The Honey Thief (17 page)

Rousal Ali scrambled to the opening of the tent, drew down the zipper and thrust his head outside. In the grey light of morning before the sun had appeared over the mountains he saw nothing but the sky and the rocks. Both men crawled outside the tent and stood in the dawn light looking this way and that.

‘Who’s there?’ Abraham called, not loudly. He called again, this time in Dari. No answer came, and there was no one to be seen who could have answered. Each man held the hand of the other, as if amazement had made them into frightened children for the moment.

Abraham said at last, ‘It was the wind.’

‘Can the wind laugh?’ said Rousal Ali.

They remained silent for some time, as long as ten minutes, and in that time they barely moved. Then Abraham became aware that he was clasping Rousal Ali’s hand and in embarrassment he released it. The sun had lifted its face above the mountains of the east and the snow peaks glittered as if each mountain were capped with gems. It was a windless dawn and indeed the night itself had been still and calm. Giant shadows lay on the slopes of the eastern mountains below the radiance of the peaks. As the Englishman and Rousal Ali watched, the shadows were overtaken by the golden glow of the rising sun.

Abraham went to the tent for his camera for the sake of some final pictures of the mountain peaks. Neither man had said so, but each knew that this tenth day was surely the day of return. After the pictures of the eastern peaks, Abraham photographed Rousal Ali standing beside the tent. Then he placed his camera on a stand with three legs and turned a dial that would permit him eight seconds to take his position beside Rousal Ali before the camera came to life. The two men stood smiling with arms around each other’s shoulders while the camera, as if in the hands of a ghost, opened its eye for an instant and made a picture of all that it saw.

*   *   *

The journey down the mountain was made in only three days. At the village of Chakar, Abraham and Rousal Ali stayed the night in the house of the headman, Najaf Husseini, who bred each year the finest goats of Hazarajat and who did not believe in such an animal as a snow leopard. The next day, Abraham and Rousal Ali travelled by horse and cart to a place known only as Taxi, two houses on the track that led to the Great Highway. The town of Taxi was occupied by one family, that of a man who owned an ancient Cadillac automobile that carried passengers to the bus stop on the Great Highway. This man was also called Taxi, although his true name was Abbas Dai Choupan. All around the two houses of the town lay the ruins of the many vehicles that Taxi had collected over the years – trucks and limousines, the shells of armoured vehicles, even the skeleton of a helicopter. All of these vehicles had been damaged in the long civil war and abandoned in the wilderness.

On the way to the Great Highway, Rousal Ali and Abraham agreed that the true reward of the expedition to find the snow leopard had been the friendship they had found. Rousal Ali made a gift of his father’s Sufi stone with its red vein. The most valuable thing that Abraham had to offer was the gold badge that commemorated a famous victory of the Lions of Millwall. He gave the gold badge to Rousal Ali, and taught him the song of Millwall, ‘Let ’Em Come’, translated into Dari.

At the Great Highway, Rousal Ali took the bus to Herat, while Abraham, after a wait of ten hours, took another bus to Kabul.

*   *   *

The house in which Abraham Lew lived with his wife and children was in the suburb of Bermondsey. He and Sophie had lived there before the time of their children. In those years, Abraham had a room set aside for the making of photographs, but when the first baby was expected the room became a nursery. If Abraham wished to make pictures he instead went to the laboratory of his university. It was there that he made pictures from those he had taken in Hazarajat – three hundred altogether. It was all done by a machine.

Abraham took the pictures home after no more than a glance, intending to share them with his wife. When the two children had been put to bed that evening, he sat at the table in his kitchen with Sophie and passed one picture after another to her. He said, ‘That’s Chakar, you can see the market, you can see the figs,’ and, ‘The sunsets were the most beautiful I have seen.’ Finally, he said, ‘This is Rousal Ali praying on the mountain. He didn’t mind me taking pictures. The water bottle is for
wu’du.
’When he came to the pictures of the tenth morning on the mountain he explained: ‘Me and Rousal Ali outside our tent. I took it with the timer.’

Sophie looked at the picture with her head to one side, musing, ‘But you told me you never found a snow leopard.’

‘It’s true, we didn’t. Why do you ask?’

Sophie passed him the picture. At first he could see only himself and Rousal Ali smiling in front of their red tent, each dressed in jeans and yellow waterproof jackets from a shop in Oxford Street. With his dark beard, he and Rousal Ali could almost have been taken for brothers. The picture captured some of that morning’s blue sky and also the steep wall of clay-coloured sedimentary rock behind the tent in which fragments of marble could be found.

‘Look,’ said Sophie, tapping the photograph with her finger.

On a ledge of the steep wall, high above the tent, a snow leopard lay at ease in the morning sun, head raised, thick tail curled. So closely did the coat of the leopard blend with the rock that the animal could easily be overlooked. But snow leopards, as Abraham knew, were the most cautious beasts in all the cat family, the most secretive. It seemed impossible that this snow leopard could lie in the sun in such a relaxed way while humans walked and talked twenty metres below.

‘That could never happen!’ he said. He walked over to the window and held the picture to the light, since there was still colour in the summer sky even at seven o’clock. But how could daylight change the picture, change what was true?

It was a snow leopard, and it gazed down at the scene below – at Abraham and Rousal Ali, at the camera itself – as if it were as close a friend of the two men as they were to each other.

‘I have never seen you so amazed!’ smiled Sophie.

Abraham shook his head, but now he too was smiling. A snow leopard! What sort of morning was that in Hazarajat? A morning of laughter outside the tent. A morning of jewels sparkling on mountain-tops.

‘Darling, a picture can’t lie,’ said Sophie.

8

The Behsudi Dowry

The house of Ahmed Behsudi in the valley of Masjed-e Negar west of Chaghcharan was surely blessed by fortune, as Ahmed himself would never deny. His six orchards flourished; his two wives, Fatima and Rabaab, were each as intelligent as the other; his mare remained strong into her eighteenth year, and his first four children honoured him with their obedience. In the last years of the reign of Shah Zahir, Ahmed Behsudi was prosperous enough to install a glass window in his house that permitted him to look west and study the nearest of his orchards while still inside. He also owned a sugar bowl made of crystal, purchased from a Baluchi merchant, a
kytigar
in our language of Dari, who travelled Hazarajat selling such oddities.

I have said that Ahmed Behsudi was the father of four obedient children, and so he was, but he was also the father of a fifth child, another boy, who was not obedient. It was this son, Hameed, who became the burden to his father that God asks all fathers to bear, in one way or another.

Hameed was not disobedient by choice. He wished with all his heart to make his father proud of him. But it was the sad truth that all the common sense that Ahmed Behsudi could pass on to his children had been divided among Hameed’s brothers and sisters, leaving none for him. As a small child, he felt the force of his mother’s hand, as many children do, but it was always with a heavy heart that his mother punished him because it often seemed that the trouble was just bad luck. When he was six, he climbed onto the roof of the house while trying to see a hoopoe bird up close – no harm in that – but he fell from the roof and landed on top of the family’s rooster, killing the poor bird. In the same way, he fed the mare in summer on some grass he’d pulled from beneath the water tank – a good deed, for the mare’s yard was all dust. But hidden in the fresh grass was a small toad, and when the toad startled the mare she kicked Hameed’s brother Mohammad Ali in the chest and broke five ribs. Hameed’s father said, ‘Do you not know that toads gather in the grass under the water tank? Why didn’t you think?’

‘Father, I will know next time,’ replied Hameed.

Other disasters had less to do with bad luck. One cold morning in autumn when it was his task to chase ravens from the apple orchard, Hameed lit a fire to warm himself and by mistake set a tree ablaze. The tree would normally produce seven hundred apples, but the damage to the trunk kept most of the tree’s fruit from ripening that autumn. His father said to him, ‘Did you not have the sense to light your fire far from the tree?’ Hameed replied, ‘Father, I’ll know next time.’

But next time was worse, for a book came into Hameed’s hands in a peculiar way, and what Hameed read in the book made him blind to his duties.

To the misfortune of being witless, Hameed had to add the misfortune of not knowing what made it possible for the Hazara to survive. Every Hazara boy and every Hazara girl is taught the answers to the survival of our people from a young age. The teaching takes the form of an almost-song of questions, to which the child responds. The mother asks her daughter, the father asks his son:

‘Where do our enemies live?’

‘To the east and west, to the north and south.’

‘Where is our safety?’

‘Our safety is in our Shi’a faith, in our family, in our village, in our people.’

‘How do we greet an enemy?’

‘We say, “Peace, brother!”’

‘And if our enemy is obstinate?’

‘By God’s will, we prevail.’

‘What is the best use we have for our hands?’

‘To make them strong.’

‘What is the best use we have for our ears?’

‘To hear what our mother tells us, to hear what our father tells us, to hear what God whispers to us when our way is lost.’

‘And what use do we make of the hours of a day?’

‘First we give our thanks to God, next we strive.’

There is nothing in these teachings about the reading of books, and if the reading of a book is spoken of, it concerns the Holy Book. There is nothing about sitting under a tree in the shade of the apricot orchard and giving hours of each day to words on a page. The Hazara wish to see their sons and daughters educated, even in strange ways, such as reading books that tell stories and do nothing else, but in a family such as that of Ahmed Behsudi reading strange books came after chasing ravens from the fruit trees and keeping the water channels clear of rubbish. It was because the boy Hameed was witless that he didn’t understand why the Hazara have survived this many ages.

I must explain how Hameed came by the strange book in the first place.

The Baluchi merchant who sold the crystal sugar bowl to Ahmed Behsudi was a very shrewd man. From a distance so far that a man’s face could not be seen in its features – the colour of his eyes, the length of his nose, how many teeth remained to him – the merchant could tell the number and value of the coins that man kept in his purse. And from the thousands of things he carried in his two carts, all of them for sale, the merchant knew exactly which item, which two items or three, would appeal to any man or woman he came across. Yet even a man as clever as the Baluchi merchant can make a mistake, as he did when he met the old man who sold chestnuts outside the gate of the embassy of America in Kabul.

But I see that I must explain how the chestnut seller came by the book that ended up first in the hands of the Baluchi merchant, then in the hands of Hameed, a story in itself.

The chestnut seller was sitting on his four-legged stool one afternoon in winter waiting for the hour at which the Americans went home. At that hour, as the Americans passed through the gate, he was bound to sell most of his chestnuts. He had taught himself certain American words, such as ‘Beautiful day!’ and ‘Okay!’ and so had become a favourite of those who worked in the embassy.

It happened this day that no Americans came to the embassy even though it was not a Sunday, the holy day of the Americans, and the chestnut seller was left a puzzled man. He tried with his few words of American to ask the soldier at the gate the reason for this sudden holiday. The soldier made no reply but only stood with his head bowed and his rifle held upside down. Within a few minutes the day grew stranger still, for soldiers came to the embassy gates in a truck and stood with their weapons ready outside the gate. Then came a black car carrying the King of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, in a green tunic decorated with a big medal in the shape of a star and many others. The chestnut seller in his amazement called out, ‘Aiee! God’s blessings on you, sir!’ Zahir Shah and his sons and many people of importance walked past the chestnut seller without seeing him and continued on their way into the embassy.

The chestnut seller approached one of the soldiers who had remained outside the gate.