Hahn Daniel - In the land of giants: hunting monsters in the Hindu Kush

IN THE LAND OF GIANTS

Gabi Martnez has published eleven fiction and non-fiction books. He is particularly well-known for his outstanding travel writing and literary journalism, and his novels have been selected as books of the year by Spanish literary magazine Qu Leer . Martnez was included in Palgrave/Macmillans list of the top five writers of Spanish Vanguardism in the last 20 years.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with forty-something books to his name. His translations from Portuguese, Spanish, and French include fiction from Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate Jos Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pel. His work has won him the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the Blue Peter Book Award, among others. Recent books include The Oxford Companion to Childrens Literature and translations of novels from Angola and Brazil. He is current chair of the Society of Authors.

Scribe Publications
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2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

First published in Spanish as S lo para gigantes by Alfaguara 2011
First published in English by Scribe 2017

Published by agreement with Pontas Literary & Film Agency

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

Text copyright Gabi Martnez 2011
Translation copyright Daniel Hahn 2017

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

9781925321630 (Australian edition)
9781925228717 (UK edition)
9781925307627 (e-book)

A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia the British Library.

scribepublications.com.au
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I see in you something that offends the common herd.

Stendhal, The Red and the Black

[H]as not the whole of history been a search for false monsters?
A nostalgia for the Beast we have lost?

Bruce Chatwin, Songlines

Rock-a-bye, baby, on the tree top.

When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall,

And down will come baby, cradle and all.

Lullaby

I

THE Fokkers shadow stretches out over the slopes of mountains that are vast and mostly nameless. The small propeller plane moves between the huge anonymous peaks that rise up all around. They say that the Hindu Kush mountain range has more than forty peaks over six thousand metres high, majestic summits that harbour edenic lakes, glaciers, gullies, and virgin forests where a different kind of life is possible. More than forty peaks brimming with treasures but eclipsed in a world that is only interested in the popularity of the rooftops: Noshaq, Istor-o-nal, Saraghrar, and the champion, the only one that is really ever mentioned, the transcendent one, the Tirich Mir.

The rooftops.

Their height has earned them a nickname and, through it, a place in the memory.

Its summer; theres not a single cloud. The sun is already burning, but the snows are constant at the tops of the great bulks that form a chain enclosing life way down there, with a suggestion that, in the valleys, everything is at their mercy.

Way down there.

People are talking about Taliban fighters lying in ambush after the last offensive by the Pakistani army. There are wide-open plains that are unexpected and beautiful. Legends about which nothing is known are glimpsed on the other side of this geological palisade that preserves settlements which are barely more than medieval legends that tell of Alexander the Greats descendants, of animals facing extinction, and furtive creatures that hide to escape from man. Down there, they say, its sometimes hard to make out what exactly wild means.

Yes, the sun is shining.

Seven years earlier, Shamsur had left his house just before eight in the morning. It was August 3rd. The sun was alone, high in the sky, but the last cool breath from the night had not yet evaporated, and Shamsur could still move about without sweating. As he walked down the valley path, he often put a hand to his well-cut blonde hair. Since Jordi liked him to look presentable, he had got into this habit, though lately he hadnt accepted many of the zoologists commands Im not a child any more, you know ? and they often argued now.

When Shamsur entered the garden, he was surprised to see everything just as they had left it two nights earlier. The dogs didnt bark or come out to greet him, though he only noticed this later. He went up to the terrace, where the structure stood that housed the bedroom and the office. The two doors were still closed. He noticed that the bedroom window was half-open, and looked in. Neither Jordi nor Wazir, the boy in Jordis care, were in their beds. Shamsur took four steps over to the office door and called out.

Jordi!

Three times.

Jordi!

Shouting.

Jordi!

He saw two photographs that had been thrown down onto the threshold portraits of two men with beards and pakhol caps. It was only a few minutes past eight, and the heat had not climbed all that high, but Shamsurs body temperature shot up. His breathing laboured, he bounded down the stairs in three steps, ran about twenty yards across the land to the room where Asif, one of Jordis assistants, slept. He found the door open, but Asif was not there.

Next door, in their stalls, the horses began to stamp the ground and snort with nerves that were abnormal for them. Shamsurs armpits were already almost drenching his shalwar-kameez. Its not right, its not right , he kept thinking, so he jumped over the little wall that ran alongside the path and continued down, now as quickly as he could manage, passing the first Kalash houses.

Where are you rushing off to? asked Abdul, who was clutching a bag.

Ive been calling Jordi, and theres no answer. Theres no one in the house. Hes been kidnapped!

What do you mean hes been kidnapped?

Im going for the police. Come, come!

Ive got to take these medicines to my wife. She gave birth last night, and shes in a bad way. As soon as Ive given them to her Ill go.

It took Abdul half an hour to get back to Sharakat House, his own house that he had been renting to Jordi for five years. At the door to the study, he found Shamsur with a doctor from the Civil Hospital and an officer from the Bumburet police station. They had come very quickly, Abdul thought. It looked like theyd taken advantage of the half-open bedroom window to get into the outbuilding.

The sun from the splendid day was projecting beams of light through the gloom, making the dust visible. Jordi was sitting in the cowhide-upholstered chair facing his desk. His head was tilted to the right, so peacefully that Shamsur wanted to believe he was sleeping. As he came close, he saw Jordis open eyes. Shamsur was streaming with sweat, the drops running down his temples, tickling his neck, sliding under his clothes, although for that moment he had lost any sense of his body, aware only of the doctor who tipped Jordis head sideways to reveal his neck, in which he could see a hole and a cut from which there was no longer anything flowing.

Hes been dead for hours, said the doctor, trying not to step in the enormous puddle of dried blood that surrounded the chair.

Shamsur took his head in his hands, gasping, and tumbled out into the brilliant morning, blind, not only because of the sun. Seven years on, he still would not be able to remember what had happened until a good while later.