Читать книгу The Somber Side of a Scientific Mind - Christian Tyoder - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Twenty-Eight Years Later

It was Wednesday, February 26, 1997, a sunny but fairly cold day for the season in Queens Borough, New York. Hans, a bank manager, came home from work earlier than usual today. His American-born wife, Shelly, sitting in the den near the window, was typing on her newly acquired Apple a report to the school board on ways to improve the school children’s behavior.

As Hans was hanging his cashmere garment in the coat closet, Shelly approached him and deposited an affectionate kiss on his dry lips. “Are you all right? You came home early today.”

“The annual meeting of Manhattan Bank Managers in Bronx ended a few minutes after four, and I decided to come home directly from there instead of going back to my office and having to fight with the traffic.”

Shelly poured two cups of jasmine tea kept warm since 5:00 p.m. under an ornate red thick fabric cozy their son brought back a few years earlier from Sweden. Husband and wife sat down on two Queen Ann-style chairs near the bay window. They were enjoying the fragrant tea. Hans reached out to his wife’s gorgeous, slender, long-fingered hand, cheerfully uttering, “I love you.”

“I love you too, darling.” Both turned their head toward the window glass panel and looked down onto the traffic-jammed streets of Queens from their comfortably warm twelfth-floor, two-bedroom apartment. The desk phone on the narrow kitchen table rang. Shelly quickly got up to answer. She placed the handset to her right ear. It looked as if she was frowningly trying to figure out who was calling and where the call was coming from. She quickly handed the handset to her husband, saying, “Honey, all I could make out was that someone wants to talk to you.”

Hans said to the caller who continued to jabber in English with a strong foreign accent, “Hallo, hallo.” Sensing that the lady on the phone had perhaps French as her mother tongue, Hans politely suggested. “S’il vous plait, parlez votre propre langue” (please speak your own language).

Hans finally realized after a few seconds that it was Martine, Abd’s wife, whom he never met. She was calling him from La Rochelle, France. They spoke in French, and their conversation lasted over an hour. Hans mentioned that he had not heard from Abd since their separation at Basel main railroad station in January 1969, even though his address and his phone number were given to Abd at the last minute. He also told Martine that he had tried several times during the subsequent four years to locate her in Tarbes, Midi-Pyrenees district, but his attempts by phone calls and letters were in vain. Martine explained to Hans that she had moved back to La Rochelle to be near her family after Abd passed away on February 14, 1969. Hans quietly listened to her while jotting down a few details of the story that went like this.

At the end of January 1969, Martine received a telegram from Ali, her brother-in-law who lived as a war refugee in Vienna, notifying that Abd had finally arrived in Bamyan, Afghanistan, and that he was very sick with his leukemia in exacerbation. She managed to get a visa for that country and then for Pakistan within seventy-two hours; she then flew to Islamabad. From there she switched buses three times to arrive a week later at the house in Bamyan where Abd was born and now occupied by his oldest brother, Zekirullah. Martine found Abd moribund to the point that he could barely recognize her. She went into details about the remaining thirty-six hours she spent at his bedside, weeping.

A month and a few days earlier, Ali was quite surprised to see his brother show up in Vienna alone, without announcement. Apparently, around the time Abd arrived in Vienna, his illness took a fast downhill course. He had to be admitted urgently to the university hospital for several days. He received blood transfusions that had helped him regain some strength. Instead of taking a convalescing rest at Ali’s home, he stubbornly made the most difficult trip of his life to Bamyan by trains then by buses less than a week after he was discharged from the hospital. The interaction between him and Abd was rather limited during the short visit, probably because of the latter’s illness. But at the inspection of the plastic bag containing items belonging to Abd that one of the nurses at the hospital handed over to him, he found, among others, garnet-colored rosary beads with crucifix and a validated Linz-Vienna train ticket. From subsequent rare and brief conversations with Abd, Ali learned that his brother did not dare to drive alone anymore because of frequent episodes of headache and dizziness by the time he reached Kirchdorf am Inn in southeast Germany. He abandoned his car there. From there he hitchhiked all the way to Linz, then finished the rest of his trip by train.

“I am curious. How did you find out that your husband and I met in Paris?”

“Are you ready to hear the real but intricate circumstances leading to this call to you? I will not be surprised if you are befuddled by what I am about to recount.”

“Please, continue.”

The French lady thanked Hans and went on to tell him the long story with each episode in detail and in chronological order. Abd arrived in Bamyan sometime at the end of January 1969. He became weaker by the day. His brother Zekirullah sent an urgent request to their uncle Faisal, a general medical doctor, to make a house call. The latter lived three hours away by donkey transportation or two hours by bike on rough country roads. Facilities for blood transfusion, commonly used in Western European countries as a supplement in the care of patients with leukemia, were out of the question. Zekirullah reported that Faisal could only give Abd injections of “bismuth for his relentless bloody diarrhea,” of “vitamins to maintain his waning physical strength,” and of “antibiotics to ward off hidden infections.”

Being the only Catholic in the whole county of Bamyan, Martine had to administer the last rites to her dying husband just before he took his last breath. The funeral was quite simple. The day after he died, his body was placed in a hard cardboard box, as coffin, and then carried by an ox wagon to the ancestral cemetery where a freshly dug grave lay next to his father’s tomb. Her brother-in-law Zekirullah, his wife, and their two sons were at the burial site. The silk flower from Martine’s coat was placed on the casket. Zekirullah recited a Buddhist prayer, and silently Abd’s remains were slowly lowered into the ground. On the next day, painfully bereaved by the loss of her companion of thirty years, Martine returned to France to find solace through close contacts with her family in La Rochelle.

Hans, noting that she became extremely emotional at times, with sentences repeatedly interrupted by audible sobbing sounds, interjected, “I am very sorry. I should not have asked you to go through your suffering again. Perhaps it would be better that I call you in a couple of days and then you can tell me the rest of the story.”

“No, no, please let me finish it now. It shouldn’t be much longer. I need your sympathy and your help, as you will know why in a moment.” Then Martine continued to keep Hans interested in her unfinished story.

After the death of Abd, she remained in touch with his surviving siblings and their family for years, in particular with Zekirullah and Ali. They exchanged letters and occasional phone calls. Not able to take risky trips back to Bamyan during the subsequent years to visit her husband’s tomb, she wanted to be certain that it was well marked and well taken care by Zekirullah, his wife, and their two sons. To express her gratitude, twice a year she sent them financial assistance that had undoubtedly helped improve their living condition, as Afghanistan was, during the period preceding the Russian War, impoverished by interminable battles between warlords. Depressed and feeble by his illness, Abd had been very little communicative after he returned to his parents’ home in Bamyan. He spent the most part of the day indoor, either in bed or on the upholstered couch, writing off and on in his tattered notebook. Neither Ali nor Zekirullah knew what was going on with Abd once he left Tarbes for Afghanistan.

Then in March 2004, a shocking surprise startled everyone in Rasulov’s family. The oldest son of Zekirullah was about to move out of his parents’ home with his newlywed wife to live in the neighbor town Dokani. The only couch in the house was given to them as a part of the dowry. During the moving process of this piece of furniture, Hans’s business card was found stuck between the springs and the cushion-protecting canvas. On the back of the card were these words in Abd’s wobbly and splotchy handwriting: “Please get in touch with Hans and give him my diary.” Martine told Hans that the word diary was not fully written and that the y is represented by a long backward slash. She said she and the Rasulov brothers believed that Abd became unconscious at that point. He was found with the head drooped, the ballpoint tightly held in his hand, and the notebook by his side.

The search began for the person with the name Hans, whom nobody on both sides of the family had ever met or heard of. Given the turmoil in the country, Zekirullah knew that it would be a very lengthy and difficult task of honoring Abd’s request. The telephonic communication between Afghan cities was most of the time interrupted and that from the country to the outside world for personal use practically nonexistent. Afghanistan was ravaged by skirmishes between warlords on one hand and the Soviet annexation attempt on the other. Soviet-supported government military planes’ bombardments of tribal encampments were not infrequent. Zekirullah sent the retrieved business card and the notebook to Ali, who lived in a Western European country that had a much better telephonic system of communication, asking him to actively try to locate Hans’s whereabouts. It took almost two months for the message to arrive in Vienna. Ali started out with a phone call to Vaduz, Liechtenstein, using the telephone number printed on the recovered business card. The occupants of the house, whose address was listed on the card, informed him that nobody by that name was known to them and that they had been living in the dwelling for almost ten years. Ali got in touch with several bank managers and the high school superintendent in Vaduz, and also with the local chamber of commerce, but there was no trace of Hans. In the meantime, Martine received from Ali a package containing Abd’s notebook and Hans’s business card. She locked these items up in her safety box and hoped that someday this mysterious person would show up.

Several years had passed. Martine continued faithfully to keep in touch with the Rasulov brothers. Then in the early part of January 1997, the unconfirmed news that Hans had moved to Sweden came as a total surprise. The railroad section of Vienna transportation department just hired a trilingual office clerk who happened to be a citizen of Liechtenstein and had his office desk just a few feet away from that of Ali. The latter quickly found out that the man knew someone who might have known Hans years ago. After all, Liechtenstein is a tiny nation. A week later Ali learned from this man that Hans’s parents had passed away, and their house was sold and resold a couple of times and finally to the current Austrian couple. Hans’s sister Karolin got married then left town soon after. But the most important bit of information obtained from the third party was that they had lunch together before Hans left Vaduz for Stockholm where he was supposed to be hired by a bank. Ali called Sveriges Riksbank, one of the main banks in Sweden. They confirmed that Hans was indeed employed by the institution’s suburb branch but had left for another job with Rusam Company Ltd., Copenhagen, a few years ago. Further telephone inquiries led Ali to successfully locate Hans at his current employment in the Bronx.

Without being asked, Martine explained to Hans why she could not succeed in advising her husband not to make the trip back to his homeland. “Abd is a self-denying man who has tremendous willpower, resolve, determination, and especially self-discipline. Once he makes up his mind, nobody can change his plan. In retrospect, I think he had tried to play down the severity of his illness in order to spare me from suffering. He knew that the lymphocytic type of leukemia that he had been diagnosed with was incurable. Therefore, in his opinion, it would have made no difference whether he received treatment in a developed country like France or no treatment at all in his homeland. A few months of prolonged life through repeated blood transfusions would do nothing more than just prolong his family members’ agony and suffering. In addition to his untreatable illness, the relationship between him and his two sons became the last straw that broke the camel’s back. So, he chose to leave us behind, as little as possible affected by his ailment, to return to his homeland and spend the remaining few short weeks there. The following words found in his notebook truly reflect his intention. ‘Out of sight, out of mind.’ Furthermore, he had on several occasions expressed the desire, when the time came, to have his body buried in his homeland, next to his parents’ tombs.”

At the end of their telephone conversation, Martine asked, “Do you know why my husband wanted us to give his diary to you? Knowing Abd, I am convinced that he must have had a solid reason to leave behind such an instruction just before he became unconscious.”

“Please let me quickly relate to you events that took place after I met Abd at the Café de la Gare in Paris, and then you will find the answer to your legitimate question.” Hans went on in length, recounting the activities of each day he was in the company of Abd back in January 1969. Very touched by Hans’s story, Martine occasionally interrupted him to ask for more details, in order to find out whether Abd had suffered with his terminal illness.

“Thank you, Mr. Reinberg, for having accepted to keep my husband’s legacy alive through your writing of his memoir. I am too old [Martine would be seventy-eight years old two weeks from that Wednesday to undertake such a demanding task]. I will mail my husband’s notebook to you the first thing tomorrow morning.” She slowly and clearly, letter by letter, spelled out to Hans her mailing address in La Rochelle and then said adieu to him after they agreed to stay in touch frequently.

Three weeks later Hans received Abd’s notebook and a copy of the business card he gave to his travel companion twenty-eight years ago. The cover of the journal was partially tattered; but there were no missing pages, except a small part of the last page was torn off. He spent that same weekend deciphering the handwritten contents of the diary and was very pleased to find out that the essence of Abd’s life was already known to him through the eight-day past conversations, except for some details from the diary which would certainly make his memoir writing more accurate and easier. Hans started to tackle the writing task the following week.