The Honey Thief (25 page)

Abbas feared the role of passenger on Konrad’s motorcycle no less than on the journey to Charikar. He fixed in his mind a vision of his wife and children awaiting him and hoped that concentrating on what he desired with all his heart would make him see beyond what he dreaded with all his heart. And he attempted to solve the problem of the vacuum flask while the motorcycle’s engine roared in his ears, thinking of atoms and molecules in their invisible combinations.

He thought, too, of the great part of a man’s life that was taken up with tasks he would avoid if he could. In his own occupation, many hours were spent carrying beehives from one location to another. There was no pleasure in it, but it was necessary. He said to himself, ‘Most of life is what is necessary.’ But then too much of what was easeful would cheapen the pleasures of life when they came. And so he must make no complaint.

Even as he was thinking of life and its trials, catastrophe was awaiting him and Konrad over the next rise. South of Pol-e-Khomri in a region of broken ground far above the highway, Konrad was ordered to stop by two mujaheddin in a Toyota truck. Guns were trained on him, and on Abbas. The two mujaheddin shouted at the one time, demanding things that were impossible. One said, ‘Plague, flatten yourself on the ground!’ The other said, ‘Run, Plague!’ The angry instructions of the two men made no sense. Abbas called out, ‘Brothers, what are we to do? You contradict each other!’

One of the men ran at him and held the muzzle of his rifle to his throat.

‘Are you tired of wearing a head?’ said the man. He had strange eyes that did not focus and a torn lower lip. He seemed the madder of the two, and perhaps he was also the commander. Abbas knew enough about the war to obey whatever orders a mujaheddin gave. In our country at that time, a thousand bands of mujaheddin roamed the north-east, some of them disciplined, some a law unto themselves, and it was never easy to see which were mad and which were not.

Abbas said, ‘Pardon me.’

Konrad had been forced to his knees. ‘The boy fights the Russians in your cause, brother,’ he said.

The commander barked, ‘He is a Russian himself, like that cur.’

A boy not much older than Konrad lay in the back of the truck. He wore a Russian summer uniform; his hands were bound. Even in his crumpled position, it had to be said that he resembled Konrad. Abbas did not wish to think of what fate lay in store for the boy, the prisoner. He was now certain that the two men were not mujaheddin, but bandits. They would sell the Russian boy to the real mujaheddin.

Now the bandit with the strange eyes forced Konrad into the back of the truck with the Russian boy. The second bandit untied the two flat-sided containers of petrol from the motorcycle and the goat-hide bag.

‘Plague, will I shoot you?’ said the bandit with the strange eyes.

Abbas didn’t reply. The second bandit poured petrol from one of the flat-sided containers into the tank of the Toyota.

The bandit with the strange eyes said again, ‘Plague, will I shoot you?’

This time Abbas responded, saying, ‘As you will.’

At that moment, the second bandit suddenly stopped pouring petrol and stared in alarm at the eastern hills. ‘Aiee!’ he cried, and threw the petrol container to the ground. The bandit who was threatening to shoot Abbas ran to the truck and climbed into the cabin.

As the engine struggled to start, Abbas now realised the danger that had startled the two bandits. A helicopter came over the eastern hills, filling the air with its thrum.

The Toyota swerved first one way then another as the shadow of the helicopter raced over the red sand and broken rock. As a boy, Abbas had seen a falcon swoop down on a hare. The hare knew it had become the falcon’s prey and had tried to save its life by swerving and baulking in the same manner as the Toyota. But the falcon had prevailed, folding its wings and descending at a speed that changed its shape to a blur. Now as Abbas watched and prayed, the helicopter fired a rocket and in an instant the Toyota leapt into the air, turning end over end. He shouted, ‘Aiee!’ just as the bandit had, and for a moment he shielded his eyes with his hands. When he looked again, the Toyota was burning on the sand. The helicopter made a wide arc in the sky and sped away westward.

Abbas ran to the burning Toyota, but even before he reached the wreckage he could see that his prayers for Konrad’s survival had been futile. The boy was surely dead. Abbas flailed at him with his hands to put out the flames, then knelt over the body, weeping without restraint.

The bandits – the false mujaheddin – they were also dead, and the Russian boy was dead, too, thrown a distance from the truck.

Abbas sat back on his heels, offering the prayers of our faith for those who have died in innocence. The term in Dari for one who has perished in this way –
shahid
– has no cousin in the English language. It means a hundred English words: one who has died without having contributed to his own death, but at the same time, one who has placed himself in danger for a greater good; not exactly a martyr, but one who will find a home in Paradise.

Staring down at the broken body, Abbas recalled holding tightly to this same body on the motorcycle for hours, for days. He had felt the life of the boy surging in him, his joy in mechanical things, his love of speed. The life that God had given him in his mother’s womb was now taken back and could not be restored.

Abbas washed the boy’s face and feet with the bottled water from the goat-hide bag left on the sand when the bandits fled.

As he had at the site of the destroyed bus, Abbas wrenched a strip of metal from the wreckage of the vehicle and began to dig graves. The earth was hard under the red sand and the digging slow. He buried Konrad first, then the two bandits. He dragged the body of the Russian to a separate place, since the boy was probably a Christian and may have wished to be put under the earth away from those of another faith. Abbas worried that he had no Christian prayers to offer the boy’s God. He thought he would ask our God to commend the boy’s soul to the God of the Christians.

And Abbas did not know if it was the custom of Christians to wash the body of one about to be buried. But it could do no harm, surely. He tore fresh fabric from one of his shirts and wet it fully. He wiped the pale cheeks of the Russian boy, whispering fragments of prayers and lines of poetry, and words came from the mouth of the corpse, words of the boy’s own language.

Abbas cried out, ‘Does he live?’

He parted the boy’s lips and poured water into his mouth. The muscles of the boy’s throat moved.

‘Does he live?’ he cried again, and the boy’s eyes opened.

The wounds on the Russian’s legs and arms and neck and right shoulder were of the sort that bled freely but were easily staunched. A doctor would insist on closing the wounds with many stitches, but all Abbas could do was to clean them with boiled water and pick fragments of cloth from the flesh with the tip of his knife.

The boy screamed, of course.

Abbas was admired for his healing hands in his village of the Hazarajat. It was believed that he had amassed treasure in Heaven as the grandson of Esmail Behishti and God had given him the power to call the dying back to the light of life. Abbas did not believe that he had any such power. He kept wounds clean, he set bones straight, he knew the benefit of many herbs – that was all.

The herbs he needed for the Russian boy were not to be found in the sand and rock of the mountains between Pol-e-Khomri and Sar-e Pol – not this late in spring. But he found the plant known as
khora-kema
, and by God’s good grace it was still in flower. He took leaves from the plant and the long stalk that held the flower. When the stalk was stripped, it would yield a green fruit like a cucumber, full of a milky liquid. The liquid would ease the Russian boy’s pain and help him to sleep. The leaves would serve as bandages for the wounds. Abbas also found honeysuckle, which would kill the infection of the wounds and could be applied to the inside of the
khora-kema
leaves.

*   *   *

Although Mazar-e-Sharif was only two days’ walk to the north, the Russian boy was too weak to sit as a passenger on the motorcycle. And even if Abbas could master the motorcycle and somehow keep the boy seated behind him, once in Mazar-e-Sharif the boy’s throat would be cut by mujaheddin, even by Hazara loyal to Baba Mazari. Only one hope for the boy: Abbas must ask Abdul Ali Mazari himself to spare him and return him to a Russian commander.

Abbas left the boy in the shade while he searched higher up the mountain for better shelter. He found an overhanging rock that covered a broad enough area to keep the sun away. In the winter it would be a home for wolves. He cleared the ground and made a bed for the boy and wrapped his wounds in
khora-kema
leaves. The boy had no fever. Infection had not taken hold. If infection came, Abbas would make use of manna from the leaves of the camel-thorn, but to find camel-thorn he would have to climb further up the mountain and even then he would have to hope for guidance from angels. The camel-thorn only made manna in certain years, and usually only in the height of summer.

The boy slept for an hour at a time but whenever he woke he screamed. To Abbas, he was no more than a child, although tall. His eyes were blue. Above one eye an old scar in the shape of the Dari letter
geem
stood out. But there was something that troubled Abbas more than the wounds. The boy had injected heroin into his left arm many times. The soft flesh of his elbow crease was scarred and blue. He knew from many tales that the Russian soldiers craved heroin and opium and drank foolishly. Some inhaled petrol fumes if nothing else was available. In Kabul, it was said, Russian soldiers wandered the streets offering anything they possessed for heroin. It was considered no sin to sell them what they wanted, since they were invaders. Many went mad.

It would be a week or even two before the boy could ride on the back of the motorcycle to Baba’s village. The food and water in the goat-hide bag would barely last. Abbas prepared himself for a time of patience. He prayed more often than he usually did, and not always prayers from the Holy Book; many he fashioned himself, asking God to lift the scourge of war from Afghanistan. For Abbas, war was like a barren field that gives no grain, no wildflowers for the bees to rob, no melons, no grass for animals to graze. It was like a famine that settled on the land. Instead of fruit, Kalashnikovs and missiles. Abbas had noticed other evils. War drove people back into their tribes. It was not Afghans who fought the invaders, but Tajiks under Tajik commanders, Uzbeks under Uzbeki commanders, Pashtuns under Pashtun commanders. And of course, Hazaras under Baba Mazari. And when the invaders were gone – for they would surely be defeated – the tribes would turn their new weapons on each other. Abbas was Hazara, but he had lived long enough to see great kindness in those of other tribes. It was a Pashtun who had saved his life on his visit two years past to Kabul, pulling him from the path of a Russian vehicle. The man who had shown him the shining valley near Herat where the leaves turned silver in the sun was a Tajik. The flowers of those trees, as big as a plate, gave nectar in such abundance that Abbas’ bees returned to their hives almost too laden to fly. And it was an Uzbeki who had married his sister Maria and made a fine house for her with his own hands. In his heart, Abbas was Hazara, but if the price of peace in his country was that people forgot their tribe and could never recall it, then let it be. He had seen less of war than many other Afghans, but he was sick of it forever.

When he was not trying to reason with God, Abbas turned his mind to the problem of the vacuum flask. The tragedy of Konrad’s death was that his mother and father would never find comfort again in life. A smaller piece of the tragedy was that Abbas would never learn more about the molecules. For he sensed that the molecules were at the heart of the problem of the vacuum flask. They clung to each other like the cells of a beehive, and surely passed information to each other. But what was that information?

*   *   *

Four days came and went with the Russian boy still too weak to lift himself from the blanket on the floor of the shelter. Sometimes he lay staring with his blue eyes at the overhanging rock above him. Sometimes he stared at Abbas. He made no objection when Abbas fed him, or helped him to relieve his bladder and his bowels. He accepted spoonfuls of broth. His eyes were either full of fear, or full of nothing. Once Abbas saw him lift his hand and touch the place on the inside of his arm where he had injected heroin. Abbas thought, ‘Soon a craving will come. How I can restrain him, I don’t know.’

The craving came on the morning of the fifth day. The boy’s eyes darted all over the shelter. Twice he spoke something in his language – a language that sounded to Abbas like the bleating of a calf when it is first born. He said to the boy, ‘Rest.’ In the afternoon, the boy began to swing his head back and forth on his bed. He spoke his strange calf-language and his eyes were now full of pleading.

Abbas pointed to the needle scars on his arm. He said, ‘No more,’ and shook his head. The boy spoke the Dari word for ‘please’:
lotfan
.

Abbas said, ‘No more.’

Then the boy lay still for hours, sometimes with his eyes open, sometimes shut. He ate broth and dried apricots. He allowed Abbas to inspect his wounds.

In the night, Abbas was awakened by a rustling sound in the shelter. He saw the shape of the Russian boy bent over the goat-hide bag. He moved swiftly to the boy and helped him back to the bed. The wound on his neck had begun to bleed again. Abbas stopped the bleeding with moss and matted cobwebs from the walls of the shelter then covered the wound with fresh
khora-kema
leaves.

The boy said, ‘
Lotfan!
’

Abbas shook his head.

‘
Lotfan!
’ said the boy, and began to cry.

Abbas gave him the milk from the stripped stem of
khora-kema
. The boy calmed down for an hour, but then began to cry out in pain. The muscles of his arms and legs were cramping. Abbas bathed the boy’s limbs with warm water and massaged the muscles of his shoulders. The boy wept all night and Abbas had to sit by him and hold him still whenever he began to writhe.