In the Land of Giants

by Gabi Martinez

  A few minutes before eight in the morning on the third of August, Shamsur left his parents’ house. The sun hung high in the cloudless sky, but the last cool breath from the night had not yet evaporated, and Shamsur could still move about without sweating. As he walked down the valley path he often put a hand to his well-cut blonde hair. Sometimes he did this without meaning to — how many times had Jordi told him to comb his hair, that he couldn’t go around looking like a savage?

  When Shamsur entered the garden, he found the house as firmly sealed up as it had been the previous morning. The dogs didn’t bark or come out to greet him. He went up to the terrace, noticed that the bedroom window was half-open, and looked in. There was no one there. Shamsur took four steps over to the office door and called out to Jordi.

  ‘Jordi!’

  Three times.

  ‘Jordi!’

  Shouting.

  ‘Jordi!’

  He saw two photographs that had been thrown down onto the threshold — the portraits of two men with beards and pakhols. It was only a few minutes past eight, and the heat had not climbed all that high, but Shamsur’s body temperature shot up. His breathing laboured, he ran about twenty yards across the land to the room where Asif slept, but Asif didn’t reply to his calls either. Next door, in their stalls, the horses — one white, the other black — began to stamp the ground and snort with nerves that were uncustomary for them. The armpits of Shamsur’s shalwar-kameez were becoming drenched. He jumped the low wall, dropped down on to the road, and continued his descent along the path, this time as fast as he could.

  ‘Where are you rushing off to?’ asked Abdul, who was clutching a bag.

  ‘I’ve been calling Jordi, and there’s no answer. There’s no one in the house. He’s been kidnapped! He’s been kidnapped!’

  ‘What do you mean he’s been kidnapped?’

  ‘I’m going for the police. Come, come!’

  ‘I’ve got to take these medicines to my wife. She gave birth last night, and she’s in a bad way. As soon as I’ve given them to her, I’ll go.’

  If he’d been asked, Abdul would have told him the baby was called Goul Nizar, though the truth was that even his thoughts about his new daughter and his wife were displaced by his recollection of the furtive figure of Mohamed Din, Jordi’s taciturn servant, whom Abdul had seen early in the morning starting a jeep, and carrying no passengers and more parcels than usual.

  Shamsur quickly located a doctor from the Civil Hospital and an officer from the Bumburet police station. They ran up to Sharakat House. They tried to force the doors, without any success. The policeman managed to get in through the half-open window. A few seconds passed in which Shamsur heard the officer’s footsteps inside, before the door opened.

  At that moment, Abdul was climbing the steps to the terrace; it had taken him about half an hour to get back. The others had arrived quickly, he thought. Like the rest of them, he crossed the threshold of the study.

  The sun from the gorgeous summer day was projecting scattered beams of light through the gloom, making the dust visible. Jordi was sitting in the cowhide-upholstered chair facing his desk, his head tilted to the right. Shamsur thought he was sleeping. He moved beside him, and saw his face. His eyes were open. Everything was in half-light. When the doctor moved Jordi’s head, and Shamsur saw the deep cut and the blood …

  ‘He’s been dead for hours,’ said the doctor, trying not to step in the enormous puddle of dried blood that surrounded the chair.

  Shamsur took his head in his hands, gasping, and tumbled blindly out into the brilliant morning.

  He stood outside, clutching his head. He felt a thick black cloud covering everything. Who knows how long he spent there? Years later, he still could not recall anything that happened in that interval.

  The execution had spattered the walls, the large desk, the computer, a framed photograph showing Jordi with Shamsur, Claire, and her boyfriend, Alexandre, standing in front of a Ferris wheel … Like the newborn Goul Nizar, Claire was this morning celebrating her birthday: she was turning fifty.

  On the little table in the corner of the room, a series of little bits of paper were arrayed, each of them with a letter of the alphabet written on it, several of them blood-stained.

  ‘And the boy?’ asked Abdul. ‘Where’s the boy?’

  Irfan learned in Chitral that his nephew had disappeared, and immediately travelled by jeep to Bumburet. He was the first member of Wazir’s family to reach the valley, beginning the search for the boy. Everybody was looking for him, everywhere — behind the electricity poles, in the river, the caves … A few hours later, his father, Samsam, joined them.

  One of the more than twenty policemen surrounding the house found the certificate confirming Jordi as a Kalash.

  ‘This man was one of yours,’ an inspector said to Abdul. ‘And he’s died in your house. So you should be responsible for the funeral.’

  That was how the law dictated it should be. Abdul was also to feed the policemen during their investigation.

  The day ended with no news of Wazir. Irfan was stroking the neck of Samsam, who was leaning against a tree to keep his balance.

  ‘You know I always try to keep control of my emotions,’ said Samsam, ‘but …’

  He began to sob. Irfan patted his face affectionately and moved a few steps away.

  The following day, thirty hours after the discovery of Jordi’s body, the police found Wazir in the bathroom of the corridor connecting the bedroom and the study. He had been slaughtered ritually, almost surgically. He had been practically decapitated.

  ‘How can you possibly explain that!’ said Abdul later to his wife. ‘There were policemen everywhere. All they had to do was open a door — a door! And it took them two days to find him?’

  ‘Don’t raise your voice, Abdul — they can hear you.’

  ‘It makes no sense. And the bleeding was fresh. Jordi’s blood was dry, but the boy’s … the boy’s was fresh.’

  The police laid Wazir’s corpse onto the terrace, exposing it to the gawking of the curious crowd who thronged around the house, and of the children running across Sharakat’s embankment. They called his father, who was still out looking for him in the valley. When Samsam appeared, a policeman urged him: ‘You — you can take your son now. He’s up there.’

  That was how it was, out in the open, in full view of everyone. That was how he found him.

  Meanwhile, three agents recently arrived from Peshawar were interrogating Shamsur.

  ‘It was Asif,’ Shamsur told them. ‘Asif. He’s just like all the Afghans, only interested in money.’

  ‘But he didn’t steal anything.’

  ‘Well, Jordi had a lot of stuff — something got taken.’

  ‘No, no,’ replied one agent, ‘look what’s happening.’

  And then, before Shamsur’s very eyes, the policemen carried away the computer, the video camera, the photo camera, and various other tools and pieces of equipment, took it all into Mohamed Din’s house, and said: ‘Shamsur, do you see where we found these things? Do you see?’

  They want Mohamed Din to be the guilty one! And what am I supposed to say? What do I say? If the government wants to eliminate me, they can eliminate me, and that’s that. Nobody will ask after me.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ Shamsur replied.

  Abdul had never believed in Mohamed Din’s guilt. He has spent seven years trying to put the pieces together, and the business with Din is one of the many that does not fit.

  ‘I saw Mohamed Din in Bumburet the morning they found everything,’ he explained to me during another night in the cabin. ‘Who could believe he’d have waited till the last moment to leave if he’d been the murderer? No, no. Somebody suggested he should run away because he was going to be blamed for what had happened, and that was what he did — he vanished. Mohamed Din is dead now. They say he
was shot in Afghanistan during an argument. How do I know? I’ve already told you, round here everybody’s got a relative in Afghanistan who knows the relative of a relative … We get to know almost everything.’

  ‘A family friend of mine, a retired soldier, says Jordi was killed by a professional,’ Esperanza informed me some days later. ‘The first thing he did was cut his vocal chords so he couldn’t cry out. And that move where he shoved his head forward … my friend’s sure it was a professional.’

  When the coroner analysed the body that the police had laid out in the autopsy room at 7:45pm on 3 August, he said: ‘Not just anybody could have done this. This job was done by specialists — people who’d been trained.’

  LXI

  You always have to take the side of the dead.

  Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold

  ‘JORDI never let anybody he didn’t know into his room, so there must have been at least someone he absolutely trusted with him in the study. Besides, he was sitting down, and there was no sign of a struggle, and given what he was like it’s impossible to imagine he would have lowered his guard with a stranger or that he would not have resisted. Jordi was very strong; he must have been attacked by two men at least. The police found two footprints in the puddle of blood by the chair — prints of bare feet. One was from a small foot. The other, a large one. Shamsur has large feet …’

  Abdul was resting the glass of liqueur on the narrow arm of his iron chair. He creased his forehead in an abominable frown. Up till that moment, he had insinuated that the brothers Shamsur and Khalil were implicated in the murder, but this was the first time he had made reference to a clue that might inculpate one of them.

  ‘Shamsur says he was drunk,’ I pointed out. ‘A drunk man wouldn’t be able carry out those movements so well.’

  ‘I’m not saying it was him. Maybe Jordi was killed by a professional, but somebody had to open the door to the killer, somebody he trusted.’

  Khalil Rahman: The only people who went into the study were Shamsur, Abdul, and me, apart from, sometimes, one or other member of the domestic staff.

  Andrés Magraner: You can forget about asking the police anything. They won’t help you; you’ll only be wasting your time. In 2004, we were over there trying to talk to the inspectors and the judges who had taken on the case, and all we did was wait, wait, wait. We got nothing out of them. These people don’t want to talk. Forget about them.

  ‘Fine,’ I said to Abdul. ‘Let’s suppose Khalil and Shamsur did have something to do with it. But why did they do it?’

  Jalili Ainullah: A lot of people asked me why he might have been killed, and I had no answers. I think the intelligence services intervened in the matter. Right from the start, the Pakistani government had never liked Jordi being in Chitral, and they never expected him to stay so long. Otherwise why did the police suggest to Jordi that he should leave? Why were there cars with tinted windows seen in the valley shortly before his death? There’s something here that the government’s involved with. But nobody’s going to give you any information, because the police have warned them off.

  Yves Bourny: In Bumburet, they probably know what happened, but no one’s going to talk.

  Cat Valicourt: Nobody was surprised to learn he’d been murdered. But what made them want to slit his throat? Wanting to understand that is dangerous. It was the C.I.A. who were handling this business — a ‘Confidential Matter’. I was advised not to try and understand it. I’ve never been so fearful for my life.

  Gabi Martínez: Who advised you?

  Cat Valicourt: Certain information was confided to me personally and confidentially. I worried for my own safety … I was very afraid. Jordi knew every part of the routes for the trafficking of weapons and drugs.

  Gabi Martínez: Who confided in you with this information?

  Cat Valicourt: Be cautious.

  Erik L'Homme: In that place, if you have a problem, you’ve got a clan behind you, a family. Jordi was alone. Killing him didn’t involve any complications, and there were a lot of people who’d be happy at his disappearance. Which was why the D.C.O. covered the murder up. Jordi bothered too many people.

  Kurt Vonnegut (writer): There are right people to lynch. Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

  Gyuri Fritsche: I have three theories. The most controversial is that he was killed by Khalil, or someone contracted by him. Was Shamsur Jordi’s lover? The second: it was somebody with business interests in the valley Jordi opposed. Or: it was Muslim extremists helped by the local authorities.

  Siraj Ulmulk: The Spanish ambassador told me the police had found some material on Jordi’s computer about his … homosexual activities. The former chief of police assured me he’d seen this evidence himself. His name is Zahïd Khan, police superintendent in Chitral.

  Gabi Martínez: Zahïd. The man who was obsessed with Jordi. Who prompted him to risk his life in Jalalabad.

  Gyuri Fritsche: Those people who didn’t like Jordi say it was a crime of passion. Those who got on with him think he was killed by the Taliban. Either way, I think at least Shamsur and Khalil know who did it.

  Abdul frowned his abominable frown. He drank some liqueur.

  ‘Eh?’ I insisted. ‘Why would Shamsur or Khalil have done it? Why would one of his friends have opened the door for somebody to kill him?’

  ‘People here are poor,’ he replied.

  LXII

  THE weather cleared, and the clouds gave way to sparkling days, and on one of these I climbed the path to Shekhanandeh. My guide, Malik Sha, was the eldest of Abdul’s ten children. Taller and more solid than is typical for the Kalash, he was dressed completely in white, with espadrilles and a pink baseball cap. Clean-shaven, his features look martial, as though crafted by an epic sculptor.

  ‘Jordi wanted to take him to France so he could learn to make good wine … Then I tried sending him to Greece but we couldn’t get the visa, and now he’s unemployed, just bumming around,’ his father had told me. ‘He speaks English and he’s a good kid; he’ll go with you.’

  We ran into the odd neighbour and some shepherds, not all of whom Malik Sha greeted. In the fields on the outskirts, Kalash women were cropping scrub and grass with adzes. We passed Sharakat House, and still had another seven or eight minutes to walk before we reached the town, which looked like something from a fantasy, at least from a distance, because as we approached them, the houses offered an unexpected revelation.

  The stunning wooden buildings engraved with legendary motifs were a façade that hid vile interiors consumed with dirt, woodworm, and rust. The putrefaction clung to the people’s faces, sullied by the sores and blemishes that came from undernourishment and destitution. Contrary to what the Muslim proverb claimed, in Shekhanandeh, beauty was not to be found within.

  We asked after Shamsur’s house at a filthy little store attended by a young boy, who took us to the cornfields located under the crag on which a good part of the town stands. We looked amid the tall reeds, surprising the women there, who, when they spotted us, covered their faces and quickly turned their backs.

  A man volunteered to inform Shamsur.

  ‘Tell him we’ll wait at his house,’ said Malik Sha.

  Not long afterwards, a blonde man appeared, young looking, his faced too marked for his twenty-four or twenty-five years, but — for this same reason — unusually attractive. With green eyes, skin that was light though made golden by the sun, and thick lips, Shamsur greeted us with a frown, unsure where to look. He had just been told that a foreigner wanted to talk to him about Jordi. Choosing his words with care, he invited us up to the first floor of the pretty house of stone and carved wooden crossbeams that he shared with his parents. The terrace looked right over Bumburet, a privileged viewing-point.

  He poured us tea, holding the pot with his left hand, and later he jotted down his name and contact deta
ils in a notebook with his right. His eyes didn’t stop moving, his anxiety contagious. We talked in English about his life with Jordi.

  ‘I wanted to live in France, but it wasn’t possible to get a visa,’ he said. ‘If I could go back now, I would. To live on my own.’

  ‘You have your family here, don’t you?’

  Shamsur gave a quick nod, yes.

  ‘I’m fine here, I have land. It’s a slow, natural life. I grew up here with my ancestors. My grandfather used to read books in English, and drink tea. His Kafir name was A Zar; the Muslim version, Abdul Khan. That was a good time in Bumburet. Now it’s bad. We don’t have land, we live like animals’ — his version had changed radically in seconds. ‘There’s only maize and a few vegetables, but everything has dried up, and in the winter we survive on dried fruits and tea. We’ve been like this for forty, forty-five years.’

  ‘You could have studied. You had the chance.’

  ‘People here don’t like studying.’

  ‘How many children do you have?’

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Do they go to school?’

  ‘Yes, the seven-year-old, he goes to school. And I’d like him to go to university. Inshallah.’

  What kind of confusion was Shamsur living in?

  In the afternoon, Khalil and Shamsur came to Abdul’s garden to continue the conversation. Khalil kept his chin raised as he spoke, smiling hypocritical smiles. He told stories, mostly referring to Jordi’s temper and how little he cared about other people.

  ‘Like that time he told me to come by his house for dinner during Ramadan. I arrived hungry, and it turned out he didn’t have any food for me. “Sorry,” he said, “I forgot.” But I really did get angry.’

  Khalil was forcing his smiles so hard that when they ended, the muscles seemed to spring back to their original gloominess.

  ‘Why did the two of you make an offer to the D.C.O. to protect him?’

  ‘Protect him? Who were we going to protect? The police advised Jordi to leave, and if we told the D.C.O. there was nothing to be afraid of, it was because we thought he was safe. Why would they kill him?’