Paris: A Love Story (3 page)

Greeting scores of friends and colleagues, we made our way to our seats. I am trying now to recall how good it felt to be part of our couple. Just a few months before, we had been honored by the Asia Society as one of five Great Couples. How long ago it now seems. In accepting the award, I had said I had no idea how I would get anything done without Richard’s support.

•   •   •

One month after that glittering evening, as I held tight to my children’s hands, we entered the Kennedy Center. I noticed a tall, blond woman, alone and hunched inside her black coat. In Washington you notice people who are trying
not
to be noticed at public events. Diane Sawyer—Richard’s partner for
many years before I came into his life. She had written me the briefest and most generous note. “At the core of Richard Holbrooke,” Diane wrote, “was his deep love for you.” I walked over to her to say thank you. Tears were streaming down her face and we exchanged a wordless embrace.

Our friend George Stevens, the producer of the Kennedy Center Honors, organized the memorial and it was remarkable. What President Obama, President Clinton and Secretary of State Clinton, Admiral Mullen, and former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan said about Richard belongs in the history books. Renée Fleming sang “Ave Maria” at my request and I have rarely heard anything so piercingly, heartbreakingly beautiful. Backstage, as we waited to speak, I stood with President Obama, his arm around my shoulder, looking at a photomontage of Richard projected on the stage. What struck me was how much older Richard looked in the final months than even a year before. Pictures of him with Karzai in Kabul, with various generals in Islamabad, in refugee camps and on military bases, showed a man aging before our eyes. When he was home he was happy and relaxed and I was too busy enjoying our brief reunions to notice. “He aged so much on this job,” I exclaimed. Later, I hoped the president did not take that as a rebuke. He told me he had worked on his eulogy late into the night, looking for the perfect poem by Yeats—Richard’s favorite. He was warm and easy to be with. “Well,” he said looking out at the packed Kennedy Center, “this tribute may even exceed Richard’s expectations.”

I spoke at this and the other two memorials. His death had
made me feel helpless. However painful, speaking about Richard was something within my power, something I could
do.

I had another reason for speaking. Most people knew Richard for his intelligence, his appetite for work and for friendship. He shared very little of his personal life—even when he was with his close friends. I wanted to fill in that missing dimension. “Richard was a very good husband,” I said at the Kennedy Center. “There were no boundaries between our personal and professional lives. We gave each other great courage—knowing the other was always there. Not a single day passed—wherever he was—without a phone call.”

Nor did we ever go to sleep on a quarrel, I thought, but I did not say this.

After the memorial, at the reception on the roof of the Kennedy Center, I shook thousands of hands. Foreign ministers, generals, ambassadors, and old friends who had traveled far to be there; I didn’t reach them all.

But my day was not yet over. The American ambassador to Afghanistan, General Karl Eikenberry, called on me at my hotel. “Our embassy—the largest in the world—is Richard’s creation,” he said, presenting me with the Stars and Stripes, which had flown half-mast over the Kabul embassy. “General Petraeus will present you the flag which flew half-mast over NATO headquarters.” I thanked him for making the long trip from Kabul to Washington to honor Richard. Some time later, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, presented me with the flag that had flown half-mast over the Capitol the day he died. I was moved beyond words by these gestures for a deeply patriotic man.

Pakistan’s president Zardari, who had traveled from Islamabad to attend the memorial, arrived next. I was spent from hours of publicly shared grief, but rather than an empty audience between a head of state and a new widow, this turned into a heartfelt conversation between a widow and a widower. Zardari, his eyes filled with emotion, talked about his own grief after his wife Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. “You must let yourself feel the pain, Kati,” he advised me, like an old friend. “It is good. I have not touched anything in Benazir’s room,” he said. “Her saris still hang in her closet. Her beads are where she left them on her dresser.”

We were joined by Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani. His wife lives in Islamabad, and he was clearly affected by this unusually personal exchange. He said, “Mr. President, I would like to spend more time with my wife in the future.” Zardari smiled and said, “Yes, Husain, you should do that.” Then, in the only political note of this surprisingly personal exchange, Zardari said, “What a bad bargain Pakistan made—nurturing extremists to fight India and the Soviets.” He shook his head. “Now we are stuck with them.”

I have never used Richard’s last name, but after the Washington memorial, I reserved a table for my family at our favorite restaurant under “Richard Holbrooke.” I now understood widows who change their names to their husband’s; anything to draw the memory closer.

After the memorials in Washington and at the United Nations in New York, I tried to pick up the thread of my life. The life that we had built was over. I felt cut loose from my moorings—unprotected. Who was I, if not part of a couple? My kids were grown up; Lizzie was in Haiti with only an intermittent phone connection. (“Are you ok Mom?” was a regular text message from my daughter, which made me smile.) Chris was in Brooklyn, loving and concerned. But I do not want to lean on them. I want my own life back.

For months letters arrive each day—in the end there are thousands of them. Most describe specific memories of interaction with Richard. Planted on our living room floor, I keep reading, as they deserve to be read, carefully, and frequently with tears. Some have a tiny crown on the back of the envelope, denoting a royal sender. Others are written on paper torn from a notebook. I feel as if the sender is writing for his or her own sake, as well as mine. To capture something—a moment, a conversation, an impression, the advice Richard dispensed so freely—that will not come again.

A handwritten note addressed to Mrs. Richard C. Holbrooke
in the tiniest handwriting I have ever seen is dropped off at my apartment. “I woke up this morning,” the note says, “and thought of you, and of all the mornings you will wake up without Richard. Signed, Joan Didion.” I am moved by this touching but infinitely sad note. But I don’t want to be sad on all the mornings to come. I have just been made painfully aware of how fleeting life is and how unpredictable. In a sense, I have never wanted to hold life tighter, or to live more fully than now, reeling from loss.

I see photos of myself
before,
and I look different: innocent and trusting. The look of someone who just assumed nothing bad would ever happen to her. I know I have to get through these days—each of which brings a tidal wave of grief at unexpected moments. On Fridays I still expect him to blast through the front door and call out, “Katika!” using my Hungarian diminutive. He was not a quiet man. And now the apartment is so quiet.

So. My life must be reinvented. No living backward. No living forward. Living in the present. But first: faced squarely. He really isn’t coming back. There will never be anyone else like him. No one will ever challenge, amuse, provoke, or (occasionally) annoy me, nor so
get
me ever again. The days and weeks seem only to clarify my loss. Who to share with the minute triumphs and tiny slights—imagined or real? When I write something, I want to show him. Who else cares as much as he did?

I pretend that I can make a new life happen, by sheer willpower. I fly to Seattle to address several hundred people in the town hall of Yakima. Other than the memorials, this is my first
public appearance since Richard’s death. I ask the lady who is to introduce me to mention that fact, in case I stumble. I am mortified to hear her announce, “Kati would like you to know this is the first time she is speaking in public since the death of her husband and that we are grateful that she made the trip.” And of course midway through my speech Richard’s shadow passes and my voice breaks. A hush falls over the hall as the good people of Yakima hold their collective breath and wait for me to compose myself. The speech is a success. I even tour vineyards and orchards. (What are the chances I will ever be back here? A question I now frequently ask myself.)

•   •   •

I have made it through the speech, the book signing, and the shaking of hundreds of hands. But at the Seattle airport, I learn my flight home is delayed by several hours and no longer direct. Hot waves of anxiety wash over me. I do not want to cry. No one to call to vent to. No one who will tell me this is no big deal. Go get a beer and chill out. I close my eyes and breathe deeply, as if I were back in the delivery room, giving birth. I do not want to be led away by Homeland Security. I am not yet myself.

The weeks pass and still every damn thing is a memory. My daughter and I watch
Z,
the great Costa-Gavras thriller. I had never before thought to compare the Yves Montand character, the crusading politician who is assassinated, to Richard. But now it’s obvious. How different the charismatic public man is from the very human private one. How painfully familiar it feels, watching Montand’s newly widowed wife, surrounded
by cameras and journalists and fighting for composure, or her blank look when her husband’s followers assure her his work will survive him. What are you talking about, her look seems to say. He is gone.

Watching an old favorite,
Shoot the Piano Player,
I am transfixed by Charlie, brilliantly played by Charles Aznavour. He has absorbed multiple losses, and at the end is still playing the piano. That’s me! I am Charlie the piano player.

Another trip. Another speech. This one is in Berlin, where I am to address a conference of Human Rights Watch. At JFK Airport’s Lufthansa counter, I am handed a card to fill out for notification of next of kin. I don’t fill it out. My welfare is no longer an urgent matter to anyone. Bad news will reach them soon enough.

Berlin is Richard’s city. He was ambassador here when we first fell in love. Getting off the plane’s gangway at Tegel Airport, I remember when he stood there waiting for me, like a kid on Christmas morning. Facing an audience of human rights activists, students, and the American ambassador, I speak about Richard’s brand of diplo217;s brand of diplomacy. One human at a time.

I am Charlie, the piano player.

Some time later, I face a tougher audience in Washington, the city I most fear for all the memories of the last two years, and of Richard’s last days. But it is the city I most want to remind of Richard’s legacy. I address the annual dinner of Refugees International, an NGO he once chaired. As I enter the hall, I know I have been here before. When? Then I remember: A dance. Katharine Graham’s seventieth birthday party. I have
no memory of what it was like to flirt, to dance, to feel anything at all beyond sadness.

Surrounded by Richard’s admirers, mostly young people whose stories all seem to begin with “Because of Richard, I decided to . . . ,” I begin to relax. I introduce two old friends of Richard’s to each other: Farooq Kathwari, the Kashmiri-American CEO of Ethan Allen Furniture, and the literary critic and editor Leon Wieseltier. “My father was a salesman for Ethan Allen,” Leon tells Farooq. America! What a great country. Richard would love this. I am enjoying myself. These are “his” people.

From the stage, I thank the outpouring of affection, “
Love,
actually,” I correct myself, and stumble over the word. Silence falls in the auditorium. Love is what I feel for the absent man. It does not seem possible that here, in
his
town in the company of
his
people,
he
is gone. I am followed to the podium by Vermont senator Patrick Leahy, who receives a lifetime award for his support for refugees. The senator tells an amusing story of a trip to Kosovo with Richard. Everybody laughs and Richard is suddenly very much present. Afterward, Leahy tells me, “You know, Hillary called me at my farm in Vermont, to tell me he had died. She was crying on the phone,” he says.

I am suddenly filled with such warmth for the secretary of state, who never lost her composure in the hospital when she sat there silently, keeping me company. She remained steady and controlled when she eulogized Richard at the Kennedy Center, and a few weeks later at the American Academy in Berlin. Somehow, I am relieved to hear that to her old friend Pat Leahy she allowed the tears to flow.

Back in New York, I look out at snowy Central Park through a curtain of ice and rain—a perfect filter between the world and me. It is a winter of record snowfall, which suits me fine.

In February, a daylong seminar on the Dayton Accords, which ended the war in Bosnia in 1995 and was Richard’s proudest diplomatic achievement, is held at New York University. I introduce myself for the first time as Richard Holbrooke’s widow. Another watershed.

Presidents’ Day weekend. I wake up with a new feeling. What lives I have lived in the past seventeen years! How enriched I am in every way. I am starting to use the first person singular for the first time in my adult life. I am going to be all right. I feel a surge of energy. I decide to attack Richard’s closet—still crammed full of his things. At the sight of the blue cashmere blazer we bought on our final Parisian shopping trip, I break down. No, I am not ready to go through his closet yet. Grief is not a linear process. It hits you with a force when you least expect it.

•   •   •

I recall my mother, in her communist prison, facing a long sentence, and cut off from her husband and her young children. In her lowest moments, she forced herself to do sit-ups in her tiny cell. So now, with my friends mostly out of town for the long weekend, with another ice storm pummeling the city, I put my bathing suit on under my snow pants and parka and head to my health club’s swimming pool. This is what Mama would do, I tell myself. I recall my father’s letter from the same prison. “Once before,” Papa wrote, recalling what the Nazis had done
to our family, “we lost everything.” My parents survived—and rebuilt their lives. So will I.