“Poor Rashid,” he said. “My poor dear friend, how could he know? “
Stefan had to concentrate quite hard as Mr Azad unfolded his tale, because although he spoke very clearly he was the kind of person who didn’t use a short word if a long one would do. But in the end, with Judy and William asking questions, and Farmor explaining sometimes in rapid Swedish asides, he got the story straight.
When Mr Azad discovered to his dismay that he had allowed himself to be fooled by the letter, he was at a loss.
“Rashid never even arrived in Sweden! That nice woman at the asylum centre who had posted it, Soheila…” Now William broke in and said that she wasn’t at the asylum centre, she was a cleaning lady at the museum, and she had told him about the key. After a bit of explaining, and several people round the table saying that they could talk lots about the key later, Mr Azad went on. He had talked for a long time to Soheila, about where she had met Rashid, and where he was heading, so he at least had some idea of what to do.
“I had a pretty good idea of what he would try. We had talked so many times of the best routes when we were younger. We even went on little expeditions, you understand, to reconnoitre.”
‘Reconnoitre’ was a word that flummoxed both Stefan and William. When it was sorted out he said, “So off I went, Judy.” He looked at his daughter. “If I had known…”
His search took him further and further back along the refugee trail, and in the end there was nothing for it, he had to cross the border.
“I had very convincing papers. They cost me a lot of money.”
Once there, said Mr Azad, he soon found out that Rashid had been taken quite early on his flight, brought back and imprisoned. By bribing the right people, and “calling in some old favours” as he put it, he had managed to organize Rashid’s escape, and they had fled in a friend’s car. But it went wrong, and they knew they were being hunted. They had to abandon their car and make way on foot. In the end they became separated. Mr Azad had been caught and had prepared himself to die. But then came the surprise. His captors knew perfectly well who he was and wanted him alive. They weren’t particularly interested in Rashid.
“How did they know it was you?” William had to ask. Mr Azad looked at him and sighed.
“Well, someone must have told them, don’t you think?”
“Someone who knew who you were?”
“Yes. I am fairly sure who it was. An old friend. Someone I trusted.”
“But he wasn’t your friend any more.”
Mr Azad was silent for a moment. Then he said,
“I suppose not. But betrayal is seldom cut and dried. Life asks a lot of us, sometimes too much.”
Farmor had been listening quietly.
“It does, Mr Azad. It does.”
“But I will say this. True friendship, if it ever comes your way, is a pearl without price.” Now he looked again at Judy. They had a lot of talking to do, but there was time.
Mr Azad returned to his story.
His captors fired their guns into the air, took off his jacket and fired into it, riddling it with bullet holes, took his papers and few possessions, smeared them with blood (“they cut my arm to get it, but under the circumstances I wasn’t complaining”) and scattered them across a hillside. Then they bundled him into a car. It was his expertise they needed. Lots of engineers and computer experts and mathematicians had fled the country, and they needed him. They knew all about the work he had been doing; that he was a physicist and engineer.
“Well,” said Mr Azad, “they succeeded very well in convincing poor Rashid that I was dead. They even put out one of those horrible announcements saying that the traitor Azad had been brought to justice and disposed of. So I didn’t exist.”
“They were lying,” William remarked.
“They were indeed. That is their hallmark, their speciality.”
After that followed a hard time. He didn’t want to talk about it much. He had no intention of doing the kind of secret work that they wanted; it had to do with weapons – nuclear weapons, he soon realized. But they told him that he would never see his daughter again if he didn’t, that they knew where she was, that they had full surveillance. He knew they were lying about that, he trusted her, but he pretended to give in. There was no other hope of seeing Judy again. So now he was treated like royalty.
“Didn’t they lock you up? Kings aren’t locked up.”
“Well, perhaps they are not locked up, exactly. But kings have bodyguards watching them all the time, and they can’t ever go out by themselves. And they get nice food.”
But Mr Azad was only waiting for the right moment. He had decided from the first that he would get back to Judy somehow. He knew he might die if he tried, and thought about that for a long time – he had lain awake one whole night. He had decided that it would be better for her to have a dead father than a father in a faraway country making bombs.
In the end his chance came. He was being driven to a research facility in the desert, and when the car broke down and the driver and his bodyguard had their heads under the bonnet, he simply threw himself out of the car and ran.
“No careful planning. I just ran.”
He ran, and then he walked, and walked and walked.
“At the end, to be honest with you, I crawled. But I came to the only place I knew where I could find help.” It was the village where he had been born. “And where you too, Judy, first saw the light of day. You don’t remember that village – but it remembers you. I was given water, a place to lay my head. I slept for two days. When I woke it was time to plan the next part of my journey. With no papers and no money, how was I to leave the country? I went to the little café, to think things over, and there, sitting at a table in the shade and drinking peppermint tea, was my deus ex machina, Andrew Balderson.”
A babble of voices erupted round the table. Even Farmor had something to say. William got nowhere with his question about what a deus ex machina was. Mr Azad calmly sipped his coffee, smiling in satisfaction at the dramatic effect he had created.
“But … you know him?” Judy asked, when things had quietened down a bit. “You can’t.”
“Why can’t I? We have met in the public library on several occasions and had some very interesting conversations – a fine scholar and a great traveller. He was very well up on the Sufis, we—”
Suddenly a thought struck Judy. “The second valley, he said you would know.”
“Of course. Attar. Mantiq Ut-Tair. The Conference of the Birds, they call it in English. The seven valleys.”
“But the second valley?”
“The second valley, Judy, is the valley of love and true friendship. A hard valley to cross. Andrew is a learned man, but even so I was able to put him in the way of some of the minor poets. And he had never read Zeb-Un-Nissa: a shocking omission, as I said to him at the time. A wonderful poet, and one of the few women who…”
“Dad.”
“Of course. Where was I?”
Mr Balderson had offered him a lift home, and he had been glad to accept.
“So I crossed the border squashed into one of his storage lockers, under the couch.”
“Just like me!” William was delighted. “I did too!”
The journey had been long, and full of difficulties. They had gone north, and managed to reach the Russian border, and then on towards Finland. Then one day they came to a beautiful lake, with an island in the middle. On the island was an old monastery, it was called:
“Valamo,” said Farmor.
“Indeed, Mrs Petterson, Valamo. A more serene and spiritual place I have never seen. We rested for a while, being very kindly looked after, and when the time came to go on (I was rather impatient to find you, as you can imagine, Judy) Andrew said no.
“‘I have stopped now, Reza, and I shall not start again. I have seen enough, and done enough, and read enough. I’m full to bursting, and it is time to start emptying stuff out.’
“That’s what he said. And
he led me to a little hermitage in the woods behind the monastery, that he had been told he could occupy. Remarkable people, the monks of Valamo. He showed me where he would sleep, I was astounded, it was…”
“A coffin,” said Judy.
“Yes, how did you know? He would sleep in a coffin!”
And that was it. Mr Azad set off alone, and here he was.
Farmor sighed contentedly. She wasn’t the slightest bit surprised that Mr Balderson had turned up when he was needed. But Stefan was stunned.
“But how could he find … there are so many places; the world is a very big place I think?”
Judy had been thinking hard.
“I think I know. We met some people at a campsite. And I told him the name of the village that Dad… That we come from.”
“Ha!” said Mr Azad, “It still works, I find,” and he tapped Judy gently on the head with his forefinger. “Indeed, Judy. I asked Andrew the very same question, and he said to me, “Reza, where does a man go when there is nowhere else to go? Who takes a man in, when all refuse him succour? He goes home, Reza, he goes home. Just as a fugue returns to its home key, a man wends his way through the music of his life… Oh well, you know how he talks.”
Yes, they said laughing, they did know. There was quite a lot of laughing after that, and talking and eating cinnamon buns and discussing Norse mythology, which Reza Azad showed a lot of interest in, to William’s great satisfaction. At one point Judy, who was sitting very close to her father, asked quietly,
“Did you tell anybody else that you were going away? Or was it only me?”
“Well,” came the soft reply, “I might possibly have mentioned it to Andrew Balderson…”
And what about poor Rashid? Farmor apologized to Mr Azad for shooting his best friend and was instantly forgiven. She rang Soheila’s apartment, and prepared her a bit, and then Reza spoke to Rashid. Nobody understood what he said, apart from Judy, and that was probably for the best.
26
The next day was beautiful. The spring sun warmed the farm and started mopping up the last of the snow. Even on the north side of the house there was only a dwindling heap left. Farmor found the first coltsfoot by the meadow fence. Then Rashid and Soheila arrived in Rashid’s little car, and soon after that the man from the scrapyard came driving an old rescue vehicle with a winch, and he and Stefan spent some time manoeuvring Aristeas on to it for his final journey. So before she knew it, Farmor had a party on her hands. She rushed off to the kitchen and Judy ran to help her.
“Cupcakes,” said Farmor. “Are they hard to make?”
“Not too hard,” said Judy, “if you know how.”
They laid tables out of doors for the very first time that year, and there was coffee and blackcurrant juice and bread and cheese, there were pancakes with whipped cream and cloudberry jam and then, triumphantly, Judy appeared with a tray of newly iced cupcakes. Her father was so moved that he stood up and made a speech to the honour of the noble cupcake and all it meant for human civilization. Then the man from the scrapyard, who had only sat with them on Farmor’s insistence, because he was wearing greasy overalls over a dirty T-shirt, and a cap with “John Deere” on the peak, got up and went to his truck, coming back with a suitcase of some kind. He opened it and took out an accordion. Then he said something to Stefan. Stefan went into the house and came out with a violin. He stuck it under his chin, and they started to play. It was strange music, some of it fast and dancing, some of it slow and winding, in minor keys with odd harmonies. It was music for forests, and mountains, and lakes and rivers and hard work.
Judy sat beside Farmor.
“I didn’t know that Stefan…”
“Oh, here everybody plays. Well, not everybody. But Stefan is fifth generation. His great-great-grandfather made the one they are playing now. He is born to it.”
When they stopped, to eat some more and drink more coffee, Judy said,
“You never told me you played the violin, Stefan.”
Stefan looked at her and grinned.
“So? It is not good for you to know everything.”
THE END
About The Author
Toby Ibbotson grew up in Newcastle upon Tyne. After university, he planned to travel the world – and he made it as far as Sweden, where he has lived ever since. His home is in the north of the country, where winters are long, dark and cold but spring is a real spring. Toby has a wonderful wife and two beloved children as well as two small dogs, nine bean rows and a honeybee hive. He has been a teacher for over thirty years.
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First published in the UK by Scholastic Ltd, 2019
This electronic edition published by Scholastic Ltd, 2019
Text copyright © Toby Ibbotson, 2019
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eISBN 978 1407 18987 1
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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