Jordi handed him a wad of folded banknotes.
‘All set?’
Abdul put the money away in his kameez without counting it.
‘This association of yours is the best thing that could have happened to us.’
And so’s my brother, thought Jordi, because Andrés was still lending him money with a regularity that now allowed him to top up the wages. Infallible Andrés, his perpetual support. Erik L’Homme had said once that, for Andrés, funding Jordi was his way of taking part in a dream.
‘You’ve given me a lot of money, though,’ said Abdul, giving the bulk that could be seen under his kameez a few little pats. ‘That’s to cover next month?’
‘No. That’s for the first rental payment for Sharakat … if your offer still stands, of course.’
Abdul hugged him.
In his new home, Jordi at last immersed himself fully in day-to-day Kalash life. He was finally able to get his belongings out of Khalil’s garage. In the garden, he planted courgettes, pumpkin, aubergines, tomatoes, green beans, peppers, and between these he bedded down plants with insect-repelling flowers.
In a stretch of the river about forty metres from the house, Abdul had a trout breeder where he also used to go from time to time to fish, and from then on he was planning to stop by occasionally, in passing, to keep an eye on his tenant’s works. A few days after the tenancy was agreed, Abdul went up to station himself in his usual spot for breeding and catching fish. Before going into the undergrowth and the trees, he saw Jordi hammering a post into the ground.
‘What are you making?’
Jordi finished driving it in.
‘A fence. It’s for the dogs, I don’t want them eating the neighbours’ chickens. Or fighting with other dogs. What about you? Fishing?’
‘Just on my way.’
Jordi wiped off the sweat with the back of his hand. His two thick serpent-shaped rings sparkled.
‘If you catch anything good and you’re in the mood, come over, and I’ll cook it for you tonight.’
Abdul showed up at dusk carrying half the day’s catch. Jordi braised the fish, and opened a bottle of apricot wine brewed by the Kalash themselves. They drank it with dinner while summarising their biographies.
‘I was born in 1959 in Bumburet. My father was a religious leader and a forestry official. His job was to stop the poachers, to protect the forests from being felled … He had three wives. I’m the son of the first, an only child. That’s not very normal round here. I guess it worked out well for me when it came to studying, because my father immediately put me in a good school in Ayun and then sent me to spend two years in a private college in Peshawar. I was eighteen and … well, I felt unsettled in the big city, with all those donkeys and cars and lorries … There were too many people for me. I didn’t even know which way was north, which was south.’
‘More or less the same as now, then?’ said Jordi, because they were both already quite drunk.
They started to laugh. They drank more. Abdul recalled the time he escaped from a teacher who used to beat him in Ayun.
‘I took off with a friend. We wanted to disappear, to get to Peshawar. We were just kids, we were six years old, but there’s one thing I remember really well —’ Abdul’s face fell. ‘At one point in the night, lost in the wood, as we tried to find the main highway, we saw a lot of people with beards standing outside a mosque. My friend was a Muslim, but I got scared. I didn’t like what I saw. I wasn’t one of them, I’d never seen so many people with beards all together … but I had heard stories about them. I thought they were going to kill me.’
The men looked into each other’s bloodshot eyes.
‘And you’re still waiting for that to happen, aren’t you?’ said Jordi.
Abdul banged the table.
‘Still am,’ he shouted, laughing. ‘I still am.’
There was shared laughter, once again.
‘So what happened, then?’ asked Jordi at last.
‘Oh, nothing. My father sent a man out to fetch me, and of course this scout was good, because he found me.’
‘He must have given you a good thrashing when you got back home.’
‘He just hugged me. He asked me never to go away again.’
Abdul had loved and respected his father sincerely. He wanted that to be absolutely clear.
‘Besides watching over the forests, my father worked wood — he was a carpenter. The hotel that you know, we built it together.’ Abdul had emptied his glass. He refilled it. ‘He died two years ago. And you know where I was? Doing construction work in Iraq. Trying to earn money. They told me he’d got bronchitis, but that it wasn’t too serious; he said it was nothing. And when they got back in touch with me, he was already dead. I couldn’t attend my father’s funeral. My absence was a shame to the community.’
Despair flooded over Abdul’s face. Jordi recalled his own father, his family. He thought about how much he loved them. He missed them, and could well understand the pain suffered by this man he already considered a friend.
‘It was an accident,’ said Jordi.
‘I was in Iraq to try and make money, don’t you see? To be able to eat.’
‘You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, Abdul. By co-ordinating the Storytellers of Tradition, you’re proving an awful lot to anybody who doubts you.’
‘The problem isn’t with my people. The Muslims have taken everything from us by force,’ said Abdul without raising his voice, something he almost never does. ‘They didn’t even buy it. We’re Indo-European, and our forefathers made this possible’ — he stretched his arm out in an all-encompassing gesture. ‘When I was little, there were Muslims in the valleys, but not many. Maybe 20 per cent. It’s more than 50 or 60 per cent now. Muslims have come from abroad and they’ve married Kalash women, converting them to Islam. They’re buying our walnut trees, our houses, and none of us can do anything to make a little money, to prosper a bit. It’s in the government’s interest for the Kalash to stay poor. In a hundred years there might be none of us left. We Kalash ought to try and do something ourselves to stop that happening, but what? I don’t know how we can change that. It’s obvious nobody’s going to help us. We’d need to have a plan.’
A plan.
This suited Jordi well — how many of those had he made before now? The question was, who was going to care, who would be prepared to listen? How well he understood Abdul. No one was going to help them.
With every new conversation with Abdul and the other Kalash, Jordi got a bit further involved. There were so many parallels between the history of those people and his own … how could he not identify with them? They were even pagans! For the first time in his life, he found himself truly thinking in the plural. It wasn’t a matter of attaining a private goal or revealing one’s secrets to the world. He had no intention of rising up alone above a thousand other heads, but rather what concerned him — it concerned him! — was the survival of that culture, and he was ready to help.
All the same, he found it difficult to detach himself instantly from any individual ambition. He was no missionary, nor was he a hermit; he didn’t long to merge with nature, nothing like that. How then to explain what he wanted? He yearned to spread a kind of purity, a truth so clean and faultless that it would distinguish him somehow, and reflecting thus he found himself flirting with the idea of being great and anonymous, which seemed dazzlingly beautiful. Maybe he was getting somewhere.
One afternoon, he came to his study and rifled through books and notes until he retrieved the Roman sentences of Pierre Grimal that he had copied down years earlier but which he still had not applied; nor did they truly affect his life. Since his youth he had seen an impressive strength in them and a great authenticity, and he identified his spirit with these things, which was why he had copied the lines down, but circumstances had hitherto prevented him from really under
standing them.
The individual hardly counts outside his functioning in the group … faced with a necessity, he must sacrifice everything that matters to him, including his person.
He had so much to thank the valleys for. Not only did they offer him the possibility of establishing parallels between his own life as fighter and the struggle of the Kalash, but they also furnished him with a noble cause for which to fight.
Rome opts for death for virtue, and as a result, for glory.
And the Kalash … the Kalash allowed him to envisage the possibility of becoming a different kind of leader. And, above all, of continuing to live there.
So that when Erik L’Homme returned to Chitral four years after the indelible argument in Shishiku, he found a Jordi diametrically opposed to the one who had found it so hard to learn Kalasha and Khowar.
‘You seriously make this stuff yourself?’ said Erik, holding up the full glass of apricot wine.
‘Course I do, man. I’ve got my own distillery.’
He held his glass up in front of Erik’s face. They clinked. Jordi took a draught far longer than Erik’s.
‘So you’ve come to find material for a book of stories. For children, is that right?’
‘You know how well I get on with children.’
‘Who’s going to publish it for you?’
‘The L’Harmattan publishing house. I’ve just come back for a few bits of information I’m missing. To tell the truth, there are a number of tales that are pretty well there already.’
‘What you mean is you’re back out of nostalgia.’
Erik put the glass down on the little stone table.
‘I’m also secretary of the association. I’m keen to check out the result of my work. How are the Storytellers going?’
Jordi unfurled the details of a plan that he would soon be carrying out. When he referred to the radical Muslims, his tone and expression grew darker.
‘Those people insist on harassing us. Bastards — scum that can think of nothing but destroying things.’
Erik was struck by the way Jordi’s rejection of those people had hardened within him.
‘Well,’ said Jordi finally, ‘will you be staying in my house?’
‘No, no. For these couple of months I’ll be in Chitral — that’s where most of the people are who I want to talk to.’
‘But you’ll come with me to spend a few days? I’ve got the room. You know you wouldn’t be a bother.’
Erik picked up the glass again, and took a sip.
‘I think the final week might be a good time.’
‘Very well, then. That’s settled.’
As they had agreed, Erik came to Sharakat House to spend the last week of his stay.
One morning, when he was accompanying his host to fetch the mail, they ran into a Chitrali who started yelling at Jordi. Erik thought he understood that his friend hadn’t finished paying off the jeep … and that somebody was losing patience. Jordi advanced towards the man who was rebuking him, shouting back. As he reached him, he threw a punch that connected with his opponent’s cheekbone. They fought for a while.
Apart from shocking Erik, it surprised him. This was the man who a few years before had recommended playing dumb, keeping calm.
As they headed back towards Bumburet, it occurred to Erik that Jordi would come to a bad end, that in this region these excesses would always come at a price. As he stood outside Sharakat House, he also wondered how it was possible to maintain this kind of lifestyle, with two servants, horses, the jeep … How could Jordi not be in debt?
Money was a necessary demon for him, Jordi used to say. His need forced him to keep moving, to keep coming up with ideas. It was true that five hundred dollars was enough to live like a king among the Kalash, with two horses, servants, a pleasant, small, and relatively comfortable house, in a mediaeval sense of comfort. But there were always bills appearing to be paid, new debts, obligations, or purchases that he forced upon himself and that ended up undermining his income.
And it was his economic predicament that prompted him to travel to the headquarters of the N.G.O. Aide Médicale Internationale (the A.M.I.), where he walked in, one May morning, accompanied by Shamsur. He was wearing black leather trousers and a tight white shirt on which a gold necklace danced. This guy’s queer, thought Gyuri Fritsche from the desk where he was having a conversation with members of his team.
Jordi greeted several people, joking constantly.
‘Who’s that?’ asked a passing businessman.
‘That?’ replied a veteran. ‘That is a Peshawar legend. When you hear “Jordi’s in again!”, it’s a sign that you’ll soon be seeing his car coming up through University Town. No, he doesn’t go unnoticed. He comes from Chitral every two or three months, and everybody has something to say about him, about him being a dangerous guy, about him having problems …’
‘Why’s he got problems?’
‘Because of his open opposition to Islam? Because of his lifestyle? Because of his taste for young boys? That’s something you’ll hear about Jordi. I don’t know — I’ve never seen anything to lead me to believe that it’s all correct, and I’ve always preferred to ignore gossip.’
‘But who is he? What does he do?’
‘Jordi? I’m sure you’ve heard of him. The man who’s looking for the yeti.’
‘Jesus! It’s him!’
‘Can anyone lend me a computer?’ said Jordi very loudly. ‘I need to check my e-mail.’
Someone immediately let him get onto one of the machines. It was the first year of communicating via the internet. Wow, what a cool invention. While he glanced at the screen he kept making silly comments that provoked bursts of laughter around him.
‘Hey, you!’ called Gyuri from his desk. ‘We’re trying to have a meeting here, so either stop bothering us or you’d better leave.’
Jordi felt an impulse to respond to this greenhorn boss he did not yet know. But it would have been very counterproductive to his intentions. He just put on a comically offended expression, and carried on checking his mail.
XXXII
HOW is a giant born? From what point is it possible to tell how big he’s going to be? They say giants suffer from an illness and that’s why they’re the way they are, and so it’s no surprise that over the course of history they’ve been considered more or less aberrant.
Invincible possessors of an authoritarian insolence, they often come into conflict with power. It comes with being big. They say that Eurymedon, the leader of the first giants, chose to exterminate them. It’s true that many of them succumbed to bronze maces, flaming torches, projectiles of red-hot metal, and that others were crushed by a chunk of island torn from the abyss. But it was never easy.
They’re hard to kill.
And some survivors remain.
XXXIII
Chastity is the flowering of man; Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it.
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
His ambivalence towards sex echoes that of celebrated others who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion — Thoreau (who was a lifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently — to say nothing of countless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, misfits, and adventurers. Like not a few of those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a variety of lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too powerful to be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by the succor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congress with nature, with the cosmos itself. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska.
Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild
CLAIRE visited Pakistan for the third summer in a row, though this time travelling on her own account. Cat Valicourt had wound up the collaboration with Jordi. As she became better and
better positioned in Coppens’s protective orbit, she found the incursions to Pakistan losing their original appeal. The discrete scientific discoveries that had been made no longer justified running the risks in mountains that were increasingly Talibanised, nor the effort required to put up with Jordi’s unpredictable outbursts. No major scientific institution was going to finance another project between them. Valicourt put a definite end to her help, but she and Jordi remained friends. After all, he didn’t want to lose all links to ‘abroad’, least of all to a scientist who was now attaining a position of authority. And, well, he had to admit that, for years, Valicourt had been a true support for him.
On this trip, Claire was accompanied by two French journalists, Agnès and Stéphane. They began by settling in Peshawar for a fortnight, sleeping at the university for a few nights and in the headquarters of the A.M.I. for others.
That year, Claire felt particularly assailed by the stares of the Punjabis and the Pashtuns. ‘There are limits to what you can get used to, and especially to what you want to get used to,’ she wrote in her diary. She looked at the clothes she had on. She was dressed according to the Punjabi fashion, with wide trousers and shalwar-kameez, but she still had her sleeves rolled up when she was out in the street, and out there half the women were in burkas. The other half were in large veils that covered their hair and face, apart from their eyes. It was intolerable. It felt as though the men were looking at her like savages. Fine, they respected her as a foreigner, they did make some allowances, but the situation was much worse than, say, in India.
‘Women have it hard in India, too, but you can see they’re still able to do something,’ she said to Jordi. ‘There, they can argue. In Pakistan, that would be unthinkable.’
On 26 June, eleven days after her arrival, Jordi appeared with Shamsur and Ainullah. They were approaching in unison, Jordi in front, and the others half a pace behind. She was struck by the sight of the trio. There was something martial, solid, deeply manly about the group. Jordi hugged her, and the boys also demonstrated their affection towards her; it was obvious that she had been the subject of their conversation. Then Jordi told them to pack the suitcases, and that he’d help with one of them himself. There was no doubt who gave the orders around here.
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