Free Caravans by James A. Michener

exhibited. If tonight Harry Brock spoke not Brooklynese but an exaggerated Oxford—one as bad as the other, I thought—we were willing to accept this convention, and when Ingrid cried, “Would you do me a favor, Harry? Drop dead?”she sounded exactly like the dumb blonde of all countries, of all time. By the end of the act we had created, there in the old fortress, that ambience which dramatists seek but which so often eludes them. Actors and audience were one, moving together and accepting each other as equals. Partly, I think, it was because each person in that warm, quiet room knew that if he did not achieve some kind of satisfaction from our play, there was nothing else in Afghanistan to which he could escape. Either he attained catharsis now, or he was self-sentenced to days of non-participation. So each of us reached out to the other, made overtures that normally we would not have made, because each knew that for the forthcoming sixteen or eighteen months we would find joy with our repetitive neighbors, or we would find no joy at all. That was why life in Kabul-sans roads, sans movies, sans news, sans everything—was so profoundly meaningful. We probed the secrets of a few rather than glossing over the chance acquaintanceship of many, and each new thing we discovered about our colleagues uncovered new significance. For example, I had never imagined that glamorous Ingrid owned such a naughty wit.
    The conversation that developed after Act Two was much different from that which followed Act One. Somehow, the play had insinuated itself into our intellect and had taken command. We poor inadequate readers had transcended ourselves, and the characters we were purporting to create had actually come to life. Harry Brock and his aspiring blonde were with us in the stout-walled embassy.
    “We could use a few of your type in our country,”Moheb Khan said to the Englishman playing the part of the junk dealer, and he meant not the actual Oxford boy but his play part, the junk dealer.
    “There’s a great deal to be said about good old Harry that isn’t said in this play,” the Englishman agreed. “Miller, how much of the building of America is to be credited to men like our Harry?”
    “A good deal, I should imagine, and I think it’s rather clever of you to discover the fact. You’ve not been in America, have you?”
    “No, but reading this part makes one recall how inevitably one thinks of Harry Brock as the archetype American. We excoriate him, just as this play does, but we forget that he is also the life force of the nation, whether any of us likes him or not.”
    Miss Gretchen Askwith threw palpitations into the hearts of various young men by observing, “Really, Mark, you read your part exceedingly well. Have you studied dramatics?”
    “In school I was in
Outward Bound.”
    “We intended reading that,” Sir Herbert interrupted, “but the younger group thought it terribly dated. Do you agree, Miller?”
    “I’m afraid I do, but I also think we should read it. It’s fun.”
    “British, isn’t it?” Sir Herbert asked.
    I did not respond to Sir Herbert’s question, for I was looking at Gretchen, and there in the crowded room I had a distinct premonition that Gretchen and I would be thrown together increasingly in Kabul … that it would become automatic for all hostesses to invite “Gretchen and Mark,” and that sometime in the next years all would be asked toShah Khan’s great compound, where a tent would be erected and where Moheb Khan would ride up on his white horse to serve as my best man while the marriage was performed.
    It was an inevitable progression, Gretchen Ask-with and Mark Miller to the altar in Afghanistan; but as I looked at her and saw her blushing, for she must have been entertaining the same premonition of inevitability, her face was obliterated and I saw only a fawn chaderi, smelling of perfume, and a pair of American saddle shoes, and I heard the name Siddiqa, and I looked at