Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  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.

  For even as love crowns you, so shall he crucify you.

  Even as he is for your growth, so is he for your pruning.

  Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,

  So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.

  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.

  Learning their history helped me understand my paternal family’s terror of outsiders. It helped me understand too the kind of fear, to the point of paranoia, that existed in my father’s family, and gave me an insight into why it must have been so ha
rd for my father to break free of his own mother to be a proper parent to his children. Boris and Iveta filled out a lot of family history. My father’s mother had come to America to escape the pogroms in Kiev. Her twin brother had been killed by a stone that was thrown through the window of their home by a rampaging crowd. Their mother was holding him in her arms at the time. For generations they had distrusted the outside world of non-Jews. In America that suspicion never waned, and my father’s family never accepted me and my sisters into the family.

  After Uncle Leon told his sister, Rosalyn, that I found our relatives in Russia, I told Leon that I wanted to meet her. She hadn’t seen me or my sisters—her only nieces—since we were small children thirty years earlier. Her first words to me when we finally met were, “You have such Jewish eyes.” I had mixed feelings about seeing her. I wanted not to like her. I had assumed she was an ogre. But she looked like my father, and my first sight of her linked me to him immediately. She was articulate and bright. She had curly hair. She had a dog. I liked her and felt slightly guilty that I did. Should I forgive her for ignoring us all those years?

  When I spoke to my father through the psychic in London, I felt a message from him telling me to go to his grave. I had not been since his death. I didn’t even know where it was. I had always worried it was unkempt and without a tombstone, that somehow he would be an embarrassment in death as he had been to me in life. The psychic drew a map, relaying instructions from my father, telling me which side of the cemetery, overlooking a hill, next to a tree. Francesca made fun of my willingness to listen to a psychic, but she promised to come with me the next time I came to America.

  We got instructions from Uncle Leon on how to find the cemetery but had nothing but the makeshift map to guide us once we were inside the grounds. We found him easily; he was just where the woman who talked to the dead had described. His grave was simple. I brushed leaves off it gently, wanting to do something loving for him, to acknowledge him as important to me. We knew he had wanted to be buried next to his older brother, Norman, so we attached the ivy from my uncle’s grave to my father’s so the two brothers could be joined, just as my sister and I felt joined by our journey there.

  The Serb Side

  I never paid much attention to the breakup of former Yugoslavia. Even though I was in the news business, I found coverage of the Balkans complicated and confusing. Besides, I had my hands full in Moscow. Then one day I was sent to Croatia. Suddenly I had to learn a lot in a hurry. When new borders were being drawn in ethnically mixed areas, large populations of Serbs found themselves in Croatia and vice versa, fueling a spiral of ethnic cleansing. One flash point was in Zagreb, the beautiful capital of Croatia, which in late 1995 was being shelled by the Serbs. The Croats had just retaken land lost to the Serbs during fighting in 1991 and driven the Serbs living there out of their homes. Now the Serbs had dug into the surrounding hills and were retaliating. A story I had thought little about was going to become very real, urgently real to me. That’s the life of a reporter.

  Atlanta had ordered us onto the next flight from Moscow to Trieste, Italy. I had to move so fast that I didn’t have time to think carefully about what I was heading into, and what I would need to bring. I figured that nothing in the Balkans could be as brutal as what I’d been covering in Chechnya, so I suppressed the trickle of fear creeping into my belly and ran home to pack some things. Packing as a foreign correspondent can be a funny game. It always seemed that if I packed for two or three days, I’d end up staying away for a month. If I packed for a month, I’d be back in under a week. This time I took everything I had.

  As soon as I landed in Trieste with my crew, we rented a van and drove into Croatia, about a five-hour drive. It was night when we crossed the border. I was bracing for a band of thugs to stop us at various checkpoints, with gun-toting goons drunkenly waving the butts of their rifles in our faces, the kind of unnerving thing I got used to in Chechnya. But we came to a normal border crossing with regular guards, who were even polite. We drove without incident into Zagreb, which surprised me with its cosmopolitan looks and charming buildings. The Esplanade Hotel, where we checked in, was full of old-world elegance.

  The next morning, I was just starting to enjoy a glass brimming with fresh-squeezed orange juice, a delicacy that hadn’t hit Moscow yet, when the peace was shattered by Serbs, who started lobbing cluster bombs into the city. The air-raid sirens were blaring, and ambulances went screeching past our hotel. We raced after them to capture the scene. It was chilling to see such a graceful European city under siege. Chechnya had seemed more suited to such savagery, where men with long beards still strutted around with sheathed knives, and where visitors like me were immersed in the daily horror without reprieve.

  Here in Croatia, war was surreal. Well-dressed women shopping for the latest Italian fashions had to run for cover and crouch in alleys when shop windows suddenly shattered, splattering their finery with blood. It was shocking to see and report on, but as the days wore on I found especially strange the way we could observe and then pull back, going in and out of the action at will. We would go into the streets and cover the shelling, then return to our luxurious hotel for a bath or a sumptuous meal. As if we were stepping into a movie, we could shoot footage of carnage during the day, and leave when we had enough. We edited our footage in the comfort of a hotel, ordering room service. I could munch on a club sandwich while deciding which shot of a ransacked house or terrified refugee would work best in our story. This was “managed” war. I could cope with it far better than the constant, almost primal terror I felt in the more barbaric version of warfare under way in Chechnya.

  I always thought of the United Nations as an ineffectual and bureaucratic organization, until I went to Croatia. Though UN forces were not exactly efficient, their presence clearly helped warring forces to exercise some restraint. UN officers often called us via cell phone to tell us where to find villages that were being retaken by the Croats. We would get onto a modern highway and, after stopping for a Coke and snacks at a gas station, turn off at the war exit and film the skirmish in full view of the UN monitors. Sometimes we stopped at UN compounds for lunch. We carefully checked out the nationality of the monitors. Nepalese curries were my favorite, although the Fijians had good food too. I thought if I spent time thinking about what we might eat, I could avoid thinking about what we might see.

  I was grateful that only a limited amount of my day had to be spent in a war. I spent time at the underground mall across from the hotel, replenishing my wardrobe, which was still hard to do in Moscow. One day, as I went looking for shoes in the relative subterranean safety, I wondered if I had lost all sense of perspective. Or was I trying to delude myself into thinking I wasn’t afraid? I was so used to lurching from one crisis to the next that I felt ill at ease sitting still. Had I chosen a daily dose of insanity to make sure my attention never wandered inward, to ensure that I only skimmed the surface of life? I had never planned to cover wars, but I was starting to realize that no matter how hard my job was, it seemed easier than confronting my own struggles. And yet covering other people’s wars made me feel hollow inside. I tried to do something normal for myself every now and then, to remind myself that I existed as more than just a vehicle to relay someone else’s story. One day I went for a manicure in the hotel. I felt deadened and hoped the touch of this woman rubbing cream into my dry skin would revive me. There was something inviolate in the beauty of perfect nails. Sometimes I went back to my room for a bubble bath while the city was under siege. I told myself it was OK to take twenty minutes off to soak in the tub and daydream, ignoring the shelling outside, but I always felt a nagging sense of guilt.

  Coming into Croatia for the first time, I had to cram on the plane to catch up on the story. In general, Western news organizations saw the Serbs as the bad guys in the Balkans, since Serb forces there were clearly taking directions from Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader in Belgrade who was later demonized in 1999 for massacres in Koso
vo. But I knew that there were two sides to every story. And this time Croats were retaking Krajina, a portion of land lost to the Serbs several years before, and conducting their own atrocities against Serbian civilians. Compared with other correspondents, I had a slightly different perspective, coming in from Moscow. The Serbs share the Orthodox Christian faith with their Slavic brethren in Russia, and many Russians believe that the Serbs, who suffered at the hands of Croatian fascists during the Second World War, are justified in behaving like bullies today. Russians also believe that the West blames the Serbs for all trouble in the Balkans, ignoring the vicious fighting engendered by Croats and Bosnians and Kosovars.

  One morning we arrived at a village that had just been overrun by the enemy. It had that postnuclear look I had come to know in Chechnya: all the trappings of life were visible but life itself had been extinguished. There were no people stirring; only remnants of life lingered, lives left in a hurry. Photos were scattered on the ground; a child’s toy lay where it had been dropped in the haste to flee. Dogs had been left chained in gardens to starve; their masters would never return for them. I needed to give them a chance at life, so I unleashed them when I could. Livestock wandered around dazed and hungry. Lives had been ransacked. In this case the victims were Serbs, chased out of their homes by Croatian forces. So I told their story. I described burned Serbian houses, lost Serbian lives. I interviewed a seventy-year-old Serbian grandmother whose painful history was etched into the deep lines of her face. She had survived Jesenovac, a Croatian-run concentration camp during the Second World War about seventy-five miles southeast of Zagreb. Serbs and gypsies were gassed and tortured there by Croatian forces collaborating with the Nazis. Serbs say hundreds of thousands perished, while Croats insist it was only sixty or seventy thousand. It is the kind of disputed memory that is at the heart of the hatred between Serbs and Croats and perpetuates the war in the Balkans. It is a rallying cry of Serb nationalism.