Caravans Read Online Free PDF

duplicity. Nevertheless, it was with the latter country that Afghanistan had always maintained its closest ties, like a husband who hates his wife yet would be lost if she deserted him.
    One of the reasons why Shah Khan had taken a liking to me, and confided in me when he refused to do so with other Americans, was that although I could not speak Persian I did speak French, and he could thus indulge his obsession that diplomacy must be conducted only in that language. Today we would speak French.
    The room in which we talked was important in the history of Afghanistan and essential to any understanding of the modern nation. Here had occurred spectacular murders which altered the course of dynasty, protracted sieges, secret councils and, strangest of all, Christian weddings under thesponsorship of Shah Khan. They took place whenever some exile from Europe wished to marry a Christian girl from one of the embassies, for there often were no Christian ministers available in Kabul.
    It was a rocky fortress of a room, built by a German architect, furnished by a Danish merchant who sold only the best, and decorated by a Frenchman who spent eleven thousand dollars in shipping charges alone. On one wall there was a Picasso, but nothing the French decorator had devised could alter the Germanic heaviness of the room, and it remained a typical Afghan salon.
    On the low table from Copenhagen lay copies of the
London Illustrated News,
the
Manchester Guardian, Newsweek,
the
Reader’s Digest
and six or seven French magazines. Against one wall stood a huge Gramophone with numerous speakers, for Shah Khan loved music, as did his son, Moheb. Another wall contained the principal British, Italian, French and American encyclopedias, as well as novels in five or six different languages.
    Shah Khan, who could be as Afghan as his room, asked bluntly, “What do you wish to discuss?”
    I showed him the leather folder and replied, “Our government is demanding that we report where Ellen Jaspar is.”
    “They’ve been doing that for the better part of a year,” Shah Khan parried. He sat deep in a leather chair which his grandfather had purchased in Berlin. Not even the French decorator had been able to banish it from the room, but he had succeeded in staining the leather an objectionable red.
    “But this time, Your Excellency, it isn’t merelythe government who demands. It’s the senator from Pennsylvania.”
    “Is that important?” the old Afghan parried.
    “Well,” I fumbled. “Let’s say that in America a senator has the same powers that you have in Kabul. Now suppose you sent the embassy in Paris an inquiry. Wouldn’t you expect an answer?”
    “I certainly would. Moheb, did you know the senator from Pennsylvania?”
    “Which one?” Moheb asked quickly. He rattled off the names of the two senators. “I liked them both.”
    “Are they significant men?” his father asked.
    “Very,” Moheb replied. The young man was an unusual Afghan, in that while he was a devout Muslim, he also drank alcohol, and he now poured me a drink of whiskey. His father, a Muslim of the old school, felt obliged to reprove his son because the drinking took place before a Christian. Accordingly he spoke harshly in Pashto, whereupon I replied in the same language, “Let the blame be upon me, Your Excellency.” This reminder that I spoke not only French but also the Afghan language softened the old man.
    “You feel, Monsieur Miller, that this time something must be done.”
    “Indeed, or we shall all be reprimanded. Perhaps called home.”
    “Let us suffer the evils that we know rather than flee to those we know not of,” Shah Khan replied, paraphrasing Hamlet in French. “Have you new material about this unfortunate girl?”
    I checked with Shah Khan and his alert son the facts that our embassy knew about Ellen Jasparand Nazrullah. In the autumn of 1942 the Afghan government had sent a fine young man from Kabul to the Wharton School, the business end