‘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 and 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.
Then one day Sultan sends a message that he will be home the next day. Mansur snaps out of his intoxication immediately. He has done none of the things his father asked him to do. Not catalogued the books, tidied the back room, made new order slips, fetched the book crates that by now have piled up at the transport depot. The matter of the carpenter and the investigations he has not even given a thought.
Sharifa fusses around him. ‘What is it, my boy, are you ill?’
‘Nothing,’ he hisses.
She continues to nag. ‘Keep your trap shut – go back to Pakistan,’ Mansur shouts. ‘Since you came everything has been shambolic.’
Sharifa starts to cry. ‘How could I have such boys? What wrong have I done when they don’t even want their mother around?’
Sharifa howls and yells at her children, Latifa starts to cry. Bibi Gul sways from side to side; Bulbula stares out into thin air. Sonya tries to soothe Latifa and Leila washes up. Mansur bangs the door into the room he shares with Yunus. Yunus is in bed snoring. He has hepatitis B and lies in bed all day swallowing medicine. His eyes are yellow and he looks paler and sadder than ever.
When Sultan returns the next day Mansur is so nervous that he avoids his sharp eyes. But he need not be so worried because Sultan is mostly preoccupied with Sonya. Only the following day, in the shop, does he ask his son if he has done all he asked him to do. Before Mansur has had time to answer the father is already issuing new instructions. Sultan’s trip to Iran was very successful. He has linked up again with his old business associate and soon crate upon crate of Persian books will arrive in Kabul. But one thing he has not forgotten: the carpenter.