Caravans (12 page)

“The secret,” Nur pointed out, “is the big dips in the road before you reach the bridge itself. See how they work?”

“Not exactly,” I replied.

With his forefinger he drew in the dust on the Jeep windshield a profile of the bridge, showing a level road which dipped sharply, rose again to cross the bridge, then dipped on the other side. Nur’s diagram looked like a scraggly capital W. “You might call it an Afghan bridge. It says to the river, ‘I want to cross you, but I know I mustn’t pinch you in. So when you want to run wild, go down the dips in the road and leave me alone. The rest of the year I’ll leave you alone.’ Silly, but it works.”

Hesitantly I asked, “But during the flood you can’t use the road?”

“Of course not,” Nur agreed. “But if you allow the river its way, it closes the road only once or twice a year. Who needs a road all year? Maybe it’s better to give it a rest.”

I thought of six good answers to this evasion, but I was constrained from using them by one overriding fact: while crossing rivers which the German had tried to conquer my bottom was wet, but while crossing on the tricky Afghan bridge my bottom was dry, and things had been this way for nearly fifty years. I kept my mouth shut.

We were about to resume our journey when a truck came down the road from Ghazni bearing a
strange group of men who were dressed in vivid clothes of many colors and who wore their black hair long in the manner of ancient Greek page boys: thick bangs in front, elsewhere a shoulder-length bob. The faces of the men were aquiline and paler than those of the normal Afghan. All were handsome but there was one young man not yet in his twenties, I judged, who was positively beautiful. At first I wasn’t sure he was a man and I must have pointed toward him as the truck crossed the bridge, for in Pashto he screamed a very filthy phrase, which caused his truckmates to cheer his insolence. In acknowledgment he made a pretty gesture like a girl, but he was startled when I shouted back in Pashto a phrase equally obscene. He laughed with gusto, moving his head so that his long hair flashed in the sunlight. Then he pointed at me with a languid, graceful arm and shouted, “I know what the ferangi wants, but he can’t have it.” Once more the men in the truck applauded their special member, and proceeded on their way to Kandahar.

“Who were they?” I asked.

“A dancing team,” Nur replied. “They tour the country all year.”

“The long hair?”

“Traditional. Judging from their clothes they must be a pretty good team.”

We had completed most of the trip to Kandahar when we overtook a young man in his early twenties, conspicuous because he wore not only the customary baggy pants and long shirt, but also a tattered overcoat made originally for a woman. It must have been a beautiful coat, with long flaring
panels and a tight waist, and looked as if it might have come from Paris. Wine-red in color, it still possessed an air of grace.

I asked Nur to stop and we invited the young fellow to join us and his eyes widened with pleasure. He climbed in the back and adjusted his coat carefully over the spare tires on which he had to crouch.

“Ever been in a car before?” I asked in Pashto.

“No. It’s exciting.”

“Going to Kandahar?”

“Yes. To the spring festival.”

“Ever been before?”

“No,” he replied with a flashing smile. “But I’ve heard of Kandahar. Who hasn’t?”

“Where do you live?”

“In the hills. Badakshar.”

“I don’t know it,” I said to Nur, who with four or five pinpoint questions developed that it was several hundred miles north.

“Must be a dump,” he said in English.

“Good place?” I asked in Pashto.

“Oh, yes!” the young man replied warmly. “Last year we had a good crop. In the autumn I sold a horse to the Povindahs as they went south. So I am coming to Kandahar with some money, I can tell you.”

As soon as he said this he realized that his boasting might cost him his life, for he did not know who we were, and travelers were frequently murdered when it was known they had money. No doubt it had sometimes happened near Badakshar, and he looked at us fearfully.

“Shut your mouth, you fool,” Nur snapped. “This time you’re lucky. We’re from the government.”

The young man sighed and fell silent, but I asked him, “Where’d you get your coat?”

He was a congenial fellow who enjoyed talk, so he said quickly, “It’s been in my family for many years. My father wore it to Kabul once. I haven’t been to Kabul, but my brother wore it to Herat, which is a large city, he says.”

“Where’d your father get the coat?”

The young man refused to answer and Nur Muhammad asked, “He killed a man for it, didn’t he?” The traveler said nothing and Nur continued. “A stranger came through the mountains wearing this coat and your father got hungry for it. So he shot him, eh?”

I turned around to look at the young man, across whose face had come a beatific smile. He said, “You government men know everything, don’t you? How to raise sheep. How to pay taxes. What roads to build. But you don’t know about this coat, do you?” He chuckled and in sheer pleasure wrapped his arms a little tighter about himself.

“Who killed who?” Nur pressed.

The young man laughed openly and wagged his finger at Nur. “No, no, Mr. Government! That’s one thing you’re not going to know. And before you ask any more questions stop the car and I’ll walk.”

“Take it easy,” Nur said.

“All right,” the young man said gravely. “But forget about the coat.”

We rode in silence for some miles, then heard a gasp from the rear of the jeep, for our rider had
spotted some of the minarets of Kandahar. “It’s the city!” he cried.

At first I saw nothing, but gradually the outlines of Kandahar, much older than Kabul, stood out against the horizon, and as we approached the walls I could not say who was the more excited, the young man with the European coat or the man from the American embassy about to engage in his first diplomatic mission.

We dropped our passenger in the middle of the city, a sprawling, dirty, camel-train metropolis whose mud walls looked as they had in the time of Darius the Persian. Nur found us a place to stay, much better than the hole in Ghazni but without the Persian rugs, and when the jeep was under armed guard I said, “Since you already know I’m here to see Dr. Stiglitz, could you find where he lives?”

“Now?” Nur asked.

“Now,” I repeated, and he soon returned to lead me down a mean, narrow street where from one dirty mud wall projected the sign.

DOKTOR
UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH

“Want me to stay with you?” Nur asked.

“No thanks.”

“Kandahar is rougher than Kabul,” Nur warned.

“I can handle myself,” I assured him and entered the doctor’s quarters.

The waiting room startled me. It was a small, dirt-floored, misshapen room with one bench and two very old chairs, on which sat men in turbans.
One rose to offer me his seat, but I said in Pashto, “I’ll stand,” and the bronzed faces stared at me. Finally one asked, “Ferangi?” and I replied “American.” The staring continued.

After some minutes the door leading to the doctor’s office opened and a turbaned man departed. The next patient in line moved in to see the doctor and he must have said that there was a ferangi outside, for the door quickly burst open and a man of middle years and middle height rushed out, not to see me but to inspect me.

“Who are you?” he demanded in crisp, accented English. I gave my name and he drew back suspiciously. “What do you want?”

I tried to say that I’d wait until he was through, but he interrupted, shouting in Pashto, “These damned Americans come here demanding special privilege. They always do. Well, he must wait in line till all of you are finished … all of you.”

In Pashto I said, “When you’re through, Doctor.”

My use of the language did not impress him. He stepped back, eyed me coldly and asked cautiously, “What is it you want?”

“Did you ever treat the American wife of Nazrullah?”

He glared at me, drew a protective shell of some kind about himself, and returned to his office, slamming the crude wooden door. In a flash he was back in the waiting room shouting in Pashto, “He must wait in line like all of you … to the very end.” Once more he slammed the door.

By the time the last Afghan had seen the doctor, darkness had fallen and I was left alone in the shadowy waiting room. The wooden door creaked
open and Dr. Stiglitz said graciously, “Now perhaps we can talk.”

He did not invite me to his office but he did leave the door open so that some light from the single unshaded electric bulb entered our room. He was balding, with a blond-gray German crew cut, and he had a pipe. He looked more frightened than bellicose, and his forehead was deeply wrinkled. “Yes, I treated Madame Nazrullah. Not quite a year ago. Sit down.” He invited me to take one of the rickety chairs while he sat wearily on the other. “Be careful of the chair,” he warned. “In Afghanistan wood is so scarce that any chair is a treasure. You can’t imagine the trouble I had finding that door. I shouldn’t have slammed it so, but visitors make me nervous.” He made a conscious effort to relax and asked with some show of generosity, “Now what do you wish to know?”

Before I could speak, the door to the street opened and a thin Afghan in his fifties entered, followed by a chaderi. The woman stood obediently near the door while the man bowed and pleaded with the doctor. “My wife is ill,” the man whispered.

“All right,” Stiglitz growled in what I thought was an offensive manner. “She’s late, but I’ll help her.” With no enthusiasm he returned to his office, and I moved my chair aside to let the woman follow, but she was left standing in the outer room and it was the nervous husband who joined the doctor. Stiglitz, seeing my surprise, said, “You’d better come in here. He wouldn’t like you alone with his wife, and what happens may interest you.”

So the American visitor, the German doctor and
the Afghan husband consulted in the inner room while the sick woman remained standing by the door of the waiting room. “Tell her she can sit down,” the doctor began, and the husband went to his wife, who obediently sat on the floor.

While he was gone I had an opportunity to inspect the doctor’s office. It was a dirty little mud-floored room with practically no medical equipment and one cupboard containing flyspecked bottles of pills. There was a desk made of packing crates and the swinging, glaring electric light bulb.

The husband returned and Stiglitz asked, “Now what’s wrong?”

“Pains in the stomach, Doctor.”

“Fever?”

“Yes.”

“High?”

“No, medium.”

“Does she vomit?”

“No.”

“Pregnant?”

“The midwife says no.”

“Is her period regular?”

“I don’t know.”

“Find out,” Stiglitz ordered, and the husband dutifully returned to the other room, where he sat on the floor to consult with his veiled wife.

While he was gone I asked, “Don’t you examine her?”

“A wife? In chaderi? I’d be shot.”

The husband returned and said his wife’s periods had been regular, so the examination proceeded. Six times the husband was ordered to ask his wife intimate questions regarding her health
and six times he relayed his understanding of her answers to the doctor. Once, when the man was gone, Stiglitz confided, “The real evil of this system comes when the husband thinks his wife’s symptoms reflect discredit on him. He suppresses the information. And if the apothecary charges too much for the medicine I prescribe he simply doesn’t buy it.”

“What happens to the woman?” I asked.

“She dies,” he replied without emotion. “That is, she dies a little sooner than otherwise.”

The husband now decided that he had told Dr. Stiglitz all that was relevant and he waited for the doctor’s decision. “It’s an amazing thing,” Stiglitz said in English, “but after a while you instinctively know what ails the woman and you probably do her as much good as if you’d taken her pulse and temperature.” In Pashto he instructed the husband what medication to buy for his wife and the man laid down a pitiful fee, which the doctor accepted. When the man went to inform his wife he left the door open and I could see him kneel beside her and console and reassure her, with obvious love etched on his face. His wife, who must have been seriously ill under the chaderi, breathed deeply two or three times, then rose and followed her husband out of the office.

“Now about Madame Nazrullah,” Dr. Stiglitz began. “Since you’re interested in her you must be from the American embassy.”

“I am.”

“And you’ve been sent down here to spy on me?”

“No,” I lied.

“You’re lying. Right this minute you’re thinking,
What’s a man like Stiglitz doing in a hole like Kandahar? Go ahead and spy on me and I’ll spy on you.”

Before I could reply, Stiglitz hopped up, ran to the door leading to the street, and barred it. When this was done he sat on one of the chairs, using it in reversed position so that its unsteady back formed a chin rest. “Young man,” he said. “Will you please bring me my pipe?” He was tired and he looked it.

I joined him in the waiting room and studied him as he lit his pipe. His hands were nervous, but I remembered that this was the end of a long day. His close-cropped head was a little larger than normal, and his hard blue eyes looked at all things with a blend of cynicism and challenge. He was inclined toward plumpness and was clearly no self-reliant German superman. I was disposed to like his quick honesty and felt intuitively that he ought to move to Kabul, where the various embassies could provide him with patients well able to pay. As he had foreseen, the major question in my mind as I studied him was, “What’s a man like this doing in a hole like Kandahar?”

“Nazrullah’s wife lived in this region for a little more than a year,” he reported grudgingly. “Why are you interested?”

“She’s disappeared.”

“What?” he asked with real surprise.

“Yes. Her parents haven’t heard from her in thirteen months.”

He began to laugh, not heartily but in disgust. “You Americans! My parents haven’t heard from
me in four years but they don’t go running to the German embassy.”