A dust cloud followed the car through the village. Then they came to the path leading up to Jalaluddin’s house. ‘Remember, no one needs to know about this, it is not necessary for the whole family to have the shame hanging over them,’ Sultan said to Rasul.
At the village store on the corner, where the path led to Jalaluddin’s house, stood a group of men, amongst them Jalaluddin’s father Faiz. He smiled at them, squeezed Sultan’s hand and embraced him. ‘Come in and have a cup of tea,’ he said cordially. He obviously knew nothing about the postcards. The other men also wanted a few words with Sultan - after all he had pulled himself up and achieved something in life.
‘We only wanted to see your son,’ said Sultan. ‘Can you fetch him?’
The old man went off. He returned with his son following two steps behind. Jalaluddin looked at Sultan. He was shaking.
‘We need you in the shop, could you come back with us for a moment,’ Sultan said. Jalaluddin nodded.
‘You’ll have to come for tea another day,’ the father called after them.
‘You know what this is all about,’ Sultan observes drily when they are sitting in the back seat of the car being driven by Rasul. They are on their way to Wakil’s brother Mirdzjan, who is a policeman.
‘I only wanted to look at them. I was going to give them back. I only wanted to show my children. They are so beautiful.’
The carpenter cowers in the corner, shoulders sagging, trying to make himself as small as possible. His fists are clenched together between his legs. Now and again he sinks his nails into his knuckles. When he talks he looks quickly and nervously at Sultan and resembles nothing but a frightened and dishevelled chicken. Sultan leans back in the seat and questions him quietly.
‘I need to know how many postcards you took.’
‘I only took the ones you saw.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s true.’
‘If you won’t admit that you took more I’ll report you to the police.’
The carpenter snatches Sultan’s hand and showers it with kisses. Sultan snatches it back.
‘Stop that nonsense; don’t behave like an idiot.’
‘In the name of Allah, upon my honour, I didn’t take any more. Don’t throw me into jail, please, I’ll pay you back, I’m an honourable man, forgive me, I was stupid, forgive me. I have seven little children; two of my girls have polio. My wife is pregnant again and we have nothing to eat. My children are fading away, my wife cries every day because I don’t make enough to feed us all. We eat potatoes and boiled vegetables, we can’t even afford rice. My mother begs leftovers from hospitals and restaurants. Sometimes there is some boiled rice to spare. Sometimes they sell the leftovers in the market. These last days we haven’t even had bread. And I also feed my sister’s five children, her husband is out of work, and I also live with my old mother and father and grandmother.’
‘The choice is yours. Admit that you have taken more and you’ll be spared jail,’ says Sultan.
The conversation goes round in circles. The carpenter bemoans his poverty and Sultan wants him to admit to a larger theft. He also wants to know to whom he has sold the cards.
They have travelled through Kabul and are out in the country again. Rasul drives them through muddy roads and past people hurrying to reach home before nightfall. Some stray dogs fight over a bone. Children run around barefoot. A burka-clad woman balances on the crossbar of her husband’s bicycle. An old man is fighting a cart full of oranges; his feet sink into the deep ruts caused by the recent days’ downpour. The hard mud road has been turned into an artery of shit, garbage and animal waste, forced into the road from alleyways and verges by torrential rain.
Rasul halts in front of a gate. Sultan asks him to go and knock on the door. Mirdzjan comes out, greets them all and invites them in.
When the men stomp up the stairs they hear the quiet hiss of skirts. The women of the house hide. Some stand behind half-open doors, others behind curtains. A young girl peeps through a crack in the door to see who might be visiting them so late in the day. Outside the family no men must see them. The older boys serve the tea the sisters and mother have prepared in the kitchen.
‘Well,’ says Mirdzjan. He sits cross-legged wearing the traditional tunic with balloon trousers, the dress forced on all men by the Taliban. Mirdzjan loves it. He is small and podgy and feels comfortable in the loose-fitting clothes. Now he has to wear an outfit he likes little, the old Afghan police uniform which the police used before the Taliban. After hanging in the wardrobe for years it is now somewhat tight. It is also warm, as only the winter uniform, made of heavy homespun, has survived the storage. The uniforms are made to a Russian pattern, and are more at home in Siberia than in Kabul. Mirdzjan sweats his way through the spring days when the temperature can reach thirty degrees.
Sultan quickly explains their business. Mirdzjan lets them talk in turn, as though they were being cross-examined. Sultan sits at his side, Jalaluddin across from him. He nods understandingly and keeps a light, easy manner. Sultan and Jalaluddin are offered tea and cream toffees and talk over each other.
‘For your own sake it is best that we sort it all out here, instead of going to the real police,’ says Mirdzjan.
Jalaluddin looks down, wrings his hands, and stutters out a confession, not to Sultan but to Mirdzjan. ‘I might have taken five hundred. But they’re all at home. I’ll give them all back. I haven’t touched them.’
‘Well I never,’ says the policeman.
But that is not enough for Sultan. ‘I’m sure you’ve taken many more. Come on! Who have you sold them to?’
‘It is to your advantage to admit everything now,’ says Mirdzjan. ‘If it comes to a police interrogation, it won’t be quite like this and there won’t be any tea and cream toffees, ’ he says enigmatically and looks at Jalaluddin.
‘But it is absolutely true. I have not sold them. In the name of Allah, I promise,’ he says and looks from one to the other. Sultan insists, the words are repeated; it is time to go home. Anyone around after curfew is arrested. People have even been killed because the soldiers felt threatened by the passing cars.
They get into the car in silence. Rasul asks the carpenter to tell the truth. ‘Otherwise this will go on and on, Jalaluddin,’ he says. When they reach the carpenter’s house he goes in to fetch the postcards. He returns quickly with a small bundle. The cards have been wrapped in an orange and green patterned scarf. Sultan unwraps them and looks admiringly at his pictures, which are now back with their rightful owner and will be returned to the shelves. But first they will be used as evidence. Rasul drives Sultan home. The carpenter is left standing shamefaced on the corner, where the path leads to his house.
480 postcards. Eqbal and Aimal sit on the mats counting. Sultan is trying to assess how many the carpenter might have taken. The postcards depict various subjects. In the back room there are hundreds upon hundreds. ‘If the whole package has gone it will be difficult to assess, but if only about a dozen are missing from several of the packages, it is possible he has just opened a few packages and taken a few cards from each one,’ Sultan reasons. ‘We’ll have to count tomorrow.’
The next morning, as they are counting, the carpenter suddenly appears at the door. He remains on the threshold and looks more stooped than ever. Suddenly he rushes over to Sultan and starts kissing his feet. Sultan drags him off the floor and hisses: ‘Pull yourself together, man. I don’t want your prayers.’
‘Forgive me, forgive me, I’ll pay you back, I’ll pay you back, I have hungry children at home,’ says the carpenter.
‘I’ll say the same as yesterday, I don’t need your money, but I want to know who you have sold them to. How many did you take?’
Jalaluddin’s old father Faiz is there too. He too tries to get down and kiss Sultan’s feet, but Sultan catches him before he gets down on the floor; he doesn’t like anyone kissing his shoes, especially not an elderly neighbour.
‘You
must know I’ve beaten him all night. I am so ashamed. I’ve brought him up to be an honest worker, and now! My son’s a thief,’ Faiz says and scowls at his son who is cowering in the corner. The stooped carpenter looks like a little child who has stolen and lied and is about to be spanked.
Sultan calmly tells the father what has happened, that Jalaluddin took postcards home with him and now they want to know how many he took and who he sold them to.
‘Give me one day and I’ll make him admit to everything, if there is more to admit,’ begs Faiz. The seams in his shoes have come undone, he is not wearing socks and his trousers are held up with a piece of string. The jacket sleeves are shiny. He looks like his son, just a bit darker and smaller and caved in. They are both thin and frail. The father stands in front of Sultan, passive. Sultan does not know what to do either. He feels embarrassed by the old man’s presence, a man who could have been his own father.
At last Faiz moves. He walks resolutely over to the bookcase where the son is standing. Like a flash his arm whips out. And there, in the shop, he thrashes his son. ‘You scoundrel, you cad, you are a disgrace to your family, you should never have been born, you’re a loser, a crook,’ his father cries whilst kicking and hitting him. He rams his knee into his son’s stomach, his foot into his crotch, beats him over the back. Jalaluddin just stands there, stooped, protecting his chest with his arms, while the father lays into him. Then he suddenly breaks loose, and runs out of the shop. He’s out in three long strides, and disappears down the steps and out on to the street.
Faiz’s lambskin hat lies on the floor. It fell off in the heat of the battle. He picks it up, straightens it out and puts it back on his head. He stands up, bids Sultan farewell and walks out. Through the window Sultan sees how he totters on to his old bicycle, looks left and right and cycles stiffly and quietly back to his village.
When the dust has settled after the embarrassing scene, Sultan continues to count. He is unruffled. ‘He worked here for forty days. Let’s say he took two hundred cards every day; that makes eight thousand cards. I’m sure he’s stolen at least eight thousand cards,’ he says and looks at Mansur, who shrugs his shoulders. It had been agony to watch the poor carpenter being beaten by his father. Mansur couldn’t give a shit about the postcards. He thinks they should forget the whole damn thing, now that they have got them back. ‘He hasn’t got the nous to sell them on, forget it,’ he begs.
‘It might have been done to order. You know all those stallholders who have bought postcards from us. Some of them haven’t been for some time. I thought they might have bought enough, but look, they’ve bought cheap postcards from the carpenter. And he is stupid enough to have sold them for a song. What do you think?’
Mansur shrugs his shoulders again. He knows his father and knows that he wants to get to the bottom of it all. He also knows that he will be given the task. His father is off to Iran and will be away for a month.
‘What if you and Mirdzjan make some enquiries while I am away? Truth will out. No one steals from Sultan,’ he says, staring fixedly at Mansur. ‘He could have ruined my entire business,’ he says. ‘Just imagine, he steals thousands of postcards and sells them to kiosks and bookshops all over Kabul. They sell them a lot cheaper than me. People will start going to them instead of to me. I’ll lose all the soldiers who buy postcards - all those who buy books too. I’ll get the reputation of being more expensive than anyone else. In the end I might have gone bankrupt.’
Mansur listens with half an ear to his father’s predictions of doom. He is cross and irritated that he has been given yet another task to complete in his father’s absence. In addition to having to register all the books, to fetch new crates of books sent from the printers in Pakistan, to sort out the red tape which is the consequence of owning a bookshop in Kabul, and to act as chauffeur and run his own bookshop, he now also has to take on the role of police inspector.
‘I’ll look after it,’ he says abruptly. He could not very well say anything else.
‘Don’t be too soft, don’t be too soft,’ are Sultan’s last words before he gets on the evening plane to Teheran.
When his father has gone Mansur forgets the whole thing. His sanctimonious period following the pilgrimage to Mazar is well and truly over. It lasted exactly one week. Nothing was improved by his praying five times a day. The beard got itchy and everyone told him he looked scruffy. He didn’t like the look of himself in the loose tunic. ‘If I can’t think permitted thoughts I might as well forget the whole thing,’ he said to himself and gave up the piety just as quickly as he had started. The pilgrimage was nothing more than an outing.
The first evening of his father’s absence he was invited out by some friends. He said he would come, not knowing they had bought Uzbek vodka, Armenian brandy and red wine at exorbitant prices on the black market. ‘This is the very best available, everything is 40 per cent proof, actually the wine is forty-two per cent,’ said the vendor. The boys paid forty dollars per bottle. Little did they realise that the vendor had drawn in two thin lines on the label of the French table wine: it was now increased from 12 to 42 per cent proof. It was all about strength. Most of his customers were young boys who, away from their parents’ strict control, drank to get drunk.
Mansur had never tasted alcohol, Islam’s most taboo substance. Early in the evening Mansur’s two friends started drinking. They mixed brandy and vodka in a glass and after a few shots reeled around in the shady hotel room they had hired in order to escape their parents’ wrath. Mansur had not yet arrived as he had to drive his younger brothers home, and when he turned up his friends were yelling and screaming and wanting to jump over the balcony.
Watching the scene, Mansur made up his mind: if alcohol made you so ill he might as well not touch it.
No one can sleep in Jalaluddin’s house. The children lie on the floor and cry quietly. The last twenty-four hours have been the worst in their experience: to see their kind father being beaten by their grandfather and called a thief. Everything had been turned upside down. In the courtyard Jalaluddin’s father walks around in circles. ‘How could I have had a son like that, bringing shame upon the whole family? What have I done wrong?’
The oldest son, the crook, sits on a mat in the one and only room. He can’t lie down because his back is full of bloody streaks after having been beaten by his father with a thick branch. They had both returned home after the blows in the bookshop. First the father on his bicycle, then the son, walking all the way from town. The father had continued where he left off in the shop and the son had not resisted. While the flogging stung his back and the curses rained down over him, the family had watched in horror. The women had tried to get the children away, but there was no place to go.
The house was built round a courtyard; one of the walls was the fence to the path. Along two of the walls were platforms behind which rooms with big windows covered in oilcloth faced the courtyard - a room for the carpenter, his wife and seven children, a room for the father, mother and grandmother, a room for his sister, her husband and their five children, a dining room and a kitchen with an earthen kiln, a primus and a few shelves.
The carpenter’s children slept on mats made up of a hotchpotch of rags and scraps of fabric. Some areas were covered in cardboard, others in plastic or sacking. The two girls with polio wore splints on one foot and used crutches. Two other children suffered from a virulent type of eczema; they were constantly scratching the scabs, which bled.
As Mansur’s two friends were puking for the second time, the carpenter’s children, on the other side of town, fell asleep.
When Mansur woke the first morning after his father had left, an intoxicating feeling of freedom overwhelmed him. He was free! He donned the sunglasses from Mazar and tore off at 100 kilometres per hour down Kabul’s streets, past laden donkeys and dirty goats, beggars and disciplined German soldiers. He stuck a finger in the air at the Germans while he bumped and scraped over the endless holes in the tarmac. He swore and cursed a
nd pedestrians jumped out of the way. He left behind district after district of Kabul’s confusing mosaic of riddled ruins and tumbledown houses.
‘He must take the consequences, that’s character-building,’ Sultan had said. Mansur pulls faces in the car. From now on Rasul can hump cases and deliver messages, from now on Mansur is going to enjoy himself until his father returns. Apart from the lift to the shops every morning, so his brothers won’t grass on him, he’s not going to do a damn thing. The only person Mansur fears is his father. In his presence he never dares protest, he is the only person he respects, at least to his face.
Mansur’s aim is to get to know girls. That is not easy in Kabul where most families guard their daughters like treasure. He has a brainwave and starts an English course for beginners. Mansur’s English is good as a result of his Pakistani schooling but he reasons that he will find the youngest and prettiest girls in the beginners’ class. He’s not wrong. After only one class he has spotted his favourite. Carefully he tries to talk to her. Once she even allows him to drive her some of the way home. He asks her to come to the shop, but she never does.One day the girl stops coming to the English course. Mansur cannot contact her. He misses her but first and foremost feels sorry for her sake, that she stopped coming; she wanted so much to learn the language.
The English student is quickly forgotten. Nothing is real and nothing is eternal in Mansur’s life this spring. Once he is invited to a party in the outskirts of Kabul. Some acquaintances have hired a house and the owner is standing guard outside in the garden.
‘They smoked dried scorpion,’ Mansur tells a friend enthusiastically the next day. ‘They crumbled it up into powder and mixed it with tobacco and got completely high, a bit angry too. Cool,’ boasts Mansur.