Caravans Page 4

  “Dimly?” Moheb was echoing. “The Jaspars looked at Nazrullah and me as if we had leprosy.”

  “What did Mr. Jaspar work at?” I asked. “Wasn’t it insurance?”

  “Yes. He had that sweet, affable nature that insurance men around the world acquire,” Moheb replied. “I liked him, and his wife was equally pleasant. He was also chairman, I believe, of the local draft board. A position of responsibility.”

  “Later on,” Shah Khan inquired, “didn’t you advise the Jaspars against an Afghan marriage?”

  “Yes. I met them in Philadelphia, and I brought along our ambassador from Washington, and the four of us … Nazrullah and Ellen knew nothing of this meeting and did not attend. We discussed the matter quite frankly.”

  “You told them the truth?” I asked.

  “Completely. As I recall, our ambassador was rather unhappy and thought the explicitness of my explanation unnecessary. Told me later I might have damaged our nation’s reputation. I told the Jaspars that if their daughter married Nazrullah, when she reached Kabul her American passport would be taken away and she could never thereafter leave Afghanistan, no matter what the excuse, without her husband’s permission. That she was an Afghan then and forever, and that she surrendered all claim to protection from America.”

  “You told them that as clearly as you are telling me?” Shah Khan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Mrs. Jaspar began to cry.”

  “Did you warn them about Afghan salaries and living conditions?” I asked.

  “I did. Most explicitly,” Moheb assured me. “I said, ‘Mr. Jaspar, Ellen mustn’t be deceived by the fact that in America Nazrullah drives a Cadillac and I a Mercedes. Our government is very generous to us as long as we’re abroad, but when we go home Nazrullah and I will get jobs that pay no more than twenty American dollars a month.’”

  “Did they believe you?”

  “They saw the cars and were sure I was lying. In Dorset, Pennsylvania, as in Kabul, cupidity is the same. The Jaspars were convinced that Nazrullah was very rich.”

  “What does he earn now?” I asked.

  The Khans conversed in Pashto and agreed that Nazrullah and his American bride had begun with a salary of twenty-one dollars a month and that it had now grown to twenty-seven, more or less.

  “And I explained the housing,” Moheb continued. “I said that for much of her life Ellen would live in a hovel, surrounded by women who despised her for not wearing the chaderi …”

  “Is it true, Your Excellency,” I asked, “that Afghanistan may soon discard the chaderi?”

  The old man leaned back in his red leather chair and replied, “You Americans seem inordinately preoccupied with the chaderi. Look!” and he pointed to the chair in the hall. “My own granddaughter wears the chaderi and her mother graduated from the Sorbonne.” I looked again at the fawn-colored shroud.

  “Does your granddaughter enjoy doing so?” I asked.

  “We do not concern ourselves about that,” Shah Khan replied.

  “But the Russians do,” I responded, touching a sore point with the old man. “They say they will force you to set your women free, as they have done theirs.”

  I knew instinctively that he wanted to speak further on this point, that he agreed with me and the Russians that the chaderi must go or revolution come, but he stopped the conversation with this observation: “I learned today that the young woman from your embassy, Miss Maxwell, was assaulted by three mullahs from the hills. You rescued her, I believe. Then you know how powerful these fanatics still are. The chaderi will remain.”

  “I assured the Jaspars,” Moheb continued, “that Ellen would not have to wear one, but that Nazrul-Iah’s family would hate her if she didn’t. I also warned them that if Ellen appeared in public without the chaderi, mullahs might spit at her.” His voice grew harsh as he added, “Miller Sahib, I told the Jaspars of every fact relating to ferangi wives in Afghanistan and later on I told Ellen herself. I was as honest as a man could be. I warned her that if she married Nazrullah she would become a woman without a country, a woman without a judge to protect her, a woman with no human rights at all, an animal … an animal.” He rose and walked with great agitation up and down the fortress room. “And I remember exactly what I said, Miller, because a year later I had to tell another girl, from Baltimore this time, the same dismal story, and this girl had sense enough not to marry me, but your damned Miss Jaspar went ahead and married Nazrullah, and now senators are trying to find out where she is.”

  He fell into a chair, poured himself a drink and reflected, “This preposterous Afghan government. It says, ‘When young Afghans go abroad they must live like gentlemen.’ So the government provides huge expense accounts and we buy Cadillacs. What allowance do you suppose I got when I was at the Wharton School? One thousand dollars every month. No wonder the girls wanted to marry us. But when that same government brought me home, you know the salary I got—twenty-one dollars a month. Right now, Nazrullah heads an irrigation project west of Kandahar and earns twenty-seven dollars a month … more or less.”

  “Is his wife with him?” I asked bluntly.

  “Which wife?” Shah Khan asked.

  I was startled. “What do you mean, which wife?”

  “Didn’t you tell the Jaspars about that?” Shah Khan asked his son.

  “There are some things an Afghan doesn’t discuss in a foreign country,” Moheb replied.

  “Was Nazrullah married before he went to America?” I pressed.

  “He had a family wife, of course,” Shah Khan explained. “But that signifies nothing.”

  “That’s not in the file,” I protested.

  “Enter it now,” the old man said. “Nazrullah was married before he met the American girl. That should put the Jaspars at ease.” As soon as he had said this, he apologized. “I’m sorry, Miller Sahib. That was ungenerous. I’m as worried as the Jaspars must be. Where is their daughter? They haven’t heard from her, you tell me, in more than thirteen months? What a terrible burden on good parents.”

  The old man began to cry, and wiped tears from his dark eyes. Afghans, I had learned, were very apt to cry on little notice, but these tears were real.

  When he had mastered his weeping he added in a beautiful French whisper, “Our family showed the same prudence as Nazrullah’s. Before we allowed Moheb to leave for England we married him to a local girl from a good Muslim family. We reasoned, ‘Later on, if he also marries an English girl, no harm will be done. When he works in Kabul he’ll have a Muslim family and when he’s sent to Europe he’ll have an attractive English wife.’ I remember discussing the matter with Nazrullah’s parents. We promised, ‘We won’t allow the boys to leave home till they’ve had one or two Afghan babies.’ It worked very well.”

  “Did you explain that to the Baltimore girl?” I asked Moheb.

  “No,” he replied honestly, “but I suppose it was what drove me to describe so frankly the other drawbacks of life in Afghanistan.”

  I put my hands squarely on the leather folder and said, “All right, where can the Jaspar girl be?”

  Shah Khan ordered a glass of orangeade, a foul sweet drink which abstemious Afghans took in place of alcohol. It was brought, of course, by a befezzed man, for in a country adhering to the chaderi, men must do much of the work usually done by women.

  “I’ve been pondering this problem,” Shah Khan reflected. “It isn’t easy to obtain news from a city as far away as Kandahar, but we manage. We find that Nazrullah and his American wife … you understand that his Muslim wife stays here in Kabul with the children?”

  “More than one child?” I asked.

  “Yes, he had one before he went to the Wharton School and one after he got back.”

  I pondered this, then pointed out, “But he must have been living with the Jaspar girl when he had the second child?”

  “Of course. But he also had responsibilities to his Afghan wife. She meri
ted consideration.”

  “So he gave her another baby?” I asked.

  “It’s difficult to comprehend our attitude toward women,” Shah Khan confessed. “We cherish them. We love them. We protect them. And we dedicate most of our poetry to them. But we don’t want them cluttering up our lives.”

  “I’d think that two wives would do just that,” I demurred.

  “My life is one of the most uncluttered I know,” Shah Khan assured me quietly, “yet I have four wives.”

  “Four?” I asked.

  Something in the way I looked at the old man amused him, for he said quietly, “You Americans picture a man with four wives as leaping from bed to bed till he drops of exhaustion. It isn’t like that … not at all. Fact is, in some ways I’m worse off than the average American businessman. He marries young, outgrows his wife and gets rid of her. I can’t. When a girl marries me, she leaves her home forever and I can’t send her back. I’ve got to support her in my home the rest of her life, unless I divorce her, which would be a public disgrace. So as the years go by I move these good women, one by one, into back bedrooms. In energy and money the American and the Afghan systems cost about the same.”

  Moheb interrupted, “The Muslim attitude toward women was a response to historical forces, and the interesting thing is that these same forces are acting now to make America polygamous.”

  Before I could challenge this surprising theory, Shah Khan observed, “Moheb’s right. Islam was born in a period when war and ambuscade killed off our men. Each family had a burdensome surplus of women, and Muhammad, with his superbly practical mind, saw there were only three ways of dealing with the matter. Either you converted the needless women into marketplace whores, or edged them into ritual celibacy, or portioned them out as extra wives. Muhammad, always the most moral of men, shuddered at prostitution and gave the women legal status as wives. He chose the flawless solution.”

  “How does this apply to America?” I asked.

  Shah Khan ignored my question. “So under our system I’ve had to take care of many women … wives, brothers’ wives, grandmothers. By the way, Miller Sahib, do you know anything of a Quaker school near Philadelphia called the George School? We’re thinking of sending my granddaughter Siddiqa there. The other girls have always gone to Paris.”

  Cautiously I asked, “How old is Siddiqa?”

  “How old is she?” Shah Khan asked.

  “Seventeen,” Moheb replied. “She prefers things American and we thought …”

  “It’s a good school,” I said. “Coeducational. Boys and girls.”

  “It isn’t a convent?” Shah Khan asked with some surprise.

  “Oh, no!”

  “That takes care of America,” Shah Khan growled. “Off she goes to Paris. But what Moheb said earlier is true. The forces that drove Islam to plural marriage will operate throughout the world. In France, for example, I thought their handling of the problem was pathetic … mistresses, liaisons, scandal, murder.”

  “But Moheb referred to America,” I pointed out

  The young diplomat sipped his whiskey, then reflected, “Do you know the thing which impressed me most in America? The frightening excess of women over men. In some cities like Washington and New York the situation was scandalous.”

  “You were there during wartime,” I pointed out.

  “And peacetime,” he reminded me. “You not only have more women than men in the population, but you also have an increasing number of young men who remove themselves from the marriage market. Homosexuality, Oedipus complexes, withdrawal from competition, psychological crippling …”

  Shah Khan interrupted to observe gently, “The point is, Miller Sahib, that brilliant young men like you come to Afghanistan and say, ‘Such a quaint land beset by such quaint problems.’ When I go to France or Moheb to America we make exactly the same observation.”

  “And the most quaint,” Moheb laughed, “is the way in which your society pretends to be shocked when some man is caught with two wives, legal or otherwise. What do you expect a girl to do when she realizes there aren’t enough husbands to go around? Grab someone else’s … I would.”

  Since I had not come to Shah Khan’s for a lecture on the shortcomings of my country, I asked abruptly, “Then Ellen Jaspar was last heard of in Kandahar?”

  “Not exactly,” Shah Khan replied. “We know she was there, because one day some mullahs attacked her on the street. Not wearing the chaderi. She distinguished herself by fighting back, and her husband joined her. Between them they kicked the devil out of the mullahs, and I’m glad they did.”

  “Must have made her popular in Kandahar,” I suggested.

  “Didn’t matter one way or the other,” Shah Khan laughed. “Most of us in government are bloody well fed up with mullahs, but we don’t know what to do about them. At any rate, her outburst didn’t harm Nazrullah’s chances, for shortly he was promoted to the best engineering job in the country. Set up headquarters in the old fortress at Qala Bist.”

  The old man’s eyes misted over at the mention of this great name in Afghan history and he asked, “Monsieur Miller, have you ever seen Qala Bist?”

  I hadn’t, but I refrained from comment because I didn’t want to get the old patriot off on a tirade about the vanished glories of Afghanistan. My trick didn’t work, for he said quietly, “This fantastic arch rising from the desert and reflected in the river. It’s as beautiful an arch as there is in the world. I much prefer it to Ctesiphon. No one recalls when it was built, but the building it was attached to must have been immense. There’s a fort nearby which surely housed ten thousand men, and an abandoned city of perhaps half a million. Now we don’t even remember what the city was named.”

  “What’s he doing at Qala Bist?” I asked, for I had learned at previous meetings that when Shah Khan started talking about the lost glories of Afghanistan, reaching back long before the days of Alexander the Great, there was no stopping him. In fact, I had acquired much of my Afghan history from such reminiscences, for unlike those of other men, the reflections of old Shah Khan were founded in fact. If he said Qala Bist had once been a city of half a million, it had been, and now even the history of the city was lost.

  “Nazrullah and his American wife went there for preliminary work on our big irrigation project,” Shah Khan explained.

  Moheb added, “We know that she reached Qala Bist, for we had letters from them. But that was nine months ago.”

  “What would your guess be?” I asked.

  “Judging from what’s happened to other ferangi wives”—both Moheb and his father used the word ferangi no matter what language they were speaking—“three things could have taken place. Miss Jaspar could have killed herself in despair, or she could have been locked up by her husband with no possibility of escape, not even to send a letter. Or she could have tried to run away. There’s a British railroad station, you know, at Chaman, but we’ve asked there and she didn’t reach Chaman.”

  “Your guess?” I insisted.

  “Putting myself in Nazruliah’s place,” Moheb ventured, “I would suggest these lines of possibility. Nazrullah was very kind to his American wife and tried to soften all the blows her vanity received. He took her as quickly as possible away from his domineering family, where his women must have made her life unbearable. At Kandahar he reasoned with her and helped her adjust to living on mud floors on twenty-seven dollars a month. She wanted to go back to America, but he refused permission, as was his right, and after a series of dreadful scenes she decided to run away on her own account and perished before she reached the frontier. It’s happened before.”

  “But why hasn’t Nazrullah reported these matters?” I asked.

  “For two reasons,” Moheb Khan replied, bowing to his father’s judgment. “First, she is only a woman and nothing to get excited about. When he gets back to Kabul he’ll explain everything. Second, because he truly loved Ellen Jaspar and still thinks she may have survived and will come back to him.” />
  We sat silent for some minutes and I noticed that the wintry darkness had enveloped us, stealing down from the Koh-i-Baba on icy blasts of wind that ripped across the plain which lay between the fortress walls. Snow eddied in the darkness like the passage of a white horse, and we were alone in the massive room of a massive fort that had withstood shocks from the Koh-i-Baba and from other quarters.

  “Would you object, Khan Sahib, if I went to Kandahar and Qala Bist? Some very important Americans insist upon knowing.”

  “If I were your age, Miller Sahib,” the old man replied, “I should have gone to Kandahar long ere this.”

  “I have your permission, then?”

  “My blessing. In spite of the rude comments of my son, we Afghans do get excited about beautiful women. And if she is a ferangi woman, we respect those ferangi who get excited about her, too.”

  To my own surprise, I asked abruptly, “Shah Khan, have you a photograph of your granddaughter, Siddiqa? The one who wants to go to School in America?”

  “No,” the old man replied. “We true Muslims don’t like photography. It seems a violation of our religious principles. An intrusion on the essence of a man.”

  “And especially a woman?” I laughed.

  “Yes, it is quite contrary to the spirit of the chaderi. But I will tell you this, Monsieur Miller, she is an unusually pretty girl, and she is the child whom you caught kissing the soldier in the bazaar this morning.”

  I was shocked by his knowledge of an event which I supposed that I alone had witnessed. “The Marines are already on their way to Khyber Pass,” I mumbled.

  “If they had not been expelled,” Shah Khan replied evenly, proving that his intelligence service covered Americans as well as Afghans, “I would not now be talking with you. Moheb, get Monsieur Miller’s jeep.”

  When the younger man had left, old Shah Khan rose from his leather chair and walked with me to the door. I looked past him for a moment, staring at the fawn-colored chaderi, and the former sensation of overpowering sexuality repossessed me, and I felt dizzy, as if the shroud were exuding its own perfume.

  “These damned girls!” The old man laughed. “They douse their chaderies with cheap French essence. To make the boys notice them more. Smell this!” And he picked up the fawn chaderi and smothered my face with it. The perfume was heavy and clung to my nostrils after he had withdrawn the silk.