The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2003

Such improbable names: Dadshah, King’s Gift; Dozdab, Thieves’ Water; Pip, near where you ended, clad in a light summer dress. Had you offended a man called Ghaderdad? Was Dadshah miffed because you would not cry? Kevin, we know, was killed before your eyes. So were the rest. What were your thoughts? I judge from how you dressed, white shoes, dark glasses, frock like a rainbow, that nothing could have been further off than death, nothing more improbable in your life than leaving; only the death of birds was cause for grieving; and then suddenly to turn a corner in your thirtieth year, off in that God-forsaken Baluchistan, and face the fury of bullets. What did you feel seeing the metal tear through the United States’ seal on the door of that old workhorse of a Jeep? American certainties were abruptly gone, terrible cries jerked out of the dying men, the bandits came plunging down from the rocks, shouting. You, dumb with shock, took the sunglasses slowly off your eyes with your left hand. Did you then remember, fleetingly, that I had driven there first some months earlier, told you about it in a burst of enthusiasm? You would only tremble. Panic was not your way. When I had told you about the bird my driver had tried to kill, you stopped at the kitchen door, and looked, until, silenced, I felt the shame of it, and knew he would not do that again. In your left hand the sunglasses were still clutched as if the time had come to go indoors, wash off the grime. Instead, you were pulled along by that wild band. Dadshah must have, in his way, been as aghast to find his trap for gendarmes had brought these pale-skinned Feranghee. His inhumanities had been against his own. Suddenly this last insurgency was of a different scale, men cursing against men and Ghaderdad louder than all the rest. Sense may have forbade violence against the woman but fear would prevail and at some stage, perhaps within the hour, someone (men say Ghaderdad) turned with a gun and shot you. Their dusky women would have run screeching about, then come close to you to stare at the blond hair, at the pale foreign face, before listening to the shouting of their men... I joined the searching parties in Kerman, scoured the Baluchi Mountains, but no trace of you. We heard that you had left us clues of scraps of cloth. We heard Dadshah would save your life to sell you into Africa, a slave to some dark chief. We heard Dadshah would use your charms himself but that his jealous wife sided with Ghaderdad against such cold and foreign love. We heard Dadshah, of old, had been a Sardar’s bodyguard whose knife killed his then-wife and her lover. He set off as a brigand, and when I traveled through those months earlier — before I came to know you and your Kevin — I very nearly met his band, but the gendarmes were there first and I was spared to come to you and display my fateful zest. Above Pip on the day the gendarmes found you, when the final worst was known, a plane from Tehran en route with VIPs, I built an air strip for you — for them — marshalling together a motley crew of tribal kids, a ragged destitute forgotten bunch, but we together cleared and marked the strip, found the white stones to form an arrow. Here were unknowns working for an unknown. Here where you disappeared a modest housewife, you became the star, wheeling up in an Army truck, boarding 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 3 T O A NITA K ILLED BY THE B ANDITS B Y G ORDON K ING