The Honey Thief (22 page)

When Abbas Behishti approached the home of Baba Mazari after his journey of three days, one of the men called to him, ‘Say if you carry a weapon!’

‘No, brother, I have no weapon,’ Abbas replied.

‘Hazara of which people?’

‘Of the Daizangi, brother.’

The man walked down from the verandah of the house with a smile on his face. He said, ‘My sister has a husband of the Daizangi. An honest man who plays the
rubab
on feast days.’

Then he explained, ‘Our master told me to expect a Daizangi of Garmab by the name of Abbas Behishti.’

‘I am Abbas Behishti of my father’s house at Garmab, but I have a house of my own now past the Sangan Hills,’ Abbas responded.

The guard led Abbas to the verandah of the house and asked him to wait. He returned within the space of a minute and now led Abbas to the back of the house and then into the courtyard. A vine of sultana grapes coming into fruit gave shade to a fountain that dribbled water from a brass spigot in the shape of a horse’s head onto a flat stone of grey shale. The vine and the fountain were common features of the small gardens that farmers kept in the Sar-e Pol region, more like an Iranian garden than an Afghan one.

Baba Mazari stood beneath the vine, ready to receive Abbas. Two things about Baba struck Abbas immediately: that he was a handsome man, and that behind the shrewdness of his gaze dwelt a deep sorrow. He thought, ‘This is my grandfather Esmail as he would have looked in his fortieth year.’ Even Baba’s beard grew as Esmail’s had: pure white on the chin and a darker colour along the jaw line and cheeks.

Baba Mazari opened his arms to Abbas and kissed him on each cheek. ‘God has granted you a safe journey to my home,’ he said.

‘God has given you good health, Baba,’ replied Abbas.

‘We will enjoy our tea before we talk.’

It was not Baba Mazari’s wife who brought in the tea and small sweets on a tray, but the guard who had shown Abbas in.

‘My family,’ said Baba, ‘those that remain to me, by God’s grace, I have sent into Mazar-e-Sharif to pray at the mosque. They will return tomorrow. Until then, my meals are prepared by those who are strangers to the kitchen. The tea is tepid.’

They sipped their tepid tea seated on four-legged stools under the shade of the vine. The shadows cast by the leaves moved across the stones of the courtyard in the faint breeze that always came at this late hour of the afternoon. Abbas noticed that Baba placed his hand on his cheek every so often. ‘A toothache,’ Baba explained. He called to the guard for oil of cloves. When it came, he poured a small amount onto a strip of cloth and dabbed the afflicted tooth. The strong smell of the clove oil filled the air.

‘Ahmad Hussein did not tell you why I asked you to come?’

‘No, Baba,’ said Abbas. ‘Has the oil relieved the toothache?’

‘I thank you, the oil has done its job.’

‘Baba, before we talk, may I offer you something for your kitchen?’

Abbas took from his cloth bag a tin with a press-lid. ‘This is honey from my bees, saved from the spring harvest. Its sweetness will not harm your tooth.’

Baba received the honey with a bow of his head. He placed it on a small table beside the tea tray and touched Abbas’ hand in a gesture of gratitude. Then he said: ‘Did you think I would ask you to fight the Russians, Abbas?’

‘Baba, I did. I am ready.’

‘Things go so badly for us that I must call a man from his bees on the far side of the Sangan Hills? No, no, Abbas. I have a million Hazara who can fire a gun. How many can make honey? But tell me this: your grandfather Esmail Behishti, an honoured man, by me and by everyone blessed to know him, did you ever notice on the top of his wrist, here, running up to his elbow – the right hand, the right wrist – a scar of raised flesh, still livid?’

‘Baba, I saw it many times. A wound from battle.’

‘So he would say. I will tell you the true story of that scar. When Esmail was at my age of forty years, a captain of Zahir Khan and two hundred soldiers were sent into Hazarajat to make an example of Khalid Naseri and his followers, who would not pay the Khan’s taxes. Khalid was taken. On a day of great shame to himself and his family, he told the captain that Esmail Behishti was the true leader – a falsehood. The captain knew well that Khalid Naseri had told him a lie but he tormented your grandfather for the pleasure of it. A length of rope soaked in oil was wired to your grandfather’s arm from the hand to the elbow. When an end was lit, it burned slowly, like a fuse, and left the honoured man scarred. But he said nothing while the rope burned. Khalid Naseri lived beyond that day but he lived in shame. He travelled first to Iran to put his shame behind him, and then to India, and finally to America where he lived in the great city of Brooklyn. Brother, Khalid Naseri became something rare amongst the Hazara – he became a man of great wealth. Do you know how his wealth came to him? I will tell you. He sold orange juice. Have you heard of anything stranger than that? A fortune came to him from orange juice! In his great factory, a thousand men put orange juice into boxes and he sold it in the American markets, in every city. His orange juice was called “nectar”. In America, a man may find wealth in orange juice, so hard to believe! But in all his wealth – such wealth that he drove two cars, not one but two – in all that wealth, his shame endured. He paid his penance in money, in American dollars. Each year for twenty-five years he has paid to have schools built for our Hazara children, he has paid for children to be given a medicine that turns away the scourge of the dysentery disease and the hepatitis disease. He has paid his money for Hazara children to travel to the great hospitals of Germany and England – children with growths in their bodies. He has paid his money for a mosque to be built in Mazar-e-Sharif – a mosque in which a
muezzin
calls us to prayer with an electrical device, the most wonderful thing for the ears you can imagine! So much for penance. Now hear what I will tell you.’

Baba Mazari poured more tea for Abbas and again cursed the incompetence of soldiers who attempted to make up for an absent wife.

‘Abbas, a bad conscience will drive a man to punish himself tenfold for the sin that brought him shame. On his deathbed his final thoughts will be of the wrong he did. Brother, you have been to Kabul – Ahmad Hussein told me this. But have you ever travelled to Charikar?’

‘Baba, I have not.’

‘The plains start at Charikar. And at the back of the city are the hills that lead you up to the mountains. It is a city of the Tajiks. You can walk the road to Charikar from Kabul in two days. In my heart is a wish for you to go to Charikar.’

‘Baba, I will go.’

‘But not with a gun. Not with one of those.’

Baba nodded towards a rifle that leaned against a post.

‘In Charikar,’ he said, ‘you will go to a house in the north part of the city. I will tell you how to find it. Inside that house you will meet Khalid Naseri. He has come to Charikar from his city of Brooklyn. In Kabul he has enemies who would kill him if they knew where he was. He will not rise from his bed to greet you, alas. He is dying, brother. It is the wish of my heart for you to greet him in Charikar, and it is the wish of Khalid Naseri’s heart that you will speak some words of forgiveness.’

‘Baba, I will go. But why me?’

‘Why you, brother? Because you loved Esmail Behishti. Forgiveness must come from a man who loved the one abused. But brother, can you forgive Khalid Naseri, who betrayed the honoured man?’

Abbas lowered his head and closed his eyes. He was silent for a minute, and for another. ‘Baba, I will know when I see him.’

*   *   *

People came to visit Baba one after another, and more still. Abbas watched and listened, as he had watched and listened when Esmail gave his advice to the many who came to him. In Baba’s face he saw the strength and wisdom of the man, but he saw more than that. He saw intelligence, he saw anger kept under stern control, and especially he saw tenderness when Baba spoke to a mother who had come with her three young sons.

Abbas stayed that night in the house of Baba Mazari and ate his evening meal with Baba and the guards. A very old woman of the village came to the house to prepare the meal, trusted by Baba’s wife not to bring a demon into the kitchen, as could happen. Such demons caused pots to disappear and salt to lose its savour. The old woman provided
shorma
to begin the meal, then
qorma
to eat with the
chalow
and the
lavash
, followed by melon and plums from Mazar-e-Sharif. When the meal was eaten Baba called the old woman in from the kitchen and thanked her for her trouble and told her that the food was excellent. The old lady, who had a temper, listened to the praise but at the end she said, ‘You would eat straw boiled in ditch water and still think it excellent.’

At the evening meal Baba would not talk of the politics that occupied him all day. Instead he spoke of fruit and of honey. ‘In Charikar the sweetest grapes in all of our country hang from vines a century old. The Tajiks are masters of the vine. Do you know, Abbas, when our ancestors came to this land they knew nothing of growing fruit, nothing of growing grain. They knew only battle. Do you know who taught them to grow figs and grapes and pears? It was the Tajiks. When we had learned how to grow fruit, we went into the mountains of Hazarajat and found soil where there was none, we found water where no water flowed, we made the stones themselves bloom into gardens. Of honey, I know only what I taste. But there was a man from the country of Denmark who came to our country to teach about irrigation. You know what I mean by irrigation? Good. Yes, he came to teach our farmers about irrigation, of which he knew much. In my house, where we sit now, he tasted the honey of Hazarajat. He said that in the world it has no equal. Irrigation and honey were his passions. No equal in the world of the Hazara honey. Do you believe him, brother – you, who commands a million bees?’

‘I hope it is true,’ said Abbas.

In the morning after prayer, a man on a motorcycle came to the house with a great noise like the roar of a Russian jet aeroplane flying low overhead. Abbas had seen motorcycles before this day and he feared them. Now Baba Mazari was telling him that the boy on the motorcycle, a boy of seventeen or eighteen years by the name of Konrad, this boy would take him on the motorcycle to Charikar. Dread and confusion gripped Abbas, but Baba said, ‘His mother is Hazara, his father is German, of the Red Cross. Do you know the Red Cross, brother? It is for Christians but in past times Red Cross came to Afghanistan with medicines for those of our faith. He lives in a city with a name I cannot pronounce. What is your city, child?’

The boy Konrad said, ‘Wilhelmshaven.’

‘Yes, such a city as the one he named. But he has come here to be with his uncle and fight the Russians. I will send him back to his mother in one month more. You will be safe in his hands, brother. He is a genius of his machine.’

Abbas was given a sturdy bag of goat hide in place of the smaller fabric bag he’d brought with him. The bag was filled with foods from Baba Mazari’s kitchen and with water in plastic bottles. Baba Mazari said, ‘Once you reach Barfak do not drink water from streams. The Russians throw our dead into them.’ And finally, he said this: ‘Brother, fighting the Russians is not what God gave us our lives for. War is not what God gave us our lives for. God gave us our lives to grow the fruits for which we are famous, and to make the honey of Hazarajat known everywhere as the best in the world. I think God gave us our lives to see our children grow strong and intelligent, do you not agree?’

‘Baba,’ said Abbas, ‘with all my heart.’

‘But in war, when we can, we must take what chances we are offered to show God the better side of ourselves. This man in Charikar has lived with the shame of a bad deed. In a short time, he will answer to God. But while he lives, he will answer to you.’

*   *   *

The motorcycle was heavily laden with its driver and its passenger, with the goat-hide bag of food and water, with bedding rolls and spare clothing and with flat-sided metal containers of petrol. But the boy Konrad drove the machine as if he were racing Satan to the gates of hell. Abbas barely passed a minute without prayer as the machine flew over rocks and ditches and plunged along dry creek beds in place of roads. Holding firmly with his arms around the boy, Abbas promised God that he would become a better servant than ever he had been if only Konrad should stop the machine and allow him to walk to Charikar. A hopeless prayer, for Abbas could hear below the unholy shriek of the machine the laughter of the boy as he drove. The reckless passage of the motorbike over the land was to Konrad sheer joy.

The regions through which Abbas and the boy raced were not the most unpopulated in Afghanistan, such as might be found in the mountains of the north-west below the peak of Nowshak, a cousin to Everest in its towering height. But my country of Afghanistan makes a trial of any journey, except in the fertile plains of the north and north-west where the deepest rivers flow. It is a land of mountains, and most of these mountains begrudge the space a single tree would occupy. They are mountains that turn their face from the companionship of people, offering a home only to the hardiest of animals – those who can live on weeds and brambles. And in their unfriendliness, the mountains are matched with the climate. I have stood under a sun that would have made my skin bubble like tar in a cauldron if I had remained motionless for fifteen minutes, and I have stood in the same place hours later in cold so fierce that my heart would have frozen solid had I persisted. Such a fate befell the soldiers of Ahmad Shah’s army in the year 1770 of the Western calendar. Eighteen thousand of them were found frozen like ice sculptures in the valley where they sought shelter from a blizzard that came from nowhere, some kneeling in prayer. And yet in this land that will not forgive a small mistake, let alone folly, my people the Hazara and our neighbours the Tajiks and Uzbeks and Pashtuns have fashioned small Edens in sheltered valleys, places of greenery and afternoon shade where fruit trees hang with pears and apples and figs and apricots unrivalled in sweetness anywhere on earth. It is as if God had said, ‘It suits my purpose to raise treeless mountains in this place, and deserts that every living thing must shun. But if I must be harsh, let me also remind you of Heaven here in the north by the Oxus.’