Myrtle peered into the box crib, turning back a few layers of blue woollens. ‘My God,’ she breathed in Nerys’s ear. ‘It’s Ravi Singh.’ They both hovered over the tiny baby, gazing at her as if she were a miracle.
After resting for a week, Caroline made the journey with Myrtle back to the
Garden of Eden
where, as far as Srinagar knew or cared, she was still recovering from her bout of fever. She left her daughter in Nerys’s care, and both her friends could see that there was more exhausted relief than anguish in the separation. She was unnaturally quiet, except for sudden bouts of weeping that she seemed unable to control, but in Srinagar her distress could be put down to anxiety for Ralph Bowen, whose name had been listed among hundreds of others as a prisoner of war.
Nerys resumed her small routines of songs and word games with the village children, broken up by afternoons of playing with Zahra and her ever-faithful attendant, Farida. It was a lucky accident that the baby’s arrival had broken through the girl’s shell of isolation, she thought. Farida even began to play with the other children, although she darted away every two or three minutes to make sure that the baby was sleeping or happily watching the patterns woven by the chinar branches
over her head. She came every morning now, as reliably as Faisal, to take her breakfast with Nerys.
Nerys began to see how Zahra might even be absorbed into the village. Babies and children didn’t seem to require the individual attention of their mothers – they were passed around between grandmothers, aunts and siblings, whoever happened to be at hand. Perhaps, she thought, with Myrtle, Caroline and herself to provide the money, there could be a life for Zahra in Kanihama. At least for her early years. And after that, when the end of the war came, there would be orphans, and displaced families, and children who would need protection in countless different ways. Who could predict what might happen to this particular orphan?
That was how Nerys reasoned, with even more secret hope and longing now that Zahra was born.
At the beginning of April, when buds had begun to swell on the thorn bushes and chinar twigs, and the fields and vegetable patches were green with new shoots, Nerys heard the sound of another car approaching. In her anxiety for Rainer she had conjured the same sound a hundred times, only to be as regularly disappointed, but now, once she let herself listen properly, it was unmistakable. She dropped the saucepan she was holding and ran outside.
It was the truck, driven by Rainer. The door swung open but he seemed unable to climb out.
She cried, ‘What’s happened? You’re hurt. Let me help you.’
His face contorted. ‘Not that side. Come round here. If I could lean on you …’
With his weight supported on her shoulder they shuffled to the house and she helped him to the chair by the stove. His face was haggard and his torso seemed twisted, like a tree struck by lightning.
‘Where’s Caroline?’
So wherever Rainer had come from, it was not the city.
She said quickly, ‘In Srinagar, with Myrtle. She’s recovering, and the baby is here. It’s a girl.’
Rainer passed his tongue over parched lips. ‘I am so sorry,’ he murmured, ‘to have let you down.’
She put her cheek to his. ‘You didn’t. Drink some of this.’
She had heated up a cupful of the midwife’s latest brew. She still didn’t know what the mixture contained, but she was impressed by its restorative effects. Rainer tasted and spat. ‘Dear God. What’s this poison?’
She relaxed a little. ‘Rainer, what’s happened to you?’
He took her hand and held it against him. After a moment he said, ‘I was lucky. I didn’t quite walk away, but I survived. Some others didn’t.’
Nerys sat down beside him on the stool usually occupied by Faisal or Farida. His hand was badly scabbed and at the edges the renewed skin was puckered as if it had been burnt. To be bombarded with questions wasn’t what he needed, she thought. He would tell her when he was ready.
He wasn’t ready until he had slept for two hours. Nerys helped him to undress before he lay down. Under the tunic that he was wearing over loose trousers, his arm and shoulder and the upper part of his chest were covered with stained, yellow-soaked burn dressings.
‘Would you like me to change these for you?’ she asked matter-of-factly.
‘Later,’ he said. As soon as his eyes closed he fell asleep.
Nerys left him in her bed and went outside to play catch and hide-and-seek with the children. The piercing mountain air was scented with woodsmoke and animal dung, just as it had been on the afternoon when Rainer had first brought her here, and now in the sheltered places the sun felt hot on her shoulders.
Later she tiptoed inside and began to prepare some food, but when she turned to look at him she realised that his eyes were open and resting on her.
‘Tell me I’m not dreaming,’ he said.
‘You’re not, unless I’m dreaming the same thing.’
He reached out his good arm. ‘Come here.’
Carefully, so as not to jostle him, she lay down in the narrow space. He put his lips against her forehead. ‘That’s better.’
Her heart was thumping so hard, she wondered if he could feel it against his scarred ribs.
At last, he began. ‘I got myself out of a military clearing hospital. I’m only a civilian, and one with dubious national status at that, so they didn’t try too hard to hang on to me. I managed to get on a flight to Delhi, and I’d left the truck with a friend of mine there so I was able to pick it up and drive straight here.’
She could see what this effort had cost him.
‘All the time I was lying there I was thinking that I’d promised to take Caroline and you to Baramulla. If I could have got word to you, I would have done.’
She smiled at him. ‘I knew that. I admit that I was worried when you didn’t come, but the anticipation was much worse than the reality. Babies are born all the time in Kanihama, you know.’
‘I am sure you were magnificent. As always.’
‘Not at all.’ Nerys laughed. ‘The village midwife was the heroine. That was her special healing potion you were drinking.’
‘I hope it will work,’ he said, with a touch of grimness.
She waited.
‘So, I did my conjuring trick. That’s all it was, just an illusion on a grand scale. The British were reluctant to give me what I needed at first, because it was a top-secret mission and I had no security clearance. As far as the brass are concerned, I’m German-sounding enough to be an enemy agent. But they had to let me work it in the end, because there was no one else with the skill to do what they needed.’
It was good, Nerys thought, to hear the old Rainer talking.
‘As you know, I had to move the airstrip so the Japs would bomb the wrong place. Against a dense jungle backdrop it’s very difficult to judge scale from the air, especially at night, so on a similar site two miles up the coast we cleared an area one third the size of the actual landing area and constructed a
scaled-down version of the real thing. I was given a team of British sappers. We built and painted balsa-wood planes, huts, storage dumps, dummy fuel stores, everything. I flew over it in a reconnaissance plane, just a few hundred feet up, and it was superb. The real site was invisible under camouflage netting, the other looked identical. Of course, part of the mission was to convince the Japs that they’d taken out the fuel dumps as well as the planes. Fuel’s crucial in any battle. If the enemy thinks you’ve got none when you have plenty, that’s a tactical advantage.’
There was a small silence while Nerys considered this. The trick would have involved staging a huge blaze, she thought.
‘We had explosives, enough to create a big bang. We constructed a pyre that would burn well and doused it with fuel. There was a system of detonators that I was controlling, so as soon as there was a direct hit on the dump I could make the whole works explode in flame, just like a cache of aviation fuel going up.’
Rainer paused, searching for words.
‘This took a certain amount of trial and error. Difficult to do, without smoke plumes giving our position away to enemy spotter planes. So we built a kind of tunnel within a tunnel, in which to test the detonator systems. I had two of the sappers inside, setting up the lines.’
He put a hand over his eyes. Then he said in a level voice, ‘Something went wrong. A dropped light, a stray spark. I don’t know. The tunnels caught fire. Within a second, they were ablaze. I went in, but I couldn’t reach the men.’
Nerys imagined the thick, smothering humidity of the remote jungle, the black smoke in an enclosed place, the stench of burning.
‘That happened the day before the operation. I wasn’t there to see it, but when the time came the fake airstrip was lit up in place of the real one and sure enough the Japs came over. I understand that the explosion and burning of the false fuel dumps was most effective.’
He paused, shifting to ease the pain from his burns. ‘I’m glad of that, for the sake of those two men.’
‘Yes,’ was all she could say.
Rainer wiped his mouth with the back of his good hand. ‘You were kind enough to offer to change these dressings? There is a box in the truck.’
She went out again into the sunshine, and saw Farida patiently standing near the door with Zahra swathed in a shawl on her back. Nerys held out a hand and led her into the house.
‘Look, here’s Farida,’ she told Rainer. ‘And this is Zahra.’
He propped himself up. Nerys and Farida turned back the shawl to reveal the baby’s wide dark eyes, olive skin and crest of jet-black hair. Hesitantly, he put a scarred finger to the tiny cheek. ‘Hello,’ he said. Then he looked up and met Nerys’s eyes. ‘I’m glad to see that there are beginnings as well as endings,’ he said.
As she walked to the Ford, Nerys looked up at the mountain-tops. The snow was melting fast, filling the stream that dashed past the dyers’ sheds in an icy flood. Very soon, the high passes would open and the road from Kargil would be clear again.
A startling crash in the undergrowth, then a long rattle of stones rolling downhill made Mair jump. She swung round and glimpsed a goat’s scrawny hindquarters as it dashed away. A second later its stink swept over her and she was instantly transported back to Changthang, where all the weeks of exploration had begun. And here, in the abandoned village, was where her unravelling of the shawl’s history finally ended.
Mehraan’s father’s and grandfather’s families and the other
kani
craftsmen had lived and worked in this huddle of cottages, now little more than broken walls surrendered to the weeds and thorn bushes. In the middle of the rough square stood a gaunt tree trunk, the scorched and splintered wood indicating that it had been struck by lightning. She picked her way past it and stood in the doorway of the biggest house. Looking upwards through the bare rafters she could see a lammergeier riding on the upward draughts of air.
There were a few scraps of abandoned furniture on the earth floor of the house, an old aluminium pot among the mud-brick rubble, the chimney pipe of a cooking stove tilted in one corner. It was like the old mission house in Leh. The people who had lived here were gone, and they were never coming back. The links were broken.
Shivering a little, Mair went outside again and wandered
away to the edge of the village where the river rushed down through a rocky ravine. There were more derelict buildings here, roofs of rusted corrugated iron hanging at dangerous angles, a corner of one sheet creaking in the wind as a counterpoint to the splash of water. Downhill, across a bend in the river, Mair could pick out a red dot. It was the Coca-Cola baseball cap worn by the driver from the Srinagar travel agency, who had brought her up here on a half-day excursion in the inevitable white Toyota.
She sat down on a flat rock and looked over at the remains of Kanihama.
Mehraan’s grandfather, the weaver who had signed his work with a double BB, was dead, his son too, and the villagers had moved elsewhere. Fine shawls were still made in Kashmir, and were bought for weddings and stored as precious currency, or else they went to Delhi and from there to the expensive shops of the West, but they were not woven in this village. This place belonged to the shepherds and their animals.
Abruptly Mair jumped up again. The scent of the wind, the smell of animal dung, even the patches of hardy turf between grey rocks reminded her of home and the old house in Wales. As longing for the valley swept over her, she heard her father’s voice. ‘Had enough of your travels? Come on, come back to us.’
She blinked. He was gone, but what he had said was right. It was time to go home. She wanted to see Hattie and her other friends, her brother and sister.
There was one more visit to make in Srinagar, and after that she was ready to leave. Mair put her hands in the pockets of her coat and began to skip downhill.
‘Here you are again. How jolly,’ Caroline called out, as soon as Aruna showed her into the room.
There was sitar music quietly playing but Aruna switched it off and ostentatiously tidied the handful of CD cases. Caroline’s bandaged leg was still propped up and there was a smell of
antiseptic. She began talking as if no time at all had elapsed since Mair’s first visit.
‘I’m so glad you dropped in. Seeing the shawl again brought it all back, you know, such marvellous memories. They were dear, loyal chums to me, Myrtle and Nerys were. I remember it all perfectly. The
Garden of Eden
. How we used to laugh about that.’
‘Srinagar was like the Garden of Eden?’
Caroline gave a long peal of laughter. ‘No, I mean the houseboat. Myrtle’s – on the lake.’
‘Oh, I see. The names. The one I’m staying in is called
Solomon and Sheba.’
‘What fun. It’s terribly good of you to take time to visit an old crock like me. There must be masses of things you’d rather be doing on your holiday.’
‘No,’ Mair said. ‘Really, there aren’t.’
‘Do have some gin. I’m not supposed to drink, the doctor now tells me. But I can give you some – don’t suppose that will do me any harm, eh? Aruna, where are you?’