Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey

by Geraldine Brooks

  sunglasses, sunscreen, hat

  ½ doz. passport photos

  ref. books + notes + novel

  maps

  canteen + water-purify tabs?

  dried food?

  pocket knife?

  antibiotics, field dressings, hypodermic

  deodorant, moisturizer, lipbalm, Handiwipes, Evian, hairbrush, tampons, toothbrush & paste

  underpants and bra

  long skirt, 2 khaki pants & vest, 2 long-sleeve shirts, 2 T-shirts, sneakers

  king suit, pumps & stockings

  chador?

  BP vest?

  For eight years this twenty-point checklist sat in a drawer of my bedside table, ready for the late night calls: “Saddam’s gassed the Kurds.” “Khomeini’s finally kicked it.”

  Everything on the list, except item 20—the bulletproof vest—could be crammed into a nylon duffel bag that just fit under an airplane seat. (The first rule of Foreign Correspondence: never check in any luggage. It’s unfortunate to arrive at an Arab summit in Casablanca only to find that your underwear is touring sub-Saharan Africa without you.) It took me about a year to fine-tune the list. It was the New York Times’s uncombed correspondent John Kifner who taught me to pack what he called a “king suit,” even if the assignment I’d set out on didn’t seem likely to call for a visit to royalty. You never knew when the local dictator might invite you to tea. Kifner also advised making space for a fat novel. Most assignments didn’t leave a spare minute for recreational reading. But some (anything that involved waiting for an interview with Yasir Arafat or a plane out of Khartoum) could provide enough time to get through Proust.

  Other lessons came from experience. Iraqi secret police riffling through my contact book showed me the wisdom of purging the names and numbers of local dissidents. And the words “Don’t leave home without it” took on new meaning the day I found myself miming “tampon” to a Farsi-speaking pharmacy clerk in Iran.

  • • •

  Covering the racetrack in Sydney, or writing about the decline of basic industry in the American Midwest, I’d never imagined myself as someone whose packing list would include a chador, much less a bulletproof vest. After a year and a half with The Wall Street Journal in Cleveland, I’d gone home to Sydney, to get on with what I still thought of as my real life, my Australian life. But then the Journal decided it needed an Australasian bureau, and so I became a Foreign Correspondent who wasn’t foreign, writing features about things that were familiar to me yet exotic to my readers. Since the Journal didn’t have a pressing interest in hard news from Australia, I was free to write pretty much what I liked. In between corporate stories I’d roam the Outback for weeks, profiling a bargeman who delivered supplies to remote Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory, or saddling up with one of the last of the Queensland cattle drovers.

  In 1987, I’d just filed a piece on how New Zealand scientists were using the country’s vast population of methane-producing, flatulent sheep to study global warming when the Journal’s foreign desk in New York called. New York never called me. On the foreign editor’s international priorities list, Sydney rated a notch or two ahead of Djiboutiville. As I answered the phone, I worried she was calling to chastise me about too many tasteless sheep-fart jokes.

  Instead, she was offering me one of the paper’s plum jobs: Middle East correspondent covering a beat that ranged over twenty-two countries. The job had become vacant because its previous occupant decided to return to Washington after spending several days in an Iranian jail. The Iranians had accused him of being a Zionist spy. The Journal got him released after pointing out that he wasn’t even Jewish.

  One small problem about me replacing him: I was.

  • • •

  Three years earlier, on a wintry day in Cleveland, I had stepped into a tiled tub of purified rainwater, sunk to my knees and let the liquid close over me. Looking up at the blurred yellow shapes thrown against the tiled walls by the electric light, I exhaled and watched my last breath as a Gentile bubble upward.

  I broke the surface, the water sluicing off my bare skin in sparkling cascades, and proclaimed the Shema—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is One.” Tradition teaches that a convert is a Jewish soul trapped by mistake in a Gentile body. Immersion in the ritual bath frees the soul again. Perhaps that trapped soul explained why, fourteen years earlier, a Sydney girl who had never met a Jew walked around with a Star of David dangling against the collar of her Catholic-school uniform.

  Daddy, back home in Sydney, had been delighted when I wrote to say that the romance with Tony seemed serious. “So fascinating to think we might have a genuine Jew boy in the family,” he wrote. “I suspect it’s in the genes somewhere.” When he was a soldier in Palestine, he had fallen for a young sabra. She had ended the relationship because he wasn’t Jewish.

  Tony didn’t care if I was Jewish or not, and seemed bemused when I announced I wanted to convert. The night of my mikvah, he came reluctantly to hear me read my Torah portion, dragging himself through the synagogue door burdened by the same childhood memories of boredom and dread that dogged me every time I had to enter a Catholic church.

  I was trying to fill what Salman Rushdie has described as the religion-shaped hole in modern lives: a place that yearns for links with past communities and for a coherent reason to do the right thing rather than the expedient one. Now my links were with Tony’s three-thousand-year-old Jewish heritage, a heritage that had always insisted that religion passes to the child through the mother. Unless I converted, our children wouldn’t be Jews. Somehow, Tony’s forebears had kept their tradition alive through the Babylonian exile, the Spanish Inquisition, Russia’s pogroms, the Holocaust. I didn’t want to be the one to bring it to an end.

  And so on that frozen Midwestern morning I became a Jew. In a few weeks more I became a Jewish bride. Barely four years later I finally arrived in Israel.

  My life had given me the teenage fantasy I’d cooked up as I wrote to my Israeli pen pals and dug my mother’s vegetable garden pretending it was an embattled kibbutz. But it was my fantasy revised beyond recognition. When I arrived in Eretz Israel in December 1987, it wasn’t as a swamp-draining Zionist pioneer but as a Foreign Correspondent with a reservation at the Jerusalem Hilton.

  I was there to cover the eruption of rage that would become known as the intifada. Within a day of my arrival I found myself in the no man’s land between Palestinian rocks and Israeli rubber bullets. I’d made a classic rookie-correspondent error, a colleague told me over drinks at the bar later that night. In an uprising or a war, you reduce your risk of getting hurt by half if you get behind one group of combatants. “Never get in the middle,” he said. “You have to choose your side.”

  But what was my side? My colleague was talking of physical placement, but his words hummed with the internal dilemma I’d faced ever since my arrival. I’d become a Jew out of sentimental identification with the world’s eternal underdogs, but the place in which I had arrived wasn’t my father’s tiny, defenseless little Israel, encircled by enemies. It was a tough state, using an army to put down civilian unrest. I had become a Jew because I wanted to be on my husband’s side in the world. But in the streets of the occupied territories in the winter of 1987 that side was no longer an unambiguous place to be.

  As I reported the course of the intifada, I found myself making friends with both Arabs and Jews. But the relationships were always strained. The Palestinians demonized Israelis, the Israelis dehumanized Palestinians. On each side it was rare to find a shred of empathy for the other.

  On the phone to Australia, conversations with my father were equally tiring. The enthusiasm he’d shared with me, that had given us some common ground, was now a place of prickly disagreement. His Zionism had hardened over the years into a faith that brooked none of the ambiguity that troubled me. He was as ardent as any West Bank settler, and kept up a steady stream of letters to the Sydney newspapers espousing the rightness of a to
ugh Israeli response to the Palestinians.

  I had been covering the intifada for a year when Arafat decided to make a symbolic Declaration of Independence for the occupied territories, to boost the young stone throwers’ flagging morale. On the day of the announcement, the Israeli army deployed, to leave Palestinians in no doubt as to who controlled their “independent” land. The army declared the entire West Bank a closed military area. But soldiers couldn’t block every shepherd’s path, so early in the morning I crammed into the back of a rattling old Fiat with a group of Palestinian students. We bumped over a rocky trail through olive groves to the Arab town of Ramallah, joining a steady trickle of illicit traffic as we reached the edge of the city.

  In Ramallah, soldiers were everywhere, ordering anyone on the street to go to their houses. They were on us within minutes, eighteen-year-olds much the same age as the Palestinian students, poking the muzzles of their assault rifles in our faces and yelling in Hebrew for our IDs. I pulled out my Australian passport and handed it over. The Israeli youths stared at it and then called for their officer.

  He was in his thirties. From his slight paunch, it was obvious he was a reservist, called up for his compulsory month of annual duty. The fatigue of bad nights on unfamiliar army cots was etched into his face. He paged through the passport, eying the array of Arab visas. He raised his head and looked at me wearily. “I think you’re a journalist, and I think you shouldn’t be here.” I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to be escorted back to Jerusalem, either. “I’m just here with my friends,” I said. “Just visiting.”

  We gazed at each other and recognized a kind of kinship. Both of us were in this tense West Bank town because of our jobs, jobs that demanded we do things that made us uncomfortable. “Get off the street,” he said. “If I see you again I’ll arrest you.”

  As I melted away with the students, I found myself thinking of my old pen pal Cohen. The reservist with the tousled hair and the softening midriff could be him, doing his annual military service. I tried to conjure a picture of Cohen from his letters to me so long ago. I wanted to find him, to turn up at his door and say, “See? Here I am. I told you I would come.” Maybe military service had already claimed him, in the Yom Kippur War or in Lebanon. I wanted to find Mishal, too, and try out my newly acquired Arabic on him. But I hadn’t written to either of them since the early 1970s.

  And I had no time. With the Iran-Iraq War edging into an eighth year, Islamic fundamentalism on the rise, Lebanon in flames, price riots in Jordan and famine in the Horn of Africa, I was on the Frequent Flyer program from hell. More than a year into my new assignment, I hadn’t taken a single day off. I could hardly spare the time to search for my old pen pals, even if I had a place to start.

  I couldn’t remember their old addresses. I supposed that their letters were lost, tossed out with school exercise books and birthday cards in some long-ago cleanup. It was five years before I found them in my father’s neglected tea chests. And it was another two years before I set out to discover what had become of the teenagers who once lived in those faraway places.

  • • •

  “What is the purpose of your visit to Israel? Do you know anyone there? How do you know them? What are their names?”

  The rapid-fire interrogations droned on. As I waited in line to be questioned by the El Al airlines security staff, I pulled the fragile old envelopes from my bag and studied the addresses. In a corner of my ticket envelope I clumsily doodled a fiery-looking Hebrew alef, trying to picture what Amme Street would look like on a Hebrew-lettered street sign. I practiced asking, wayn issharia hatha? (Where is this street?) in my rusty Arabic.

  The people on line for the flight covered the spectrum of American Jewry. There were stylish Orthodox women from the Upper East Side, fulfilling the modest dress code of their faith with straw hats and long linen dresses; black-coated Hasidic men from Crown Heights; huge tour groups with towers of luggage, and Walkman-wearing teenagers off for their year abroad at Hebrew University. The tall, beefy youths jostled each other with the easy physicality of puppies. I wondered what their fellow students would make of them. Israelis go to university only after army service. I had seen them on campus: lean, self-contained, slow to smile, their faces prematurely lined and their watchful eyes grave.

  All the passengers ahead of me had simple answers for the security checkers. But what was the purpose of my visit to Israel? I’d answered the question dozens of times before, drenched in sweat in the stifling old terminal of Cairo’s international airport or shivering in the chilly expanse of London’s Heathrow, waiting for flights that left late at night, the terminals empty and the halls patrolled by machine-gun-toting Egyptian soldiers or bulletproof-vested British police holding German shepherds on tight leashes. On those trips I’d always had press credentials and a clear assignment.

  But this time all I had was a handful of old letters and a whim. The purpose of my visit to Israel was to find an Arab and a Jew I hadn’t been in touch with in twenty-three years. I wanted to know how they had been treated by the history I had helped to write every day when I was a Foreign Correspondent. But I also wanted to get back in touch with that other foreign correspondent—the passionate young girl in faraway Sydney who dreamed of adventures in dangerous places, and then went on to have more adventures than she’d ever imagined.

  “And what is the purpose of your visit to Israel?” As I tried to answer, the grim young El Al interrogator peered at the letters. The old-fashioned design of the stamps intrigued her: they’d been issued before she was born. She called over the flight’s security chief, a wary man who questioned me closely. Finally he handed back the letters as the young woman marked my boarding pass with the sticker that would allow me to board the flight. Their stern faces softened into sudden smiles. “We think it is a very beautiful story,” she said. “We wish you luck.”

  Hours later I woke from a cramped doze as the plane banked over Tel Aviv. Below, an edge of brilliant blue sea sparkled against the gray concrete sprawl of the city. Along the coastline, solar panels glinted from the rooftops of boxy apartments. An Israeli writer once observed that he preferred the unhandsome chaos of jerry-built Tel Aviv to the ancient gleaming stone of Jerusalem. Jerusalem, he complained, was too holy and too demanding. “If I forget Tel Aviv,” he said, “my tongue won’t cleave to the roof of my mouth.”

  I wondered if there was an Israeli Sam Spade down there somewhere in a dingy office who would help me with my search if I got desperate. To find Cohen, I knew I could try the army: almost all Israelis are soldiers, and the army has to know how to find them quickly in time of war. In Nazareth, I had a journalist friend on the Arabic paper. I was sure he would have some ideas about how to locate Mishal.

  But first I would go to the old addresses, no matter how unlikely it was that the trail would be fresh enough to follow after twenty-three years. In that time I had moved house fifteen times and wound up ten thousand miles from where I started. If any of my old pen pals presented themselves at the door of the house they’d written to in Concord, my trail would be colder than a frosted beer glass at the corner pub.

  It was dusk when I pulled off the coastal highway and drove into a small town on Israel’s narrow waistline north of Tel Aviv. Cohen’s home town was once a moshav—a farming co-op in which families worked their own land, sharing machinery and marketing crops jointly. Over time, the moshav had been swamped by the sprawl reaching out from Tel Aviv and had grown into a residential community of some 7,000. Now only a few melon fields and orange groves remained.

  It was that Mediterranean hour when the heat has finally eased and the heavy shutters have been flung open. People walked their dogs past neat little bungalows with bougainvillea-splashed gardens and mango trees. I pulled over near two smiling women gossiping on the street corner. One of them was pushing her sleeping baby in a kibbutz-designed crib on wheels that allows parents to take slumbering infants with them to the communal dining hall. I showed the women t
he old mauve envelope with the Amme Street address on it, written awkwardly in a hand unpracticed in the Roman alphabet. They puzzled over the street name. Neither had ever heard of it, which was odd, since the town had only a few dozen streets.

  “There’s a big map in the town square,” said the young mother. “I’m sure you’ll find it marked there.”

  The air in the square was tangy with the smells of grilling meat and spicy falafel. Lamb kebabs sizzled on the flames at an outdoor restaurant. Boys in high-top sneakers and baseball caps hung out under eucalyptus trees. They looked about sixteen—the age Cohen was when I wrote to him.

  The map was easy to find, large and well illuminated. Of course, it was in Hebrew. A middle-aged man noticed me studying it in the gathering gloom. I asked if he could help me and showed him the envelope.

  “Amme?” he said, baffled. “I don’t know such a street.” Pinching his fingers together in the universal Middle Eastern gesture that means “Wait a minute,” he darted off with my precious letter. I followed, into the Town Hall. A secretary got out the telephone directory and looked up Cohen. My heart sank. Looking for a Cohen in an Israeli phone book struck me as only a little better than trying to look up a Smith in Sydney, or a Kim in Seoul. “There’s a Cohen on Amami Street,” she said, and proceeded to dial the number.

  Of course. Written Hebrew leaves out many vowels. Amme was young Cohen’s best try at transliterating the Hebrew word Amami:

  A woman answered. Her voice had the quaver of old age. I asked for Cohen in halting Hebrew.

  “Ma?” she said. “What? Who wants him?”

  I told her Geraldine Brooks, from Australia.

  “Jordan Books?” she said, her voice rising with a tinge of alarm. I think she thought I was an Arab publisher. I passed the phone to my helper. His solution to the communication problem was to repeat what I’d said, louder.

  “OUR-STRAW-LIAR!” he bellowed.

  “Australia,” I prompted.