Caravans Read Online Free PDF Page B

of the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia. This Nazrullah, who was then twenty-four—eight years younger than Moheb Khan—came from a good Kabul family, was bright, good-looking and endowed with a very comfortable expense account which allowed him to buy, from a Philadelphia used-car dealer, a Cadillac convertible painted red.
    The young Afghan cut a swath in Philadelphia society. He was seen everywhere—Merion, Bryn Mawr, New Hope. At the same time, the solid engineering degree he had earned in Germany prepared him to work for high marks at the Wharton School.
    Moheb added, “In spite of his enthusiastic social life, Nazrullah was an honor student. I kept tabs on him, since I was serving in the embassy in Washington at the time.”
    “Didn’t Nazrullah’s time at the Wharton School overlap yours?” Shah Khan asked.
    “No,” Moheb explained. “Don’t you remember? You sent him to Wharton because I’d done fairly well there.”
    I pointed excitedly at Moheb and shouted in English. “That’s it! The W stands for Wharton!”
    “Exactly!” Moheb shouted back, and we raised our glasses.
    “What’s this foolishness?” old Shah Khan asked from the depths of his red leather chair.
    “Your son branded his white horse with a W. In honor of his degree from Wharton,” I explained.
    “Preposterous,” Shah Khan growled, plainly irritated by his son’s noisy drinking.
    “Nazrullah was offered half a dozen jobs in America,” Moheb added, “but he preferred to help us out here at home.”
    “Where’d he meet the Jaspar girl?” Shah Khan asked, fingering his gold chain.
    “Those were the years,” Moheb reminded us, “when there weren’t too many American men available. Nazrullah …”
    “What’s his last name?” I interrupted.
    “Just Nazrullah,” Moheb replied. “Like so many Afghans, he has no last name. As to the girl. She was a junior at Bryn Mawr. I think he may have met her while he was playing tennis at Merion. She came from a good family in Dorset, Pennsylvania.”
    “Where’s that?” I asked, finding it strange to be asking an Afghan about American geography.
    “Small town in Penns County,” Moheb explained. “North of Philadelphia.”
    “They didn’t get married in Dorset,” I explained to Shah Khan.
    “I should say not!” Moheb agreed vociferously. “Her family raised bloody hell. Bryn Mawr did the same. You know what that girl did? In the middle of the war she went to England, wangled her way to India, and came up the Khyber Pass in a donkey caravan. She was married here in Kabul.”
    “It was a brilliant wedding,” Shah Khan remembered. “Have you a picture of the girl, Monsieur Miller?”
    From my files I produced several photographs of Ellen Jaspar. As a sophomore at Bryn Mawr she had played in Shakespeare—Olivia in
Twelfth
Night
—a thin, good-looking blonde and apparently graceful. In her junior year she sang in the chorus that co-operated with Fritz Reiner in doing Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony,
and in her surplice with her blond hair peeking from under her cap she looked angelic. There were pictures of her and Nazrullah, she a lovely white and he a romantic brown. And there was one picture of her when she graduated from high school, wide-eyed and smiling, yet somehow apprehensive. I had known a thousand girls like Ellen Jaspar; they adorned the campuses at Radcliffe, Smith and Holyoke. They all did well in English, poorly in mathematics, indifferently in philosophy. They were the vibrant, exciting girls who would seriously consider, in the middle of their junior year, marrying a young man from Afghanistan or Argentina or Turkestan. Most of them, in their senior year, developed more sense and married young men from Denver or Mobile or Somerville, outside of Boston.
    “What made her different?” Shah Khan asked.
    “We have the reports. Her father says he begged her not to do this thing, and all she would reply was that she was fed up with Dorset,