Caravans (9 page)

Primly Nexler handed the letter to Richardson, who accepted it without comment, but Verbruggen blustered, “I’d have acted precisely as the Jaspars did. If my daughter gets A’s and B’s in her real subjects and a music professor sends me a letter as garbled as that, I’ll be as stupefied as the Jaspars were.” Then he stared at me with his big, blunt face and demanded, “Miller, does that letter make any sense to you?”

Having heard what he had just said, I didn’t want to insult him, so I equivocated. “It’s part of the picture, sir.”

“What a hell of an answer!” he exploded. “As a father my reaction was the one I just gave. But as an outsider, trying to get a focus on this thing, the music professor’s letter is the only one that makes sense.” Nexler smiled with satisfaction.

Abruptly Verbruggen turned to Nur Muhammad and said, “Nur, we brought you here today for a fresh look at an old problem. Considering what you’ve heard, what do you make of it?”

Nur Muhammad was one of the indefinable Afghans who turned up at all embassies. He learned English—or French or German or Turkish as required—had a fair education, quickly made himself invaluable, and was surely in the pay of the Afghan government, to which he reported secretly. Nur was an agreed-upon convenience, for he told the Afghans what we wanted them to know; and through him the Afghans leaked official secrets to us. He had been invited to this morning’s meeting to warn the Afghan government that we expected full cooperation in Kandahar.

Nur, who acted as if he did not know that we suspected him of being a government agent, cleared his throat and said cautiously, “Your Excellency, I cling to these fundamentals. Miss Jaspar is not held prisoner here in Kabul. Nazrullah did not murder her. She may be a prisoner at Qala Bist, but that seems unlikely, because remember what I said. Only women can keep a ferangi wife prisoner. Men cannot. I therefore conclude that she has run away to the British at Chaman and has died in the attempt.”

“Why haven’t we been informed?” Verbruggen growled.

“Nazrullah hopes that she may still be found alive. And remember one thing, Your Excellency. You’re not fighting the Afghan government on this matter. It’s not a case of Shah Khan withholding information. He too is perplexed.”

“Well,” Verbruggen warned, “look after Miller in the south. We haven’t time to worry about another missing American.”

“He shall be my special charge,” Nur Muhammad
assured him, and from the manner in which the acting ambassador had spoken Nur realized that it was time for him to depart. Graciously, he withdrew.

As soon as Nur was gone, Verbruggen said to me, “While you’re down there, there’s another matter I want you to look into. Several of the embassies may go together to hire a doctor. We want a ferangi, of course. We’ve been advised there’s a German practicing in Kandahar. What’s his name?”

Richardson consulted a memorandum and replied, “Otto Stiglitz.”

The acting ambassador continued, “Seems to be a refugee who fled Nazi Germany. But he might have come here to escape British or Russian courts trying war criminals. Anyway, the Italians recommend him as an excellent doctor and if he is, we might work out something. Check him out. Maybe he’ll know something about our girl, too.”

I looked about the room to insure that no Afghan personnel had entered unexpectedly, then said, “There’s one more matter to discuss, sir. Yesterday as I was leaving, Shah Khan took me aside and whispered that he had recently received a rumor regarding Ellen Jaspar so bizarre that he refused even to discuss it. Didn’t want it in our files under his name. At any rate, a rumor has arisen substantial enough to survive a trip from Kandahar to Kabul, but so ridiculous …”

“You’re using Mr. Jaspar’s word,” the acting ambassador pointed out. “Shah Khan said bizarre. I suppose they mean the same.”

“Anyone care to guess what the rumor might have been?” I asked.

“You’ve obviously been thinking about it all night,” Verbruggen pointed out. “You speak.”

“Could Ellen have murdered Nazrullah? And is the Afghan government hushing it up?”

Richardson shook his head. “Shah Khan is the Afghan government.”

Verbruggen was not so easily satisfied. “Has any American seen Nazrullah alive?”

“Yes,” Richardson replied, consulting his notes. “That irrigation expert from Colorado, Professor Pritchard, reported that on his way to ascertain water flow along the Persian border he had talked with Nazrullah at Qala Bist.”

“Would he have known Nazrullah if he saw him?”

“His letter refers to him as a fine young man with a beard who graduated from the Wharton School. Must have been Nazrullah.”

“Next guess,” the acting ambassador snapped.

“Could she have defected to Russia?” I asked. This was 1946 and most Americans would have viewed my question with amazement, for in the States it was not yet recognized that Russia was our major enemy. In Afghanistan, living next door to Russia as we did, we knew.

“The thought’s been going through my head,” the acting ambassador replied. The Kabul dispatches of 1946 and 1947, if they are ever published, are going to make our staff look like a group of military geniuses. Partly this was because Richardson, our intelligence man, saw things very clearly; partly because Captain Verbruggen had a feeling for military matters; and partly because all of us on the staff could add two and two.

“We know that the Afghans hate communism,” I argued, “especially its attitude on religion, but we also know that secret Russian missions have been operating in this country. Now if an American woman let it be known that she was fed up with America and Afghanistan … well, mightn’t the Russians approach her?”

Richardson tried to light his pipe and said offhandedly, “You’d probably be on better grounds if you investigated the likelihood that she defected to the Chinese. Don’t forget that lands controlled by the Chinese Communists touch Afghanistan on the north.”

“I think we’re up the wrong tree,” Captain Verbruggen said. “If she had gone over to either Russia or China, those governments would use that fact to embarrass us. They haven’t done so.”

“On the other hand, sir,” I argued, “this girl’s whole personality, her attitude toward her home … Everything indicates the kind of person who might turn traitor.”

The acting ambassador refused comment and changed the line of discussion radically. “Any chance she’s in Europe? Why couldn’t she be toasting her heels in Venice with some Italian grand duke?”

Richardson treated this with contempt. “The chances of an American girl’s entering India without being noticed, then sailing from Karachi or Bombay, are just not measurable. Can’t be done. You want to call the British embassy to check?”

“I withdraw,” Verbruggen surrendered. There was silence, after which he turned to me, saying, “You find out what happened, Miller.”

“I’ll do my best, sir,” I said briskly.

“You’ll find out,” he growled, “or you’ll damned well be back in the navy.” The group laughed and Richardson left, followed by Nexler. When we were alone Captain Verbruggen put his arm about me and said, “Miller, it would be a feather in my cap if we could get this Jaspar thing cleared up before the old man gets back from Hong Kong.”

“I’ll do my damnedest,” I promised.

“On the other hand,” he cautioned, “don’t rush things. This is your first big mission. Ask a lot of questions. Learn the country. Don’t be afraid of looking stupid, because one of these days we could be driven into war across this terrain, and you’d be the only American who’d ever seen parts of it. Keep your eyes open.”

“I will.”

Suddenly he cried, with real emotion, “God, I wish I was going in your place. Good luck, kid.”

As I left his office I thought: Nexler’s dying to get to Paris and Richardson wants to get back to Washington. But Verbruggen and I love Afghanistan. Who cares about the dysentery and the loneliness? For I knew that Afghanistan was the toughest assignment on record. Here was the post which sooner or later tested a man, and for me the preliminaries were over. I was about to plunge into one of the world’s great cauldrons.

While it was still dark, Nur Muhammad helped me pack the jeep for the trip to Kandahar. We stowed our extra tins of motor oil, the precautionary spark plugs, the rope, an extra jack, sleeping bags and medical supplies. We had requisitioned from the embassy four cases of army K-rations, two spare tires and some jugs of boiled water for drinking. Seeing us on that wintry morning, you would not have guessed that we were embarking on a routine trip from the capital of a sovereign nation to the secondary metropolis nearby. We looked more like adventurers about to set forth in some dubious caravan, which we were.

Before we left Kabul, where wolves had again made forays down narrow streets, I asked Nur if he would drive me past the home of Nazrullah’s family, and he obliged. It lay in the southern arm of the city, on the way to Kandahar, and when we drew up before its tall, fast-bound wooden gate, studded with ancient nails and bolts, I realized that I was once more facing the portal of an Afghan fortress. The surrounding mud walls were many feet high, so that nothing inside was visible. No agency in Afghanistan other than force was entitled to break its way into these confines, in which
a woman could be kept hidden indefinitely without the assent of any but her jailers.

While we sat in the car inspecting the silent and forbidding gate, we became aware of someone inside the walls who had been alerted by our presence, and after a while a feeble light, obviously from an open flame, was seen glimmering through the chinks in the weatherbeaten gate. The light stopped moving. Someone on the other side was staring at us through the gate. No one spoke.

After several minutes I whispered to Nur, “You suppose they know who we are?”

“They know,” he replied. “The jeep means ferangi.”

“Why don’t we ask where Ellen is?” I suggested, certain that Nur would dismiss the proposal as fruitless. To my surprise he shrugged his shoulders, decended from the jeep and went dutifully to the gate. Even though the unseen watcher must have followed his approach, nothing happened. Finally Nur surrendered and went through the formality of tugging the bell cord.

Inside the stout wall there was a clangor and the light moved. After the customary interval the small one-person doorway that had been cut into one of the larger gates swung open and a thin man swathed in rags and a dirty turban peered out. While Nur spoke in Pashto he listened impassively, then shook his head no. The little door squeaked shut in the darkness and between the chinks I could see the flickering light disappear.

“They don’t know where she is,” Nur reported, and in our strong headlights I caught my last glimpse of the mysterious wall.

The road from Kabul south to Kandahar was about three hundred miles long and had been in existence for some three thousand years. Judging from its condition at the end of winter in 1946, the last repairs must have been completed at least eight hundred years ago, for each mile of the road involved a particular adventure.

The potholes were so deep that we could travel at no more than twenty, and wherever water had seeped under the rocks, the entire roadbed vanished and we had to set out across rutted fields until the antique roadway reestablished itself. In the darkness we passed many vehicles disabled, their passengers sleeping unconcernedly until spare parts could be procured from Kabul on foot.

Promptly at six, for we were in the vernal equinox, the sun rose over the eastern hills and illuminated the noble, desolate landscape of central Afghanistan. Far to the west stood the Koh-i-Baba range, white in majesty and completely impenetrable as long as snow preempted the passes. Nearer at hand stood an occasional home, a low, mud-brick affair entirely surrounded by walls along whose tops thorns had been trained to grow and broken bottles implanted. Close to the road stretched shreds of fields which in good years might produce scattered crops; but usually rain stayed in the mountains and the farmer’s work proved fruitless.

The dominant aspect of the landscape was its color. Everything not covered with snow was brown: the mountains, the mud walls, the land where nothing grew. The human stragglers on their way to Kabul seemed all a dirty brown. Once
their shirts, hanging to their knees, must have been white, but much wear and little laundry had rendered them brown. Even the dogs were brown.

We stopped once to watch a group of men playing with one of these dogs, but the beast knew we were strangers and began snarling, whereupon the men picked up small rocks and with prodigious accuracy threw at the animal until he retreated. “I should think they’d injure the dog,” I protested, but Nur pointed out that none of the stones had been thrown with force.

“They love their scrawny dogs,” he assured me. “Kill an Afghan’s dog and he’ll track you through the Hindu Kush.”

To travel from Kabul to Kandahar at the time of equinox—we were starting our journey on the twenty-first of March, the last day of winter, the first of spring—was comparable to traveling from the snowbound mountains of New York to the spring-drenched warmth of Virginia, for as we moved south we rushed headlong into the Asian spring, and we traveled from snow to flowers. Before the first morning had passed we were seeing blue flowers beside the road and yellow birds speeding across brown fields. The great bleak plains, so recently under snow, were beginning to look almost alluring.

Our first stopping point was the ancient capital of Afghanistan, the storied city of Ghazni, and I use the word
storied
with care, because when it was announced that I had drawn Afghanistan as my first diplomatic post I studied what I could of local history and no existing city captured my imagination as Ghazni did, for from its many-tow-ered
walls there had issued in the year 1000, a convenient date to remember, a barbaric conqueror of unmatched vigor. He was known as Mahmud of Ghazni, and every year for more than a quarter of a century this fearful Afghan had led his armies down through the Khyber Pass and onto the plains of India, where he was not once defeated nor even successfully resisted.

The chroniclers said of him, “Mahmud kept the cities of India tethered in the sun like fat cows, which he came regularly to milk.” He murdered thousands, swept up the riches of a continent, and transformed his ugly little Afghan city of Ghazni into one of the contemporary centers of education, wealth and power.

I remember that on the day when I first encountered his name, one of the most lustrous in Asian history—comparable perhaps to Chalemagne in Europe—I interrupted my studies to ask some twenty other graduate students then joining the State Department if they had ever heard of Mahmud of Ghazni, and none knew the name. I think it was then that I realized how completely unknown a land Afghanistan was, and I discovered to my chagrin that even learned people were vaguely of the opinion that Afghanistan was an alternate name for Ethiopia. Many of my friends assumed I had been assigned to Africa.

Well, I learned who Mahmud of Ghazni was, and now with Nur Muhammad’s guidance I was approaching his city. What a drab, desolate disappointment it was from a distance, a scrawny collection of mean brown buildings surrounded by an ugly mud wall. From where I first saw Ghazni, it
looked like a nondescript collection of cattle barns. There were no trees, no cooling river, no spacious approach. It was to remain my major disillusionment in Afghanistan, this dreary, almost forsaken jumble of mud huts that had once been the capital of much of the world.

But when we reached the wall there were compensations, and I must confess that when I stood before the great south gate I did feel a stirring of imagination and an echo, however remote, of the imperial Mahmud. The gate was huge and excellently built. It was protected by two stout round towers whose battlements were slotted for rifle fire and whose windows were mere slits for the accommodation of guns. To stand outside this gate amid a throng of travelers, seeking admission to the city, imparted a sense of history, and I could believe that it was from the security of these walls that Mahmud had issued on his yearly forays.

And when we had edged our jeep through the gates and into the narrow streets, even the dimmest mind could perceive that we were no longer in Kabul, where the embassies provided a spurious international flavor and where German engineers had at least brought the river under control. In Ghazni there were no German engineers and we were in the most ancient part of Asia.

In the little square in which we finally found ourselves, an earthen, unpaved square bordered by dusty shops and a filthy restaurant, every man we saw was dressed in dirty white trousers, knee-length shirt, western-style vest, shabby overcoat and voluminous turban. All wore open-toed sandals of ragged leather, and there was not a karakul cap
to be seen. Nor were there any women, not even in chaderi. Men walked by lugging skins and furs, bladders filled with goats’ milk, grapes and melons from the south, bundles of charcoal, and odds and ends of country produce. Compared to the bazaar at Kabul, this was mean indeed, for color was lacking, and movement, and foreign goods; but it was impressive in a timeless way and I was not unhappy when Nur parked the jeep and told me to guard it while he went searching for a place to stay, for the road was so bad that we could not hope to make Kandahar in one day and to stop south of Ghazni was unthinkable.

I had been studying the mean little square for perhaps ten minutes when I found myself surrounded by Afghans in tattered clothes, ordinary men from the city who were interested in the ferangi. They were pleased when I spoke Pashto and were telling me that in the Ghazni area it had been a bad winter with little food when Nur Muhammad returned. As he did so, the crowd mysteriously dispersed, and I supposed that Nur had reprimanded them, but I saw what had scared them off was the approach of two mullahs, tall, bearded men in dark robes and scowls of intense hatred. They marched up to the jeep, which they knew to be alien to their interests, and began berating it, not me.

Their fury abated when I spoke to them in Pashto, explaining that I was their friend. Granted this assurance, they relaxed their animosity and began discussing my trip with me. They proved to be pleasant men, and under Nur’s careful persuasion they actually started laughing and the crowd
regathered. Nur assured them that the ferangi would not molest the girls of Ghazni nor would he drink alcohol. They bowed as they departed, and Nur whispered, “Mullahs could be handled … if we had enough time.”

Nur now called a little boy to lead me to the front of the hotel while he drove the jeep to a compound in the back, where it could be locked up and guarded during our stay in Ghazni. The boy, dressed in pitiful rags, shuffled along a narrow alley and brought me finally to my first Afghan hotel, which I approached with real excitement. I will say merely that it had no glass in any window, no lock on any door, no water, no heat, no food, no bed, no bedclothes, and no flooring but earth. It did, however possess one characteristic that made it memorable: on the dirt floor of our room were piled five of the most beautiful Persian rugs I had ever seen. They had been woven in Russia at the ancient city of Samarkand and had been smuggled into Afghanistan by itinerant traders who had hauled them over mountains and across deserts. They were poems in thread, three reddish blue and two in stunning white and gold. They had lain on the hotel floor for many years, where the extreme dryness had kept them from rotting, and they seemed now as colorful as when they left the loom. They made the hotel livable and I was dismayed when Nur Muhammad began unloading every item of our cargo, including the two spare tires, onto them.

“Don’t lug that stuff in here!” I protested. “What shall I do with it?” he asked.

“Leave it in the jeep,” I said.

“In the jeep?” Nur gasped. “They’d steal everything we own.”

“You hired two men with shotguns,” I argued.

“They’re to see that nobody steals the wheels,” Nur explained. “Miller Sahib, if we left these spare tires in the jeep, the guards would sell them in ten minutes.”

I was disgusted and said, “I’m hungry. Let’s go out and get some food.”

“We can’t both go,” Nur replied.

“Why not? The mullahs know you’re here as my friend.”

“I mean the room. We can’t leave it unguarded. One of us has to stay.”

I looked out the back window, a mere slit for rifle fire, and pointed to the two big, bearded guards lolling in the empty jeep. “Let’s put one of them in the room.”

“Them!” Nur exploded. “They’d steal everything we have and shoot us when we got back.”

“Then why are you paying them?” I demanded.

“To keep the wheels on the jeep,” Nur repeated.

I couldn’t hide my irritation, so Nur took me to the front window, another rifle slot, and showed me the hotel courtyard, where forty or fifty hungry-looking tribesmen had gathered. “Miller Sahib,” Nur whispered, “they’re just waiting for us to leave this room.”

It was decided that I should eat first, and it was about three in the afternoon when I returned to the square seeking a restaurant. I use the word loosely, for all I could find was the filthy corner café I had seen earlier. It contained one rickety table, three chairs and a water bottle whose sides
could not be seen for flyspecks. Its aroma, however, was another matter, for I had grown partial to Afghan food and this café had some of the best. The waiter, a man in an unbelievably tattered overcoat and green turban, brought me a chunk of nan, a kind of thick, crunchy tortilla made of coarse, nutritious flour and baked in slabs the size of snowshoes. It was, most of us thought, the best bread we had ever eaten, for it was baked in clay ovens over charcoal and tasted of the fields where the wheat had grown. The waiter also plopped down a large dish of pilau, a steaming mixture of barley, cracked wheat, onions, raisins, pine nuts, orange peel and shreds of roast lamb. On these two dishes, nan and pilau, I would exist during my entire trip, and I would never tire of either.