First Chapter: I Am Marjan
PROLOGUE I am Marjan, son of the one-eyed lion from Kabul. My story begins in Köln, Germany, where I was born in the local zoo a year and a half before my father’s death. He was, according to legend, the most famous lion in the world and my keeper tells me that his picture appeared in all the newspapers when he died and many stories were written about his heroic survival after he was attacked in an act of revenge by the family of a deranged man whom he had killed when a grenade was dropped in his cage and blew up in his face, disfiguring him permanently and making him blind in one eye. My mother was rescued from the Kabul Zoo and gave birth to me later in Germany; she tells me I look like my father, same shaggy mane, same dark eyes, same throaty growl, though not yet as loud or formidable as my father. Many visitors with kids come to the zoo on weekends to study me. They like to watch me wrestle with my keeper and the other young lions. For those who knew my father who, after all, was born here before being shipped to the Kabul Zoo as a gift to the Afghan people, I am certain they want to observe my habits in order to compare me to him and see if I measure up. According to my keeper, I am not yet fully grown but my legs are strong enough to sprint a hundred meters in less than four seconds if I only had the necessary room to run at full speed. My teeth have all fallen in place and my jaw is so powerful that I can devour any piece of meat thrown at me with greater speed and dexterity than the other lions in the zoo. If you don’t mind me boasting a bit, as every lion likes to do, I will tell you of the day I saved a little boy from the jaws of another lion in the zoo. The boy, who let his curiosity get the better of him, something all lions understand, fell into the pit that separates us from those on the grounds above us looking down. The boy panicked and there was a lot of shouting, cries for help from the boy’s mommy. I sprinted in front of the other lion in the pit who had been growling all morning long because he was hungry or bored, and whacked him one hard on the side of his head with my right paw. We got into a big fight; he didn’t like my protecting the little boy. But the fight was distracting enough for my keeper to come out and snatch the boy away safely. My good behavior got me a few extra pounds of meat, which made the other lions jealous, as it enabled me to bulk up my muscles a bit. It also earned me high praise from my keeper. Klaus is the best keeper in the world; he had worked all his life with lions, he told me, and he even visited my father in Kabul to see how the old man was doing at the time when things were not going well in the zoo and many of the animals were going hungry. Klaus recommended me for transfer one day to the zoo in Los Angeles, then the famous one everybody talked about in San Diego. If all went well, I would land in the San Diego Wild Animal Park where I could roam freely and carve out my own territory, perhaps even meet and court a young female lion and, God willing, be a proud father to a brood of young cubs. I am over four hundred pounds in weight, and almost one hundred inches in height, more than eight feet tall, when I stand on my hind legs, not including my tail which is about forty inches in length. My shoulders and forearms are strong. I have thirty good teeth in my mouth, none cracked or chipped, Klaus my keeper tells me, and my jaws are short, yet powerful. I can rip apart any piece of meat or bag of bones thrown my way in a matter of moments. My coat is light tan at the front but really dark, reddish brown at the back; my tail is also tipped dark. In the wild, many if not most cubs, little ones, die before even reaching their first year of life, which is sad indeed. And grownup males get pretty badly beat up by the time they reach the ripe old age of ten or eleven, and usually die before they are even twelve. My father lived twice as long in the Kabul Zoo until the buddies of that Taliban soldier exploded that grenade in his den, blowing up his face and blinding him in one eye, as well as making him lose his sense of smell and hearing. We like to live in what humans call prides. A pride consists of as few as two or as many as twelve adult females and their cubs. All the females are related; you may find your relatives there, sisters, mothers, aunts, and cousins. If she is born into a pride, a lioness will stay in it for life, although a large pride may split into smaller ones. Pride females care for cubs together, hunt and eat together, and aggressively defend their hunting grounds and water holes in the wild from other prides. Equally important, pride females must often defend their cubs from groups of male lions. Male cubs, unlike females, are driven from the pride when they are between two and four years old. If they are lucky, they leave with their brothers and cousins; if not, they team up with males who are not blood relatives. These groups of two to six males are called coalitions. The goal of a coalition is to join a pride of females to mate and have young ones, cubs of their own. This usually involves chasing off members of the coalition currently in residence with a pride, although I can tell you resident males don’t and won’t leave willingly. Bloody combat may take place, with the larger of the competing coalitions generally winning the pride. They tell me my roar can be heard from as many as ten kilometers away, even when I cough and clear my throat. My roar can strike fear in the hearts of men, Klaus my keeper tells me, so use it wisely, he counsels, because it can have consequences. When men get frightened, they either attack or run away; mercifully, most run away. Men, when angered, I am told, will hunt us down with guns or other weapons, as they have since the beginning of time. Often they will hunt us simply for sport. I had not heard from my mother that men hunt lions for food, but mostly for sport, as a trophy of some kind, a symbol of their power and status. This is not right, of course, but I am confident that over time, perhaps in another millennium or two, things will change. We used to live all over Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. We even lived in north America and parts of south America, I am told. But our numbers have diminished, as humans have slaughtered us for sport and taken over our land in Asia, even as far as southern India and the island of Sri Lanka. Many surviving lions live in Africa south of the Sahara Desert, and a few hundred, I am told, live in a reserve called the Gîr National Park in northwest India. We are called Asian lions in that part of the world. * * * A request had come from a zoo in America, from Los Angeles and the San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park, and the good men and women who run our zoo in Köln decided on a Sunday afternoon in late winter, against the wishes of my keeper, to take action and lend me out. By all accounts I was the “ideal ambassador” for the German folk: virile and well-behaved, intelligent and a good entertainer, especially to young children who would be the most frequent visitors. With a big sigh and a look of regret, Klaus told me, “Marjan, I will miss you but it will not be forever.” “Are you sure?” “I am sure. Trust me.” I would be what is known in the zoo business as a loaner lion: another zoo would “borrow” me for a period of time but after my “tour of duty” in America, I would be given the opportunity to come back home again. And barring any mishaps or unforeseen circumstances, Germany would still be my native land. In any event I had no choice in the matter, which bothered me, and began to grow apprehensive about making such a trip, so Klaus, attuned to my concerns, spent the next eight weeks after the decision had been made teaching me the fundamentals of English. Up to that point, I only knew German, plus some Dari, which I had learned from my mother during the time she raised me as a cub. Dari is a beautiful language, very appropriate for a lion, with lots of deep, harsh guttural sounds and great peals of emotion coming forth with each shout and breath and every slowly-pronounced word deep-down from the heart. My mother had told me on several occasions that my father would be proud, indeed, if I had the discipline to keep up with my native tongue, at least enough to get by, in the event one day I happened, God willing, to visit my native land. Now I had to learn English, but I was lucky because Klaus was a brilliant teacher. He prepared me best he could for my long journey to America and the cultural shock I might encounter. It was another, distant land but similar in many ways to Germany; folks there were friendly and kind. He used the German word gastfreundlich to describe them. I would be well-cared for at the zoo in San Diego and meet a wide variety of people from all countries in the world, people of many colors and races and religions, who put aside their differences and now called themselves Americans. He began reading passages from a book, Democracy in America, written more than a century and a half ago by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, which, he said, captured the spirit and passions of the American people as no author had before or since. Klaus would not let me sleep at night until he had finished reading a chapter of de Tocqueville’s book to me. He gave me a compass and showed me a map of the city in case I got lost and could not find my way. But above all else he told me, “You must be kind to children. Americans love their children and do everything for them, even if it means spoiling them badly.” “Why is that?” I begged to know. “Quite simple.” “How so?” “Because Americans are children themselves.” CHAPTER I Some History About My Father, The Most Famous Lion in the World My father arrived as a young lion, only two years old, at the Kabul Zoo in the summer of 1978, a gift from the German people and the patrons of my zoo in Köln. Named Marjan, meaning coral or precious stone in Dari, the language next to Pashto spoken by most Afghans, he had a roar, I am told, like no other lion in the world. From his keeper he eagerly learned Dari, a dialect of Persian; Dari has many guttural sounds and cries befitting the throat and vocal chords of a lion. He took great pride in entertaining schools of children from poor villages all over the country with his charm, virility and handsome good looks. He spoke a language every child could understand. An army of Russian communists, in an act of madness, invaded Afghanistan about a year later, in 1979. For the next decade, according to history, the country of my ancestors was at war; Afghans fighting valiantly to defend their homeland in the mountains and valleys of the Hindu Kush against the invaders. The lapis sky, it is said, turned black and the ancient landscape grew littered and pockmarked with mines, yet somehow, miraculously or by the will of God, Kabul the capital was spared. Marjan was the main attraction at the zoo, along with a female Asiatic black bear named Donatella, two wolves, one Afghan antelope, two porcupines, two Asian wildcats, numerous rabbits, four monkeys, three eagles, two owls and four falcons. After the Russians were kicked out in 1992, a civil war erupted and then it was Kabul’s turn to get hit. My father’s zoo was almost completely destroyed by bombs and rocket attacks. Mr. Akbar, the zoo’s keeper at the time, could not even give medicine to the animals, the ones most badly wounded, because his supplies were wiped out in the rain of bombs and terror. Many died. The men of the Taliban, whose idea of fun was to beat up on the animals for sport, had a particular liking for Donatella, poor bear, and took turns bloodying her nose with the wooden butts of their Kalashnikovs while she sat imprisoned in her four-by-six meter wire-mesh cage. In autumn of 1993, a Taliban soldier, probably stoned out of his mind on the fetid smoke from his opium pipe, I figure, tried to impress his buddies with a foolish stunt: he climbed over a fence into the zoo and jumped into my father’s den. The soldier found Marjan’s new companion lioness, a young woman of great beauty and strength whose name was Chucha, and began stroking the nape of her neck in a show of power and possession. Marjan would not stand for any of this, so he immediately sprinted to her rescue and mauled the soldier to death. You have to understand lions will always protect the females in their pride and challenge any intruder who comes near them. As it happened, so the story is told, the family of the soldier who had been killed appeared the following day to take revenge, and tossed a grenade into Marjan’s cage. Without knowing, my father thought the explosive was something to eat and pounced on it. The grenade blew up in his face. And the blast mutilated almost all the royal lines and contours of his noble head, blinding him in one eye, and splattering bits of shrapnel over his mouth and cheeks, and way up inside his nose. It also made him deaf and knocked out some of his big front teeth, making it extremely difficult for him to eat meat or chew on bones, which, as every lion, he relished doing. He was lucky, all things considered, even to be alive, given the severity of his wounds. Because he was much loved by the Afghan people and by the keeper of the zoo, Agha Sheraga Omar, Marjan found the will to live in spite of his near death experience. He went on to mate with a young lioness named Minoo, a miracle onto itself by all accounts in view of his condition, and after she was smuggled out of the country one night by two enterprising German engineers on a secret mission and sent to the Köln Zoo, she gave birth to a daughter and to me, naming me after my father. Minoo nursed and suckled us to health (lions are born blind and many die young), and taught us to hunt and fend for ourselves, and in tribute to my father, we learned to speak Dari. All the children at the zoo say I bear a striking resemblance to my father, embodying his strength, courage, and the transcendental spirit of a warrior lion. There was even talk among the keepers of sending me to Kabul to meet my father but the Taliban regime made it practically impossible. On several occasions, I heard, as news of the regime travelled fast, Marjan was nearly stoned to death and many of the more extreme and fanatical Talibs wanted nothing more than to kill all the animals in the zoo. Kill all the animals, can you believe that? Members of the regime had to be convinced by Islamic scholars from the university in Kabul that the Prophet himself once kept animals and wished them no harm. Apart from Minoo, my mother, whom he missed, Marjan’s favorite lioness in the Kabul Zoo was Chucha, but unfortunately she died of some unknown illness in 2001, and this caused the old lion much sadness and grief. Word had it from Marjan’s keeper, Abdul Sattar, that he refused to eat meat after Chucha’s death. He had gone on a hunger strike. The strike lasted a whole week. Until he was finally able to eat again. After the American and Northern Alliance troops marched into Kabul to free the people from the tyranny of the Taliban and to hunt for bin Laden, they found my father’s zoo in a state of terrible neglect and disrepair. Most of the surviving animals were barely alive. Many zoos and other organizations around the world rushed to help in the relief effort in late fall of 2001. Although Marjan’s condition was poor, on examination by the doctors and relief workers they thought his chances for survival good. They needed to treat him for parasites and other diseases, and provide him with a steady diet of nutritious food combined with heavy doses of vitamin supplements, and equally important, fix a ramp leading to his den because he would stumble and fall, poor lion, trying to get inside to sleep. Marjan and his plight became symbolic in a way of the Afghan people who had suffered through so many wars in the last quarter century. Despite the best doctors’ care, his condition worsened and he grew weak. He was, evidently, bleeding heavily in his intestines but showed no outward signs. Nor complained in Dari to his keeper of his stomach pains and deep suffering. On the 25th of January, a few months after the liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban, he could hardly move and had to be lifted by hand on a mattress into his den box at night. Things had gone rapidly downhill for the noble giant, just when there was a change of regime and an international outpouring of help and relief. Early the following morning, Agha Sheraga Omar, the director of the zoo and an official from the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), a man named John Walsh, found Marjan dead in his den box. The diagnosis was liver and kidney failure. He was twenty-five years old, about eighty-eight years of age by comparable human standards. After his death, my father’s body was simply left where it had lain and many Afghan people came by to pay their last respects to him because he had endured much of the same suffering they had. On Sunday afternoon, Marjan had his skin removed in hopes of having it mounted for some kind of permanent display. The rest of his remains were buried on the zoo grounds later Sunday evening during a private ceremony with his keepers. Mr. John Walsh, when asked what words were spoken at the service, replied, “That’s between us and the lion.” On Monday, January 28th, a memorial service was held at the zoo for Marjan. Legend had it that hundreds, if not thousands of Afghans were there in attendance to pray for him, honor his memory, and hope for better times ahead in the next life. He had become a hero of the Afghan people, their loss and deep suffering over more than a quarter century of war. At the service some people from the new government announced they were going to rebuild the zoo and restore it to its former glory. A new young lion would assume Marjan’s role in the zoo, after the reconstruction of his cage. Marjan’s skin, ravaged from the wounds of war, would be mounted and shown for display in the zoo’s museum, while a life-size statue in bronze honoring his memory and enduring spirit would be constructed right at the front entrance to the zoo for all to see upon arrival. A sign, meanwhile, was erected over my father’s grave. The sign, carved in metal on a roughhewn wooden post, read: (In English) Marjan (In Arabic) He was about 23. He was the most famous lion in the world. __________________________________________ © copyright 2008 Tom Maremaa
A tale of magic realism about an extraordinary lion
Author's Notes in the Margin: "Something got unleashed a while back––a mythic tale about an extraordinary lion. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but it all began in Afghanistan and with research into the true story of Marjan, the lion in the Kabul zoo who was almost blown up by a crazed Taliban soldier and who came to symbolize, over time, the incredible suffering of the Afghan people under the tyranny of that demented regime. When Marjan was rescued in January of 2002 in Kabul by officials from the World Society for the Protection of Animals, he was near death, blind in one eye, stumbling badly in his den from the wounds of war. Attempts to restore him to health failed and he died on January 28th. By all accounts, to the Afghan people and the press covering the story, he had become the most famous lion in the world.
     "My story, Marjan The One-Eyed Lion From Kabul, is a fable about the son, also named Marjan, now living in the Cologne, Germany zoo, young and healthy, yet with strong memories of his father and an equally strong desire to avenge his father’s death. Marjan is sent to California as a ‘loaner lion’ by his keeper Klaus who teaches him English and counsels him be a good actor and entertainer for the children who will come and visit him in the San Diego Wild Animal Park. The story is told in the first person from Marjan’s point of view.
     "Marjan weighs 400 pounds and stands over eight feet tall on his hind legs. He’s fluent in German, Dari (which his father spoke in Afghanistan), and English. When his flight to California hits turbulence, he is freed from the cargo hold of the plane, and later escapes on his own at the Los Angeles airport. He meets an Afghan cab driver, who looks after him and introduces him to the Afghan community (many exiles), where he falls in love with a woman named Lulu. After a few false starts singing in a rock band and trying to get a job in Hollywood, Marjan is arrested. Rather than being sent back to Germany or to the zoo in San Diego, he is given the choice of joining the Marines and preparing to serve in Afghanistan.
     "In Part II of the story, he is sent to boot camp, where he struggles to fit in, is later dismissed, but then enticed to join a Special Forces alpha detachment. The mission will take him to Afghanistan as part of the hunt for bin Laden. In Part III, he is greeted by the Afghan people as a hero and worthy successor to his father. The hunt is dangerous, of course, but Marjan survives and is transformed (as is the reader) by the experience. 
     "The story is as much about the suffering of the Afghan people, about the life of lions in a strange, new land, about the practice and teachings of Sufism, and the quest for justice as it is about Marjan’s courage and heroics. It seemed appropriate that it should be told in the lion’s voice. The work is purely original and probably unlike any other work of fiction you might read this year.
     "At one level, I guess this is my answer to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, which I found enormously satisfying and uplifting. I can’t really call my novel “magic realism,” although the narrative certainly has its roots in that form. The story simply releases the archetype of a lion (in the person of a son) come home to avenge the loss of his father and bring justice to the Afghan people. Beyond that, the archetype is intended to move the reader (of all ages from young to very old) toward greater enlightenment and emotional understanding."    
    -Tom Maremaa
 
 
 
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