Caravans (4 page)

“Where’d he meet the Jaspar girl?” Shah Khan asked, fingering his gold chain.

“Those were the years,” Moheb reminded us, “when there weren’t too many American men available. Nazrullah …”

“What’s his last name?” I interrupted.

“Just Nazrullah,” Moheb replied. “Like so many Afghans, he has no last name. As to the girl. She was a junior at Bryn Mawr. I think he may have met her while he was playing tennis at Merion. She came from a good family in Dorset, Pennsylvania.”

“Where’s that?” I asked, finding it strange to be asking an Afghan about American geography.

“Small town in Penns County,” Moheb explained. “North of Philadelphia.”

“They didn’t get married in Dorset,” I explained to Shah Khan.

“I should say not!” Moheb agreed vociferously. “Her family raised bloody hell. Bryn Mawr did the same. You know what that girl did? In the middle of the war she went to England, wangled her way to India, and came up the Khyber Pass in a donkey caravan. She was married here in Kabul.”

“It was a brilliant wedding,” Shah Khan remembered. “Have you a picture of the girl, Monsieur Miller?”

From my files I produced several photographs of Ellen Jaspar. As a sophomore at Bryn Mawr she had played in Shakespeare—Olivia in
Twelfth
Night
—a thin, good-looking blonde and apparently graceful. In her junior year she sang in the chorus that co-operated with Fritz Reiner in doing Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony,
and in her surplice with her blond hair peeking from under her cap she looked angelic. There were pictures of her and Nazrullah, she a lovely white and he a romantic brown. And there was one picture of her when she graduated from high school, wide-eyed and smiling, yet somehow apprehensive. I had known a thousand girls like Ellen Jaspar; they adorned the campuses at Radcliffe, Smith and Holyoke. They all did well in English, poorly in mathematics, indifferently in philosophy. They were the vibrant, exciting girls who would seriously consider, in the middle of their junior year, marrying a young man from Afghanistan or Argentina or Turkestan. Most of them, in their senior year, developed more sense and married young men from Denver or Mobile or Somerville, outside of Boston.

“What made her different?” Shah Khan asked.

“We have the reports. Her father says he begged her not to do this thing, and all she would reply was that she was fed up with Dorset, Pennsylvania, and that she would rather die on the sands of the desert than marry the young man from that town who had been courting her.”

“Is Dorset so bad?” the old Afghan asked. “I knew many small towns in France, and they weren’t exciting, but they weren’t bad, either.”

“I used to drive out to Dorset,” Moheb Khan replied. “I remember it as a lovely American town. Rather colonial in architecture, I recall.”

“But you didn’t live there,” the old man reflected.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Moheb corrected. “For three days. Ellen and Nazrullah drove me up one Friday afternoon. He wanted the Jaspars to see that in Afghanistan we had many young men who spoke well. It was an agonizing weekend.”

“The Jaspars took the whole thing rather dimly?” I asked.

Moheb was about to reply when I received the distinct sensation that some additional person had entered the room. A presence of some kind seemed to hover near me in the heavy battle-room and I thought I saw old Shah Khan looking over my shoulder and shaking his head. I turned in the direction of whoever it was who might be receiving the message, and there was no one. But I did see something I had not noticed when I first arrived in the room. In the hallway, thrown across a chair as an American child might throw her raincoat, lay a fawn-colored chaderi.

“Dimly?” Moheb was echoing. “The Jaspars looked at Nazrullah and me as if we had leprosy.”

“What did Mr. Jaspar work at?” I asked. “Wasn’t it insurance?”

“Yes. He had that sweet, affable nature that insurance men around the world acquire,” Moheb replied. “I liked him, and his wife was equally pleasant. He was also chairman, I believe, of the local draft board. A position of responsibility.”

“Later on,” Shah Khan inquired, “didn’t you advise the Jaspars against an Afghan marriage?”

“Yes. I met them in Philadelphia, and I brought along our ambassador from Washington, and the four of us … Nazrullah and Ellen knew nothing
of this meeting and did not attend. We discussed the matter quite frankly.”

“You told them the truth?” I asked.

“Completely. As I recall, our ambassador was rather unhappy and thought the explicitness of my explanation unnecessary. Told me later I might have damaged our nation’s reputation. I told the Jaspars that if their daughter married Nazrullah, when she reached Kabul her American passport would be taken away and she could never thereafter leave Afghanistan, no matter what the excuse, without her husband’s permission. That she was an Afghan then and forever, and that she surrendered all claim to protection from America.”

“You told them that as clearly as you are telling me?” Shah Khan asked.

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“Mrs. Jaspar began to cry.”

“Did you warn them about Afghan salaries and living conditions?” I asked.

“I did. Most explicitly,” Moheb assured me. “I said, ‘Mr. Jaspar, Ellen mustn’t be deceived by the fact that in America Nazrullah drives a Cadillac and I a Mercedes. Our government is very generous to us as long as we’re abroad, but when we go home Nazrullah and I will get jobs that pay no more than twenty American dollars a month.’”

“Did they believe you?”

“They saw the cars and were sure I was lying. In Dorset, Pennsylvania, as in Kabul, cupidity is the same. The Jaspars were convinced that Nazrullah was very rich.”

“What does he earn now?” I asked.

The Khans conversed in Pashto and agreed that Nazrullah and his American bride had begun with a salary of twenty-one dollars a month and that it had now grown to twenty-seven, more or less.

“And I explained the housing,” Moheb continued. “I said that for much of her life Ellen would live in a hovel, surrounded by women who despised her for not wearing the chaderi …”

“Is it true, Your Excellency,” I asked, “that Afghanistan may soon discard the chaderi?”

The old man leaned back in his red leather chair and replied, “You Americans seem inordinately preoccupied with the chaderi. Look!” and he pointed to the chair in the hall. “My own granddaughter wears the chaderi and her mother graduated from the Sorbonne.” I looked again at the fawn-colored shroud.

“Does your granddaughter enjoy doing so?” I asked.

“We do not concern ourselves about that,” Shah Khan replied.

“But the Russians do,” I responded, touching a sore point with the old man. “They say they will force you to set your women free, as they have done theirs.”

I knew instinctively that he wanted to speak further on this point, that he agreed with me and the Russians that the chaderi must go or revolution come, but he stopped the conversation with this observation: “I learned today that the young woman from your embassy, Miss Maxwell, was assaulted by three mullahs from the hills. You rescued her, I believe. Then you know how powerful these fanatics still are. The chaderi will remain.”

“I assured the Jaspars,” Moheb continued, “that Ellen would not have to wear one, but that Nazrul-Iah’s family would hate her if she didn’t. I also warned them that if Ellen appeared in public without the chaderi, mullahs might spit at her.” His voice grew harsh as he added, “Miller Sahib, I told the Jaspars of every fact relating to ferangi wives in Afghanistan and later on I told Ellen herself. I was as honest as a man could be. I warned her that if she married Nazrullah she would become a woman without a country, a woman without a judge to protect her, a woman with no human rights at all, an animal … an animal.” He rose and walked with great agitation up and down the fortress room. “And I remember exactly what I said, Miller, because a year later I had to tell another girl, from Baltimore this time, the same dismal story, and this girl had sense enough not to marry me, but your damned Miss Jaspar went ahead and married Nazrullah, and now senators are trying to find out where she is.”

He fell into a chair, poured himself a drink and reflected, “This preposterous Afghan government. It says, ‘When young Afghans go abroad they must live like gentlemen.’ So the government provides huge expense accounts and we buy Cadillacs. What allowance do you suppose I got when I was at the Wharton School? One thousand dollars every month. No wonder the girls wanted to marry us. But when that same government brought me home, you know the salary I got—twenty-one dollars a month. Right now, Nazrullah heads an irrigation project west of Kandahar and earns twenty-seven dollars a month … more or less.”

“Is his wife with him?” I asked bluntly.

“Which wife?” Shah Khan asked.

I was startled. “What do you mean, which wife?”

“Didn’t you tell the Jaspars about that?” Shah Khan asked his son.

“There are some things an Afghan doesn’t discuss in a foreign country,” Moheb replied.

“Was Nazrullah married before he went to America?” I pressed.

“He had a family wife, of course,” Shah Khan explained. “But that signifies nothing.”

“That’s not in the file,” I protested.

“Enter it now,” the old man said. “Nazrullah was married before he met the American girl. That should put the Jaspars at ease.” As soon as he had said this, he apologized. “I’m sorry, Miller Sahib. That was ungenerous. I’m as worried as the Jaspars must be. Where is their daughter? They haven’t heard from her, you tell me, in more than thirteen months? What a terrible burden on good parents.”

The old man began to cry, and wiped tears from his dark eyes. Afghans, I had learned, were very apt to cry on little notice, but these tears were real.

When he had mastered his weeping he added in a beautiful French whisper, “Our family showed the same prudence as Nazrullah’s. Before we allowed Moheb to leave for England we married him to a local girl from a good Muslim family. We reasoned, ‘Later on, if he also marries an English girl, no harm will be done. When he works in Kabul he’ll have a Muslim family and when he’s sent to Europe he’ll have an attractive English wife.’ I remember discussing the matter with Nazrullah’s parents. We promised, ‘We won’t allow the boys to
leave home till they’ve had one or two Afghan babies.’ It worked very well.”

“Did you explain that to the Baltimore girl?” I asked Moheb.

“No,” he replied honestly, “but I suppose it was what drove me to describe so frankly the other drawbacks of life in Afghanistan.”

I put my hands squarely on the leather folder and said, “All right, where can the Jaspar girl be?”

Shah Khan ordered a glass of orangeade, a foul sweet drink which abstemious Afghans took in place of alcohol. It was brought, of course, by a befezzed man, for in a country adhering to the chaderi, men must do much of the work usually done by women.

“I’ve been pondering this problem,” Shah Khan reflected. “It isn’t easy to obtain news from a city as far away as Kandahar, but we manage. We find that Nazrullah and his American wife … you understand that his Muslim wife stays here in Kabul with the children?”

“More than one child?” I asked.

“Yes, he had one before he went to the Wharton School and one after he got back.”

I pondered this, then pointed out, “But he must have been living with the Jaspar girl when he had the second child?”

“Of course. But he also had responsibilities to his Afghan wife. She merited consideration.”

“So he gave her another baby?” I asked.

“It’s difficult to comprehend our attitude toward women,” Shah Khan confessed. “We cherish them. We love them. We protect them. And we dedicate most of our poetry to them. But we don’t want them cluttering up our lives.”

“I’d think that two wives would do just that,” I demurred.

“My life is one of the most uncluttered I know,” Shah Khan assured me quietly, “yet I have four wives.”

“Four?” I asked.

Something in the way I looked at the old man amused him, for he said quietly, “You Americans picture a man with four wives as leaping from bed to bed till he drops of exhaustion. It isn’t like that … not at all. Fact is, in some ways I’m worse off than the average American businessman. He marries young, outgrows his wife and gets rid of her. I can’t. When a girl marries me, she leaves her home forever and I can’t send her back. I’ve got to support her in my home the rest of her life, unless I divorce her, which would be a public disgrace. So as the years go by I move these good women, one by one, into back bedrooms. In energy and money the American and the Afghan systems cost about the same.”

Moheb interrupted, “The Muslim attitude toward women was a response to historical forces, and the interesting thing is that these same forces are acting now to make America polygamous.”

Before I could challenge this surprising theory, Shah Khan observed, “Moheb’s right. Islam was born in a period when war and ambuscade killed off our men. Each family had a burdensome surplus of women, and Muhammad, with his superbly practical mind, saw there were only three ways of dealing with the matter. Either you converted the needless women into marketplace whores, or edged them into ritual celibacy, or portioned them out as
extra wives. Muhammad, always the most moral of men, shuddered at prostitution and gave the women legal status as wives. He chose the flawless solution.”

“How does this apply to America?” I asked.

Shah Khan ignored my question. “So under our system I’ve had to take care of many women … wives, brothers’ wives, grandmothers. By the way, Miller Sahib, do you know anything of a Quaker school near Philadelphia called the George School? We’re thinking of sending my granddaughter Siddiqa there. The other girls have always gone to Paris.”

Cautiously I asked, “How old is Siddiqa?”

“How old is she?” Shah Khan asked.

“Seventeen,” Moheb replied. “She prefers things American and we thought …”

“It’s a good school,” I said. “Coeducational. Boys and girls.”

“It isn’t a convent?” Shah Khan asked with some surprise.