The Honey Thief (26 page)

Two more nights passed in this way.

Abbas became used to the sounds of the darkness whenever the boy’s sobbing stopped for an hour. He heard the distant rumble of trucks on the highway, the more distant murmur of Russian bombers on their way south-east to Herat, sometimes helicopters flying high overhead in swarms. And he heard owls calling to each other in their hunt for mice and desert rats and scorpions and the small snakes of the region with their golden bellies. He heard the songs of nightingales and the cry before dawn of a little bird he’d noticed with a white breast that fed on the gnats that rose in clouds to find shelter away from the light.

He no longer thought of his family. It caused him pain to picture his son Esmail waiting to catch a glimpse of his father returning along the track that led over the Sangan Hills. Nor could he picture Sabah in her beauty when she uncovered her hair and teased him by letting the tips brush his face. Nor could he think of love-making, nor of the breakfasts his daughters prepared for him on the one day a week he stayed home and slept late. He did not expect to see his family again.

In these mornings of late spring the sun came over the mountains at first slowly, then suddenly it was in the eastern sky, white and fierce. The shadows it threw were a deeper shade in late spring than in early spring. Its heat was so strong that even grasshoppers found the shade. Abbas worried that the water would run out, and he drank little himself. Most was needed for the Russian boy’s wounds, and to massage his limbs when the cramping came. Food, too, was a worry. Abbas ate little of the food, but he had always been a small eater and could survive on next to nothing. The boy needed nourishment every day. Abbas said to himself, ‘Such a burden this foolish boy has become!’ Then he said, ‘Well, so be it.’

On the morning of the eighth day, the boy smiled. He reached for Abbas’ hand and squeezed it. He spoke in his own language of Russian. Abbas thought it safe now to leave the boy alone for an hour or so while he searched for a spring. He also hoped to find the plant known as
gaz
in my language of Dari, but known as tamarisk in English. He wanted to harvest
gaz-anjabin
, which is the manna of the
gaz
, for the manna would act more powerfully on the boy’s cramping than the
khora-kema
milk.

He made the boy understand that he would be gone for an hour, and the boy nodded his head.

Abbas followed a
wadi
up the mountain until he came to a place where the red sand changed to pink. This sometimes meant that the water that flowed in the
wadi
in early spring could still be found an arm’s length down. He dug with the implement he’d fashioned to make graves for Konrad and the false mujaheddin. He found water at the depth he’d expected and drew it up with a metal cup and poured it into empty plastic bottles. Its taste was bitter, but the bitterness meant that it contained a natural enemy of infection that would benefit the Russian boy’s wounds.

Abbas filled six bottles with the bitter water, then went in search of
gaz
. He stood on a high rock and looked for the tips of the trees growing up from shade into sunlight. By good fortune he found a grove and cut the black bark to make the sap flow. He collected the sap on the blade of his knife and made more cuts and gathered the manna on the blade and more and more, and put the tip of his blade to the wound in the bark and let the sap run down to the hilt. He took sap from the tamarisk until he had a full tin. He fitted the press-lid to the tin and made it secure.
Gaz
is full of salt and even the manna has a salty taste, but once he heated it in water the best part of the manna would come to the surface, while the salt would sink. The salty water could be used to wash the boy’s wounds, while the manna could be chewed and its nourishment would pass into the boy’s body.

He was walking back to the shelter full of success when he heard an engine come to life. For a moment he was baffled, then he thought, ‘It is the motorcycle.’ He ran through the rocks with all the skill he’d taught himself chasing sheep and goats in the mountains as a boy. He saw the Russian faltering along on the motorcycle – unsteady at first then finding his balance and speeding away.

Abbas dropped the goat-hide bag and chased the motorcycle. He shouted at the Russian, ‘
Estadah!
Estadah!
’ But the boy didn’t stop and Abbas chased only the noise of the engine until the noise of the engine came to an end.

He found the motorcycle and the unconscious Russian lying in a tangle on the ground. He lifted the motorcycle and freed the boy and with great effort dragged him back to the shelter. All of his wounds had opened again and blood was flowing. Abbas boiled water and washed the wounds and treated them with moss and matted cobwebs until the bleeding had ceased. The boy became conscious again and immediately began to weep.

‘Find your courage!’ Abbas shouted.

When the boy continued to weep, Abbas pulled his ears.

‘Find your courage!’ he said again. Then he said in great anger (not that the boy could understand), ‘Should I not leave you in the sun to cook? Why do I not? What madness has brought you to Afghanistan? Did you come to make a nuisance of yourself? For surely you have succeeded!’

If the boy could not understand the words, he could see the anger. He stopped weeping.

Abbas boiled the manna, the
gaz-anjabin
, in water. He cleaned the wounds again with the cooled water, taking care that he was not cruel in his anger. He made the boy understand that he had to chew the
gaz-anjabin
and swallow it. While he chewed, the boy stared at him with his blue eyes. Abbas felt he was instructing a child.

*   *   *

On the day that followed the boy’s madness with the motorcycle he fell into a fever. But Abbas could see from the colour of the healing wounds that the fever was not from infection. No, the boy’s body craved heroin and opium and was struggling with itself. Not a true fever, but a time of sweating and shivering. Abbas sat by the boy and bathed him with warm water and massaged his limbs and fed him milk from the
khora-kema
and chewed manna in his own mouth until it was soft and made the boy swallow it. He sang songs to the boy, songs he had sung to his own daughters and to his son. He recited poetry he had learnt from his grandfather Esmail. He recited the words of the Prophet from the Holy Book. He told the Russian boy stories of the Bandit King of long ago, Ali Hazari, who scorned the rule of Cruel Shah Hamal and stole money from the Shah’s palace and gave it to the poor people of Hazarajat. These were children’s stories and the Russian could not understand even a single word, but he listened.

The fever passed, the shaking passed. The Russian boy’s wits returned. He had more than one word of Dari, it now seemed. He could say, ‘thank you’, and ‘water’ and very strangely, ‘birdseed.’ He attempted to tell Abbas a story in sign language. It appeared that he had kept a bird in a cage in his barracks, and had gone into the market to buy birdseed. That was what Abbas understood. It also appeared that he had six brothers and sisters. His name was Lev. His city (here he made the shape of buildings) was Kursk.

Abbas told his own story to the boy. He made the shapes of three children, each one taller than the one before. He showed with his hands and with sounds the flight of a bee. And he showed with his hands a flower opening, and the bee gathering nectar. The boy Lev wore a puzzled expression for a long time, but then understanding came, and he laughed. ‘
Pchela!
’ he said, and made the sound of a bee. Then he touched a finger to his lips and showed pleasure, as at the taste of something sweet. ‘
Med!
’ he said. ‘
Pchela
, buzz buzz buzz!
Pchela!
Med!
Pchela
,
med!
’

When he judged the boy strong enough to travel on the motorcycle, Abbas dressed him in an Afghan shirt and trousers and turban. With the goat-hide bag and fresh water from the
wadi
and the remaining flat-sided container of petrol, Abbas and the Russian walked to the site of the motorcycle.

This was the dilemma. If Abbas took the boy to the Russians, the Russians would shoot Abbas. If Abbas took the boy Lev to the mujaheddin, the mujaheddin would shoot the boy, or something worse, and might even shoot Abbas too. Only Baba Mazari could make sure that both the boy and Abbas were kept from harm. Abbas had tried to make the boy understand, and the boy had nodded his head, but he was probably puzzled. He trusted Abbas. That was enough.

More than the mujaheddin, and more than the Russian helicopters, Abbas feared the motorcycle. He knew how to operate the machine but steering it seemed a nightmare. The Russian boy knew more of the machine’s ways but his wounds restricted him. Abbas would steer the machine.

He practised driving the motorcycle over the sand. It was not difficult if he drove slowly. He prayed to God for a journey of charity with few collisions and drove due west through Samangan finding trails away from the roads. The Russian boy held him by his waist. But the boy Lev could only hold on for twenty minutes before he needed to rest his arms.

Abbas made the machine move at only half the speed that Konrad had driven it. Even then, his fear was enough to make him stop twice to vomit into the sand. Such a strange thing that he should so fear the machine when he was unafraid of more dangerous things. A snake could glide across his body when he slept on the ground and he would only say, ‘Greetings to you!’ Once he had wakened from a short sleep in the honey fields with a big camel spider on his head but had remained still while the spider found its way to another place of rest.

For the whole journey Abbas feared the mujaheddin and the false mujaheddin and the Russians and the communist soldiers of the Afghan army.

South-east of Sar-e Pol he stopped for the night and fell onto the sand and slept without first making the boy a bed. He woke in panic, fearing that the boy Lev was dead. But the boy had also fallen asleep on the sand and was breathing well. Abbas lay on his back looking up at the night sky. The stars were brighter than ever he could recall and were strewn in multitudes down to the western horizon. Between the stars the sky was not black but the blue of midnight. A lizard slept beside his head.

*   *   *

It was the afternoon of the following day when Abbas reached Baba Mazari’s village in the north. He raised his head in great relief and praised God’s mercy and praised God’s charity. All of the scourges he’d feared had been avoided.

Three guards walked down from the house with their rifles in their hands. They were not the guards who had watched Abbas depart twenty days earlier. One guard called to Abbas, ‘Abbas Behishti of Tayvareh?’

‘From Sangan, brother. Tayvareh is to the west of my village.’

‘Who is this?’ the guard asked, jutting his chin towards the Russian boy.

‘I rescued him from false mujaheddin near Pol-e-Khomri.’

‘Is it a Russian dog?’

Abbas was embarrassed by the guard’s bad manners. He said, ‘Brother, mind your speech. I will talk with Baba.’

‘You will talk with the worms in the earth if you rouse my temper,
sadah
,’ replied the guard gruffly. (‘
Sadah
’ means ‘hillbilly’.)

Abbas lost his temper. This did not happen often. He seized the guard by his beard and pulled it hard. ‘You cannot remember the manners your mother taught you? Then shame!’ He turned the guard around and slapped him hard on his behind. He glared at the other guards as he led the Russian boy Lev to the house.

Baba was away in the north for three days, as Abbas discovered. But Baba’s wife greeted him as if he were of the family. She called him ‘honoured man’ and was polite to the Russian boy Lev. Privately she asked Abbas, ‘What has happened? Is Konrad no longer with us?’

‘It is my sorrow to tell you that he has lost his life to the Russians. A helicopter killed him with a rocket.’

Baba’s wife nodded. She touched her heart and her forehead to show her own sorrow. Then she said, ‘Who is this child?’ and Abbas answered, ‘You may think of him as my prisoner. He is one of the Russians from their city of Kursk.’

Baba’s
hawoo
(his second wife) brought in melon juice, then hot tea made in the Turkish fashion, then small cakes of nougat. Abbas yearned to wash himself and to trim his beard, which had become untidy, and to cut his fingernails and toenails, but first he asked Baba’s wife to call a surgeon for the boy Lev. When the surgeon came he agreed that the boy’s wounds had escaped infection but he opened the gash on the boy’s neck again and stitched it carefully so that the scar would not disfigure him.

*   *   *

It was thought unwise for the Russian boy to see who came and went from Baba’s house and thus he was kept in a second house in the village where Abbas visited him each day. This second house was that of Khalid Turkman. Despite his name, Khalid was not a Turkman but a Hazara who had lived and worked in Turkmenistan under the Russians. He had attended the university in Ashgabat and held certificates to show that he understood mathematics of many kinds. He understood Russians too and spoke their language and had come back to Afghanistan to give advice to Baba Mazari about the Red Army.

Khalid Turkman spoke with the Russian boy Lev in his own language and told Abbas what he’d learned.

‘He is nineteen years old,’ said Khalid Turkman. ‘He was at the university in Kursk when he was sent to the army.’

Then Khalid said, ‘He does not like the war. He hates the army.’ And, ‘He doesn’t want to die.’ And, ‘He says you are like an angel who came into his life.’ And, ‘He is sorry he tried to run away from you. He says he doesn’t want drugs anymore.’

Abbas spoke. ‘If we let him free in Mazar-e-Sharif he would have a needle in his arm in ten minutes. Ask him what he studied at his university.’

Khalid spoke to the boy for some minutes. ‘He says he studied physics. Do you know what is meant by that?’