‘Oof, it’s all such a long time ago. I don’t remember, but sit down. Want some tea?’
Abdul told one of his daughters to serve them tea in the garden. And that was where it did all begin, this time.
Jordi asked about the situation of the Kalash, and Abdul Khaleq talked to him about walnuts, historical staples for his ethnic group’s trade and nutrition.
‘The Muslims are buying our walnut trees in exchange for small amounts of sugar, tea, rice, or salt. The Kalash who sell them … they are wrong.’
‘Why?’
‘Later they make them pay exaggerated taxes to eat the nuts produced on what used to be their own fields.’
‘Why do you sell them?’
‘We need that sugar. That tea. That rice. That salt.’
Abdul talked about the deforestation of the wooded areas. About the incredibly dangerous roads to the valleys. About the lack of a single telephone network. About the government, which forced them to teach their children the Koran, though school never lasted very long anyway because the families’ poverty forced them to put the children straight to work in the fields.
‘Just as well we’ve got the tourism. For the moment, that’s what’s saving us. But if the Taliban keep on the way they’re going …’
‘But you don’t see any of that tension out on the streets. The Kalash and the Muslims are friendly towards each other.’
Abdul looked far out into the endless garden. On the slopes down towards the valley a couple of bearded men were lying on the grass, and Kalash children were playing.
‘People have got to live,’ replied Abdul.
That was what he’d read in Loude, years ago! And to think he hadn’t taken him seriously when he arrived. What an idiot. Of course Loude was right — there was a reason he had studied these people for years. Harassment does exist. Mutual antipathy, too. It was just that diplomacy was still capable of masking the hatred in strangers’ eyes.
After his chat with Abdul, Jordi climbed the slope to Shekhanandeh, where he found Khalil.
‘Jordi. What a surprise, I wasn’t expecting you,’ said the Nuristani. How many times over had he told his colleagues the story of their suicide mission to Jalalabad. Since then, seeing Jordi again took him straight back to that bittersweet day.
‘Hi, Khalil. I want to ask a favour. I’m going to France to spend Christmas, and I’ve got too much gear at home, besides the car … I’d like to store a few things in your family’s garage …’ he nodded toward the garage. ‘I don’t want to trouble you. I’d leave it somewhere else if I could — it’s just that everywhere people ask me for a load of money.’
‘Leave anything you want — don’t worry about it. You know everything here is free to you.’
On his return from France in the spring of 1997, Jordi asked Khalil if he could keep his stuff in the garage a little longer, while at the same time requesting his help to get himself a house close to Shekhanandeh, the highest part of the Bumburet valley.
‘It should be pretty big. I’ll need space to clear out your garage once and for all.’
He had spent a whole winter developing his future plans. The last weeks in France had seemed endless, going back over projects, reading even more about the Kalash, and feeling certain that this would be the ideal geography for establishing their operational base.
Shekhanandeh was a reasonably suitable place for getting closer to the Kalash: it would allow him to remain in contact with his friends who were Muslim — which is what the Nuristanis of Shekhanandeh are — while he got close to the pagans, whose buildings began ten minutes further down the valley, in the village of Krakal. Besides, beyond Shekhanandeh, the path that led into the mountains ran on into Afghanistan. It was, in short, the perfect location.
Khalil showed him a plot of land around a semi-derelict house.
‘I want a house. I don’t want to have to build one myself — I can’t spend that much.’
‘But you can come here to this one right away.’
‘No, please, find me someplace finished. A house that’s completely built. Finished.’
Several months later, Khalil was still pushing him towards that bit of land.
Jordi drove through the Bumburet valley to the village of Krakal. When he could go no further in the jeep, he got out and started to climb the steep slope, his mountain boots tramping through the narrow threads of water that snaked along the way. Streams and springs kept various stretches of the path that runs through Bumburet constantly soaked.
He called to Khalil from the door of his house. The Nuristani leaned out at the balcony and gestured that he would come down.
‘Why don’t you want to help me?’ said Jordi as Khalil made his way down the stairs, tugging on his beard. Still on the steps, his forehead creased, he held up his hand.
‘Take it easy. Let’s have a walk.’
They walked as far as the cornfields that stretched out at the foot of the big crag over which the hamlet was built. When they had taken cover on the paths that encircled the fields, Jordi resumed his questioning.
‘So why aren’t you helping me, huh? Is it really so hard to find a house in this tumbledown village? Just look at it —’ Above their heads were loose lintels; through glassless windows you could make out roofs that were rotten or filled with holes; many walls were missing stones. At this rate, it wouldn’t be long before some of these buildings collapsed.
‘Be patient, I can’t do magic. You’re a foreigner. Things here go the way they go. And they don’t go quick.’
‘Don’t fuck me around, Khalil. I live here, too.’
‘No, you live in Chitral.’
‘Things don’t change so much in a couple of hours’ drive.’
‘Maybe they do.’
Should he go on arguing? After all, it wasn’t going to get him anywhere — he knew his friend well. He returned to the path without saying goodbye. There was nothing to be done with that damned layabout. It wasn’t surprising that the Nuristanis lived in wretched conditions, always taking their time with their answers, even for a good deal like the one he was offering! Or did they not want him to settle in their territory? And if that’s what it was, why didn’t they just tell him straight out? Pah! He returned angrily to the main path and began the walk back down.
‘Hey, Jordi!’ Abdul Khaleq was piling up firewood on the terrace of a house. ‘Where are you going?’
‘That Khalil … If I keep listening to him, I’ll end up never coming to live in the valley.’
‘Still got that idea of yours about a house?’
‘That’s why I’m here.’
‘You like this one?’
‘That’s yours, isn’t it? The one you told me about.’
‘I want to rent it out.’
‘You don’t use it?’
‘What for?’
‘I don’t know. You’re working in it now.’
‘It needs keeping up, but I live in the hotel now with my family … and a bit of extra money really wouldn’t hurt.’
‘Why are you offering it to me? It looks like a good house, it’s in a privileged location … There’d be a lot of people interested, wouldn’t there?’
‘You aren’t a Muslim.’
Abdul’s house was the last Kalash building before the stretch that led to Shekhanandeh’s Muslim territories. In the other direction you still had to go down the track a few minutes to reach the Kalash settlement of Krakal. It was halfway between one group and the other, really, almost in neutral territory. And practically isolated. Only two Muslim families lived close by.
Jordi asked to take a look.
The property stretched further than it appeared, climbing the hillside. The upper part of the property would be a good place for the dogs.
Close to the entrance was a small stable just a few metres from a hut that would
be able to house the staff. Just a few steps away, another independent unit offered a hearth, a corner for cooking in, and a bedroom. And climbing a few steps took you to the terrace from which he had spoken to Abdul and where the main body of the house was to be found, which was bigger than the others because it was composed of two combined units.
On the terrace, he looked out over the views of the valley, of the wonderful village of Shekhanandeh, of the Afghan mountains.
The solitude surrounding him was seductive, too.
As was the prospect of a life in a place that marked a borderline.
All he needed were the rupees.
XXVIII
BESIDES commander Gould, millions of people have taken an interest in the Loch Ness Monster, one way or another. Each year, the lake receives thousands of people who want to contemplate its waters, on the lookout for unexpected waves or foam. The economy of that place depends on the monster now. People continue not seeing it, there are no concrete reasons for believing in its existence, but every year the flood of pilgrims is renewed. Why? What are they after?
The appeal of the lake is that it’s set itself up as a reference point for fantasy. People imagine that their dreams might materialise right there.
The imagination has its sanctuaries, too.
Imagining. The assumption is that we all do it, anywhere, and although this is correct, it’s no less true to say that people need places. Places to believe.
XXIX
The oldest, most widespread stories in the world are adventure stories, about human heroes who venture into the myth-countries at the risk of their lives, and bring back tales of the world beyond men … It could be argued … that the narrative art itself arose from the need to tell an adventure; that man risking his life in perilous encounters constitutes the original definition of what is worth talking about.
Paul Zweig, The Adventurer
‘YOU and your publishing house could make a fair amount of money from the book about Jordi, couldn’t you?’ said Esperanza in a café at the Gare de Lyon, in Paris.
We were about to say our goodbyes following several days of visiting people who had known Jordi in that pair of cities, Paris and Lyon. She had only a couple of bites left to finish the sandwich she’d bought at a fast-food joint. She said something else: ‘Well, you’re already getting paid for the research. You’ve come several times to France, you want to travel to Pakistan …’
We’d been exchanging intimacies for months, but this was the first time Esperanza had dared to broach any economic questions openly. Actually there was quite a long time in which nobody from the Magraner family broached the two subjects that are so crucial for the understanding of a life: sex and money. The absence of these things in our chats was so stark that it only increased my desire to learn more. It was as though both subjects verged on taboo in the Magraners’ imagination, which was why I didn’t want to force the subject. I guessed that, with time and with trust, they would eventually arise.
The moment for money had come.
I’d made it clear that I believed visiting Chitral was indispensable for the book and that I wanted Esperanza to travel with me, and that this was going to cost a significant sum.
‘Because you’re really sure you want to go there?’
In June 2009, western news reports identified Pakistan’s north-west frontier province as possibly the most dangerous place on earth, and so Esperanza obviously worried about the risks of the journey. Of course, she kept repeating that her mother had enough with one murder in the family, but there was no doubt that she, too, wanted to go.
‘It’s time to draw a line under the story,’ she said. ‘Jordi’s still buried in Krakal, though getting him repatriated … For one thing, we’d have to talk to the Kalash about bringing the body, they spent a lot of money on the burial, they sacrificed goats … He wouldn’t have got a funeral here anything like what they gave him there. Some people don’t understand it, but I respect the Kalash. It’s not easy to decide where the body should end up. What do you think?’
‘He always did whatever he could to stay there.’
‘Yes … though the Kalash did agree to his being repatriated … I don’t know if it’s what Jordi would have wanted. I’d like to go back to sort out his grave. And take my mother. I think it’d do her good to be close to her son’s grave. We told her there had been confirmation that it was Jordi’s corpse, but we never showed her any pictures of the body. She has no proof. Perhaps she needs to really face it, see the place where he’s resting. And, well, I don’t really think it’s all that bad for his grave to stay in the valley. But I’d like to give him a decent stone, with his name, so that people who visit the mountains know he lived there, and remember him.’
Esperanza wanted to go, and at first I had proposed to fund half her trip. Now, at the station, she was cautiously sounding out what financial possibilities existed for our mutual project. She never spoke openly of money, as though it intimidated her to give figures or to get into a dance of numbers that would somehow corrupt her brother’s memory. The reasons propelling her were too genuine, pure, and sentimental, and money too soulless a presence to be included in the same thought. Damned money — an overwhelmingly obscene presence her whole life, a power that had only ever mistreated her family and that there was no way of avoiding. Money loomed like an untouchable whose name was best avoided; if there was no choice but to mention it, she would do so only in hushed tones.
‘Maybe the publishers could pay for the gravestone …’
I could easily recognise the caution, this wariness, the cowardice at the moment of facing up to negotiations. I know the distress and shame that comes from not only asking for money, but merely speaking of it. Those of us who have seen so little of it, who have been denied so much, who spend with one eye on the calendar, we do somehow revere its power while we feign contempt for it, or even, sometimes, boast about forgetting it. ‘Who are you running away from? Whoever you’re running from, it is of that that you are’ — the words of a poet. Money is located in a dimension above our reach; for some people, talking about it is like talking about someone we see often but who turns out to be totally unknown, and so we cannot allow ourselves familiarity nor even to mention their name without stress. We also know that this hatefully necessary totem will not permit any carelessness, that at the slightest mistake it will disappear in a puff of smoke, and when we have to talk seriously about money we do so shyly, because its reality and the havoc it could cause us, has caused us, are intimidating. It has never treated us generously, and we don’t think it ever will, but its omnipotent presence obliges us to deal with it with some frequency, and our lives largely depend on it. That’s how we think.
‘I can assure you, if I’m here, it isn’t for the money,’ I replied. ‘I just write books. I’ve published several, and my current account still looks pretty much as it did when I started out. There are millionaires in literature, but only two of them, while in the majority of cases, at least in mine, when it comes to money, the hope is that each book will pay for the next. Of course, you always trust that one of them will get you out of where you are, but that’s not why I write, just as I don’t think Jordi was an explorer in order to make himself rich. The money they’re paying me to write his story isn’t bad, but it doesn’t nearly cover the costs of the travelling and the time I’m going to spend on it, and so in order to survive in the meantime I’ve got to keep on writing articles and giving talks … If I’m doing an investigation into your brother, it’s because I think his story deserves to be told. It’s one of the most incredible I’ve heard, and I think it brings together some feelings in which many people will be able to see themselves reflected. His life is a metaphor for many people’s lives — at least I see myself in him all the time, and I want to pay him the tribute he deserves, because it’s an act of justice and because, strange as it may seem to you, his story concerns me deeply.
’
I knew at once that I had given a melodramatic speech worthy of Jordi himself. I relaxed. Esperanza shook off some crumbs, both satisfied and expectant.
‘So about the gravestone, you needn’t worry about that,’ I added. ‘We’ll come up with some solution.’
The coffees we had ordered when we sat down had gone cold.
‘I have to think about whether I’m going or not,’ she said. ‘It’s really dangerous there. I have to think about it.’
Soon afterwards, Claire G. appeared, on a bicycle and wearing a short skirt, curls going all over the place, displaying a pair of explorer’s binoculars. My train was about to leave. I kissed the women, who stayed behind, chatting by the Gare’s beautifully glazed entrance.
XXX
‘ALEXANDRE! Please help me with this,’ shouted Claire, who was unable to usefully shift the largest piece of her luggage. Alexandre made as if to take a handle, but, realising it would be easier for him just to manoeuvre it on his own, lugged the whole weight to the door of the airport.
‘That’s him there,’ said Claire, raising a hand to wave to Jordi.
‘Claire!’
Jordi bounded over to her, kissed her on both cheeks, rubbed her arms up and down several times, smiling happily.
‘This is Alexandre,’ said Claire. The lad had just put the bag down beside the wheel of Jordi’s jeep. He was sweating profusely despite the short distance he had come.
‘Welcome to June,’ said Jordi, shaking his hand.
‘Come on, don’t say weird things. Alexandre is working on a thesis on the evolution of language — the last thing he needs is you confusing him with your word games.’
Jordi took the bag, and with a single movement tossed it into the back of the jeep. Alexandre was impressed.
‘Cat says hello,’ said Claire.
‘Right.’
‘Hey, don’t grumble, she wasn’t able to come. After all, she did endorse this exploration, and she’s managed to get it financed by the French government.’
In the Land of Giants Page 17