Caravans (6 page)

The Afghan servant came in to place upon the
fire a few precious logs, and each of us drew closer to someone else, for the wind outside was audible. “The stranger rejected my rebuff and asked again ‘Sir Herbert, do you know anything of the Kashmiri bear?’ I replied, with some irritation, ‘It’s a bear. I’ve seen it at the zoo in Simla. Roger Whats-hisname shot one.’ The man pressed me, ‘But have you shot one?’

“‘No,’ I replied, and the man said sternly, ‘Then you have no right to have an opinion upon this matter. Sir Herbert, you must not shoot this particular bear, really you mustn’t.’ I thanked him for his pains and marched out of the bar, but on the way to the shoot, one of my guides asked me in Kashmiri if I had ever hunted the bears of his country, and when I said no, he suggested that we go back. This so whetted my appetite that I spurred the horses and we came to that part of Kashmir where the brown bears are to be found.

“We hunted for some time and saw nothing, but toward dusk we came upon a thicket, and although I didn’t get a clear sight on the beast, I could see it was a bear, and I let fly. I didn’t kill the bear, and more’s the pity, for I had wounded it mortally.”

Sir Herbert stopped his narrative, and for a moment I thought he had undertaken in his telling rather more than he had anticipated. He did not want to continue, that was obvious, but he took a gulp of whiskey and said, “I suppose no one in this room has ever heard a Kashmiri bear. He has a voice like a human being … like a woman in extreme pain. When he is wounded, he beats his way through the thicket crying like a stricken mother. You can almost hear the words. He moans and
wails and is obviously about to die of mortal pain. It is …” He fumbled for words, extended his right hand and punched the air. “It is …”

From a place near the fire Lady Margaret said, “It is shattering to the mind. Sir Herbert wanted to leave the thicket, but the bearers warned him that he must finish off the bear. That was his duty. So he plunged in—the men told me—but the bear had limped off into the deeper woods.” Husband and wife fell silent, and we listened to the rising wind, blowing down the last of the winter’s blizzards.

“I tracked that sobbing bear for about an hour,” Sir Herbert said quietly. “It was easy, because constantly the beast screamed and wept. It was positively uncanny. That bear was not an animal. It was all the grieved things that men shoot, the partridges, the deer, the rabbits. I tell you, that bear spoke to me, crying out in its pain. I finally found it exhausted by a tree. Even as I came upon it, it wept new laments. By God, I tell you that bear …”

“Did you shoot him?” the French ambassador asked in French.

“Yes. I don’t know how, but I did. Then I rushed back to Srinagar to find the man who had warned me in the bar, but he was gone.”

“What is the point of this story, Sir Herbert?” Moheb Khan asked. “Surely if tonight we shoot a wolf it will not behave so.”

“The point is, Moheb Khan, that none of us in this room was prepared for what we expected in Afghanistan. You, Miss Maxwell, didn’t your government in Washington hand you a neatly typed
report on Kabul? Mean temperature. Dress warmly. Expect dysentery.”

“Yes,” Miss Maxwell laughed.

“And it was all the truth, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“But did it prepare you for today? Getting up at six to type a play because you wanted to be here with us? Being assaulted by mullahs in the bazaar? Seeing wolves rushing at your car?”

“No,” Miss Maxwell said calmly. “The reports in Washington did not prepare me for any of that. I never dreamed that I could find a room anywhere in the world as warm, as human as this one. Almost everyone I care for deeply is right here, tonight. As for the mullahs and the wolves, I wasn’t prepared for them, either. Right now I don’t believe they happened.”

“Exactly what I meant,” Sir Herbert said, holding his hands up toward the group. “Reality in no way prepared me for the Kashmiri bears. I’m sure that dreadful incident never happened. But, Miss Maxwell, sometime years from now, those wolves will be as real to you as that stricken bear is to me. And to each of us, years from now, Afghanistan will be real, too.”

“You make it sound far too difficult to understand my country,” Moheb Khan contradicted. “It’s very easy, really. All you have to do is read what Colonel Sir Hungerford Holdich said about us in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.” He pronounced the names with exaggerated precision.

“What are you saying?” the Swedish girl asked in French.

“With your permission,” Moheb Khan said, bowing to Sir Herbert and taking down from the library shelf Volume I of the Britannica. Opening it to the article on Afghanistan he read in a sardonic accent:

“Now that’s all one paragraph, mind you,” Moheb Khan warned us, “and I used to wonder
how long it would take me to acquire the attributes I was, as a typical Afghan, supposed to have. Crafty, lying, deceitful I was, but what do you suppose kept me from qualifying? That troublesome bit about the bird of prey. How does one transform himself into a bird of prey? Well, I gave up on that first paragraph, but the next one offered hope. May I continue?”

“Proceed,” Sir Herbert said.

Moheb Khan smiled, adjusted the heavy volume and read on:

With a flourish, Moheb Khan slammed the encyclopedia shut and stared at the readers. “You know, there’s a funny thing about this. It was written by an Englishman who was totally perplexed as to how we Afghans had managed to thrash the living daylights out of English armies … twice. The man who wrote this must have perched himself on a stool in a little room and thought for some time: What kind of men are these Afghans, that they can defeat our armies? And he composed the
description of a man who was as unlike an Englishman as possible, and then he wrote it properly in this big book, which I first read at Oxford. And what was my reaction? At that time? I was proud that a ferangi had seen so deeply into my character and had written with such respect. Today, when I am older, these seem like words of hatred or ignorance. They are not. They are profound words of respect from a scholar who simply had to know how we Afghans generated our capacity to fight Never forget that marvelous peroration: ‘the charm is not of long duration, and he finds that the Afghan is as cruel and crafty as he is independent.’”

“Moheb!” I cried. “You’ve memorized the passage, haven’t you?”

“Only the favorable parts,” he laughed.

“You think ‘cruel and crafty’ one of the good parts?” Miss Askwith inquired.

“When you use those characteristics to defend the end word of the sentence, they’re good,” Moheb replied. “Always remember the end word, Miss Askwith. Independent.” Then he laughed easily and said, “But through trying years you English have come to know me as your trusted friend. Otherwise, how would I dare read such an English passage inside these walls, where twice my cruel and crafty ancestors murdered every Englishman resident in Kabul? In 1841 we did that evil thing, and in 1879 we played an encore, and I think it damned gracious of you even to have me here.”

“Don’t think we English forget the massacres,” Sir Herbert said gravely. “It lends a certain spice to life in Kabul. Within these red and crumbling
walls. Sort of like living in Hiroshima when an airplane flies overhead.”

“I think we should get on with the reading,” I suggested.

“He’s to be the star,” a young British officer teased. He was my principal rival for the attentions of Miss Gretchen Askwith.

“As a matter of fact,” one of the Frenchmen said in French, “he’s supposed to kiss Ingrid.”

“I am,” I said eagerly, “and I’d appreciate it if we got to that part before morning.”

“Wise boy,” Ingrid laughed. “In the morning I look dreadful.”

It was in this mood that the reading began. During the first act, the voices seemed strange, for the Englishman who was supposed to be Harry Brock remained an Oxford aesthete, and Ingrid could be no more than a Swedish beauty with prominent breasts, while the others remained themselves, including me, who never transmuted myself into anything but an eager young man from the American embassy. But the fire was warm. The audience was attentive. And outside there was the smell of wolves, and no one could forget that he was in Afghanistan in the deep of winter, far, far from what he knew as civilization. I think even Moheb Khan was affected by the experience, for at the end of the first act he asked, “Sir Herbert, have the evenings I missed been as good as this?”

“Since I’ve been here they have,” the Englishman replied. “Three weeks ago we read
Murder in the Cathedral.
I was asked to be Thomas à Becket.”

“Oh, I should like to have seen that!” Moheb
cried. “American college folk are very fond of T. S. Eliot. They adore him as a fellow citizen who became a poet, and respect him for having had the character to flee America, which they would like to do, but can’t.”

I’m afraid I had fallen rather deeply into the part I was reading, that of the intellectual reporter from the
New Republic,
and I said, “Like Eliot, you fled America, Moheb, but unlike him you regret it every minute.”

“Agreed!” the affable Afghan cried. “If there’s one thing I like it’s fast cars and a sense of irresponsibility. In America I had both, and every day I work here in Afghanistan I regret their passing.” He raised his palms in a gesture of submission, then added, “But at some point in our lives, we must grow up.”

“I am sure your country will,” I replied evenly. Moheb, rather pleased with his earlier remarks, flushed slightly but nodded pleasantly, for he was not the kind of fighter who refused to accept his adversary’s blows; he rather respected the man who could strike back.

“Will anyone have more spiced rum?” the ambassador inquired, and as the servants refilled our drinks, and as the fire grew brighter, we reformed our group and the reading of Act Two commenced. By now we were more accustomed to our roles, and the audience accepted whatever peculiarities we exhibited. If tonight Harry Brock spoke not Brooklynese but an exaggerated Oxford—one as bad as the other, I thought—we were willing to accept this convention, and when Ingrid cried, “Would you do me a favor, Harry? Drop dead?”
she sounded exactly like the dumb blonde of all countries, of all time. By the end of the act we had created, there in the old fortress, that ambience which dramatists seek but which so often eludes them. Actors and audience were one, moving together and accepting each other as equals. Partly, I think, it was because each person in that warm, quiet room knew that if he did not achieve some kind of satisfaction from our play, there was nothing else in Afghanistan to which he could escape. Either he attained catharsis now, or he was self-sentenced to days of non-participation. So each of us reached out to the other, made overtures that normally we would not have made, because each knew that for the forthcoming sixteen or eighteen months we would find joy with our repetitive neighbors, or we would find no joy at all. That was why life in Kabul-sans roads, sans movies, sans news, sans everything—was so profoundly meaningful. We probed the secrets of a few rather than glossing over the chance acquaintanceship of many, and each new thing we discovered about our colleagues uncovered new significance. For example, I had never imagined that glamorous Ingrid owned such a naughty wit.

The conversation that developed after Act Two was much different from that which followed Act One. Somehow, the play had insinuated itself into our intellect and had taken command. We poor inadequate readers had transcended ourselves, and the characters we were purporting to create had actually come to life. Harry Brock and his aspiring blonde were with us in the stout-walled embassy.

“We could use a few of your type in our country,”
Moheb Khan said to the Englishman playing the part of the junk dealer, and he meant not the actual Oxford boy but his play part, the junk dealer.

“There’s a great deal to be said about good old Harry that isn’t said in this play,” the Englishman agreed. “Miller, how much of the building of America is to be credited to men like our Harry?”

“A good deal, I should imagine, and I think it’s rather clever of you to discover the fact. You’ve not been in America, have you?”