“Why?”
“It’s damned important that our side have someone who’s been there. We’ve no information about it except that every summer the nomads gather there, and we think that Russians, Chinese, Tajiks, Uzbeks… the lot …”
“Supposing I could get there, what do you want me to do?”
“Just look. Find out who the Russians send and how they get across the Oxus.”
“I’d stand out like a sore thumb,” I protested.
“That may be an advantage,” he said. “Think you can arrange to stay with the caravan?”
“Possibly,” I evaded, trying not to show the joy I felt at the reprieve.
“If you could,” he said cautiously, “I think we’d forget about the jeep.”
I said, “I’m not keen on Qabir. Sounds dull. But I’ve always wanted to see Balkh. Can I come in tonight for some fresh gear?”
“No. We don’t want you around the embassy, Tell me what you need and I’ll get it”
“Some money, a few vitamin pills, some nose drops … boy, your nose dries out … and some note pads.”
“Don’t take any notes on Qabir,” he warned.
“I haven’t said I could get there,” I cautioned. “If there is such a place.”
Late that afternoon, while Mira was scrounging the Kabul bazaars, Richardson returned with my gear and a batch of mail, and in a gesture unprecedented for him shook my hand warmly and said with feeling, “Miller, do you even dimly comprehend the opportunity you have? For seven years we’ve been trying to get to Qabir. So have the British. For God’s sake, keep your eyes open.”
“What did the ambassador say?”
“He said, ‘Imagine such a job going to such a squirt.’” Richardson left, and I swore to myself: Somehow or other, I’m getting to Qabir.
I sat at the edge of my tent in the twilight and wondered what trick I could use for staying with the Kochis, and as I pondered the problem I realized that I wasn’t much interested in Richardson’s Russians but I was keenly concerned about continuing with Mira. With no plans at all, I felt: Something’s bound to work out.
I turned to my mail. Girls had replied to my letters, but now I couldn’t even remember their faces. A letter from my father sounded as if Mr. Jaspar were arguing incomprehensibly with Ellen, and provincial Boston matters which had once been of significance were now tedious. How could a group of Kochi women gathering camel dung seem more important than my aunts in Boston? How could my adventures with a gang of nomads and a mixed-up girl from Pennsylvania preoccupy my thoughts? More particularly, how could I manage to stay with Mira?
My problem was unexpectedly solved by Zulfiqar. Accompanied by Dr. Stiglitz he came to my tent and said half apologetically, “The doctor has official permission to stay with us. He’s coming to Qabir.”
“Where’s that?” I asked, trying to appear nonchalant.
“Where the nomads meet each summer. In the Hindu Kush.”
“Hope you have a good trip,” I said to Stiglitz. “Sounds a long way off.”
“It is,” the German agreed. “But what we wanted to discuss with you … we need a lot of medicine.”
I put on a serious face and said, “I suppose you could buy what you need in the bazaar.”
“Yes …” Zulfiqar said, “if we had the money.”
This time I have no jeep,” I reminded him.
“But the American officer … when he came, did he give you any money?”
“Yes,” I replied, and waited.
“We were wondering,” Stiglitz proposed, “Would you buy us the medicine if …”
“If what?” I asked cautiously.
“If we took you to Balkh with us?” Zulfiqar suggested.
I wasted time so that it would look as if I were judging the proposal, then asked suspiciously, “How much money would you need?”
“About two hundred dollars,” Zulfiqar replied.
“I have a hundred and fifty,” I offered, unable to control my excitement at having tricked him into doing what I wanted.
“Good!” he cried, and four hours later he and Stiglitz returned to camp with a cache of drugs and medical implements that would have done justice to a small pharmacy. They had been blackmar-keted from as far away as Paris and Manila, and in the areas where we would be heading they’d be worth a fortune. “You got a lot with my dollars,” I observed.
“For what we want to do we’ll need a lot,” Zulfiqar said briefly. He advised us to get to sleep promptly, for we were off to the high mountains next morning at four.
Stiglitz, tired from the bargaining at the bazaar, followed his advice, but apparently Zulfiqar himself did not, for before I could fall asleep I heard the clatter of horses’ hoofs, and since no one was permitted to ride the brown horse but the leader of the clan, it must have been Zulfiqar. There came a scratching at my tent and a boy of eight or nine slipped in to advise me that I was wanted. Throwing a shawl about me, I went out expecting to meet the Kochi but saw instead the stars and a beautiful white horse that Mira was holding for me.
“It isn’t right that you should walk, Miller,” she said.
“Where’d you get this?” I asked, dumfounded.
“In Kabul,” she said softly. “My present to you.”
“But, Mira! Where’d you find the money?”
“I was afraid that if you had to walk all the way to Balkh you might leave us,” she whispered. “You require a horse, Miller. An important man like you deserves one.”
I was about to protest her extravagance when I looked at the right flank of the beast, and there emblazoned deep was the letter W. I was being handed a white horse branded with a memento of the Wharton School in Philadelphia, and when Moheb Khan discovered the theft I could be arrested. I started to upbraid her for having the horse, but I was halted by a powerful doubt as to just how she might have acquired it. I recalled her keen interest in Moheb Khan. Weakly I asked, “How did you know I was staying with the caravan?”
She replied gently, “For days my father and I have been trying to think of some trick that would keep you with us. Last night he told me, ‘Go to sleep, Mira. I’ll think of something.’”
I thought of my lost hundred and fifty dollars and asked, “You mean that Zulfiqar was trying to get me to stay with the caravan?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “How did he manage it?”
“In a very interesting way,” I replied.
Slowly, gently she took my hand and told the little boy that it was now time for him to leave us, and she led me and the white horse far from camp to a spot where that afternoon she had cached a blanket and I noticed for the first time that from somewhere—probably the bazaar in Kabul—she had stolen a bottle of perfume, and in a wild embrace we found each other. For each of us, I discovered, it was the introduction to love, under a full moon on the high plateau of Asia; so that when toward four the next morning we headed back toward camp, I had the most persuasive reason in the world for accompanying the Kochis to Balkh.
For many centuries there had been a circuitous highway leading from Kabul to the historic Vale of Bamian, where Buddhism had flourished centuries before the birth of Muhammad, and gifted travelers from the age of Alexander to the present had described the rugged beauties of this road; but Kochis avoided it, for they knew a caravan route which climbed directly into the Koh-i-Baba, a route so spectacular, passing as it did through gorges and along cliffs, that its grandeur was reserved for those who traveled in the ancient caravan manner. So far as I know, this road has never been described in books, because only Kochis used it, and they did not write.
The mountains were fifteen and sixteen thousand feet high, forbidding bulwarks whose peaks no man had climbed, and wherever we looked they dominated the view; it seemed unlikely that anyone could penetrate them, let alone a caravan of camels. But under Zulfiqar’s experienced guidance we headed for one apparently solid wall after another and somehow each barrier provided us with one lucky escape: sometimes a gorge, so
metimes a green valley that opened dramatically to the north.
Now the animals grew fat on abundant grass and on some days even the camels modified their grumbling. I spent hours watching our fat-tailed sheep, those preposterous beasts that looked not like sheep but like small-headed beetles stuck onto very long legs. They derived their name from an enormous tail, perhaps two feet across and shaped like a thick country frying pan covered with wool and rich with accumulated lanolin. The tail bumped up and down when the sheep walked, a grotesque afterpiece that served the same function as a camel’s hump: in good times it stored food which in bad times it fed back to the animal. I was told that the lanolin was not solid but could be moved about with the hands; certainly it could be eaten, as we proved in our pilaus, but now that the tails were at their maximum they made the ugly sheep seem like something an ungifted schoolboy had scratched on a tablet, and as I sat watching the huge bustles bounce up and down I used to speculate on how the beasts managed to copulate. To this day I don’t know.
Our fat-tails were made to look even more farcical by the fact that we occasionally overtook the caravan of some mountain tribe with a flock of karakul sheep, those superbly built patricians with long necks, expressive faces, deep-set eyes and soft ears. They were the finest animals in Afghanistan and were extremely valuable, since karakul skins were a major item in the nation’s trade with the outside world. Whenever one examined the fortunes of men like Shah Khan in Kabul, it was usually found that their wealth derived in some way from karakul. The wool of the older animals was not impressive and had, so far as I know, no particular value, but newborn lambs were covered with the silky, close-matted, curly fur that is treasured in all countries; and to compare these aristocratic sheep with the ungainly fat-tailed clowns of our caravan was all to our disadvantage. I asked Zulfiqar why we had no karakuls and he explained, “I’d like to, but the desert marches would kill them.”
Because the mountains of the Koh-i-Baba grew increasingly difficult for the caravan—camels growled at rocky areas—we made shorter journeys than before and were inclined, when we found good pasture, to halt for three or four days. It was in these periods of rest, these peaceful days in the high mountains, that Mira and I had our good times. We would leave my white horse in camp for the children to ride and with a chunk of nan would hike to some higher plateau where we would lie in the cold sun, talk and make love.
To be with Mira was a primitive joy. By now I was able to share her concern with matters of the caravan: “Where should we stop?” “When will the ewes throw their lambs?” “Could you live in a village like the one we saw yesterday?” It was her opinion that six weeks of village life beneath a chaderi would kill her, a judgment that I was prepared to accept.
She was like an elf, old enough to be married but young enough to run after a herd of camels with a stick. She had shown no inclination to accept any of the nomad men as her mate, nor did she think of me as a potential solution. On the fifth day north of Kabul she said, “It would be pleasant if you could ride with us forever, Miller. On the trail you’re a strong man.”
When I asked her how Kochis organized their marriages she said, “We don’t usually consult mullahs. A young man goes to an older man like my father and says, ‘I want your daughter Mira. How many sheep do I get if I take her?’ Or he may demand some camels. Of course, if they do get married he stays with the clan. That way the animals don’t leave. Neither does the daughter.”
“Is there a feast?” I asked, still uncertain as to what the ceremony consisted of.
“Drums, flutes, a roasted sheep. The children get colored candies and the bride two new sets of clothing. When I marry I’ll get a black skirt.”
“Ellen wears a black skirt. Is she married to your father?”
“Oh, no! He didn’t give her the black skirt. Racha did, out of kindness, because Ellen’s were wearing out.”
“Did Racha give her the bracelets, too?” I asked idly as we lay looking at the white clouds seeping over the edge of the Koh-i-Baba as its peaks watched us from the north. Mira explained that Zulfiqar had given Ellen the bracelets, but I did not hear her full reply, for I was thinking: I’ve been with them eight weeks and not a moment of rain. Not even a cloud. What an amazing world, drifting along like this year after year. Then an irritating thought oppressed me: What’s so amazing about it? They probably have the same kind of days in Arizona. But I found consolation in one fact: In Arizona they don’t have Mira.
As I ended my soliloquy, she ended her explanation of the bracelets, then asked pertly, “If somebody asks you, ‘How did you join the Kochis, Miller?’ what will you say?”
“I’ll say, ‘For the first part of the trip, I had to join because somebody stole my jeep.’”
“Did you know that I helped take off the wheels? When we sold them at Musa Darul I got some of the money.”
“For the second part of the trip … that’s more difficult to explain. Maybe I’ll say, ‘A beautiful Kochi girl bought me with a white horse.’”
Mira kissed me and ran to a brook to catch a drink of fresh mountain water, bringing me some in her felt cap. “How did you get that horse?” I asked, with a nagging memory of Moheb Khan and the possessive way he had taken the arm of the Swedish girl Ingrid.
“With the money I got from stealing the jeep, I bought the horse. Isn’t that fair? Lose a jeep, find a horse?”
My recollection of Moheb Khan reminded me of Nazullrah and I asked, “Did you ever meet Ellen’s husband, Nazrullah?”
“I saw him. He has a beard.”
“Did your father meet him?”
“Why should he? As my father told you in the caravanserai, we made a three-day camp at Qala Bist… because of the desert ahead. At the end of the three days Ellen asked Zulfiqar if she could come with us. Up to then she had never spoken to him, so he had nothing to do with her running away. It was us she loved, the caravan and the camels and the children. It was much later that he allowed her to sleep in his tent.”
“Was Racha angry?”
“Why should she be? He allowed her to stay in the tent, too.”
“Are Ellen and your father …” I didn’t know the Kochi words and started again. “Is she his woman?”
“Of course,” Mira laughed, using the vulgar Kochi gesture for sexual intercourse. “But not like you and me. Not for great fun under the stars.”
“Does she love your father?” I persisted.
“Everybody loves my father,” she said simply. “In some clans men try to kill each other. Not in ours. But she doesn’t love him the way I love you, Miller.” To demonstrate the difference, she grabbed me and we ended up rolling on the ground, then seeking a protected crevice in the rocky walls.
It was tacitly understood that Mira and I would not embarrass Zulfiqar by sleeping together in the camp, since he chose to ignore his daughter’s misalliance. We were therefore driven to sleep in the open and it became customary for Mira to make a show of going to bed in Zulfiqar’s tent, while I did the same in mine, and then later for her to throw pebbles against the black felt, whereupon I would drag out my sleeping gear and lug it beyond the camels, where we would sleep till just before the break of camp.
Strangely, it was in daylight on the trail that I experienced my deepest sense of love for Mira, and I find it difficult to explain why; but when I was riding the white horse, moving up and down the column like Zulfiqar, I would occasionally overtake Mira when she did not see me, and for some minutes I would watch her, swinging along the road in her loose sandals, her shawl falling across her shoulders and her black pigtails bobbing in the sun, and I would recognize her as the freest human being I would ever know. She envied no one, loved whom she wished, took what she needed, concerned herself only with the immediate problems at hand, and lived on the high plateaus where nature was superb or on the edges of the desert where life was as clearly outlined as man ever sees it. Then she would hear me, and she would look over her shoulder at her man on the horse she had acquired
for him, and in her look was both equality and pride, and it was sharing that look which made me feel so much a man. I had survived the war as a courageous boy; on the caravan trails, riding through the Koh-i-Baba on a white horse, I discovered what it was to be a man.
We had been traveling like this for five or six days when I began to detect a marked change in Dr. Stiglitz. The apprehension I had noticed in Kandahar and Musa Darul, when he worried about his tobacco and his beer, had left him, and the strong sense of guilt that had characterized him at the caravenserai was gone. He strode briskly along the trail without turban or karakul, his steel-gray hair close-cropped for sun and wind to play upon. At times he looked even happy, in a studied Germanic manner, and made overtures to extend the mutual respect which had begun to develop on that last night before we reached Kabul
One day he left his position at the head of the camels and fell back to talk with me. Ignoring Mira in his German manner, he said, “A man could march on like this forever.”
I suggested, “Maybe it’s because your health is better… the open air.”
“I place no great reliance on exercise,” he assured me professionally. “In Munich I lived perfectly happily walking a few blocks from my home to my office.” He lost himself in contemplation of those good, gone days before the war, then added significantly, “I think what accounts for the difference is the confession I made to you at the caravanserai. To be able to tell those things to a Jew …”
“You feel you’ve purged yourself?” I asked coldly.
“No, Miller! Remember, when we spoke I didn’t know you were a Jew. Of what I did I can never purge myself. But I can learn to live with history … to accept its full burden. That I’m doing.”
“Why was the release deferred until this trip? The evil occurred years ago.”
“Ah, so!” he agreed. “But always before I was preoccupied with myself. Could I get out of Germany? Could I enter Persia? Would I be caught and hanged?” He shuddered. “I was pathetic, involved only with myself and my tobacco and my beer.”