Caravans (20 page)

“I have the same complaint against you,” he replied seriously. “Not once do you or the ambassador say ‘By cracky’ or ‘Gee whillikens.’ We’re living in a denatured age.”

“Proceed, Son of the Prophet.”

“That reminds me of something amusing,” he said. “For a while I dated a Penn coed whose sole knowledge of Asia was that fine ballad ‘Abdul Abulbul Amir.’ Funny thing was, she made about as much sense as any of the others.”

“What did wreck The City?”

“First, this used to be the world’s foremost example of irrigation. I think Alexander commented on that. You can see relics of the old system everywhere. Over there, for example. Probably a reservoir. But people got lazy. They didn’t keep
working on it. They felt that what had worked for a hundred years was good enough for the next hundred years. They stopped cleaning the ditches … built no new dams. They guessed right. For a hundred years, no trouble. But the death warrant had been signed. Genghis Khan can’t be blamed for that. The people had grown fat and lazy.

“Second, and I place much emphasis on this, there was salt. If you irrigate a piece of land long enough, the constant flow of water must deposit salt, so that each year you raise a crop, you deteriorate the land that made the crop possible. Therefore I don’t blame the lazy people entirely. Maybe the salt was just too big a problem to handle. In some future century, perhaps, all of Colorado and Utah will be useless because the men of this century were such good farmers. Your salt levels are rising ominously. Behold, Denver, Colorado!” And he pointed to the ruins.

“The third reason is the most tantalizing of all. Goats. Those damned goats are the curse of Asia. God gave us a fertile land, covered with magnificent trees and soil rich enough to feed all men. But the Devil got even by giving us just one thing. Goats. And they took care of the forests. Ate all the young trees. And the rich fields. Ate the cover off and turned them to deserts. Probably the most destructive animal ever created. Much more dangerous than the cobra.”

“But how would goats affect The City?” I asked.

“When this was a metropolis,” Nazrullah explained, “the hills you see must have been covered with trees. Brisk business in timber and charcoal. Excessive cutting killed some forests, but goats
took care of the rest. So today in Afghanistan we have almost no forests. Do you suppose we live in mud houses on purpose? They’re miserable, but we have no wood. All the time I was in America I wondered, ‘What is the goat in America?’ I found out. It’s the man who destroys your forests.” He paused, then observed, “You defeated Germany in this war, but in the future Germany’s bound to win. Because Germans plant trees.”

I tried to lead the conversation back to Ellen Jaspar but was forestalled when our guide, perched on the spare tires behind my ear, sang out that we were approaching Chahar, where Pritchard lay. We looked for a ditch and plunged in to refresh ourselves, then stood on the bank as the monstrous wind sucked us dry, and when our turbans were no longer wet we replaced them with karakul caps. We straightened our clothes to make ourselves as presentable as possible, and while we were doing this I asked, “Why all the falderal?”

Nazrullah replied, “Down here you impress the sharif, or you get nothing.” As we drove into the village he added, “We’re so far from Kabul that government doesn’t actually exist, except in the person of this brigand who rules as he wishes. Who’s going to drive across that desert to correct him?”

It was an attractive village with an oversized caravanserai and cool pomegranate trees whose blossoms sent me an unfamiliar fragrance. The sharif came out to greet us, a huge fellow well over six feet in height, and I thought: How often we choose tall men to govern us.

And this sharif governed, that was obvious. As
absolute monarch of a tiny kingdom, he had his own army, his own judges, his own treasury. Since he lived so close to Persia and so far from Kabul, his little kingdom used mainly Persian coins and Persian stamps. “Dozens of these principalities remain in Afghanistan,” Nazrullah explained, and I understood why, in Chahar, the evacuation of an American with a broken leg was impossible. When you got sick here, the local medicine man cured you, or you died.

The sharif led us to a low, stifling hut tucked away in a corner of the caravanserai, and there on a straw mattress laid over a rope bed we found the gaunt, gray-faced American engineer John Pritchard, a wiry man in his late forties. Nazrullah held out his hand and said, “Hello, Professor. The American embassy’s sent a man to get you out of here.”

“I’m willing to go … right now,” the sick man replied. The sharif’s servants had kept him clean, fed and shaved, but he was in pitiful shape and I sensed at once that he was close to dying, for his left leg, exposed to dry air to speed the healing, had been punctured by two fractures and was now clearly gangrenous. The skin was taut and greenish.

Dr. Stiglitz hurried to the bed and studied the leg for some minutes, smelling his fingers as he did so. He then probed the man’s groin and armpits. When he was done he placed his right hand on Pritchard’s shoulder and said quietly, “Herr Professor Pritchard, the leg must come off.” The engineer groaned and his face went even whiter than it had been.

Stiglitz continued, as if to convince the rest of us, “In my opinion there’s no chance on earth to save this leg. I’m positive other doctors would agree. I’m sorry, Herr Professor, but you must know.” Pritchard made no further sound; he must have expected such a decision.

Stiglitz added in a dispassionate professional voice, “We face a difficult choice, for which we are all responsible—Pritchard, Nazrullah, Miller. I can take the leg off here, but where would you recuperate? Tell me that. Or I can medicate the leg now, then rush you back to Kandahar, where the operation could be performed much better and where you could recuperate at ease. In that case the question is, Could you stand the trip across the desert?”

Each waited for the other to speak, then Pritchard said firmly, “If I stay here, I will surely die.”

Stiglitz asked, “Then you want to go back to Kandahar?”

“Yes! Yes!” Pritchard cried.

“What do you think, Nazrullah Sahib?” Stiglitz continued.

“I’d like to ask one question,” Nazrullah countered. “Professor Pritchard, you remember what the desert was like. Do you feel strong enough to cross it now?”

“Yes!” Pritchard repeated. “If I stay here I’ll die.”

“We’ll take you to Kandahar,” Nazrullah said firmly, and when the decision was reached he became once more his efficient self. Looking at his watch, he said crisply, “We must get back to The City before darkness. We’ll sleep there. Start across
the desert at dawn. You fellows up to it?” Nur and Stiglitz said they were. Then he addressed Pritchard directly: “This is the last chance. You’re sure you can cross the desert?”

“Right now,” the engineer replied.

“We go,” Nazrullah announced.

But I was appalled, both at the decision itself and at the hasty manner in which it had been reached. “Wait a minute!” I protested. “Dr. Stiglitz, is Professor Pritchard qualified to make a decision like this?”

“I am,” Pritchard interrupted. “I’ve waited here too damned long. If I stay here, I’m going to die.”

“Have you ever crossed the desert?” I asked, betraying my nervousness at intervening in such a matter, for I was the youngest present.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” Pritchard asked contemptuously.

“You remember the heat?”

“Look, Miller, I refuse to stay here. Let’s get going.”

“The heat?” I shouted. “Have you ever crossed in daytime?”

“Yes!” the sick man shouted back. “I can take it.”

I appealed to Dr. Stiglitz. “You know very well, Doctor, that intense heat and movement will increase the danger from that leg.” The German was silent and I shouted, “Don’t you?”

“Yes,” Stiglitz grudgingly assented. “And every minute we don’t operate increases the risk.”

“That’s what I thought,” I said weakly. I felt as if I were going to burst into tears. Very quietly I said, “We’ll operate here—right now.”

Stiglitz spoke solemnly: “But the risk to his life is just as great here, Herr Miller.”

“For God’s sake!” I cried. “Give me an answer, yes or no.”

“There is no answer, yes or no,” the German replied stubbornly. “There is risk. There is risk here and risk there. I cannot decide.” He turned to Pritchard and asked gently, “You know you’re in grave danger, don’t you Herr Professor?”

“Three days ago I thought I was dead,” Pritchard said. “I’m not afraid any longer. In your opinion, Doctor, which way gives me the best mathematical chance?”

“That I cannot answer,” Stiglitz insisted. “You and your American adviser must decide.”

The sick man looked up at me, and I almost had to turn away, death seemed so close. “Young fellow,” he said quietly, “I calculate my own chances as being best if we go to Kandahar.”

I was so certain that once we got that leg on the desert it would insure his death, pumping poison constantly throughout his body, that I could not accept either his answer, or Nazrullah’s assent, or the doctor’s impartiality. I knew we must take the leg off at once. In my anguish I looked at Nazrullah and said, “Could we walk in the garden a moment?”

“You’re wasting time,” Nazrullah warned me.

“I need your advice,” I said.

“You have my advice … Kandahar.”

“Please,” I begged.

Against his will I led him out beneath the pomegranate trees, sweet in the spring, where I had a chance to confront the hard quality of his mind.
“You’re the American in charge,” he said harshly. “You must decide … in fifteen minutes.”

“But, Nazrullah, you’re a scientist. You know that a leg like that is pumping poison right through that man’s blood. He can’t possibly get to Kandahar.”

“The doctor thinks he can. I think he can. We should leave.”

“But if we do decide to operate here, will you arrange things for us?”

“Absolutely, Miller. I’ll stay here a month if necessary. You make the decision and I’ll abide by it. But make the decision.”

“Help me do what’s best,” I pleaded. “There’s a man dying in there.”

“I can’t do your job for you,” he said coldly.

“Could I see the doctor again? For just a minute?”

“Stiglitz? He’s incapable of a moral decision. He said clearly: The facts are these. You decide.”

“What did he say the facts were?” I asked, sweating nervously. “I want to hear them from him again before we decide.”

“No!” Nazrullah cried. “You can’t evade your responsibility.”

“Please, review with me what he said. I don’t have it clear.”

“He said,” Nazrullah repeated impatiently, “that Pritchard would probably die, whether we amputated his leg here or hauled him across the desert to do it.”

“He never said that!” I protested in real confusion.

“He implied it. He believes it. And if that’s true,
which I’m sure it is, the problem becomes simple. What’s best for your country and mine?”

“That’s a hell of a way to talk about a man who may be dying.”

“Miller, he is dying. What’s best for you and me to do? Speak up or we’re leaving.”

“Wait a minute. Let me think,” I pleaded. “Nazrullah, we know he wants to get out of here. How much weight should I put on that fact?”

“The whole weight, Miller. If he stays here he knows he’ll die.”

I hesitated, then said firmly, “All right We take him to Kandahar.”

“That’s your decision?”

“Yes. Let’s get started. Right now.”

“Please put it in writing.”

“What are you trying to do?” I cried.

“Things like this often end badly,” Nazrullah said cautiously. “Americans like to blame Afghans … make us look stupid. If a stupid decision is being made, you’ll make it, and you’ll put it in writing.”

“I’m not afraid,” I said bravely, feeling much older than twenty-six. “But in that case I’ve got to talk with Stiglitz and Pritchard.”

“You have ten minutes,” Nazrullah said, “After that we stay here … for many weeks.”

We returned to the sick room and I asked Dr. Stiglitz to join me in the garden. He protested but Nazrullah said in German, “Go ahead.”

“Your honest judgment, Stiglitz, and you can’t evade now. What’s best for this man?”

“This is a decision I cannot make,” Stiglitz insisted stubbornly.

That’s a hell of a position for a doctor to take.”

“It’s the only one under the circumstances,” he said defensively.

“What are the circumstances?” I shouted, losing control of my patience under the hammering I was undergoing.

“Pritchard is going to die,” he replied bluntly.

“I say that if we take the leg off right now he’d have a chance.”

“You’re right.”

“And if you haul him through the desert death is almost inevitable.”

“You’re right.”

“Then for God’s sake, let’s go in there and operate.”

“I warned you, Herr Miller, that this is not a decision I can make. Pritchard is convinced that if he stays here any longer he will die. His spirit is worn out … can you understand that at your age? Worn out. It might be wiser for him to risk the journey to Kandahar if it restores his hope.”

“Who can decide this?”

“Pritchard.”

I returned to the room and told Nazrullah, “I’ll write out the order in five minutes.”

“You’d better,” he said.

I went to the sickbed and before I spoke to Pritchard I looked at the bleak walls of the Caravanserai and smelled the stale, baked air. I would not have wanted to live in that room, even in health. But to have lain in that stifling heat for three weeks while local practitioners ruined my leg, to have watched it swell and grow green,
would have been intolerable, and now to face the prospect of six more weeks would kill my spirit.

I sat on the bed and told Pritchard, “I guess it’s up to you and me. Here or Kandahar?”

“I know I’m in bad shape. But if I stay here … what’d you say your name was?”

“Miller. I’m from the embassy.” Then I had an idea. “You know, Professor Pritchard, the ambassador himself sent me here. He’s deeply worried about you.”

“I didn’t know anybody gave a damn.” He turned his head, unable to control his tears. “Jesus, Miller, this is the end of the world.”