Caravans (29 page)

“What’s that one telling you?” she demanded.

“That Maftoon killed a man … for you.”

“He did,” she laughed. “He broke off this tooth, too,” and she showed me the stump. “I’d never have been happy in the city.” Then she winked at me and warned, “You go away from Mira, Mira kill you, too.”

When she returned to the camel droppings Mira laughed and said “I’m not so foolish. When the time comes, you go. When the time comes, I go.”

For two days I studied Stiglitz and Ellen as carefully as possible, and I had to admit that Mira was right. They were in love and Zulfiqar knew it. So far he had kept the German from the tent and of course Ellen was not free to leave her bed at night
as Mira did, but I looked for an opportunity to warn her of the danger she was inviting, for in spite of his seeming acquiescence I was convinced that Zulfiqar would kill Stiglitz if honor required.

I had never seen Ellen looking so radiant. We were now in cold country, well above ten thousand feet, with snow only a short distance above us and occasionally in some high pass actually nipping at our ears, and Ellen had acquired a long gray burnoose like those worn by Tajik mountaineers. It was made of raw wool and reached to her ankles; so that even in very cold weather it was comfortable. Into its attached hood Racha had worked gold and silver threads, showing Ellen’s lovely blond head to good advantage, and when she rode my white horse, as she sometimes did when I wished to walk with Mira, she created the image of a fair young goddess leading her Aryans to some mountain fortress. I understood why Dr. Stiglitz had fallen in love with her.

Well before dawn on the ninth day out of Kabul I was lugging my sleeping gear back to the camels for loading when I saw that Ellen was standing in the darkness, watching for a chance to talk with me, so I wandered over to her and asked, “You need some help?”

“Not in packing,” she replied. “But could we talk?”

I threw my gear to Maftoon and told him, “You can ride the white horse,” whereupon Ellen and I started down the trail.

It was a matchless time for the discussion of ideas, since we were about to enter one of the noblest areas of Asia, the great Vale of Bamian. Because
we were approaching it in darkness from the west, we would be hiking toward the sunrise, and the silvery cliffs on the north would loom out of the shadowy world just as our bodies and our incorporate thoughts came into being from their own universe of shadow. But it was the vale itself that lured us on: a lush, irrigated valley of historic richness from which Buddhism had spread to China and Japan, a vale crowded with trees and cool brooks and pasture lands. It was lined with poplars like a formal Italian garden, and to come upon it in the darkness, when each step revealed new beauties, when the approach of the still-distant sun brought more and more illumination both to the vale and to the problems we carried to it, was an experience not to be forgotten.

In the darkness Ellen cried, “Miller, I’ve fallen in love!” and the anguish of her cry, the honest perplexity it echoed, had to be respected.

“Mira told me … some time ago.”

“We’ve tried to keep it secret … even from ourselves.”

“Mira says you could invite great danger,” I warned.

“I’m not concerned with danger,” she said boldly. “I left Bryn Mawr seeking something like this. I left Qala Bist for the same reason. Now that I’ve found it …”

We hiked in darkness, with now and than a fugitive ray of light streaking across the sky like a scout sent forward by some Mongol army. In the gloom Ellen cried, “Miller! What shall I do?”

The pleading in her voice enlisted my sympathy and I tried to be as helpful as possible. “Let me ask
your question another way,” I suggested. “What are you already doing … hiking along a caravan trail at four-thirty in the morning in Central Asia? Ellen, what are you doing?”

She became defensive and countered, “I might ask you the same question.”

“With me it’s easy. I was sent here. By the government. To find you.”

In the darkness she laughed. “Oh, no! The government didn’t send you here. It sent you to Qala Bist, but you came here on your own account.” Something of the gentleness that had marked her beginning observations now vanished and she added with some asperity, “You’re here because for the first time in your circumscribed little life you’re sleeping with a wonderful girl, and I don’t blame you a bit. But please don’t try to convince Aunt Ellen that the United States government told you, ‘Go out and sleep under the stars.’”

“That takes care of me. Now what about you?”

Her gentleness returned, and as new streaks of light appeared in the east she explained, “I was driven here. It wasn’t Nazrullah, who was a most considerate husband, and it wasn’t Zulfiqar, whom any girl could admire. It had nothing to do with love or men. I suppose I was driven here by what I saw happening in the world … I was driven by something I was powerless to fight.”

I listened, tried to understand, walked for some time in silence, then said, “Ellen, I’ve done my damnedest to analyze your behavior, and I’ve failed. When we were in Kabul I turned in my official report, so this discussion concerns only you and me. Can you please explain in simple words?”

“I don’t think so,” she replied thoughtfully. “Either the words I’ve already used trigger your intellect or they don’t. Either you intuitively feel that America is making terrible mistakes, or you don’t.”

“Well, I don’t feel it. America’s doing a damned good job.”

“I’m talking to an idiot,” she groaned in the darkness. “Dear God! I need help so desperately, and You send me an idiot.”

“Try it again,” I said with resignation. “In the simplest words you can muster.”

“I will,” she said softly. “Miller, don’t you see that we’re bound to build bigger bombs and then bigger bombs and finally bombs so big that we can destroy the whole world?”

“What you say could be true, but I take consolation in the fact that America is building those bombs and not somebody else.”

“Miller!” she screamed. “Do you think no one else can build them?”

“Of course they can’t. Russia? China? They’ll never have the technical skill.”

“Miller!” she shouted. “Don’t be an idiot! We’re talking about your soul and mine. Don’t you see that …”

“Who’s been feeding you this line? Stiglitz?”

“Yes, he says …”

“Does he also say that he was a Nazi … in charge of killing Jews?”

“Yes,” she replied softly. “And that’s why I must live with him … the rest of my life.”

I was so infuriated with her garbled nonsense that I raised my hand to slap her, but in the halflight
she saw it and drew back. “Talk sense,” I growled.

The sun, as if eager to provide an illumination which we could not find for ourselves, crept toward the eastern horizon and sent shafts of light high across the heavens. Ellen, happy that the night was ending, shook the gold and silver cowl from her head and allowed the twilight to play upon her shimmering hair. Looking at me in deep confusion of spirit she said, “I am talking sense. Promise me that no matter what I say in the next few minutes … no matter how I outrage your logic, you’ll listen and try to understand.”

“Out of sheer curiosity, I will.”

“Let’s say I was a girl growing up in a normal family, in a normal church, with a normal group of friends. Boys liked me, and teachers too. I went to dances, gave parties, did well in college. But one day when I was about fifteen … long before the war … I saw that everything my family did was irrelevant. We were keeping score … I can’t call it anything else … in a game that simply didn’t exist except in our imagination. Did that idea ever occur to you?”

“No.”

“I’m sure it didn’t,” she replied, without rancor. “Well, World War II came and I listened to such nonsense as men rarely display in public. I kept my mouth shut, primarily because Father took it so seriously. He was home safe … too old to fight. So he could be pretty heroic. As chairman of the draft board he gave a rousing speech to all the young men he sent away. It would have moved you deeply, Miller. Some of the boys my age told me,
‘Your old man makes you want to march right out and do your job … and his.’ Some of my classmates weren’t so dumb.”

“Some of my classmates weren’t so dumb either,” I snapped. “I remember a philosophy major named Krakowitz. He said, ‘There’s only one thing worse than winning a war. That’s losing it.’ It was his opinion that when you were fighting Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo it might be true that nobody could win, but it was also true that if you lost, it could be real hell. Krakowitz. He died at Iwo Jima.”

“I’m deeply touched,” she said, bowing in the morning twilight. “So in college I met this gang of kept professors. What else can you call them? Their moral responsibility was to dissect the world, but they were paid to defend it. I suppose they had a job to do … learn, earn; pray, stay; live, give. They had one hell of a system going for them, those professors.

“But there was one who used to drop hints that he knew the world needed dissecting, and he caught on to me very fast. Taught music and wrote to my parents that I was rejecting the world. Boy, was he right! Father bullied him in his best draft-board manner and pointed out that I was doing all right in my ‘real’ classes. Reminded me of the passage in Plato where citizens looked so long in the mirror they confused image with reality. It never occurred to Father that this befuddled music master was looking at the real world while the others were marking me on attributes that would never matter … not even when Gabriel blows his horn.”

She paused, leaving me space to confute her if I
wished, but I was so befuddled by her succession of comment—as compared to the ease with which Mira accepted the life of the caravan, and to hell with what was bothering London or Tokyo—that I refrained from entering the argument. I had asked for an explanation, and I was getting it, whether I understood it or not. She continued, “When the worst part of the war arrived, my vision was confirmed. I don’t know why I wanted to marry Nazrullah. For one thing, in those days I hadn’t discovered that he was exactly like my father. Dear Nazrullah! He’ll have paved roads in Afghanistan yet. I suppose I came here because Afghanistan was as far from American values as I could get.” She paused, then added a curious comment: “The fact that Nazrullah already had a wife made the decision easier. Do you follow me?”

“I’m lost,” I confessed.

“What I mean is, my father described anything out of the ordinary as ridiculous, and I wanted to outrage his whole petty scale of judgment. What was the most ridiculous thing I could do? Run off with an Afghan who had a turban and another wife.” She laughed a little, then added, “Do you know what started my disillusionment with Nazrullah? That turban. He wore it in Philadelphia for show. He’d never think of wearing it in Kabul.”

“I still don’t understand,” I replied.

“Lots of young people in America will,” she assured me. “They’re beginning to reject any society built by men like my father.”

“Then God help America,” I said bitterly.

“It’s the young people like me who will save
America,” she responded. “They’ll understand what’s happening, and they’ll change things.”

I was pondering this chicanery of mind and thinking: I have to respect the passion of her thought and the sincerity with which she advances it, but I certainly distrust the logic—when the sun burst above the horizon and poured some much-needed light into the Vale of Bamian, illuminating the series of white limestone cliffs that rimmed the northern boundary. They rose high above the vale and were deeply eroded, so that shadows played across them in fascinating variety. The green poplars that grew so plentifully elsewhere stopped at the cliffs, allowing them to stand forth in sharp relief. Then, as the sun grew brighter, Ellen called, “Miller! Look!”

At first I did not see what had startled her, since I was looking for some ordinary thing. Then, looming from a gigantic niche cut in the face of the tallest cliff, appeared a towering statue of a man, many scores of feet high, wonderfully carved from the living rock. It was apparently a religious figure of heroic proportions, but what gave it an eerie quality was the fact that its enormous face had been chopped away: lips and chin remained, big as human beings themselves, but all above was a flat expanse of limestone.

While we stood in awe before the towering statue, the rest of the caravan drew up, permitting Zulfiqar to point with his gun at the faceless figure and announce, laconically, “Buddha.”

The caravan moved on to its accustomed tenting space, but Ellen and I remained staring at the hypnotic figure. I asked her to stand for comparison by
the mammoth feet while I stood back to calculate how tall the statue was: my rough guesswork yielded about a hundred and fifty feet Who had carved it here in the heart of a Muslim country? Who had chopped away the benign face?

I was not to find an answer to these questions, but as we studied the gigantic statue I became aware that the cliff beside it was honeycombed with caves, whose windows were literally peppered across the limestone. “What are they?” I asked, and Ellen suggested this might at one time have been a monastery. We looked some more and found an opening which seemed to lead to the caves, and Ellen indicated that she would like to explore them.

We entered a dark shaft that led upward through solid rock and after much climbing and skirting of precipitous ledges came to a small wooden bridge that carried us to the top of Buddha’s head. We were now far above the earth and a fall would have been disastrous, but we perched safely on the god’s head, surveying the vale that opened out before us. In the distance, in bright sunlight, we could see our tents going up.

From the head we found another passageway leading eastward to an interlocking nest of larger caves, which in the old days must have been lecture halls seating hundreds of monks. We found one especially lovely room whose windows, a hundred feet above the earth, framed a view of the Koh-i-Baba, and it was here that Ellen sat cross-legged on the rocky floor, her burnoose covering her body, as she resumed her argument with me.