The Honey Thief (27 page)

Abbas sat up straight in his excitement. ‘Ask him if he understands the molecules.’

‘If he understands the molecules?’

‘Yes! Ask him, it would be a kindness.’

The Russian boy indeed knew about molecules. Abbas asked Lev why a vacuum flask can keep hot things hot and cold things cold. The boy Lev himself seemed as excited as Abbas. He asked for some paper and a pencil. On the paper he drew small circles with symbols attached. Through Khalid, he explained about the transfer of heat between molecules. And he said that a vacuum flask has two layers of glass, and between the two layers lives a vacuum. In a vacuum there are no molecules and the transfer of heat is greatly reduced. If a hot liquid is poured into the vacuum flask, the temperature of the liquid will remain the same for a long time. If a cold liquid is poured into the flask, in the same manner the temperature of the cold liquid will remain the same for a long time.

Abbas asked, ‘Everything is molecules?’

‘Everything,’ the Russian boy replied.

Abbas sat back in his chair smiling with happiness. This was something he thought might be true! God had made the world with molecules! It gave Abbas pleasure to think of the molecules joined by their small arms, each with its symbol. He thanked the Russian boy with all his heart.

*   *   *

When Baba returned from the north, he pulled his beard and covered his head when he learned of Konrad’s death. ‘I fear to tell his mother!’ he said. He stood and walked up and down in the courtyard for some time, shaking his head and striking himself on the chest where his heart dwelt.

Then he seated himself again. ‘As God wills,’ he said.

He listened to Abbas’ story of his meetings with Khalid Naseri. He nodded his head at the news of his death. Then he asked about the Russian boy, Lev, and heard all that Abbas had to tell.

‘What would you have me do with him?’ he said.

‘I would have him returned to his people,’ said Abbas.

‘Then you mean that you would have him hanged,’ said Baba. ‘How did the false mujaheddin capture him, Abbas? I will tell you. In the way they capture many others of these Russian fools. By putting a pistol to his head when he was pleading for opium. The Russians will know how he was captured. They will hang him or shoot him.’

Baba again stood and paced in the courtyard. He touched his jaw and asked his
hawoo
for oil of cloves. ‘I will take a hammer to this tooth,’ he said. ‘The surgeon told me that it would take two days to fix my mouth. Two days! Have I such leisure?’

Then he said, ‘It matters to you that this boy is saved? I would shoot him now.’

‘He is a child,’ replied Abbas.

‘Yes, he is a child. He is a Russian child trained at Ashgabat to kill our children.’

Baba poured more clove oil onto a small piece of cloth and dabbed his afflicted tooth again.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘The boy can live. But in two weeks he will be back in the market trying to sell his Kalashnikov for twenty American dollars’ worth of heroin. Yet if it is your desire, my brother, he will live. I have a prisoner – a Russian officer – in Mazar. The Russians love him, he is the son of someone important. I will give them the officer and this fool of a boy and tell them that the boy must be spared. Will that satisfy you?’

Abbas crossed the courtyard and kissed Baba’s hand.

‘And now let me ask you this,’ Baba said. ‘Will Khalid Naseri return to Hazarajat and lie in our soil?’

‘Baba, with my blessing,’ said Abbas.

‘Is this from your heart, brother?’

‘From my heart,’ said Abbas.

*   *   *

At their parting, the Russian boy Lev wept until his face was soaked. He swore a sacred oath that he would never touch heroin again. Abbas did not believe him, but he pretended to. He said, ‘My good wishes to your mother and father, and to your brothers and sisters. Thank you for the story of the molecules.’

Once the boy was gone, Abbas was ready to return to his own family. But he would not ride the motorcycle back over the Sangan Hills. No, he would walk. Baba Mazari embraced him and called him a hero of the Hazara people. Abbas said, ‘Will Konrad’s mother call me a hero of the Hazara people? I wish he were here.’

He made the journey back to his home with his head full of molecules and their strange ways and his heart full of sorrow for the death of Konrad. He stopped many times on the path to his home to commend Konrad’s soul to God, and to pray for some sense to come into the head of the boy Lev.

Past the Sangan Hills, on the track that crossed a small tributary of a river that joined the Helmand, he found his home safe, and his children safe and his wife smiling.

The day after his return, Abbas took his son Esmail with him on a journey of half a day to the grave of his grandfather, Esmail Behishti. He dug in the earth close to the headstone and placed the ball given to him by Khalid Naseri in the hole, wrapped in the pennant. He packed the earth firmly into the hole and placed a small stone on top of it. He spoke these words: ‘The sinner Khalid Naseri offers these to you.’

Abbas had told his son the story of the ball and the pennant and the reason for their burial. He had told him what little he knew of the game of baseball, of the two teams that strove against each other to be champions of America. Now as Abbas and his son prepared to leave the grave and return to their home, the boy said, ‘Will our grandfather accept the ball of the Americans?’

Abbas did not answer immediately, and the boy asked again, ‘Papa, will our grandfather accept the ball of the Americans?’

Abbas said, ‘Yes, I think he will accept it.’

11

The Richest Man in Afghanistan

The hills and mountains near Sangan rise in every direction and no matter where you stand, you can see mountains beyond mountains. In the hills it is possible to find valleys sheltered enough to provide grass and thorny bushes to feed goats and sheep, but in many places there is nothing. And yet in this nothing, Jawad Noroosi one day found his fortune.

I say ‘one day found his fortune’ but in truth his fortune was his luck, which had been with him from birth. It was in the hills that his luck first revealed itself, and might have made him the richest man in Afghanistan if it had not also been a curse. Not that it mattered. Jawad had little use for money, living the simplest of lives, with no family to lavish gifts on, and no wife to fill a house with ornaments.

Jawad Noroosi was only seventeen years of age when his luck became a legend. Up until that time, he was thought of as a boy afflicted with a mad mother and a father almost as mad. The husband had told everyone that his wife was the Messiah of a new religion that honoured the moon. He said that his wife could make blackbirds fly as high as wild geese and return with apples made of gold. But years of waiting for this miracle only ended in disappointment and the few followers that the Woman Messiah had gathered drifted away.

A boy of seventeen is considered a young man when it comes to work, as I have said before, although no more than a child in other ways. He might sweat beside his father in the fields for twelve hours a day, but we would still say that such a boy was too young for marriage. And we would still say that a boy of that age needs his mother. At this difficult age, Jawad’s mother the Woman Messiah and his father the mullah of her new religion disappeared. They had been seen on the road to Kandahar and had told a traveller they met that the people of Sangan were too fickle to live amongst. Jawad, their only child, was left to care for himself in the small house his parents had owned.

Jawad’s mother the sorceress (for that was how the villagers thought of her) had left him a stone for good luck wrapped in his second shirt. And a note: ‘The stone is from the moon. Guard it well.’

Jawad had always shone with happiness, but now he was overcome by despair and wept for a week. An old man of Sangan, Baba Khadem, took him into his care and reported that the boy sat staring at the piece of rock his mother had left him and talked of jumping to his death from the top of the town hall – not a very tall building, but the tallest one in Sangan at the time of this story, seventy years before today. That would be a shame, because the boy had certain gifts that promised a better future: he spoke twelve languages and could tell by his nose where water was to be found under the earth. Amongst the languages he spoke were Uzbeki, Baluchi, Pashtun, Turkmen, Nuristani and a dialect of Persian spoken only by the fire-worshippers. The boy said he’d learnt all of his languages from his mother, the sorceress or Woman Messiah. Apart from his human languages, the boy could also converse with Baba Khadem’s mule in a tongue that sounded like a saw cutting through timber.

And Jawad had a further gift: that of working hard. Baba Khadem gave him the task of making bricks for the summer cottage he was building in the hills close to the snowline. The boy not only made the bricks, he loaded Baba’s mule with forty at a time and led the beast into the hills and back twice a day before nightfall.

It was on one of these journeys into the hills that Jawad discovered topaz. He showed the stone to Baba and asked, ‘Is there a use for this?’ To which Baba said, ‘Surely!’ and told the boy to bring back all he could find. The next day, Jawad returned from the hills with a block of stone in which green garnet could be seen, a very rare gem. He asked Baba, ‘Is there a use for this?’ Baba said again, ‘Surely!’ and told the boy to bring back all the topaz and all the garnet of any colour he could find.

The boy came back each day with so much topaz and green garnet that Baba Khadem began to worry about his own soul. He had made many journeys up and down the hills and mountains of Sangan and had never found so much as a fragment of topaz or green garnet. And yet God had led this smiling boy with a mad mother and a mad father to a trove of gems. To Baba, this meant that God intended the riches for the boy to make up for foolish parents. He said to Jawad, ‘These riches are your own. I want none of them.’ And from that day, he closed his mind to the boy’s gift.

The gift mattered little to the boy. Once all the bricks for the summer house had been carried up to the snowline, he didn’t even bother to search for more gems. Instead he took over the occupation of well-digger when the town’s well-digger of many years was bitten by a fox with the foaming disease and died within a week.

The first well to be dug took him through a layer of familiar rock. He recognised topaz by the light of his candle without bothering to harvest the gems. But he told the owner of the well, which was soon turned into a quarry. He unearthed more gems in the construction of his second well and that well too became a mine. His great gift became so well known that he was followed everywhere by men of the town waiting for him to put his pick to the earth. So many hungry faces around him made Jawad uneasy, and he gave up well-digging.

Since the house left to Jawad by his mad mother and mad father sat on a piece of land just big enough to enclose a garden, the young man, or boy, if you prefer, decided to make his living by growing corn and broad beans. He purchased corn seed and bean seed and set about turning the soil. In great excitement, men and boys and even a few women of Sangan raced to the site of Jawad’s labour, thinking that he would quickly be up to his neck in topaz and green garnets. But no, he dug only nine shallow furrows for his seed (an uneven number for good luck) and all the people waiting for riches went home unhappy. Baba himself came to see what the boy was up to and informed him that the earth was too poor to support even weeds and that the project was certain to fail.

Within a week, the shoots of the corn and beans had risen above the ground. Within two weeks, the beans were climbing the stakes Jawad had driven into the earth. Within three weeks, the corn stalks had reached the height of an ass. Within four weeks, against all nature, bean pods had appeared. And again against all nature, corn ears were fattening on the stalks. In six weeks from planting, Jawad Noroosi’s garden flourished with corn stalks twice as high as a horse, while each bean in its pod was the size of the giant ruby on Zahir Shah’s famous coronation ring. The wonder of what the poor earth of Jawad’s garden had produced drew sightseers from all over the province of Ghowr, and even from as far away as Farah and Herat.

A mullah from Tayvareh studied the garden and declared it impious. ‘The devil has had a hand in the raising of the corn,’ he said. ‘And the beans.’ Anyone who ate the produce of Jawad Noroosi’s garden would be carried to hell by witches and goblins. All the same, people ate the beans and the corn, sold for a very modest price by Jawad, and sang their praises.

But Jawad’s success soon made him bitter enemies. In Sangan many farmers relied on growing corn and beans for a living. But who would pay for their produce when Jawad gave ten times the weight for half the money? The mayor of Sangan came to Jawad’s garden with five deputies and a demand that he switch to turnips, which nobody in Ghowr Province cared for anyway. And stories were told of women growing beards after eating Jawad’s corn and beans. A farmer’s wife appeared in the marketplace with a beard that reached to her waist, claiming that she shaved each morning only to have the beard grow back within hours. It was plain to see that the beard was false, made of bark and dried grass, but many chose to believe her. Another woman, also the wife of a farmer, swore that she’d left a plate of Jawad’s corn on a shelf in her kitchen where it was eaten by rats. ‘The rodents grew to the size of a grey wolf!’ she said. ‘Aiee! Who will be safe?’