Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  And Gee Gee hung her head, so appropriately, so humbly, so convincingly.

  They hadn't been watching me, of course. And the State Department does not brainwash people. But subconsciously I knew quite enough to feed their prejudices. Here were Marxists who blamed everything on the United States and they were easily taken in by anything that supported their prejudiced conclusions. In fact they were delighted!

  And as I continued to hang my head in, oh, such embarrassment, the interrogator primly used me as an ideological example for the young Angolan troops who were sitting around the little room on the floor.

  "You see," he said with barely concealed glee, "here you have, right here before you, exactly an example of what we have been telling you about. They say they are objective journalists and then they come here, after having been brainwashed by the ... " On and on he went, with such pleasure, while Gee Gee hung her head -- and thus got safely out of Angola without compromising anyone except "the State Department," confirming a myth that existed already in their minds.

  Kate Webb, the wonderful Aussie who was United Press's star reporter in Vietnam and was captured herself for two weeks with the Viet Cong, later told me that I had indulged in a little bit of Marxist "self-criticism," thus utterly delighting and even soothing them.

  Whatever, after his little ideological speech to the young soldiers the interrogator began (how insulting!) to lose interest in me and even in the names he had so fervently wanted. I could see his attention becoming frayed and moving elsewhere. He sighed heavily. "When we can get a car, I guess we can take you to the airport." He looked at his watch. It was 2:00 A . M . by then. "You can get the seven A . M . flight to Paris." Then he left -- and the interesting part began.

  For the first time in the week that I had been in Angola, I was able to talk to some of the real revolutionary soldiers. I sat there in that dank, Humphrey Bogart-style little room in the old Portuguese prison and talked for more than two hours with the little black soldiers, most of them only thirteen or fourteen years old. Their voices hung in the still night air as they told me, in their simple and true way that was so different from the ideologues', what the war in the jungle had been like. And I felt wonderfully like a journalist again, instead of a prisoner.

  By 4:00 A . M . they came to get me and take me to the airport to be "deported," and I had one fleeting, admittedly unworthy and petty thought -- a wave of resentment washed over me that I had already bought a ticket to Paris on my own, because had I not, they would have had to buy me one. On the other hand, I had bought it with black-market Angolan money and so the entire trip from Luanda to Paris and back down to South Africa cost me only three hundred dollars!

  On the way to the airport, through the oppressive dankness of the dark early morning, the interrogator made one more try. In one column I had referred to a woman by the made-up name of "Marcella" and he insisted upon knowing who Marcella was. Actually she was a young Angolan housewife who worked at one of the embassies, but now a reckless mood came over me.

  "All right," I said, now feigning a willingness to work with him, "I'll tell you." He looked around in the car, and even in the semi-darkness I could see his eyes light up. "You go out the front of the Presidente Hotel," I began, making up the apocryphal story as I went along, "and you walk around the park. At the first corner you go to the right for three blocks. There are a bunch of shacks there and you turn and walk about half a block.... On the left, in a little white house, you'll find Marcella. She's a Portuguese woman, about sixty years old, and she has six children. Her husband has gone back to Lisbon and she's very bitter about being left here.... "

  It was all made up -- and it was only after I was in Paris and mentioned it to a friend that he reminded me of a certain story by Albert Camus, in which a prisoner tells a similar story and the jailers go to the place -- and find exactly the person. It sent a terrible chill up my spine.

  At the airport they deposited me in a room with several young Angolans who were directing the few planes in and out. It was early morning still, and the air was cloying in the Angolan heat. Rats were scurrying about the floor, so I secured my feet on a chair. And all the while, as we sat there snoozing, from an old, high radio from the 1930s came the music of "Radio Cabo Verde," singing its way suddenly out of my childhood and into this strange African night with "You Belong to My Heart," which had been one of my mother's early favorites. At that moment I grasped the reality of the existentialist moment.

  ***

  So, yes, I got to Paris, and I wrote in the lead of my long piece which was printed all over the world:

  PARIS -- Most travelers do not come to Paris by way of Angola. I had not planned on it myself. But the new Angolan government decided I should see Paris in the spring -- and I didn't see any realistic way to refuse them.

  But "incidents" like these, having intruded into your life, do not just then leave you alone. They remain to haunt you and taunt you. What remained with me, I guess, was the kind of fear that comes from the fact that each time I was arrested or held, it happened so unexpectedly that it seemed to come out of nowhere. If you know you are being watched, or stalked, or sought out, then at least you can plan for it -- it is another kind of "knowing." This incident in Angola, as well as the ordeal in Soviet Georgia, left me with the terrible feeling that anything can happen at any time and that anyone can turn without any warning into some kind of monster. It is something I have not got over and something I doubt I ever will quite get over.

  Fear and courage are the web of our work and in our lives, yet ironically correspondents seldom talked about them. When they had taken me into that prison that night in Luanda, I took God aside with an arrogant little promise. "If I get out of here alive," I told Him confidingly, "I will never complain about anything again." It was a foolish promise (what can one expect when one tries to bribe God?), mostly because I assiduously kept trying to observe it long after it was at all appropriate to real life.

  "Mystery alone is at the root of fear," Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, and, as in many things, he was right. "Once a man has faced the unknown, the terror becomes the known." Dial one day read me the part where he says that in our strange business you become deeply close to your colleagues, and when you hear that one has died "out there," while performing your shared chores of life, often you cannot really believe that he is gone. "They land alone at scattered and remote airports, isolated from each other in the manner of sentinels between whom no words can be spoken," he wrote. "It needs the accident of journeyings to bring together here or there the dispersed members of this great professional family. Life may scatter us and keep us apart ... but we know that our comrades are somewhere 'out there' -- where, one can hardly say -- silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful. And when our path crosses theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the shoulders! Then, bit-by-bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning.... "

  I saw great, and often quiet, heroism on the part of many of my friends: the ones, like the wonderful Joe Alex Morris of the Los

  Angeles Times , and so many others who died on duty. When I saw The New York Times's Henry Tanner in Cairo just after he had been ambushed in Beirut and the others in the car killed, I remonstrated with him not to go back. His answer was simple and un-dramatic: "It's when you most want not to go that you most have to go." And he went.

  There was another odd quirk to the whole conception of heroism, which was implicit in so many of the correspondents and which Freud called in effect "the overcoming of death": the correspondents got damned angry and enraged with the world, but they didn't get depressed, they didn't get pessimistic, they didn't in general feel it was all for nothing and that mankind was no good. Given the things they had to witness and live through, this always struck me as very strange indeed.

  I finally came to the conclusion that it was mainly b
ecause the correspondents were "there." They were experiencing things firsthand. Life and history were not abstractions to them, and somehow nothing is so bad when experienced as it becomes when lived secondhand -- and thus not experienced at all. Vietnam, in a strange sense, was much worse to people watching it on a distant and abstract TV screen than it was for those of us who were there. The solution to despair is "being there," in whatever work and profession; being in the intense and passionate center of things instead of on the dull, gray, alienated outskirts of life, experiencing things secondhand.

  A footnote: I suppose that subconsciously in those days I sought out people who in themselves reflected this conflict -- this chasm -- this delineation -- between thought and action, between observer and protagonist, between writer and actor -- and I found a different courage on the two sides.

  Perhaps the most dramatic person of this world -- and the one that personally I found the most courageous and the most moving -- was the famous Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges. I called him one day in Buenos Aires and to my delight he invited me for dinner. So it was that I found myself waiting at nine on the dot in the darkened hallway of his building in downtown Buenos Aires, and immediately the elevator door opened and he emerged. So frail. So old. So blind. He felt his way in his own darkness with his cane and spoke to me. It was as if his greeting were coming from quite another world, which it was. We walked around the corner to his restaurant, where he ate only rice and tea, he was so sick.

  I felt as never before in my life that I was in the presence of true genius. As we sat for several hours at the table, what struck me was the way his soul shone through his frail body, as though it were a human lighthouse. The "beacon" was so clearly him, the body only an appendage, necessary, but so unendingly troublesome. But it was more than genius and greatness; it was, finally, that he was wholly and totally one; his personal decency and integrity perfectly matched his literary genius. I adored him.

  He talked that night, as in so much of his writing, about the "macho" world he had been raised in (for he had been raised on the great estates of the Pampas, where machismo was the very essence of manly life). And yet he was so different, so very different.

  "When I think of people in my family who had their throats cut or who were shot, I realize I'm leading a very tame kind of life," he said. "But really, I'm not, because after all they have just lived through these things and not felt them, whereas I'm living a very secluded life and am feeling them, which is another way of living them -- and perhaps a deeper one, for all I know."

  The other thing that impressed me so immensely was his utter lack of any feeling sorry for himself, although he had by then been blind for many years. This awful affliction that would have destroyed the powerful machos, a little man like Borges took with simple courage.

  Indeed, the theme that shadow-boxes within and throughout Borges's life and work is this dialectic over types of courage. In his work you find men who become paralyzed but find unspeakable joy in it because now they are truly able to see the world, and there are men who fight to the death after some hoodlum's challenge only because a bartender recognizes them -- once given a name, they exist and must take responsibility for that existence. There is his fantasy literature in which he describes in third person his own suicide, suicide being the means of moving from the inaction of the thinker to the action of the actor. Dreams, dreams, dreams. The only thing he was ever known to say publicly about his divorced wife was, "She did not dream."

  The other thing that so impressed me about Borges was the extent to which his person was at one with his work and his work at one with his courage. For it was Borges, this little man, this non-fighter, and not the macho saloon fighters, who had become the symbol of resistance to tyranny against Perón, against Argentine Naziism, against communism. In him the literary quest became the moral quest, flesh first created the word and then the word was made flesh.

  There was also a duality about Borges that on a more primitive scale I had felt in my own life: there was Borges, the private man, and "Borges," the literary character created by the former. It is to "Borges," the other man, that things happen, and Borges himself described the process in The Aleph. "Little by little," he wrote, "I have been surrendering everything to him, even though I have evidence of his stubborn habit of falsification. And so, my life is a running away, and I lose everything and everything is left to oblivion or to the other man. Which of us is writing this page, I don't know."

  So by becoming "Borges," the literary creation, he had finally obliterated himself -- which is what all great writers do. He made the most perfect marriage of art and life that I suspect we have in this generation. Art is -- becomes -- life. He is its breathtaking personification.

  All the macho leaders with their power and women and wars -- all the men that I had seen -- controlled others, but they never could control themselves. Borges did. As his biographer, Emir Rodriguez Monegal, wrote of him:

  Borges lives forever inside a magic space, totally empty and gray in which time does not count.... Protected and isolated by his blindness, in the labyrinth built so solidly by his mother, Borges sits immobile. He doesn't bother to turn on a light. Everything is quiet except his imagination. Inside his mind, the empty spaces are filled with stories of murder and wonder, with poems that encompass the whole world of cultures, with essays that subtly catalog the terrors and the painful delights of men. Old, blind, frail, Borges sits finally in the center of the labyrinth.

  I still feel Borges's presence so deeply that I shall never forget him. "Borges," I wrote at the time, "has realized the center we all seek, free and creating, while the macho saloon fighters who haunted his life turn out to be only fodder for his pen. He not only has overcome, he has won."

  I suppose Borges fascinated me so because he personified and resolved the conflict between people who live things but do not know them, and those who know them and understand but do not live them. I was trying to do both, and in the very special way the first women journalists experienced -- and knew -- this world.

  ***

  The Angolans were the predecessors of a new situation in the world -- an ominous syndrome that I named the "Lebanon Syndrome" -- that came to haunt us all. It came unnoticed at first, like an uninvited ghost that no one wanted to acknowledge, and finally it swept in like an overpowering wind of change.

  I went back to Lebanon in the spring of 1977 for the first time since the fall of 1974. During those three years the country had been wracked by one of the most brutal civil wars in human history. Group against group, family against family, clan against clan, religion against religion. Lebanese against Palestinian, Moslem against Christian, Syrian against Lebanese ... there seemed, after a short while, to be no more glue to put together the shattered pieces.

  I wanted to know what the war had been like -- really like, inside. "What is striking here," a member of the French architectural team that was then trying to redesign the city, said, standing in the midst of this perverse devastation and shaking his head, "is that it is as if there were a willful and deliberate effort to destroy." Professor Umayam Yaktin, one of a group then studying the "Beirut phenomenon," told me, "Both sides wanted to kill innocent people. All the hospitals were hit -- from all sides. I could go into Freud -- that people are innately born with aggressive impulses -- but I think it's more than that."

  What we were really seeing was a totally new kind of war. Once the various sides saw that no group could win, at whatever cost, each side began to bomb its own people, to hit its own neighborhoods, with artillery, and to bomb theaters in which its own people were watching movies. I began to call it "pathological war" -- military men like General Andrew Goodpaster told me he called it "irrational war."

  Whichever title one wanted to give it, it was not really war; it was the breakdown of war. And it catapulted the foreign correspondent -- as well as all the "in-between people" like diplomats, businessmen, missionaries, Red Cross people -- into a new type of danger neve
r before dreamed of in modern times. For in these dark new wars there were no borders. There were no recognized civilians--indeed the "civilians" became the deliberate targets. There were no respected neutrals, most definitely including journalists. Red Cross trucks and hospitals were deliberately hit instead of protected. Children fought and were killed, without second thoughts.

  What had happened in the postcolonial period was the breakdown of the great powers' ability to keep peace in the world. With this had come total dismissal of the "rules of war" that had been built up over the centuries. "To die in Spain," I wrote, "was to be a hero to the generations. To die in Beirut was to die without benefit of clergy, embassy or even public note. To die in Beirut is, for a journalist, moreover, to die with your story on Page 13 and your death notice on Page 27."

  What it meant for us foreign correspondents was that we had become the new targets. No longer did we have even psychological protection; indeed, we were sought out to be killed. Angola had only been a taste, a forewarning, the suggestion of a world changing before our eyes. What I started to see in the late seventies was a world in which more and more pockets of the world were coming to be completely closed off to us for information and knowledge. And we, who used to see the world in bipolar terms of democracy or totalitarianism, are now faced with the new alternative and ultimate horror: permanent anarchy or permanent disintegration. For the modern journalist it was a new and particularly murderous development.

  ***

  Meanwhile my own life was moving, developing, changing. In between my trips abroad, which now often extended to eight or nine months of the year, I would return to Chicago to lick my wounds in the bosom of my family. My dear mother, not really comprehending what I was doing but always loving and supporting me, of course wished I would get married and "settle down." So did the men I knew and cared for. It was difficult, for I felt at heart that I was disappointing everyone. My brother Glen was there, always supportive, always the wonderful rock for all of us, not to speak of our dear friend Bob Simpson, like a second brother to me, and all the rest of our Chicago friends.