Buying the Night Flight

by Georgie Anne Geyer

  We came, through the bitter cold of Rutba and Ramadi and all those shabby towns of desperate dreams, finally to reach the border about 4:00 A.M. An old bus, scabrous and shaky, had stopped and its poor denizens were lined up with their odd bags and old sacks tied together with rope and placed pathetically in front of them. They were freezing in the bitter cold. It was as if they had been told to put their whole lives in front of them and that was all they could find. I was reminded again that this is a brutal world for the people who must truly live in it and are not privileged voyeurs, like me.

  The old Lebanese woman, whom cruel turns of fate had made a searcher of women crossing this bleak border, was asleep in her small hut as the guard took me there. The winter winds were howling now like wolves across the endless desert plain. Outside, at four o'clock in the morning, it was total darkness. When the Jordanian customs man switched on the light, the woman shot up in bed. She was old and plump, wearing the traditional Palestinian robe-upon-robe, and she was to search my purse -- my symbol of being in another world -- before I crossed the border and returned to what was in effect the Western world.

  Suddenly, without warning or apparent reason, her broad, brown face shriveled with pain. "Lebanon," she said to me, and it was like an animal's cry of pain. She put her hands on her ample breasts. "From Lebanon," she said. Then she imitated planes dropping bombs. "All family killed," she went on. "I ... I now here." Her arms motioned to the bleak outside, and it looked even more like a hell.

  ***

  I had tried to give the poor woman some money, but she wouldn't take it. It had just been another of those moments -- and there are far, far too many of them in this part of the world -- when a single human being, driven beyond any capacity to bear, suddenly cried out to all of us.

  And as we sped now toward Amman, this lost lone woman seemed very much a metaphor for the Iraqi-Iranian war -- and for a lot of the people I had known in my life, and what I had given my life to. For just as she was one more tragic victim of the continuing saga of borders and refugees and too many people without homes from Lebanon to Ethiopia to Somalia to the Yemens, so was this war and all my stories at heart a war and a story about borders--and about her.

  Everything in my curious life seemed to flash across my mind as we sped through the night, in flight from the most dangerous and unknown parts of the world and toward the light and the known. For as morning began to come upon the winter desert, as it happened we were just then reaching the friendly, low, and golden hills that lead to Amman. We stopped for a few minutes at a funny little cafe for coffee. The two Jordanian men who ran it, both friendly and pleasant, nevertheless looked at me -- stared, really -- as if I were a creature from another planet. They were not, of course, wrong, but I believed, as I always have, that I belonged as much there as anywhere.

  Then, almost as if it were an omen, we started climbing the beckoning hills just as the sun began shedding its golden morning light about us. Now, in place of the cold darkness, a kind of shimmering mist lay over everything. It was like coming out of a cave into a new dawn. The night flight had ended, with its serenity and also its fears, but the moment of sovereignty somehow remained -- and still remains -- with me, the final mark of transcendence and human control over the mundanities and cruelties of the world.

  XVII.

  On Becoming a Columnist

  "I don't have any ideas that are more than seven hundred words long."

  --A columnist

  I recall exactly the moment I decided to come home again. It was November of 1974, and I was sitting quite squashed and exhausted against the window in a large jet plane en route from Dubai to Bahrein to Dhahran to Riyadh to Jedda. Two enormous and blubbery Gulf sheikhs in their flowing white robes had jammed themselves in the seats next to me. I was perspiring in the endless heat and dreading the endless stops and starts ahead of me, not to speak of arriving in the steamy Red Sea port of Jedda without a hotel room at midnight. Then, for some reason I turned around.

  There on the three seats just behind us sat three falcons. Yes, falcons. Their razor-sharp talons were tethered to a long plank of wood, which lay squarely across the three seats, but their hoods were off and the jet black, beady, threatening eyes all focused oddly upon me. Their keeper, a Bedouin in long robes, stood at the edge of the seat calling each by name: "Ahmed ... Zakki ...."

  I turned my head back. Perhaps it was time to give up this strange life. After all, I had been overseas, usually traveling constantly, for nine months of each of the previous eleven years. It had been extraordinary -- a wondrous life -- but could it not be time to move on? I had had at least one fiancé tell me (and not sweetly) that my favorite three words were not "I love you," but "Room service, please." As I sat that darkening evening on the plane, crowded by sheikhs and falcons, it suddenly occurred to me that when I died it would be just "going to the last transit lounge."

  Even then the words foreign correspondent , voiced to some stranger on a plane, still filled me with a deep sense of excitement and yearning. But little by little, as the years passed and I saw "one more war" and one more country that I had loved fall to some squalid self-righteous totalitarianism, and as eighteen-hour flights every three days and eighteen-hour days began to take their toll, I began to see the need for some sort of change.

  As much as I hated to admit it, I needed a home, perhaps just a city apartment but still a home. I wasn't going as far as marriage or children, but maybe a pet. A first step. I needed an address of my own, like the Palestinians. I needed a few -- not too many but a few -- full nights' sleep a month. I needed to be in a place where I could come back to people I knew and had known for years: the comfort of easy congeniality as opposed to the growing strains of meeting different people every day, of charming them (at best), of offending them (at worst), of convincing them. I needed some effortlessness in life.

  I would become a columnist. And it would all be easy.

  After all, I had been with the Chicago Daily News for fifteen years and Marshall Field, the publisher, had one of the biggest syndicates in the country. I was doing a column once a week for them already, which they admitted was doing splendidly on the wire. It never really occurred to me that my own "family" would not syndicate me -- which shows how very naive we can be!

  When I had lunch that winter with Dick Sherry, a lanky, laconic man who was then the top salesman for the Field Syndicate, things could not have gone more wrong.

  Dick coughed. He turned different colors. I took a bite of my broiled fish while looking deliberately at him.

  "I don't want you to be disappointed," he began, not looking at me. It was a bad time for syndication, he said, because papers were cutting back on everything. I wasn't well enough known nationally, not a celebrity item. The world was changing and columns didn't catch on so well anymore.

  "But don't give up," he said in one of those voices that drive reasonable women to kill. "All this might change in two or three years. Meanwhile, do something to get yourself known as a journalist -- and then maybe we can syndicate you!"

  I had covered everything in the world; interviewed everybody; covered every war and met every guerrilla; and after all that I was told I should do something to make myself known ?

  "What..." I asked with just a touch of archness, "do you suggest I doooo?"

  He warmed at once, actually thinking I was looking to him for advice. "Why, I have a friend who's publisher of Avon Books in New York," he said. "You could get a book out in six or seven weeks and get yourself known."

  "Are you talking about a sex book?" I cooed.

  "Naw, naw," he said, but as he said it, he brightened noticeably. "Not exactly." The possibility hung in the air between us while I cracked my fishbones noisily.

  I was learning, the hard way, that papers were changing.

  On the Daily News we had all been part of an epic time lag where a tight-knit, loving group of seekers and reformers worked together for the good of it and for the wonderful fun of it. But n
ow the new newspaper style had taken over from our clan of bandits and night-flyers. As Dean Reed of the Gannett papers once put it, "Somewhere along the way, it became a business." Gone were the days when Malcolm Browne of The New York Times could say,

  "This is like a priesthood." Nicholas von Hoffman, another early friend, had said, "It was when I learned the ethics of journalism that I found my place in life."

  ***

  The night the Daily News closed in March 1978 -- a little more than two years after I went to the Los Angeles Times Syndicate -- was a night I will never forget. Although a lot of people's hearts were breaking, the final party at the old Sheraton Hotel in Chicago somehow also had elements of a victory. People came from all over the country. It was a celebration of something great that had existed in a moment in time -- and then passed on. It was heartbreaking, but it was at the same time glorious because the fact that this paper -- this joyful association of individuals, this spirited commitment of all to a common cause, this gallant undertaking -- had existed. Bill ( M . W .) Newman, one of the finest of the Daily News writers, wrote the final story:

  The Chicago Daily News , the writers' newspaper, ends as it began -- a momentous Book of Life. It took 102 years to finish and these are the final pages.

  But the story isn't over -- just the Daily News' part of it. A newspaper dies, but newspapering goes on. Life goes on. Tomorrow is the sequel, and all the tomorrows after that.

  Bill's story had in it all the special Chicago newspaper-world gallantry that we had all so loved. So did the final banner headline: SO LONG , CHICAGO . Gallant, but not maudlin. For those of us who loved that paper and those people and that life, there would never come another time, another such moment.

  When I went to the Los Angeles Times Syndicate in the fall of 1975 and moved to Washington, I knew little about syndication except that talent -- columnists of all sorts, cartoonists, political cartoonists, etc. -- was "syndicated" by syndicates usually, but not always, attached to big newspapers or newsmagazines. The merchandising and promotional staffs of these syndicates, which were in effect one of many corporate conglomerates like Field Enterprises or the Times Mirror Company, sold you to as many papers as they could, and you produced the "product." It was and is a tough business; the only business I know that is tougher is show biz, which writing a column rather resembles. Most columnists get a simple fifty-fifty cut on the amount taken in by the column. Since rates vary according to the circulation of the papers, a paper can get you for anything from five dollars a week to three hundred dollars. Then it gets still further confused because some large papers insist upon territorial rights, thus effectively acing out the smaller papers in the area.

  I was lucky. I got an excellent five-year contract that provided the most unusual security of a guaranteed salary and even an expense account, which seems a lot until you take one six-week trip to the Middle East and see what you have left. I was an "independent contractor." I made all the decisions and decided what to write about and when, at least so long as the column was "working," which meant selling. I also had to figure out how to get columns into Los Angeles, to be sent out to the clients. When I was in Washington, this was easy; I just took them into the Times bureau and they went by Rapifax machine, which relayed one page every thirty seconds. When I was traveling about the country, I dictated into the Times's dictating machines by telephone. And when I was overseas, I had to plan to be somewhere close to a Reuter's News Agency office -- or else file ahead. The wildest times were the last weeks before going overseas. I had to make all my own arrangements, make all the arrangements for interviews (either through the embassies in Washington or through my own contacts, now a network everywhere in the world). Then I usually had to file three columns ahead to protect me the first week, when I was often in some Reuter-less country. When I got on the plane, I collapsed happily -- either it was done or it was not, but there was little else I could now do.

  It would seem to be a profession without any controls. All that freedom! But that wasn't really true. The controls, in actuality, were awesome, both professionally and psychologically. Every editor on every paper that buys you has the control of life and death over you every day. Every reader's letter influences them. All you need to do is make one mistake -- or give one really far-out interpretation -- and you're finished. No, the controls were there, the classic controls of the free market, not to speak of your own inner moral and ethical controls, which must be fearsome.

  I was not happy with the quality of the column the first six months. First of all I persisted in remaining a reporter: I ran around ceaselessly trying to "cover" things, only to find to my frustration that very little of what I got out of "covering" things actually was of much use to me in the column. Columns demand thought, meditation, judgment, original investigation: not so much running around.

  Second, I began to realize how deeply difficult it was for me to reveal myself, which I had contracted to do for five years, three times a week, seven hundred words. It is one of those many paradoxes of life that there I was, a very private person who finds it painful to hurt anyone's feelings (particularly to do with beliefs) placed precisely in that position of hurting other people's feelings three times a week ... in seven hundred words ... for five years.

  I was jumping from being a correspondent, where, after all, I basically did analysis and basic reporting, to being a columnist, where I did commentary and opinion: from objectivity to the strongest subjectivity. I felt at first almost a physical revulsion at making judgments on things. I felt I was being untrue to my journalist's calling and oaths; I felt a little intellectual-whorish. I suffered endlessly over hurting people. I had all sorts of metaphysical agonies. Clearly I was born to be a columnist!

  And then there was something else: We all think we have well-thought-out opinions on everything. Well, let me tell you, when you are called upon actually to put down those opinions in seven hundred words, three times a week, you find that you don't. At first I was horrified that I could be found so wanting; later I became excited by the challenge.

  And there was the new way of working. Now, instead of the city room at the Daily News or hotel rooms in strange countries, I was working at home. I turned the dining room of my Washington condominium into my office. I got two telephones, one with an answering service, so I could be on the first phone and at the same time take incoming calls on the second.

  And I had a pet. Providentially, six weeks before I left Chicago in the summer of 1975, I went out one morning at an unusual time to mail some letters and there on the street, where I had never before ever seen a kitten, was this funny-looking white and black kitten. He was all legs and ears, with a tiny, almost mouse-like white body and gnarled little head. He had rather artistic black spots down his back and the black fur on his head made him look as though he had a black toupee on. When I patted him, he purred--indeed, purring seems to be his major calling in life. The first morning he was curled up, his head on my pillow, in exactly the same curl as I. I named him Pasha, since I was and am convinced that he is a direct descendant of the Egyptian god-cats, and brought him to Washington, where he was the first cat to be allowed to stay in the cushy Fairfax Hotel. He also travels with me occasionally, usually between Washington and Chicago, where I often leave him with my brother Glen when I take lengthy trips overseas. He goes with me on the plane, of course, albeit under the seat, and he rides in a carrying case that has the stickers of elegant hotels from all over the world on it. He is a boon companion; at night, being an Egyptian god-cat with a great memory, he whispers me to sleep with stories of great caravans carrying myrrh and frankincense north from Oman and the Kingdom of Punt and of great sea battles off Alexandria. Some people do not understand that, but Borges would have all too well; he knew that people who dreamed were in truth closest to reality.

  It took a while to iron out the problems of what kind of columns. At first the syndicate editor decreed, "No foreign-affairs columns -- and no women." I was stunned, since
that was all I had anything to say about. But soon Marian, my editor in New York, and I began slipping both in.

  I got quite daring. I even wrote one on how Freud had been wrong about women and challenged the idea that any woman would want anything as unsightly as a penis. The last line particularly pleased me: "We must remain calm, and remember that there is nothing wrong with the penis. In its place."

  Another time I wrote from Egypt after interviewing three women who as children had had clitoridectomies, the unspeakable operation in Africa and parts of the Middle East in which the nine-year-old female's clitoris is ritually removed to "keep a woman chaste." It is quite a ceremony, in which the little girl clutches a tree while the little organ is cut out with a knife so she will never disgrace her family. Funny, but that column was never used anywhere. But I was not going to give up.

  Gradually I realized the different qualities that being a correspondent or reporter, as opposed to being a columnist, called for. To oversimplify greatly, the qualities of being a reporter are accuracy, fairness, and an understanding of context. The qualities of being a foreign correspondent are accuracy, fairness, and a deep understanding of cultural differences plus a special gift in interpreting them. But the qualities of a columnist, while they stem from this, are sufficiently different to be bedeviling. They are accuracy of perception, an informed but opinionated perception, and an understanding of the effect your words can have on people and events. Once I saw the natural, though certainly not linear, progression, I was even a little overawed that I had been able to make the transition as naturally as I had.