Caravans (23 page)

“No man could have withstood what he withstood. He’d come back to the cage with his dirty little penis shriveled up and blue, and he’d say, ‘I am still alive.’ And the fat women, remembering their husbands dead somewhere in Germany, would take him in their arms.

“It was at this point, when pneumonia was about to begin, that he started greeting me each morning
with the same statement. Very polite. ‘Good morning, Herr Professor. I am still alive.’”

Stiglitz leaned against the pillar, weak with horror. Then he said in a ghost-like voice well suited to the silent room, “And all the time my filthy wife was going to bed with anyone who had a little authority.” He looked at me with the beseeching face a man uses when he is beyond personal salvation and asks help of a priest or a rabbi. In a kind of wail he protested, “But I was honest about the experiment. I could have killed Sem Levin any time I wished, and silenced that speech: ‘I am still alive.’ No, I held rigorously to the schedule as planned. We lowered the degrees day by day. My records will show that … exactly as planned.

“Much later than anyone would have dared predict, this dirty little Jew”—ten minutes ago he had been a
fine human being—
“contracted pneumonia. He should have died. By all human precedent he should have died. But those fat women somehow infused life into him. All that I took away they gave back. On the last three days he could scarcely make his voice heard, but he rasped, ‘Good morning, Herr Professor. I am still alive.’

“Finally we broke him. Would you believe it, Miller, he spent three days stark naked in a room two degrees above zero, your system.”

Neither of us spoke. Then, in a wild rage, he shouted, “That’s why, you stupid American, I could not make the decision yesterday. John Pritchard would have refused to live if we had left him there. If Sem Levin could refuse to die, why couldn’t Pritchard refuse to live? Tell me that, Mr. Know-it-all.”

“What happened?” I asked in unconcealed horror.

“He died. Two full weeks after we had predicted … fourteen days … he died. The man in charge was so infuriated with the fat women that he sent the whole cage full of Jews away.”

“Away?” I shouted. “Say it. Where?”

“Away,” he repeated dully. Then quickly: “I don’t know where he sent them. He signed the order … the other man.”

“Stiglitz,” I said quietly, trying to keep control of myself, “you’re lying.”

“No, no, Heir Miller. It was he who signed the order.”

“You’re lying,” I repeated, not moving.

“No, before God, he signed the order. For Sem Levin I was responsible. That I admit The records will prove my guilt regarding him. But the others …”

“Stiglitz!” I screamed, driven to my feet by an impulse outside me. “I am a Jew!”

He stared at me in awful disbelief, then drew back against the pillar. He tried to laugh, as if I were joking. He moved his mouth to speak but could say nothing, and failing, ran behind the pillar for protection. “Herr Miller …” he gasped weakly.

“I’m going to kill you,” I threatened, making a lunge at him, but he used the pillar adroitly to protect himself, and I did not touch him.

In the large room there was no furniture, no weapon of any kind except the knife he had used for scraping away the plaster. It had been left
lying on the earth near where I stood, but I didn’t see it. To my surprise, Stiglitz left the protection of the pillar and made a lunge at me. I felt I could handle him, although he was heavier than I, and I got set to tackle him head on, but my preparation was useless, because he had no interest in me. With a swoop, he fell on the knife and leaped to his feet, jubilant.

“I’m going to kill you,” I repeated slowly. “For Sem Levin and the others in the cage.” He grinned at me, holding the knife awkwardly with both hands before his chest, and I made a strong feint to the right, then a drive to the left, aiming a kick at his groin. I caught him well and sent him down in a screaming heap, with the useless knife still held before his chest. Had there been a chair in the room, I would have killed him then, beating him to death, but since I had only my hands, I refrained from leaping on him. Instead, I started kicking at him savagely as he lay huddled on the floor. Then, with a second feint at his head, I drove in with a powerful kick at his stomach, straightening him out and sending the knife softly into the dust. I made a football lunge at him and caught his throat in my hands.

I was about to strangle him when the great door of the serai creaked open, admitting daylight and a tall Afghan. With a deep voice he asked in Pashto, “Who would fight in a serai?” I looked up and saw above me a dark-faced man with mustaches and a flowing turban. Across his chest were bandoleers and in his belt a silver-handled dagger.

“Who would fight in a serai?” he repeated.

There was no reason,” I replied in Pashto, scrambling to my feet.

“Good,” he cried, and with a deft kick of his booted foot spun our knife against the wall, where it fell quietly to earth. Recovering it, he jammed it into his belt beside his own and said, “The knife I will keep.”

As he spoke, other men began filing into the fort and finally a woman, tall and stalwart, with bangles in her nose and no chaderi. Then I recognized who the intruders were: the Povindahs I had seen at Ghazni, and this tall man with the two daggers was the one whom Nur and I had met that day on horseback.

He seemed to recognize me too, for he turned away and strode to the door, where he issued commands which I could not hear. When he returned, additional men appeared bearing bits of wood and utensils, which they carried to the center of the room, where a substantial fire was started.

When it was well ablaze, with smoke drifting out a hole in the ceiling, three Povindah women marched in with that wild, matchless gait I had admired in Ghazni. They were dressed in good gray blouses and black skirts, and since they passed close to me and wore no chaderies, I stared at them and found them handsome … not beautiful in any way but handsome.

After they had taken their places about the fire another Povindah entered, and she was not only handsome; she was bewitching, a saucy pigtailed girl of seventeen or eighteen, dressed in red skirt and pink blouse. We looked at each other, and I recognized her as the girl chasing the goat at
Ghazni, and I saw that in her nose she wore no bangles and that her face was extremely clean and sensitive. She kept looking at me as she moved toward the fire and seemed to smile, as if she recognized me, and the grace of her movement reminded me of the gazelles, who could twist and turn at any moment, and so we stared at each other until the man with the bandoleers cried roughly, “Mira!” And the girl went to him for instructions which I did not hear.

She either did not understand what the leader directed or she thought his words unwise, for she stood perplexed, whereupon he gave her a shove and cried, “Mira, do as I say.” He propelled her from the serai and I had to assume that he was angry with her for having paraded before me, but I was wrong.

For soon she appeared at the door bringing with her a most beautiful young woman with blond hair, fair complexion and sparkling blue eyes. She was obviously not a Povindah, even though she was dressed as one in black skirt and bracelets. It had to be Ellen Jaspar—tanned from long hours of marching in the sun, slim, vibrant, more challenging even than her photographs.

I can’t recall now what I had expected Ellen to look like: vaguely, I had supposed she would be brittle, or obviously neurotic, or reticent with an overt fear of sex, or generally odd-ball like the typical college girl who reacts negatively to the world. She was none of these. Not a single cliché of the sterile revolutionary was visible in this unmarked, wonderful face, and I could hear Richardson of Intelligence
saying in the embassy:
I’d date that one. She’s stunning.

Then I understood why her husband, when I had asked him on the desert if she were in Afghanistan, had looked first to the eastern and western stars, judging from them that it was the season when his wife would return to this country with the march of the nomads. Any man who had ever known Ellen Jaspar would keep in his mind a schedule of her movements. It was to this band of Povindahs that she had run away, and I stepped forward to introduce myself and to tell her that I had come to rescue her. But before I could speak, she nodded slightly, as if she already knew who I was, and hurried past me to where Dr. Stiglitz remained in a dazed condition on the ground.

I remember clearly that her lips started to form a word, then stopped. On her second attempt she cried, “Dr. Stiglitz!” He looked up, saw who it was, and more or less collapsed, hiding his face from what he could scarcely believe.

She knelt beside him, took his hands and gently pulled him from the ground. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Madame Nazrullah, I can’t believe …”

Having restored him to his feet, she left him abruptly and came to me, her blond hair peeking from beneath an embroidered Asian cap. Standing before me she said graciouly, “I’m Ellen Jaspar, and you must be Mark Miller from the American embassy.”

“How did you know?” I asked in some confusion.

“Our people followed you at the execution in Ghazni,” she explained.

In some strange way her composure made me feel out of place, and I didn’t know what to say. “I’m glad to find you alive,” I fumbled.

She suppressed a smile and said, “The savages have treated me rather well.” Then she moved to the side of the tall leader and linked her arm with his in one of those automatic gestures which cannot be explained but which betray everything … only a woman who is living with a man ever makes that particular movement. Ellen Jaspar had run off with the leader of a nomad caravan, and it must have been this improbable rumor that had reached Shah Khan in Kabul. Little wonder that he had refused to repeat it or have it attributed to him in our embassy records.

“This is Zulfiqar,” Ellen announced.

“Is the feud ended?” the big nomad asked Stiglitz and me. When we nodded he cried, “Then let us eat!” And I had my first meal with the nomads.

We had not finished breakfast when two Povindah boys with darting eyes and quick gestures—the kind who steal you blind in a bazaar—came yelling that a jeep was hidden in one of the rooms. The Povindahs piled out to see the vehicle and Zulfiqar demanded, “Whose is it?”

“Mine,” I said.

“Why is it here?”

I pointed to the broken axle and explained, “I hit rocks on the dasht.”

“What were you doing on the dasht?”

The Povindahs gathered round, and since Dr. Stiglitz was still unnerved by the unforeseen consequences of the pillar, I had to explain Pritchard’s death in Pashto. Having done so, I began translating into English for Ellen, but she interrupted, in good Pashto, “I learned the language.”

When we returned to our breakfast, Zulfiqar surprised me by inquiring bluntly, “Now what do you want to ask us about Ellen?” He pronounced her name gently, in two careful syllables:
Ellen.

I turned to Ellen and asked, “When you first saw me … how did you know who I was?”

Zulfiqar replied. “They told us in Ghazni.”

“No one in Ghazni knew what I was doing,” I protested.

At this Zulfiqar laughed and indicated with his thumb that Ellen was to speak. She brushed back her blond hair and chuckled. “Two minutes after you arrived in Ghazni, Mira saw you in the bazaar.”

“There were no women in the bazaar at Ghazni.”

“Mira is everywhere.”

“Is that true of all Povindahs?”

The indulgent smile on Zulfiqar’s face disappeared and he banged his extended fingertips onto the rug from which we were eating. “We’re not Povindahs!” he exploded. “That’s an ugly name given us by the British. It means that we’re permitted”—his voice assumed much scorn—“permitted, if you will, to cross into their lands. We are the Kochis, the Wanderers, and we ask no nation’s permission to cross boundaries. It was we who established the boundaries, centuries ago!” He subsided, but warned me quietly, “We are the Kochis.”

Ellen resumed: “Mira saw you in the bazaar and sprinted back to camp to warn us that a ferangi was in town. She already knew that you were from the embassy, had a jeep, traveled with an Afghan driver who worked for the government, and that you were headed for Kandahar. Don’t ask me how she knew.”

I looked at Mira, whose dark eyes were flashing satisfaction. She smiled, but said nothing.

“When you attended the stoning of the woman, three of our men were spying on you. Later they talked with your armed guards. They found you were headed for Qala Bist, and when you hiked
out to our camp at the edge of Ghazni, I watched you from the tents.”

Zulfiqar smiled again and said, “She wanted to speak then, but I argued, ‘No. Don’t spoil his fun. He’s a young man. Let him go to Qala Bist. Find out for himself. Let him follow us across the desert. He’ll talk about it the rest of his life.’”

I was struck by his shrewdness and recalled the things I would have missed: Kandahar, the arch at Qala Bist, The City, and this caravanserai. In some way I must have betrayed my thoughts, for with a twist of his hand he imitated a man fighting with a knife and observed, “A caravanserai at dawn … who would steal this from a young man?”

I looked at Zulfiqar with new respect and reminded him, “You offered to answer my questions. Why is Miss Jaspar here?”

With no resentment he explained. “Last September we camped for three days at Qala Bist. On our way to winter quarters at Jhelum. And this American woman came out from the fort to visit with our children … with our women. She spoke some Pashto and our people talked. She asked them where we were going, and they said, the Jhelum. She asked by what route, and they told her Spin Baldak, Dera Ismail Khan, Bannu, Nowshera, Rawalpindi. As we were leaving she came to me and said, ‘I’d like to travel with your caravan!’ I asked her why, and she replied …”

“I said,” Ellen interrupted in Pashto, “that I would like to march with the free people.”

I turned to Ellen and asked in English, “Is he married?”

In Pashto she replied, so that all the nomads
could hear, “It seems I can love only married men.” Then she pointed to one of the handsome older women and said, “That’s Racha, Mira’s mother.” It was thus made obvious to all what my English question had been, and thus I began my acquaintance with Ellen Jaspar in irritation and embarrassment.

The older woman, with a golden bangle in her nose, bowed gracefully, and I felt like a reproved child. I thought: I’m two years older than Ellen Jaspar, but she makes me feel like an infant. I remember that as I finished this thought, I happened to look across the rug and saw that Mira was smiling at my confusion.

When we finished eating, Zulfiqar asked Ellen in Pashto, “Is the fat one a doctor?” Ellen replied that he was, and Zulfiqar said, “Ask him if he’d look at some of our people.” Ellen said, “Ask him yourself. He speaks Pashto.”

“I’d be happy to help,” Stiglitz volunteered, eager to reestablish himself after the fight at the pillar.

Zulfiqar announced, “The doctor will look at your sores,” and the Kochis lined up to show him torn fingers, scarred legs and teeth that should have been yanked earlier. As I watched Stiglitz work, I was again impressed by his skill in handling sick people and I was torn between admiring him as a doctor and hating him for what he had once done as a doctor; while on his part he began to revive his hope that in spite of last night I might still recommend his employment by our embassy. Once he looked at me with a half-smile and asked in English, “For a people without doctors, the Kochis
are quite healthy, aren’t they? They get along very well without doctors.”

I felt it unnecessary for me to put him completely at ease, so I ignored the question and had started toward the door when I was met by a travesty of a nomad, one of the funniest-looking men I ever saw. He was about five feet three, scrawny, unshaved, dirty, and clothed in the grimiest rags imaginable. He wore his filthy turban with one end almost to his knees and grinned through broken teeth and a left eye that had a scar dropping three inches from the corner to his jawbone. He shuffled along in sandals that almost fell from his feet and nodded obsequiously to all.

He had been bitten by something, and showed his left arm to Dr. Stiglitz, who asked, ‘’What happened?”

“That damned camel!” the man railed, spitting between his black teeth.

“Looks like you’ve been chewed,” Stiglitz mused, looking at the ugly, extended wound.

“This is Maftoon,” Ellen explained. “He tends the camels. What happened, Maftoon?”

“That damned camel!” the little man repeated.

“He has great trouble with the beasts,” Ellen laughed. She spoke rapidly with Maftoon and he nodded. “One of the camels gummed his arm,” she said.

“Don’t you mean bit?” I asked.

“No, I mean gummed. Camels have no upper teeth, you know. At least not in front. When they get mad at you, and Maftoon’s are always mad at him, they gum you.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Come along,” she volunteered, and she took me out to the camels, where she threw bits of nan at them, so that they opened their mouths wide to catch the food and I could see that she was right. In front the beasts had strong lower teeth but no uppers, only a broad plate of hard gum against which they bit to chew off grass or other fodder. In back, of course, they had grinding teeth.

“I never heard of this,” I said, looking for a baby camel that I could inspect more closely.

“Try this one,” Ellen suggested, and she called an enormous brute some nine feet tall at the hump, the female with a bad disposition who had attacked Maftoon and sent him to the doctor. “This old devil hates Maftoon but gets along well with me. Hey, hey!” she called, and the huge beast came close, lowered her head, and nuzzled Ellen for a piece of nan. The split upper lip opened and Ellen pressed her thumb against the hard flat gum, then threw a chunk of nan, which the camel caught. “You try it,” she said, and I took the nan and got the old camel to open her mouth. The plate against which her lower teeth hit was hard as bone.

“Extraordinary,” I said as the big beast ambled away, but as she did so she caught sight of little Maftoon coming from the doctor, and she began to make noises, showing her irritation. I say “make noises” but I’m sure that isn’t the right phrase: the camel uttered a sound that was a combination groan, growl, gurgle and grunt. And it was clear that whereas Ellen and I could inspect her teeth, Maftoon had better stand clear.

“Watch!” Ellen whispered, as the little camel
driver took off his turban and threw it on the ground. He took off his long shirt, his tattered pants, his sandals, everything until he stood quite naked. Then he moved back and waited while the embittered camel shuffled up, smelled the clothes and began kicking them violently. She bit them, stamped on them, spit at them and then pushed them about the sand with her head. When she had vented her spleen she stalked majestically away, gurgling and grunting.

When she was gone, Maftoon recovered his clothes, dressed and went in pursuit of the placated camel. When he reached her head he scratched her neck, she gurgled amiably, and the two walked off toward the meager pasture.

“What’s it all about?” I asked.

“The old camel drivers believe … and it seems to work … that a camel bears terrible grudges. Maftoon and the old lady had a fight, and even though she gummed his arm, she’d attack him again and again unless he allowed her to fight his clothes. She’s satisfied and tomorrow he’ll be able to load her again.”

We followed the little man and his camel for some distance, then sat on rocks to watch the animals graze over land where I could see nothing. Ellen said, “I never tire of watching camels. I suppose it goes back to my Sunday school in Dorset, Pennsylvania. At Christmas we traced camels on the wall. Goodness, that seems years ago.”

My interrogation of Nazrullah had been so constantly postponed that I was determined to learn as much as possible in my one day with the Kochis,
so I launched right in: “Why won’t you write to your parents?”

She was expecting some opening attack like this and replied easily, “What could I tell them?” She looked at me pleasantly as the bright sun illuminated her well-scrubbed face. “If they couldn’t understand a simple problem like Nazrullah, how could they possibly understand this?” She pointed to Maftoon, the camels and the caravanserai.

“Perhaps I could understand.”

“Not likely.” She spoke with a contempt which erased the pleasantness I had observed before.

“Nazrullah is still very much in love with you. What happened?”

“He’s very kind. He’s very tedious,” she replied.

I was irritated by her assumed superiority and was about to comment on it when I saw at the caravanserai gate the tall figure of Zulfiqar, spying on us, but after a while I had to conclude that he was not spying, for he seemed neither jealous nor suspicious; he looked as if he were glad that Ellen had found a chance to talk with an American. I thought: Wonder what they talk about when they’re alone. Aloud I asked, “Can Zulfiqar read and write?”

“Books, no. Figures … better than either of us.”

She said this in a bored manner implying that no further comment from me would be welcomed, so I observed, “Nazrullah seemed one of the ablest men in the country.”

“He is,” she said with equal finality and equal boredom. Then with a show of real warmth she added, “His wife Karima’s even better.”

“I met her…inchaderi.”

“Karima! She never wears chaderi if she can help it.”

“I had a government official with me.”

“That’s how it works,” she observed, reverting to a monotone. “Karima observes the custom to protect Nazrullah, and he assures the government that he approves in order to protect Karma.”

It was a neatly phrased summary, but I remembered what Nazrullah had said on the desert:
On the morning after the marriage Ellen came to breakfast wearing a chaderi.
Probably I should have kept my mouth shut, but she had gone out of her way to irritate and embarrass me, so I remarked, “Nazrullah told me that when you first came to Afghanistan you wore the chaderi.”

She blushed angrily, blood coursing across her beautiful face. “Nazrullah talks a lot,” she said.

“Karima talked a lot, too,” I continued. “She told me that while you were still in America you learned that Nazrullah already had a wife.”

She laughed uneasily. “Why are you American men so preoccupied with such trivialities? Of course I knew he was married. This proves, Mr. Miller, why you could never understand my reasons for leaving Dorset, Pennsylvania.”

“Any chance of my understanding why you left Nazrullah?”

She looked at me steadily, almost insultingly, with deep blue eyes, then laughed. “No one who works for the American embassy could possibly understand.”

That did it. “If you were a man,” I said coldly, “I’d bust you in the nose. Why don’t you have the decency to tell your parents where you are?”

My bluntness shocked her and she bit her knuckles, then toyed nervously with the embroidery on her blouse. “Your question is a sensible one, Mr. Miller, and it hurts. My parents are good, decent people and I’m sure they mean well. But what can I possibly write to them?” She looked at me with the first compassion I had seen since we started talking, but it quickly faded. “Would you suggest something like this?” she asked brightly, as she began reciting an imaginary letter.