’s stuffy clients, just as she took pleasure in the eyebrows of officialdom that raised themselves over the stylishly cut trousers Hiroko had brought with her from Tokyo.

  Hiroko leaned back, her elbow resting on the stone floor, legs crossed at the ankles. Briefly in Tokyo she’d lived the life she had thought she’d wanted – that of the forties version of the ‘modern girl’. Jazz clubs, and cigarettes, and no one but herself to support with the money she earned from translations. For a while she’d even enjoyed it. Now it was only to keep Elizabeth company that she sometimes acceded to coming out to these gatherings with their intricate rules of behaviour, which she knew she could only flout up to a point before embarrassing James Burton. She was much happier curled up on a sofa in Bungle Oh! working on Urdu exercises Sajjad set for her or reading a book from the Burton library.

  ‘I always assumed I knew why Konrad was so obsessed with discovering all he could about the lives of the Europeans and Japanese in Nagasaki.’ She could talk without constraint about Konrad to his sister now, though James hadn’t entirely rid himself of the air of panic which suggested he was forseeing an oriental melodrama unfolding in his living room each time she mentioned his brother-in-law. ‘So determined to see a pattern of people moving towards each other – that’s why he kept researching his book instead of writing it, you know? He was waiting for the war to end and the foreigners to come back and give him his triumphant ending. He thought the war was an interruption, not the end of the story.’ She looked once more towards the shadows flickering on rubble and exhaled a breath of smoke. ‘I always thought his obsession grew from a need to believe in a world as separate as possible from a Germany of “laws for the protection of German blood and German honour”.’ She laughed without much humour. ‘Imagine hoping to find that separate world in Japan.’

  ‘And now? You think there was some other reason.’

  ‘Yes, Ilse. You.’

  ‘Oh.’ Elizabeth shook her head, made an embarrassed gesture of disavowal. ‘I was nothing in Konrad’s life. His mother – my stepmother – had me sent away to boarding school in England before he was born. And most of my holidays were with my mother’s family in London. Konrad and I were strangers.’

  Hiroko nodded briefly. It would be too cruel to say that Konrad had been searching through Nagasaki for a world in which they didn’t have to be strangers, a world in which he could have arrived in Delhi to see the sister he was finally old enough to know as an equal and not found that his Germanness, her Englishness, were all that mattered.

  ‘I don’t miss him at all,’ Elizabeth said slowly. ‘But even so, when you first came to our house, before I saw you, there was a moment when I thought it was Konrad. And it was . . .’ She pressed her fingers against a spot just above her heart. ‘A joy so deep I know nothing about its origins.’ As she had known nothing about the origins of all that desperate passion in the aftermath of Konrad’s death, when she had reached for James night after night, not mourning her brother but needing some assurance of her own body’s existence – she was flesh, she was blood, not a shadow. But her only refuge was in orgasm, which felt like obliteration. Was that irony or just another of life’s cruelties?

  Hiroko looked from Elizabeth to the men and women lounging on picnic blankets while moths and Indian waiters flitted darkly between them, a wave of an uncalloused hand brushing one away, calling the other one near. And there was Kamran Ali speaking to a waiter in his broken, English-accented Urdu. Everything here was awful and – she glanced at Elizabeth – sad. And yet here she was with nowhere else to be. Did that make her awful, or merely sad? Either way she would have to do something – something! – to step out of the sense of temporariness that ac
companied each moment, except the ones in which she and Sajjad sat on the Burton verandah and a new language ceded its secrets to her.

  The bearer circled back to say Mr Burton was asking his wife to join him, and Elizabeth rolled her eyes and stood up.

  ‘You would have liked Konrad,’ Hiroko said. ‘If I’d married him, I’d have made sure you liked each other.’

  Elizabeth touched Hiroko’s hair gently.

  ‘I don’t doubt you would. And I’ve never said this before – I should have. I’m so sorry for all you’ve lost.’

  Together they walked back to the firelit gathering, neither remarking that from the moment Hiroko had mentioned Konrad they had started to speak in German, and that doing so felt like sharing the most intimate of secrets.

  5

  ‘And then my brother Sikandar’s daughter said—’

  ‘Which one? Rabia Bano or Shireen?’

  ‘Shireen. She said—’

  Elizabeth closed the wooden lattice doors that led from the sitting room to the verandah, blocking off the sound of Hiroko and Sajjad chattering in Urdu. Six weeks of daily classes should not have been enough to make Hiroko quite so conversational, she thought, allowing herself to feel aggrieved at the fixation with which Hiroko spent her days running her index finger along the curlicued script of the vocabulary lists and children’s books that Henry had used for his lessons with Sajjad.

  She sat back at her writing table, acknowledging with a grimace the foolishness of having shut out the breeze as she twisted the weight of her hair away from her neck. On the tabletop were two sheets of letter-writing paper, each with two words inked on it.

  Dearest Henry –

  Willie, Liebling –

  She let her hair fall back into place with a fleeting thought of replicating Hiroko’s haircut, picked up her pen and held it poised above the second letter. Willie – Cousin Wilhelm – was the only one of her German relatives who had ever truly felt like family to her. Perhaps in part it was because he understood – with his penchant for younger, beautifully dressed men – what it felt to be an outsider in the Weiss clan. She had thought him dead early in the war, rounded up with others of his ‘Wildean persuasion’ – his terminology, not hers. Only in ’45 had she discovered he’d been working with the underground in Germany, helping Jews and homosexuals to escape the Nazis, and that at the end of the war he’d migrated to New York. And now he wrote to say it was the finest city in the world, and all it lacked was her presence.

  The pen made a swooping motion as though leading up to some great burst of resolve, and then just before the nib touched the page it veered off to the other letter.

  Dearest Henry . . .

  She pressed the nib against the page and wrote firmly:

  Of course you’re coming home this summer. Yes, there’s trouble in the Punjab but Delhi is perfectly safe, and Mussoorie as peaceful as ever. Your grandmother really shouldn’t worry so much.

  Your father has been boasting to everyone about your bowling average. We’re both delighted to hear of your continued successes.

  She stopped, and put down the pen. Why was it that the more Henry settled into boarding school the more formal his letters to her, and hers back to him, became? And why had she ever agreed to let James send him off to England? She batted away a fly with the hand holding the pen and a spray of ink appeared on the wall opposite her. The stigmata of the blue-blooded, she thought, moving the framed picture of Henry so that it covered the speckling.

  It’s the done thing. That’s what James had said to begin and end every argument about Henry and boarding school. But in the end she’d had her own reasons for agreeing to send him away. The looming end of Empire meant they would all have to leave India before long; better to wean Henry away from it – summers in India, the rest of the year in England – than sever the tie in one abrupt motion. She glanced over at the latticed door. It still rankled that her boy had thrown his arms around Sajjad and wept, declaring, ‘I’ll miss you most,’ when the time for his departure had come. Though it was ridiculous of James to insist it was jealousy about her son’s affections that made her dislike Sajjad – she had disliked him from the start. Instinct, that was all.

  ‘Is the lesson still going on?’

  James’s aftershave entered the room, followed by the man himself.

  ‘Well, they’re out there talking in Urdu. I don’t know if it’s a lesson or just chit-chat. You nicked yourself shaving.’

  ‘Hmmmm . . .’ James touched his finger to the cut on his jaw. ‘They seem to start earlier and go on later each day.’

  The combination of the dab of blood and the look of discontentment made him appear unusually vulnerable. Elizabeth piv­ oted out of her chair and walked over to him, feeling the word ‘wife’ slip around her shoulders with a feather-light touch.

  ‘You’re the one who employs him, you know. You have every right to tell him if you’re unhappy with the way he’s utilising his time.’ She ran her finger along his jaw, wiping off the blood, and then absent-mindedly put the finger in her mouth.

  ‘Vampire,’ James said, smiling, the atmosphere in that moment light between them as it hadn’t been in a long time.

  Elizabeth looked at his jaw. There was still a spot of blood there. For a moment all she wanted to do was lean in and place her mouth against his skin, feel the tingle of aftershave against her lips and hear him sigh in satisfaction and relief as he used to do during their early married life when some expression of physical desire was Elizabeth’s signal that whatever squabble had sprung up between them was now ended. But he was already wiping away what remained of the blood and stepping past her to glance at the letters on her writing desk.

  Willie, Liebling –

  James ran his fingers beneath the endearment, the paper dark­ ening where he touched it with hands that had been less than thoroughly dried after his shave. ‘Liebling’ appeared underlined, and struck both of them as an accusation. She used to refer to him by that endearment – in the days when German was her language of intimacy. Which went first, he wondered? German or intimacy? How was it possible that he didn’t know?

  ‘Is Hiroko to stay with us indefinitely?’ he said abruptly.

  ‘Keep your voice down, James!’

  ‘I don’t mean I want her to go.’ He picked up the pens in the pen-holder, one by one, and then replaced them again. He really should write a letter to Henry, but Elizabeth’s detailed weekly missives to their son left nothing for James to add. ‘You clearly enjoy having her around.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No, I do. The house doesn’t feel quite so empty any more.’

  James touched the blue dot on the wall, just behind Henry’s photograph, and made a sharp noise of protest when the ink transferred itself to his hand. Honestly, Elizabeth. The wall had just been repainted. He could see by the perceptible shift in her stance that she was preparing for another fight, and the mere thought of it exhausted him.

  ‘I’m just wondering what I should . . . we should be doing for Hiroko. Should we be introducing her to young men? British, or Indian? The whole Japanese thing makes it a little awkward. Should we find out if there are Japs in Delhi somewhere?’

  ‘She doesn’t seem much interested in that sort of thing. I broached the subject once – she said, “the bomb marked me for spinsterhood.” ’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Oh, James. Don’t be so dense. Her head is still filled with dreams of Konrad. No one can compete with that.’

  ‘More to Konrad than we thought, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Yes. I think there was much more to Konrad than we thought.’ She sat down at her writing desk again, and James situated himself on the sofa that allowed him to look at her profile while she wrote, calling out for Lala Buksh as he did so.

  His voice reached Sajjad and Hiroko outside.

  ‘Time for chess?’ Hiroko said, and Sajjad placed a finger over his lips and shook his head conspiratorially.
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  ‘We’re in the middle of a game which he knows he’s going to lose. I don’t think he’s in any hurry to continue with it,’ he said, smiling. Hiroko tried to smile in return but it faltered almost on inception so that all Sajjad saw was a quiver of her lips. He looked at her in concern. Something was wrong today. He had been trying all morning to engage her with his stories but her responses had been at the very brink of politeness.

  Hiroko glanced over at the closed doors leading into the house.

  ‘It would have been Konrad’s birthday today, Sajjad, and she doesn’t even know that.’

  Sajjad had never known how to bring up the subject of Nagasaki and Konrad with her, though the more time he spent in her company the more he wished simply to find a way of indicating that such sorrow should not come to anyone in the world, and particularly not to a woman so deserving of happiness.

  ‘Can I tell you how I met him?’ Sajjad said. ‘Yes? It was in Dilli, in 1939. It was summer. And so hot. The sun is possessive of this city in the summer – it wants all its beauty to itself, so it chases everyone away. The rich to their hill stations, the rest of us to darkened rooms, or under trees where the shade marks the edges of the sun’s territory. I was on my way to the calligraphy shop, where my brothers were waiting for me. And then I saw an Englishman. In Dilli, in my moholla. Not in Chandni Chowk, or at the Red Fort, but just walking through the streets lined with doorways.’

  ‘Not an Englishman. Konrad!’ Hiroko leaned forward, her cheek resting on her palm, seeing it so clearly.

  ‘Yes. I had never spoken to an Englishman, never even considered it, but something in that one’s face made me go up to him. He was standing by the side of the road, sniffing the air. It was summer, and the air was drenched in the scent of mangoes. “Sahib, are you lost?” I said. He didn’t understand I was speaking English. So I repeated it. And he said, very slowly, as if he thought I might have as much trouble with his accent as he did with mine, “Can you explain this smell to me?” I didn’t understand what he meant. It never occurred to me he wouldn’t know the smell of mangoes. I decided he was looking for a story, the way my nephews and nieces do. So I said, “Some god has walked, sweating, through here.” He held out his hand and shook mine, and said, “That’s the best thing I’ve heard since I came to Delhi. I’m Konrad.” Just like that. “I’m Konrad.” And I never went to the calligraphy shop. We walked through Dilli, defying the sun for the rest of the morning, and at the end of it he brought me here and asked Mr Burton to give me a job. And this is my life now. I’m here now, in this place, talking to you because Konrad Weiss liked the way I explained the scent of mangoes.’ He finished speaking and worried that the story had been more about him than Konrad. But Hiroko was smiling at last, and that felt like victory.