The Mountain Shadow

by Gregory David Roberts

‘A good friend would leave him the hell alone, right now,’ she said. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ She fixed me with that look: hunger burning in a tiger’s eyes, staring at prey. I loved it. ‘He’s happy,’ she said quietly. ‘And?’ She glanced at Abdullah, who’d come up to stand beside me. ‘Happy’s hard to find,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve got absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Give me a ten-minute head start,’ she laughed. ‘No, make it fifteen.’ ‘What are you planning?’ She laughed again, and pretty hard. ‘I want to warn Khaled that you’re coming, and give him a chance to escape. You know how important that is, don’t you? A chance to escape?’

‘Well –’ ‘I got fat,’ he said. It wasn’t regretful or ironic. It was a flat statement of fact. ‘Well –’ ‘But you look very fit. What have you been doing, to get all those bruises?

And that’s when I understood the power that comes into us when another man, even if it’s only one other, bends his knee in devotion. I understood that men sell the power of that dream to women, every time they propose.’

‘What the fuck, Khaled?’ I snapped, but he put his finger to his lips, silencing me. ‘Please, Lin, be quiet! We won’t get a minute’s peace, if you wake them up.’ ‘Okay, bye, Khaled,’ I said, leaving. ‘What are you doing?’ Khaled asked, a puzzle stamped on his forehead. ‘Well, I’m gonna keep on walking until I’m not here. That’s what goodbye means.’

‘There’s something you have to see! Something I must show you! It’s a secret. A secret I want to share with you.’

Crime mixed with anything is fatal,

sand-line curves of her body, contoured by the climb.

The more slender your grip on reality, the more dangerous the world becomes. On the other hand, the more rational the world you find yourself in, the more carefully it must be questioned.

Loyalty is something you need for things you don’t love enough. When you love enough, loyalty isn’t even a question.

‘And pride, the good pride that we need to survive in a brutal world, what is it? Good pride does not say I am better than someone else, which is what bad pride says. Good pride says For all my faults, I have a born right to exist, and I have a will, which is the instrument I can use to improve myself. In fact, it is quite impossible to change and improve yourself without a measure of good pride. Do you agree?’

What I’m telling you is this: kneel in humility, kneel in the knowledge that we are all connected, every one of us, and every living thing, kneel in the knowledge that we are all together in this struggle to understand and belong, but don’t blindly obey anyone, ever. Do you young people have anything to offer on this point?’

Praise from the wise is the sweetest wine. I felt the warmth of it inside.

‘Obedience is the assassin of conscience,’ Idriss said softly, ‘and that is why every lasting institution demands it.’ ‘But surely we must obey something?’ the Parsi student asked. ‘Obey the laws of the land, Zubin,’ Idriss replied, ‘except where they would cause you to act in a manner that is not honourable.

Obey the Golden Rules. Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you, and do not do to others, what you would not have them do to you. Obey yo...

Obey the universal law of consciousness, that everything you think or say or do has an effect greater than zero, even if it’s only an effect on yourself, which is why you must try to minimise the negative in what you think and say and do, and maximise the positive. Obey the instinct to forgive, and to share wit...

‘It took so long, fourteen billion years, for this part of the universe to bring into being a consciousness, right here, capable of knowing and actually calculating that it took fourteen thousand million years to make the calculation. We don’t have the right to throw those fourteen billion years away. We don’t have the moral right to waste or damage or kill this consciousness. And we don’t have the right to surrender its will, the most precious and beautiful thing in the universe. We have a duty to study, to learn, to question, to be fair and honest and positive citizens. And above all, we have a duty to unite our consciousness, freely, with any free consciousness, in the common cause of love.’

Abdullah was laughing out loud, happily and freely, something I’d never seen in all the years that I knew him. I painted that laugh on a wall of my heart.

‘Everything about you matters, Karla.’

‘There are demons in all of us. Some of them do not mean us any harm. They just want to live inside us. Some of them want more. They want to eat the souls that hold them.’

‘You can’t go back home,’ I said firmly, my hands tight on the handlebars, ‘because you don’t know what’s waiting for you. And you can’t stay here, because you do know what’s waiting for you.’

‘Every time an elevator door closes on me,’ she said, as the elevator doors closed, ‘I want a drink.’

‘So, I don’t converse any more. I’m making this exception, tonight, because my shift has ended, and because I like you. I liked both of you, from the moment you walked in. And when I like something, I’m never wrong about it.’

‘To green eyes – may they always be protected.’ ‘I’ll certainly drink to that,’ Randall said, sipping champagne. ‘To green queens,’ she said, smiling light at me.

‘Say, Karla!’ Vinson shouted. ‘I’m damn glad to finally meet you.’ ‘It won’t do any good,’ Karla replied, playing it straight. ‘It . . . it won’t?’ Vinson smiled, already confused. ‘No. Anything you heard is out of date.’ ‘Out of . . . what?’ ‘I reinvented myself.’ Vinson laughed. ‘Oh. Wow. Like, when did this happen?’ ‘It’s happening now,’ Karla said, holding his gaze. ‘Try to keep up.’ My heart stumbled like a drunk dancing. God, I loved her. There was no-one like her.

‘Resentment is unmet need or desire,’ she said. ‘That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.’

knew you’d get it,’ she said, her eyes blue pools of relief. ‘It’s just that I want a special now, one that’s mine, instead of a constant now, that I constantly share with someone else’s now.’ A constant now, that you constantly share with someone else’s now. It was a pretty good definition of prison. ‘I hear you.’ ‘I want to know what it’s like to be me, when it’s just me.’ ‘Go get ’em, Lisa.’ She smiled, and let out a weary sigh.

There was an open journal on the bed. I’d been trying to write a new short story. I was challenging myself with a difficult subject. It was about happy, loving people in a happy, loving place, doing happy, loving things. It wasn’t going well.

People who abhor crime, as I do, often ask why men who commit crimes, as I did, do such things. One of the big answers is that the low road is always easier, until it crumbles away beneath desire. One of the small answers is that when life and freedom are at stake, the men you meet are often exceptional. In other lives, they’d be captains of industry, or captains of armies.

thirty-minute drunk

road. Nature was healing me, as Nature does, when we let it.

I saw the new-moon chips of nail polish near her cuticles, the bruise on her face, about the size of a man’s ring, the cuts on her own knuckles, the fragrance of fresh soap in her clothes, hand-washed in a hotel basin, the bag on the back seat, carrying essentials for a quick escape, and the quick escape she made every time her eyes detected that I might be looking into her, and not just at her. But observation only took me to a tough, brave, devout girl on the run, who’s meticulous in her hygiene, but won’t clean the last coloured fragment of the girl she was from her fingernails. The why of her was still a mystery, because the why of anyone only comes with connection.

‘You stole police evidence?’ ‘No, of course not. I bought police evidence.’

I had to pull myself together. I needed my motorcycle. ‘I have to go home,’ I said. ‘Of course. I will come with you.’ ‘Didier –’ ‘Why do you always fight affection, Lin? It is truly your great, personal flaw.’ ‘Didier –’ ‘No. When a friend wants to do a loving thing, you must allow him. What is love, but this?’ What is love, but this?

What is civilisation? Idriss once remarked. It’s a woman, free to live as she wants.

You’ve got to like a man who anthropomorphises his own greed: at the very least, it’s a conversation. ‘What’s your

‘It’s a steep slide from resolution to retribution,’ she said. ‘And a lotta people rush off that cliff.’

Some things we do to others kneel so long in our hearts that bone becomes stone: a scarecrow in a chapel.

‘Do you wish,’ she said falteringly, ‘do you constantly wish that you had done something else?’ ‘It’s just regret,’ I said. ‘Regret,’ she repeated absently. ‘You know how they have proof of life, in a kidnapping?’ ‘Not really.’ ‘When someone’s kidnapped, the negotiator wants proof that the kidnapped person is still alive. A phone call, or film. Proof of life.’ ‘Okay.’ ‘Regret is just proof of soul, Rannveig. If you didn’t feel it, you wouldn’t be the nice person you are,

‘Knowledge isn’t knowledge, until the truth of it is self-evident in the sharing. Again.’

when I stared into his leaf-brown eyes long enough, I fell like a kid into a creek, and had to think fast to catch up, when a question shook me from the stream.

Are you game?’ ‘Honey, for the rest of your life, I am the game.’ ‘Do you mean it?’ ‘I mean it.’

‘Are we back to that again?’ Abdullah harrumphed. There actually are people who harrumph. I know quite a few, as it turns out. My theory is that harrumphers have a tiny pinch of extra bear DNA than the rest of us, in their setup.

They need to know that reaction will always be fast and violent, and they need to fear it. If they don’t, they all turn on you, and then things get bloody.

In one way and another, golden days became silvered nights.

‘We were being fashionably late for the party, and

it. It was as if she was swimming in a shadow every time she moved, and I wanted to swim with her.

‘To cover her assets.’ ‘To cover her assets,’ Karla said, tapping me on the chest in agreement. It was the first time she ever did it: the first time that little gesture born in who she was, when she was completely relaxed in love, made its way to my skin.

She was beautiful, in a new way. She was defending me, guarding me with a part of her soul.

Kisses without consequence or expectation: kisses as gifts, feeding her, feeding me with love.