39

As the rented SUV approached border control, Kim Burton allowed herself to imagine the consequences if the Afghan hiding beneath blankets in the trunk were discovered. She skipped over the question of what would happen to either him or her, and instead envisioned a world in which ‘political profiling’ became customary at the borders, with immigration officials trained to identify Americans suffering liberal guilt.

       She rolled down her window and smiled at the Canadian official, handing him her driver’s licence as she did so.

       ‘Not the most flattering picture of you,’ he said. ‘Staying long?’

       ‘Just a few hours.’

       ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re worth more of your time than that.’

       ‘Not in January, you aren’t. I’ll come back in the spring.’

       ‘I’ll look out for you,’ he said, handing back the licence and waving her through with a wink.

       She wasn’t doing this because of liberal guilt, she reminded herself, though all along the journey she’d felt more than a pang of it as she found herself thinking about how she had always taken for granted her ability to enter and exit nations at will – those nations which required Americans to go through a visa-application process she’d simply never visited. It had come as a shock last year when she’d asked Hiroko and Ilse to go to Paris with her to discover how difficult it would be for Hiroko to get a visa – ‘Not worth the hassle,’ Hiroko had sadly concluded after looking at the list of requirements.

       ‘You can come out now,’ she said when the border was behind them and the surrounding landscape was snow-covered fields.

       Abdullah clambered into the back seat.

       ‘Should I stay here or come forward?’ he asked with that careful politeness which disconcertingly blanketed his personality.

       She pulled over on to the shoulder, so he could come around to the front in a dignified manner. He stepped out, walked a few steps to the field and bent to punch his fist through the snow. Kim gripped the wheel and considered pressing on the accelerator.

       Abdullah got into the front seat, holding up his arm, which had snow clinging to it up to the elbow.

       ‘It’s deep,’ he said. ‘Last year in Central Park, my friends and I made snow angels.’ He didn’t look at her as he spoke.

       ‘Have you been outside New York much?’ she asked. It would take her approximately thirty minutes to get him to the fast-food restaurant near Montreal where he was due to meet the man who would take him onwards. Thirty minutes in a car with an Afghan. She glanced sideways as he carefully wiped snow off his black-gloved hand, and told herself there was no need to feel threatened.

       ‘Once,’ he said. He spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully – or perhaps he was conscious that his accent wasn’t easy to follow. ‘My friend Kemal rented a van and took a group of us to Massachusetts, to a mosque there, during Ramzan. We were seven of us: two Turks, one Afghan, one Pakistani, two from Egypt, one from Morocco. All travelling together in America.’

       ‘Just once? In nearly a decade.’ Then she felt foolish for the incredulousness that revealed her inability to conceive of a life without holidays and travel.

       ‘Yes. It was amazing, the way America drives when it isn’t in New York city.’ He smiled. ‘The road signs! We laughed so much about the road signs.’

       ‘What’s so funny about road signs?’ She could feel her mouth position itself into a smile, wanting very much to find some shared moment of humour but unable to see how ‘road signs’ might lead to levity.

       ‘For everything, everything that is, everything that might happen, there’s a road sign. DEER CROSSING. MOOSE CROSSING. OLD PEOPLE CROSSING. CHILDREN CROSSING. ROCK FALLING. Only one rock? That one I don’t understand.’

       At that, she did laugh, genuinely, relaxing her grip on the wheel slightly and becoming aware for the first time how stiff with tension her neck had become. She almost made some joke about Sisyphus.

       Abdullah almost caught her eye as he smiled, and continued: ‘BRIDGE AHEAD. COVERED BRIDGE AHEAD. SOFT SHOULDERS AHEAD. ROAD WIDENS. ROAD NARROWS. My friend Kemal – he’s Turkish, very educated – he said what a thing it is, to live in a country where every possible happening is announced in bright glow-in-the-dark letters. We wondered what would happen if something unexpected happened in a country like this, without any warning.’

       Kim glanced sharply at him, but he was leaning forward rotating his arm in front of the heating vents to dry off the sleeve of his grey winter coat and still not looking at her. She hadn’t noticed any of the road signs while driving up I-87. But she’d noticed flags. Despite these months of seeing so many of them in the city she’d still been taken aback by their profusion. Flags stuck on back windows of cars; flags on bumper stickers; flags impaled on antennae; flags on little flag poles adhered to side mirrors; flags hanging out of windows; flags waving a welcome at service stations; flags painted on billboards (with some company’s logo printed discreetly yet visibly at the bottom in a patriotically capitalistic gesture). They made her remember Ilse laughing that the phrase ‘God Bless America’ struck her as advertisement rather than imperative (STUDENTS – BUY SCHOOL SUPPLIES HERE. MOMS – GIVE YOUR KIDS THE GIFT OF LOVE WITH HEARTY2 SOUP. GOD BLESS AMERICA.) And yet, though she knew both Ilse and Harry would have rolled their eyes at the display of patriotism she saw something moving in it. But she kept wondering what her Afghan passenger made of it.

       ‘Then we got our answer,’ he said. ‘To what America would do if something unexpected happened.’

       ‘Yes, you certainly did,’ she said, discovering all the tension in her body seemed to have moved to her jaw, making it difficult to get the words out.

       This time he looked directly at her.

       ‘No, I didn’t mean . . .’ He shook his head, looked offended, made her feel apologetic, then irritated for being made to feel apologetic. ‘That night, on the way back to New York, I was half asleep when I realised that up ahead all cars were slowing, swerving around something. I woke up fully, and imagined someone dead in the middle of the highway. Then I heard Kemal laugh. There, in front of us, lit up by headlights, was a big pile of blue and pink toy animals – rabbits and bears.’

       Kim saw it as he spoke in his soft voice, envisioned something almost reverential about the way all cars slowed and swerved, not daring to run over a little blue tail or a soft pink ear. It would have been a moment of silence, of wonder, she knew, uniting everyone on that dark dark highway.

       ‘And Kemal also swerved,’ she said.

       It wasn’t a question, until Abdullah didn’t respond, turning instead to look out of the window at the unblemished whiteness.

       He had cut right through the stuffed toys. Kim found the image grotesque, and knew she couldn’t indicate as much without appearing to suffer from misguided American empathy – cluster bomb the Afghans but for God’s sake don’t drive over the pink bunny rabbits!

       Could he tell her, Abdullah wondered? Could he say he had asked Kemal to drive as close to the toys as possible and each of the men inside had taken armloads of rabbits and bears – their fur softer than anything the men had touched in years. Each of them had a child or a nephew or niece or young sibling to whom they would send the toys as a gift the next time one of the lucky ones with legal paperwork left New York and headed to whichever part of the world he had left behind. Abdullah’s son now slept with the soft blue bunny the father he’d never met had sent to him via a cabbie from Peshawar.

       But if he told Kim Burton this she might think he was a thief – all of them, thieves – stealing fallen cargo.

       ‘Your English,’ Kim said, after a short silence. ‘It’s very good. Where did you learn?’

       ‘When I first arrived in America I only knew what I remembered from Raza’s classes. But my first week in Jersey City I went to the mosque there and asked the Imam to tell me where I could learn English. And he found a retired teacher, from Afghanistan, who said it would be his farz – you understand the word? No? It means religious obligation. It’s a very important word to us. He said it was his farz to teach a mujahideen. Not everyone forgot. What we had done, for Afghanistan, for the world. Not everyone forgot.’

       ‘I can’t really imagine what it was like,’ Kim said, carefully, mentally testing her own sentences before she spoke them for anything that might give offence. ‘All those years of fighting the Soviets.’

       ‘No. No one can. War is like disease. Until you’ve had it, you don’t know it. But no. That’s a bad comparison. At least with disease everyone thinks it might happen to them one day. You have a pain here, swelling there, a cold which stays and stays. You start to think maybe this is something really bad. But war – countries like yours they always fight wars, but always somewhere else. The disease always happens somewhere else. It’s why you fight more wars than anyone else; because you understand war least of all. You need to understand it better.’

       In the silence of the SUV, with the heating on a fraction too high, she realised just how uncomfortable he was making her feel when she found herself unwilling to retort: ‘So what you’re saying is . . . the way to end wars is to have everyone fight them?’

       But why should she feel uncomfortable? She was the one making all the effort. Abdullah seemed to feel he owed her nothing. This morning when she met him at the street corner he and Hiroko had picked the evening before he had thanked her, very politely, and insisted that he would stay hidden under blankets as long as they were in America; if the car were searched at the border he would say he climbed into the back at a service station on I-87 when he discovered the SUV unlocked. But beyond that he had offered nothing, hadn’t even acknowledged she was breaking her nation’s laws for someone whose innocence she had no reason to take for granted.

       The snow from his jacket had melted into a stain of water, which he was attempting to dry, very carefully, with a handkerchief. What reason was there to believe the story his brother told Raza? How did they know the FBI knocked on his door for no reason except that he was an Afghan? How did they know he had run for no reason except panic about his migration status? That he was an Afghan didn’t make him a liar or a terrorist, of course not; but wasn’t it just as absurd – condescending almost – to assume that because an Afghan he couldn’t be a liar or a terrorist? If his story were true he should just have gone to the FBI. No matter how bad things had become in the name of security no one – no one – was going to be detained indefinitely for just being an illegal migrant worker. Come on! New York would shut down if that become a crime anyone cared about. And if the FBI did turn him over to the INS, what of it? He’d be deported. To Afghanistan. In the comfort of a plane!

       She cracked open the window, and let the racing wind whistle through, though Abdullah huddled into his coat and put his hands over his ears – whether to cut off the sound or the cold she didn’t know.

       It had all happened so fast. Less than ten hours between the time she met him and the time they left the city.

       ‘What’s the point of waiting?’ Hiroko had said when Kim queried the need for such haste. ‘The FBI’s already been to the garage from where he leases the cab, and to the home of the man who takes the cab on its night shift to ask if they know where he is. This afternoon he called this person in Canada who’s arranging things to say he’ll meet him tomorrow, so tomorrow he’s going. I told you, I’ll take him.’

       Hiroko made everything seem inevitable – this journey, the timing of it, his innocence. And so Kim had gone against everything in her training, hadn’t even considered the points of stress under which Abdullah’s story might buckle, and had simply curled up in her bed and fallen asleep as soon as Hiroko had agreed to let her drive the car. The truth, she now realised, was that she was so busy looking at ways of keeping Hiroko from smuggling an Afghan across the border that no other threats had been visible.

       ‘Hiroko’s an amazing woman, isn’t she?’ Kim said, rolling up the window, trying one last time to establish common ground.

       ‘Raza has a place in heaven because of her,’ Abdullah replied. ‘Imagine knowing your whole life you have a place in heaven.’

       ‘I don’t understand.’

       ‘She converted to Islam. The one who converts another is guaranteed a place in heaven for himself and his children and grandchildren and so on down for seven generations. I think it’s wrong only to honour Raza’s father – the man who did the converting. The convert should also be honoured. It’s because of Raza’s mother also – not only his father – that he’s going to heaven. And his children and grandchildren after him. Even martyrs who die in jihad can’t do so much for their family. It’s written in the Quran.’

       ‘Have you read the Quran?’

       ‘Of course I have.’

       ‘Have you read it in any language you understand?’ Suddenly the traffic seemed to have thickened; a reassuring number of people were driving alongside, and no fear of giving offence could possibly match her indignation at listening to Hiroko being reduced to a launch pad for her husband and son’s journey to a paradise in which she didn’t appear to have secured a place for herself in this Afghan’s mad system of belief.

       ‘I understand Islam,’ he said, tensing.

       ‘I’ll take that to mean no. I’ve read it – in English. Believe me, the Quran says nothing of the sort. And frankly, what kind of heaven is heaven if you can find shortcuts into it? Seven generations!’

       ‘Please do not speak this way.’

       ‘Tell me one thing. One thing.’ Unexpectedly, such a rage within her, overpowering everything. ‘If an Afghan dies in the act of killing infidels in his country does he go straight to heaven?’

       ‘If the people he kills come as invaders or occupiers, yes. He is shaheed. Martyr.’

       How slowly, unwillingly, her fist had opened to drop the first clod of earth on to Harry’s coffin. It was the moment when her heart truly understood that all the imagined tomorrows of their relationship – Delhi, conversations without recrimination, days of hearing the other’s stories in full – would never come. Because of just one man with a gun. She had always thought it would take so much more than that to bring Harry down. But it was just one Afghan with a gun who never stopped to think of Harry Burton as anything but an infidel invader whose death opened up a path to Paradise.

       ‘He is a murderer. And your heaven is an abomination.’

       ‘We should not speak any more.’

       ‘No, we should not.’

       There was not another word between them – the tension almost suffocating – until she pulled into the parking lot of the fast-food restaurant. But as he opened the car door to leave he said something in Arabic in which she only caught the word ‘Allah’ and followed it up with, ‘I won’t forget what you’ve done.’

       What had she done? She watched him walk across the parking lot, his stride that of a man walking into freedom, a family with two children entering the restaurant behind him.