The Honey Thief (2 page)

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In the city where I now live, all the stories are in books. They are studied in the universities. I am not sure that these stories still pierce the flesh of those who hear them and make a life for themselves in the listener’s heart. In Afghanistan, we have very few universities and very few professors. The history of the Hazara is told in the fields, in our tents, in our houses. Many of the stories I heard when I was growing up, even those from centuries ago, came to life again before my eyes. I was told the story of Abdul Khaliq who was cut to pieces with knives because he would not submit to the enslavement of the Hazara people. Some years after I heard the story, I was running for my life from people who wanted to do to me what had been done to Abdul Khaliq, and for the same reason. I heard stories of Hazara chieftains who’d fought five hundred years ago to hold onto the small piece of Afghanistan that Hazaras hold sacred today. In my own lifetime, the great Hazara chief Abdul Ali Mazari fought with all his strength in the same cause and died because of the same small error as the chieftains of the past – by looking for a moment to the left instead of the right. I heard tales of the honoured eagles who came down from the highest part of the sky and took hares as they ran between rocks, and I saw the same thing when I was a shepherd in the mountains. My heart and my mind, my bones and flesh and all the organs of my body are bound together with the cords of the stories I was told. They made me Hazara, week by week, tale by tale.

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This new land of mine is also the land of the Net; of the dot-com, Skype, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, Twitter; of conference calls, direct debit, online banking. In the course of a day, I’m likely to employ all of these inventions and devices. A man I know well comes to my business premises, points at three rugs of great value and says, ‘I can auction these at $25.50 minimum; that’s each one, fifteen points to the gavel, ten to me. What do you think?’ I take out my calculator, busy myself for two minutes, then reply, ‘Fifteen to the auctioneer is steep. If he can make it 12.5, go ahead, ten points to you, of course.’ I’ve embraced the digital world, and I’ve embraced arithmetic. But when the day comes to an end and I lock up my shop and prepare to drive my Corolla the ten minutes to the apartment where my wife and daughter are waiting, I always glance at the sky as I did a hundred times a day when I was a shepherd and try to work out the sort of weather I can expect the next day. If there are clouds in the sky, I take into account their height above the ground, the speed at which the wind drives them along and the exact direction in which they are heading. If there are no clouds in the sky, I look at the colour of the sunset, whether it is red or scarlet or orange or pink, because I will make a different calculation for each colour. Within my shop, it doesn’t matter if the weather is hot or chilly, wet or dry or humid. And yet I cannot forget the habits of the shepherd. It is the same when I purchase honey in the supermarket. My brother, Gorg Ali, a beloved man, made the finest honey in the world, and he managed this by speaking to his bees, by pampering them, by searching for the place where they would be happiest. And so I still ask myself in the supermarket, ‘But does this jar of honey come from bees who were loved?’

No, I cannot forget where I came from, the life I led when I was a boy and a young man, the people who stood close to me and told me the tales of my people. Some of those tales, like those of Abdul Khaliq and Abdul Ali Mazari, are known to every Hazara; others, like that of Esmail Behishti, himself a great storyteller, and Ahmad Hussein, the man who knew bees better even than my beloved brother, better than the bees knew themselves, are known mostly to the Hazara of the village in which I grew up. And some are known only to me.

When I open my shop, I am a businessman, no different to many other businessmen. And I am a citizen, no different to many other citizens. I take an interest in politics. I watch the news. I think, ‘But is enough money being spent on education?’ Or I might think, ‘Is the earth becoming warmer? What is to be done?’ I have a friend who comes from Uzbekistan, and he thinks such things as those that come into my own brain. I talk with my friend from Israel knowing that he has the same interests as me. I am alike to many people, millions, perhaps even, say, billions. But when I sleep, I am not the same. When I sleep, I dream like a Hazara.

2

The Wolf Is the Most Intelligent of Creatures

He was an old man who lived in a village three hours’ easy walk from the banks of the Murghãb River. In his life he’d had three wives and had outlived them all. Since he was so esteemed amongst the Hazara, he could have chosen a fourth wife but he preferred to live a widower with the family of his oldest son, Jafar Ali. He found enjoyment in the company of all his sons, all of his daughters and grandchildren but he liked the youngest son of Jafar Ali best, a boy by the name of Abbas. At twelve years of age, the boy had a quick mind and a ready smile. He had been to school in a town further south and could recite mathematical tables and measure angles. Abbas made it his job to sit with the old man over breakfast and bring him more tea when it was required.

Each morning, Esmail told the boy one of the stories for which he was famous. The first story he told was of a man whose hearing was so sharp that he could hear the sound made by cloud shadows as they passed over the land below.

‘And what sound do the cloud shadows make?’ asked the boy.

‘A cloud moving fast makes a sound like this,’ said Esmail, and he put his lips together and whistled softly, almost too softly to hear. ‘But when the wind is light and the clouds travel slowly, they make a sound like a flower opening in the sun.’

Abbas smiled. He had a practical mind and he didn’t believe that the stories he was told by Esmail were strictly true.

‘My hearing is good,’ he said. ‘I can hear the sound of pebbles rolling when a red fox stumbles a long way off. But I have never heard a shadow.’

Nevertheless, he enjoyed listening to the old man. While they were being told, he believed the stories for the pleasure of it. The old man had tales to tell of horseshoe bats that flew across the sky in such numbers that they blacked out the light of the moon; of brown bears that held conversations with human beings; of snow leopards that sang songs.

When he’d finished a story, Esmail would ask the boy if he’d enjoyed it. The boy would say, ‘A snow leopard cannot sing,’ or ‘Bears don’t talk,’ but he always said it with a smile. As he grew older, he understood that Esmail had such mastery as a storyteller that sometimes he would become fanciful just for his own amusement.

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If the old man had only told stories of talking bears and singing leopards, he would not have built the reputation he had amongst our people, the Hazara. He was considered a man of learning, even though he had never been to school. Men came to him when they were troubled and listened to his advice. He spoke quietly on these occasions, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting. He carried a staff with him everywhere, made from the wood of a gundy tree and worn smooth all along its length. When he gave advice, he would tap the base of the staff on the ground, digging up the soil just a little, as if this helped him to concentrate. He gave advice on disputes between families, on marriages, on children who were growing up wild.

Nobody but Abbas ever questioned his advice. People saw he had a great power that he could use in a number of ways and they accepted everything he said. One day a man came to him to ask for advice about a woman he wished to marry, and since Abbas was then twelve years of age and much more than a boy, Esmail let him stay and listen. The man, whose name was Naid, was twenty-two. The woman he wished to marry was twenty and was considered very beautiful but also very lazy. Naid himself was anything but lazy. He was a carpenter and a house-builder and was always at work when the first light of morning came into the sky. Abbas could see that Naid was deeply worried about this marriage he was contemplating. Amongst the Hazara, there is hardly a worse vice than laziness. We have survived in the mountains of the Hazarajat by throwing ourselves into our work without complaint. In the mountains of the Hindu Kush, you work hard or die young. Women work as hard as men, or harder. Every meal must be thought about. Every purchase must be wise. A lazy wife is a catastrophe.

Young Naid told his story wearing a frown the whole time. He gripped one hand in the other and squeezed and kneaded it. Abbas’ mother Amalia served him tea which he drank very slowly, sometimes forgetting it was sitting before him. Often he pushed his hands against his temples and rubbed with his fingers. As Abbas sat watching, he could see only one answer that the old man could give Naid: forget this woman for she will be your ruin. Nobody supported Naid in his choice of a wife; his mother was full of scorn; his father said he was mad. And so Abbas was shocked to hear his grandfather say to Naid, ‘Yes, marry her. Of course you must.’

‘You believe so?’ said Naid, who was as shocked as Abbas. He had been stooped over, sitting before Esmail, but as soon as the old man spoke he sat upright as if he’d been stuck with a prickle.

‘Yes, that is my advice. Marry her. Buy a present for your mother to calm her temper. Ask your father for his blessing.’

‘Then that is what I will do. My mother and father will accept the marriage once I tell them that you have approved. I thank you with all my heart. I honour your wisdom.’

When Naid had departed, Abbas said to the old man, ‘That was a very strange thing to say!’

‘Do you think so?’ said the old man, and he gave Abbas a look that meant, ‘There is more to this than meets the eye.’

‘Surely you have sown the seeds of unhappiness for Naid.’

‘Listen,’ said the old man, and he made a gesture with his hand, touching one ear, so that Abbas knew to attend closely. ‘Have you seen a man who has only one leg to carry him through life? Have you seen a man who has lost a hand? Laziness is like that. It is a handicap to carry through life. The woman Naid wishes to marry is like a woman with a misfortune to bear. Better she should have a husband who knows nothing but hard work than a husband who is lazy himself. Naid will always toil until the sweat falls from his face. Now he will have a wife whose beauty will enrich his life in one way at least.’

The old man was revered for the advice he gave, but strangely he found small pleasure in his reputation. And this was something that Abbas noticed, so closely did he study the old man.

‘When people say you are the wisest man in the world, you always close your eyes and bow your head,’ said the boy. ‘It doesn’t please you, I think.’

The old man smiled and took the boy’s hand in his own, much older, hand.

‘This is why I live in your father’s house,’ he said. ‘To hear what you have to say.’

‘Then it’s true? It doesn’t please you to be praised?’

‘When I wake in the morning, I look at the sky and wish to return to my bed. My bones ache. But I wash and pray and eat some food and go about my work. The people who say I am as wise as a prophet don’t see me wishing to sleep an hour longer. A human being cannot be a god, Abbas. He is just a man with pains in his knees and a sore back.’

‘But you should be proud. People walk for a whole day to listen to you,’ the boy responded.

‘Abbas, every life is a life of folly,’ said Esmail. ‘For each intelligent decision we make, ten more are foolish. That is what it means to be a human being. I once knew a man who found a gold coin on the ground. It must have fallen from the purse of a merchant – that may be one explanation. The man found the coin and rejoiced. For a while, the gold coin made things easier for his family. Every day for the next two years, the man went back to the place where he’d found the coin to see if another one was waiting for him. But he never found a second coin. This is what we do. We think good fortune will happen again and again. But our eyes tell us that good fortune only happens now and then, not every day. I am no different. Much of my life has been devoted to folly. When people say, “Esmail, how much you know!” I think of how foolish I have been and feel ashamed.’

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The old man liked to be questioned – that is what Abbas understood by the time he was twelve. And so he spoke his mind to his grandfather whenever a story seemed strange or crazy. The old man called Abbas ‘the scientist’ because of his habit of asking for proof. ‘When a brown bear sits and talks to me, then I will believe you,’ Abbas said, and the old man smiled with approval.

‘But what if I tell you that the wolf is the most intelligent animal in the world? What if I prove to you that a wolf is more intelligent than a man?’ said Esmail one spring evening.

‘That can never happen,’ replied Abbas.

‘It will happen tomorrow,’ said the old man. ‘I will come with you when you watch the sheep. You will have your proof.’

It was Abbas’ job to guard his family’s sheep and goats when they were grazing on the spring grass in the hill pastures. It was not his only job, but in the spring it was the most important one. He had been a shepherd for a year when the old man told him that a wolf was the most intelligent creature in the world, but so far he had never seen a wolf come close to the flock. It could happen any day. Lambs were being born and wolves would pick up the scent of the afterbirth and come down from the mountains to hunt.