But when would they be able to go and reclaim the corpse?
They hesitated.
On the one hand, the Spanish and French embassies would not contribute towards paying for the repatriation, which the firm Walji’s Adventure estimated would cost 5,850 dollars, including the body’s transportation to Valence and subsequent interment. It was a demanding figure, though the family would make the effort, of course they would … though, on the other hand … Abdul had sacrificed more than twenty goats for the funeral, and he was still supplying provisions for the policemen who’d settled in Sharakat House. The whole thing was ruinous. It cost him three hundred thousand rupees altogether, and he was forced to close the hotel. It was a very tough blow for his finances. And what if Abdul didn’t want them to take Jordi away?
‘He was buried with all the honour of a great chief.’
‘He was very well respected.’
‘He was a bulwark.’
‘An ambassador.’
Those were some of the things said afterwards.
‘The Kalash looked up to the scientist as almost a god,’ reported the El Mundo newspaper in Spain.
The question was: what would Jordi have wanted? Where would he have preferred to be laid to rest? The instincts of the family had collided with the biography of the barmanu-hunter, the protector of the Kalash. Jordi had found pleasure and suffering in Chitral as nowhere else, and he had held out there, almost calling out for death. His adult life had taken place in those mountains. He was Kalash himself.
The Magraners accepted that Jordi’s remains should stay in the valleys, at least for a while. Out of respect to those who were his people. And to him.
LXIV
We killed him openly […] but we’re innocent.
Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold
NOOR Mohamed appeared very early with a friend and Abdul. The emerging sun was evaporating the river waters forming a very light mist that enveloped the pair who crossed the garden in a ghostly air. Noor Mohamed was wearing a denim waistcoat over his cornflower-blue shalwar-kameez. Chaotic curls danced over his forehead, making him look even sleepier.
‘He had to convince his wife,’ said Abdul. ‘He told her you’d come a long way to see him, he had a duty to talk to you.’
Noor Mohamed was clearly ill at ease. We didn’t have a common language to speak in; his was Nuristani, so I addressed Abdul.
‘Tell him I’m grateful to him for coming, and …’
Noor Mohamed grabbed my arm, dragged me off into the garden, and, at an incautious distance, he said: ‘No Abdul. No Abdul. No Abdul.’
Abdul had not followed us. He had certainly heard the Muslim. What did he mean, no Abdul? Why?
‘Abdul muyirim. Abdul muyirim.’
We walked over to the iron chairs.
‘I can’t understand you,’ I said. ‘What does muyirim mean? How are we going to understand each other without Abdul?’
‘Abdul no!’ — he gave a furtive glance at the hotel porch, where Abdul had sat down.
I didn’t think Noor Mohamed should be doing this. He shouldn’t be looking at Abdul while he was talking about him. Fuck. It was much hotter, all of a sudden. What Noor Mohamed suggested was too unsettling. I didn’t want to believe it; it wouldn’t suit me to believe it.
‘Shamsur, Khalil, Asif, Abdul, muyirim,’ he said. ‘Shamsur, Khalil, Asif, Abdul, muyirim.’
He said the same thing, again and again, alternating his enumeration of names with shifty looks towards the porch. His lack of discretion was upsetting me. When he understood that our conversation couldn’t get any further, he sent his friend off in search of someone. Soon a clean-shaven young man appeared who introduced himself as a Kalash. He was to translate for us.
‘What does muyirim mean?’ I asked.
‘Criminal.’
A pre-ordained shiver ran through me. I managed to stop myself looking over at the porch.
‘Tell him to repeat what he’s been saying, please.’
Noor Mohamed gave his list of muyirim again, but I didn’t need a translation to notice that this time he had not named Abdul. Jogging his memory would have been unforgivably incautious. Our translator was Kalash. However well he may have known my informer, he was Kalash above all, and every detail of that conversation would probably reach Abdul’s ears. If Abdul truly was implicated, including him among the suspects could put Noor Mohamed, as well as me, in danger.
The translator began to shiver. It was quite cold; all three of us were hunched down in our icy, damp chairs, but his shaking increased quickly, till it was most dramatic.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s so cold.’
He was clenching his teeth to stop them chattering.
‘What did you see that night?’ I asked Noor Mohamed.
‘Around two in the morning I got up to urinate, and I saw Shamsur with two suitcases. When he noticed me, he looked as though he was going to hide, but I asked him what he was doing, where he was taking those things. He told me he was studying English and he was taking some books to study.’
‘English or French?’
‘I don’t know. Probably French.’
‘And?’
‘When I learned that Jordi had been killed and the police started asking questions, I told this to the detectives. Jordi was a good neighbour — he was always giving me things, and sometimes he gave me a bit of money, when times were hard.’
‘What did you tell the police?’
‘Just that, what I saw. They made a lot of notes in their notebooks, but they did nothing. I repeated it to them several times — nothing. Then, one day, Shamsur and Khalil came for me, to say that if I didn’t keep quiet they would kill me.’
The translator was shaking like a man possessed. Abdul was chatting on the porch with Goul Nizar, the girl born in the small hours of that unforgettable morning. She was seven years old, and she was getting ready for school.
Not long after giving his testimony to the police, Noor Mohamed was accused of possession of drugs. He did a spell in prison before emigrating to Nuristan for a year.
‘I was very scared, and I left. When I was there, I told the story to an American commander, but he didn’t do anything either. When I came back, Khalil came again and told me he’d paid the police a lot of money, and that I’d better keep my mouth shut.’
‘And what about now — are you afraid?’
Noor Mohamed raised his big, heavy eyelids, focusing his tired light-brown eyes on me.
‘I am very afraid, especially at night. We are a family of six, I work out in the fields. I wouldn’t be able to do anything …’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
I was about to add, ‘You’re putting your life at risk’.
‘Because there has to be justice.’
Probably we all looked down at the grass. I certainly did. Silence. I sensed the translator tremble. I couldn’t stop thinking about Abdul. How badly I wanted to speak his name, to ask Noor Mohamed why he considered him muyirim, why he had withheld his name in the presence of our translator. By speaking it myself, how much was I bringing myself closer to death?
‘Who else in Chitral knows this story?’ I asked.
‘Well, the police. And Athanasious Lerounis, the Greek. I thought he might be able to help — I didn’t know who else here could help me. I asked him to hunt down the criminal. He didn’t do anything either, but he did keep giving me money to allow me to present myself at the police station in Chitral. I had to go sign in every few weeks, and the trip costs money.’
‘Does anybody else know?’
‘No one.’
‘So: the police, Lerounis’ — I looked right at the translator — ‘and now you.’ The boy gave a quick nod. ‘I’m asking you not to tell anyone what you’ve heard here. Alright? Anyon
e — please.’
Now that I’m back and I’m alive, I can play the whole thing down and smile at the words I directed at Abdul after my informant had said goodbye: ‘I don’t know why he didn’t want you to hear. He didn’t tell me anything you don’t already know.’
Abdul was holding his small penknife, folded closed.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied. ‘They put him in prison for six months for having hashish, and he distrusts everybody. It’s normal.’
LXV
THE dictionary definition of ‘monstrous’ covers everything that is ‘against the order of nature’, including ‘any fantastical or mythical creatures’. At the monstrous peak of popular culture, one might choose to single out the freak in Loch Ness, the Minotaur, Medusa, the Chupacabra, and the yeti.
All the same, the word is also used to identify people who carry out ‘monstrous acts on a huge scale’. The Tibetan poet Jetsun Milarepa believed that this is in reality the only meaning of the word, which was why he wrote:
All that which seems monstrous,
all that which everyone calls monstrous
all that which everyone recognises as monstrous,
comes from man himself.
LXVI
This is not a fight from which one returns one sunny morning, crowned with flowers amid smiling girls. There is no one to watch, no one to say: Well done.
Dino Buzzati, The Tartar Steppe
The fact is, that, if one analyses human glory, it is composed of nine-tenths twaddle, perhaps ninety-nine hundreths twaddle.
Charles Gordon, Diary
ÁNGEL, Esperanza, and Andrés Magraner travelled to Chitral in May 2004 for the first time since the death of their brother, almost two years afterwards. ‘Why did it take you so long?’ people asked.
Just days before their arrival in Pakistan, a new bomb killed eighty people in a mosque in Karachi.
‘Huh? Why did it take you so long?’ The Magraners didn’t answer ‘Because of fear’ — perhaps the most honest answer. The fact was, they were there.
They shared two weeks of recollections and impotence wandering round Pakistani courts and embassy offices. France wanted nothing to do with the case. Spain claimed to be short of infrastructure. The Magraners wasted the majority of their time in corridors and waiting-rooms. At least they did manage to see Wazir’s parents.
Every night concluded in a similar way: ‘We’ve put the world to rights and now we’ve gone to sleep,’ Andrés would write in his diary. They often found it hard to get to sleep, and even then they remained alert. The early-morning prayers would wake up the youngest Magraner, who would toss and turn in his bed, in a ferment of rage and loathing, the voice of the muezzin filling the night like a torment.
‘It’s horrendous!’ (Andrés’s diary.)
They heard colourful and sometimes ignominious theories about the reason for the killing. Shamsur insisted that Mohamed Din had written to him shortly before dying, acknowledging his guilt.
No one had seen this letter.
Shamsur had offered so many different versions to different people, or even sometimes to the same person, that it was not unreasonable to question his state of mental health. Or his intelligence. One day, in Andrés’s presence, he had started hitting his own head, gabbling ‘arsehole Muslims, arsehole Muslims’. Who should I believe? Andrés asked himself while Shamsur sat there in front of him, hitting his own head. When everybody says that everybody else is lying.
In France, Andrés continued to send entreaties for somebody to get involved in the investigation. When he wrote to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, not knowing what to do to rouse his correspondents to action, he got carried away:
He was more than a brother. He was also my teacher, he was sometimes like my father, who we lost in 1975, when I was not yet twelve. I used to play with him all the time, with our toys, when we were kids.
But without success.
He wrote to the French office for victims of terrorism, who replied that it was unclear whether Jordi was a victim of terrorism, and only people of French nationality had the right to any compensation; he wrote to the French Ministry of Justice; to the minister of foreign affairs, Dominique de Villepin, who sent him back to the Pakistani consular services; and to the Interpol headquarters in Lyon. There were many more letters, three years of letters, waiting for news from three lawyers: Jacques Vergès recommended that they contact a Spanish lawyer; Bertrand Madignier gave up after two fruitless years; and Gilbert Collard, the most famous of all, didn’t lift a finger. Of course, it had been stupid to go to him — how was he going to be interested in this case, if after all he had got his reputation by ‘defending Moors’?
Andrés decided that if anybody might, if anybody had to intercede on Jordi’s behalf, it would be his own country’s embassy, and despite an initial refusal he once again sought help from ambassador Antonio Segura Morís, the same man who’d said at a cocktail party that it had been a crime of passion, and whose employees at the embassy were endorsing the jealous-homosexual-affair theory.
And what were they basing their crime-of-passion theory on, anyway? In 2010, Segura Morís was the Spanish consul in Shanghai. I sent him an e-mail, asking about Jordi’s murder. The former ambassador replied quickly:
The fact of my having been aware of this sad occurrence in my capacity as Spain’s ambassador means that, for reasons of professional confidentiality, it would not be right for me to speak on the matter, which I hope you understand. Jordi Magraner was born in the then Spanish protectorate of Morocco, where his family were living, with whom he then moved to France — Valence. To the best of my knowledge it was not a murder but a homicide — which, as you are aware, is not the same: certain aggravating circumstances have to converge to make a homicide into a murder — and at the moment of his demise Jordi Magraner had — I think I remember this rightly — French nationality.
I wrote back:
I’m very grateful for your reply. On that subject, let me say that following my investigations in Pakistan I don’t share the characterisation of ‘homicide’ that you assign to Magraner’s death. There is every indication of it having been a murder, and one carried out, furthermore, by several people, obviously premeditated, which is why I am particularly interested in your version of events. I understand your difficulty in approaching certain subjects, but I imagine it would not be in any way compromising for you to explain at least what steps were taken by the embassy on learning of Magraner’s death. And, if possible, your opinion of them. I would be very grateful for your collaboration.
Also, the Magraner family assures me that Jordi had Spanish nationality.
I guess Segura Morís must have felt cornered. This time, it took him more days to reply. When he did, he didn’t describe the embassy’s actions following the crime, nor did he refer to Jordi’s nationality, but rather focused on the technical aspects of the investigation, concluding:
In a case like this — homicide or murder — it is only murder if the judge decides it is so. I’m sorry not to have been able to be of more use, and take this opportunity to send you my cordial greetings.
As he had done with Andrés, Segura Morís settled on sending me back to Pakistani justice, the route that anyone who knows that particular swamp makes a point of avoiding, what with it being so hopeless and corrupt. The Magraners had already failed in their attempt to learn more through the police and the judges. All they’d managed to do was increase their despair and their rage by discovering something that was indeed significant: the security organisations, the judges, the politicians, and everybody connected to the spheres of power accepted that it was just another crime of passion. The residents of the valleys, the caravanserais, shepherds, and members of N.G.O.s who knew Jordi and his story tended to agree in pointing the finger at the Taliban as the killers — and even, some of them, at the secret services. But
then how was one to explain the suspicion falling on Shamsur, Khalil, and an Afghan refugee? Some neighbours believed that the Rahman brothers had been used. ‘They were hungry, and if they didn’t kill him, they opened the door to the killer. Isn’t that the same as killing him?’ That is what the neighbours think.
The impossibility of obtaining answers or support after three years of sustained effort would eventually shatter Andrés. He was exhausted from filling out forms, from making calls, from the infinite bureaucracy, and so tired at the huge loss of Jordi. He felt like an empty vessel. He didn’t feel there was anything else he could do; he couldn’t go on bearing that weight.
After 2004, he stopped trying to rehabilitate his brother’s memory, while his mother, bit by bit, was reborn. After three years of barely talking or listening to music, sunk into the sofa, without tears, Dolores began to find her way back. On 11 April 2006, her eightieth birthday, a limousine came to collect her at home to take her to the restaurant where, without her knowledge, her whole family — and somebody else — was waiting for her.
‘Hello,’ said Erik L’Homme. ‘I’ve come in Jordi’s place. I want you to feel like he’s here, too.’
‘Yes, that really was so moving,’ says Dolores whenever she recalls that day. ‘It was, I know it. It really was.’
Early in 2006, Esperanza found the strength to go into Jordi’s old bedroom in Valence, open the iron suitcases, and start classifying his notes and diaries. She fell ill, but in the summer she returned to the task. She papered the room, and put the books in order. Until that point, whenever she’d gone in there she had been overcome with sorrow, distressed to feel that she was touching her brother’s things without permission.
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