I asked other questions that Khalil obviously did not like. After a while, he said he had to leave and that we wouldn’t be able to meet up again in the coming days.
‘I’d like it if you were there when we set the stone on Jordi’s grave,’ I said.
‘I have things to do, sorry.’
He left.
Dusk was approaching, sharpening the chill, but the sun was still holding out. Shamsur wrapped himself in a brown shawl. Abdul poured a single cup of steaming tea, for me, and withdrew. I was embarrassed to see him rebuff Shamsur so obviously and cruelly.
We more or less reconstructed the events of the last night up to the moment when Shamsur left Sharakat House. He insisted that the day they discovered the crime he had found photos of men with long beards and pakhols on the floor outside the study door. This wasn’t common practice among the Taliban, so Shamsur said: ‘They must have fallen out of their pockets.’
No more, no less.
They must have fallen out of their pockets.
He had personally shown the police the photos he said he’d found.
Later, I asked him: ‘Did you have sexual relations with Jordi?’
‘Never.’ He didn’t bat an eyelid, apparently familiar now with the subject. ‘Jordi never asked me to do anything like that, and I never knew of him asking anyone else.’
‘Why do you think the dogs didn’t bark the night of the murder?’
‘Those were bad dogs, they didn’t do their job. Asif took advantage of that — he had no trouble telling the people waiting outside that they could come into the house.’
Abdul had insisted that Jordi always tried to surround himself with the best. The best horses, the best goggles, the best rifle, the best dogs … However, those dogs slept for three days in row. Abdul believed someone had poisoned them.
‘Poor Jordi,’ added Shamsur. ‘At least he didn’t suffer. After the blow to his head, he was half-dead already.’
At some point previously, Shamsur had also alluded to a blow to the head, though on that occasion I had overlooked it, putting it down to some linguistic confusion. The post-mortem report had not recorded any cranial injuries.
‘How was he struck?’ I asked.
‘They didn’t find the object. Apparently, the first thing they did was get him from behind with a hammer or something.’
It was a struggle not to contrast these statements with Abdul’s. According to the Kalash, the head had no external injuries, at least he hadn’t seen any, and so the post-mortem was correct. And he kept insisting on the detail of Wazir’s fresh blood.
‘The blood was fresh. It was fresh,’ he kept repeating, certain of the existence of a plot that probably implicated the higher orders.
After the murder, the police had considered Shamsur a suspect, but a lack of proof freed him from jail. He spent the next three years making a weekly trip down to the police station in Chitral, two hours by car, to demonstrate that he hadn’t left the valleys.
‘Several times I had to go on foot because I didn’t have any money. I don’t have money or work — I hunt birds. One time I did the trip to Chitral with one rupee in my pocket. On top of that, the detectives carted me around all over the place, and pummelled me with questions. One day I couldn’t stand it any more, I took hold of a knife and stuck it in my stomach. I wanted to free myself. But No, no, how could I do that? I said to myself. I’m clean, I haven’t done anything. And here I still am. I’m no longer afraid.’
Shamsur wrapped the blanket around himself. We were starting to dissolve into the darkness.
‘Well, it’s nearly time to eat,’ he said, and when he looked at the solitary glass of tea, I remembered that we were in Ramadan. That was why Abdul hadn’t served him a cup, too. How easy it is to be mistaken when we judge other cultures. How hard it was to interpret what was being said, what was happening around me.
‘Asif must be caught,’ added Shamsur. ‘He’s in Kabul.’
From the porch, Abdul must have been able to make out two very still shadows. We sat in silence for perhaps half a minute. Then I asked him: ‘Is it true Khalil gave you a good hiding to make you marry your brother’s widow?’
He stared right at me. It was hard to make out the white of that pair of eyes which seemed, at last, to have been tamed. He remained silent for several seconds. He looked down and, in that position, his eyes now lost from my sight, he replied: ‘There are two things I don’t understand about my life. Why I got married. And why I lived with Jordi for so long.’
That night, I asked Abdul for a change of room. By now, I had spent several days sniffing around in the valleys, and Shamsur and Khalil had been clearly nervous and standoffish enough to spur still further my sense of the risks surrounding me. There were no concrete facts supporting my fears, but I could feel the atmosphere thickening. I was being oppressed by an almost tangible sensation of something unfolding — the way the mountain dwellers answered, those glances, Abdul’s increasingly awkward revelations and conjectures …
‘Noor Mohamed gave a statement to the police that in the early hours of the day of the crime he had seen Shamsur going in and out of Jordi’s house with suitcases,’ my host had said over dinner.
‘And what did the police do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘But they did think it was suspicious, didn’t they?’
‘Nothing,’ he said again.
‘Who’s Noor Mohamed?’
‘The neighbour who lives opposite Sharakat House.’
‘The neighbour? Can I talk to him?’
‘Probably. Tomorrow I’ll try to get you to see him first thing, before he goes off to work.’
My nerves gripped me tightly for the rest of the night. I thought about the photos of the men in pakhols that Shamsur claimed to have seen on the threshold of the house on the day they found the body. Photos of the suspected murderers! It was like a joke — there was no way assassins could be so careless. And if, as Shamsur was suggesting, the Pakistani intelligence services were involved, did they really think this clumsy trick would be enough to divert attention to the Taliban? Didn’t they realise that unrealistic photos were rather a suggestion that somebody was trying to make the investigation lead to some suspects in particular?
However, my own experience demonstrated that the possibility of simple clumsiness should not be ruled out. So much of reality is made up of dodgy screenplays.
During the evening, Abdul had also mentioned the secret services several times as being complicit in, if not perpetrators of, the murder, and I couldn’t stop wondering whether there were microphones in that damned cabin. That was when I asked to move to the main body of the hotel.
I settled in a room on the upper floor. While I scratched my flea-bites, I decided that, without question, whoever had killed Jordi had really wanted to kill him. They weren’t going to let him leave Bumburet, even if he never came back. In fact, in the two previous months, he’d hardly been seen in the valley, and Jordi had been planning to leave again for Peshawar the day after his murder.
But no matter: they wanted to kill him.
In one of the books he was working on, Jordi had written that the Nuristanis will allow for the possibility of the death penalty. They do not often have recourse to it, ‘but sometimes,’ he also wrote, ‘bitterness exceeds good sense.’
LXIII
An individual death, like a pebble dropped in water, might make but a brief hole; yet rings of sorrow widened out therefrom.
T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
ON Sunday 4 August 2002, Dolores Magraner was still asleep at eight in the morning. Rosa thought it strange, as her mother was always up first thing, but she paid it no further heed. She made a pot of coffee, toasted some bread, drank an orange juice, and killed time in order that they might have breakfast together, as they usually did. Rosa had come fro
m Valencia to spend a few days with Dolores, and she wanted to squeeze them out as much as she could.
At nine, her mother was still in bed. This was strange. In recent days, Dolores had seemed concerned at the lack of news from Jordi, and she’d been having nightmares. Then there was that damn cough, the torment of every night. Tiredness must have taken its toll, doubtless her body was asking for just a little more sleep … but the thing was, it wasn’t normal. Rosa went into her bedroom.
‘Mamá,’ she said, touching the lifeless body gently. ‘Mamá, are you OK?’
‘What? What’s happening? What time is it?’
‘Take it easy, mamá … I wanted to check if you were OK. Stay in bed if you want.’
‘No … no … but what time is it? I didn’t wake up — ’ she looked at her watch — ‘Oof! It’s gone nine!’
‘It’s not a problem, mamá, we’re in no hurry. Breakfast is ready if you fancy it …’
‘Thanks, child, I’m getting up. What a peculiar thing to have happened to me.’
After breakfast, Rosa got into the shower. She was about to come out of the bathroom when she heard the telephone.
‘Allo!’ said Dolores.
‘Allo. It’s Shamsur.’
‘Shamsur! What’s going on?’
Shamsur didn’t know what to say. Dolores wouldn’t understand him in English, and his French was poor, so he tried to limit what he said to the crucial things.
‘I have bad news. Jordi is dead. Where is Andrés?’
He got it out like a punch. Dolores felt something hard to express, as though she had ceased to feel. Her eyes were dry while an unknown sorrow opened out a path someplace, perhaps in her belly, making its way through, devastating her completely until it crowded into the centre of her breast, where sadness seemed to take form, and there it grew, and grew, like a great sigh that would not come out.
Why is grandma not talking?, Shamsur wondered.
‘Mamá?’ said the boy.
Dolores could not speak. Nor cry. She could just hear the electric void of the cables and, from time to time, a ‘Mamá?’.
At least I didn’t tell her he’d been murdered, just that he’s dead, Shamsur continued to rationalise while he heard something in the handset that must have been Dolores’s breathing, or were they sobs? No, Shamsur, they were not sobs. Dolores has not cried again since.
They didn’t speak much more. Dolores hung up and took a few steps that were so hesitant that Rosa rushed to hold her up while her mother gave a piercing scream. Soon afterwards, Rosa called Andrés.
‘They’ve killed Jordi — Jordi — Jordi.’
Jordi, thought Andrés. My brother, Jordi. He’d been talking to Rosita about him the previous night. Andrés had said that he’d had it with Jordi, that he wasn’t going to ask any more banks to help him, that all his work wasn’t bearing fruit, it had no future. My brother.
Andrés got in touch with Shamsur.
‘Jordi is dead, and it is very hot,’ the Nuristani informed him. ‘What will we do?’
Andrés faltered. My brother is dead. He’s dead. While they talked, Andrés cried.
‘The Kalash should take care of it for now. Tell them to keep the body while we sort out the paperwork here.’
Esperanza heard the tune of her mobile phone in the Portuguese Algarve, where she was spending her holidays. It was her daughter, Marie.
‘Mamá? … Mamá?’
Some hours earlier, Esperanza’s telephone had fallen into the water, and though she could hear Marie, her daughter could hear nothing back from her. Marie called again. When she heard that the phone was being answered but she got no reply, she said: ‘Mamá, if you can hear me, I have something important to tell you. Please, call this number.’
Esperanza bought a phone card and dialled her daughter’s number from a payphone.
‘Mamá, they’ve killed Jordi.’
Esperanza lost all sense of reality. She no longer heard anything Marie was saying.
‘I’m going.’
The news spread.
Andrés called Claire, who was on holiday. They killed him the same day as my fiftieth birthday, she thought. Soon afterwards, she received an e-mail from Jordi, asking her for money.
The team at the A.M.I. notified Ainullah of the news. The initial sadness soon gave way to a frenzied rage, into a visceral hatred of those savages running around on the mountains. Ainullah found himself overcome by bitterness; he was beside himself for several hours. He picked up the telephone, needing to confirm the news with a call to Andrés, who said, yes, they had killed him.
Cat Valicourt had a panic attack. She was scared the e-mails Jordi had been sending her over the years had been intercepted and that somebody would misinterpret his requests. He wrote in his messages about capturing the barmanu, the hairy one, but what if someone surmised that this might be a code for the bearded men? And what if they thought what Jordi wanted was to capture the bearded men … and that she’d been helping him?
The news agency Agence France-Presse designated the murder a ‘political crime’ motivated by Jordi’s proselytising zeal, as he was seeking to win followers for Christianity. The Pakistani press accused him of having been in contact with the Northern Alliance, describing him as an eccentric pursuer of as deranged a fantasy as the barmanu.
On the day of the murder, the magazine Grands Reportages had released the issue containing Jordi’s interview under the by-line of Franck Charton, the reporter who had considered him ‘eccentric and sentimental’. He had included a comment in which the palaeontologist Yves Coppens, the very same scientist Jordi had always considered an enemy for having pretended his investigations didn’t exist, allowed for the possibility that one day it might be possible to find ‘some kind of archaic human’ in the Hindu Kush. Another text published around that time insisted that, in the past century, no crimes had been committed among the Kalash.
On 5 August, the Kalash wrapped Jordi’s body in the Shawl of Wisdom, leaving only his head uncovered. They positioned the wooden coffin in the middle of the main chamber of the Temple of the Ancestors, a Kalash edifice that was slightly bigger than most, with quite a low ceiling, a space that in the west would be associated rather with a small storeroom than a sacred space. There were several bags of ice on his body. The heat was ever more oppressive, and the corpse had been decomposing for several days.
Hundreds of Kalash came from the three valleys to congregate in the temple, though its limited capacity meant that most were spread out on Krakal’s most populated hillside. They began to play the drums, and the women to sing. Dances were danced whirlingly with arms raised, branches were shaken, flags were waved, and people cried. They cried.
Shamsur and Khalil spent most of the ritual on the porch. Akiko, the Japanese woman who lived in the valleys married to a Kalash and who had known Jordi, filmed the funeral. On the tape, you can see several dozen Kalash embracing, forming a large ring surrounding the coffin, and they circle around it, singing. In the middle is just Jordi, with one or two girls shaking branches of green oak to purify the body and drive away the swarms of flies gathering over the corpse.
Faithful to tradition, Abdul and his family fed all those attending. In the video, you can see the people eating a thick broth of goats’ meat and flour in which they dip bread. It is also Abdul who speaks the words of farewell. His beard had begun to grow, for that is how the Kalash mourn. He would not shave it again until December. A Kalash burial usually lasts three months; but, with Jordi, people kept coming from the valleys to pay their condolences for six.
After the ceremony, the cortège headed for the pitiful Krakal cemetery. They buried the body at the very back of the necropolis. From the grave, you just have to jump a low stone wall to escape the funereal copse and set out on your ascent of the mountain.
Gyuri Fritsche arrived in Bumburet on the afternoon of
Tuesday the sixth with a police escort, and accompanied by one of Jordi’s many ex-employees, Sultan. He needed to know more about his friend’s death, and he didn’t trust the police. He started taking photos, asking questions. The agents were still in Sharakat House, round which the kids were running wild. There was no security cordon. Anybody could breach the crime scene in this investigation, which was registered under article 302 of the Criminal Code, under the leadership of Mir Azam Khan, the man who had advised Jordi to disappear.
When Gyuri heard how Jordi had been slaughtered, he deduced a religious motive … or at least that the murderers wanted people to imagine such a thing. Someone said something about homosexuality and some passionate revenge. Gyuri remembered his son riding on his friend’s leg.
‘Fuck,’ he muttered. He needed more information, details, some kind of explanation. He had been able to establish that Jordi had not suffered, but that it had been different for the Kalash boy, who’d had to be caught first and then been decapitated far too slowly.
When he met Khalil, he found him extremely jumpy. Shamsur was behaving strangely, too — he was dodging questions, or answering them rather incoherently. Gyuri concluded that Khalil and Shamsur knew something, at the very least. Then he went to his friend’s grave and cried.
An employee from the post office in Fontbarlettes gave Dolores the gift of a little sponge so she could more easily seal the thank-you letters she would be sending to the hundreds of people who had expressed their condolences. In the meantime, the Magraner siblings were trying to resolve the matter of the repatriation of the body, having previously authorised the burial. They were told it was already much too late to repatriate the body, as it was badly decomposed. There are no cold chambers in that region of Pakistan.
Shamsur asked Andrés to come to Pakistan to take care of the body, but the Spanish embassy advised against travelling there, warning that any member of the family going to that region would be putting themselves in serious danger — all the more so if they were there in order to deal with such a dubious matter. They had to reply quickly, so the Magraners did what the embassy told them to do: in accordance with their instructions, they sent a fax instructing Shamsur and his family to take charge of Jordi’s body and his belongings.
In the Land of Giants Page 33