In the Land of Giants

by Gabi Martinez

  Jordi clenched his fists. Shamsur. It was impossible to tame that little savage. He waited for him to come back from school, where he was supposed to be, and in Ainullah’s presence he asked him: ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘School,’ replied Shamsur, without looking at him.

  One of Jordi’s hands was open on the table. Utterly still, he followed the boy’s movement around the living room.

  ‘Why don’t you want to go to school?’ he asked. ‘Why did you fight with Ainullah?’

  Shamsur looked at Jordi, glanced quickly at Ainullah, then focused again on Jordi.

  ‘He’s lying — don’t listen to him,’ replied Shamsur. ‘He wants your attention, so he makes these things up. What he’s saying is a lie.’

  Ainullah was shaking his head, his eyes on the ground, not saying a word. Nobody moved. They were waiting for the master’s decision. Which didn’t come.

  ‘Make the dinner,’ he ordered Ainullah.

  The Afghan took the box of matches from the table and walked over to the hearth. I’m right, and Jordi knows it, but it’s normal that he still mistrusts me — his workers have deceived him too many times. It’s nothing. He struck a match. With the flame, he began to burn a piece of paper that he brought close to the least thick log until the fire took. And Shamsur … well, he’s still a kid after all. Jordi’s wrong to trust him and his family so much. But it makes no difference. Makes no difference. He can see I work a lot and very hard, and that things run smoothly with me. He’s got to realise what’s in his own interests.

  Ainullah was lumbered with the burden of his origins. The Afghans were no longer welcome in Chitral. In a few short years, their image had changed drastically. When the first wave of refugees had arrived in 1979, the Afghans had been very well received. But soon the echoes of the war and the miseries inherent in the valleys started to make thing worse for the Chitrali, who were going hungry while they watched the Afghan refugees benefiting from the international aid distributed by the U.N.H.C.R. (the U.N. refugee agency). The natives no longer got hold of any money, while a lot of Afghans were taking possession of many local businesses, until they owned a good part of the trade in Chitral. At the start of the nineties, the area was home to some forty thousand Afghans, and the natives were already viewing them with undisguised suspicion.

  The thing was, apart from the advantages they received from governments, the refugees had known how to thrive. They undoubtedly worked faster and were more practical and effective than some of the not at all far-sighted Chitrali — this much was clear to Jordi, and, after all, he wanted people who were responsible and efficient. It was a good yardstick for testing their trustworthiness — he didn’t care where they’d come from. And so, three days after the argument, Jordi went into his room, opened a small wooden chest about half a metre from the head of the bed, and took out a pistol.

  ‘Ainullah!’

  The boy appeared with muddy hands, which he held out at a prudent distance from his clothes.

  ‘Take it.’ Jordi held out the weapon. Ainullah hesitated. He raised his hands a little, showing his palms, meaning that he couldn’t take it as he was. From a distance, one might have thought the armed man had taken him prisoner. ‘Take it!’

  Ainullah rubbed his hands quickly on his shalwar-kameez. He took hold of the pistol by the grip.

  ‘If anyone comes into the house without permission, you shoot. Try to get their legs, don’t kill them,’ said Jordi, and he left.

  How happy Ainullah felt. What a sign of trust! Jordi was a superb boss. The finances weren’t going too well, but Jordi was agreeable, fun, and he was as alone in Pakistan as he was himself — that sort of thing gives people a bond, and this was the proof. If he were honest, Ainullah had to admit that he’d rather go anyplace with Jordi than do anything else.

  ‘That’s good. That’s good —’ the servant kept repeating with the pistol in his hands, holding it as though it were a baby.

  He would show Jordi how right he’d been. While he was working for him, his boss would be safe. He could guarantee it. He felt so good with him, he trusted him, and there was nothing like trust for a peaceful life. Not even Zahïd, the head of the Chitral secret service, was going to adulterate the new peace attained by Ainullah.

  Zahïd had been on Jordi’s trail for some time. He didn’t believe his scientific reasons for living in Chitral, and his presence there had gone from being a nuisance to an obsession. Which was why, on several occasions, he had questioned different people who were close to Jordi — Shamsur and Ainullah, among them — trying to force statements that would incriminate ‘the Frenchman’ as a spy.

  ‘If you don’t talk, I’ll accuse you, your boss, and Shamsur of being homosexuals,’ Zahïd had threatened Ainullah. ‘What is it you all do there all day, anyway, eh? Come on, out with it, what do you do? You’re going to be spending half your life in jail.’

  Homosexuality is a crime punished in Pakistan with up to ten years in prison.

  That was the threat that allowed Jordi to counterattack. Where did Zahïd get the nerve to accuse them? What was that damned swine basing it on? He went to speak to several high-ranking people in Chitral who, lacking any evidence, were forced to excuse Zahïd, and they begged Jordi not to send the prefect of Chitral the letter he had considered writing, denouncing the way he was being harassed by the head of the secret services.

  Jordi sent the letter. In it, he enumerated the names of the relevant high-profile figures who were supporting his investigation from France. He returned home so highly strung that he started pacing around his room, speaking out loud.

  ‘How can they doubt my honour and that of the people living under my roof? Do they not know how many members of Shamsur’s family are in the army and the police? Do they not think, if I’d done something, these people would have reported me? What do they stand to gain from persecuting me like this?’

  The prefect read the letter, and warned Zahïd to go easy.

  XXIV

  DURING his annual winter trip to France, Jordi received a visit from Erik L’Homme.

  ‘Andrés told me you were here and wanted to see me. You could have called me yourself,’ said Erik. He would have liked to upbraid him a bit more, but Jordi’s approach had already been exceptional enough for him to continue pulling the rope tight. ‘You’re looking well.’

  ‘You’ve put on weight,’ said Jordi with an impatient grimace.

  He cleared his throat. He didn’t know how to start. He wanted more or less to say sorry, though that wasn’t quite right. In Shishiku he had said what he needed to say to the L’Homme brothers — he didn’t regret it, and if that pair of … No, no … enough … He’d summoned Erik in order to get him back, and so he oughtn’t to go down that path. But circumlocutions weren’t his strong suit.

  ‘Look, I’m thinking about setting up an association to disseminate the culture of the Hindu Kush. I think it would help with a lot of things in the area … and I thought of you to be secretary.’

  Erik drew his head back a few centimetres. He hadn’t expected this. No less than an offer on the very day of their reunion! What a strange way Jordi had about him. Though he wouldn’t have minded having something like it himself.

  ‘Tell me a bit more — what do you want me to do?’

  Jordi didn’t give copious details; it was really just a question of having someone as a reference-point in Europe.

  ‘Fine,’ Erik replied. ‘I’ll be the secretary.’

  Their relationship would never be the same again, but Erik left Valence comforted by the reconciliation. He had even enjoyed seeing his friend. When he arrived home and called Yannik to tell him about the encounter, his brother asked no questions.

  Back in Chitral, Jordi learned that Cat Valicourt had been named an adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Cat notified him that they would at last be in a position to drive fo
rward a big expedition with the support of the Natural History Museum and the University of Peshawar. Officially it would be on a prehistoric mission — professional barmanu-hunters were not a part of the plan, and so Jordi would be assigned the role of translator, guide, and watchman for the campsite. In the event of the ministerial treasurers not approving the figure, Valicourt would immediately sneak him in as the mission administrator.

  Jordi short-circuited her. What did she mean, ‘administrator’? Seven years going after a goal, and now the official documents were going to present him as an administrator? Him, a pure-bred hunter. A treasure-seeker. A man of the mountains, more experienced and wild than anybody. And to the world he would be an administrator?

  Jordi sent a fax presenting his resignation to Cat due to a lack of information and inconsistencies. He wasn’t going to put up with Valicourt suggesting that he restrain himself at given moments or behave more diplomatically … He, who’d spent more than eight years adapting his diplomacy to suit the local manner, and achieving results that had never been managed by any of those useless embassies. Cat was not going to lecture him on how to treat the Pakistanis. Even if he were to lose her support in Paris …

  With the letter in his hands, he began to take stock, and noticed the date on the letterhead: February 1996. So many years already. I’ve been here too long. The secret police are pursuing me, they spend their days questioning many of my friends and acquaintances, and I guess it must be normal, because having been through a spell in a nest of spies like the Alliance, and with the barmanu never showing up … I’m the perfect suspect. But it’s just that these bastards are fucking with everybody I know. Everyone asks me these dumb questions, they believe what they’re being told, and I can’t trust anybody — not even the staff at home. It’s exhausting. Exhausting. And it’s been two years here. I need a change of air.

  ‘Ha!’ he laughed aloud. He didn’t have the means for a ‘change of air’. The problem was, he didn’t have the means to stay where he was, either. Besides, when things were looking bad, when his melodramatic vein was at its worst, he always considered returning to France, and when he realised that he was lapsing back into that victimised pose, he got annoyed at having been so faint-hearted. Just hold on.

  A day later, Valicourt accepted his resignation in one of the bluntest faxes Jordi had ever received. She called him a coward, inconsistent, impulsive, intransigent; she lamented his short-sightedness; and she reminded him that all the arrangements she was making were in order that his presence on the mission might yet be official, because without the paperwork, without a bureaucratic stamp, nobody was going to provide Jordi with a single franc. In short, you self-centred, pig-headed arsehole, this is going to happen all the same without you. That was her message.

  Jordi’s reply on 3 March: ‘Hello, Cat. Good news about the mission!’

  Valicourt was bewildered to hear from a Jordi who sounded so moderate and obliging. How could he have changed his tone so dramatically in such a short space of time? Anyway … Very well, she’d accept. In truth, she needed him. But the mission was only going to last a month — she couldn’t expose herself for too long to the unpredictable decisions of that weathercock.

  Jordi had good reasons for his change of tone. Zahïd, pressed by his bosses to smooth things over with Jordi, had decided to help him in his search for the barmanu.

  ‘There are rumours they’ve caught a barmanu in Afghanistan,’ the policeman told him.

  ‘What evidence do you have? I don’t believe you. How am I to believe you after the way you’ve treated me?’

  The following day, Zahïd introduced him to commander Bulbul, a former Pashtun artillery officer allegedly taking refuge in Chitral, but who often crossed the border to spend periods in Jalalabad. The unpredictability of the Afghan–Pakistani border facilitated the traffic of people, arms, drugs …

  ‘Azrat Ali, director of Jalalabad airport, says they’ve caught a barmanu,’ said Bulbul.

  Jordi wanted to believe him. There was nothing he wanted more than to believe him. Of course it could be an ambush, but when a few days later a cousin of Ainullah’s who had arrived from Afghanistan confirmed that the rumour was true, Jordi made the choice to travel. He needed to try.

  He stopped shaving. He wanted someone trustworthy to accompany him, and he asked Khalil to go with him to Jalalabad.

  ‘Your cousin in the army lives there, right? He might be able to help us.’

  ‘Do you want them to kill me?’ Khalil exclaimed quickly, losing his usual serenity for a moment. ‘The situation in Afghanistan’s really bad — the Taliban are everywhere.’

  ‘If they kill you, they’ll kill me, too.’

  Khalil raised his chin slightly, flicking his fringe back. He closed his eyes, sober again, despite everything.

  ‘Besides, I don’t know how you can trust Zahïd. He’s the one who wanted to accuse you of being a spy. They want to kill you. It’s a perfect trap, Jordi. They know what you’re looking for and they set the bait for you. They want you to kill yourself.’

  ‘I need you, Khalil.’

  ‘I work for the government. If they catch me crossing the border, they can put me in prison, I could lose my job.’

  ‘So are you coming or not?’

  XXV

  We left on 16 March 1996, accompanied by the commander, Ainullah and Farid, a Chitrali friend who’s studying at the University of Peshawar. We crossed the border without any problems (under the commander’s protection). The road is destroyed; it took us two days to get there. The region is plagued by bandits and looters. There’s no real administration. It’s total anarchy. Everybody carries guns, and each person has his own law. You can get killed here for one rupee — it’s utter chaos.

  The people are the most savage, in the most pejorative sense of the word. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve been spared them the whole trip, escaping the thieves who seek to assail us on the deserted route, at night.

  None of us has been shaving and I, even with the beard, should try hard to seem as Muslim as possible, keeping check of every gesture, because under no circumstances should they detect that I am European. I have had to pray, imitating Ainullah. [Diary]

  They entered Jalalabad under the expectant gaze of hundreds of mujahedin with their weapons slung across their chests, dodging children who were playing at being Rambo pointing at people with index fingers on the trigger of their rifles.

  ‘Azrat Ali isn’t here,’ they were informed at the airport. ‘He’s left for Dari-é-nour.’

  Bad news. Not even Jordi wanted to travel through that territory, which was dominated by the cruellest, most fanatical, tribes in Afghanistan.

  ‘We can’t go without protection,’ said the commander.

  ‘You’re Pathan — do you not dare?’ Jordi challenged him.

  Even he wasn’t entirely clear himself why he asked these questions. They simply sprung up. And if the response forced him to run foolish risks, he would accept, because he couldn’t go back on it, he wouldn’t know how. As luck would have it, the commander was not willing to give way.

  ‘I’m not going there.’

  They tried to retrieve details about the capture of the barmanu from the airport staff, but weren’t convinced by the replies, and they returned to the city in search of Azrat Ali’s brother. Before the interview they would have to persuade the family they didn’t belong to the Pakistani intelligence services. Then the brother and other men described the barmanu they claimed to have captured, though they refused to show it to them.

  ‘They have no reason to hide it from us,’ Jordi told his companions as they left the building. ‘They aren’t interested in money, and when we ask to see it, they immediately get aggressive. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘They aren’t going to do anything without their boss,’ said the commander. ‘And this is getting ugly.’

&
nbsp; Armed men were aiming hostile glances at them from the corridors that led outside. On the street, scattered groups kept them in their sights.

  ‘Ugly? Either we leave, or they start making holes in us,’ said Khalil.

  Jordi understood that they weren’t going to be allowed to see the barmanu and that the commander was right — things really were getting ugly.

  ‘The worst thing is not knowing when we’ll be able to see Azrat Ali,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to wait forever … Fine, then … We’ll go back home.’

  The group crossed the streets of the city enveloped in a spectral silence. Under his shalwar-kameez, Jordi felt for the Russian officer’s little pistol that a prince friend had lent him. When they reached the bus station with the coaches bound for Pakistan, he commanded: ‘Keep walking.’

  The expeditioners kept going without opening their mouths, only slowing their pace a little. Nobody asked for an explanation, but Jordi knew they needed one.

  ‘We’re not going to be using the bus service. I wouldn’t be surprised if Zahïd’s police officers were waiting for us. I don’t trust him.’ He forced himself not to catch Khalil’s eye, so as not to receive a predictable reproach, a what-did-I-tell-you? ‘This smells too much like a trap.’

  An hour after leaving Jalalabad, they saw a Taliban unit kill four people on the side of the highway. They walked on, trying to keep their eyes on the horizon, praying that the Taliban wouldn’t notice the presence of a westerner among them. We’re gambling with our lives. Why did I agree to come here? We’re gambling with our lives. We’re gambling with our lives. Khalil couldn’t get the idea out of his head. When a child ran across the road, Khalil took a swift step back, on his guard. It’s nothing, he said to himself. Stay calm. Keep going. They heard vehicles in the distance. Isn’t that the whirr of a helicopter? The sound of distant motors unspooled a hellish series of ideas in his head, ending with the whole group soaked in blood.