The Honey Thief (10 page)

The camera operator gathers his camera and leaves the scaffold. He will not be permitted to photograph the executions themselves, since even men who have committed great evil should be permitted to die with dignity.

The mullah has taken over from the judge, as is proper. It is the role of the judge to read sentences but not to involve himself in the carrying out of those sentences. The change suits the crowd, for the mullah’s voice is deep and commanding. The squeaky voice of the judge doesn’t carry the ring of authority so important when announcing the judgements of Heaven.

The mullah calls the name of Khuda Khaliq, Abdul Khaliq’s father. Khuda Khaliq, nudged by a soldier, mounts with difficulty the three steps to the scaffold; his ankles are shackled and his hands lashed behind his back. He is dressed in loose trousers and a long grey shirt, as are all of the condemned men and boys, with the exception, of course, of Abdul Khaliq. Perhaps there were not enough new striped shirts to go around, or perhaps Abdul Khaliq’s shirt is intended to distinguish him as the guiltiest of the guilty, the chief monster amongst lesser monsters.

Abdul Khaliq’s father – not an old man by any means – does not look at his son as he shuffles past him on the scaffold. In any case, Abdul Khaliq in his heavy chains is staring fixedly at his own feet. The two soldiers guarding Khuda Khaliq hand him into the keeping of the two powerfully built hangmen.

Abdul Khaliq himself is compelled to take up a position at the fore of the platform. He shuffles there with even more difficulty than his father displayed mounting the steps. When Abdul Khaliq is in the position stipulated, one of the hangmen wraps his arms around Khuda Khaliq from behind and lifts his feet from the ground. The second hangman mounts a wooden box sitting directly below one of the dangling nooses. He slips the noose over the head of Khuda Khaliq, then manipulates the rope so that it fits firmly around the condemned man’s neck. The second hangman steps down from the wooden box and pushes it aside. The first hangman releases his grip on Khuda Khaliq.

*   *   *

Abdul Khaliq is called on to raise his eyes and to watch the death struggle of his father. It is the mullah who makes the demand. But Abdul Khaliq refuses to watch. His gaze is fixed downward. One of the four soldiers guarding Abdul Khaliq prods him in the small of the back with the point of his spear. Abdul Khaliq keeps his eyes on his feet. The soldier prods him again. Abdul Khaliq jerks forward, but doesn’t lift his gaze. Some in the crowd shout instructions to the soldiers, telling them to hold Abdul Khaliq’s head upright by force. Others cry out in support of the boy, ‘Leave him be! Leave him be!’ All cries cease after a further minute. The body of Khuda Khaliq has ceased moving. There can be no doubt that he is now dead, or so close to death that it doesn’t matter. It is only courteous to allow Khuda Khaliq’s spirit to leave his body in silence.

The first hangman lifts the weight of Khuda Khaliq’s body while the second hangman loosens the noose. The body is lowered to the floor of the scaffold and laid at the feet of Abdul Khaliq so that he cannot fail to see it. The mullah crouches and touches the forehead of the dead man in the sacrament of departure, rarely denied to the dead, even to alleged accomplices of a king-killer.

The body of Khuda Khaliq is then laid at the front of the platform.

Qurban Ali, Abdul Khaliq’s uncle, is hanged next. Abdul Khaliq is again called on to watch, again refuses and is again prodded with the point of the soldier’s spear, this time in the back of the neck.

Qurban Ali’s body is laid beside that of Khuda Khaliq.

A second uncle is hanged. Then Abdul Khaliq’s friend from school, Mehmood Jan, is hanged. Then three members of the council that governs Kabul are hanged, for reasons nobody can fathom. Then the three sons of a Khaliq family friend are hanged, two of them older than Abdul Khaliq and one younger. The three nooses are employed at the one time for the hanging of the three sons.

The father of the three boys is hanged next, having witnessed their death, followed by the school principal Mulavi Mohammad Ayayub and three teachers. By this time, almost an hour into the executions, the soldiers have given up prodding Abdul Khaliq with their spears. There is no point to it. He won’t raise his eyes.

Qasim Khan Muheen is now made to mount the scaffold. Although a number of political enemies of the old King – enemies who have been in prison for some months and have nothing to do with the king-killer – are also rumoured to be hanged, Qasim Khan Muheen is the last of the so-called conspirators due to die today. It is customary for the reigning monarch to grant a pardon to at least one man on a day of grand spectacles such as this, and sure enough, just as the noose is tightened around Qasim’s neck, a triple drum-beat sounds and an emissary from the palace arrives with a document from Mohammad Zahir Khan. The document is handed to the mullah, who hands it to the judge without bothering to read it, who hands it back to the mullah, also without reading it. The mullah steps to the front of the scaffold platform and reads from the document. ‘Mohammad Zahir Khan, by the will of God, monarch of the God-granted kingdom of Afghanistan, extends the mercy for which he is known throughout the civilised nations of the world to Qasim Khan Muheen, who will now spend the rest of his life in prison. It is also the pleasure of Mohammad Zahir Khan to declare that Abdul Khaliq’s classmates Mohammad Ishaq, Abdullah Aziz Tokhi, Karim Jan, Mohammad Usman Jan Tajir, Ghulam Jan, Akhbar Jan Akhtar, Hashim Jan Akhtar, Jan Bismal Zadah and Nabi Jan will not face the penalty of death, but will remain in prison for the rest of their lives with Qasim Khan Muheen.’

The crowd is pleased that custom has been followed in the pardoning of Qasim Khan Muheen, a highly respected member of the council that administers the city of Kabul. Nobody believed that he had anything to do with the assassination of Mohammad Nadir to start with. As for the conversions of sentence for the king-killer’s classmates – that was expected. None of them were amongst the prisoners brought to the scaffold. Only classmate Mehmood Jan was expected to hang. He sat next to Abdul Khaliq in class. The other classmates sat some rows in front.

The platform is now quite crowded with the living and the dead. The mullah, the judge, six soldiers, the two hangmen, the bodies of those who have been executed and Abdul Khaliq have left little room for the five honoured executioners who will shortly carry out the sentence of ‘Death before the people’ on the king-killer. The mullah calls on the commander of the soldiers in attendance to see to the removal of the dead bodies from the platform.

Abdul Khaliq’s execution follows as soon as the dead bodies are removed from the scaffold. His death is terrible. I will not describe it here. But I will say that in Kabul today, a visitor can stand in Dehmazang on the very site of the platform that was erected to display the hatred of the King for his enemies. If that visitor were a scientist with the right equipment, he might be able to locate the last remnants of the blood that flowed from Abdul Khaliq’s wounds and dripped down to the flagstones. The blood would reveal Abdul Khaliq’s DNA and tell us much about him – more about him, in certain ways, than he knew about himself. This poor wretched boy, who passed so much time in dreams – it is almost as if he were chosen by fate from amongst the millions of his fellow Hazaras to show, with his pain, with his dreams, with his blood and his flesh, what it means to be Hazara. His DNA would not show that. It would only identify him as a human being, male, distantly related to the Mongols of Northern Asia. His suffering is in his story, not in his remnants.

6

The Music School

It became known as the music school, the small house outside the town on a mountain track too rocky for a horse and cart and no longer used by goatherds. The house had once been owned by Ali Hussein, the wool-dyer, but when he went mad his family took him to Mazar-e-Sharif to see a famous Uzbeki doctor and he never returned. The house was seized by Ali Hussein’s creditors and finally sold to Karim Zand, a stranger to the town and according to everyone who met him, as mad as the wool-dyer.

He came to the town in the time of Shah Zahir, the son of Shah Nadir, shot by the king-killer, Abdul Khaliq. Why Karim Zand should have chosen such a small town in the Hazarajat for his home was a mystery at first. Those who saw him enter the house for the first time said that he brought no possessions with him other than a long leather case, a bag of lentils, another bag of rice and a basket of turnips. Nobody knew anything of his origins either, and he had no interest in making friends. Even stranger, he wasn’t Hazara. The whole village was Hazara apart from two families of Uzbeks, known as ‘the navigators’, who had lost their way in a storm twenty years earlier and wandered five hundred kilometres off course.

Suspicion of strangers is as common amongst the Hazara as amongst any other people. The villagers watched the house that had once belonged to the wool-dyer to satisfy their curiosity about the new owner, and also to make sure that he was not a spy in the employment of Shah Zahir. It was thought, too, that the house of the wool-dyer might be cursed since it acted as a magnet for desperate people. Some of the older people of the town claimed that the house had been occupied by madmen even before the time of the wool-dyer. And where was Karim Zand’s family? In Afghanistan, people are never judged alone but as a member of a family. If a man or a woman acts strangely, we look for the origin of such behaviour in the mother and father, or in the grandparents, or even further back. Someone might say, ‘Oh, it is only to be expected that so-and-so goes about the town shooting cats, for in the time of the demon Dost Mohammad his great-great-grandfather was known to eat earthworms.’ To appear out of nowhere with no family seems a type of deception.

Certainly Karim Zand looked like a madman, there was no doubt about that. He was very tall and his bones carried hardly any flesh. His beard was red but his hair that grew like the fleece of a goat in winter and fell over his eyes was grey and black. It was thought that Karim Zand must have dyed his beard with henna like the Sunni Turks, but those who’d glimpsed him from close range said no – his beard was red by nature. He never wore a hat or a turban – true madness.

The Hazara are as suspicious of strangers as any Pashtun or Tajik, as I say, but we are different in this way: we let people be, given time. It can be explained by our long history of being thought suspicious ourselves. A man like Karim Zand comes to live amongst us and we imagine that he might be desperate or dangerous. But when a month passes and two months and three months, we say, ‘His beard is red, let it be red.’ Or we say, ‘He eats turnips, he drinks nothing, it’s his insane business, surely!’

It was true that Karim Zand ate only rice, lentils and turnips, so far as anyone could see. Maybe at night he hunted hares and lizards and ate them – nobody knew. No cooking fire could be seen in front of his house. No smoke rose from his chimney. An idea was suggested by the chief of the village, Nadir Ali: ‘He is a Sufi. God feeds him.’ It was an idea that excited everyone until Ali Hussein Mazari (known as ‘the traveller’, since he had lived in Iraq) said that no Sufi would dress in the fashion of Karim Zand.

‘Sufis dress in white,’ he said. ‘And no Sufi would grow a red beard. They pray all day and all night. Who has seen Red Beard pray?’

After Ali Hussein spoke, Karim Zand became known as Red Beard by some people, and ‘the new madman’ by the rest. If Karim Zand was not a Sufi, he was likely a mystic of some other sort. Some mystics were a burden to those they lived amongst, some were a blessing, and it was not yet known which Red Beard would be.

It was late in winter when Karim Zand came to the house of the mad wool-dyer and it was spring before the people of the village came to know the most important thing about him. One of the wives of the brick-maker Mohammad Barzinji had taken the track past his house to look for herbs in the four small valleys called the Claw, which took stream water from the mountains down to the Hamet River away to the west. She had her daughter Latifeh with her and an old dog whose nose had been split down the middle in a fight with a donkey. As they passed above the house of the madman on their return from the valleys of the Claw, Mohammad Barzinji’s wife suddenly dropped the sack full of herbs she was carrying and threw her hands to her ears.

‘Merciful God our Great Master!’ she cried. ‘What noise is that?’

The daughter, Latifeh, was not terrified in the way her mother was, but instead stood still with her head on one side listening closely. The dog with the split nose was listening too, his ears pricked in a manner he hardly bothered with in these days of his old age.

‘It is music,’ said Latifeh. ‘Listen, Mama. It is the music of Karim Zand, it is coming from his house.’

But Mohammad Barzinji’s wife wouldn’t listen. She ordered her daughter to pick up the sack of herbs, and both mother and daughter, with the dog loping beside them, hastened down the track to the end of the village.

The wife of Mohammad Barzinji began crying out at the top of her voice as she stood in the little clearing at the end of the village. This was the clearing where farmers brought produce down from the terraced fields in the higher valleys to sell in season, and it was the place where a small monument of hard stone had been shaped by a mason to mark the site of a massacre. That was decades earlier, the massacre, when six Hazara men and one boy had been shot by the soldiers of Abdur Rahman.