‘Come on up, Jordi, come on up.’
Inside the house, there was no sign of Shamsur. The old man’s wife served some tea.
‘Shamsur’s working in the fields — he won’t be back today till late. He takes very good care of his wife; his brother would be very happy and very proud of him.’
‘Right … it’s actually Shamsur I’ve come to talk to you about. When we met, you told me you wanted Shamsur to do well, you remember?’
‘Of course. And we’re very grateful for …’
‘Look, soon I’m going to be going back to France for a bit. And I want to ask your permission for Shamsur to travel with me. It’s a great opportunity.’
XLIV
BEFORE that flight to Paris, there is one episode that remains obscure, which those who know about it find hard to explain. They say that during a trip Jordi and Fjord took to Peshawar, they stopped for a night in a small village. It was completely dark. Jordi went for a walk with Fjord, the lights of a van dazzled him — other people say it was a car — and he stumbled in the darkness and fell into a gully. Some people say he was knocked unconscious and that Fjord sheltered him with his body until the animal himself decided to go for help. Others insist that Jordi, immobilised by the pain, ordered him to go for help. According to Jordi, he shouted at the Malamute: ‘To the hotel! To the hotel!’, and everybody praises the determination and intelligence of a dog like Fjord who, one way or another, seems to have saved his life.
Ángel Magraner, who by this time was already in Fontbarlettes, saw his brother arrive standing very upright because of the corset he had worn ever since, and he asked after the dog.
‘This year he’s staying in Chitral. He’s starting to get too old for so many airports — they’ll take good care of him back home. I’ve told them to give him salmon at Christmas, like we always do here.’
Later, Ángel asked to see where he’d been injured. Jordi’s back was covered in marks and bruises. Ángel said nothing till he was alone with Esperanza: ‘He got beaten up, and he’s invented this story so we won’t worry.’
XLV
‘SO, how are you coping?,’ Jordi asked Shamsur as they waited to step out onto another French stage.
‘Good.’
‘Don’t touch the curtains, or the people outside will get distracted.’
‘France is good for me. People behave well towards me, there’s good food … I don’t know what more I could ask for. I’m doing well.’
Jordi pursed his lips in satisfaction, and gave the boy’s shoulders a gentle shake as he said: ‘Perfect. Just one lecture left, then we’ll be able to rest for another few months.’
Naturally, the association had done its job well, securing him even more talks than expected.
‘Come on, then, let’s go,’ said Jordi, giving Shamsur a slight push to introduce himself to the audience. They sat down in front of some fifty spectators beside a Greek historian, and talked about the Hindu Kush and the Kalash. Shamsur spoke little. His role was to be there, and so he entertained himself by looking into the eyes of the people who were looking at him. Sure, they look at me the whole time because I’m the authentic inhabitant, he thought.
In Valence, Jordi enrolled Shamsur in a French school by correspondence course, and continued investigating the history of the Kalash and the barmanu, drinking coffee after coffee until the small hours. He meticulously prepared the various lectures on paganism that had been organised for him, surprising himself at the unimprovable reception of his ideas. The audience seemed almost invariably seduced by the pagan model.
It was logical. The large religions were evolving badly; millions of people were increasingly losing faith in the monolithic ideas propagated by very inflexible gurus, disconnected from the hedonistic inclinations of a western society jaded with idols and regulations. Gorged on artifice, the new human beings were crying out for a more natural life, one connected to the mountains, the oceans, the sun. All it took was a discovering of the pagan option to understand the scale of the possibilities. It was logical, to Jordi.
‘I’m getting bored,’ said Shamsur, sitting in front of the television.
He had been watching programmes for more than three hours, and he no longer knew how to position himself on Dolores’s sofa. Jordi had just appeared in the dining room carrying a heap of papers that he kept reading, still standing there.
‘Go to the Vercors tomorrow,’ said Jordi without looking at him.
‘Will you come with me?’
‘I can’t tomorrow. But as soon as I’ve given the last talk, we can spend a whole day around there.’
Shamsur looked back at the TV without registering what he was seeing. The cows in the Vercors were amazing, so fat and with those enormous udders, at least compared to the ones in Bumburet. But he was beginning to get fed up with thinking about them.
‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said.
He only went three blocks. On a desolate corner close to the highway, he lit up a little brick of hashish and rolled himself a joint. When he returned home, he smelled scandalously of drugs, but Jordi didn’t mention it. Maybe he had a cold? In Pakistan he’d have got a serious ticking-off. In the afternoons that followed, Shamsur kept smoking hashish. Jordi caught him several times, but he never reproached him.
Shamsur spent many hours alone in Valence, and though Jordi hated the fact that he was getting high, he had decided to demonstrate an unusual tolerance. Shamsur deduced that, being his host, Jordi felt that he ought to allow his guest certain things. And there was something to that. But, above all, Jordi understood that Shamsur needed his own means of escape if the gloominess of the banlieues wasn’t to crush him. The boy would be better able to handle his boredom and doubt in a narcotic limbo; with any luck, the joints would help him to alleviate his melancholy. After all, he used to smoke loads of them in Chitral behind his back.
During a dinner with friends of Jordi’s, one of them cornered Shamsur during the after-dinner drinks.
‘You smoke, don’t you?’ he asked him.
‘I know you doctors don’t recommend it, but everyone does it.’
‘Don’t see me as a doctor; we smoke, too’ — they exchanged smiles. ‘And I’m not talking about tobacco. I’m asking if you’ — the doctor glanced around him ‘— if you really smoke.’
Shamsur nodded slowly.
‘Can you get me something?’
‘Sure. But you give me the money first.’
‘That’s what I’d assumed — don’t worry about that.’
Through the doctor, other friends of Jordi’s learned about Shamsur’s taste for hashish, finding ways to ask him for clandestine supplies. Shamsur earned himself a little extra money from the transactions. He set up his own network of doctors and other health workers. Jordi knew about none of this, being busy recovering his energies to carry on thinking things up. How insignificant all the anxieties and dangers he’d suffered in the Hindu Kush seemed from here, as though the kilometres were transforming his experiences into fantasy. Maybe that was why he missed it even more. Nostalgia was occupying more and more space every day, encouraging him to imagine that everything would work out well, he would earn money, and, for a start, he’d get his mother out of Fontbarlettes.
‘Come on, seriously: where do you want to live for the next few years, mamá?’ Jordi asked Dolores, as he had asked her a thousand times before.
‘You know very well where: near your siblings.’
Jordi, once again, got angry.
‘You can’t stay here, mamá. This neighbourhood isn’t right for you, you’re old now, and one of these days they’re going to snatch your purse or they’ll break into your house, and then what, huh? What will you do on your own? No, there’s no way. You’ve got to move.’
‘I’ve lived here my whole life, and it doesn’t suit me too badly.’
‘I’m a
bout to catch the barmanu, and when I do it’s going to be a global sensation, I’ll earn some serious money, and I’m going to get you out of here.’
‘Okaaaaaay … Do you want a bit of yesterday’s pie?’
‘I could take you to Pakistan. That oxygen would do you good.’
‘The idea of going … Everything you tell me about that place I’ve seen already in Morocco. And I don’t go backwards. I want comfort. Comfort is a lovely thing. I’m like the conquistadors, always moving forward.’
‘Comfort? I’m talking about making you really better. Why would you want to be comfortable but sick?’
‘Do you want pie or don’t you?’
And on Jordi went, dreaming, still spreading the story of the barmanu that would allow him to return to Chitral after a few months to stay on, at least, in the mountains.
After one of the lectures on relict humans, Shamsur said: ‘Why don’t you give up on it, once and for all? Hundreds of people have gone to hunt it, and nobody’s found it. Doesn’t that make you think?’
‘It’s there,’ Jordi replied, unmoved. The words were like rocks. ‘It exists.’
It was his search. Was he pursuing a myth? Perhaps. But it didn’t matter to him as much as the fact of having found a reason for living. And at a certain point it doesn’t matter whether what you do means anything to anyone else.
When he got back to Bumburet, Fjord was dead.
‘They don’t know how it happened,’ said Jordi on the telephone.
Ainullah was listening to him from Panjshir, where he had settled. Sultan, the servant who now took care of the house and the horses, had found the body a few days before Jordi’s return, and he had buried the dog himself.
‘Where is it?’ Jordi had asked him. ‘Take me to where you buried him.’
They walked a few metres towards the river, and that was enough, because they just had to follow the nauseating trail of stench to reach the grave.
‘They’ve killed him. Someone killed him,’ said Ainullah down the phone. ‘They want to scare you, to make you leave.’
‘Don’t talk nonsense. Fjord was already a good age. And that’s enough now, I don’t want to talk about it any more.’
Fjord had been a little over ten years old, though he had lived a demanding life. Sultan was a member of Shamsur’s family: he was a nice man, hard-working, he did his chores, he never caused trouble, and Jordi wasn’t prepared to encourage suspicions. Fjord was old. That was that.
In any case, things were changing fast. Within a short space of time, Jordi’s affective universe was profoundly altered. Shamsur had grown up, a protégé now longing for new liberties; and his inseparable Fjord would never again flop down onto his bed at night-time. No other dog would do it either, because Fjord would never be replaced.
XLVI
ONE morning in March 2001, Jordi got up, greeted the sun, shaved with his electric shaver, ate a piece of bread with honey, drank tea, and mounted one of his horses, as he felt like riding a little. He passed through Krakal, shouting at the kids to get out of his way — sometimes they would run across in front of the galloping hooves or otherwise behave recklessly. On one side of the track, next to a man who was tightening bowstrings, Jordi saw an unusually numerous group of Kalash gathered, and a conversation was taking place in hushed tones.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked from up on his saddle.
They told him about kilos of dynamite and tanks firing cannon by order of the Afghan Taliban government. After more than fifteen hundred years of history, and having been declared ‘the heritage of humanity’, two of the giant Buddhas of Bamiyán had been obliterated. The government had decreed that the Buddhas were idols and, therefore, contrary to the teachings of the Koran.
XLVII
‘… dealings with a woman in foreign parts, though you was a crowned King twenty times over, could not but be risky.’
Rudyard Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning,
the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest
is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
‘ABIB Noor and his father have made me another offer on the house,’ said Abdul. ‘It’s a lot of money. But I’m not going to sell it to him. This house is the border with the Muslims, the last Kalash house. If they buy it, they’ll keep on moving down, and eventually they’ll take control of everything.’
The winter was coming to an end. Jordi and Abdul were alone, drinking apricot wine in the study at Sharakat House.
‘They just keep on advancing more and more. They’ve already managed to get rid of the Kalash who lived in the piece of land above us, and now they’re putting up that stable right next door …’ said Jordi, gesturing with his thumb over his head. ‘Did they really need to put it there? As if they didn’t have plenty more land …’
‘You leased it to Abib Noor, right? Well, it’s yours now.’
‘I keep renting it so I don’t have to tell him to move. I’m trying to sort things out, so he can see I don’t want any problems … but the way it’s going, one of these days I’ll burn that fucking stable down.’
‘You’re such a brute.’
‘We can’t allow abuses like this to keep happening. And what does the government do, huh? Arseholes. No, no chance. Look at the highways you need to take to get here. And the water … there’s no phone line …’
‘Apparently they’re installing the cables soon.’
‘It’s not normal, Abdul, it isn’t normal! Who is taking care of the Kalash?’
‘Athanasious wants to do things.’
Despite sharing many of Jordi’s opinions, Abdul had obliged himself to be more appeasing. It was his survival mechanism. Braking before it was too late, taming his tongue. Forbidding himself from getting worked up.
‘Athanasious is a swindler, an authoritarian braggart, a Greek nationalist who’s now started manipulating the idiot myth that you people are all descended from Alexander. Descended from Alexander! It’s a historical heresy and an intellectual sham. I do understand it’s useful for publicity and to get tourists coming, but that thing about Alexander is a lie. In the meantime, though, the Greek government pays out a fortune to him.’
Abdul nudged his pakhol forward till it was nearly covering his eyebrows. He leaned back in his chair. He sipped the drink, and twisted his expression into a grimace that was somewhere between sad and terrified.
‘It’s Abib Noor you need to keep an eye on, not the Greek.’
Neither of them said anything about it, but they both knew what Abib Noor was saying in the valley about Jordi and Shamsur, and it was still on Abdul’s mind as he walked drunkenly down the path towards his hotel. He stumbled and fell onto one of the trickles of water that irrigated the path. It wasn’t the first time that had happened. As he had always done before, he began laughing till he coughed.
In the days that followed, Jordi tried to make his ties with Abib Noor closer. When he wanted to buy grass from him for the horses, Noor asked an exorbitant price. One morning, returning from a walk, Jordi found horses he didn’t recognise in the stables he had rented, and he had to shelter his own someplace else. Soon afterwards, Abib Noor accused Jordi and Shamsur of having taken wood from those stables without permission and having cut down some trees for firewood, which was forbidden by law. Finally the Muslim wrote a note in which he made accusations about Jordi and Shamsur’s homosexual relations, specifying the problems this could cause in the valley. He made copies, and shared them among the inhabitants of Bumburet.
Jordi regretted having held back like never before. Daily he cursed Abib Noor. I should have taken that son of a bitch down a peg or two long ago. He’d imagined a variety of ways of smashing his face in, breaking his legs, really teaching him a lesson, b
ut he understood that the context was not on his side, and so after the latest offensive from the swine he shut himself up in his study, ordering that he should not be disturbed, punched the wall, and sat down to write a letter he headed Insults, problems, threats and propaganda against me. In it, he explained his relationship with Abib Noor from the very beginning, claiming that the Muslim had gone so far as to arrange meetings with the purpose of attacking him ‘because, he said, I am a foreigner and a Kafir’. As for Shamsur:
Shamsur Rahman is like my little brother and Abib Noor accuses us of homosexuality […] He’s giving us a bad reputation and inciting people against us […] He doesn’t respect the laws of the village […] The whole thing is untrue.
He handed the letter to the police, together with one of the slanderous pieces of paper written by Abib Noor. In the letter, he demanded that the security services fulfil their duty, emphasising that if anything happened to him, it would be their responsibility.
XLVIII
Esperanza Magraner: My father was very closed up about sex; at home, he never spoke about it. My sister and I were only allowed out if we were back before nightfall. And even when my sister was older, she wasn’t allowed to be seen with a boy if I wasn’t present. In 1969! To my father, sex was something that could only be done within marriage, never outside it, as though he were afraid of disease or dishonour. I think this upbringing was drummed into Jordi … like all of us.
Erik L'Homme: Deep down, he was homosexual. A repressed one, though neither Yannik nor I were ever the subject of advances from him. He did, though, speak freely about sex, saying he took Antiquity as his model. He always remarked that from a historical point of view, from a philosophical perspective, the pleasure of both male and female company was applauded.
Claire G: He might have been bisexual, like the Romans. That complicity with Shamsur and Ainullah … but I’m sure he wasn’t exclusively homosexual. After one night he spent with Marie Odile, I found the rubbish bin full of condoms.
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