Caravans (24 page)

She looked at me bitterly and said, “If you think that would put them at ease, send it to them. Frankly, I haven’t the guts.”

I was disgusted with her. She sounded like a freshman I knew at Mount Holyoke, except for two things: the other girl’s father sold stocks and bonds in Omaha, and in her sophomore year she got some sense. This Jaspar girl was irritating, and I said something which must have made me sound foolish: “When the years pass, you’ll be old. What will you do in a Kochi caravan then?”

“What will Senator Vandenberg do? He’ll be old. And you … what’s your first name, Miller?”

“Mark. Groton and Yale.”

“That’s just dandy. If there’s anyone I like to meet in the middle of the Afghan desert it’s a Yale man. Tell me, do you honestly believe that in my home town of Dorset, Pennsylvania, there’s a basic good, while here in Afghanistan there’s a basic evil?”

“I believe that anyone does best when he clings to his own nation, his own people … and his own religion. I understand you gave yours up.”

“Presbyterianism is not difficult to give up,” she replied.

“A moment ago I said to myself, She sounds like a Mount Holyoke freshman. I put you about four years too high. You sound like a high-school freshman.”

“Damn you!” she snapped. “I’m sitting here among the camels thinking: That poor dear boy, Mark Miller. Groton and Yale. The years will pass and he’ll be stuck in some pothole like the embassy in Brussels. And hell be old. And he’ll have missed
the whole meaning … the whole goddamned meaning.” She looked at me sadly and said, “You’re a young jerk and you’re already prematurely middle-aged and I’m terribly sorry for you.”

I stared at her. I said nothing for at least four minutes, just stared at her. Finally she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I surrender. Get me some paper. I’ll write the letter.”

I asked her if she would come inside, but she replied, “I never get enough of this free air,” and as I entered the caravanserai to get some paper from my brief case I met Zulfiqar and told him, “She’s going to write to her parents,” and he replied, “I asked her to, months ago.”

I handed her the paper and she sat scrunched up on the rocks, biting my pen. Then, as she started writing freely and easily, I had a second chance to study her. If I hadn’t just heard her bitter comments, I would have sworn that she was exactly what I had guessed when I first saw her in the caravanserai: a lovelier, more beautiful, more delightful person than we had seen in the embassy photographs. She simply did not look like a disgruntled post-adolescent. She was a mature, sensible-looking woman with a plenitude of charm, and if I could have erased her recent conversation I could easily have agreed with her enthusiastic roommate, whose report I now recalled so clearly:
Ellen Jaspar was a dear, sweet kid. She was loyal, responsive, and trustworthy.
It sounded like the Girl Scout oath, but now Ellen came to a difficult part of her letter and a scowl crossed her face—a harsh, belligerent scowl—and I could not possibly kid myself
into thinking that I was dealing with any Girl Scout.

“Will that do?” she asked, thrusting the finished letter at me. I took it, turned away from the bright sunlight, and read:

Thinking of my own close-knit family in Boston, I could have wept at her inability to communicate with her people. I returned the letter and said, “Sign it, and I’ll airmail it from Kandahar.”

But before writing her signature she let the pen hang idly and mused, “God knows, Miller, I told
them the truth. I am happy, healthy and alive. And if I were to grow old as pleasantly as Racha has done, I’d be content.”

She signed the letter, addressed the envelope carefully, then bit the pen for some moments. Extending the sealed letter provocatively toward me, she waved it twice, then studiously tore it into minute bits, which she scattered among the camels. “I cannot send such evasions,” she said hoarsely.

We stared at each other for some time and I saw in her eyes hatred, bitterness and confusion. But as I continued to look at her, these ugly attributes vanished and I saw merely the appealing gaze of an attractive, perplexed young woman. I said, “I’ll write to them.”

“Please do,” she replied.

I returned to the caravanserai, where I faced one of the more difficult decisions of my misson: on the one hand I was dead tired from the long, tragic day on the desert followed by the sleepless night at the pillar, so that my whole autonomic system demanded that I fall asleep; but on the other I awaited the momentary arrival of a rescue mission led by either Nazrullah or troops from Kandahar, so that before the rescue party took me away I wanted to see as much of Kochi life as possible. I forced myself to stay awake, watching the children and the older women working at their jobs. I thought constantly: I’m probably the only person from the American embassy who ever saw the Kochis close-up. I can sleep tomorrow.

But when I looked at Dr. Stiglitz, spread out on the floor by the pillar, it became impossible to fight sleep any longer. I dropped on the hard-packed
earth and almost immediately lost consciousness. My last memory was of Racha throwing a shawl over me.

I awoke in darkness and my first thought was: Good! If the rescue party hasn’t made it by now, they won’t come till tomorrow. I can stay with the Kochis tonight. The big room was filled with the smell of cooking, for Zulfiqar had ordered a substantial fire, around which many were working. Then I became aware of someone sitting beside me, and it was Mira in her red skirt, and when I stirred she said in Pashto, “Zulfiqar told me to keep the children away.” Then in broken English she said, “Ellen tell me English few words.” She spoke in a lilting, pleasant voice that sounded as if it belonged to a younger girl, and she had a gamin smile. When I reached out to inspect her attractive pigtails, which no other Kochis wore, she smiled with pride and explained, “Ellen fix my hair American way.” She pronounced Ellen’s name as her father did, in two gentle syllables.

In Pashto I asked, “Does Ellen work in the camp?”

“All work,” she replied in English, followed by Pashto: “Have you come to take Ellen away?”

“I wanted to, but she won’t come.”

“I am so glad.”

“Who told you I was going to take her away?”

“We’ve always known she would leave some day,” Mira replied. “Look how she works.”

Ellen, not knowing that I was awake, was busy at the fire, the antagonisms of her letter lost in work. Zulfiqar had killed a sheep in honor of the ferangi and it was roasting, with Ellen in charge to
see that it didn’t burn. From time to time she stuck a long fork into the flanks and tasted it, smacking her lips as she did so. Children stayed close to the fire, begging her for stray pieces of mutton, as if she were their mother, while against the wall lounged Kochi men, waiting silendy for the unscheduled feast. Other women were preparing pilau in stone vessels, while Dr. Stiglitz and Zulfiqar were opening K-rations, whose tops were promptly licked clean by other children. Except for the American cans, it was a scene that dated back to the beginning of man on the plains of Central Asia.

“We eat!” Zulfiqar announced, and it was exciting to watch Ellen, relaxed and motherly, standing by the roasted sheep and passing out portions as if she had done so all her life. From time to time, with greasy hands, she brushed her blond hair back from her moist face, appearing as feminine as any woman I had ever seen, and I recalled her words from the destroyed letter:
I am happy, healthy and alive.
Clearly she was, and when it came time to serve me she smiled as she gave me a chunk of well-browned meat.

“Be sure to try the nan,” she advised, as I helped myself to pilau.

Mira led me to a rug where the leaders were sitting, and I found a place across from Dr. Stiglitz, beside whom Ellen would sit. Later, when I tasted the nan Ellen asked, “Delicious, eh?” I replied that it had a nut-like flavor and she explained in English that it had been baked directly over dried camel dung. “Can’t you taste it?” she pressed, and I
could. In Pashto she said, “It is of the earth. It is of our life.”

Zulfiqar nodded and said, “The sheep you’re eating … we raised.”

Later I told Zulfiqar, “Ellen wrote the letter to her parents, but tore it up.” Ellen added, “Zulfiqar understands. I can’t explain Dorset to him, nor him to Dorset.”

The big Kochi chieftain said, “You write, Millair.”

“I will…tomorrow.”

My mention of this word evoked a sadness, and at our rug nothing was said; each looked at the other with a sense of strangeness. Mira broke the spell: “What will you tell her parents?”

“What should I tell them?” I asked the group, and to my surprise it was Racha who spoke.

“Tell them,” Zulfiqar’s wife said, “that now we head for the Oxus and in the winter back to the Jhelum. We live between the rivers.”

“But don’t call it the Oxus in your letter,” Ellen warned. “They’ll go crazy looking for it on their maps. Correct name’s the Amu Darya … about a thousand miles from the Jhelum … and we make the round trip each year.”

“Two thousand miles?”

“Each year.”

“You ride the camels?” I asked.

This occasioned great laughter and Ellen explained, “Only the babies ride camels. The rest of us … we walk.” She indicated Zulfiqar: “He has a horse, of course, but he must ride back and forth watching the animals.”

“Do you mind the walking?” I asked.

Ellen indicated her legs tucked beneath the black skirt. “They get very strong,” she assured me.

“How long has your clan been making this trip to the Jhelum?” I asked, and Ellen consulted Zulfiqar.

“There is no memory,” he replied.

“Where exactly is the Jhelum?” I asked.

“Far over the border in India,” was Zulfiqar’s answer, which caused me to burst into laughter.

The big Kochi looked at me quizzically and I explained, “At a meeting in the American embassy we were trying to guess where she might be.” I indicated Ellen, who said in English, “I’ll bet you were.” Quickly she translated the joke into Pashto, and the group laughed.

“And this important officer said”—I imitated Richardson’s pipe-puffing, self-assured style—” The chances of an American girl’s entering India without being noticed are just not measurable.’”

Zulfiqar chuckled. “The British! A million of us pass back and forth each year and no one knows where we go or how we feed ourselves.”

Ellen added, “We’re the wanderers who make fools of petty nations.”

“Where are you headed now?” I asked.

“Musa Darul, Daulat Deh … in twenty-five days, Kabul Bamian, Qabir …” Then he added a name that excited my imagination, for I had known it from boyhood days: Balkh, in ages past the greatest name in Central Asia.

“Balkh!” I said, and for a moment I daydreamed of how it would be to visit Balkh, but my fantasy was broken by Ellen, whose unpredictable behavior I was about to witness for the first time. Because
our argument over the letter had become acrimonious, I expected her to be resentful, but to my surprise, and for reasons I could not decipher, she said quietly, “We go right to Kabul.” Zulfiqar nodded, and from something in the way he acted or from some nuance in Ellen’s speech, I received the impression that I might be welcomed on the march to Kabul. I leaned forward to broach the matter and Mira did the same, as if she were anticipating hopefully my reaction to one of the most tenuous invitations ever extended.

“You go right to Kabul?” I repeated. No one spoke.

Then Zulfiqar said quietly, “You’re young. They’ll send soldiers to fetch the broken jeep.”

I turned to consult Dr. Stiglitz, whom I had continued to rebuff, and he said in English, hoping to win back my approval, “He’s right, Herr Miller. You should see the mountain passes. I’ll stay with the jeep.”

Ellen contradicted: “You must come too, Doctor. We could use you in the caravan.”

Zulfiqar leaned back and surveyed the ceiling, then asked Racha, “Could we use such a doctor at Qabir?” Racha studied the German and nodded, whereupon Zulfiqar warned, “We won’t reach Qabir for many weeks. Will you join us?”

Dr. Stiglitz licked his lips and replied weakly, “Yes.”