In the Land of Giants

by Gabi Martinez

  ‘Take him out to get some air,’ said Shamsur. ‘He’s going to rot away in here. He doesn’t know anyone in Bumburet.’

  ‘Are you not well, Wazir?’ asked Jordi.

  ‘No, very well. I like studying. And I have fun with Shamsur.’

  ‘Fine, fine,’ Shamsur interrupted him. ‘But which do you prefer, studying or having fun with Shamsur?’

  Wazir gave a hesitant smile. His eyes moved between Jordi and Shamsur.

  ‘OK, that’s enough,’ said Jordi, standing in front of Shamsur, blocking Wazir with his body. ‘You’re starting to annoy me, boy.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  Now the eyes of Wazir and Shamsur were both on the grown-up. Who does this brat think he is? He ought to draw a line in the sand. The kid knew his weaknesses too well, and was taking advantage of his regard for him. He would have to stop it, to prevent him from losing his respect entirely.

  ‘That you’re fired.’

  Why did he feel so torn apart when he argued with Shamsur? Why did so many good moments they had shared suddenly flash before him — climbing mountains, playing with Fjord, rolling about on the bed? No matter. It was over. He would have to accept the sadness of the separation, but at least in practice his absence wasn’t going to cause any disruption. Jordi already had two good workers. Sultan was still there, who, in addition to taking care of the horses, also helped out the other employee, Mohamed Din, with the vegetable gardens and pruning the overgrown bushes.

  Shamsur had become the centre of attention again. He pursed his lips.

  ‘Fine. Goodbye.’

  He left without believing the dismissal was for good. The stupid loudmouth will give in soon enough. Three days went by. Sultan and Mohamed Din worked just fine without ever missing the occasional help from a Shamsur who was becoming increasingly depressed at losing the favour of his eternal protector. He began to spend many hours close to the road or on the grass, watching the house.

  ‘He really is sad,’ said Sultan to his colleague Mohamed Din as they led the horses to the watering place.

  ‘He’s devastated.’

  ‘Makes you feel sorry for him.’

  The horses sank their muzzles in the water.

  ‘He was asking for it. He’s a wastrel and he’s incompetent — you’ve said so yourself a thousand times.’

  ‘Right, but I don’t know …’

  Some hours later, Sultan went in search of Abdul. He asked for his help in trying to persuade Jordi to allow Shamsur back in. And they did it. Jordi hired Shamsur again.

  They celebrated the reunion on a snowy day. They killed two chickens, bought wine, and toasted the future.

  A few weeks later, Jordi dismissed Sultan. The quarrel was that Sultan had damaged a silver dish with lovely engravings and that, what was more, he had lied to him several times. But the truth was that Sultan and Shamsur had been on bad terms, old quarrels had been stoked, and Shamsur had engineered matters so that Jordi would expel his rival.

  ‘How could he be so wicked?’ Mohamed Din liked that word — he slipped it out it whenever he could. ‘Little traitor.’

  ‘Hold on to that end,’ Abdul ordered him. The two of them were placing a log in the little dam where Abdul kept the salmon. ‘They aren’t going to escape with this here.’

  They sat down, panting, on the riverbank.

  ‘Shamsur and Sultan hadn’t been getting along,’ said Abdul. ‘What I don’t understand is why Sultan ever interceded on Shamsur’s behalf.’

  ‘He felt sorry for him, I’ve already told you. And you see how the boy thanks him. You can’t trust anyone nowadays, young people specially. What have they been teaching these little devils? How wicked … I don’t know what’s going on in Jordi’s head … I hope he gives me an assistant soon. When I was on my way here, I saw him talking to Asif.’

  ‘The Afghan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘To hire him?’

  ‘I don’t know, but they looked very serious when they were talking. What’s wrong? You don’t like Asif?’

  Abdul did not reply.

  ‘We do need someone, don’t we?’

  Abdul got to his feet. He walked quickly through the undergrowth. Jordi’s crazy. He went into Sharakat House, jumping the fence that led to the path, went up to the office, and knocked on the door. He heard a chair being pushed across the floor, and the door opened.

  ‘Are you taking on Asif?’ he asked from the threshold.

  ‘I already have.’

  ‘Don’t hire him, Jordi.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s an Afghan. Don’t do it.’

  Abdul said it again and again.

  ‘Don’t do it — the Afghans aren’t to be trusted.’

  ‘Ainullah was Afghan.’

  ‘There’s always an exception.’

  ‘Yeah, I get it. Anything else?’

  Abdul brushed off the front of his kameez, turned around, and went down the steps towards the front door. Abdul’s such a pain. I’ve been far too cautious, and anyway, what was wrong with Asif? As though Ainullah hadn’t been proof enough that origins don’t matter. Besides, Jordi liked the calm that surrounded this thin twenty-something, his good manners and his precise, intelligent way of speaking. Asif’s youth and boldness would be good to balance out the more serious aura of Mohamed Din, the old hand who was the cook and who was in charge of logistical matters, who lived in a house nearby with his family, and with whom Jordi maintained relations that were good but superficial.

  Mohamed Din was a refugee who had come from Nuristan. He possessed the tanned skin and the lean build typical of men from those lands. After marrying a girl from Shekhanandeh, he had inherited a piece of land that he devoted himself to cultivating, avoiding too many dealings with other people, dedicated to his family. They said he’d killed a man in Nuristan. Who knows? In Bumburet, he had always behaved with moderation and courtesy. He was an indoor man.

  Yes, Asif would alleviate his circumspection. Lively without being overwhelming, he soon demonstrated that he knew how to use tools and words. He let slip the occasional sarcastic comment; he brought a certain intellectual spark. You could never see in him the emotional burdens that Mohamed Din certainly dragged along with him — far from it — and he exuded strength and vigour.

  Jordi assigned him the small building attached to the stables as his bedroom, opposite the big entrance gate. To reach the study and Jordi and Wazir’s living quarters he had to climb a little path, up past the unit that included the kitchen, climb the stairs, and cross the terrace. That way, everybody would be able to enjoy enough independence.

  When Khalil learned about the hiring of Asif Ali he, too, criticised it.

  ‘Why are you hiring people from outside the valley? You should only have locals in your service.’

  Asif was an Afghan Pathan. He’d arrived with his family three years earlier, but his wife and children had left at the end of that winter, leaving him alone, and that was when Jordi had given him work.

  Asif and Wazir represented two worlds that were frowned upon by the Muslims of Bumburet. The Afghans had a reputation for being thieves and liars, and — especially since 9/11 — their presence had provoked even more suspicion among the locals. The Kalash were infidels. And the Afghan and the infidel were now coinciding in the foreigner’s house. Jordi thought the two presences would compensate for each other, as though one counteracted the other, a demonstration that having two so disparate creeds living together was possible.

  He chose a delicate moment for his social experiment. Unidentified vehicles were starting to appear in the valleys, with men nobody had seen before.

  ‘The Americans are attacking Afghanistan, and I’ve heard they’ve got C.I.A. agents patrolling the mountains,’ said Abdul Khaleq.

  ‘And what do I care about the Ameri
cans?’

  ‘Take care, Jordi. Since 9/11, things have changed a lot. The terrorists have come out of the caves.’

  ‘But Chitral’s still at peace, isn’t it?’ Abdul shrugged. ‘The Chitral Scouts have always protected us. Take it easy, Abdul. This is a peaceful place, completely different from Dir, Swat, and all the other places around us.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right about that.’

  LVI

  ‘WHAT’S happening in the Swat valley has left us without any tourists, but here, as you can see, that’s hardly new,’ said Babu Mohamed in the clover-carpeted garden of the Mountain Inn hotel. Neither the conspicuous boil on the left side of his forehead nor the significant stain in the middle of his shalwar-kameez detracted from his attractiveness or elegance. He had a not very long beard, refined, almost completely white. His hair was also white, and rather short for his sixty-three years. Babu Mohamed had just shown me ‘the computer room’. For years, it was from its single terminal that Jordi sent his e-mails.

  ‘I hope you like the hotel. The one thing you won’t get is any company — you’re the only guest. Might I see the number they’ve given you at check-in?’

  I handed him the piece of paper lately stamped at the police station, a compulsory procedure upon arrival.

  ‘Two hundred and thirty-three. You are the two hundred and thirty-third visitor who’s come to Chitral this year. Just think what that means for a tourist area like ours. Soon the snows will start, and we won’t be getting practically anyone else. At most, another twenty people will come before the end of the year.’

  Babu walked with me in front of the porch to the last of the hotel’s twenty-three rooms. He positioned himself at the edge of the gully where, moments ago, a man had crawled who, on reaching the garden, had kneeled and begun to pray. He was still there. A few metres from the building’s façade rose the mountain on whose slopes had been carved — who knew how? — Welcome to the Chitral Scouts in letters so vast that they could be read from the foothills. The Chitral Scouts’ post was a few metres from the hotel, in the upper part of the Great Bazaar.

  My apartment consisted of a living room for receiving visitors, a bathroom, and bedroom, decorated with a framed photo of Kalash girls. It was signed by Hervé Nègre, whom I had met at Esperanza’s Lyon house. Hervé had been travelling through the valleys since 1976 and had become a Kalash of the Mutimiré clan. He’d spent thirty years photographing a group of Kalash, always the same people, bearing witness to their ageing, but by the time we met it had been a good while since he’d visited Chitral. Esperanza suggested that he come with me. As well as a photographer, Hervé is a healer, he gives massages using plants, he practises magnetotherapy, and he claims he dreams ‘things before they’ve happened’. He asked for a bit of time to find out what his dreams were trying to tell him. After a few days, he excused himself, saying his work had been piling up and that the dates of the trip weren’t going to be free. It’s also true to say we didn’t get along too well. I don’t know how he and Jordi got along. Esperanza assures me they got on famously, but I never found any texts in which Jordi mentioned him, nor, when the time came to recall stories, was Hervé able to tell me much about him.

  In the garden, Babu had served tea for just one. He was not going to drink any, it being Ramadan. He put his glasses on to look at the photographs I had brought. When he identified Jordi, he tut-tutted, smiling. Gusts of warm wind were coming down from the mountain, shaking the tops of the trees. When he let go of the photos, Babu pulled out a string of beads that he began to toy with in one hand.

  ‘In Chitral,’ he said, ‘every year there are ten or fifteen murders, but they have nothing to do with foreigners. A lot of them are marital — men who slit their wives’ throats, though lately there have also been cases of women who’ve poisoned their husbands. The rest tend to be about property, arguments that end up being settled with gunshots. The most usual thing is to kill someone with a gunshot. To kill another person with a knife, you need to have a bad heart.’

  A friend of Babu’s showed up with a newspaper, extracted a sheaf of pages, and handed the rest to my host. The front-page photo showed one of the long queues I had seen in previous days in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, where thousands of people were trying to get the bags of flour and sugar that were subsidised by the government during Ramadan.

  Babu and his friend leafed through their parts of the newspaper, speaking only intermittently, only a little. From time to time, they would exchange phrases that included the word ‘Taliban’. The murmur of the wind, and the warbling and the rustle of the leaves on the treetops would, in other circumstances, have been an invitation to sleep. Babu’s old sandals were covered by a layer of filth as black as the inside of his nails. He turned a page of his newspaper. A bee buzzed. Car horns sounded in the Great Bazaar.

  I went out to wander that artery that ran parallel to the river, which flowed down grey with earth and mud. Men wedged into their little stores watched me openly while smoking hookahs, fiddling with strings of beads. I didn’t see any women in that nest of Sunnis. Even though I was wearing Andrés’s shalwar-kameez, was as skinny as most of the other people there, and my beard had thickened out, I felt more out of place there than anywhere.

  A group of young men led by an adult with a muezzin’s goatee went into the city’s only Kalash shop, their kameezes stained with dry sweat. They were lecturing the shop assistant that he ought to go to the mosque. The man listened to them tensely, before claiming that he had to serve his customers. The preachers smiled beatifically in unison, and withdrew mechanically. That icily friendly attitude, their clumsy attempt at empathy straight out of a robotics manual, made me shudder.

  ‘Are you Kalash?’ I asked the shopkeeper.

  ‘No. And I don’t get on with the Kalash, either.’

  At night, in the last room in the Mountain Inn, the wind howled, crashing against the windows protected by mosquito screens. I have slept on mountains before, but never on this one, I thought. Whoever killed him wanted to kill him, I thought. But why hadn’t they got rid of him earlier? Was the killer allowing time to pass to see whether anyone would save him? Or was he expecting his victim to give up, to go away someplace else? Perhaps he died because there was no other remedy. Perhaps Jordi himself was calling out for the hour of sacrifice, the logical and shamefully predicted end of his adventure — though, being a sincere pagan, he never would have considered himself a martyr. Triumph should come to him in his life, and divinity, too. How was I to understand him? How am I to understand you?

  ‘The story of the man who went to find the yeti is one of those stories you don’t forget. Everyone I spoke to insists it was a crime of passion,’ the press correspondent Ethel Bonet, lately arrived in the country, had told me in Islamabad.

  I had trouble sleeping. I examined every noise, every flicker of the light. Some kids shouted. You would think that the voice of children at night time would pacify me and bring calm, as though nothing bad could happen with them around. Not in this story. The children were a part of the terror, somehow.

  Abdul Khaleq, Jordi’s old Kalash friend, the owner of Sharakat House, came by early to fetch me. He was polite but grim in our first conversation. He didn’t know where to look, and only relaxed when he was in the jeep that would take us to Bumburet. First, though, we stopped at the marble factory on the outskirts of Chitral. The knives were dividing up big blocks, raising clouds of dust that floated over the valley, as the man in charge showed us his stone plaques.

  Abdul and I chose one. It wasn’t complicated.

  ‘Yes,’ said Abdul, ‘That one. Half white, half dark.’

  We chose a rectangle of pristine marble streaked with a chain of shadows that zigzagged like lightning. I wrote down on a piece of paper the inscription that the Magraner family had wanted, paid with my money — so cheap! oh, Esperanza, why do we worry? — and the manager assured us that we would be able to
collect the gravestone within a few days.

  LVII

  I against my brother,

  my brother and I against our cousin,

  my brother, our cousin and I against our neighbours,

  and all of us against the stranger.

  Bedouin proverb

  FROM the outset, according to the reporter Franck Charton:

  Jordi seemed a somewhat eccentric adventurer, rather sentimental, with a visceral temperament. He had a strong personality, and was garrulous, perhaps sombre. When I came to know him better, I discovered that he was also hypersensitive, extremely hospitable and generous, simple and spontaneous. I was really grateful for his candour, his direct way of dealing with people, the remarkable integrity of his nature.

  Charton came to Chitral in May 2002 with the aim of photographing the Kalash spring festivities and interviewing the famous barmanu-hunter. Apparently, abroad, that label had continued to stick. Charton also concluded that the people did like Jordi, considered him a true Kalash, and though he realised that Jordi needed money, Charton didn’t think the need was overwhelming him.

  He was wrong.

  At the end of May, Jordi once again found himself going through the payments into his current account, item by item. The B21 and the associations had done their part, and yet he was still on the verge of bankruptcy. How could he work this out? Well — he would have to keep Wazir, the servants Mohamed Din and Asif, the house and the horses, and keep funding the Storytellers of Tradition, as well as financing the vehicles needed for travelling through the mountains. He thought everything in this list essential, and didn’t want to give anything up — out of vanity, but also so as not to let down those who had put their trust in him.

  He looked through his diary. He was tempted to try Andrés … No, he couldn’t. He shouldn’t. And so? Not that there were many other people he was ready to trust. He begged for an urgent loan from his dear ‘four-parter’, Marie-Louise Marie France, which brought in 457.35 euros on the 28th of the month.