The Honey Thief (23 page)

They drove east through the province of Samangan, hour after hour with no more than a pause for each to relieve his bladder or for Konrad to fill the petrol tank of his machine from the flat-sided containers. Even when motionless, Abbas endured the shudder of the machine in his bones and heard the roar of the engine in his ears. Konrad avoided all traffic, all habitations, so that in the space of five hours Abbas saw only a handful of people, nearly always Tajiks, one with his family in a wooden cart pulled by a donkey. The Tajik waved Konrad down to ask for water.

‘Brother,’ said the man, addressing Abbas as the older, ‘the mujaheddin took our water, shame on them. You stand between this family of mine and death.’

‘Not the Russians?’ asked Abbas.

‘No, mujaheddin from the north. Tajiks of my own tribe. War makes them cruel.’

By nightfall Abbas and Konrad had passed into Baghlan Province. They camped in the hills above the A76 highway south of Pol-e-Khomri and less than fifty kilometres from the city of Baghlan itself, which had to be avoided to keep clear of the Russians. At this time of year the snows had melted other than on the heights but the nights remained cold enough to kill a man not aware of the chill that came down near midnight. Konrad had little experience of the Afghan climate, but Abbas knew well what to expect. He searched amongst the boulders until he found a cave – it is always possible to find a cave in the Hindu Kush – and in its shelter he and Konrad ate dried apricots and salted beef and spread their bedding. Konrad sang songs of Germany, although not so much of Germany as America and England, but popular in Germany, as he explained. The songs were as strange to Abbas as if they were sounds from the mouths of wild animals. Yet he enjoyed them, especially the sight of Konrad dancing as he sang with the golden moon behind him. Konrad sang a song called ‘Billie Jean’, and another called ‘Bette Davis Eyes’.

It was strange, also, to hear Dari from the mouth of this boy who did not look like an Afghan, with his light hair and blue eyes. Abbas asked him about his mother, how she had come to marry a German of the Red Cross.

‘My mother was a nurse in Herat when the Red Cross came. Really she was a doctor but was permitted to work only as a nurse at that time. She was employed by the Red Cross where she met my father, whose name is Richard. From the first moment, they loved each other. My grandfather said that my father could marry my mother if he became of our faith, and so he did. He took my mother to Frankfurt am Main, a very great city of West Germany, and then to Wilhelmshaven. My father is not in the Red Cross now. He has a surgery, and my mother also has a surgery. My mother spoke to my sisters and me of the Hazara, so that we would know our heritage. I came to Afghanistan to see my uncle Mohammad Ali and all of my cousins in Herat. But I came also to fight the Russians.’

‘Does your father know that you fight the Russians? Does your mother know that you fight the Russians?’

‘Oh, no! If they knew, they would come to Afghanistan and take me back to Wilhelmshaven!’

‘Your uncle does not tell your secret?’

‘My uncle made me a servant of Baba, for my safety. He keeps my secret. I am not permitted to use a gun. I take Baba sometimes on my Yamaha to Mazar-e-Sharif. Of all motorcycles, Yamaha is the best for Afghanistan.’

Abbas listened to Konrad’s story with great interest. He liked the boy, who laughed so much, and danced and sang. War was an adventure for him. Abbas said, ‘Your mother and father are of the faith, but I have not seen you pray.’

‘I am an atheist.’

‘An atheist? What is an atheist?’

‘I do not believe in God.’

‘But that is impossible!’ said Abbas. Nothing Konrad had said until then so amazed him. People might believe in gods of all faiths, Abbas understood that, but to believe in no god at all seemed madness.

‘How then did the world begin?’ said Abbas.

‘Oh,’ said Konrad, ‘a big explosion.’

Now Abbas knew that the boy was teasing him. He resolved to keep silent on the matter of faith.

Konrad drove all through the next day into Parvan Province. They camped in the heights above the Salang Tunnel where the A76 Highway dived beneath the mountains. Abbas made sure that they were well sheltered from the sky, for the Russians would fly overhead in helicopters looking for mujaheddin. From his covered position he could still gaze down at the highway and at the many vehicles that disappeared into the mouth of the tunnel. In one minute, he saw more cars and trucks than he had seen in all the years of his life in Hazarajat.

Before he slept, Abbas thought again about the vacuum flask. It kept things cold, it kept things hot. ‘Konrad, do you know what is meant by a vacuum flask?’

‘Yes,’ said the boy.

‘It can keep hot tea hot, it can keep cold fruit juice cold. How?’

The boy was silent for a time. Then he said, ‘It’s a mystery.’ And he fell asleep.

*   *   *

The journey of the following day would bring Abbas and Konrad to Charikar and suddenly the war was all around them. Three helicopters with red stars on their undersides came up from behind a range of hills and flew fast overhead. They were close enough for Abbas to read numerals on the underside of each craft. From the south came the thud of artillery shells exploding, and then plumes of smoke. A force of mujaheddin appeared from nowhere on Yamaha motorcycles like Konrad’s and raced past them, two to a cycle, the man at the back with an automatic rifle or a grenade launcher held upright. Then in a shallow valley no more than thirty kilometres from Charikar, Abbas and Konrad came upon a sight of such horror that they were compelled to bow their heads with their hands over their eyes. A bus that had left the highway to find a path around a checkpoint lay on its roof burned and blackened. Scattered on the ground and hanging from windows more than fifty bodies could be counted. All were charred, like sticks from a fire. It appeared that none had survived. ‘Rockets,’ said Konrad. ‘From helicopters.’ The explosions that had killed all of these people could not have been very recent. Sand had begun to bank up around the wreck of the bus.

Abbas said, ‘They must be buried.’

For the rest of the day the two men dug graves with strips of metal from the bus. It would have been easier and quicker to bury all the bodies together in one great hole in the earth, but Abbas wished each body, or such parts of a body as could be found, to occupy a single grave. The soil was pebble and clay beneath the sand and the digging was arduous. But by evening, five rows of graves had been filled, fifty-six bodies buried, amongst them twenty children. Those of our Shi’a faith, such as Abbas, would normally show full respect to the dead at burial, and the bodies would be washed in the ritual of
wu’du
, the hands bathed up to the wrists, the face washed, the mouth and nostrils cleansed with strips of cotton, the head itself gently wiped with a damp cloth, then the entire body washed three times over and rubbed with camphor and sandalwood. A white cotton shift would be fitted over the body of a man, two white cotton burial garments fitted over the body of a woman. Such washing, such careful cleansing prepares those who have ended their life on earth for their reception into Heaven. Prayers would be spoken by a mullah and the mourners, four
takbirs
; all those who had come to honour the one who had died would stand in rows as they prayed, the rows always of an uneven number.

Abbas did not have the leisure or the equipment for such a burial. The charred remains of the bodies could not be properly washed in the ceremony of
wu’du
even if water and white cotton had been on hand. But at least Abbas could pray. In our faith, whether Shi’a or Sunni, any man of sound belief can speak the prayers for the dead, Janaza Salah, confident that his words will reach the ears of God. And so Abbas spoke reverent words over each body before closing the grave with the soil of clay and pebble. He said, ‘Glory be to thee, O God, and Thine is the praise, and blessed is Thy name, and great is Thy majesty, and none is to be served besides Thee.’ These words are the first of the Holy Book, known to every Muslim except those who profess to be atheists, such as Konrad.

Over each grave, Abbas also spoke the words of the third
takbir
. ‘O God! Grant this Thy servant protection, and keep this servant close, and pardon this servant, and make this servant’s entertainment honourable, and wash this Thy servant with water and snow and hail and cleanse this Thy servant as a white cloth is cleansed of soil and blemish.’

It was usually possible to distinguish children from adults amongst the bodies, and when it was a child who lay below him in a grave, Abbas said these words: ‘O God! Make this child a cause of recompense for us and make the child a treasure for us on the day of resurrection.’

Konrad worked all through the heat of the day without complaint, so admirable in the eyes of Abbas. He stood in silence when Abbas prayed over each body. Since the prayers were spoken in Arabic and Konrad could not know what was being said, Abbas took the opportunity to do something for the boy’s soul. At the end of each recital of the third
takbir
, he added these words for consideration in Paradise: ‘Oh God, lead this boy Konrad to the faith and away from foolish talk of explosions.’

*   *   *

It was well past sunset when Abbas and Konrad entered Charikar, a city more ancient than our faith. The house of Khalid Naseri was easily located in the north of the city. Once Abbas had shown a guard armed with a rifle and two pistols in holsters a letter from Baba Mazari, he was permitted to enter the house with Konrad and shown to a room where a man of some age with a deeply lined grey face lay raised on cushions in a bed. Abbas saw in an instant that the man was Hazara of a tribe that lived near Herat. Sure enough, when the man greeted him he spoke in the dialect of his tribe.

‘I thank God for His kindness in sending you, Abbas Behishti. Will you, too, accept my gratitude?’

‘A small thing,’ said Abbas. ‘God be with you.’

Abbas then introduced Konrad, and in few words explained his presence and his history. Konrad smiled.

While tea and biscuits and melon were being prepared, Abbas, seated on a low stool close to the bed, gazed about the room with curiosity. On one wall a number of flags were displayed bearing words that Abbas knew to be English. Each of the flags said, ‘METS’, followed by a year in the numerals used by Americans. Photographs of young men in caps were also displayed on the wall. Abbas was surprised to recognise a black man of America who had appeared in the
Saturday Evening Post
of his teacher many years ago. The black man’s name was Willie Mays. The story in the
Saturday Evening Post
was about a famous catch in the game played by Americans called baseball.

Khalid Naseri said, ‘It is my love, baseball. I went many times. This is the team of my heart, the Mets of New York. It is a team from Queens and I live in Brooklyn, but Brooklyn lost its team to the Americans of California. See this picture, this is Tom Seaver. This picture is Gary Carter. This one is Mr Met, the mascot. And this one is Gil Hodges. I carried these pictures with me from my home in Brooklyn. I carried the pennants with me. This one is my best. Do you see these words? They say, “World Series 1969”. The Mets became champions of America. I think they will be champions of America this year, too. But I will not see it.’

Konrad asked to be excused, since the matters to be discussed were private. Abbas nodded. Khalid Naseri raised a hand from the bed covers.

A woman Abbas had not seen when he entered the house now served the tea and biscuits and melons. She was not Hazara, not Afghan. She kept part of her hair covered with a scarf in our custom, but the part of her hair that showed was very fair. Most startling to Abbas were the trousers that the woman wore – blue jeans, in fact, such as he had seen two or three times in his life on Afghan men in Kabul. The blue jeans showed the shape of the woman’s legs and hips. Abbas felt a blush spreading rapidly over his face and up into the flesh of his scalp below his turban.

‘My wife, Barbara,’ said Khalid Naseri.

Barbara, the wife of Khalid Naseri, smiled at him with teeth so white that Abbas thought he was being tricked in some way. Amazed and confused as he already was, Abbas had yet more wonder to behold, for the wife of Khalid Naseri addressed him in perfect Dari – the Dari that is used by the most educated Afghans, very like the Old Persian spoken by mullahs from wealthy families.

‘A pleasure to meet you,’ said the woman Barbara. ‘Your great kindness in coming to my husband’s sickbed touches me deeply.’

‘It is as God wills,’ replied Abbas.

He noticed that there were tears in the woman’s eyes, and this caused him to blush a second time.

‘I will leave you then,’ said Barbara. And still speaking Dari, she said to her husband, ‘Honey, don’t exhaust yourself.’

When she had left the room, Khalid Naseri said, ‘Americans call those they love “honey”. It took me a long time to understand. We have been married for thirty years. Our sons are grown.’ Then he added, ‘Abbas, you know why I have come here, to Charikar. You know the shame I have carried for so many years. A man like you, Abbas Behishti, you will never know the burden of shame.’

Abbas met Khalid Naseri’s gaze, but he said nothing.

‘Let me say this,’ said Khalid Naseri. ‘I have lived a life of comfort from my thirty-fourth year. I have a house in Brooklyn that would seem a palace to all but a small number of Hazara. I have a second house in the state of Massachusetts in the town of New Bedford. That town of New Bedford stands by the ocean – such an ocean is never seen by the people of our land of Afghanistan. Very beautiful, Abbas, I promise you. I have a special boat that I sail on the ocean, a special boat with sails that catch the wind, can you imagine? It has been my pleasure to sail this boat with Barbara and my sons for the past so-many years. I have a third house where I can live outside of America at Grand Bahama, a distance into the ocean. Such beauty there cannot be described, but I can promise you that it would astonish any Hazara who saw it. My sons have attended fine schools, each of them, Abbas, three sons in all. And to enjoy this comfort, what did I do? I listened to a man who told me that Americans would buy fruit juice in small cardboard boxes. Nothing more. All the blessings I have described followed, and not least the blessing of my wife. Some people think to themselves – I have seen it in their eyes – “A woman so beautiful as she has been paid for with the Naseri fortune.” But I met Barbara when I still slept on the floor of a friend’s house in the Bronx. To make some money I taught Americans how to cook food in the Hazara fashion –
qabil palao
,
qorma
,
mantu
,
khameerbob
. Barbara visited one of my classes with a friend of hers, a woman who was interested in the food of other lands. Who can say why, but we liked each other from the moment we met. So strange! I prospered at everything I turned my hand to, Abbas! At everything! Even at love. With shame in my heart, I prospered. But year after year as my fortune mounted, the weight on my heart grew heavier. Barbara said to me, “You seem so sad!” In my life in America, so many times I could never count them, people say to me, “Khalid, you are the most fortunate man ever to come from your country, why do you never laugh?” How could I answer? How could I say, “God gave me good fortune to sharpen my pain”?’