Excerpt of Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie
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P R O L O G U E
Once he is in the cell they unshackle him and instruct him to strip. He
takes off the grey winter coat with brisk efficiency and then - as they
watch, arms folded - his movements slow, fear turning his fingers
clumsy on belt buckle, shirt buttons.
They wait until he is completely naked before they gather up his
clothes and leave. When he is dressed again, he suspects, he will be
wearing an orange jumpsuit.
The cold gleam of the steel bench makes his body shrivel. As long
as it’s possible, he’ll stand.
How did it come to this, he wonders.
The Yet Unknowing World
nagasaki, 9 august 1945
Later, the one who survives will remember that day as grey, but on
the morning of 9 August itself both the man from Berlin, Konrad
Weiss, and the schoolteacher, Hiroko Tanaka, step out of their
houses and notice the perfect blueness of the sky, into which white
smoke blooms from the chimneys of the munitions factories.
Konrad cannot see the chimneys themselves from his home in
Minamiyamate, but for months now his thoughts have frequently wandered
to the factory where Hiroko Tanaka spends her days measuring
the thickness of steel with micrometers, images of classrooms swooping
into her thoughts the way memories of flight might enter the minds
of broken- winged birds. That morning, though, as Konrad slides open
the doors that form the front and back of his small wooden caretaker’s
house and looks in the direction of the smoke he makes no attempt
to imagine the scene unfolding wearily on the factory floor. Hiroko has
a day off - a holiday, her supervisor called it, though everyone in the
factory knows there is no steel left to mea sure. And still so many
people in Nagasaki continue to think Japan will win the war. Konrad
imagines conscripts sent out at night to net the clouds and release
them in the morning through factory chimneys to create the illusion
of industry.
He steps on to the back porch of the house. Green and brown leaves
are scattered across the grass of the large property, as though the area
is a battlefield in which the soldiers of warring armies have lain down,
caring for nothing in death but proximity. He looks up the slope towards
Azalea Manor; in the weeks since the Kagawas departed, taking
their house hold staff with them, everything has started to look rundown.
One of the window shutters is partly ajar; when the wind picks
up it takes to banging against the sill. He should secure the shutter, he
knows, but it comforts him to have some sound of activity issuing from
the house.
Azalea Manor. In ’38 when he stepped for the first time through its
sliding doors into a grand room of marble floor and Venetian fireplace
it was the photographs along the wall that had captured his attention
rather than the mad mixture of Japanese and European architectural
styles: all taken in the grounds of Azalea Manor while some party was
in progress, Europeans and Japanese mixing uncomplicatedly. He had
believed the promise of the photographs and felt unaccustomedly
grateful to his English brother-in-law James Burton who had told him
weeks earlier that he was no longer welcome at the Burton home in
Delhi with the words, “There’s a property in Nagasaki. Belonged to
George - an eccentric bachelor uncle of mine who died there a few
months ago. Some Jap keeps sending me telegrams asking what’s to be
done with it. Why don’t you live there for a while? As long as you
like.” Konrad knew nothing about Nagasaki - except, to its credit, that
it was not Europe and it was not where James and Ilse lived - and
when he sailed into the harbour of the purple- roofed city laid out like
an amphitheatre he felt he was entering a world of enchantment. Seven
years later much of the enchantment remains - the glassy loveliness of
frost flowers in winter, seas of blue azaleas in summer, the graceful elegance
of the Euro- Japanese buildings along the seafront - but war
fractures every view. Or closes off the view completely. Those who go
walking in the hills have been warned against looking down towards
the shipyard where the battleship Musashi is being built under such
strict secrecy that heavy curtains have been constructed to block its
view from all passers-by.
Excerpted from Burnt Shadows
by Kamila Shamsie. Copyright © 2009 by Kamila Shamsie. Excerpted by
permission of Picador, a division of Macmillan. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted
without permission in writing from the publisher.
