The Honey Thief Read online

  NAJAF MAZARI fled upheaval in Afghanistan in 2001 and made his way to Australia, where he now lives with his wife, Hakeema, and his daughter, Maria. He is a successful businessman with a shop in Melbourne’s antique precinct, selling traditional Afghan rugs. He is deeply involved in creating a better climate for asylum-seekers in Australia and in charity activities that provide medical and educational assistance to some of the poorest villages in Afghanistan. Each year, Najaf sponsors an Afghan Evening of traditional song, dance and cuisine that highlights the achievements of Afghans in Australia. In 2008 Najaf co-authored the extraordinarily successful book The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, which eloquently tells the story of his journey as a refugee from Afghanistan to Australia.

  ROBERT HILLMAN is a Melbourne-based writer of fiction and biography. His autobiography, The Boy in the Green Suit, won the Australian National Biography Award for 2005. His 2007 biography, My Life as a Traitor, written with Zarah Ghahramani, appeared in numerous overseas editions and was short-listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2008. His first collaboration with Najaf Mazari, The Rugmaker of Mazar-e-Sharif, grew out of an abiding interest in the hardships and triumphs of refugees.

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Copyright © Najaf Mazari and Robert Hillman, 2011 All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Originally published in Australia by Wild Dingo Press

  Map illustration: Dimitrios Propokis

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mazari, Najaf, 1971-

  The honey thief : a novel / Najaf Mazari & Robert Hillman.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-101-60622-3

  1. Afghanistan—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Hillman, Robert, 1948- II. Title.

  PR9619.4.M37565H66 2013 823’.92—dc23 2012039997

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book is dedicated with great affection to Robin Bourke, Norman Bourke, Jeanie Gibb, Hakeema Mazari, Maria Mazari, and also to Bruce Norman.

  Acknowledgements

  The authors wish to express their gratitude to the publisher, Catherine Lewis, and her dedicated team at Wild Dingo Press for their invaluable support in the development of The Honey Thief. We would particularly like to thank Hugo Britt and Katia Ariel for their painstaking editing of the manuscript and for the many improvements they suggested, and Susannah Low for her stunning design work. Special thanks go to Mustafa Najib, Abdullah Alemi and Major (Retired) Ali Raza for kindly agreeing to check the historical and political references throughout the book.

  The authors would also like to thank all of the following people for their advice and encouragement: David Baillieu; Julian Burnside; Dan Cudmore; Ann Dillon; Sally Godinho; Christian and Elisabeth Groves; Norm Groves; Bruce and Rea Hearn-Mackinnon; Jim and Caroline Hill; Walid and Nadda El-Khoury; Harry Kontos; Nancy Otis; Rod Parnall; Ahmad Raza; Hussain Sadiqi; Simon Stewart; Jessie Taylor; Dunstan Towning; Pamela Vincent; Lin Windram; Colin Young; all the wonderful people at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in Melbourne and Amnesty International Australia.

  Contents

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Acknowledgments

  Note

  1 Hazara

  2 The Wolf Is the Most Intelligent of Creatures

  3 The Honey Thief

  4 The Life of Abdul Khaliq

  5 The Death of Abdul Khaliq

  6 The Music School

  7 The Snow Leopard

  8 The Behsudi Dowry

  9 The Beekeeper’s Journey

  10 The Russian

  11 The Richest Man in Afghanistan

  12 The Cookbook of the Master Poisoner Ghoroob-e-astab of Mashad

  13 Thoughts on Growing and Eating

  Recipes

  Glossary and Notes

  Note

  The inspiration for the tales in The Honey Thief is derived from the long oral tradition of storytelling in Afghanistan. As in those tales of centuries past, a number of the stories in this collection are based on actual events, and some make reference to people who have played a role in the larger narrative of Afghanistan. The oral history of Afghanistan, preserved by storytellers in villages, towns and cities, is a living treasure. The Honey Thief is conceived as a tribute to the men and women who for many centuries celebrated in poems, songs and stories the experience of ordinary Afghans, their culture and wisdom.

  1

  Hazara

  I was born in Afghanistan, but I only came to know where my country belonged in the world when I left it. I had seen maps of my homeland, of course, and I knew that Afghanistan had six other countries on its borders, but I took little interest in them. Then one evening, in a land of television sets far from Afghanistan, I saw a huge globe that rotated slowly, showing the weather for all the countries on earth. A young woman with dark hair and a green dress with silver buttons said that it would be dry in Kabul with a top temperature of thirty-nine degrees. I realised for the first time that Afghanistan is in the middle of the world, stranded there with no coastline, with no escape.

  The sight of my native land on the television set fascinated me, but I must confess that it didn’t fill me with pride. I had no desire to stand to attention and sing the national anthem. This had nothing to do with the fact that Afghanistan is only on the news when things are going badly there. It had nothing to do with the explosions that tear people apart in the streets; nothing to do with the American jets that fire rockets into houses from a great distance; nothing to do with harvests of opium poppies. No, it was because my loyalty is not to this land in the middle of the world, but to the small part of it in which my people, the Hazara, have toiled for their bread for eight hundred years.

  Afghanistan is a land of struggle, more than most, but of all those who live there, none have struggled like the Hazara. Perhaps this is because we are a mystery people; no one knows for certain where we came from, and we have been resented for generations by those who live in Afghanistan in greater numbers than ourselves.

  I say we are a mystery people, but only to others. We are not a mystery to ourselves; at least not amongst the Hazara I know. Many believe that we are the descendants of Genghis Khan’s warriors who swept down from Mongolia eight hundred years ago and overran China, northern India and the whole of Central Asia. Scientists who have studied us say, ‘Maybe.’ They look at our faces, and see the same faces as those of the people who live in Mongolia today. They look at our customs, and see many that we share with the people of Mongolia. They look at our yurts, our tents, and see the same yurts that the people of Mongolia pitch on their plains. They look at a hundred different things, a hundred different signs, and the more they look, the more they see what ties the Hazara to the Mongolians. And then they say, ‘Maybe.’ They have to be cautious, in the manner of scientists. But we, the Hazara, we don’t have to show the same caution. We know in our bones and in our blood where we came from. But does it matter? People are not theories. People are blood and bone, the eyes they see with, the hands they work with. Hazaras, who work with their hands, have lived in the land now known as Afghanistan for a very long time. There is no other land to which we belong.

  * * *

  A tribe is a world. I have described myself to people who are not of my tribe in this way and that, and usually I satisfy the person I’m talking to, and also satisfy myself, up to a point. I say, ‘I am a pacifist,’ and so place myself in a very large tribe of people who share at least one belief with me. Or I say, ‘I am a businessman,’ and the banker I am addressing knows that I can be relied on to keep an accurate account of what I buy and sell; that I make sensible decisions with my money. I say, ‘I am a Muslim,’ and the Muslim listening to me will make a dozen assumptions about the life I lead, most of them correct. When I meet a Hazara, I don’t say, ‘Nice to meet you, I am Hazara.’ There is no need. We will greet each other in a different way to the way we greet people who are not of our tribe. We will be both excited and shy at the one time. Excited because we are brothers, shy because without even knowing my name, the man I am talking to can see deep into my heart. And if this man says, ‘I have no bed for the night, I have no bed for the next year,’ I will say, ‘You have a bed in my house.’ As we stand facing each other, hundreds of years of good news and sad news flow between us. We are made from the same clay; or rather, we have heard the same stories.

  * * *

  In the city where I now live, all the stories ar
e in books. They are studied in the universities. I am not sure that these stories still pierce the flesh of those who hear them and make a life for themselves in the listener’s heart. In Afghanistan, we have very few universities and very few professors. The history of the Hazara is told in the fields, in our tents, in our houses. Many of the stories I heard when I was growing up, even those from centuries ago, came to life again before my eyes. I was told the story of Abdul Khaliq who was cut to pieces with knives because he would not submit to the enslavement of the Hazara people. Some years after I heard the story, I was running for my life from people who wanted to do to me what had been done to Abdul Khaliq, and for the same reason. I heard stories of Hazara chieftains who’d fought five hundred years ago to hold onto the small piece of Afghanistan that Hazaras hold sacred today. In my own lifetime, the great Hazara chief Abdul Ali Mazari fought with all his strength in the same cause and died because of the same small error as the chieftains of the past – by looking for a moment to the left instead of the right. I heard tales of the honoured eagles who came down from the highest part of the sky and took hares as they ran between rocks, and I saw the same thing when I was a shepherd in the mountains. My heart and my mind, my bones and flesh and all the organs of my body are bound together with the cords of the stories I was told. They made me Hazara, week by week, tale by tale.

  * * *

  This new land of mine is also the land of the Net; of the dot-com, Skype, Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, Twitter; of conference calls, direct debit, online banking. In the course of a day, I’m likely to employ all of these inventions and devices. A man I know well comes to my business premises, points at three rugs of great value and says, ‘I can auction these at $25.50 minimum; that’s each one, fifteen points to the gavel, ten to me. What do you think?’ I take out my calculator, busy myself for two minutes, then reply, ‘Fifteen to the auctioneer is steep. If he can make it 12.5, go ahead, ten points to you, of course.’ I’ve embraced the digital world, and I’ve embraced arithmetic. But when the day comes to an end and I lock up my shop and prepare to drive my Corolla the ten minutes to the apartment where my wife and daughter are waiting, I always glance at the sky as I did a hundred times a day when I was a shepherd and try to work out the sort of weather I can expect the next day. If there are clouds in the sky, I take into account their height above the ground, the speed at which the wind drives them along and the exact direction in which they are heading. If there are no clouds in the sky, I look at the colour of the sunset, whether it is red or scarlet or orange or pink, because I will make a different calculation for each colour. Within my shop, it doesn’t matter if the weather is hot or chilly, wet or dry or humid. And yet I cannot forget the habits of the shepherd. It is the same when I purchase honey in the supermarket. My brother, Gorg Ali, a beloved man, made the finest honey in the world, and he managed this by speaking to his bees, by pampering them, by searching for the place where they would be happiest. And so I still ask myself in the supermarket, ‘But does this jar of honey come from bees who were loved?’

  No, I cannot forget where I came from, the life I led when I was a boy and a young man, the people who stood close to me and told me the tales of my people. Some of those tales, like those of Abdul Khaliq and Abdul Ali Mazari, are known to every Hazara; others, like that of Esmail Behishti, himself a great storyteller, and Ahmad Hussein, the man who knew bees better even than my beloved brother, better than the bees knew themselves, are known mostly to the Hazara of the village in which I grew up. And some are known only to me.

  When I open my shop, I am a businessman, no different to many other businessmen. And I am a citizen, no different to many other citizens. I take an interest in politics. I watch the news. I think, ‘But is enough money being spent on education?’ Or I might think, ‘Is the earth becoming warmer? What is to be done?’ I have a friend who comes from Uzbekistan, and he thinks such things as those that come into my own brain. I talk with my friend from Israel knowing that he has the same interests as me. I am alike to many people, millions, perhaps even, say, billions. But when I sleep, I am not the same. When I sleep, I dream like a Hazara.

  2

  The Wolf Is the Most Intelligent of Creatures

  He was an old man who lived in a village three hours’ easy walk from the banks of the Murghãb River. In his life he’d had three wives and had outlived them all. Since he was so esteemed amongst the Hazara, he could have chosen a fourth wife but he preferred to live a widower with the family of his oldest son, Jafar Ali. He found enjoyment in the company of all his sons, all of his daughters and grandchildren but he liked the youngest son of Jafar Ali best, a boy by the name of Abbas. At twelve years of age, the boy had a quick mind and a ready smile. He had been to school in a town further south and could recite mathematical tables and measure angles. Abbas made it his job to sit with the old man over breakfast and bring him more tea when it was required.

  Each morning, Esmail told the boy one of the stories for which he was famous. The first story he told was of a man whose hearing was so sharp that he could hear the sound made by cloud shadows as they passed over the land below.

  ‘And what sound do the cloud shadows make?’ asked the boy.

  ‘A cloud moving fast makes a sound like this,’ said Esmail, and he put his lips together and whistled softly, almost too softly to hear. ‘But when the wind is light and the clouds travel slowly, they make a sound like a flower opening in the sun.’

  Abbas smiled. He had a practical mind and he didn’t believe that the stories he was told by Esmail were strictly true.

  ‘My hearing is good,’ he said. ‘I can hear the sound of pebbles rolling when a red fox stumbles a long way off. But I have never heard a shadow.’

  Nevertheless, he enjoyed listening to the old man. While they were being told, he believed the stories for the pleasure of it. The old man had tales to tell of horseshoe bats that flew across the sky in such numbers that they blacked out the light of the moon; of brown bears that held conversations with human beings; of snow leopards that sang songs.

  When he’d finished a story, Esmail would ask the boy if he’d enjoyed it. The boy would say, ‘A snow leopard cannot sing,’ or ‘Bears don’t talk,’ but he always said it with a smile. As he grew older, he understood that Esmail had such mastery as a storyteller that sometimes he would become fanciful just for his own amusement.

  * * *

  If the old man had only told stories of talking bears and singing leopards, he would not have built the reputation he had amongst our people, the Hazara. He was considered a man of learning, even though he had never been to school. Men came to him when they were troubled and listened to his advice. He spoke quietly on these occasions, sometimes standing, sometimes sitting. He carried a staff with him everywhere, made from the wood of a gundy tree and worn smooth all along its length. When he gave advice, he would tap the base of the staff on the ground, digging up the soil just a little, as if this helped him to concentrate. He gave advice on disputes between families, on marriages, on children who were growing up wild.

  Nobody but Abbas ever questioned his advice. People saw he had a great power that he could use in a number of ways and they accepted everything he said. One day a man came to him to ask for advice about a woman he wished to marry, and since Abbas was then twelve years of age and much more than a boy, Esmail let him stay and listen. The man, whose name was Naid, was twenty-two. The woman he wished to marry was twenty and was considered very beautiful but also very lazy. Naid himself was anything but lazy. He was a carpenter and a house-builder and was always at work when the first light of morning came into the sky. Abbas could see that Naid was deeply worried about this marriage he was contemplating. Amongst the Hazara, there is hardly a worse vice than laziness. We have survived in the mountains of the Hazarajat by throwing ourselves into our work without complaint. In the mountains of the Hindu Kush, you work hard or die young. Women work as hard as men, or harder. Every meal must be thought about. Every purchase must be wise. A lazy wife is a catastrophe.