Inside the tissue paper was a small, very old rock. There were markings carved into it. The features were faint.
“Daddy’s Head,” Dupree said to herself.
Fourteen
After Louis died, one of the things Nancy did to keep her mind off him was continue the collection they’d started during the war. She scoured bazaars and antiques stores and book stalls in Pakistan and Afghanistan. She visited old mujahideen and exiles and aid workers to see what they had. She hired unemployed men to help her. She stored the old books, reports, pamphlets, newspapers and magazines, tracts, treatises, photos, film reels, and slides she gathered in Peshawar. “If it had Afghanistan in the title, it wasn’t safe around me,” she said.
Of course, it didn’t work. In every new find, there was something to remind her of Louis. “Louis would have liked this,” she would say to herself, handling a book, or, reading an account of a particular battle, “Louis would have disagreed with that.” Finally, she admitted to herself that the collection was her way not of moving on from Louis but of remembering him. More than that, of memorializing him and his love of Afghanistan.
While her new library awaited completion in late 2012, her collection sat in Kabul University’s main library, a sad affair in the middle of campus. Most of the materials were stored in locked, fragrant cedar cabinets. In the back of the building was the small, stuffy archiving room. On the days I visited, young male archivists (and one woman) could be found studying and scanning, copying and uploading, unbinding and rebinding. One day I looked over the shoulder of an archivist as he paged through a Taliban propaganda newspaper from 1996 whose headline read “Congratulations to the People of Afghanistan About the Capture of Kabul by the Taliban.” Another archivist was at a computer, going through scans of photographs taken by an aid worker. “When people die and their estates don’t know what to do with their goddamn things,” Nancy said, “they call us.”
Operations were overseen by Rahim, a dour, wiry man whom Dupree hired in Peshawar. He and a group of helpers smuggled the collection into Afghanistan. They stuffed about 30,000 items into sacks and loaded them onto the backs of horses and men for the trek over the Khyber Pass. It took six months. Rahim said it was worth it. “We learn many things from Nancy,” he told me. “Many information about Afghanistan we get from Nancy.” Now they have about 90,000 items.
In 2005, when he was university chancellor, Ashraf Ghani donated a plot of land on the campus to Dupree to house the collection. When I asked him why, he told me the collection “represents the proposition that to overcome the past we need to understand it. The past is haunting Afghanistan. We have too much history—history that has not become historical. History that lives. Our perceptions of history are clouding our future. We’ve done horrible things to each other, and those things need to be put to rest, and this collection is part of that.”
Browsing the cabinets one day, I found myself thinking of a line from the Homebody’s monologue:
My research is moth-like. Impassioned, fluttery, doomed. A subject strikes my fancy: Kabul, you will see why, that’s the tale I’m telling—but then, I can’t help myself, it’s almost perverse, in libraries, in secondhand bookshops, I invariably seek out not the source but all that which was dropped by the wayside on the way to the source.… Old magazines, hysterical political treatises written by an advocate of some long-since defeated or abandoned or transmuted cause; and I find these irrelevant and irresistible, ghostly, dreamy, the knowing what was known before the more that has since become known overwhelms.
One day in the archiving room, I overheard Nancy speaking with a young Englishman who’d been volunteering his time. He had just told her that he would have to come in less.
“So you’re leaving us?” she said to him in a plaintive voice.
“No, Nancy,” he said, trying to be as gentle as possible. “I’m not leaving. I’ll just be able to come in less than I have.”
“You’ll leave, I suppose,” she said. “Everybody leaves eventually.”
Maybe sensing he’d stay if she offered him some compensation, she added, “You know, we’re out of money. We’re broke, completely.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. It had been obvious enough to me, watching it at work, that her organization was inefficient. Her staff was well intentioned but poorly trained and overly worshipful of her. Nancy herself was Homebody-like, unable to focus on any single task or line of thought for very long. Just how inefficient I learned on my last days in Kabul. Wafa, her executive director, admitted to me that the organization was, indeed, broke. Nancy had blown through a $3 million grant from the State Department a year ahead of schedule. The Norwegian government had stepped in with a bridge loan, but now that was nearly gone, too.
An auditor hired by the grant administrator to assess Dupree’s organization told me she “is completely exhausted and wants to let go, and she’s trying to hand it over, but her board can’t be bothered.” The whole thing was being held together, barely, on the strength of her legend, he believed. “The American government has spent $3 million supporting the cult of an old lady.” An employee of hers told me the organization “will collapse when Nancy is gone,” a contention with which the auditor agreed. Indeed, many of the people around her seemed to believe this.
Penury nagged at her. Grasping deans at the university were making noises about commandeering her new library. She worried that Karzai, having paid for some of it, might use it for his own purposes. After trips such as the one to Charikar, she suspected that Afghans were indifferent to her projects. She seemed to become sicker and more impatient by the day. Her coughing fits grew deeper and longer, her outbursts more plangent and scattershot; it was as though everyone reminded her of how little time she had left and, thus, everyone was a waste of time. Americans took the worst of it. Around them she became annoyed before they’d had a chance to open their mouths. It wasn’t long before she was blowing up at me when I walked into her office each morning. She would lapse into the first person plural, as though she were yelling at herself, too. “You don’t seem to be interested in the things we are doing!” she said one day. “What are we doing here? Why?! What’s our purpose?”
Fifteen
For weeks I had been bothering Dupree to take me to the National Museum. I wanted to see Daddy’s Head with her. Finally, she relented, and I could see as soon as we arrived why she hadn’t wanted to come. The museum still pains her. Everything in it reminds her of Afghanistan’s past, of her past, of Louis.
At the entranceway stands a second-century marble relief of the Kushan king Kinishka that is particularly close to her heart. She likes to call Kinishka, a scholar and arts patron, her hero. The statue’s head is gone, smashed by a Talib. “This poor little fella,” she said as we walked by him. Inside we passed a damaged Buddha. “I, ah—” she said, then turned away, on the brink of tears.
Upstairs, after looking at a display of gold coins (“I kept telling Louis to find me some gold,” she joked), we emerged from the gallery to find burly military contractors with assault rifles taking up positions on the staircase. They looked as though they expected the statues to come to life. Nancy didn’t flinch. Nor did she betray interest when their charge—an official, clearly American, in a baggy suit, moustache, bad haircut—bounded up the stairs. He introduced himself as a deputy ambassador of something.
“Another ambassador?” she said.
“There are so many of us,” he replied gamely.
The ambassador’s wife introduced herself with an eagerness that made it clear she’d wanted to meet Dupree for some time. “Yes, yes,” Nancy said, waving a hand and pushing past.
As I was about to ask about Daddy’s Head, the museum director, Omara Massoudi, approached. Old friends, he and Dupree used to comb the bazaars in Peshawar together, looking for stolen artifacts. In the Taliban years, he sold potatoes on the street.
“Nancy Jan, will you have a cup of tea with me?” Massoudi asked.
“You�
�re very kind,” she said. “Do you really want me to?” The ambassador and his wife and their aides joined them in Massoudi’s large, barren office. After business cards had been exchanged, she asked the ambassador, “But anyway, how do you find our poor museum?”
“It’s mixed emotions,” he said. “It’s so impressive and so gorgeous what you see, and heartbreaking to think of what was lost. But I think it is a tribute to—”
“You have to have been here,” she said, cutting him off. “Mr. Massoudi and I, we’ve gone through a lot. You see, he’s such a gentleman. Impeccably dressed. Can you imagine him with a beard down to here?” she said, gesturing at her knees. Everyone laughed, and she was off. “And he used to turn up in Peshawar and—those were hard times. But! It was even harder times for the museum, because a rocket had hit the roof and flames all over the place. The roof had fallen onto these precious Islamic bronzes, and they were all melted together. There was no electricity, no water, no nothing. No heat. And the walls were all covered with soot and grime and dust. We went like that for many, many months. So I cannot believe it when I come here, to see this sparkling, beautiful building. It’s a miracle.
“I’m building a very small building, but it’s taken a long time,” she went on. “You must come and see my center.”
“I’d love to,” the ambassador said. He attempted to make his farewells, but Dupree kept talking. More about the museum, musings on the promise of Afghan youth; then her monologue became mothlike, impassioned, fluttery, doomed. I was sitting next to the Homebody.
“The other day I went to a music concert,” she told the ambassador. “Modern classical music. John Cage and all that. You know John Cage?”
“Yeah,” the ambassador said, almost hiding his confusion.
“Ping, bonk, henk, hah, all that?”
“Yeah.”
“Well he used to be my neighbor. And I didn’t think much of his music then. And so these people were doing a fantastic job with the cello and the saxophone and the—but all modern. I thought it was quite pleasant. Then they played one with John Cage’s concept that there is music in everything. All noise has music. Got it? So these three or four people on the stage, they each had a radio. And one by one they each turned the radio to static. Chek-wawa-kchaea. This is supposed to be music? I’m sorry. It didn’t catch me then and it doesn’t catch me now.
“I went out after that,” she continued, “and I saw the cellist. She had been overworked, and I gave her a big hug and I said, ‘Beautifully done, except that last thing left me cold.’ ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we did that because it’s his hundredth anniversary.’ My neighbor? Hundredth anniversary? And they were all so embarrassed because I’m nearly a hundred. They didn’t mean it that way, but it came out that way.”
Nervous laughter.
“Well,” the ambassador said, getting up, his moustache hairs seeming to bristle with alarm, or maybe pity. “Anyway the, the—I want to thank you all for the opportunity to visit this museum. It’s a real privilege and honor to do it. And I feel much, ah, richer for the experience.”
Sixteen
Afterward, I asked Nancy what she thought of him. “He’s an ambassador,” she said. By this I took her to mean: My patience for my countrymen, and their preposterous exertions in this doomed place that I love so much, is at an end. And it was a position for which I could hardly blame her. On the contrary, the ignorance and futility—there is no other term for it: the abject failure—of the American adventure in Afghanistan is obvious as soon as one sets foot in the country. Our attempts to rebuild institutions and infrastructure have come to little; hugely expensive projects sit skeletal and looted, the countryside poor and benighted; Karzai’s ministers live like pashas in Kabul. This is to say nothing of a reinvigorated Taliban or of the daily bombings, maimings, be-headings. All of it at the expense of the American taxpayer, America’s reputation, and, worst of all, everyday Afghans, the people whom Dupree has been trying to help for most of her adult life.
“We have really destroyed this very sensitive characteristic of the Afghan character, which is self-sufficiency,” she told me one day. “They used to be proud of the fact that they did things for themselves. But now they’ve had so much money thrown at them, they’ve had so many advisers telling them what to do, that from the village on up, these young people don’t want to think for themselves. Let the foreigners do it.”
Dupree feels this failure deeply, and as an American adopted by Afghans, it takes a double toll on her, embarrassing and infuriating her in equal measure. She knows that she is part of this failure; that, as the quintessential expat do-gooder in Kabul, she somehow embodies it. On her good days, she also remembers that she is separate from it, that Afghans love her, perhaps even need her. She remembers that, if the glories of Afghanistan’s past can only be imagined, she can imagine them better than anyone and help others in the imagining. But on her bad days, she carries this failure on her face, in her bones, like a walking broken promise. She worries that one or the other of her homelands might blithely do away with her legacy. Her library finally opened in March of last year, several months after my visit. But even as the building’s completion approached, she spoke of it as a tenuous thing. “It would only take one mullah with a match or one American daisy cutter,” she told me, “and it would be finished.”
Dupree had reluctantly agreed to speak with me one last time. Shortly after I got to her office, however, so did a young Afghan American woman, two hours late for an appointment. Dupree had been yelling about her—“Where the hell is this person? God damn it, damn it, damn it!”—but when the woman finally arrived, apologizing profusely, Dupree issued a contrition-banishing wave of the hand and invited her to sit down.
It was her first time in Kabul, the woman explained, and she’d gotten lost. She was a graduate student, about to begin research near Kandahar. She had nothing pressing to ask of Dupree, nothing to offer her, but Dupree put aside what she was doing—and me—to speak with her, about nothing much. Soon they were trading stories and laughing. She took the woman out to tour the campus. When I returned to the office, three hours later, they were having lunch. Dupree was talking about Louis. It was the happiest I’d seen her. I left quietly.
On my way off campus, I stopped at the new library, recalling something the auditor had said about it. “She wanted to make sense of what her legacy would be,” he’d said, “so she’s become obsessed with the building.” He was probably right—and the obsession had paid off. It was a beautiful building. Its granite walls and stolid wooden beams and flagstone portico were somehow already perfectly weathered. Inside, there was no furniture, no curtains, no books. It felt new and old at the same time. It knew a lot but would say nothing. Students were already walking by it as though it had been there forever, and soon enough, none will remember its provenance. Though it is Nancy’s monument to Louis, to their love of Afghanistan, she has refused to put their name on it. It is called, simply, the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University.
I walked into the interior courtyard. A solitary worker was cleaning a new windowpane. Nearby his young son was sitting with a neat pile of tattered textbooks. The school year had started, and he wanted them to last through the long winter ahead. He was carefully wrapping each cover in brown paper.
New York Times Magazine
FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING
The judges who nominated “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” for the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing said that John Jeremiah Sullivan’s story about his search for two nearly forgotten blues singers “leads the reader on an unconventional tour of American roots music, introduces us to its obsessive collectors and charts the outer limits of historical memory.” In fact, the outer limits of American culture is where Sullivan lives, as evidenced by the extraordinary series of stories that have earned his work two Ellie awards and five additional nominations since 2003, on topics ranging from horse racing and Disneyworld to Christian rock and David Foster Wallace.
The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie
In the world of early-twentieth-century African American music and people obsessed by it, who can appear from one angle like a clique of pale and misanthropic scholar-gatherers and from another like a sizable chunk of the human population, there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and 1931 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley. There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and musicians as great, but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness reveal such vast and bewildering coextent. In the spring of 1930, in a damp and dimly lit studio, in a small Wisconsin village on the western shore of Lake Michigan, the duo recorded a batch of songs that for more than half a century have been numbered among the masterpieces of prewar American music, in particular two, Elvie’s “Motherless Child Blues” and Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words Blues,” twin Alps of their tiny oeuvre, inspiring essays and novels and films and cover versions, a classical arrangement.
Yet despite more than fifty years of researchers’ efforts to learn who the two women were or where they came from, we have remained ignorant of even their legal names. The sketchy memories of one or two ancient Mississippians, gathered many decades ago, seemed to point to the southern half of that state, yet none led to anything solid. A few people thought they heard hints of Louisiana or Texas in the guitar playing or in the pronunciation of a lyric. We know that the word “Geechee,” with a c, can refer to a person born into the heavily African-inflected Gullah culture centered on the coastal islands off Georgia and the Carolinas. But nothing turned up there either. Or anywhere. No grave site, no photograph. Forget that—no anecdotes. This is what set Geeshie and Elvie apart even from the rest of an innermost group of phantom geniuses of the twenties and thirties. Their myth was they didn’t have anything you could so much as hang a myth on. The objects themselves—the fewer than ten surviving copies, total, of their three known Paramount releases, a handful of heavy, black, scratch-riven shellac platters, all in private hands—these were the whole of the file on Geeshie and Elvie, and even these had come within a second thought of vanishing, within, say, a woman’s decision in cleaning her parents’ attic to go against some idle advice that she throw out a box of old records and instead to find out what the junk shop gives. When she decides otherwise, when the shop isn’t on the way home, there goes the music, there go the souls, ash flakes up the flue, to flutter about with the Edison cylinder of Buddy Bolden’s band and the phonautograph of Lincoln’s voice.
The Best American Magazine Writing 2015 Page 23
