In the Land of Giants

Home > Other > In the Land of Giants > Page 28
In the Land of Giants Page 28

by Gabi Martinez


  Shamsur did get a certain pleasure in seeing him irritated. During an event in Jordi’s honour in Savoy, Shamsur approached the organiser, Jean Rivollier, and blurted out: ‘This is all very nice and everything, but you know Jordi and I haven’t actually found the barmanu.’

  Although he tried when in Europe to keep his cool and control his outbursts, Jordi twitched. That boy, that man, was no longer satisfied with fulfilling the role of companion — he wanted rather to be participating on his own account … criticising him.

  The stay in Europe was prolonged more than usual. The daily news bulletins announced that Osama Bin Laden, leader of the Al-Qaeda terrorist group that had claimed responsibility for the attacks on the Twin Towers, was hiding in the tribal areas of north-western Pakistan. Meanwhile the I.S.I. was tightening links with the radical Jamaat-e-Islami party while simultaneously showing themselves ready to collaborate with the United States on the hunt and capture of Taliban fighters, trying impossibly to keep playing both sides.

  In the United States, vindictive inertia and the need to offer up those responsible for the 9/11 killings to public opinion led president George Bush on 7 February 2002 to decide to deny POW status and access to justice to members of Al-Qaeda, to Taliban fighters, and to other suspected terrorists they had captured.

  ‘It was a step backward for the United States and for humanity,’ the political analyst Ahmed Rashid would write years later. ‘The fact that the supreme power on earth was unleashing their war on terror without respecting the rules of war that they themselves had signed, denying justice at home, weakening the U.S. Constitution and then pressuring their allies to do the same, set in train a devastating denial of civilised instincts.’

  The contenders were both competing on the darkest side of humanity. The men lying in ambush in the mountains found insuperable reasons to be utterly savage. It had never been so simple to transform oneself into a monster.

  ‘And that’s where you want to go back to?’ asked his sister Rosa. Jordi had travelled to her house in L’Eliana, a few minutes from Valencia, together with Andrés, Philo, Dolores, and Shamsur to spend the Fallas festivities.

  ‘There’s nothing happening in Chitral. It’s a tourist area,’ replied Jordi.

  It was mid-morning, and Jordi was sprawled on the dining-room sofa in a sky-blue shalwar-kameez that Rosa thought the height of chic. Dolores was more or less listening to the conversation while the others were chatting on the terrace.

  ‘You aren’t afraid of going back there, the way things are? Send Shamsur by plane, and you stay in France,’ suggested Rosa, nodding towards the Nuristani.

  ‘I need to go back. Shamsur’s brother is taking care of my horses, my chickens, the rabbits, the vegetable garden …’

  ‘And the servants?’

  ‘I dismissed them before coming here, but I have two new ones who’ve agreed to start when I get back.’

  ‘Kalash?’

  ‘No, Afghans. They’ve been recommended by people I trust.’

  ‘People you trust? You can be so silly! They’re going to lay a trap for you!’

  ‘They really aren’t, Rosita. I’m fine.’

  ‘You can’t see the danger you’re in!’

  ‘Look, there are things I can’t tell you, but don’t be afraid. All of you are in more danger than me, with so much terrorism and decline all around you. And more things are going to happen — even more serious things.’

  They argued. Jordi added that when he returned he meant to take in a Kalash boy to educate, so that in future he would help his people.

  ‘Yeah, like Shamsur, right?’ said Rosa, an ironic tone in her voice.

  ‘Shamsur isn’t an authentic Kalash.’

  On Wednesday 20 March, the ‘French’ Magraners and Shamsur said goodbye to Rosa. Jordi was the first to embrace her. Then came the others. And then Jordi did something unusual: he approached his sister again and gave her another hug. Held close against Jordi, Rosa was moved in a distant way, moved by that second hug. She squeezed him tighter. She could sense a deep sadness in him. She felt this was not a normal goodbye, as though Jordi wanted to preserve her image, her gaze. She had a bad feeling about it.

  In Valence, Andrés once again tried to dissuade him.

  ‘The guys who killed Massoud were kamikazes disguised as journalists. You can’t trust anybody any more — not an eight-year-old boy, not a pregnant woman. Take a year to rest, wait to see how things develop, and then decide.’

  Jordi bought several pieces of equipment, among them a latest-generation video camera, he packed up what he needed, and one Sunday in early April 2002 he kissed his mother twice and hugged her tight. He got into the car. As he moved away, his hand kept waving goodbye to Dolores. It is the last memory she has of him.

  LIV

  There could be no honour in a sure success, but much might be wrested from a sure defeat. Omnipotence and the Infinite were our two worthiest foemen, indeed the only ones for a full man to meet, they being monsters of his own spirit’s making […] To the clear-sighted, failure was the only goal. We must believe, through and through, that there was no victory except to go down into death fighting and crying for failure itself, calling in excess of despair to Omnipotence to strike harder, that by His very striking He might temper our tortured selves into the weapon of His own ruin.

  T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom

  But where the danger is, also grows the saving power.

  Friedrich Hölderlin

  JORDI visited Gyuri and Iris soon after arriving in Pakistan. He needed the warmth of a family, to make the disconnection not feel so abrupt.

  ‘Ah, mon ami!’ cried Gyuri when he saw him. They hugged. Mon ami. Gyuri would never have imagined he’d be so happy to be reunited with that extravagant being … whom he called his friend. ‘Mon ami!’ he said again.

  They had dinner together. Jordi delivered one of his bedtime stories to the girls, said goodnight to them, and, alone once again with the couple, he summarised his European winter. They noticed he was more preoccupied than usual.

  ‘I’m going to catch the barmanu. It’s not going to get away from me this time.’

  ‘How many dogs have you got now?’

  ‘Three. They’re good trackers. But this time there’s something else,’ said Jordi, getting up from the table. ‘Look, you’ll see I’ve come back very well prepared.’

  He opened the suitcase he had left in a corner of the dining room, and got up brandishing his new video camera.

  ‘What do you think?’

  Gyuri and Iris were stunned.

  ‘Very …’ began Gyuri, ‘very …’

  ‘It’s beautiful, Jordi,’ said Iris. ‘If the barmanu knew you were going to record it on that, it’d pay a visit to the barber’s first.’

  Gyuri didn’t so much as crack a smile; he was even troubled that Iris was joking. He thought the money he’d lent Jordi had been for him to live on, and now he’d suddenly shown up with a luxury video camera. It didn’t even occur to Jordi to make reference to the two-thousand-dollar debt — the camera was proof that he’d invested the money appropriately, wasn’t it? Actually, this was why he was showing it to them. Gyuri calculated the piece of equipment must have cost him more or less two thousand dollars. He felt used, but he did not protest.

  ‘And what do you say to the possibility of working at the U.N.H.C.R.?’ asked Iris, who during Jordi’s time in Europe had been sending messages renewing that possibility. He frowned.

  ‘Could you give me something a bit more specific? What kind of work would I be doing? Who would go with me?’

  ‘Like I said in my last mail, they’d entrust you with the leadership of a sub-delegation in Afghanistan.’

  ‘And the money?’

  ‘About nine thousand dollars a month.’

  ‘Nine thousand!’ Gyuri butted i
n. ‘That’s quite a tidy sum!’

  Jordi forced a smile.

  ‘Thank you, I’ll think about it,’ he replied, knowing he wouldn’t waste a minute on the possibility. He didn’t even bother pretending — he spoke in such a way that it was quite clear he was going to turn it down.

  Gyuri couldn’t believe it. This was a guy whose lifestyle, the plans he wanted to develop with the Kalash, meant he urgently needed money … a guy they were offering this perfect job on a platter … and he was choosing not to take it! There weren’t many people capable of a gesture like that. This was someone who’d decided not to comply with anything he only felt half-hearted about, and kept trying to live his life genuinely faithful to the things he truly loved. The guy was a wonder — you had to give him that. The business with the camera stung a bit but, very well, mon ami, very well … Yes, quite a guy.

  In mid-April, snowstorms kept the Lowari Pass closed, preventing Jordi’s arrival into Chitral. He had ruled out taking the plane in order to protect the budget, and the snow would have stopped the flights anyway. He went through enervating days of waiting — ‘an odyssey,’ he wrote in his diary — wanting to see his Kalash friends, wondering how Sharakat House was, weighing up the difficulties that the Greek humanitarian aid would have had in reaching ‘these three thousand people and their democracy’. His impotence and anxiety had repercussions on his relationship with Shamsur. Their arguments rolled on and on, ever more wounding, followed by protracted silences.

  The news went around that Osama Bin Laden had been sighted in neighbouring Dir.

  As soon as Jordi arrived in Bumburet, he tidied the house, and climbed into the jeep, headed for the Kalash valley of Birir. He was going in search of his new protégé.

  It was the two journalists prowling about the area who had first told him about Wazir. The reporters had hit it off with that twelve-year-old shepherd on a trip to Birir.

  ‘We’d have liked to take him to France,’ they had said to Jordi. ‘He’s a very sharp lad, he shouldn’t stay here, least of all the way things are … but there’s no way we could get him a visa. We thought you might be able to help out a bit, teach him French, educate him a little. When the landscape changes, maybe you could even take him to France — kind of like you did with that blonde kid.’

  It didn’t sound too bad to him. Things had become so difficult with Shamsur, and he was excited by the possibility of educating a new disciple, having a new dream, another chance. But before saying the word, he wanted to see the boy.

  ‘I’ll visit him when I get back,’ he said once he had heard the proposal.

  Well, he was back now.

  He took the jeep down to Ayun and the worrying road to Birir, a series of barrier-less curves where the ground often comes loose. The road is a trail of graves in memory of those who have fallen over the edge.

  He skipped over rocky streams, climbing along tracks that were really for livestock, till he reached the house beside the river, sunk into an embankment that was crossed by the highway.

  Samsam, Wazir’s father, preferred to talk in his brother Irfan’s house, a wooden jewel set into a hillside. From his balustrade he had a fine view right across the mountains, one mountain after another, hugging the valley. The woods were dense, the lower hillsides a riot of maize, in this ravine that was so beautiful, so remote, crossed by a wide, gently flowing river.

  They served tea with a lot of milk. The occasion merited it.

  ‘My son knows how to help with the cows and the sheep — he’s a good shepherd. He likes to fish, he likes playing football and handball … but most of all he’s a good student. He learns everything extremely fast, he does. Those journalists said if they took him to Europe, he could be a doctor.’

  ‘And what do you think?’

  ‘That he can be whatever he wants to be, if you people help him.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be with him. He’ll have good teachers in France.’

  Samsam didn’t know a great deal about Jordi. He’d seen him a couple of times, and the information he’d received was based on rumours, but he had a good feeling about this foreigner … and the truth was, opportunities like this didn’t come along very often in life.

  ‘You make us very happy by agreeing to educate our son,’ he replied.

  Today, Samsam has the languid, puzzled look of a man suffering. Amid all the premature wrinkles on his face, those between his eyebrows display the scale of his incomprehension. Sometimes flies land on his face, and he doesn’t scare them off. He is forty-five or forty-six years old — ‘it’s not just me, hardly anyone here knows their age for sure’ — and he has four daughters whose education he’s prepared to pay for, whatever it is, it’s up to them to decide. Neither he nor his wife, Tsran, can read, nor do they listen to the news, because there’s no coverage in the valley.

  This year, the prolonged, extreme heat has yielded a pitiful grape harvest, all small and dry, with no chance of extracting any wine. In Birir, the zeal for storing water has ended up corrupting the reserves in the wells, and cholera has spread. The hundred Kalash families and hundred Muslim families in Birir are going to have to gather a lot of firewood and a lot of grass to accumulate the minimal amount of rupees that will allow them to make it through the winter.

  ‘Yes, Wazir was a good shepherd,’ said Samsam, and this is the only time he smiles. ‘He was my only son. A son is most important; he can help in other ways. And having him disappear …’

  LV

  AS Wazir climbed into the jeep, Jordi became fully aware that for the first time in fifteen years he was going to break a kind of personal rule. Until now, all the employees and protégés with whom he had lived had been Muslims. Wazir was going to become the first Kalash to share his house. As he drove, he tried to calibrate the consequences of this initiative, the joy of the Kalash, and the resentment of the Muslims, but he didn’t spend too long speculating. The road was dangerous enough already, and besides, who could venture any guess about the future?

  Wazir proved every bit as good a student as Jordi had been promised. It was hard not to compare his speedy progress with the laziness and peevishness of Shamsur, to whom Jordi still felt hopelessly connected all the same. He would have liked to make Shamsur a king, and even though he was coming to realise that this plan wouldn’t come to fruition either, the dreams and the affection he had placed in the Nuristani over so many years bound them to each other in a contradictory fashion. As he watched Wazir’s determination, he was assailed by a wave of fury towards that wretched dimwit who never really understood how much he might have achieved if he had only heeded Jordi’s advice and applied a little perseverance. Meanwhile, he did admire the stubbornness with which Shamsur insisted upon a rural life, however much people might give him a hard time about it.

  But what did Shamsur represent? What place did he occupy in his life?

  ‘Shamsur.’

  Speaking his name propelled him back to an earlier life, which was too distant now. To other dreams. To the barmanu. By now, the barmanu and Shamsur belonged to the dreams of his youth, his most beautiful, overflowing aspirations. He would not abandon them entirely, they were a part of his universe, there was always still hope, but he would focus his energies on two other aims — the Kalash and Wazir (a Kalash boy himself) — in a way that marked his farewell to the epic and his return to earth. After all, defending the Kalash also involved large doses of heroism; it was just that this glory, once attained, would be written in a more ordinary register, less mythical than capturing the barmanu. With the Kalash and Wazir, Jordi felt himself touching down in an arena where men were pitted in daily struggles.

  By exchanging the hunt for the struggle, he was also opting for a more sedentary lifestyle. He imagined that doing this marked the start of his own particular phase of maturity.

  Shamsur still frequented Sharakat House and helped with domestic duties, for which Jordi p
aid him well. All the same, there often wasn’t enough work. He was frequently to be found sprawled on the riverbank or in the undergrowth smoking hashish, so the scuffles with Jordi multiplied.

  ‘You’re going to end up with a square arse,’ said Jordi when he found him, as usual, sitting on a rock outside the house. ‘Go on, come up and have dinner with us.’

  ‘Where you have you come from?’

  ‘What do you care? Are you coming up, or aren’t you?’

  They went into the house. Wazir was on his bed, leafing through an illustrated book.

  ‘All finished?’ asked Jordi with a glance at the homework books. Wazir nodded. Shamsur threw himself on him and started to muss up his hair.

  ‘Leave him be,’ commanded Jordi.

  ‘He’s my little brother, aren’t you, dwarf?’

  He ruffled his hair again. Wazir struggled, amused, slapping at him affectionately.

  ‘You’ve already got brothers.’ Jordi grabbed one of Shamsur’s shoulders and pulled him back. ‘Worry about playing with them.’

  Shamsur stumbled, and almost fell. He half-closed his eyes mockingly and said: ‘Right, that’s true. Wazir’s a different kind of brother. He’s not a Muslim.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re a Muslim?’ asked Jordi.

  Shamsur fell silent, slighted.

  ‘So why don’t you grow your beard, if you feel so Muslim?’ asked Jordi.

  ‘I shave because I like it.’ Shamsur’s tone had changed. ‘I believe in Allah because he’s my God, and in the prophet Mohammed. And I shave because I like it.’

  ‘Well, get a look at you! You were a Red Kafir. You people used to be great.’

  ‘Hey, stop, stop it. You’re talking about my forefathers. I’m a Muslim.’

  Wazir was trying to draw a snow leopard on the small corner table of the study.

  ‘Good lad,’ said Jordi, running his fingers through his hair.

 

‹ Prev