Caravans (21 page)

“I can see that,” I agreed.

“How the hell did I get here?” he mumbled. “Making a water study for a nation that just don’t give a damn.”

“Don’t say that. You wrote to us about Nazrullah. He’s a fine engineer.”

“The guy with the beard?”

“Trained in Germany,” I assured him.

“Some of the best come from Germany,” he said in the approving manner of practical men who recognize excellence wherever developed.

“You’re determined to make the run to Kandahar?”

“If I stay here I’ll die.”

“You appreciate the risk?”

His spirit cracked. Rising on one elbow he shouted, “If you’re afraid of your lousy job, I’ll put it in writing. I want to get the hell out of here.”

“I’ll do the writing,” I said, feeling miserable, for I knew I was condemning him to death. I called
Nur Muhammad to bring my brief case, and on official paper I wrote:

Feeling sick at what I had done, I handed Nazrullah the directive. He read it twice, showed it to Stiglitz and Nur Muhammad, and folded it carefully. “We’ll leave in ten minutes, sleep at the edge of the desert and start our crossing as soon as we can negotiate that bad approach.”

He had overlooked one fact. John Pritchard refused to leave his post until his water-level records were collected. “That’s why I came here,” he said. “If they want to build that dam, they’ll need these records.” To my surprise, Dr. Stiglitz supported him.

“A scientist should keep records,” the German said.

So I was led by a guide to a spot two miles down the Helmand, where John Pritchard had been collecting the data on which Nazrullah would build his dam. More significantly, perhaps, Pritchard’s word would form the basis for riparian treaties between Afghanistan and Persia, who had
threatened war over the river. We found a small shed, boiling hot, some water gauges, a sheaf of irreplaceable records. The guide warned me in Pashto to watch the steps leading to the shed, for it was here that Pritchard had broken his leg; and as I stood in this lonely shack, this veritable end of the world where the temperature was daily above a hundred and thirty, I thought of all the careless speeches made in Congress about the cookie-pushers of the State Department, those striped-pants boys who haunt afternoon teas, and I wished that some of the arrogant speakers could have seen the work that John Pritchard had accomplished for our nation and for Afghanistan.

“Was Pritchard a good man?” I asked the guide. It was a kind of judgment he had not previously been asked to make, and he was confused. Finally he said brightly, “Yes, he could handle a gun with skill.”

I was to ride with Nazrullah in his jeep, while Nur and Stiglitz supervised loading Pritchard in the back of theirs. As they did so the German said heartily, “If I ever saw a man with a good chance to get across the desert, it’s this one.”

“We’ll make it!” the engineer called as we set forth, and it became my duty when we stopped to pour as much water as possible over the stricken man, thus keeping his temperature down, but before we had traveled far he became partially delirious and asked that I ride with him, as he wished to speak of America.

Thus we rode past the brooding, empty buildings of The City, and in the cooler evening his fever abated and we talked. He was from Fort Collins,
Colorado, and had spent each autumn hunting in the Rockies. He was, he admitted, a fairly good rifle shot and had bagged elk, bear and mountain goats. He had a low opinion of the latter and felt they did more harm than good. He was optimistic about one thing: said he knew a one-legged man in Loveland who had no trouble hunting.

“I’m the kind of man,” he said, “who won’t give up till I learn how to walk with a wooden leg.” But at the next stop Dr. Stiglitz decided to give Pritchard a knock-out pill, and the engineer fell asleep.

As soon as morning light permitted, we negotiated the canyon, and when the sun was well ablaze we were on the desert, stopping frequently to pour water on our turbans. At first I rode with Nur and the sick man, keeping his body under wet compresses, but he grew constantly worse, and at one of the water stops Stiglitz insisted upon changing places with me so that he might supervise the invalid. The more drastic steps he took to keep Pritchard alive worked. At the start of our trip I had given the engineer no chance to live, but apparently I was going to be proved wrong.

I now rode with Nazrullah, and after we had discussed Pritchard’s leg, he asked me bluntly, “What else do you need to know about my wife?”

The question startled me, for I had been devising stratagems whereby I could trick him into comment, and for a moment I could not think clearly, so I repeated lamely, “She ran away?”

“Yes. Last September.”

“That’s eight months ago,” I stammered.

“Seems longer,” he reflected, rubbing his beard. In his soggy, formless turban he looked quite Asiatic.

“Why did she run away?”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he replied with a nervous laugh. He wanted to be helpful, but the facts were so preposterous that he was unable to evaluate them, so he kept silent, reminding me of the worried Afghan husband who had hustled back and forth between his sick wife and Dr. Stiglitz: he would report only what he himself understood.

I appreciated his efforts at good will, for the conditions under which we rode made conversation difficult. The desert was intolerably hot and we were both gasping for air. “This must be hell on Pritchard,” he observed.

“It’s what I was worried about yesterday,” I remindedhim.

“We’ve been through that!” he cautioned, “I have your order, in writing.”

“Did you warn Ellen Jaspar that…”

“That I was married? Yes.”

“The other day in Kandahar I met your wife, your Afghan wife, that is.”

“I know. Karima told me about it in her letter.”

“How could she send a letter?” I asked, like a movie detective trapping a suspect. “I saw her only a short time before I left.”

“The messenger who brought Dr. Stiglitz also brought her letter,” he explained, and I had to laugh at my own suspicions.

“I’m sorry,” I apologized. “This whole thing seems so shadowy.”

“To me it’s even more so,” he confessed.

“Then what Karima said was true? You did tell Ellen?”

“Whatever Karima says is apt to be true.”

“Is she a beautiful girl?” I asked for no obvious reason.

“Very. It was stupid of her to wear the chaderi. I don’t require it.”

“I suspect she was afraid of Nur Muhammad.”

Inappropriately, Nazrullah began to laugh and I must have looked at him with censure, for he said, “I’m sorry, but when you mentioned the chaderi I remembered something which explains Ellen rather better than anything else I could tell you. I sympathize with your suspicions. You’re sure that I mistreated her and that my family kept her prisoner and that she’s walled up somewhere pining for freedom. Miller, when she arrived in Kabul, all of us … everybody … tried to make her feel at ease. You know what she did? On the morning after the marriage she came down to breakfast wearing a chaderi.”

“What?”

“Yes, at breakfast. A very expensive silk chaderi which she had asked a dressmaker in London to make from a picture in a book. She was going to be more Afghan than the Afghans. My family tried not to laugh, and I had tears in my eyes to think that she was such a good sport. We explained that you don’t wear a chaderi at breakfast. But I had one hell of a time keeping her from wearing it on the street.”

He laughed in memory of that bizarre event as a father laughs during a business lunch when he recollects his child’s mistakes. “You may have heard that one day in Kandahar the mullahs spat at her. When it was all over, she started to cry, not at the mullahs but at me. ‘If you’d let me wear the
chaderi,’ she whimpered, ‘this wouldn’t have happened.’”

“I don’t understand.”

“None of you Americans understand what an extraordinary woman Ellen is. Obviously her parents didn’t. Nor her professors. Don’t call her a girl any more. She is a woman. I doubt that she was ever a girl. She is a rare human being who sees through to the essence of God. I suppose you know that on one of our first dates she told me all about the atomic bomb.”

“You met her in 1944,” I checked. “At that time there wasn’t such a bomb.”

“She invented it,” he said cryptically.

I looked at him askance and he was about to elaborate when the rear jeep signaled us to stop, and in the moments we waited for them to overtake us he added, “Ellen foresaw that if the nations continued their madness, they would be forced to invent some super-terrible weapon. She even described it rather accurately. ‘It’s the age of air, so they’ll deliver it by air, and it’ll wipe out whole cities.’ She added that there was no way to prevent it and probably no way to escape. She said, ‘I hope I can get to Afghanistan before they destroy us all.’ At first I thought she was using us as a refuge … because we would be the last place bombed, but that wasn’t her idea. She told me, ‘There isn’t going to be any refuge, and if I’m to die, I want to die in Afghanistan, which is as far away from our pitiful civilization as any place I know. Let’s live and die close to primitive things.’ I suppose that’s what she had in mind when she protested my building the dam.”

Dr. Stiglitz walked gloomily to our jeep and said frankly, “He won’t make it, Nazrullah. He wants Millar to ride with him.”

But I was so close to probing Nazrullah’s secret that I protested, selfishly: “I want to talk with Nazrullah… just a little longer.”

Stiglitz said without expression, “Pritchard wants to talk, too. To an American.”

“Forgive me,” I said, and when I took my seat; close to the engineer’s fevered head, I started applying towels, but he merely gasped and rolled his eyes at me. He was very close to death.

Finally he whispered, “I can’t breathe.” Nur was weeping.

“I can’t breathe either,” I assured the dying man. “This heat.”

“With you the cause is different,” he replied lucidly. “You don’t carry a leg that’s beating like a drum. I can feel it pumping poison.”

I bit my tongue to keep from reminding him that he was repeating my words. I said, “We’re better than halfway through the desert.”

“I want you to give my wife a message,” he said with painful effort. “She lives in Fort Collins. Damned good woman. Tell her …” He winced, as an almost visible pain streaked across his face, driving him to incoherency.

I soaked his turban and applied wet rags to his leg. The river water was used up and I proposed to Nur, “We’ve got to use some of our drinking water.” Nur looked at me is dismay, studied the desert ahead, then listened to Pritchard moan. I saw tears start down his cheek and dry to salt in the desperate air.

“If he needs water, give it to him,” he said in Pashto.

I poured some of the drinking water over Pritchard’s head and he regained consciousness long enough to dictate jumbled phrases to his wife. She was to consult with a Mr. Forgraves in Denver. The kids must graduate from college, both of them. Then, for some reason I didn’t understand, he went into a long discourse about a new kind of paint he had seen described in a technical journal. It would cure their cellar problems once and for all. Be worth two hundred dollars but he thought she might get it for less.

“Pritchard,” I broke in after the paint monologue, “I think I’d better get Dr. Stiglitz.”

“Don’t. If I’m gonna die, let me die with my kind, not some goddamned Nazi.” He started shivering. Then a dreadful sweat broke out across his face and little rivulets of perspiration accumulated, to be evaporated instantly in the swirling heat.

“I’m burning up!” he shouted. Nur Muhammad, who heard the conversation, began to cry openly and finally stopped the jeep.

“I will not drive a man to meet death,” he sobbed as he stood bareheaded in the sun. “If death wants this man, death must come … here.”

In a kind of frenzy I saw the jeep ahead pulling away, so I blew the horn repeatedly. “Knock off the noise, you kids,” Pritchard cried.

Nazrullah caught my signal and whirled about on the blazing dasht. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” he stormed at Nur.

“I will not drive a man to meet death,” Nur stubbornly repeated. Taking a small rug from his gear,
he spread it on the sand and, kneeling westward to Mecca, prayed.

“He looks awful,” Nazrullah said and Dr. Stiglitz hurried over to check the delirious engineer.

A strange, desert prayer came to my lips, silently: “Oh, God, spare my countryman.” At the mumbling of these words, John Pritchard died.

I looked distractedly at Nazrullah, who shrugged his shoulders and said, “It was a chance. Nobody thought it was a good chance.” The callousness of this remark made me want to storm at the incompetents who had permitted this disgraceful suicide, but that obligation was taken from me by Nur Muhammad, who wept, “You’re all criminals. Bringing this doomed man onto the desert.”

This was too much. I shouted, “If you thought that, why didn’t you say so?”

“Nobody asked me,” he sobbed, and it occurred to me that if he had once supported my argument, we never would have left Chahar and Pritchard would now be alive. But I knew why he had remained silent: he had been afraid to contradict his social superior, Nazrullah, so now we were on the desert with a dead body to deliver … remorselessly assaulted by the noonday heat.

Nur Muhammad was quite incapable of driving, so I took charge of the second jeep, the one with the corpse, and we headed for Kandahar, but when we reached about forty miles an hour on the shale I suddenly saw looming ahead a field of gotch, which I swerved sharply to avoid, recalling the soldiers who were dead for not having done so, and I threw the jeep against a series of jolting rocks which snapped the front axle.

Nur Muhammad went to pieces, berating himself for the fact that he was not at the wheel in this difficult terrain and cursing fate because the corpse had been thrown out of the jeep and now lay in horrible contortion on the dasht. Nazrullah, in contrast, was superb. He quieted Nur, absolved me of blame, and helped Dr. Stiglitz load the corpse into the workable jeep. He then quietly studied his map and informed us, “The Caravanserai of the Tongues must be a little distance to the north. We’ll tow the broken jeep there and decide what to do.”

But while we were attaching two ropes Dr. Stiglitz said, “Why don’t we drive back and take the front axle from the jeep of the two soldiers?”

Nazrullah stopped sharp, dropped the ropes and stood in the blazing sun considering the alternatives the German had suggested. Clutching his beard he mumbled, “Why didn’t I think of that? Stupid. Stupid.” He walked away from us, positioning his opened hands as if they were two jeeps. For a long time he strode back and forth across the desert, then returned to us.

“For three reasons we must go directly to the caravanserai,” he said. “First, I’m not sure we could find the other jeep if we wanted to.”

“It’s right back there.” I pointed.

“It’s more than forty miles,” he corrected, “and sometimes you can’t find things a second time in the desert. Second, we don’t have enough water to double back and forth. But most important, suppose the sharif’s scouting party has already been there? Suppose we go back and find that the jeep is gone?”

Saying no more, he completed tying the ropes, then hauled us up to the Caravanserai of the Tongues, into which we limped at four that afternoon. His note was still fastened to the door.

We pushed the jeep into one of the honeycomb rooms, then held a council in which Nazrullah explored the alternatives available to us. We decided that two men in the good jeep must try to get back to Qala Bist, taking Pritchard’s body along. It was no use risking four lives. The other two men, with what food could be spared, must remain at the caravanserai with the damaged jeep until such time as a rescue party could return. “There’s only one question,” Nazrullah concluded. “How shall we pair up?”

Learning from the past, I responded quickly: “I’ll write an order and accept full responsibility. Stiglitz and Nur will stay here. Nazrullah and I will drive to Qala Bist.”

“Reasonable,” Stiglitz grunted.

Nur Muhammad, still shaken, wrecked that plan. He sniffed, “It’s my duty to stay with Miller Sahib.”

“Your duty is discharged,” I replied in Pashto.

“No! You are in my care,” Nur insisted.

“The whole argument’s irrelevant,” Nazrullah said. “If anyone must cross the desert it’s got to be the Afghans. Miller and Stiglitz, stay here. Nur, jump in the jeep.” Nur started to voice some new objection, but Nazrullah shouted a phrase remembered from his American education. “For Christ sake, scram!” When Nur was settled, Nazrullah and I hiked with the water jugs to the stagnant pool that provided a meager supply for the caravanserai.
“Can you live on this stuff for three or four days?” he asked.

“You get back here before then,” I joked, but I remembered the terror that Nazrullah felt about being on the desert with only one jeep, so I took all the jugs of sweet water and gave them to him. As I did so I said, “Keep this crate away from the gotch.”