Caravans

  Then he stepped across the two stupefied westerners and grabbed me by the throat with his left hand. With his right he gave me a blow that sent me staggering backward in the dust. “Get out!” he roared. “Get out!”

  Finally he grabbed little Maftoon and lifted him off the ground. “They’re your friends,” he shouted scornfully. “Take them to Balkh. Now! Now!”

  In a storming rage he tore into his tent and began throwing out all the possessions that Ellen had accumulated. This done, he rushed to my tent, where he did the same with everything belonging to Stiglitz and me. The doctor’s bag landed on one corner and popped open, spilling medicine which the silent Kochis began greedily grabbing.

  “Put it back!” Zulfiqar shouted. “We want nothing of theirs.”

  In this manner he continued, with blood reddening his back, until he saw us packed, with white horse saddled, and Maftoon ready with the camel Becky, who carried a tent for us, and a donkey whose panniers contained some food.

  “Get out!” he bellowed, and as we crept away down the river trail toward the confluence where he had gained glory in the yurt, I saw him rip off his shirt to inspect his wound. It was not deep and he yelled for Racha to wash it. That was the last I ever saw of Zulfiqar or his wife Racha.

  We formed a pathetic caravan as we moved out of the Hindu Kush. Stiglitz, shaken by his approach to death, was allowed to ride the white horse, which he did in silence. Ellen was in a state of unbelief: her jaw was sore and her vanity abused. Confusion was increased by the effect of her gray burnoose, which made her look soft and feminine while her words made her harsh and unlovely.

  “How dare he strike me?” she asked several times. “And spit at me? He’s no better than an ignorant mullah. I should have killed him myself.” She was shaken with anger at the memory of her humiliation, and as I studied these bedraggled lovers I was willing to concede that they had converted themselves into non-people, those rejected dregs on which the world rebuilds, and I was sure they felt confirmed in this claim.

  Little Maftoon was equally disturbed, because when he got rid of us at Balkh there was no escape: he would have to rejoin the caravan, and it had been his knife that had wounded Zulfiqar, his friendship for me that accounted for his being with us. The scar-eyed cameleer found no pleasure in this caravan, nor did his enemy Aunt Becky, who like all camels protested any trail that descended, since it threw unaccustomed burdens on her awkward front legs. She growled and gurgled so much that pretty soon somebody in the caravan had better undress and let her fight his clothes or there would be serious trouble.

  Nor was I exempt from the sense of melancholy which had been closing in on me for days. I had lost Mira, the elfin spirit of the caravan, and I could imagine her trapped in the mountains by her father’s hatred of me. In my loneliness I was forced to admit, for the first time, that I loved her without reservation. On the high plateaus she had laughed and teased her way into my heart, and she would remain a part of me as long as I lived. To have lost her without even a farewell was intolerable. But I had also been abused by her father, who during the preceding weeks had been treating me as his predilected son, sharing with me thoughts he would not confide to others. He had gone out of his way to help me with my mission, introducing me to the Kirghiz sharif, and from watching him at work I had grown to admire his cool calculations and mastery of politics; yet our friendship had ended with his knocking me down, cursing me and throwing me out of his camp. Frankly, I couldn’t understand what had happened.

  In fact, if one considered the entire complement of our cut-rate caravan, the only member not spiritually wounded was the donkey. He plodded along with panniers banging his sides, content to know that if he didn’t work for us, on this trail, he would have to work for someone else, on some other trail.

  We had proceeded thus for two silent hours when I heard Maftoon cry, “Miller Sahib! Look!”

  I turned to see what new misfortune had befallen us, half expecting to find that Aunt Becky had broken a leg, but instead I saw Maftoon pointing back along the trail we had traveled, and there came Mira, in red skirt and pink blouse, running to overtake us.

  “Her father will kill her,” Maftoon lamented.

  She was more than a mile away, a marvelous little hummingbird skipping across the meadowland, and I started running back to meet her. “Take the horse,” Stiglitz offered, but I was already on my way.

  Out of breath we met on the trail and rushed into a long kiss, which convinced me of how desperately I needed her, how ashamed I had been at being forced to leave the caravan without speaking to her. I think that as we finished our embrace she was weeping, but I do not know, for in these matters she was proud and she buried her face in my shoulder as I lifted her and carried her along the trail.

  The others came back to meet us, all except Aunt Becky, who, when she started downhill, turned back for nothing. We looked at her gaunt brown figure plopping across rocks and began to laugh. It was so joyful to be with Mira, and cockeyed Maftoon, and the lovers and the beat-up old camel.

  As I put Mira down, Ellen ran to embrace her as if they were schoolgirl roommates, and the affection between the girls was real, for to Ellen Mira owed her dress, her manner of doing her hair and her few English sentences; and it was obvious that she was pleased to be with the American girl again.

  But Maftoon warned in a doom-laden voice, “You should not have done this, Mira. Your father will kill you.”

  To our astonishment Mira replied, “He told me to come.”

  “He what?”

  “Of course. I told him, ‘I’d like to go to Balkh with Miner,’ and he said, ‘Why not?’”

  “You mean that Zulfiqar …”

  “He’s not mad at anybody,” Mira assured us, expressing surprise that we should think so.

  “He knocked me down,” Ellen protested. “He spat at me.”

  Again Mira embraced her friend. “He had to do that, Ellen. The others were looking, waiting—the whole caravan.”

  “He almost killed me,” Stiglitz added, rubbing his neck.

  Mira looked almost condescendingly at the German and asked proudly, “If my father had been truly angry, do you think he would have missed with his dagger? His honor demanded that he do something about you, Doctor. But he wasn’t angry. It was only make-believe … in front of the others.”

  I caught Mira by the shoulders and shook her: “Are you telling the truth?”

  She laughed at me as she broke free. “Miller! When my father said good-by just now he was chuckling. He told me, ‘Tell that damned German he put up a good fight.’ And he sent you this, Dr. Stiglitz.” From her pink blouse she produced the Damascus dagger Zulfiqar had used in the duel. Handing the silver sheath gravely to the German, she said, “His wedding present to you. My father said, ‘It will remind the wife that her husband was once willing to fight for her … with daggers.’”

  Then she took me aside and explained softly, “When you left, Miller, my father went to our tent and threw himself on the rugs. Again and again he said, ‘He was like my son. He was my son. Why did I strike him?’ For a while at Qabir I think he hoped that by some miracle you would stay with us and help him run the caravan.” There was a moment of intense silence, broken by her sharp cry, “There goes Becky!”

  The willful old camel had spotted, off to one side of the trail, some grass that she fancied and, having eaten it, now continued straight ahead in the new direction even though it was taking her into dangerous rocky areas. Nothing would stop her, dumb beast that she was, for she would continue plodding ahead until she destroyed herself, unless some human teased her into returning to the trail. By those who know them best, camels are considered the stupidest of animals, and Aunt Becky was out to prove her claim to the title, but she was forestalled by Mira, who dashed after the lumbering beast, cursing her madly, and we fell to laughing as the determined little nomad pursued the huge camel, scrambling over rock and shale until she had maneuvered Aunt Becky back to safety.

>   This was the tonic our bedraggled group needed, and without fully appreciating what I was doing or its consequences I took Ellen by the hands and teased her in a schoolboy’s way. “Ellen and her men!” I chanted, waving her arms up and down. “She wants to reject the world, so she runs off with Nazrullah, whose only ambition is to build a big dam. So she drops him for wild free Zulfiqar, who wants to settle down beside the dam. Then she chooses Dr. Stiglitz. Look at him up there grinning on that horse. He’s planning to build a hospital on Zulfiqar’s land beside Nazrullah’s dam.”

  “Ring-around-a-rosy,” Ellen cried, joining in the joke. And with a sudden lilt of her body she began dancing me over the trail, her gray burnoose swinging free in haunting beauty. Then I felt the pulsating throb of life in her hands as they gripped mine and realized that this was the first time I had touched Ellen. She was vibrant and her eyes flashed, making her irresistible and quite different from the troubled young college girl we had discussed that wintry day at the American embassy in Kabul. I was caught by an embarrassment which sprang from reasons I did not then fully comprehend, and I let her hands fall, so that the force of her dancing spun her away in lovely gyrations until she collapsed in laughter on a grassy bank.

  Dr. Stiglitz leaped from his horse to lift her to her feet, but Mira reached her first and asked with real concern, “Are you hurt, Ellen?”

  “I could dance right out of the mountains,” she told the little nomad. Then she reached up and kissed Dr. Stiglitz as he helped her back onto the trail.

  In this manner we re-formed our little caravan and, with Mira restoring the levity we had lost, began one of the loveliest journeys any of us would ever know. From Qabir to Balkh was only eighty miles, which we should have covered in about five days, but we were in no hurry and our patient progress through the mountains became an extended joy. It had been one thing to carry on a light love affair with a bright-eyed nomad girl, built of hasty meetings in rocky enclaves; it was quite another to live with that girl twenty-four hours a day, helping her prepare pilau, watching her as she loaded the donkey and sharing her life as if we intended never to part. Once she said, “We should find mountains where it never snows and get us a flock of karakuls,” and she laughed when Ellen teased, “Can’t you imagine Mark Miller herding karakul sheep on Boston Common?” But her easy laughter did not hide the fact that we were falling deeper and deeper in love, so that our final parting was bound to be a matter of anguish.

  At the same time I had a chance to observe Ellen and her doctor as they started their new life freed from the presence of Zulfiqar, and as I watched them I had to admit that there was some substance to Ellen’s confused thesis about the non-people. She and Stiglitz worried about nothing. For them there was no past, no future, no responsibility. The days came and went, and the two lovers existed. They were non-people who on a high plateau in Afghanistan had found each other after a series of improbable adventures, and the days of their rebirth from nothingness were brilliant to watch.

  Yet as soon as I have said this, I must confess that it was also now that I became aware for the first time of a dark presence when they were with us in the tent, an element of strangeness, almost of tangible foreboding. It was Mira who pointed this out to me. For us, love had been a relaxed and easily accepted experience. To be sure, the little nomad girl reveled in an exquisite passion, which she found joy in sharing, and I, although I am no expert in these matters, felt sure at the time that my response was adequate. But on the first night out of Qabir, when the bunks were made and all four of us had gone to bed in the black tent, Mira and I were astonished at the sounds which came from the opposite side of our quarters. It was as if those other lovers feared that nights were numbered and that at Balkh some tragedy would envelop them. Mira whispered, “We better leave the tent for them,” but as we crept away I had the curious feeling that this extraordinary performance in the other bed had somehow been directed at me.

  Mira and I walked in the gray light of the full moon, passing the nook where Maftoon slept with the animals, while the white horse, that symbol of leadership and manliness that Mira had brought me, grazed on the hillside. In Pashto Mira said, “I am convinced now that my father was relieved when Ellen started sleeping with Dr. Stiglitz.”

  “That’s still an astonishing thing to say.”

  “I think he’d had enough of lovemaking,” she suggested.

  “With a girl like Ellen? You must be crazy.”

  “Do you remember that first morning?” she asked. “At the caravanserai? My father found you fighting and ran out to warn us, ‘Hide Ellen. The American is here looking for her.’ So we hid her in one of the little rooms. But only a few minutes later he ordered me to bring her before you.”

  I tried to recall the scene. Zulfiqar had taken our knife and the Kochis had entered, including Mira, whose saucy pigtails I could still see. Yes, Mira was right. Zulfiqar had sent her out specifically to fetch Ellen, and had he not done so, we need never have known that she was with the Kochis. He had intended me to find her.

  Mira and I walked for some hours through the great mountains of Afghanistan, then crept quietly back to the tent where Ellen and Stiglitz were asleep, but on the second night the performance in the other bed was repeated and again Mira suggested that we leave, and in this manner my ambivalent feeling toward the other couple developed: in the day they were persons of feeling and judgment with whom I found an increasing sense of identification; but at night they became something strange. One curious facet of this ambivalence concerned Dr. Stiglitz, for I had gradually been forced to concede that he had transformed himself from a Nazi criminal into a man determined to serve humanity. My hatred for what he had done to the Jews in Munich was exorcised; our weeks together, our long discussions, had made him like a brother. I therefore had to conclude that whatever uneasiness I felt about the couple must stem not from Stiglitz but from Ellen.

  For example, on the third evening out we pitched our camp in a rocky gorge that would lead us out of the Hindu Kush, and at the end of day Maftoon spread his little prayer rug on the rocks. Estimating where Mecca stood, he knelt to pray, but he had uttered only a few words when Dr. Stiglitz, impressed by the gravity of the mountains at dusk, joined him, and they knelt as the Koran directed, shoulder to shoulder in that brotherhood which Islam fosters and which is unknown to most other religions.

  Women were not allowed to pray with men, so well to the rear Mira knelt and after a while Ellen joined her and I was left standing alone within the circle of rocks, wondering how there could be any connection between that spot and Mecca. I respected Islam, but I had never felt either a part of it or capable of ever becoming a part; but at this moment I remembered Nazrullah’s question: If you lived in Afghanistan permanently, wouldn’t you pray as a Muslim? Impulsively I knelt beside Dr. Stiglitz and felt his shoulder touching mine, and for some minutes the five of us prayed and I heard illiterate Maftoon chanting, “God is great God is great. I am witness that there is no God but the one God, and I am His servant. For God is great. God is great.” At that moment of fellowship I could believe that this strange religion, so difficult for a Jew like me to comprehend, had been specially ordained for deserts and high plateaus, and it had been sent by God Himself to make men in these lonely areas act as brothers. At that moment I experienced an intense sensation of Otto Stiglitz as my brother.

  “God is great. God is good. We are the servants of God,” Maftoon chanted, and it occurred to me: In all the Muslim prayers I have actually heard recited as compared to those one reads in books, I’ve heard only of God, never of Muhammad. Maftoon, as if he had overheard my thoughts, ended his prayer, “God is great, and I am witness that Muhammad is His Prophet.” When we rose I looked back at the girls, and there was dark little Mira in pigtails still kneeling beside blond Ellen, whose burnoose fell about her stately figure like the robes of some saint in prayer, and there was a sense of beauty hovering above the worshipers so harmonious with the setting that for a long time w
e stayed in the shadow of the mountains saying little.

  On the next day we penetrated the last range of hills separating the Hindu Kush from the arid plains leading to Balkh, and as Aunt Becky stumbled out of the mountains and saw flat ground again, she gave a series of joyful gurgles and started loping across the dusty fields, as if here at last was the true Afghanistan.

  The heat became considerable, for this was mid-July, and we had to exercise caution in our use of water. We also reverted to the desert practice of traveling at night, but since the moon was nearly full this added to the beauty of our trip. During the day we slept, Stiglitz and Ellen in the tent, Maftoon with the camel, and Mira and I wherever we could find shade.

  “I thought Ellen was your dearest friend,” I chided Mira as we hiked through the heat looking for a place to sleep.

  “She is,” the little nomad replied, “but it will be safer if you sleep away from her.”

  “Why do you say a thing like that?” I demanded.

  At first she refused to speak, then added simply, “It was while she was sleeping with my father that I discovered she was in love with Dr. Stiglitz.”

  “How could anybody know a thing like that?” I asked with some irritation, for we were finding no shade.

  “I told you at the time, didn’t I?” she reminded me.

  “How did you know?” I snapped.

  “I knew, that’s all.”

  Toward midnight of our fourth day on the plains I was riding the white horse at the head of the caravan when I spotted, in the silvery moonlight ahead, an extensive area denuded of trees but marked by solitary mounds on which grass seemed to be growing in scanty spots. In the semidarkness it looked like a burial ground for giants, but when Maftoon overtook me in the moonlight he said, “That is Balkh,” and I rode on to inspect the meaningless sweep of empty earth.

  So this was Balkh, mother of cities, fair Balkh where Alexander had married Roxane, the learned city at the crossroads of the world, the leading metropolis of Central Asia! As a boy I had been fascinated by this city, ancient and famous even before the days of Darius. All the remembered travelers of Asia had recorded their impressions of this dazzling treasure house: Ibn Batuta, Hsuan Tsang, Genghis, Marco Polo, Tamerlane, Baber. Its history was resplendent. Its memory was obscured. And now even its outlines were destroyed.