Caravans Page 6

  “But did it prepare you for today? Getting up at six to type a play because you wanted to be here with us? Being assaulted by mullahs in the bazaar? Seeing wolves rushing at your car?”

  “No,” Miss Maxwell said calmly. “The reports in Washington did not prepare me for any of that. I never dreamed that I could find a room anywhere in the world as warm, as human as this one. Almost everyone I care for deeply is right here, tonight. As for the mullahs and the wolves, I wasn’t prepared for them, either. Right now I don’t believe they happened.”

  “Exactly what I meant,” Sir Herbert said, holding his hands up toward the group. “Reality in no way prepared me for the Kashmiri bears. I’m sure that dreadful incident never happened. But, Miss Maxwell, sometime years from now, those wolves will be as real to you as that stricken bear is to me. And to each of us, years from now, Afghanistan will be real, too.”

  “You make it sound far too difficult to understand my country,” Moheb Khan contradicted. “It’s very easy, really. All you have to do is read what Colonel Sir Hungerford Holdich said about us in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” He pronounced the names with exaggerated precision.

  “What are you saying?” the Swedish girl asked in French.

  “With your permission,” Moheb Khan said, bowing to Sir Herbert and taking down from the library shelf Volume I of the Britannica. Opening it to the article on Afghanistan he read in a sardonic accent:

  “The Afghans, inured to bloodshed from childhood, are familiar with death, and audacious in attack, but easily discouraged by failure; excessively turbulent and unsubmissive to law or discipline; apparently frank and affable in manner, especially when they hope to gain some object, but capable of the grossest brutality when that hope ceases. They are unscrupulous in perjury, treacherous, vain and insatiable, passionate in vindictiveness, which they will satisfy at the cost of their own lives and in the most cruel manner. Nowhere is crime committed on such trifling grounds, or with such general impunity, though when it is punished the punishment is atrocious. Among themselves the Afghans are quarrelsome, intriguing and distrustful; estrangements and affrays are of constant occurrence; the traveler conceals and misrepresents the time and direction of his journey. The Afghan is by breed and nature a bird of prey. If from habit and tradition he respects a stranger within his threshold, he yet considers it legitimate to warn a neighbor of the prey that is afoot, or even to overtake and plunder his guest after he has quitted his roof. The repression of crime and the demand of taxation he regards alike as tyranny. The Afghans are eternally boasting of their lineage, their independence and their prowess. They look on the Afghans as the first of nations, and each man looks on himself as the equal of any Afghan.

  “Now that’s all one paragraph, mind you,” Moheb Khan warned us, “and I used to wonder how long it would take me to acquire the attributes I was, as a typical Afghan, supposed to have. Crafty, lying, deceitful I was, but what do you suppose kept me from qualifying? That troublesome bit about the bird of prey. How does one transform himself into a bird of prey? Well, I gave up on that first paragraph, but the next one offered hope. May I continue?”

  “Proceed,” Sir Herbert said.

  Moheb Khan smiled, adjusted the heavy volume and read on:

  “They are capable of enduring great privation, and make excellent soldiers under British discipline, though there are but few in the Indian army. Sobriety and hardiness characterize the bulk of the people, though the higher classes are too often stained with deep and degrading debauchery. The first impression made by the Afghan is favorable. The European, especially if he come from India, is charmed by their apparently frank, openhearted, hospitable and manly manners; but the charm is not of long duration, and he finds that the Afghan is as cruel and crafty as he is independent.”

  With a flourish, Moheb Khan slammed the encyclopedia shut and stared at the readers. “You know, there’s a funny thing about this. It was written by an Englishman who was totally perplexed as to how we Afghans had managed to thrash the living daylights out of English armies … twice. The man who wrote this must have perched himself on a stool in a little room and thought for some time: What kind of men are these Afghans, that they can defeat our armies? And he composed the description of a man who was as unlike an Englishman as possible, and then he wrote it properly in this big book, which I first read at Oxford. And what was my reaction? At that time? I was proud that a ferangi had seen so deeply into my character and had written with such respect. Today, when I am older, these seem like words of hatred or ignorance. They are not. They are profound words of respect from a scholar who simply had to know how we Afghans generated our capacity to fight Never forget that marvelous peroration: ‘the charm is not of long duration, and he finds that the Afghan is as cruel and crafty as he is independent.’”

  “Moheb!” I cried. “You’ve memorized the passage, haven’t you?”

  “Only the favorable parts,” he laughed.

  “You think ‘cruel and crafty’ one of the good parts?” Miss Askwith inquired.

  “When you use those characteristics to defend the end word of the sentence, they’re good,” Moheb replied. “Always remember the end word, Miss Askwith. Independent.” Then he laughed easily and said, “But through trying years you English have come to know me as your trusted friend. Otherwise, how would I dare read such an English passage inside these walls, where twice my cruel and crafty ancestors murdered every Englishman resident in Kabul? In 1841 we did that evil thing, and in 1879 we played an encore, and I think it damned gracious of you even to have me here.”

  “Don’t think we English forget the massacres,” Sir Herbert said gravely. “It lends a certain spice to life in Kabul. Within these red and crumbling walls. Sort of like living in Hiroshima when an airplane flies overhead.”

  “I think we should get on with the reading,” I suggested.

  “He’s to be the star,” a young British officer teased. He was my principal rival for the attentions of Miss Gretchen Askwith.

  “As a matter of fact,” one of the Frenchmen said in French, “he’s supposed to kiss Ingrid.”

  “I am,” I said eagerly, “and I’d appreciate it if we got to that part before morning.”

  “Wise boy,” Ingrid laughed. “In the morning I look dreadful.”

  It was in this mood that the reading began. During the first act, the voices seemed strange, for the Englishman who was supposed to be Harry Brock remained an Oxford aesthete, and Ingrid could be no more than a Swedish beauty with prominent breasts, while the others remained themselves, including me, who never transmuted myself into anything but an eager young man from the American embassy. But the fire was warm. The audience was attentive. And outside there was the smell of wolves, and no one could forget that he was in Afghanistan in the deep of winter, far, far from what he knew as civilization. I think even Moheb Khan was affected by the experience, for at the end of the first act he asked, “Sir Herbert, have the evenings I missed been as good as this?”

  “Since I’ve been here they have,” the Englishman replied. “Three weeks ago we read Murder in the Cathedral. I was asked to be Thomas à Becket.”

  “Oh, I should like to have seen that!” Moheb cried. “American college folk are very fond of T. S. Eliot. They adore him as a fellow citizen who became a poet, and respect him for having had the character to flee America, which they would like to do, but can’t.”

  I’m afraid I had fallen rather deeply into the part I was reading, that of the intellectual reporter from the New Republic, and I said, “Like Eliot, you fled America, Moheb, but unlike him you regret it every minute.”

  “Agreed!” the affable Afghan cried. “If there’s one thing I like it’s fast cars and a sense of irresponsibility. In America I had both, and every day I work here in Afghanistan I regret their passing.” He raised his palms in a gesture of submission, then added, “But at some point in our lives, we must grow up.”

  “I am sure your coun
try will,” I replied evenly. Moheb, rather pleased with his earlier remarks, flushed slightly but nodded pleasantly, for he was not the kind of fighter who refused to accept his adversary’s blows; he rather respected the man who could strike back.

  “Will anyone have more spiced rum?” the ambassador inquired, and as the servants refilled our drinks, and as the fire grew brighter, we reformed our group and the reading of Act Two commenced. By now we were more accustomed to our roles, and the audience accepted whatever peculiarities we exhibited. If tonight Harry Brock spoke not Brooklynese but an exaggerated Oxford—one as bad as the other, I thought—we were willing to accept this convention, and when Ingrid cried, “Would you do me a favor, Harry? Drop dead?” she sounded exactly like the dumb blonde of all countries, of all time. By the end of the act we had created, there in the old fortress, that ambience which dramatists seek but which so often eludes them. Actors and audience were one, moving together and accepting each other as equals. Partly, I think, it was because each person in that warm, quiet room knew that if he did not achieve some kind of satisfaction from our play, there was nothing else in Afghanistan to which he could escape. Either he attained catharsis now, or he was self-sentenced to days of non-participation. So each of us reached out to the other, made overtures that normally we would not have made, because each knew that for the forthcoming sixteen or eighteen months we would find joy with our repetitive neighbors, or we would find no joy at all. That was why life in Kabul-sans roads, sans movies, sans news, sans everything—was so profoundly meaningful. We probed the secrets of a few rather than glossing over the chance acquaintanceship of many, and each new thing we discovered about our colleagues uncovered new significance. For example, I had never imagined that glamorous Ingrid owned such a naughty wit.

  The conversation that developed after Act Two was much different from that which followed Act One. Somehow, the play had insinuated itself into our intellect and had taken command. We poor inadequate readers had transcended ourselves, and the characters we were purporting to create had actually come to life. Harry Brock and his aspiring blonde were with us in the stout-walled embassy.

  “We could use a few of your type in our country,” Moheb Khan said to the Englishman playing the part of the junk dealer, and he meant not the actual Oxford boy but his play part, the junk dealer.

  “There’s a great deal to be said about good old Harry that isn’t said in this play,” the Englishman agreed. “Miller, how much of the building of America is to be credited to men like our Harry?”

  “A good deal, I should imagine, and I think it’s rather clever of you to discover the fact. You’ve not been in America, have you?”

  “No, but reading this part makes one recall how inevitably one thinks of Harry Brock as the archetype American. We excoriate him, just as this play does, but we forget that he is also the life force of the nation, whether any of us likes him or not.”

  Miss Gretchen Askwith threw palpitations into the hearts of various young men by observing, “Really, Mark, you read your part exceedingly well. Have you studied dramatics?”

  “In school I was in Outward Bound.”

  “We intended reading that,” Sir Herbert interrupted, “but the younger group thought it terribly dated. Do you agree, Miller?”

  “I’m afraid I do, but I also think we should read it. It’s fun.”

  “British, isn’t it?” Sir Herbert asked.

  I did not respond to Sir Herbert’s question, for I was looking at Gretchen, and there in the crowded room I had a distinct premonition that Gretchen and I would be thrown together increasingly in Kabul … that it would become automatic for all hostesses to invite “Gretchen and Mark,” and that sometime in the next years all would be asked to Shah Khan’s great compound, where a tent would be erected and where Moheb Khan would ride up on his white horse to serve as my best man while the marriage was performed.

  It was an inevitable progression, Gretchen Ask-with and Mark Miller to the altar in Afghanistan; but as I looked at her and saw her blushing, for she must have been entertaining the same premonition of inevitability, her face was obliterated and I saw only a fawn chaderi, smelling of perfume, and a pair of American saddle shoes, and I heard the name Siddiqa, and I looked at Siddiqa’s uncle, Moheb Khan, and I knew that it would never happen that I should marry Gretchen Askwith, no matter how inevitable our courtship. I longed to see the hidden face of Siddiqa Khan. I was mesmerized by the flowing movement of her chaderi, by the exquisite sense of sex this child had somehow managed to evoke.

  Sir Herbert repeated his question: “Isn’t Outward Bound a British play?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I always supposed it was by a sentimental American who wanted to sound British.”

  “You may be right,” Sir Herbert replied with the thin smile that served him as a laugh.

  The reading of Act Three recaptured the intensity that we had created in Act Two. The laughter at our jokes was rather more explosive than it should have been, and my courting of Miss Ingrid more emotionally received. A good many people in the room were wondering what was going to happen to Ingrid—the person, not the character—and it gave our play an adventitious prurience to have me, one of the unmarried men, attracted to her, even in make-believe.

  As we ended our reading there was genuine applause. Our audience was grateful that for a few hours we had provided them with escape, and when the snowy winds whirling down from the Hindu Kush whistled outside, the gratitude increased. I knew there would arise, as had arisen before, a longing not to shatter the illusion of the night, and that we would sit around for hours and talk, hoping to extend the human warmth we had created.

  We were astonished, therefore, when Moheb Khan said rather explosively, “Miss Ingrid, may I drive you home?”

  The Swedish girl smiled graciously at the Afghan and replied, “Yes.”

  Within a moment Moheb had his coat and hers. He summoned his driver from the kitchen quarters where all the Afghan drivers were resting, and from the manner in which Ingrid nestled into her fur coat and then onto the arm of Moheb Khan, we intuitively knew that she had allowed the part she had been playing to influence her normal personality. There could be little doubt that Moheb and Ingrid would be bedded down that night. When the door opened and we caught the snowy blast and saw Ingrid move even closer, that last little doubt was erased.

  When the door closed, one of the Frenchmen asked, “But isn’t Moheb Khan already married?”

  “He has two wives,” one of the Englishwomen volunteered.

  “Both Afghan?”

  “Of course. He wanted to marry an American, but it didn’t come off.”

  No one could have anticipated where this line of conversation might lead, but it was forestalled, and properly so, by Sir Herbert, who said, rather petulantly, I thought, “We really ought to read Outward Bound. I’ll offer myself as the bartender.” There was an immediate flurry of casting and a determination as to which secretaries would type out the required copies of which acts. Miss Maxwell, indestructible American that she was, offered to do the longest and others fell in line.

  Then Sir Herbert said, “For the young lovers we’ll have Gretchen and Mark.” The audience looked at us as if we had been set apart, and my former sensation of the inevitability of love in Afghan surroundings returned. Gretchen smiled, a wonderful British smile with white teeth and flushed cheeks. There was a moment of painful indecision, which I fractured by suggesting, “May I drive you home, Gretchen?”

  My question was so parallel to Moheb Khan’s, the situation was so transparent, that Gretchen flushed again, then laughed prettily and said, “Sir Herbert, you must keep them from talking about us, too.”

  Sir Herbert grew red, looked at Lady Margaret, then said, “I think you should know by now that in Kabul any pretty unmarried girl is fair game for all sorts of speculation. Are you riding with Mark?”

  “Yes,” Gretchen snapped saucily. “Yes, I am. Just the way Ingrid went with Moheb
.” She did not yet have her coat on, but she grabbed my arm possessively.

  Sir Herbert smiled wanly and said, “I dare say Freddy and Karl will be damned unhappy about your decision.”

  “At the next reading I’ll ride home with Freddy and Karl,” she laughed, slipping into the coat which an Afghan servant held for her.

  Lady Margaret interrupted. “But at the next reading you and Mark are to be lovers.”

  Gretchen flashed her wittiest smile at her superior’s wife. “Lady Margaret, haven’t you noticed? At the end of a reading the actress is so irritated with her stage lover that she wishes to have no more to do with him. After all, in our play tonight Ingrid and Mark were lovers. But she made no move to go home with Mark. By the time the next reading’s finished, I’ll be fed to here with dear Mark.” With her hand she made a line across her eyebrows. “Tonight, he is my gallant champion, to keep me from the wolves.” To my surprise, she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek.

  “Bravo, Gretchen!” Lady Margaret applauded.

  “Looks as if you’re losing your secretary to the Yanks,” Sir Herbert huffed at the ambassador, as I led Gretchen to the jeep which Nur Muhammad had driven up.

  Not all the British hands could find quarters in the embassy grounds, ample though they were, and some lived in Kabul proper, in a spacious walled house west of the public square. It was quite the liveliest spot in town, filled with laughter, ponderous jokes which the British overseas so love, and a fairy-tale kind of make-believe which has enabled them to live in reasonable relaxation in almost any portion of the globe. I was often in this house and I remember it now mostly as a center of things hearty. When I first came to know it and its occupants I wondered how a man ever got an English girl into bed. What did they do with her hockey stick? How did he halt her from making very witty jokes about nothing? Now, as I started to ride homeward with one of the prettiest English girls I had ever met, I was bothered by the same questions.

  But as we rode over the winding trail that led from the embassy to Kabul, and as we saw to our left the soaring mountains of the Hindu Kush, outlined in snowy moonlight, the trivial problems of courtship left us, and we were two strangers from alien lands traveling across one of the high plateaus of the world. Gretchen moved closer to me, and we held hands as our jeep approached the first houses of Kabul.