Caravans (26 page)

When the villagers tried to abuse Stiglitz or me they got a sharp surprise: we swore at them in Pashto, claimed to be light-skinned Kochis, and warned them to mind their own business. Sometimes they stopped dead and stared at us, whereupon we laughed and they laughed. Braver men among them would run beside us, asking if we were ferangi, and at such times we would confess that we were German and American, and the animosity would vanish. Occasionally some young man in the village who wanted to comprehend his world would march with us for miles, even to our camp, asking a hundred questions. Such men became our friends, and even if I had not mailed my report to Kabul, these inquisitive men would have got the message to our ambassador, by word of mouth from one village to the next until it crossed Afghanistan. It was such a rumor that had reached Shah Khan in Kabul: “Traveling with the Kochis is a blond ferangi.”

We had reached the halfway spot on our march to Kabul when we came upon an especially pathetic village, where I had a chance to see for myself the gentler side of Ellen Jaspar’s honest concern with human problems. It was not yet dawn as we moved down the main street, glaring back at frightened faces which peered at us through darkness, and Ellen whispered, “It does my heart good to compare these suspicious villagers with our free nomads.”

“I agree. I get a positive bang out of marching through a village like this.”

“Just think!” she cried with real intellectual excitement. “In a few years Afghanistan will destroy prisons like this”—she indicated the tight-barred houses—“and the country will go back to the ancient freedom of the caravan.”

I should have allowed the subject to drop, but I was struck by a fundamental contradiction in her thinking: the idea that freedom could be preserved only by turning back the clock. I could hear her arguing with Nazrullah at the site of the future dam:
It’s a shame that the river must lose its freedom,
refusing to realize that only when the river was harnessed and used could Afghanistan know the real freedom of release from poverty. Therefore I said, “I’m afraid you have it backwards, Ellen. Afghanistan will never gain a single freedom by reverting to the caravan. It will save itself by generating true freedom in the villages.”

“How?” she asked with some contempt.

“Roads, books, Nazrullah’s electricity.”

“Oh, Miller!” she cried passionately. “You misunderstand history and the nature of man. We are born free, like the nomads. But step by step we insist upon crawling into little prisons on little streets in mean little villages. We must destroy these prisons and restore the nomad spirit.”

“I’m sorry, Ellen. What you want is impossible. What we must do is go into the villages and rebuild them on a basis of freedom. We must go forward. We can’t go back.”

“But in Pennsylvania, my father is the village. In Afghanistan these surly people are the village. Will books and electricity cure my father … or these clods?”

“Only books and electricity can do it.”

She stopped in the middle of the road, pressed her right hand to her mouth, and weighed my arguments. Light from one of the houses, reflecting on her bracelets, flashed across her lovely face. “Miller,” she whispered generously, “in part you’re right, but you forget that men like my father …”

I was not allowed to hear her rebuttal, for out of the shadows darted a pretty little girl of nine or ten, less fearful than her elders. Running through the darkness, she caught Ellen’s hand and cried in Pashto, “Your bracelets are beautiful.” With a gesture of instinctive warmth, Ellen caught the child, swung her in the air, kissed her, and held her in her left arm while she took off one of her bracelets to give the child.

It was a moment I cannot forget. There in an alien street, beset by enmity, Ellen cradled the child in timeless pose: a lovely young mother holding in the darkness a child who intuitively trusted her; and I was forced to recall Karima as she said:
Ellen knew that I could have children and apparently she couldn’t. Dr. Stiglitz will confirm that.
I wondered if this were true, and if so, did it account for her essential barrenness of spirit?

My reflections were shattered by the agonizing shriek of the child’s mother, who burst upon us screaming, “The Kochis have stolen my child!”

This was a signal for villagers, long trained to repulse such thefts, to rush at us from many sides, and there was fighting. But what stunned me was the arrival of six or eight determined women in chaderies, moving swiftly through the darkness like avenging furies. Their shadowy forms engulfed
Ellen as they tore at her hair, her clothes, her face. One thin figure in a gray chaderi swept in like a ferret and grabbed the child. Seeing that the little girl held a contaminated bracelet, the thin figure tore it from the child’s hands and threw it back at Ellen.

“Don’t steal our children!” a voice of passion warned. The avengers withdrew, but from the shadows came a gaunt, bearded man rushing belatedly to the brawl and hissing hatred.

“Whores! Whores!” he shouted, maneuvering like a robed ghost in his efforts to spit at Ellen.

Zulfiqar had seen the mullah coming and had deftly swung his horse across the man’s trajectory to drive him away. The mullah followed at a distance, screaming impotently; and thus we left the frightened villagers, who remained in excited groups, congratulating each other on having once more thwarted the Kochi kidnapers.

Zulfiqar, concerned over Ellen’s welfare, dismounted to assure himself that all was well, and she buried her head in his shoulder, sniffling, “All I wanted to do was give the little girl a bracelet.”

“How did it start?” the big Kochi asked indulgently.

“Miller and I were having a peaceful argument …”

“About what?”

“I claimed that originally Afghanistan knew the freedom of the caravan, but that willfully the people put themselves in these village prisons under the rule of mullahs.”

“You’re right about the past.”

“Miller claimed that we can never go back to the
caravan. That we will know freedom only when the villages have books and roads and electricity.”

“He’s right about the future,” and before Ellen could protest the decision, he leaped upon his horse to lead our caravan from the niggardly village, but then he galloped back to us and cried, “Some day all of us will live in villages like this. But they will be better villages.” And he was gone.

The very next morning I had poetic confirmation that Zulfiqar’s vision of the future was more likely than Ellen’s, for in the early hours when light was just beginning to break across the peaks of the Koh-i-Baba, we sighted a village where dogs were silent, and we crept upon it unawares and were well inside the confines before we were discovered —great camels lumbering down the main road, peering into windows as the villagers were rising— and at one corner I saw a house lit with candles, and it seemed, there in the shadow of the mountains, like all the warm, homely refuges of the world. It was a small segment of space, walled in against the wandering nomads and the camels. It was one man’s home. Not even the soaring freedom of the Kochi tents, pitched beside torrents in the mountain passes, could equal the security of that chance home we saw in the half-darkness of dawn. The village people knew something the nomads would never know, a kind of spiritual freedom, and if they were forced to pay a terrible price for it, perhaps that was their choice.

To my surprise, as I brooded on these matters I looked up to see Zulfiqar, on his brown horse, staring at me and the house, and I think he was remembering our discussion of the morning before,
and deciding anew that he and I were right; but a dog began barking, the villagers poured out, and the old antagonism between nomad and villager was resumed.

At first I hadn’t realized why the villagers were so apprehensive about locking things up as our caravan approached, but after I had seen flashing Mira at work I understood their antagonism. Whenever we made camp after transiting a village I found that she had acquired some new piece of clothing, or a farm tool, or a kitchen utensil. Ellen once said, “The only thing that child hasn’t stolen is a bed. You watch! If somebody leaves a door open some day …”

At one camp I caught Mira with a new saw and asked her, “Why do you steal from the villagers?”

“When we march through,” she replied, “they look at me with hate and I look right back at them the same way.” Then she added, “But do you notice how the men follow me so hungrily with their eyes? They’d like to join the Kochis … for one night. I could spit at them!”

Our clan had ten large black tents, but many of the Kochis preferred sleeping on blankets in the open. Zulfiqar, his wife Racha, Ellen and Mira occupied one of the smaller tents, notable because it had an awning held up by two additional poles forming a kind of porch where rugs were thrown and where the camp’s social life took place. In the late afternoons, when the animals were at ease, Zulfiqar would sit cross-legged between Racha and Ellen, discussing matters with his people. I often joined them and thus formed the foundation for
the friendship which developed between the Kochi leader and me.

He asked me many questions, but I learned more than I taught. The Kochis were Muslims who ignored the tyranny of the mullahs but who held Mecca in as deep regard as any Sunni. As we discussed Islam, with its strong reliance upon nature and a powerful God who motivated all natural things, I better understood how Ellen and Dr. Stiglitz had been able to embrace this religion. One afternoon as we sat under the awning, Ellen said, “I could never explain my apostasy to my parents, and that’s the real reason why I can’t write to them. You see, I was raised to believe that God personally hovered like an unseen helicopter just above the steeple of the Presbyterian Church on Adams street in Dorset, Pennsylvania”—I had remarked earlier how she loved to reel off that rubric, as if names alone symbolized the focus of her rebellion—“and although He was free to keep a weather eye on the Lutheran church down the street, His real responsibility was our congregation. We were the true religion. All else was delusion. I think that if my parents had only once, while I was growing up, intimated that God might also be personally worried about the Jews, I would still be in Dorset. For that would have made sense.”

At the end of this rather protracted speech Zulfiqar asked, “Do all American women talk so much?” I said yes and he shrugged his shoulders the way scareyed Maftoon did when he couldn’t comprehend the behavior of a camel.

The figure of speech Ellen had used disturbed me. Had she spoken with spurious concern for the
Jews because Stiglitz had warned her that I was one? In English I asked, “Did Stiglitz tell you I was a Jew?”

“You are?” she shouted in real delight. “Zulfiqar! Miller is a Jew!”

The big leader, his bandoleer and rifle beside him on the rug, leaned forward to inspect me. “You Jewish?” I nodded and he burst into laughter.

Ellen said in Pashto, “You should hear what this big fool believes about Jews!”

Again Zulfiqar laughed, attracting other nomads, who gathered to see what was happening. He stood beside me and compared his large Semitic nose to my small Nordic one. “I’m the real Jew!” he shouted, and other Kochis stepped up to compare their faces with mine. A long discussion followed, at the end of which Zulfiqar asked, “Millair, are Jews really as avaricious as we say?”

I thought a moment, smiled at Ellen and replied, “Let me put it this way. Zulfiqar, if you parked your jeep near a bunch of Jews … they’d steal the tires while you weren’t looking.”

It took some moments for the boldness of my reply to sink in, and some of the lesser Kochis caught on before Zulfiqar. They were loath to react until he had set the pattern, but they obviously relished my gall. Then he exploded in rollicking laughter and imitated a steering wheel. “Millair,” he laughed, “you scared us when you started for the jeep. We had most of it packed on camels.” Then he stopped laughing and looked suspiciously at Ellen. “How did you know about the jeep?”

“In the bazaar at Musa Darul … they tried to sell it back to me.” My discovery of their duplicity
pleased the Kochis, and from that moment Miller the Jew became blood brother to the Aryan nomads.

But to one obligatory aspect of Kochi life I never did become adjusted. As we marched week after week through the treeless valleys a detail of four women worked at the rear of the caravan, moving back and forth across the landscape, and it was their duty to gather the fresh droppings of the camels, the sheep and the donkeys and with their bare hands to mold the manure into briquettes which were carefully hoarded in the panniers carried by the donkeys; for in a land where there were few trees other fuel had to be found, and dried dung was excellent. It burned slowly, like punk, had a pleasing odor which imparted flavor to food cooked over it, and was light in transportation.

The Kochi children delighted in coming upon dried dung which the sharp-eyed women of some former caravan had overlooked, and it was a kind of game for them to see who would spot the next camel dropping. One day Mira and I were following Aunt Becky, who as usual was straying, when the camel dropped a large deposit which the women would probably miss; so I gritted my teeth, turned my nose away, and scooped up the precious stuff, running it to the panniers, where the women tending the caravan cheered. I was blushing when I returned to Mira, who, when she satisfied herself that no one was spying, threw her arms about me and kissed me for the first time. “You’re a real Kochi!” she teased, and thereafter when I went to her father’s awning-porch it was to see her and not
to talk with him; and we took long walks among the deserted hills.

Two days after our first kiss, we were hiking up a narrow valley where flowers were in bloom and I thought: The Kochis know only two seasons, the best of spring and the best of autumn. I looked at Mira and asked, “You never know winter, do you?”

She surprised me by pointing to the mountains overhead and saying, “It’s always ready to pounce on us.” And there it hung, the snowline of the Koh-i-Baba, an ominous threat which reminded me of our impending arrival at Kabul, when I would have to leave the caravan.