Flirting with Danger (14 page)

For some correspondents, the thrill and danger of war becomes a way of life. Perhaps being near death makes them feel more alive. In Chechnya, I felt the opposite. I wanted to do my job well, but the shock of near-death made me ask myself what I was doing there. Was I emotionally disconnected? Was that why I could continue to operate in such a terrible environment? Maybe it was only my ability to abandon my feelings that allowed me to witness these horrors daily. I had somehow wandered off emotionally and psychologically, missing in action from myself. I suppose, in a way, this distance from my emotions made me a better reporter. I could act as a blank slate on which to convey other people’s stories. But it also made me realize how much of me was dead inside. Going to Chechnya made me think, in the most basic way, that I deserved to live, and that I needed to inhabit my own emotional world instead of using news as a surrogate by stepping into other people’s lives. I had to be bombed into valuing my life.

After that day on the bridge, I asked to be relieved in Chechnya and to go back to Moscow. I had been away almost a month, but it felt like far longer. It was a great relief to get home to my apartment
in Moscow and soak in the bath for hours. But the relief was only temporary. I still had to file stories daily. And I knew I would soon have to return to Chechnya, because we were short of reporters who could go. I dreaded it.

And then the lure of the chase hooked me again. The Russian Defense Department granted a request I had put in weeks before, to spend time with the soldiers on the Russian side of the war. Despite my exhaustion and fear, I felt drawn to the chance, because it was the first access any Western journalist had been given to the Russian military in Chechnya. Reporting in any war can become one-sided. I empathized with the Chechen civilians who were being bombed, but it is often simply the side that is more accommodating to the media that gets the most sympathetic coverage. Almost all of the Western news was sympathetic to the Chechens, and I could understand why. Russian troops shot at our car when we first tried to approach them in Chechnya. But I still felt that the Russians deserved to have their side of the story told.

I headed south again on a Russian military transport plane, this time with another of CNN’s powerhouse camerawomen, Cynde. We landed in a sea of mud, into which we plunged knee deep as we descended from the plane. Somehow we hauled our bags and cases of equipment through the mud to the building housing the military press department. We were at headquarters of the Russian forces in Mozdok, a dreary Russian town close to the Chechen border. We were there to persuade them to take us on one of their helicopters to the front lines in Grozny. Every morning we’d trudge onto the base past the same frozen dead dog lying in the snow outside the barracks. It bothered me. Couldn’t somebody pick it up?

The misery of the Russian soldiers was nearly unbearable. Few of those we spoke to understood why they were there. Many were eighteen-year-old conscripts who barely knew how to use their
Kalashnikovs and wandered around looking dazed and shell-shocked. Outside the Russian camp, a crowd of women gathered each day—mothers, many of whom had traveled from far across Russia, looking for news of their missing sons. One officer said to me, “I’ve never seen anything like this in Afghanistan. This war is a meat grinder. We just keep throwing more boys at it and they get chewed up and spat out.”

Cynde’s and my persistence paid off. The Russian press officer, who had been so shocked to see two women get off the transport plane, held us off for days, promising to take us into the battle but not believing we really wanted to go. Even having gotten this far, part of me secretly hoped he would say no and I wouldn’t have to go through with this. I was almost sorry when he eventually relented. We climbed aboard a postal helicopter that brought mail and other supplies to the front lines. The pilot told us to take off our flak jackets and sit on them because Chechens would be firing at us from the ground. I knew what it was like to be a helpless ant being bombarded from above; now I was going to get to feel the fear from the other side, like a duck in flight being pursued by hunters below. The pilots flew evasive maneuvers through the mountainous terrain. They were very skilled, but I had mixed feelings when I discovered that it was vodka that emboldened them. I think I held my breath for most of the trip. When we landed on a ridge where the Russians were dug in and heavily fortified with tanks and artillery, I felt safer. It was more secure to be taking pictures from the side, behind the big guns. We spent the day filming helicopter gunships strafing Grozny, and tanks and heavy artillery firing at the city. The hard part was knowing what was happening on the other side, to have seen the destruction each salvo causes. But the wounds were inflicted on both sides: at a makeshift triage tent, injured Russian soldiers were bandaged up to be quickly flown back to base; nearby
a row of dead soldiers lay in the grass, stiff and lonely, no longer in a hurry. Moscow may have believed that holding on to Chechnya so as to not risk further disintegration of Russia was worth fighting for, but few of the soldiers on the front lines seemed to think so.

The war dragged on for months. The network’s interest waned, then flared up again whenever the story heated up. People congratulated me when we were nominated for an Emmy award for our coverage, but I could not feel much joy in it. I never recovered from the brutality of my first month there. I never felt the same about Russia. I knew it was time for me to leave.

“Speaking to the Dead”

A
ll her adult life, all my younger sister, Francesca, ever wanted was a husband and a baby. She never suffered from my wanderlust. She stayed close to home, satisfied with life’s simple pleasures. I had to traverse the globe for years before the same thing looked attractive to me. While I went around the world, her longest journey was from New Jersey to Delaware. While I was covering other people’s wars for a big broadcaster, she was working in a stable office, Xeroxing, stapling, and collating.

As different as we are, I feel an indescribable bond with Francesca. She is like my mirror. Our insides seem linked. She has a direct pipeline to my heart, often anticipating what I say or feel. The same things make us laugh and cry. There have been times when I have heard her voice on my answering machine and been confused: she sounds so much like me that I think the voice is mine. We have no
inhibitions with each other. We share everything. I know she is always on my side. She brought fun and laughter into our heavy home. The longest relationship I will ever have is with my sisters—longer than with a spouse, my mother, or my child.

Francesca is one of the wisest people I know. She always knows where to look for answers, how to speak to her own heart for guidance. Though I was different, searching outside myself around the world, I came to value her kind of clarity and acceptance of a simpler life.

When we were children, my mother often teased Francesca by saying she would sell her to an Arab sheikh for her all-American blond, blue-eyed beauty. She did end up gravitating toward Middle Eastern men. They weren’t confused by modern American gender issues and power struggles between the sexes, and took care of her in a traditional way. With them she could do what she wanted, which was to stay home, paint her nails, and take care of the house. She could play that role, which I knew I never could.

She eventually fell in love with a Lebanese man named Hadi, who worshiped her in his reserved and gentle way. They lived a suburban life: do-it-yourself projects on weekends, planning for their future brood. They were a funny pair. Always with his nose stuck in
The Economist
, Hadi was one of only a few people who asked me informed questions about whatever war I had just been covering. Francesca was more engrossed in the latest sitcoms, charming and witty in a way that she never needed to impress anyone with intellectual pretensions. Francesca’s sorority-girl looks belie her wicked sense of humor and ability to mimic and have an entire room convulsing with laughter. Hadi played her straight man, a counterpoint to her antics. He was always supremely practical. They were saving and doing repairs on their house before they took the next step, marriage.

Not long after the war in Chechnya, Francesca called me in Moscow.

“Hadi came home from work today and I noticed a huge lump on his neck,” she said. “He always reminded me of Daddy; I knew he’d get cancer.”

I tried to calm her, pointing out that Hadi was only thirty-five years old, assuring her it was nothing that serious. But, as optimistic as I sounded, her news took my breath away. We had suffered through my father’s cancer a long time ago as children, and I was terrified at the thought that she would have to go through that kind of trauma now, as an adult.

Eight months later Hadi was dead. It was the same cancer, lymphoma, that had killed my father twenty years before.

Francesca lost her man. She lost her house. She lost her dream of a happy family and children. Everything she had ever wanted evaporated in a matter of months. When I came to visit, I had been deeply moved by the love that I saw flowing between Francesca and Hadi as he lay emaciated in a cancer ward in Philadelphia, with only a few tufts of hair left. The tenderness between them was potent and wordless as Hadi gently drifted out of her world. One evening after I visited Francesca and Hadi in the hospital, I went home and read Kahlil Gibran. Their love seemed to embody his words. I cried and cried that night, for Hadi, for Francesca, for my father, for me.

Hadi’s cancer opened reservoirs of sadness I had been carrying around for two decades about my father’s death. For everyone in my family, Hadi’s death seemed to let us relive my father’s death, since we were so young when it happened. My mother was practically inconsolable about Hadi, perhaps reliving sorrow she had had to suppress when my father died.

Just before Hadi’s diagnosis, I took a trip to Barbados, the Caribbean paradise I had last seen just before my father died when I was fifteen. After I settled into a beachfront hotel full of British colonial charm and luxury, I went unannounced to see Janice, whose American sister I had been for two months. A small girl opened the door. She said her name was Siobhan. After I had left twenty years earlier, Janice and her sister made a deal that whoever had a girl first would name her after me. When Janice’s sister gave birth, she kept the promise and named her Siobhan. Janice had two children of her own and, oddly enough, had given them Russian names, Natasha and Nicholas. It made me wonder at all our unconscious connections. Going back to Barbados felt like the beginning of the long road home that I needed to take, now that my Russian adventure was coming to a close.

With the irrational cruelty of Hadi’s death and all the feelings about my father with which I was suddenly flooded, I sought solace on another plane of consciousness. I went to see a clairvoyant in London. She turned out to be a matronly blond Englishwoman who lived with her husband and children in plain row housing in a suburb outside London. I had expected a house full of candles and dark curtains, and instead found her husband watching a cricket match on TV in a perfectly normal sitting room, while his wife ushered me into the dining room to talk to the dead. She was recommended by a friend, and I was told she had given counsel to many members of the British upper class, including Sarah Ferguson, the
Duchess of York, according to the tabloids. She used no crystal balls or Ouija boards, but fondled my watch as she tried to make contact with the other world. She let me believe I could talk to my father, twenty years after his death. It made no difference to me whether it was real or not, whether I was talking to an actual ghost or an imagined one: it was a dialogue I needed to have. I wanted a chance to say things to my father that I had been unable to tell him before he died. I had never been able to say good-bye or tell him I loved him or feel his pride in me. I wanted him to know that I had turned out well, that I had graduated from Duke, and that I had taken graduate courses at Columbia, his alma mater, that I had a good job and that I spoke Russian. The process of talking to him made me feel as though I could finally let myself love him.

The more I talked to the memory of my father, the more I wanted to say. I wanted him to know that I had found our relatives in Russia. But there was a harrowing story behind that. Two cousins of my father, Boris and his sister Iveta, had corresponded with my father’s family during the Second World War. In the mid-1950s, my father’s family wrote to Boris and invited him to visit America, and suggested an alternative possibility of meeting one day in Israel. The letters from Boris stopped. All they got was silence. For years my father’s sister, Rosalyn, was haunted by his disappearance, afraid that the one mention of Israel was enough to get Boris sent to the gulag. Now it was forty years later. Uncle Leon asked me in one of his many letters if I would try to find them, to put his sister’s mind at ease. I used my reporter’s skills and tracked down Boris and Iveta without much trouble. I was apprehensive about meeting them, afraid they might be bedraggled, bitter, and burdensome. To my delight, they were charming and warm. Although Boris had been expelled from the institute where he studied because of the letter from America, his career tarnished forever, he had rebounded well.
Despite his ordeal, Boris had become a linguist, speaking eleven languages, and was also an eminent economist at Moscow University. Iveta, a concert pianist, had masses of curly hair just like mine. Her husband was a polar explorer. Like their American cousins had done with my mother, they too seemed to ostracize Boris’s non-Jewish wife. Although they welcomed me warmly to their home, I felt a tinge of rejection at not being quite Jewish enough.