The Honey Thief (12 page)

Abdullah was baffled. How should he grasp the
tula
if not at either end and not in the middle? He reached out his hand once, twice, ten times, twenty times, and each time he withdrew it. Finally he climbed to his feet, brushed the tears from his eyes and went home.

All through the next day while he crushed beetles in his uncle’s orchard, he thought about the
tula
, and how it could be taken up in such a way that the madman would not be offended. He could find no solution. He thought to himself, ‘The master does not wish to teach me.’

All the same, his mind kept returning to the problem, but without reward. In the night he went to the house of the madman, driven by desire to learn the
tula
. He thought, ‘I am becoming mad myself! Will that satisfy the master, when I am also a madman?’

Karim Zand sat the boy before the
tula
. ‘Now, pick up the instrument. However, I am a man quickly moved to anger. If you pick it up at this end, I will beat you to within an inch of your life. If you pick it up by this end, I will tear the skin from your bones and feed you to the ants. And if you pick it up here between the two ends, I will make myself a breakfast of your entrails.’

This time, Abdullah didn’t consider anything except his desire to hold the
tula
. He reached out and grasped the instrument and held it firmly. He expected a blow from the madman, or even worse, the flash of a sharp knife. Instead he saw on the face of Karim Zand a smile that stretched from his left ear to his right.

‘You see?’ said Karim Zand. ‘It is not so difficult to pick up the
tula
.’

*   *   *

Abdullah’s second lesson was to learn how to listen. Karim Zand played the
tula
for an hour and the boy’s task after that hour was to say nothing, which was not so difficult because he could not speak. But Karim Zand questioned him when he stopped playing. ‘Did I not make myself clear, beetle?’ (He had begun to call Abdullah ‘beetle’.) ‘I said, “Say nothing.”’

Abdullah lifted his hands as if to say, ‘But nothing was said!’

‘With your mouth, you obeyed me,’ said Karim Zand. ‘But with your eyes, you went chatter chatter chatter! This is what you were saying: “The most beautiful music!” But that is not what I want to hear. When you learn the
tula
, you will not want to hear those words either. It is not beauty we seek with the
tula
. It is only the truth. Do you think the truth is always beautiful? No. The truth is sometimes beautiful, but often it is ugly. In the city of Shiraz where I once made my home, I saw a man who had lost his wife to the plague. Then his children followed. He had loved his wife greatly and his children were the light of his life. When the pain was too much for him to bear, he thrust his hand into a saucepan of boiling oil and held it there. That is the truth about love. If I tell the story of this man on the
tula
, I do not wish to hear you say with your eyes, “A beautiful tune!” Do you understand now?’

So Abdullah listened with his eyes on the rug on which he sat. When Karim Zand had come to the end of the music for that night, he said, ‘You, who has no voice, what did you hear?’

Abdullah couldn’t answer.

‘You heard voices. But not the voices of people. Come with me.’

Karim Zand took the boy outside. The night was black, with clouds hiding the stars and the moon. Karim Zand spoke. ‘Listen. In the heavens the clouds are travelling from the east to the west. They have a voice. The moon that is hidden has a voice. Each star that you cannot see has a voice of its own. The mountain that stands above us has a voice, and the mountain behind it. The wind has a hundred voices. The bears in their caves have their own voice when they stir in their sleep. The fox has its voice as it searches for the eggs of the bulbul, and it has another voice when it hunts hares. The
tula
alone knows the voices of the world. Now go home!’

Before he put his foot to the track that led to his uncle’s house, Abdullah reached out his hand to shake the hand of the madman. The door of the wool-dyer’s house, now that of the new madman, was open and the light of the cheap oil lamp fell across the threshold. As the madman accepted his hand, Abdullah noticed something he had not noticed before. The madman’s left hand was badly scarred, all the way up his wrist.

*   *   *

It was not long before Abdullah’s uncle Ali Reza discovered that the boy was leaving his bed each night. Ali Reza had a soft spot for his nephew, whose fate it had been to have a foolish owl-eating father and a hare-brained mother who ran off with a tooth-puller. And Abdullah was a boy loyal in his affections and attentive to his tasks – Ali Reza commended these qualities. But there was another reason for Ali Reza’s fondness for Abdullah. A fortune-teller had come to the village once, a Jew who wandered the world with a donkey for transport and a rooster for company. The man had been cast out from the tribe of Jews for having stabbed a rabbi, but for what reason he’d stabbed the rabbi he wouldn’t say. The Jew had also the company of a woman from the land of Syria who followed the faith of the fire-worshippers, and it was she who was thought to give the fortune-teller his information about the future. The Jew told fortunes not by reading the palm of the hand but by running his fingers through his customers’ hair. He did this blindfolded, and so was able to count pious Muslim women amongst his clients. When he felt the hair of Ali Reza, who had approached him in an idle moment, he said without hesitation, ‘That boy of yours will bring you honour, of that I am sure.’ Ali Reza asked which boy he meant, since he had three sons. The fortune-teller responded, ‘Why, the boy with jewels for eyes.’

Ali Reza asked the boy openly why he left his bed each night. Abdullah took his uncle by the hand and led him through the village and up the rocky path to the house of the new madman. He knocked on the door twice, then paused, and knocked a further three times. This manner of knocking had been taught to him by Karim Zand, who would not come to the door for anyone but Abdullah. Karim Zand showed his most fierce expression to Ali Reza, but agreed at last to talk to him. In this way, Ali Reza heard from the lips of the madman himself that Abdullah, the beetle, was learning to play the
tula
. He was amazed, of course. At first he didn’t know whether the boy should be scolded for keeping secrets and beaten with a stick, or praised for his ambition. In making up his mind, Ali Reza recalled the words of the Jew with the crazy wife who followed the faith of the fire-worshippers. ‘That boy with jewels for eyes will bring you honour.’ Ali Reza thought to himself, ‘The Jews are a strange people, certainly, but the Prophet Himself showed them respect. Perhaps they know things concealed from uneducated people such as myself.’ Another consideration was the part that music had played in the traditions of the Hazara. ‘Imagine a nephew who can fill the house with the music of the
tula
,’ he thought. He allowed his nephew to continue with his instruction in the art of music-making.

*   *   *

Karim Zand was a very strict teacher. He gave this warning to Abdullah before the boy had blown a single note on the
tula
: ‘This is a simple instrument, beetle. But inside it lives all that is known about the world. In forty years, I have only just begun to learn what it wishes to tell me. You will learn what I can teach you, God knows how much that will be. You have a skull and a brain within. But how much use will that brain be to you? We will see. In four years, if you have shown you are more than the fool you seem to be, you can play in public. Not before.’

Abdullah was a good student. The madman gave him special exercises to aid his breathing. Even a clever student of the
tula
might take a year to master breathing, but Abdullah showed progress within just three months. Before a year had passed, he had learned enough of the great body of the
tula
’s music, known as the
radif
, to play three full song groups, called
dastgahs
, or forty-five
goushehs
, each
gousheh
being a complete melody from the bygone days of the madman’s native Persia. It could be seen that he had a gift. And because he had no voice of his own, he had also developed the skill of listening. No one would have guessed, but the madman had a great deal to talk about. Perhaps it was because Abdullah did not interrupt him that he was willing to talk so freely. His tales were full of magic. He told Abdullah of a great master of the
tula
from the land of Iraq who could make stones rise from the ground and float in the air with his music, and of a horse who was cured of the colic by a sequence of notes that the Iraqi master alone knew. He said that there was a tree in Takht-e-Jamshid, the forest close by the city of Shiraz, that wept tears when a master of the
tula
of that city played beneath it.

The story that Abdullah thought about longest was that of the Persian king who commanded a master of the
tula
to play for his young wife, sorrowing after the death of her first child. The wife of the king had grown as pale as bones that bake in the desert and would accept no food and no water. The
tula
master, Ali Masoud Zamanzadeh, played in the morning and again in the evening for a month and then a second month, and little by little the poor woman returned to health. When Zamanzadeh tired, the wife of the king brought him dishes of walnuts and pistachios and served him with her own hand. She prepared rosewater for him, and sat dishes in a circle around him in the royal apartment –
kashk-e baadenjaan
, carefully prepared with rich whey, and
boulanee
, and
koo-koo-yeh morgh
with the flesh from chickens normally reserved for the king himself, and fresh caviar each day from the Caspian Sea packed in snow from the mountains. Zamanzadeh grew plump on the food the queen served him, and the queen too grew plump with a new baby. She said to her husband the king, ‘Zamanzadeh must play the
tula
for me each day while I carry the child, his music gives me strength.’ The king agreed, but with some reluctance, for the queen seemed to speak of nothing but Zamanzadeh’s music, and Zamanzadeh was a handsome man with a black beard and mustachios that curled at the ends.

The queen’s time came and she gave birth to a boy who announced his health with his first loud cry. The queen had never in her twenty years shown herself so full of the joy of life. It was she who fed the baby boy from her own full breasts, and it was she who washed the baby each day in a basin of polished stone. Zamanzadeh the
tula
player remained at the palace, as pampered as ever, for the queen would not hear of him going his way to make the poor living that is a musician’s fate.

The king took great delight from his baby son, just as any father would. But at least once each day a voice like that of a snake with the power of speech hissed in his ear: ‘King of Persia! Is the child yours? Can you say that he is?’ When he could bear it no longer, the king devised a plan to test the feelings of Zamanzadeh for his wife. He called a woman of his court to him, not a woman of importance, one whose task it was to train the dancers of the court, nothing more. He told her to prepare the most beautiful of his dancers for a strategy he was devising. The woman brought to the king a girl by the name of Ashada, at fifteen already renowned for her beauty and for the grace of her dancing. The king told Ashada that she was to dance in private for the
tula
player, Zamanzadeh, and that she was to grant Zamanzadeh his every wish. The king said, ‘There are ways in which a woman can please a man.’

Ashada danced for Zamanzadeh as the king had commanded. The king had concealed himself behind a screen in order to watch. And what woe this brought him! Ashada danced, Zamanzadeh watched on without smiling, Ashada drew close to him and filled his senses with the perfume that bathed the silk of her garments, Zamanzadeh shook his head. The king watching in secret took Zamanzadeh’s discomfort to mean that he loved the queen, and could not bear to look at another woman, no matter how beautiful. What other explanation could there be? So desirable a woman as Ashada spurned in this way?

The king prepared one final test, this time of the queen’s affections, since the punishment he had in mind for Zamanzadeh and the queen and even for the baby prince was so fierce that he would not act without certainty. He had a famous craftsman of Isfahan make him a toy of great cunning, a mechanical bird of pure gold that would lift its wings and sing when a hidden spring was released. The king called the queen to him, and the baby prince, who was now a year old, and the
tula
player. He told the queen to place the boy on the rich Hamadani rug that covered the floor, and the queen did as she was instructed. The king asked Zamanzadeh to leave his
tula
on the rug, three paces from the baby, and Zamanzadeh did so, of course. Then the king placed the golden bird on the rug by the
tula
. When the king released the spring, the golden bird raised its wings and sang. The prince crawled across the rug with delight to where the golden bird sat beside the
tula
. Before the eyes of all – the king, the queen, Zamanzadeh – the baby reached for the
tula
in preference to the golden bird. In his grief the king with his own sword struck off the head of Zamanzadeh, and of his wife. His baby son was given to a tribe of Arabs.

This story meant more to Abdullah at his age than it would have meant some years earlier, for he had fallen in love with a girl of his own age who came to the village in summer with her mother. The girl, whose name was Leila, sold mulberries and apricots from the orchard of a landowner in Kabul, a man who had seized Hazara land in the terrible years of the Third Rebellion. The landowner was not the worst of those who had taken possession of Hazara land, for he allowed Leila’s father to retain thirty per cent of the crop for himself. Many Hazara from the time of Dost Mohammad onwards were compelled to farm land that had been stolen from them for ten per cent of the crop – a bitter life to lead.