Ángel Federico and Dolores married in Casablanca and had six children. Jordi was the fifth. After the Allied bombing of the city, the Magraners were displaced to Tangiers. When Jordi was four, the family moved to Valencia, but the post-war devastation and the quality of French social services, with a good system for assisting large families, encouraged them to cross the Pyrenees after two years of barely surviving. They had learned French in the Maghreb, so the language would be no obstacle to them. The Magraners settled in Valence in 1965, thinking of the day they would return to Spain. Ángel Federico gave his family a good upbringing without ever managing economic comfort. Jordi was fifteen when he died.
In 2009, Rosa, the eldest, was the only daughter living in Spain. She was separated, devoting her time to sewing. As for the ‘French’ Magraners, Juan had just retired after several years working as an electromechanical engineer at Solystic, a company specialising in the sorting of mail. Ángel was a coach driver. Esperanza worked as an administrator for a textile company. Andrés worked at Markem-Imaje S.A., carrying out the marking of products with an ink-jet printer.
‘Here we’re used to eating, working, and sleeping, and Jordi brought us something different,’ said Esperanza at the table.
The admission gave me goosebumps. For the Magraners, it wasn’t enough to have had a dream. All the same, they were grateful for having had a member of the family who showed them how much reality dreams have in them, inoculating them with a spirit of curiosity and adventure that ended up taking Ángel, Andrés, and Esperanza to Chitral. It only lasted a few weeks, but they will take those weeks, that experience of the world, to their graves.
As for the others, the family never left the bounds of their ravine. Prosperity isn’t a word that fits this lineage of surviving grandchildren. Jordi never felt he owed France very much.
He and his siblings were educated to appreciate nature, and none of them were baptised. Ángel Federico and Dolores never challenged the Church, but they kept their children apart from it. And they made the effort to travel to Spain as frequently as their savings would allow. Spanish was spoken at home, and sometimes Catalan. In fact, Jordi is registered as Jorge Federico, but he had a Catalan iaia (that is, a granny) who always called him Jordi, and he liked it, and so it stuck. At Christmas time, he would dress like someone off to the Fallas festivities, and when he travelled to Spain he would take part in popular fiestas. On the day he was murdered, he had, hanging at the head of his bed, a large Valencian flag.
‘I’m studying Arabic at the mosque in Lyon,’ said Isabelle at the table. ‘I want to read the Koran and understand what goes on in the heads of people who’ve read it. And to understand what they’re saying when I’m out on the street.’
Isabelle has created a web page where she compiles all the information published about her uncle Jordi, and pieces of his own writing.
‘What I’ve learned is that most Arabs who live in France don’t speak Arabic. But they do follow their families’ ideas, however. And if their parents tell them the Koran comes first, the Koran comes first.’
When the fruit compote and the apple pie arrive, Isabelle recalls a day when she hadn’t put on suitable boots for climbing in the snow. When she found herself clinging to a wall, Jordi exclaimed, ‘You should have been properly prepared!’ and he left her hanging there a good while. Then they hoisted her down, one hand holding onto an ice axe. The grazing of her knees against the rocks opened up wounds they disinfected with whisky. Marie recalled an encounter with a wild boar. Jordi ordered her to stay quiet. The creature sniffed at her before retreating.
Marie: He knew everything about animals.
Isabelle: He was an encyclopaedia.
Marie: He always used to bring us little gifts from his travels.
Isabelle: He smoked a pipe; he was against drugs. But Shamsur did smoke hashish.
Marie-Louise Marie France: Jordi was manifold — nobody truly knew him. He kept everything well compartmentalised. When he came to Paris, he’d see each person separately, and he never told everybody the same things.
XX
BETWEEN journeys, Jordi received an invitation from the French TV programme L’Odysée de l’étrange (‘The Odyssey of the Strange’), which broadcast ten minutes of pictures taken by Yannik L’Homme during his incursions into the valleys. They were there to illustrate the curious adventures of the scientist being interviewed.
‘It was strange. Just one of those things, I guess,’ said Erik L’Homme. ‘In the whole report, Jordi never mentioned the time Yannik and I were there with him. Not one reference to our help, to the work we did. But there was an accident. I don’t know how it happened, but the editor got confused and thought I was Jordi, so that in the studio, Jordi had to sit through ten minutes of documentary in which the protagonist of his story wasn’t even him. It was funny, our little revenge.’
‘Did he say anything to you afterwards?’
‘No, never.’
XXI
THE survival and spread of the ever-wilder men in the mountains of Pakistan has a great deal to do with poverty and fear. Religion is involved, too, of course, but the poverty and the fear came first.
Then war.
XXII
‘MY full name is Ainullah. My family name is Jalili. My father’s is Masjudi. My father, my mother, my brothers, and one of my sisters were all killed in the Panjshir valley. A Russian jet bombed my family. Three of my brothers, one sister, and I were out of the house when the jets came. I’m eight years old, but I’m a good worker.’
How many times must Jalili Ainullah have repeated that same damned story in that year, 1983? This time, he was talking to two men who were tilling a small patch of the mountain. Above their heads, an engine was thundering.
‘Russian,’ said the farmer who was working the hoe.
‘American,’ his colleague corrected him, squatting down alongside. ‘Can’t you hear it’s much quieter?’
The men gazed at the sky. When they grew tired, the one who was standing turned to Ainullah: ‘We haven’t got anything, kid. I’m sorry.’
If they’d asked him how the story went on, Ainullah would have explained how, after the massacre, he and his surviving siblings had fled from Panjshir to the province of Baghlan. They crossed mountains, walking for seven days till they reached a valley that seemed protected. Five days later, they were bombed again, and continued in their flight. They had been looking for food ever since.
The years went by. Time introduced variations into the story Ainullah presented.
‘I’m nine years old, but I’m a good worker.’
‘I’m ten years old, but I’m a good worker.’
‘I’m a good worker.’
Each sibling attempted to reconstruct his life on the fringes of others.
For Ainullah, survival became a wandering in search of food, and his marriage in 1991 never altered this dynamic — rather the contrary. As he made his way across valleys, he would wonder how many more people there were like him, how many had had to abandon their homes in search of a roof and food. How many Ainullahs were there wandering the mountains? Resting in a small village, he met another of those Islamist ex-fighters who were recruiting followers for a new cause. They had been everywhere the last few months.
‘The Russians and Americans are nothing to us!’ cried the preacher, armed with a rifle. ‘Allah alone is our guide!’
‘Who’s this?’ Ainullah asked one of the people listening.
‘I don’t know, I’ve not seen him before. They say he’s with a group called Al-Qaeda.’
At the end of the speech, a few men, some of them quite young, surrounded the one with the rifle to ask him questions. Everybody was showing signs of nerves and high spirits.
Thousands of orphans, poor people, refugees, vagrants, and men disposed to get their revenge on a system which, they believed, was mistreating them
began to spread across the mountains of Pakistan, transforming these places into the global centre of jihadism. At the higher altitudes, conditions were not ideal, so the men reverted to the wild, hiding in caves and forests, while from that very same Peshawar, the City of Flowers, the I.S.I. — Pakistan’s feared secret services — provided covert assistance for the emerging Taliban.
XXIII
IN the summer of 1995, Ainullah was a twenty-something orphan, as slim as he was graceful, with plenty of reason to feel angry at a hundred different things, to enlist among the savage hordes and that way at least get to eat. But he was made of different stuff. To young Ainullah, the atrocities around him were mitigated by the strength of his age, by the number of his hopes. Besides, he believed he was able to change his path, and this impulse heartened his mornings when to make a living he would once again set up his tiny fruit stall in the market at Chitral. Next to him, Jordi was with some Nuristani kids, trying to make himself understood.
‘Do you need help?’ said Ainullah.
Jordi stroked his chin, recently shaved with an electric razor, a luxury he had begun to allow himself — just as well that electricity had arrived here, too. He was vain after the fashion of a worthy mountain farmer. He took great care of his appearance, but unaffectedly, without becoming a dandy.
‘Eh?’ Ainullah insisted. ‘Do you need help?’
Jordi nodded, saying nothing. Ainullah combed his jet-black hair to one side and produced a translation that Jordi considered perfect. The boy seemed trustworthy and effective.
‘Where are you from?’ asked Jordi after he’d said goodbye to the Nuristanis.
‘From Panjshir — it’s in Afghanistan.’
‘I know it. I like it almost as much as that lion you’ve got out of there, that Massoud. Now that’s what I call a leader. Quite some nightmare for the Taliban.’
Ainullah nodded, expressionless. Jordi spent a few moments examining this handsome fruit-seller. The angles of his face had all the delicate hardness of the classic movie stars, though somewhat undernourished. Misery had made him cautious, and he let his intelligence slip out gradually, taking care not to overdo it, and he seemed even shy.
‘And you, where are you from?’
‘France.’
Jordi sometimes assigned himself to that country; it varied moment to moment. And this time it was in his interest to be French.
‘Your country’s a good friend to Afghanistan. During the war with Russia, they helped Massoud a lot.’
‘Go on, give me some apricots,’ said Jordi. Ainullah selected the pieces of fruit. ‘What are you doing in Chitral?’
‘I’m an I.D.P. war refugee.’
‘Do you speak other languages?’
‘I’ve studied in many different schools, and I’ve visited a lot of places … and so I’ve learned a few.’ Jordi’s interest had just perked him up. ‘Do you think you can get me some work, please? I’ve got three children to feed in Afghanistan.’
Jordi took out his box of Pree, offered the boy a cigarette, and, since he didn’t want one, he lit it himself. He spent too long smoking it and watching Ainullah, without speaking, lost in his thoughts. Both were sweating, but it obviously affected Jordi more. This summer had reached highs of fifty-two degrees. With this heat, Jordi moved more slowly; it took him longer to react. Three children, so young. Should he accept another Afghan in service? Perhaps Marie-Louise was right to distrust those people: after giving up the directorship of the Alliance Française, Jordi had gone off for a few days’ holiday with friends, and, when he returned, Gorki had disappeared.
‘They’re saying he ran away. I think someone stole him. Makes no odds, he was a dumb dog. Fjord and I are going to take a rest,’ he had written recently to his mother. In Spanish. Some lines a little lower down, in French, he asked Andrés to be discreet in his messages, not to send him detailed information by letter or fax, to write to him always in French. Not that this was the best language for communicating, either, given that France supported Massoud. The French weren’t exactly welcome; but in case of an emergency, at least Shamsur or someone from the Alliance would be able to decipher the messages.
‘I’ll ask around,’ replied Jordi. ‘If I find anything, I’ll let you know. What’s your name?’
Jordi returned to the fruit stall two days later. He didn’t beat around the bush.
‘I’m soon going to be travelling to France, like I do every year. I’ll be there for several weeks, maybe a couple of months, not too long. Can you look after the house and the dogs while I’m away?’
‘Of course, of course. Why not?’
‘You’ll be on your own for months.’
‘That’ll be nothing new.’
‘Another thing: do you know how to cook?’
That night, Ainullah prepared a typical Afghan palwe at Jordi’s house. Ainullah had heard a lot about the barmanu-hunter, but this time it was Jordi himself who summarised his work in the mountains. He told him about his Spanish blood. He was still cooking when a boy came in with a kind of pouch in which it was possible to see a book and several notepads.
‘Oh, I didn’t say, you’ve also got to set a place for Shamsur.’
The boys exchanged greetings. Jordi sat down and tasted the food.
‘You’re a good cook,’ he said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes, you’re good. I’ll teach you to make a few things. Come, you should eat, too. You can go here.’
Ainullah sat down opposite Shamsur. Jordi was at the head of the table, between the two of them. He was gratified to be sharing a dinner with those two great lads who exchanged furtive glances in an attempt to study one another. Shamsur was the more brazen of the two, of course; he was in control of the space.
‘Your salary will be three thousand rupees a month,’ Jordi told him. Ainullah was the only one of the three whose plate was already empty. ‘Currently I can’t pay more. Looking for the barmanu costs a lot. If I find it, that’ll change, anyway. I’ll receive money and materials from the French government, and if all goes well you’ll be able to buy yourself a house in France or in Spain, wherever you like. Just have a bit of patience. Heat some water for the coffee.’
Ainullah obeyed. When Jordi and Shamsur finished their dinner, he took their plates. As he placed the saucepan of hot water on the table, he said: ‘Can I ask, who is this boy?’
‘My son,’ Jordi replied.
Shamsur looked, expressionless, at his tutor, who poured the water onto the instant coffee, and brought his nose to the cup. Ainullah thought the man and the child didn’t have the same colour hair, he wondered what the mother was like, where from, but clearly the lad was from the mountains, you only had to watch him eat. Had Jordi married a Muslim woman? A blonde Muslim woman? Or had he done it with one of those Kalash?
‘No, no,’ said Jordi suddenly. ‘I’m joking. Shamsur is the brother of a friend. He’s from Bumburet, but he lives with me.’
Shamsur and Ainullah hit it off well in that house rented by Jordi in Bagrabad valley, not far from the Muslim heart of Chitral. During the day, Ainullah looked after Fjord and the new dog adopted by his boss; he would give them rice. He also got food for the two horses, cleaned the house, washed Jordi and Shamsur’s clothes … About every three days, Shamsur’s father, Khalil, and another of his brothers would come down from their village to visit and see how everything was going. When he had finished his chores, Ainullah would get on his bike and pedal twenty minutes to the house where he slept.
One morning, after half an hour of piling logs, Ainullah knocked on Jordi’s bedroom door. He wasn’t there. The boy had never yet been inside that room — he always found it closed. He tried his luck with the door, which opened. It was like going into an eccentric museum, so filled with ceramics, old tools, knives, books, animals in jars of formaldehyde …
‘What are you doing!
’
Jordi had just crossed the threshold.
‘Get out of here. Now! Out! I don’t want to see you in here again.’
Ainullah didn’t know what to say. He didn’t even apologise as he withdrew, and it was that freeze, his sincere lack of excuses, that made Jordi think the boy was truly ashamed. He had a good feeling about this Ainullah. Really, Shamsur was no kind of comparison. Which was why Shamsur was both a challenge and his great weakness. The kid had started to monopolise his thoughts to a degree Jordi wasn’t used to. For the first time, he was almost able to imagine a future with somebody different: with Ainullah. He still aspired to his protégé taking the reins of the kingdom that by birth belonged to him. They would both make it happen; they had to make it happen. He wasn’t going to give up. Shamsur needed education, to be put back on the right path, affection, a guide … and what was he himself, if not exactly that? A mentor. They balanced each other out, because Shamsur helped him to forge his dreams of permanence, of eternity, he was the heir who could realise them, a leader-in-waiting who needed only to be awakened, and he was a step away from that happening, he would soon become aware of his huge strength. Yes, they would make it happen.
Less than a month later, Jordi had to go on a trip for several weeks. Ainullah had shown himself to be very well acquainted with the valleys, as well as giving so many displays of responsibility, trustworthiness, and good intentions that Jordi charged him with looking after the house and Shamsur in his absence.
As he had supposed, his intuition had been right. When he returned, everything was still in order.
‘I’m very pleased, Ainullah. Up till this point, I’ve come across too many people who have stolen from me or who haven’t known how to work. I’m very pleased — truly. I’m going to settle in Bumburet, and I’d like you to remain with me.’
‘You’re very kind,’ replied Ainullah. ‘I’m Afghan, so you needn’t worry, we Afghans are good workers — nothing like the Pakistanis. I’ll look after you, your house and your dogs, your horses, the motorcycle, and the equipment … but keep an eye on Shamsur. He isn’t taking his studies seriously. We had many arguments because he didn’t want to go to school, and one time he even tried to hit me.’
In the Land of Giants Page 14