Burnt Shadows Page 3

  ‘Your father will be back from his walk soon,’ Konrad says. Regretfully he stands up, pulling her along with him. ‘This is not how I want him to see his future son-in-law for the first time.’

  ‘Come back for dinner then. I’ll give you all you can eat of Urakami’s best miso-flavoured water.’

  ‘Sounds perfect.’

  He’s looking at her now in a way that makes her put her hand up to her mouth to brush off whatever he sees clinging there. He laughs softly, puts his arms around her waist and kisses her.

  He has kissed her before, of course. Many times. But always in a hurried manner, quickly quickly before anyone sees. Now he is different. She feels something moist. It’s his tongue. That should feel repellent, but it doesn’t. Anything but. She is amazed by what her body seems to know to do in response, how this can feel both strange and yet familiar.

  When he pulls away she says, ‘Stay,’ and leans back into him.

  He shakes his head at her in a way that doesn’t mean no, only not yet.

  ‘Stay.’

  But he steps back. He suspects she does not fully understand what is promised in that demand, what is already just a single breath away from being inevitable.

  ‘I’ll be back for dinner.’ He steps backwards, his eyes never leaving her face.

  In this manner he walks down the stairs, and she can’t help laughing. He looks as if he’s in a movie reel that has accidentally reversed itself.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . Urakami Cathedral!’

  ‘Oh. Is that where we’re going to get married?’ Displeasure in her voice.

  ‘Of course not. You’re not even Catholic.’

  ‘That’s not the problem. I want to get married on a mountain, looking down at the sea.’

  ‘I’ll only be looking at you.’ His grin manages to make the statement sexual rather than sentimental.

  This side of him really is entirely new, and she is surprised by her own sense of anticipation even as she swats the air as though to dispatch his absurd comment.

  He has reversed himself all the way to the verandah now.

  ‘So why are you going to the Cathedral?’

  ‘Father Asano said he’d lend me some books. I don’t want the books, but since he’s one of the few people still willing to associate with me I don’t want to offend him.’

  ‘We’ll leave them all behind, Konrad. We’ll find an island where only the two of us have to live.’

  It is the first time she has said his name without the honorific. He steps forward, presses his mouth against hers again – uncaring that the neighbours might see.

  When he is gone, Hiroko races up to the stairs to see if she can watch him from the window as he descends the slope, but the angles of her house don’t allow it. She is suddenly, shockingly, aware of her own body. Such a mixture of heaviness and lightness – her limbs suffused with pleasure, exhausted by it, and yet it feels as though there are wings attached to her, on the verge of lifting her off the ground entirely.

  In the corner of the room is a trunk in which her father keeps the most precious memories of his wife. She opens the trunk and reaches for the silk kimono which is folded beneath a seashell and an envelope filled with letters.

  Hiroko removes the kimono from the trunk, and throws it up in the air. The silk shifts against itself and unfolds, so that what went up a square comes down a rectangle; again she throws it up, and it hits the ceiling lamp, catching on its shade before slithering down into her waiting arms. She closes her arms around the fabric that suggests being draped in a waterfall and thinks of holding Konrad, naked.

  She undresses quickly, removing the hated grey monpe and the shirt that was once a gleaming white and is now just the colour of too many washes. Then she continues, removing every scrap of clothing. Something strange is happening inside her body which she doesn’t understand, but she knows she wants it to go on happening. Without care for underclothes, she slips one arm into the sleeve of the kimono, the silk electric against her skin.

  Konrad walks across Urakami Valley, his heart folding in and in on itself.

  Hiroko steps out on to the verandah. Her body from neck down a silk column, white with three black cranes swooping across her back. She looks out towards the mountains, and everything is more beautiful to her than it was early this morning. Nagasaki is more beautiful to her than ever before. She turns her head and sees the spires of Urakami Cathedral, which Konrad is looking up at when he notices a gap open between the clouds. Sunlight streams through, pushing the clouds apart even further.

  Hiroko.

  And then the world goes white.

  The light is physical. It throws Hiroko forward, sprawling. Dust enters her mouth, her nose, as she hits the ground, and it burns. Her first response is a fear that the fall has torn her mother’s silk kimono. She raises herself off the ground, looks down. There is dirt on the kimono, but no tear. Yet something is wrong. She stands up. The air is suddenly hot and she can feel it on her skin. She can feel it on her back. She glides her hand over her shoulder, touches flesh where there should be silk. Moves her hand further down her back, touches what is neither flesh nor silk but both. She wonders if this has something to do with the burning she felt as she fell. Now there is no feeling. She taps the place that is neither flesh nor silk. There is no feeling at all.

  Her neighbour comes out on to the verandah next door.

  ‘What was that?’ she says.

  Hiroko can only think that her clothing is in shreds and she must go indoors to change. She hears the cry of her neighbour as she turns her back on the woman to enter the house. Hiroko runs her fingers along her back as she climbs the stairs down which, minutes earlier, she had followed Konrad. There is feeling, then no feeling, skin and something else. Where there is skin, there is feeling. Where there is something else there is none. Her fingers pluck at shreds embedded in the something else. Shreds of what – skin or silk? She shrugs off the kimono. It falls from her shoulders, but does not touch the ground. Something keeps it attached to her.

  How strange, she thinks, as she idly knots the sleeves of the kimono around her body, just below her breasts.

  She walks over to the window out of which she tried to catch a glimpse of Konrad as he walked away and looks down the slope, searching for clues. Houses, trees, people gathering outside, asking each other questions, people shaking their heads, sniffing at the air.

  Then.

  Hiroko leans out of the window, forgetting she is almost entirely naked. Something is wrong with her eyes. They see perfectly until the bottom of the slope and then they cannot see. Instead they are inventing sights. Fire and smoke and, through the smoke, nothing. Through the smoke, land that looks the way her back feels where it has no feeling. She touches the something else on her back. Her fingers can feel her back but her back cannot feel her fingers. Charred silk, seared flesh. How is this possible? Urakami Valley has become her flesh. Her flesh has become Urakami Valley. She runs her thumb over what was once skin. It is bumped and raw, lifeless.

  So much to learn. The touch of dead flesh. The smell – she has just located where the acrid smell comes from – of dead flesh. The sound of fire – who knew fire roared so angrily, ran so quickly? It is running up the slopes now; soon if will catch her. Not just her back, all of her will be Urakami Valley. Diamond from carbon – she briefly imagines herself a diamond, all of Nagasaki a diamond cutting open the earth, falling through to hell. She is leaning further out, looking through the smoke for the spires of Urakami Cathedral, when she hears her neighbour’s scream.

  Hiroko looks down, sees a reptile crawling up the path towards her house. She understands now. The earth has already opened up, disgorged hell. Her neighbour’s daughter is running towards the reptile with a bamboo spear in hand – her grip incorrect. The reptile raises its head and the girl drops the spear, calls out Hiroko’s father’s name. Why does she expect him to help? Hiroko wonders, as the girl keeps chanting
, ‘Tanaka-san, Tanaka-san,’ hands gripping the sides of her face as she stares at the reptile.

  The only light is from the fires. Her neighbour is calling her name, somewhere close. The neighbour is inside the house, her footsteps on the stairs. Where is Urakami Cathedral? Hiroko bats at the air with her hands, trying to clear away whatever separates the spires from her sight. Where is the Cathedral? Where is Konrad?

  Why is she falling?

  ‘There. See? There.’

  ‘How can you be sure it’s him?’

  ‘No one else in Nagasaki could cast such a long shadow.’

  Veiled Birds

  Delhi, 1947

  1

  Sajjad Ali Ashraf had his eyes fixed on the sky as he cycled parallel to the Yamuna River, trying to locate the exact celestial point at which Dilli became Delhi. Dilli: his city, warren of ‘by-lanes and alleys, insidious as a game of chess’, the rhythmically beating heart of cultural India (he wasn’t merely dismissive of opposing views, he was inclined to believe they were only made in jest), the place to which his ancestors had come from Turkey over seven centuries earlier to join the armies of the Mamluk King, Qutb-ud-din Aibak.

  And then – Sajjad almost tipped over as his feet on the pedals turned recalcitrant, as they were apt to do when his attention was elsewhere – there was Delhi: city of the Raj, where every Englishman’s bungalow had lush gardens, lined with red flowerpots. That was the end of Sajjad’s ruminations on British India. Flowerpots: it summed it all up. No trees growing in courtyards for the English, no rooms clustered around those courtyards; instead, separations and demarcations. Sajjad smiled. That was it. That would be the subject of today’s discussion with James Burton. Not flowerpots, but separations. Of course, almost all the wisdom he polished and honed in his mind on his morning journey into Delhi remained unspoken. But even so, as James Burton said, the readiness was all.

  On the matter of separations . . . Sajjad looked up again, but this time stopped the bicycle as he did so, and hopped off it. Yes, there, there was the boundary of Dilli and Delhi. There, where the sky emptied – no kites dipping towards each other, strings lined with glass; and only the occasional pigeon from amidst the flocks released to whirl in the air above the rooftops of the Old City where Sajjad’s family had lived for generations.

  I am like those occasional pigeons, Sajjad thought. At home in Dilli but breaking free of the rest of my flock to investigate the air of Delhi. He mounted the bicycle again, and wondered if there was a couplet to be written about pigeons and the Indians who worked for the English. Almost immediately he was impatient with the thought. He had no talent for verse, and it was only when in Delhi that he spoke fervently of the culture of poetry he had grown up with; in Dilli itself, while his brothers and sisters-in-law and aunts and cousins and mother traded couplets with each other, his mind would occupy itself with thoughts of the chess games which he and James Burton carried over from one day to the next as though they were stories of sultans and djinns. If he was to be honest, he missed the days when it was legal documents rather than chess games which occupied his thoughts each morning, but one day they would return to that – no doubt, no doubt. James Burton had promised him.

  A few minutes later he was in the Burton property in Civil Lines, walking up the driveway lined with flowerpots. He paused by the Bentley to check his reflection in its window and when all he saw was the car’s interior he moved undaunted to the bonnet, which reflected his image gleamingly back at him. He paid little attention to those aspects of his appearance that made his mother blow prayers over him to cast off the Evil Eye – the fine yet abundant hair, the perfectly proportioned features (except, at certain angles, the nose), the neat moustache, the fair skin of his Turkish ancestors, the confident air of a man of twenty-four who has never known failure – and instead fixed his attention on the beige cashmere jacket from Savile Row, running his hands along its length with sensuous pleasure.

  ‘The peacock is here,’ Elizabeth Burton said, watching from her bedroom window and believing it was the slimness of his torso rather than the softness of the fabric he was admiring. She saw Sajjad bring the sleeve of his jacket to his lips – so embarrassingly pink and fleshy – and her eyes flitted away from him impatiently.

  ‘Say something?’ James asked from the doorway.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t give him your clothes,’ Elizabeth said without turning towards James. ‘He’s started looking at everything you wear as if it’s his property; did you see how upset he was yesterday when you spilt ink on your shirt?’

  ‘Discarded clothes as metaphor for the end of Empire. That’s an interesting one. I don’t care how he looks at my shirt so long as he allows me to choose the moment at which it becomes his.’

  Elizabeth leaned her cheek against the open window shutters, and James watched her for a moment – the copper hair falling sleekly just above her shoulders, the statuesque figure, the sensuous droop of her eyelids. At thirty-seven she wasn’t fading, just sharpening her edges. Trying to remember the last time they made love, he recalled instead the furious passion that had consumed their nights in the aftermath of Konrad’s death, and the relief he knew they had both felt when it ebbed away. (‘So this must be what sex feels like for animals,’ she had said one night during that crazed period while James was still inside her. He had been unable to meet her eye in daylight for the rest of the weekend.)

  Elizabeth picked up her cup of tea from the windowsill and felt as though she’d posed herself for a portrait, The Colonial Wife Looks upon her Garden. It was worth looking upon, she conceded. The February sun had none of the antagonism that characterised it in later months, and the garden had responded to its benevolence with a burst of colour. Elizabeth made a mental checklist as she looked from one end of the front garden to the other: verbenas, dog flowers, larkspur, roses, sweet peas, phlox. And those were just the flowers at the far end, against the boundary wall. In colonial Delhi, gardens were to the wives what cricket was to the husbands – when conversation became tense, stilted, awkward, it would retreat to Bradman or gladioli. And February, when the chrysanthemums gave way to roses, was the very peak of the gardening year. All those interminable ladies’ lunches!

  Perhaps this would be the year she’d reveal that it wasn’t the winter flowers for which she waited all year, it was the royal poinciana – or the gulmohar, as the Indians more romantically called it. She envisaged the indignation of the Delhi wives if she were to dismiss the winter flowers of Delhi – which were also the summer flowers of England – in favour of that most brazen of India’s trees, with its red-gold flowers that flamed through the city in the summer, offering up resistance to the glare of the sun and, in so doing, unmasking the winter flowers as cowards.

  ‘My imagined rebellions get more pathetic by the day,’ she said.

  She didn’t expect James to still be there; they had long since fallen out of the habit of staying around to listen to each other’s responses. Even so there was a moment in which she hoped to hear him ask her what she had meant. But James was already making his way slowly down the stairs – his leg still not fully recovered from the fall from a horse two months earlier.

  Sajjad was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs, and James smiled at the sight of the young man in his perfectly fitted jacket.

  ‘Which of your poor sisters-in-law was up all night adjusting that to your size?’ he said, hopping down the final two steps and allowing all his weight to fall on the stronger leg.

  ‘Qudsia.’ Sajjad held up a hand to steady James as he tipped forward on landing.

  ‘Your younger brother’s wife?’

  Sajjad made a noise that sounded like confirmation. In fact, he was the youngest of the brothers but he saw no point in James Burton’s occasional attempts to unfurl the tangle of consonants and relationships that made up his family.

  The two men walked across the chequered-tile floor to the verandah where two tables were set up – one with a chessboard, its game alread
y in progress, and the other bare.

  On this second table Sajjad deposited the files he’d carried over, while his eyes scanned the back garden for anything feathered.

  ‘There is a sunbird in your hollyhock, Mr Burton.’

  ‘Sounds like a rude punchline. Go, wander’ – he waved his hand in the direction of the garden – ‘I’ll look over the excuse for work they’ve sent me this week.’

  Sajjad hopped down from the verandah to the grass, ignoring the steps. Elizabeth would see something pointed in that, James knew. She’d think the younger man was attempting to draw attention to the disparity between the elegance of his landing and James’s earlier stumbling descent. But James was pleased with the carelessness with which the Indian felt he could hurl his body from one surface to the other; such a contrast from that studied formality which had marked his earliest interactions with James, eight years earlier.

  It was Konrad who had first discovered Sajjad (‘You say that as though he were a continent,’ Elizabeth had remarked once on hearing him articulate the thought.) During his brief stay in Delhi he had come home to James and Elizabeth’s one day, after a morning of taking in the sights, with an absurdly good-looking Indian boy following behind.

  ‘Can’t you find him a job?’ Konrad had said, striding into the family room, where Henry, just learning to walk, was scrambling over James’s knees. ‘He speaks fine English – once you wrap your ear around the accent – and has no interest in his family’s calligraphy trade.’

  ‘Konrad, you can’t simply pick up urchins off the street and bring them home,’ James said impatiently, glancing at the boy who stood just inside the doorway, his eyes to the ground.

  James saw the boy’s head lift up for a moment, and the expression told him that the Indian’s English was good enough to understand, and be offended by, ‘urchin’. James looked him over more carefully. No, not an urchin – the dirt on his white-muslin clothes was that of someone who had thrown himself to the ground in a wrestling match rather than someone with only a single set of clothing, and the fact that Lala Buksh, James’s bearer, was making no attempt to guide the boy out to wait in the corridor or in the driveway while the ‘sahibs’ discussed his fate was telling. In the year James had been in Delhi he’d learnt enough to know that Lala Buksh could be counted on to serve as divining rod for the hidden currents of social status among Indians.