In the Land of Giants

by Gabi Martinez

  Marie Odile: We never talked about sex, and I never saw any homosexual behaviour in him, but, no, I didn’t have sexual relations with him.

  Junaid Ali (mountaineer): In Chitral, homosexuality is common among Muslims. Siraj Ulmulk himself, all the princes … It’s not like that with the Kalash.

  Gyuri Fritsche: Well, in ancient Greek society, being homosexual or loving a boy was quite common. It was considered normal in the relationship between a teacher and his pupil. And in Afghan-Pakistani culture, among men it is also considered pretty normal to have sex with boys. The reason is, if you’re heterosexual and you want to sleep with a woman without being married to her, that could mean the end of your life and hers. Which is why the Taliban are known for these practices, which they even joke about themselves.

  Erik L'Homme: There are different laws. What earns a punishment here is normal there. And vice versa.

  Abdul Khaleq: The truth is, Jordi did arrive from Peshawar one time with an Afghan boy. After five days’ living together, the boy, who couldn’t write, came to get me to write an accusation against Jordi for having asked him for sex. I told him I wouldn’t do it, that it would bring shame on him, and I went straight over to see Jordi. He said the boy had wanted to charge him more money to work for him than they’d agreed, and that was why he’d fired him, and now the kid was getting his revenge in this way. ‘Why would I need to bring over an Afghan boy if I wanted to do something?’ The truth is, a lot of people have asked me for drugs, alcohol, women and men … but Jordi never asked me for anything like that. And he had no reason to. One time we slept together at the American Club in Peshawar, and he never made any kind of advance on me.

  Gyuri Fritsche: I think Jordi was a paedophile. But he tried to keep it to himself because he was aware of the social implications. When I started to think more deeply about the subject and face up to the various theories, I had to acknowledge that this might have been the reason for his murder. I spoke to good friends of his, who confessed to knowing something, and I’m referring to people who actually saw things, not just second-hand information — they gave concrete examples. One of those examples I heard from a good friend of Jordi’s who certainly had no reason to put him in the wrong.

  Gabi Martínez: What examples? What friend?

  Gyuri Fritsche: Abdul. He had also resisted believing the rumours until a couple of things happened that made him change his view. One time, a boy came complaining to him about what Jordi had done. Abdul gave him a bit of money to keep quiet, and he kept the information to himself. Another time, he was walking past Jordi’s house and looked through the window, and saw Jordi and Shamsur in bed together.

  Shamsur: Jordi was like my big brother. He never asked me for sex.

  Jalili Ainullah: With me? No way, he never tried anything. Some people said he liked boys, but I always ignored them. In any case, it was a matter of Jordi’s personal choice. I like women — that’s my choice. Jordi never forced anyone to hook up with him. I find it hard to talk about these things. He never said ‘I like men’. And he had several things with women.

  Gabi Martínez: With whom?

  Jalili Ainullah: Oh, I don’t know. At least he had a lot of female friends.

  Abdul Khaleq: I didn’t see Jordi and Shamsur in bed together. Whoever told you that must have misinterpreted me.

  Andrés Magraner: Another hypothesis for why they killed my brother was paedophilia. According to several reports, including on the internet, Jordi was a paedophile — with Wazir Ali Sha, too. There’s a rumour that Wazir’s father might have killed Jordi for having abused his son. Someone told me that, not long before his death, young Wazir, who had spent some time with my brother, didn’t want to go back to Krakal — that is, to Jordi’s house. And his father scolded him, saying he should go back to Jordi, that Jordi was a good man. But then why would he have killed his own son?

  Yves Bourny: Sometimes gossip is enough to sentence someone to death.

  ‘Don’t forget!’ Jordi shouted at the police. ‘If something happens to me, you’ll be responsible!’

  XLIX

  IN the summer of 2009, I made twenty-seven telephone calls to the Spanish embassy in Pakistan. Each time, I waited several minutes until the line was cut off, with two exceptions. The second time they picked up, I managed to speak to Juan José Giner, who had been the representative in Pakistan for nearly three decades. Giner had known Jordi. He didn’t want to talk about him, nor about his murder, nor about the repatriation of his body, which had never been carried out. He assured me that everything he had to say had been picked up by the press at the time. The press had got practically nothing.

  When I asked him for advice about how I could get myself into Chitral, he recommended that I give up. When I wrote weeks later to request an interview with him on my arrival in Islamabad, no one replied. When, months later, I asked who had been the Spanish ambassador to Pakistan in 2002, they refused to supply me with the name. The text that was posted on the website of the Spanish embassy at the time read:

  There is an elevated risk of terrorism and sectarian violence right across Pakistani territory. The attacks — suicide attacks among them — are mostly aimed at the Pakistani security forces, though also at places that are frequented by foreigners. Several parts of the country are also the setting for armed confrontations between the Taliban militia and the Pakistani army.

  The threat to foreign citizens, and particularly westerners, has risen considerably, and more and more kidnappings of foreigners are being reported, especially in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan.

  The Pakistani army had just completed its counter-offensive in the Swat valley, adjoining Chitral, when I went in to the Pakistani consulate in Barcelona to request a visa. They processed it within a day. They said that things were calm in Chitral, though they did require that I show a banker’s reference as proof that I would be able to pay the costs of a possible repatriation.

  By that time, some residents of the countryside and the mountains who had fled from Swat were beginning their return home, while the Taliban were mostly escaping towards South Waziristan. No one imagined they might cross the mountains towards Chitral — a route that was too tough, as well as being guarded by the Chitral Scouts.

  In France, Esperanza was interviewed down the phone by the Pakistani embassy in Paris. She had decided to travel with me to place the stone on Jordi’s grave, though she had told her mother that she was going off on holiday to someplace peaceful, not wanting to worry her. Several days passed, and Esperanza held a second interview with the embassy.

  We sorted out our airline tickets and our hotel reservations for the first nights in Islamabad and Chitral. Esperanza had ironed the two shalwar-kameez and baggy trousers that her brother Andrés had used on previous visits, intending me to wear them.

  With just three days to go, the embassy notified Esperanza that they would not be issuing the visa. She would not be able to fly to Pakistan.

  ‘They said too many French women are getting kidnapped, and they’re fed up with paying ransoms,’ she told me on the phone.

  I was afraid. Without her, my trip took on a quite different dimension. Her absence made me no more than a meddler with no roots or friends there, with a camera, biro, and notebook, asking questions about a murdered foreigner. All the same, I couldn’t mess up something I’d already worked on for so long. Postponing the project would mean leaving the bubble I was living in, so full of expectations, fears, and hopes, giving up on the adventure that — as I was hyperaware — I was experiencing. Besides, a postponement would ruin the economic calculations I’d done, condemning me to months of extremely delicate finances. At least, that was how I interpreted it.

  I couldn’t not go.

  Besides, how do you give up on adventure? I was a part of it, and I gloated over the word and its echoes. Adventure. It increases you. It makes you feel bigger, stronger
, better.

  How easy Jordi was to understand.

  Cat Valicourt wrote: ‘Now’s not the time to travel to Chitral, still less to try and understand the murder.’ Claire G. asked: ‘Do you really want to go?’ Dolores Magraner begged: ‘Don’t go to that place, there’s nothing but death, don’t go, don’t go.’ Andrés warned me: ‘That place is full of landmines. There are shepherds who step on them in the mountains, and even if they’re only wounded nobody will go to help them because they’re afraid of getting blown up, too.’ Gerardo Marín, one of my publishers and a friend of mine, said: ‘I guess it’ll be good for the book … but be careful.’ Erik L’Homme recommended that I wait till the fights that were still occurring in the nearby mountains subsided. Elsa, my wife, said: ‘Whatever I tell you, I know you’ll go all the same …’ My parents got angry when I unintentionally had to tell them my plans shortly before the date that was set for my flight.

  At Charles de Gaulle airport, Esperanza handed me Andrés’s clothes along with a pakhol, and gifts for a few friends, and wished me luck.

  L

  Like Satan, he revolts against his fallen state with the rage of a self-assertion that is radical, absolute […] Like him, he is addicted to the discourse of freedom, not of obedience […] In the place where he is, the discourse of freedom and independence to which he is so devoted is expressed with a demagoguery so extreme that his very ideological standards are themselves transformed into a lie.

  Bel Atreides, introduction to Paradise Lost

  As time went by our need to fight for the ideal increased to an unquestioning possession, riding with spur and rein over our doubts. Willy-nilly it became a faith. We had sold ourselves into its slavery …

  T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  ON the edge of the precipice, Jordi put one knee down on the earth, resting the butt of the rifle on his raised thigh. He was wearing camouflage gear, boots, and binoculars, with infra-red goggles in his pouch. He looked like a sculpture, outlined against the void and the distant hillsides. It wasn’t the ideal season for demonstrations of mock battle, but Éric Chrétien had started his report on the ‘anachronistic’ barmanu-hunter, and he was required to do a bit of performing. Besides, he wasn’t going to get intimidated nor change what he was doing just because a handful of bullies were harassing him.

  He enjoyed working with Chrétien, but, as he always did lately, he returned home without ever being able to get his mind off the tormenting figure in his current account, which was approaching a negative amount again after he’d paid a number of debts and covered the costs of travelling to France with Shamsur. Which was why, when a week later he found an envelope under the door sent by Beaufour Ipsen International, he quickly bent down to pick it up, and disembowelled the envelope messily: the firm were confirming that they were interested in hiring him; he just needed to specify when and how his signature would reach them. He would be working for department B21 under the supervision of Monsieur Chollet, and he would earn three hundred euro a month in exchange for a research protocol on the traditional therapies that were carried out using indigenous plants, particularly in the Nuristan area. If I’m representing B21, that changes everything. I have a source of income and a defined employer — I’m not a tourist. And so I can ask for a multiple-entry annual visa.

  He would also be able to count on an annual return ticket to France.

  ‘Chollet could really be paying more, though. Three hundred euro isn’t much; it’s really not enough,’ Jordi said to Khoshnawaz, the Storyteller of Tradition from the Rumbur valley. Children were rushing out of a Kalash school. ‘We need more money to support the Storytellers, and it’s quite clear the government isn’t going to help us.’

  ‘The effects of the work are starting to show,’ said Khoshnawaz. ‘The children are behaving more respectfully towards rituals and religious festivals. We should keep these lessons going if we can.’

  Not long afterwards, Jordi learned that the Kalash were going to be receiving aid from a new N.G.O. headed up by Athanasious Lerounis, the Greek. The supposedly good news was tainted by betrayal.

  ‘I don’t believe it, Gyuri. They’re going to be implementing our plans. The Greek embassy have stolen our plans!’ Jordi told his friend.

  ‘That was why they asked us not to send it to anyone else,’ said Gyuri.

  ‘We’re such idiots. When I think back to when I promised we would respect the agreement … Idiots. They just had to let some time go by, and now they stab us in the back by releasing the money to this Greek N.G.O. instead. What a disgrace. I hope at least they’ll lend a hand with what we’re asking them for.’

  They soon learned that the N.G.O. was not going to take their requests too much into account, and nor were they going to invest in the Storytellers, so that night when they were having dinner at Gyuri’s there was much to be critical about.

  ‘The A.M.I. could have tried harder to get the money to come to us instead of to Lerounis,’ said Jordi. ‘But no, of course not, they never stop having their doubts. What does a guy have to do to make your bosses see things a bit more clearly? Or was the problem that I was the person suggesting the plan? They’ve never trusted me.’

  ‘Come on, Jordi, man, it’s not easy to be the guys in charge. And remember, these are the same bosses who are relying on you, despite all those rumours that are going around.’

  The kids were playing in their bedroom.

  ‘What rumours?’

  ‘I don’t … you know …’

  ‘I know what? What?’

  ‘One time, a French–Afghan showed up who said he worked for the Afghanistan embassy in Paris, and he started accusing us of being manipulated by you. He said you were in the pay of the Pakistani secret services.’

  Jordi became furious. How was this possible? Why didn’t they just let him do his work in peace, once and for all? As though it were a reflex, a way of demonstrating what truly interested him, he began to enumerate his expeditions, explaining the plans he’d made for when he located the barmanu. He even mentioned that he’d thought about whom he was going to contact on the day he caught it.

  ‘And you’ll be one of them.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I’ll need a doctor to take care of the creature during the transportation.’

  ‘Right. Vital signs and all that stuff …’

  ‘It’s not a joke, Gyuri. It won’t be easy.’

  ‘Why?’ asked a child’s voice, suddenly. In one corner of the dining room, little Maartje was listening.

  ‘And what are you doing there? Weren’t you in your room?’ said Gyuri, getting to his feet to take her back to bed.

  ‘Why what?’ asked Jordi.

  ‘Why won’t it be easy to take the barmanu?’

  ‘Oof … it will take a lot of people to move it — remember, the barmanu weighs an awful lot.’

  Gyuri picked his daughter up in his arms.

  ‘Come on, off to sleep with you. Now isn’t the time to be talking about monsters.’

  ‘Is the barmanu a monster?’

  ‘No, sweetie, it’s not,’ said Jordi, with a reproachful look at Gyuri. ‘But even though your father thinks it is, I’ll still call him when the time comes. I have a phone list with all the people I’ll call when I find the barmanu. I’ve even been thinking about the bait.’

  ‘What’s bait?’

  ‘It’s the thing you leave to attract the animal you’re trying to catch.’

  ‘And what is the bait going to be?’

  Gyuri looked at Jordi, at once threatening and amused.

  ‘Charly.’

  ‘Your friend?’

  ‘Yes. Barmanus like girls a lot.’

  ‘To eat?’

  ‘Go on, off to play in your room, little one,’ said Gyuri again, disappearing into the corridor with his daughter. ‘We grown-ups are going to have
our dinner soon, so enjoy your last little bit of time before bed.’

  Gyuri half-closed the door of the girls’ room and turned towards Jordi, twisting a hole in his forehead with his index finger, as if his friend had a screw loose.

  ‘Why do you need human bait?’ asked Iris, who had been following the conversation as she laid the table.

  ‘You know that Pakistani legend in which a woman explains to her husband what an amazing lover the barmanu is, don’t you? Then the husband goes mad with rage, and kills his wife. It’s because barmanus are crazy about sex. The moment they pick up a woman’s scent, they just lose it.’

  The girls could be heard playing in their room.

  ‘And that’s why you thought of Charly Govaerts.’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Man, it’s true she’s not bad at all …’ said Gyuri.

  ‘I was thinking about tying her to a tree in the forest. We hide somewhere nearby and wait for the barmanu to come down, and when it appears, thwack.’

  Gyuri and Iris looked at him with the twisted smile of expectant stupefaction. They were hesitating. They didn’t want to believe what they had heard. It was a relief when Jordi began to laugh.

  From then on, the fantasy of using Charly as bait for the barmanus served to liven up many an evening gathering, triggering instantaneous laughter from Gyuri, Iris, and Jordi. That night, they didn’t stop laughing, and amid the warmth of the good time they were having, the Dutchman reminded his friend that he was yet to teach him how to make one of his unforgettable paellas. Jordi said he would be delighted to. Gyuri hoped that with any luck they’d arrange that soon. He wanted to learn some of his friend’s techniques — he was impressed by how good a cook he was, by his paella in particular.

  ‘Sure, anytime,’ replied Jordi.

  To Gyuri, Jordi was an incarnation of happiness, always ready to eat and drink anything. He made feeling good, and feeling happy, and living life to the full a fundamental part of his identity. He demonstrated an almost mystical devotion to carpe diem, which was doubtless connected to his desire to live among the Kalash, and in accordance with the fundamental elements that define us as human beings: camaraderie, a love of entertainment, music, dancing, culture, protecting the poor, the environment, and love in general.