The Mountain Shadow (46 page)

‘I’m not doing an aphorism contest,’ she said, frowning a smile and sitting down beside me.

‘We are the art, that sees us as art.’

‘No way,’ she said. ‘Keep your lines to yourself.’

‘Fanaticism means that if you’re not against me, you’re against me.’

‘I could report you for aphorism harassment, do you know that?’

‘Honour is the art of being humble,’ I replied, deadpan.

We were speaking softly, but our eyes were sharp.

‘Okay,’ she whispered, ‘you’re on. My turn?’

‘Of course it’s your turn. I’m already three up on you.’

‘Every goodbye is a dress rehearsal for the last goodbye,’ she said.

‘Not bad. Hello can lie, sometimes, but goodbye always tells the truth.’

‘Fiction is fact, made stranger. The truth about anything is a lie about something else. Come on, step it up, Shantaram.’

‘What’s the rush? There’s plenty more where they came from.’

‘You got somethin’ or not?’

‘Oh, I see, it’s to throw me off, and put me off my game. Okay, tough girl, here we go. Inspiration is the grace of peace. Truth is the warden in the prison of the soul. Slavery can’t be unchained from the system: slavery
is
the system.’

‘Truth is the shovel,’ she fired back. ‘Your mission is the hole.’

I laughed.

‘
Every
fragment is the whole entire,’ Karla said, firing at will.

‘The whole cannot be divided,’ I said, ‘without a tyranny of parts.’

‘Tyranny is privilege, unrestrained.’

‘We’re privileged by Fate,’ I said, ‘because we’re damned by Fate.’

‘Fate,’ she grinned. ‘One of my favourites. Fate plays poker, and only wins by bluffing. Fate is the magician, and Time is the trick. Fate is the spider, and Time is the web. Shall I go on?’

‘Dark funny,’ I said, happier than I’d been in a while. ‘Nice. Try this – all men become their fathers, but only when they’re not looking.’

She laughed. I don’t know where Karla was, but I was with her, at last, in a thing we both loved, and she was my heaven.

‘The truth is a bully we all pretend to like.’

‘That’s on old one!’ I protested.

‘But a good one, and worth a second run. Whaddaya got?’

‘Fear is the friend who warns you,’ I offered.

‘Loneliness is the friend who tells you to get out more,’ she countered. ‘Come on, let’s move it along here.’

‘There’s no country too unjust, too corrupt, or too inept to afford itself a stirring national anthem.’

‘Big political,’ she smiled. ‘I like it. Try this on for size – tyranny is fear, in human form.’

I laughed.

‘Music is death, made sublime.’

‘Grief is ghost empathy,’ she hit back quickly.

‘Damn!’

‘You give up?’

‘No way. The way to love, is to love the way.’

‘Koans,’ she said. ‘Grasping at straws, Shantaram. No problem. I’m always ready to give love a kick in the ass. How about this – love is a mountain that kills you, every time you climb it.’

‘Courage –’

‘Courage defines us. Anyone who doesn’t give up, and that’s just about everybody, is a man or woman of courage. Stop with the courage, already.’

‘Happiness is –’

‘Happiness is the hyperactive child of contentment.’

‘Justice means –’

‘Justice, like love and power, is measured in mercies.’

‘War –’

‘All wars are culture wars, and all cultures are written on the bodies of women.’

‘Life –’

‘If you’re not living for something, you’re dying for nothing!’ she parried, her forefinger on my chest.

‘Damn.’

‘Damn,
what
?’

‘Damn . . . you got . . . better, girl.’

‘So, you’re saying I won?’

‘I’m saying . . . you got . . . a lot better.’

‘And I
won
, right? Because I can do this all day long, you know.’

She was serious, her eyes filled with tiger-light.

‘I love you,’ I said.

She looked away. After a time she spoke to the fire.

‘You still haven’t answered my question. What are you doing here?’

We’d been husky-whispering in the contest, trying not to wake the others. The sky was dark, but a ridge of dawn the colour of faded leaves hovered over the distant, cloudy horizon.

‘Oh, wait a minute,’ I frowned, realising at last. ‘You think I came up here, because
you’re
here? You think I set this up?’

‘Did you?’

‘Would you want me to?’

She turned the half-profile on me, that sadder, softer eye searching my face as if she was reading a map. Red-yellow fire shadows played with her features: firelight writing faith and hope on her face, as fire does on every human face, because we’re creatures of fire.

I looked away.

‘I had no idea you were here,’ I said. ‘It was Abdullah’s idea.’

She laughed softly. Was she disappointed, or relieved? I couldn’t tell.

‘What about you?’ I asked, throwing a few sticks on the fire. ‘You didn’t suddenly get religion. Say it ain’t so.’

‘I bring Idriss hash,’ she said. ‘He’s got a taste for Kashmiri.’

It was my turn to laugh.

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘About . . . a year.’

She was dreaming something, looking out at the dawning forest.

‘What’s he like?’

She looked at me again.

‘He’s . . . authentic. You’ll meet him later.’

‘How did
you
meet him?’

‘I didn’t come up here to meet him. I came to meet Khaled. He’s the one who told me that Idriss was here.’

‘Khaled? Which Khaled?’

‘Your Khaled,’ she said softly. ‘
Our
Khaled.’

‘He’s alive?’

‘Very much so.’

‘
Alhamdulillah.
And he’s up here?’

‘I’d pay good money to see Khaled up here. No, he’s got an ashram, down in the valley.’

The hard-fisted, uncompromising Palestinian had been a member of the Khader Council. He’d been with us on the smuggling run into Afghanistan. He killed a man, a close friend, because the friend endangered us all, and then he walked alone and unarmed into the snow.

I’d been a friend, a close friend, but I’d heard nothing of Khaled’s return to the city, or anything about an ashram.

‘An ashram?’

‘Yeah,’ she sighed.

Her face and manner had changed. She seemed to be bored.

‘What kind of ashram?’

‘The profitable kind,’ she said. ‘It has a majestic menu.
That
, you’ve got to give him. Meditation rooms, yoga, massage, aromatherapies and chanting. They chant a lot. It’s like they never heard of funk.’

‘And it’s at the base of
this
mountain?’

‘At the start of the valley, on the west side.’

She frowned a yawn at me.

‘Abdullah goes there all the time,’ she said. ‘Didn’t he talk to you about it?’

Something staggered inside me. I was glad to know that Khaled was alive and well, but the cherished friendship felt betrayed, and my heart stumbled.

‘It can’t be true.’

‘The truth comes in two kinds,’ she laughed gently. ‘The one you want to hear, and the one you should.’

‘Don’t start that again.’

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Sucker punch. Couldn’t resist it.’

I was suddenly angry. Maybe it was that sense of betrayal. Maybe it was old crying, finally forcing its way past the shield of softness, gleaming in her kinder eye.

‘Do you love Ranjit?’

She looked at me, both eyes, soft and hard, staring into mine.

‘I thought I
admired
him, once upon a time,’ she said, ‘not that it’s any of your business.’

‘And you don’t admire me?’

‘Why would you ask that?’

‘Are you afraid to tell me what you think?’

‘Of course not,’ she said evenly. ‘I’m wondering why you don’t already
know
what I think of you.’

‘I don’t know what that means, so how about you just answer my question?’

‘Mine first. Why do you want to know? Is it disappointment in yourself, or jealousy of him?’

‘You know, the thing about disappointment, Karla, is that it never lets you down. But it’s not about that. I want to know what you think, because it matters to me.’

‘Okay, you asked for it. No, I don’t admire you. Not today.’

We were silent for a while.

‘You know what I’m talking about,’ she said at last.

‘I don’t, actually.’

I frowned again and she laughed: the little laugh that bubbles up from an in-joke.

‘Look at your face,’ she said. ‘What happened to you? Fell off your pride again, right?’

‘Happily, the fall’s not too far.’

She laughed again, but it quickly became a frown.

‘Can you even explain it? Why you’ve been fighting? Why a fight always finds you?’

Of course I couldn’t. Being kidnapped and strapped to a banana lounge by the Scorpion gang: how could I explain that? I didn’t understand it myself, not any of it, not even Concannon. Especially not Concannon. I didn’t know, then, that I was standing on a tattered corner of a bloody carpet that would soon cover most of the world.

‘Who says I
have
to explain it?’

‘Can you?’ she repeated.

‘Can
you
explain the things you did to us back then, Karla?’

She flinched.

‘Don’t hold back, Karla.’

‘Maybe I should chase to the cut, so to speak, and
tell
you the answer.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Sure you’ve got the stomach for it?’

‘Sure.’

‘Okay then, the –’

‘No, wait!’

‘Wait what?’

‘My conversation sub-routine is crying out for that coffee.’

‘You’re kidding, right?’

‘No, I’m grievously coffee-deprived. That’s how you kicked my ass.’

‘So I
did
win?’

‘You won. Can I have the coffee now?’

I used my sleeve to snatch the pot from the fire and pour some coffee into a chipped mug. I offered it to Karla, but she wrinkled her lip in a proscenium arch of disgust.

‘I’m reading a
no
,’ I guessed.

‘How’s that magic act workin’ out? Drink the damn coffee, yaar.’

I sipped at the coffee. It was too strong and too sweet and too bitter, all at the same time. Perfect.

‘Okay, good,’ I croaked, coffee shivering hello. ‘I’m good.’

‘The –’

‘No, wait!’

I found a joint.

‘Okay,’ I said, puffing it alight. ‘I’m good. Lemme have it.’

‘Sure you don’t need a manicure, or a massage?’ Karla growled.

‘I’m so good, now. Smack me around all you like, Karla.’

‘Okay, here goes. The marks on your face, and all the scars on your body, are like graffiti, scrawled by your own delinquent talent.’

‘Not bad.’

‘I’m not finished. Your heart’s a tenant, in the broken-down tenement of your life.’

‘Anything else?’

‘The slumlord’s coming to collect the rent, Lin,’ she said, a little more softly. ‘Soon.’

I knew her well enough to know that she’d written and rehearsed those lines. I’d seen her journals, filled with notes for the clever things she said. Rehearsed or not, she was right.

‘Karla, look –’

‘You’re playing Russian roulette with Fate,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘And your money’s on Fate? Is that what this is about?’

‘Fate loads the gun. Fate loads every gun in the world.’

‘Anything else?’

‘While you do this,’ she said, even more softly, ‘you’re only breaking things.’

It was just true enough to hurt, no matter how softly she said it.

‘You know, if you keep coming on to me like this . . . ’

‘You got funnier,’ she said, laughing a little.