Caravans Read online

  Then we saw lights—actual flaming torches—as men hurried to and fro and a wagon with horses approached. There was a crowd in the road, and Nur Muhammad left the jeep to find out what had happened. In a moment he returned to report without inflection, “The wolves found an old man.”

  It must have ended quickly. Fifteen to twenty wolves, by local count, had struck the man and torn him to pieces within a few minutes. Now they were raging somewhere to the east and soldiers were out to shoot a few, after which the others would retreat. Nur Muhammad drove the jeep past the scene of mutilation and we reached the English dormitory.

  Pretty Gretchen said, “Will you come in?” and I said I would, for I knew that on the morning following a reading no one would get to his office promptly, and in the English house there would be fun and good talk and kissing beneath the stairs. But when I started in, I saw Nur Muhammad sitting in the jeep and I said, “Nur, you can go home. I’ll walk across the park.” But he said, “You mustn’t They haven’t shot the wolves yet.” And from the east we heard sounds and could tell that something was rushing down the narrow streets, and I did not want to be in the English house that night.

  “I’ll take Nur Muhammad home,” I apologized. “He’s been working since dawn.”

  Almost as if relieved of a heavy burden Gretchen said, “I do think that’s best,” and I bounded, with improper haste I reflected later, into the jeep.

  “Let’s find the wolves,” I cried to Nur, and we spurred the jeep east of the American embassy and along one narrow street after another until we were on the edge of town, with soldiers well to the south. They were moving slowly northward, hoping to come upon the animals, and we could see lights moving mysteriously along the edge of the river.

  We stayed there in the snowy moonlight for some time alone, on the edge of an ancient city with the Hindu Kush rising to our left and the immensity of Asia all about us: to the east the Khyber Pass, to the north the Oxus River and the plains of Samarkand, to the south the bazaars of Kandahar and the limitless deserts of Baluchistan, and to the west the strange lake that vanishes in air, and the minarets of Shiraz and Isfahan. It was a moment of immensity in which I sensed the hugeness of Central Asia, that semi-world with a chaderi over its face, and just as the chaderi of Siddiqa had contained its own perfume, now the crisp, silent night with the flickering lights along the river possessed its particular power. It was the smell of frozen fields, biting on the nostril, the aroma of the bazaar, great and filthy even in the night, and the clean, sweet smell of pine trees that hid behind garden walls. Those were moments I shall never forget, when the vastness of Asia, whose distant mountain passes had sent us the wolves, was borne in upon me and I wondered how I had been lucky enough to draw an assignment in Kabul, the most remote of capitals.

  My reverie was broken by shots to the south; gunflashes could be seen. The soldiers must be near at hand. I remember distinctly that at that moment, when the light of the guns added illumination to the crystal, snowy night, I thought: It was nights like this that the Russian writers spoke of, the white nights of Russia. It was a vagrant thought, shattered by a rush of sound.

  Moving up from the river, across fields that were now barren, came the wolves: fifteen, eighteen, they were so close-packed I could not count. They seemed not to be running. They were moving as one giant animal, its heads looking out from side to side and finding no food. It was a terrifying, possessive animal that moved across the snow, a force driven by forces outside itself, an embodiment of Asia and the great mountains.

  One of the wolves must have smelled Nur and me, for the pack suddenly veered directly toward us, but when its leaders saw not men but the mechanical jeep, whose headlights now exploded with brilliance, the animals shifted course without visible decision, and the gray pack slipped off into the frozen night.

  “Here they are!” Nur Muhammad shouted, and the soldiers rushed up. Some shots were fired and I remember mumbling to myself: “I hope they got away.”

  The Afghan soldiers came to the jeep and conversed with Nur and me for a few minutes, pleased at meeting a ferangi who could speak Pashto. Their officer arrived later in a staff car and it was agreed to leave two men on watch. “It will soon be spring,” the officer said in Pashto, “and we’ll have no more wolves. Till next year.”

  It was now about four in the morning, but there would be no sign of daylight for many hours, and Nur started to drive me home, but I said impulsively, “Let’s go to the English house!” and we did and as I had suspected the lights were not yet extinguished, and when I knocked on the door the English girls were not surprised to see me. Some men were there talking about the play and I created a stir when I said, “We’ve been out chasing the wolves. We saw them on the eastern edge of the city.”

  “Were they fearful?” Gretchen asked, and she seemed then immensely pretty, and I told her of the wolves and of the soldier who said it would soon be spring, and as I had anticipated earlier there was fine English fun, and good talk, and kissing beneath the stairs.

  Next morning I was awakened by Nur Muhammad beating on my door and crying, “Miller Sahib! Captain Verbruggen has called a meeting for eleven!”

  I rose hastily, doused my eyes in cold water and waited for Nur to push open the door with his pot of boiling water for my shave. My face luxuriated in the soothing water, and as I scraped my beard, I asked, “How much time?”

  “It’s past ten,” he warned, and I looked into the hall to greet him, brown, well shaved, dressed in western clothes and karakul cap, waiting to lead me to our breakfast. This morning he was bursting with a special pride. “I’m also to attend His Excellency’s meeting,” he confided, and I saw that he had used my shoe box to freshen his shoes as well as mine. Such things he was not required to do. He was my official helper at the embassy, but he was a married man and had asked if he could augment his salary by overseeing the servants at my house. “Otherwise, Sahib, they’ll steal you blind. They’re Afghans, you know.”

  I lived in one of the new houses on the far side of the public park that dominated the north arm of Kabul: to the west lay the British dormitory, within walking distance, while to the east stood the American embassy, also close at hand. When I had finished shaving I slipped into an Afghan robe and went onto the roof of my house to view once more a scene far more important to me than either the British dormitory or the American embassy. I wished to inspect the mountains and thus remind myself of where I was.

  I looked first to the west, where the poetic Koh-i-Baba mountains stood shimmering in the sunlight, so near they could almost be felt, so graceful and varied that they seemed like Gothic sculpture rather than real mountains. To the north stood the great, somber Hindu Kush, heavy and foreboding. They had been named, local legend insisted, The Hindu Killers because of what they had done to the natives of India who tried to cross them seeking the profitable trade of Samarkand. Whenever during my working day I caught a glimpse of the Hindu Kush I felt that I was in direct link with the heartland of Asia.

  For to the east these master mountains of Afghanistan joined the Pamirs, the impenetrable, mysterious massif that guarded the meeting place of nations; and these in turn led to the Karakorams, most inaccessible of the Asian mountains, on whose flanks lived the Hunza people, the Gilgits and the Kashmiris. South of the Karakorams came the Himalayas themselves on their eastward sweep down the spine of Asia.

  Thus each morning when I greeted the mountains I felt myself in contact not only with Afghanistan but with the entire continent of Asia and with my own past: the wartime flights over the Himalayas into China; the intelligence mission into Gilgit, perched in the clouds; the great sea battles off the eastern flank of Asia; and now my job with the State Department in Kabul. I breathed deeply half a dozen times, imagined the ponderous ballet of the mountains as they swept across Asia, and went down to where Nur Muhammad and the servants had arranged breakfast.

  For his eleven-o’clock meeting Captain Verbruggen had collected the four members of
our staff best informed on the Ellen Jaspar affair. Richardson of Intelligence was there, a tweedy, pipe-smoking gentleman who affected a British-type mustache and who was favorably known for talking sense, primarily because he refused to give any opinion unless it was fortified by documents. He had reached the State Department via the F.B.I. and was an expert in security and Russian intentions. We supposed that he had been assigned to Afghanistan only briefly in order to study the southern flank of Russia where it impinged on Afghanistan. He felt the case of the Jaspar girl to be an intrusion and frequently said so. But now he sat confidently, his hands folded on his own intelligence file, just waiting for us to ask him questions.

  Nexler, the subtle brains of the embassy, was also present, a self-effacing man in his late forties and the only one on our staff who enjoyed secure status in the real hierarchy of State. Unlike the rest of us, he had not come to the department from some other job; he had always been a diplomat and found subtle pleasure in reminding us of the gap that existed between him and us. He was an expert in masking his opinions, but we suspected that he deplored the naval attaché as a political hack, held Richardson in contempt as a kind of F.B.I, precinct cop, and regretted me as an unavoidable error in a department that had been forced to recruit untested men to fill new posts. He suffered Kabul in silence, waiting for the day when he would be transferred to a real embassy, say Buenos Aires or Vienna. London and Paris would come later. In the meantime his strategy in Kabul was to speak as little as possible.

  Nur Muhammad and I completed the group, and it was to me that Captain Verbruggen spoke first: “Shah Khan’s office delivered the papers, so you’re free to head for Kandahar.”

  “I’ll go down tomorrow,” I said.

  “Good. What do you expect to find?”

  “Yesterday Shah Khan suggested three different things that could have happened. First theory. She killed herself.”

  “Is that likely?” Verbruggen asked.

  “It’s possible. She must have been shocked by the life she was required to lead in Afghanistan. I know I was shocked yesterday by some of the things Moheb Khan said.”

  “He’s the one in the Foreign Office?” Verbruggen asked.

  “Yes. Moheb told me something that isn’t in our reports. Nazrullah married an Afghan wife before he left for America and had a baby with her.”

  “We knew that,” Richardson said complacently, tapping the file with his pipe.

  I was irritated that he had kept information from me. “Did you also know,” I asked, “that after Nazrullah and Ellen Jaspar were married, his Afghan wife lived with them and she had a second baby? This could well have caused Miss Jaspar to kill herself. Remember, three years ago the Allison girl did.”

  The Americans in the room winced at the memory of that dismal affair, and Richardson asked, “Wouldn’t we have heard about a suicide?”

  “I asked about the lack of information, and what do you suppose Moheb answered? She was only a woman, and when Nazrullah gets back to Kabul he’ll tell us all we need to know.”

  “What were the other guesses?” Verbruggen asked.

  I thought: Look at Nexler wincing. A career diplomat would say, “What are the other hypotheses?” I prefer Verbruggen’s way.

  “Second theory,” I said. “She’s been locked up by her husband and we won’t see her for some years. Remember that this occurred with that English girl Sanderson and that Dutch girl …”

  “Vonderdonk,” Richardson filled in promptly.

  “Do you take such a hypothesis seriously?” Verbruggen asked as Nexler raised his eyebrows.

  “I certainly do. It’s happened before.”

  Richardson sucked his pipe, then observed cautiously, “Evidence I’ve collected supports the belief that Nazrullah loved his American wife, did all he could to make her happy. I find no parallel with the Sanderson and Vonderdonk girls. Their husbands hated them and kept them locked up eight or nine years to prove it. I reject this theory completely.”

  “We’re rejecting nothing,” Verbruggen said firmly. “This is Afghanistan and no one of us here can project himself inside the Afghan mind. How do you know what Nazrullah might do?”

  Richardson nodded amiably, dragged on his pipe, then asked, “Let’s concede that he’s keeping her locked up. Where? A city like Kandahar? An outpost like Qala Bist?” We looked at one another.

  “Excuse me, sir,” Nur Muhammad interrupted. “I’ve reviewed all recent cases of such personal imprisonment. Without exception the jail turned out to be the home of the husband’s mother. If you surround a ferangi wife with half a dozen women in chaderi they not only can keep her hidden, they enjoy doing it.”

  Captain Verbruggen looked at Nur Muhammad as if to say: Whatever we pay you, son, it’s worth it. Aloud he asked, “Have we checked the mother’s home?”

  “Everything possible,” Nur replied. “Not a single clue.”

  Nexler spoke for the first time. “But didn’t your government also check in the Sanderson and Vonderdonk cases?”

  “They did,” Nur confessed, “and they found nothing. But Nazrullah’s family is much more modern than the ones involved in those cases.”

  “Would you rule out the possibility that she’s hidden, right here in Kabul?” Verbruggen pressed.

  “No,” Nur responded quickly. “After all, it was Your Excellency who reminded us that this is Afghanistan. But I do think it most unlikely.” The acting ambassador nodded. American officials were not supposed to be addressed as Your Excellency, and by no stretch of protocol did Captain Verbruggen warrant the honorific, but I noticed that all who were so addressed were pleased with the courtesy and reluctant to admonish.

  Nexler asked quietly, “Is there no way to visit the family home and check for ourselves?”

  The naval attaché turned sharply to his colleague and snapped, “You overlook three factors. In Afghanistan a home is a fort, and if we try to barge in they’ll shoot us. The country has no habeas corpus. And most important, Miss Jaspar is no longer of any legal concern to the American government.”

  “Perhaps we should tell that to the senator from Pennsylvania,” Nexler observed dryly.

  “He can bully us about the girl,” the acting ambassador complained, “but there’s not a damned thing we can do to bully the Afghan government What’s the third guess?”

  “Shah Khan advised us to consider an eventuality which has also occurred in the past. Miss Jaspar has run away. Trying to reach the British railway station at Chaman. If so, two things may have happened. She reached Chaman, which we know she didn’t do because we’ve checked. She died in the desert, which is the way the two earlier cases ended.”

  “I don’t have their cases,” Richardson protested.

  “Before your time,” I said, and he retreated behind his pipe.

  “That finishes your report?” Verbruggen asked.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied with a finality I did not feel. There remained the matter of Shah Khan’s implausible rumor, which he had refused to share with me, but for the moment I concealed this because I wanted our group to explore logical conjectures before speculating on wild improbabilities.

  “I’d like to point out,” Verbruggen growled with that down-to-earth realism which characterized him, “that your first alternative contains two alternatives of its own, one of which you overlooked. Miller says Shah Khan suggested Miss Jaspar may have committed suicide. I suggest she may have been murdered … by Nazrullah.”

  Nur Muhammad, whom I expected to rise in defense of his countryman, quickly agreed with the logic of this hypothesis. “Not impossible,” he said firmly. Then he added, “But I’ve studied Nazrullah, and it’s unlikely he would murder a ferangi.”

  The acting ambassador nodded. “From what I know of him, most unlikely. But I raise the possibility.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I replied. “As you know, I’ve never seen Nazrullah, but from what I’ve read of him he’s not the murdering type.”

  “We’re leaping
to some rather broad conclusions,” Verbruggen cautioned. “Let’s all get back to facts.”

  Richardson coughed and said, “I have a complete report on the Jaspar girl. Naval Intelligence and F.B.I, helped us out.” He opened his file ceremoniously, looked at Nexler, and asked, “May I start reading?” Without waiting for consent he began:

  “Ellen Jaspar, born in Dorset, Pennsylvania, 1922. Father’s in real estate and insurance. She has one brother, three years younger. He seems normal in every way. Enlisted in the army and did well. Now a sophomore at Penn State. We include a photograph of the Jaspars taken in 1943, the year before our subject met the gentleman from Afghanistan.”

  Richardson detached the photograph and said, “lf you’re looking for the All-American family, here it is. Even have a collie and a Buick.”

  When the photograph reached me I saw a family which could have come from any part of America: mother a bit plump but well dressed; father taller and solid-looking; son ill at ease in pants a little too tight; collie dog well cared for; Buick recently pollished; daughter …

  “She’s much prettier than most foreign women who marry Afghans,” Nur Muhammad reacted.

  To my surprise Richardson laid down his pipe and said, “I’d date that one. She stunning.”

  I looked again. At twenty, Ellen Jaspar was the typical sophomore at a good girls’ college like Bryn Mawr. She was lean, well groomed, an attractive blonde, which must have made her additionally impressive to Nazrullah. No one would mistake her for the brain of the campus; she was too good-looking for that. Nor would anyone pick her as the hottest thing at the Saturday dance; she was too intelligent for that. She was, to use a phrase then coming into use, well-scrubbed, for even in the picture she was conspicuously neat, and one felt that she had not prettied herself up for the photograph.