Bruno said, ‘Yes, that’s sad. But perhaps she also understood what made him who he was. Many lives were lost on Nanga Parbat before Buhl climbed it. Sixteen men on a single day in 1937. Rainer would have known all that, but still he went. Perhaps he needed to live and to risk death in that way, because extreme risk was in the end the only reality he could subscribe to. Maybe the gravity of mountains and the weightlessness of magical illusion were always opposing within him. He probably hid the compulsion even from the people he loved. He must have been a fascinating character. Do you think your grandmother loved him?’
‘Yes, I do. And, yes, I think you’re probably right.’
The shawl, the photograph, the lock of hair.
The quirks of history that linked her to Bruno Becker, the vertiginous face of the mountain confronting them – all these things made a pattern that seemed, in that moment, part of a bigger and only partly intelligible design.
This realisation made Mair feel happy in a profound way that seemed entirely new to her.
‘Now it’s time to talk about Zahra,’ she said.
Bruno stood up and shook breadcrumbs off his lap. Two Alpine choughs greedily descended on them.
‘Later,’ he said, the adept storyteller again. ‘Can you remember the mountain names? What’s that one?’ He pointed at a vast tumble of rock and snow.
‘Um, is it the Wetterhorn?’
‘Good,’ he said.
They ate dinner back at the cabin, and afterwards Bruno lit the oil lamps. They were sitting inside with the door closed
because clouds had drifted across the sky and a chill wind rolled down off the glacier. He took another book off the shelf and opened it. With her head bent close to his, Mair saw that it was a more modern photograph album with sticky plastic interleaving the pages. Some of the pictures were even in fading colour.
‘This is Zahra.’
A solemn little girl with dark brown hair worn in two looped plaits, lined up with a row of other children in school dresses. Her skin was darker than her companions’, but not distinctly so.
‘And here.’ Bruno pointed.
She was a teenager in this one, short-haired, dressed in jeans and a blue-checked shirt. Her face was more clearly visible and Mair studied it for any resemblance to Caroline Bowen. She could see none at all. Zahra had aquiline features and dark eyebrows that almost met at the bridge of her nose.
‘There’s only one more. Mine wasn’t a family for photographing every rite of passage.’
Zahra stood near the top of a flight of stone steps with Prita on the one above her. Their heads were level. Prita’s hair was greying now, centre-parted and drawn loosely back. Zahra was perhaps twenty, solemn and formal in a dark skirt and jacket. Even in their Western clothes, Mair thought, they looked distinctly Kashmiri. Their features were quite different but they could have been taken for biological mother and daughter because of something poised about the way they looked into the camera, heads up and gaze unwavering. She reflected that the two of them must have been closer than many natural mothers and daughters because of their difference from their Swiss friends and neighbours.
Bruno answered an unspoken question. ‘That must have been taken when Zahra was at university. Prita and she always had an understanding that once Zahra had finished her education they would go back to Kashmir.’
He collected his two glasses from the shelf and poured
schnapps, slid one across the table to Mair. ‘My father told me that they often joked about it together. Before the maharajah finally acceded to India, he used to claim that he wanted Kashmir to be a sort of Asian Switzerland. Independent, neutral, on friendly terms with all its neighbours. Prita and Zahra would say that Maharajah Hari Singh originally had the right idea, at least. They knew that much from the real Switzerland.’
‘So they went back?’
‘Yes, not long after that picture. It was in the mid-seventies, before the really bad times of the insurgency, but you more or less know what they found.’
Mair did.
‘Srinagar became a dangerous place. They settled eventually in Delhi. Zahra taught European languages at one of the universities.’
‘Did she marry?’
Bruno gave one of his rare smiles, and drained his schnapps. ‘Yes. She had three boys. I believe one is a pilot, one is a software designer, one is an architect.’
Mair beamed with satisfaction. ‘How wonderful.’
‘It is, rather. I’d like very much to have been able to visit her in Delhi.’
The yellow light of the lamp hollowed darker shadows out of Bruno’s face. In the silence that followed they listened to the rising wind and the old cabin creaking like a ship at sea. Bruno’s eyes were on the photograph of Lotus with her white hair blown into a cloud around her head. ‘In a few more weeks, it will be a whole year since she died.’
As gently as she could, she asked, ‘Will you be here on your own?’
‘I don’t think I shall be fit company for anyone else.’
‘Bruno …’
‘I know. She’s dead and she won’t come back, and those of us who are left behind have to pick up and carry on without her. I’m doing it, Mair. But it takes time and an effort of will.’ His head dropped suddenly into his hands and he clawed his
fingers through his hair. With his face hidden he said, in a muffled voice made jagged by pain, ‘It takes so much effort. To wake, to exist for another day, to sleep – or try to. Over and over again, living while all the time Lotus is
dead
.’
She got up from her seat and went to him. This time she couldn’t stop herself. She put her hands on his bowed shoulders. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you to do anything any differently. I wouldn’t have the cheek, when you’re already braver than it seems possible to be. I was going to say that if you wanted someone to stay with you, even nearby, I’ll be here. I was at Lamayuru. I saw how it happened. There would be nothing to explain.’
She had meant it in the sense that there would be no need to describe the sequence of those events to someone who had not witnessed them, but he flinched under her hands.
‘She was so innocent and trusting and yet we couldn’t keep her safe. I can never explain that away.’
‘There’s no explanation to be made. Not about what happened, or how. It was a terrible accident.’
He was choking now with sobs. Mair’s face was wet too. She cradled his head against her ribs and waited as he wept.
In the end he raised his head and she immediately released her hold. Her hands retained the memory of his skull shape and the thickness of his hair. She went back to her seat and, after a last look at Prita and Zahra, she closed the photograph album.
‘I could hear your heart beating,’ Bruno said. There was an odd, disbelieving glimmer in his face that she read as hope. In a voice so low that she could barely hear the words, he added, ‘Another human heart.’
He reached for the bottle and refilled their glasses. ‘Let’s talk,’ he said. ‘Can we do that? I’m surprised to realise it but I’ve enjoyed today. I’d forgotten what it’s like to talk and have someone listen, taking in what you say and measuring it up and shaping an answer in a voice different from your own, instead of the monologue going on and on in your own head.
I’ve been alone too long. I don’t want to talk about Lo any more, though. I will do eventually, if you’ll listen, but I’m not ready yet. Is that all right, Mair?’
His words were falling over each other now, all the hesitancy obliterated.
‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘That’s quite all right. You could tell me some more about Prita and Zahra, maybe. Were they very close?’
He listened to the wind for a few seconds. Then he settled back in his seat, ready for the story. Mair found that she breathed more easily.
‘Yes, they were. There were a few disagreements, I think. Zahra was my father’s generation but she was quite modern in her outlook, and Prita was very traditional. But by the time I was old enough to notice anything, they were devoted to each other. They came back here two or three times while I was growing up to visit my father and their other friends. Prita used to give me Indian sweets in amazing colours, and I thought that was very exotic. Zahra taught me some words of Urdu.’
‘Did she know about her background?’
‘Oh, yes, Prita never concealed anything. Zahra knew that she was an orphan adopted from the mission in Srinagar.’
‘My grandfather’s mission,’ Mair put in.
They looked at each other across the table. The two halves of the story that they held between them fitted together as neatly as two nutshells enclosing a single kernel.
‘Prita was a widow whose own son had died at about the same age as Zahra was when they arrived in Europe. Prita herself was legally married to Rainer so, of course, as a wife and then a presumed widow once more she was able to come to Switzerland and inherit his estate. Zahra arrived with her, somehow or other, probably as the result of one of Rainer’s magical flourishes aimed at concealing an illegitimate birth. That is, if all your theories are correct. Eventually Zahra became a Swiss national too. As far as we were all concerned, all of us who knew them, they were a mother and her daughter.’
Bruno paused. He added, in a lower voice, ‘I’m quite certain that to one another they were mother and daughter too.’
Mair had the same thought. Yet she believed – no, she
knew
– that Zahra’s natural mother was still alive, and living in a quiet house in a suburb of Srinagar. Should she bring them together, after so long? Was it right to intervene in other people’s lives and play with their histories?
The two halves lay in her hands now, and Bruno’s.
She had no proof: only a theory, a sheaf of letters, a lock of hair and a
kani
shawl. And a man sitting opposite her who had lost his daughter, just as Caroline Bowen believed she had lost hers. The agony of that loss was plain to see. Sixty-odd years might have diminished it for Caroline, but she had spent perhaps as much as half of that time in a lunatic asylum.
Mair sat upright. There was no doubt in her mind that the secret wasn’t hers to keep, now that she had unravelled it. ‘I’m going to go back to India to see them both,’ she said, ‘if you will give me Zahra’s address.’
Bruno stared at the lamp flame and said nothing.
Mair waited.
Then she added softly, ‘Or perhaps you could come with me and we could visit Zahra together. That was the plan, wasn’t it?’
He did look at her now, remembering.
She saw something else in his face, a contraction of the eye muscles and tightening around his mouth, and she knew that it was fear.
Bruno was afraid to leave his shell, the safety of his cabin in the mountains, and venture out into the world again.
He shook his head. ‘I would hold you back,’ he said oddly.
‘No,’ she contradicted. ‘I don’t think so. The history isn’t all mine, is it? Half of it is yours to tell.’
‘I don’t know.’
But he did: she could see that in his face too. Outside concerns were intruding into the isolation of grief.
In silence he battled with himself as rain drummed on the
cabin roof. Mair rinsed the glasses in the sink, put the bottle back on the shelf, and climbed the ladder to her bedroom while he still sat at the table. She was in bed, lying in darkness when his head and shoulders framed themselves in the doorway. ‘All right. I’ll come to India with you.’
He closed the door on her and the latch clicked.
The house was in a leafy street in south Delhi, secluded behind rendered walls painted pale mustard-yellow. They waited at black metal gates as Bruno spoke into an entryphone.
They had arrived separately the night before, Mair from London and Bruno from Zürich, to meet at the anonymous hotel near the airport where they had arranged to stay. Eating dinner in the hotel’s gloomy coffee shop, they had been awkward with each other after the ease of the cabin in Switzerland. Now that they were finally in India they were unsure what their mission really was, and it seemed too late to be agreeing on what they would say to Zahra or how they might say it. They made small-talk and went straight to their rooms afterwards.
Jetlagged and unable to sleep, Mair had slid open the balcony door and stepped out into the night. There wasn’t even a shiver of movement in the scalding air, and the traffic noise from beyond the hotel garden was as loud at three a.m. as at midday. The orangey ribbons of elevated motorways snaked in all directions, glimmering with cars and trucks, and in their shelter were the awnings and refuse of colonies of destitute people. In the ten months she had been away she had forgotten the din, the surging motion and the brutal contrasts of India.
Was this all a mistake? Mair wondered. Should she have left history where it lay?
She shook herself.
A voice like the buzz of a grasshopper floated out of the entryphone grille and the left-hand gate swung open. They walked along a path between oleander bushes with the patter of a water sprinkler close at hand. A door opened at the top of some shallow steps and a small elderly woman stood there. She was light-skinned and she had Kashmiri features, but this was not Zahra. ‘Mrs Dasgupta says please to come in.’
They followed her into a wide hallway, the polished floor laid with Kashmir rugs.
‘I am Farida,’ the woman said. ‘Come this way.’
A set of doors led to a room full of dark carved furniture, kept cool and dim by lowered blinds. A stately figure came to greet them, her arms outstretched to envelop Bruno. She had styled hair that was more grey than dark, she was plump, dressed in a loose silk shirt and wide trousers, and spectacles hung from a cord round her neck.
‘You are here,’ she cried. ‘Come, let me look at you.’
Mair stood aside as they hugged each other and spoke rapidly in Swiss-German. Bruno handed over the flowers and gifts they had brought with them, and Zahra exclaimed and remonstrated. Mair looked at the pierced china baskets filled with sweets, the coloured glass ornaments, teapots, and numerous framed photographs of boys and young men in variations of uniform, teamsports clothing or academic dress. She smiled to herself. This was a family home. Zahra’s family home.