The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  That was how Louis Dupree talked—to Times writers, to fellow archeologists, presidents, statesmen, interrogators, spies. He even talked that way to his wife, Nancy, who, when asked whether it was true her husband swore like sailor (and a sailor he had been before becoming an archaeologist), would sometimes sigh longingly and reply, “Worse.”

  Dupree’s personal correspondence is full of letters from nervous museum administrators asking after unaccounted-for expenses and unpaid salaries. In the field he worked casually. In 1962, he carried out the first major excavation at Aq Kupruk, an immensely important site, essentially by himself. For the follow-up dig, three years later, when he discovered the Head, he splurged and brought along as diggers and assistants a pair of graduate students, a pair of precocious high schoolers, and his cook.

  “We were very, very careful with it,” Charles Kolb, one of the graduate students, recalled of the Head. Except for Dupree, that is. Although it was very possibly the most important find of his career, he never properly catalogued it (thus its lack of a single name or record number). Then, in Kabul, he took it home with him, where Nancy, a writer of guidebooks and an amateur scholar, came to adore it as much as he did. Dupree’s daughter took a shine to it, too, and called it Daddy’s Head. The name stuck.

  The Afghan official who granted Dupree permission to take Daddy’s Head to New York told him, “If you lose it, you’ll owe us half a million dollars.” The careful procedure Dupree employed to transport it overseas involved putting it in his jacket pocket, folding the jacket, and stuffing the jacket into the overhead shelf on the plane. Nancy spent the flight looking up nervously at the bundle.

  Upon its return from the United States, Daddy’s Head was installed at the National Museum in Kabul. Between their excavations, research trips, lecture tours, and teaching stints abroad, Louis and Nancy would visit it there. They’d stare at it for what seemed like hours, talking about the history it must have witnessed. One photograph of the couple shows them sitting at a table, gazing at the artifact as Louis holds it in his fingers (gingerly, but on equal terms). They appear mesmerized, as though Daddy’s Head is almost physically drawing them back in time. The photo was taken in 1971, as they were falling more deeply in love with one another, and, together, with Afghanistan. They peered into the country’s wondrous, terrible, unknowable past. Daddy’s Head, they liked to think, was opening its vault of secrets.

  In 1978, a communist cabal seized power in Afghanistan. Louis was imprisoned and deported. The next year the Soviet Union invaded. Its troops pulverized the country, reducing much of its history—the unearthed chapters and those still buried—to rubble. Louis helped the Afghan resistance while Nancy worked with refugees. The struggle against the Soviets gave way to civil war, and their beloved National Museum was in the crossfire.

  Nancy and others tried to save the artifacts in the collection. But she didn’t find Daddy’s Head. The Taliban ended the civil war, but followed that by closing schools, ransacking libraries, and destroying much of what was left of the collection. She wondered if all of the work she and Louis had done to preserve Afghan culture had been in vain. She assumed she would never see Daddy’s Head again.

  One

  I first encountered Nancy Dupree in a ghostly sort of a way. On a Tuesday night in 2003, while soldiers my age were in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban, I was sitting in a theater in Los Angeles, watching a production of Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul. The play’s first scene is given over entirely to a monologue spoken by a Mrs. Dalloway–type character. Why she is addressing us, and from where, she leaves unspoken, as she does her identity—she does not name herself and is known in the program only as the Homebody—but we’re aware from the Homebody’s first words that the central fact about this woman is that she is deeply taken by, even lost to, Afghanistan. She speaks about the country with passionate eloquence, yet it seems her knowledge of the place has left her understanding less about it, not more. In the convolutions of her speech and mind, the Homebody is wise and helpless, composed and scattered, ancient and infantile. “Our story begins at the very dawn of history, circa 3,000 BC,” she begins, as the lights come up, but interrupts herself at once to explain, “I am reading from an outdated guidebook about the city of Kabul.”

  The Homebody’s monologue is brilliant but tortuous, almost infuriatingly so. She departs the narrative of Afghan history for jags about party etiquette and antidepressants, uses words no audience member could be expected to know and then apologizes for them. She is, in other words, very human. So much so, it’s clear—or anyway was to me that night—that she must be based on a real woman.

  Curious, I eventually contacted Kushner and learned her back story. In the 1990s, he was browsing the stacks at the New York University library, looking for material about Afghanistan, when he stumbled across a volume titled An Historical Guide to Kabul. He opened the book and didn’t close it until he’d read to the end; the Homebody and the play had emerged. The guidebook’s author’s name was Nancy Hatch Dupree.

  I started asking around about her.

  “If the Afghans ever go back to deities, she’ll be one,” the former American ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker told me of Dupree. “They all know what she’s gone through with them and on their behalf.”

  Ashraf Ghani, the Afghan intellectual and presidential candidate, described her as “a grandmother figure and mother figure in Afghanistan. Somebody who’s given us our cultural heritage. Someone who’s played a living witness to our history.”

  Kushner, who since writing the play has become friends with Dupree and serves on the advisory council of her foundation, called her a woman of “dazzling erudition.” (Nancy has never seen Homebody/Kabul. “I hear it’s good,” she tells people.)

  The Grandmother of Afghanistan—that is not original to Ghani. It is what Afghans call Dupree, aware that she is technically American. In fact, if she could be said to have any single vocation, this may be it: She is a self-appointed but also widely acknowledged guardian of Afghan culture, the country’s bluffest and most beloved expatriate busybody. Among other things, she is the author of dozens of books and scholarly articles on Afghanistan’s history, architecture, politics, music, literature, and art; a founder of the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage; the creator of a library extension service that distributes books to schools and government bodies around the country; the creator of the most extensive digital archive of Afghan historical materials; an occasional adviser to ministers and generals; and an advocate for Afghan women’s and children’s rights.

  Natives and foreigners alike have been trading stories and legends of her ever since she first arrived in Afghanistan over a half-century ago. There was the episode in the 1960s, for instance, when Nancy saved Bagh-e-Bala, the onetime summer palace of the emirs, from destruction, partly out of scholarly devotion to the building and partly so she could host her wedding there. In the 1980s, a young Saudi man approached her, looking for help bringing in equipment to dig tunnels where mujahideen fighters could hide between attacks on Soviet troops. Dupree was not an official, he was aware, but he had heard that she knew everyone of importance in Afghanistan, and that she had the rind to get what she wanted from any one of them. Nancy was too busy to help him, but she recalls the man, who went by the name Osama bin Laden, being “very shy and polite.”

  More recently, while ordering lumber for a construction project, Nancy ran up against a moratorium on logging that Hamid Karzai had instated. After she called him and made her frustrations known, Karzai ordered the moratorium lifted temporarily. “He was just a little nobody when I first met him,” she told me of the president of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

  Karzai had other reasons to be helpful. The lumber was for a library Dupree was building at Kabul University, for which he’d already helped raise $2.5 million. The project that could most properly be called her life’s work, she has been planning the library and collecting its contents for thir
ty years. Those contents represent one of the most comprehensive, if not the most comprehensive, archives of post-1979 Afghan historical documents and scholarship anywhere. The library is the more impressive because it is a repository of knowledge about a time during which knowledge was concertedly destroyed in Afghanistan—a memory bank for a generation of Afghans whose clearest personal memories are of exile. She sees it as her greatest gift to her adopted home, as well as her last attempt to save Afghanistan’s past, as it were, from itself.

  Like other Americans, in the years after 9/11 I read and thought a lot about Afghanistan, that country—in the Homebody’s words—“so at the heart of the world the world has forgotten it.” After learning of Dupree’s collection, I found myself thinking a lot about it, too. I tried to picture its old books and photographs. I wondered what they had to say about this place that has so changed the course of my own country’s history, this place where so many Americans have gone to die, but about which America still knows so little. In the fall of 2012, I heard that Dupree’s library was, after so many years in the making, finally scheduled to open. I also heard that her health was failing. I called her and told her I wanted to come to Afghanistan. She wasn’t overly excited at the prospect, but neither did she exactly object. I booked a ticket for Kabul.

  Two

  On a hot September morning, I stepped from one of Kabul’s loud, dusty streets to the Kabul University gate. The guard refused to let me in. “I’m here to see Nancy Dupree,” I told him, reckoning the Grandmother of Afghanistan must be known to all. His expression underwent no change. “The Afghanistan Center at Kabul University?” Nothing. Finally, losing interest, he waved me through.

  Dark episodes in recent Afghan history originated on the university campus. It was here that communists and Islamists first did battle in the ideological skirmishes that led up to the Soviet invasion, here that the warlords who would destroy the country—and who still run much of it—first rubbed shoulders. Ashraf Ghani told me that when he came to the university, “people were literally killing each other there. There were warring student gangs.” One of his first acts as chancellor was to remove forty-three tons of scrap metal from the school, he said, most of it pieces of blown-up tanks. The tanks have been replaced by a lot of healthy-looking trees, and fewer, less-healthy-looking buildings. Today the campus has a liberal vibe that contrasts with the rest of the country. Female students wear cursory headscarves or none at all; they and their male classmates look at and sometimes even talk to each other.

  Twenty feet from the gate I got lost. Dupree had anticipated this, apparently: Soon a silver sedan pulled alongside me. The silhouette of what might have been a child appeared in a back window. I’d never met Dupree, only spoken with her on the phone. Her avian voice hadn’t prepared me for the diminutive woman I found. A collapsing robin’s nest of gray hair didn’t quite get her to five feet, and she couldn’t have weighed more in pounds than her age in years, eighty-six at the time. Her eyes were sunken, her face a topography of wrinkles. (I was reminded of the Homebody’s description of an Afghan whose “skin is broken by webs of lines inscribed by hardships, siroccos, and strife.”) But her cheeks were girlish and full, her mouth small and coy.

  Hidden inside a light blue salwar kameez and a long scarf, Dupree seemed already to be in mid-conversation when I settled next to her in the backseat. That morning had produced a dustup over fabrics that she wanted for the library, she was saying, and “people just do not realize you don’t accomplish things overnight here. They come from somewhere else and expect everything to fall into place. But it takes so much bloody time.” Looking out the window, she added, “That’s why everything here is kind of … half-assed.”

  We drove to her temporary office, which she’d been working out of for years, in a converted garage. With a cough, she eased into a chair behind the old dining room table that serves as her desk. Her staff, at small desks around the room, greeted her as Nancy Jan. (Jan is a Dari diminutive that means, roughly, “dear.”) They were all Afghan, all in their twenties or thirties, and all, I noticed, men.

  “Oh, I’m notorious,” she said when I asked her to square this with her advocacy for Afghan women. “In Peshawar, I tried to have women, and I discovered that they’re not reliable. In this society, you get somebody trained and then the father says, ‘We’re moving from Peshawar to Islamabad,’ and off they go. Or they get married. Or they’ve got children and, you know, they don’t turn up because their child’s got diarrhea.”

  A cook brought out plates of rice pilau from the kitchen (a closet with a hot plate) as the library’s designers arrived to discuss the fabric situation. Dupree had been informed there was not enough of the red pattern she’d ordered long before for all the upholstery and curtains in the library and now was, she announced, “really browned off. We could have done this six months ago!”

  “Two years ago,” said Dupree’s executive director, Waheed Wafa, a tall, warm-voiced man whose face exuded beleaguerment. Like many educated Kabulis, Wafa grew up with the Duprees’ books. Also like many educated Kabulis, he was beaten by the Taliban. When the U.S.-led coalition invaded, in 2001, he became a fixer for the New York Times, then a reporter. Dupree hired him in 2011.

  Wafa produced a fan of swatches, potential replacements, and held up a reddish one. “That’s dullsville,” Dupree said, waving a hand dismissively. She jumped to the issue of acoustics. Without enough good fabric to absorb sound, the library would be too loud.

  “What about urns?” Waheed suggested. Knowing Dupree’s mood could be improved by a story of Afghan ingenuity, he told one: During the Taliban years, he said, his friends in the Kabul underground used to hold meetings in a room they thought was secure. But one day they realized Talibs were listening outside. So they lined the walls of the room with large urns, to muffle their voices.

  “Oh yes, yes!” Dupree said, getting into the story, and smiling for the first time since I’d met her. A cordial South African designer stepped into the office and joined the conversation. “See how everything in Afghanistan has to be negotiated?” he whispered to me.

  After some gentle cajoling from Wafa and the others, Dupree agreed on potential vendors. “OK, that’s done. Decision made. Bang!” she said, slapping her hand on the table. Her staff looked up from their desks hopefully. A date was set to go to the market, and the group left. “He’s writing a book,” Dupree said of the South African designer once he had gone. “Everybody’s writing a book.” I asked if she ever thought of writing another book. “No. I don’t know enough. I don’t care enough.”

  Later, Wafa told me the new library was still months from completion. Since Dupree was relying on the Afghan government to pay for much of it, she was also relying on the government to pay the workers who were supposed to be finishing it. It hadn’t been, and they weren’t. I asked him when it might open. “God knows,” Waheed said, dragging on a Marlboro. He’d recently upped from a half-pack to a whole pack per day, he confided.

  Three

  A few days later, Dupree and a thickset, bearded man in his mid-thirties named Mashall, who manages her box-library program, drove to Charikar, a town about forty miles north of Kabul, to check in on a provincial council and a few schools. As we were departing, I asked if it was safe in Charikar. “We don’t ask questions like that,” she said. “If you think about that you’ll go nowhere. And that’s why the Americans don’t go anywhere.” Not just Americans but foreigners generally are seen by Afghans mostly as they make their way in chauffeured cars between fortified homes, fortified offices, fortified hotels, and fortified restaurants. Dupree is known for going anywhere she likes and for despising fortification.

  On Kabul’s outskirts, we drove past mile after mile of new cinderblock homes and roadside shops fashioned from steel shipping containers. “What you’re going through now, this place used to be desert, complete desert, just ten years ago,” she said. “It just shows that when Afghans decide to do something, they’re not slackers,
they get at it and they do!” Then she pondered. Her mood turned. “But it’s not organized. It’s all … personal. I suppose they tax all this, but do they pay the taxes? Who knows. It’s higgledy-piggledy.”

  “It’s not sketched, Nancy Jan,” Mashall said.

  Like many Afghans, Mashall has come to know Afghanistan only in adulthood. Before that he lived in Pakistan, where he’d moved as a child after his village was bombed in the Soviet war. He grew up in Peshawar, where he met Dupree in 1999. “When people see Nancy on the TV,” he said, “they say, ‘She’s still working, she’s still here.’ We say to our women, ‘Look at Nancy Dupree, she’s eighty and still working.’”

  Dupree waved a hand. “When people see me they say, ‘Good God, that woman is still alive?’”

  She looked from the window onto a magnificent view. In the distance were the “skirts of the mountains,” as a Persian poet once called the foothills of the Hindu Kush, and before them the Shomali Plain, a mine-ridden flatland once alive with vegetables and grapevines. We passed a cinderblock sprawl that had been a meadow, the site of a cavalry battle in the First Anglo-Afghan war, in the early 1840s. Dupree recounted how she and a friend used to ride horses there and reenact the fighting. “I swear there must be people in that village who tell stories about these two crazy women who rode around charging at each other.”

  We passed Bagh-e-Bala, the domed hilltop palace that the emir Abdur Rahman built to escape the heat of the Kabul Valley at the end of the nineteenth century. “That’s where Louis and I were married,” she said.

  Four

  Nancy Hatch was born in Cooperstown, New York, in 1926, and raised in Travancore, a small feudal kingdom on the southern tip of India, during the last gasps of the Raj. Her mother, a onetime stage actress, studied traditional Indian theater and wrote a guidebook to Travancore. Her father, who’d fought in the First World War with the British, worked on education projects for UNESCO around Asia. “He taught me a tremendous amount,” Dupree said. “One thing was, if you hold on to something too long, it fails.”