I experienced a stab of guilt, anticipating the coming charade.
“Will do. And, Mila?”
“Yes?”
“I love you. But, please. No more of this. One sleuth in the household is enough.”
“I guess I was thinking of safety in numbers.”
“The moment I need reinforcements, you’ll be the first to know.”
“Take care, love.”
“You, too.”
I cursed myself for not having warned her off in advance. I suppose I hadn’t wanted to spoil my departure, but I knew from experience that Mila wasn’t daunted by the idea of tempting fate. It was leaving fate to its own devices that troubled her. Understandably so, given what had happened to her in Sarajevo, an event that forever shaped how she dealt with the world. It also gave us common cause, if only because I happened along at her most vulnerable moment.
She had already caught my eye in that winter of ’92, a season of snowfall and shellfire that drove everyone indoors with its grim smell of woodsmoke and carnage. Her looks were the immediate attraction. In that department I am as shallow as the next man. But what held my fascination was her brisk yet caring manner, a rare combination of warmth and efficiency. She was the sort of person you wanted alongside you when tempers were short and everyone was on the verge of breakdown. Yet it was the momentary failure of those good instincts that helped draw us together.
It began when a family of five came to visit her one morning. The father knew he would have to stay behind because he was a male of fighting age. But he was insistent on getting the others out of town in the next refugee convoy, even though they were well down the waiting list. The Serbs besieging the city seldom let convoys leave, and he knew it might be weeks before the next opportunity. But fair was fair, and that’s what Mila told him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But there are so many others who need to leave just as badly. Maybe the next one.”
“But my daughter needs medicine for her heart,” the father said. “Look.”
He held aloft the trump card, a pill bottle that rattled when he shook it, like a piggybank down to its last pennies.
“It will be gone in less than a week.” Then he gestured to a pale, drawn girl of perhaps fourteen who stood at his side, mustering her most pathetic expression.
Mila, nobody’s fool, had seen this ploy and dozens of others, equally convincing. It was almost always an act. Maybe the medicine wasn’t really for her heart. Or they had a few hundred more tablets stashed back at their apartment. The only way to get them aboard would be to knock someone else off the list who might have even greater needs.
I watched the scene unfold from a nearby desk. Mila and I traded conspiratorial glances, although to her credit she neither smiled nor openly played the cynic.
“Have you tried the Red Cross?” she asked. “They have been bringing in emergency medications. Maybe your doctor can help you get more.”
“Our doctor was killed by a sniper three weeks ago. We haven’t been able to get a thing.”
“Then I’m sure they will be happy to deal with you directly. In the meantime, I can do this for you.”
She scribbled their names on a pass that would give them priority on the next convoy, whenever that was. Like many of us, Mila sometimes offered a little help even in response to obvious shams, if only to reward the initiative. And, who knows, sometimes the sob stories were true. But in a city of 300,000 there were too many to choose from.
Shortly afterward I left for some errands. When I returned later to meet another colleague, I dropped by her desk hoping to resume my flirtation. I didn’t really expect it to go anywhere, but in a war zone you tried when you could.
No sooner had I struck up a conversation than her Motorola squawked and she took it up with a sigh. It was some liaison officer from the UN Protection Force, speaking in an urgent tone that everyone in the room could hear, which only made it more awful to bear. Something about a family who had been hit by mortar fire only moments ago. A pretty nasty business, he said, but perhaps Mila could help with identification, because in one of the victim’s pockets they had found a form dated that day with her signature on it. Something to do with priority on the next convoy?
“Describe them,” Mila said, sounding as if she had just had the wind knocked out of her. “How many?”
“Five. Two adults, three children. We might save the mother, but I’m afraid the others are dead. They were waiting in line outside one of the med centers. Somebody said they were trying to get a prescription filled.”
Almost everyone in the aid business has suffered from guilt of one kind or another over the years. During the most trying times in the field you can never take a nap, a drink, or a moment of peace without wondering whether your indulgence is costing someone his life. But seldom are cause and effect so clearly and devastatingly linked, and no one in the room just then could have failed to note the crushing impact on Mila. She was glassy-eyed, speechless, and couldn’t function for the remainder of the afternoon. When it was time for sleep, her friends had to unstack her cot and smooth out her bedroll. They helped her undress as if she were an invalid.
The next day Mila announced her plans to visit the surviving mother, who had been taken to Kosevo Hospital. When I stopped by to check on her, her Bosnian friends were urging her not to go. The deaths were just another stroke of ill fortune, and not her fault, they said. Another blow of nasty luck in a city where death enjoyed all the short odds. They were right, of course, but they didn’t detect the need dwelling so deeply in her eyes, so I spoke up.
“You should go if you really want to,” I said. “But you shouldn’t go alone.”
She nodded, and her friends drifted away, too skittish to accompany this new angel of death on such an awkward mission. So I volunteered, and Mila nodded again, as if my assent were the most natural thing in the world.
We arrived after a chilly walk across the city, shellfire pounding as randomly as thunder, to find the woman barely conscious. She lay buried in a welter of bandages, sheets, and IV bags. The more difficult sight was the small shrine of family photographs that some friend or neighbor had arranged on a bedside table. The four faces lined up like accusers waiting to testify, each with a heartbreaking smile. All that was missing was the daughter’s bottle of pills.
Mila took a deep breath and leaned low to whisper in the woman’s ear. She never told me what she said, and it wasn’t the sort of question you would ask. When Mila stood she had tears on both cheeks. I’m not sure the woman heard a word, and she never opened her eyes. Which was a shame, really, because I think what Mila needed most was a tearful denunciation, any act of anger to allow atonement to begin.
We stood there for ten minutes longer, not saying a thing, and when it became apparent that Mila might remain all evening I gently led her away. We crossed back through the city hand in hand. I steered her into a café and bought her a coffee and a pastry—true luxuries in those days. I was gratified to see some color return to her cheeks, and her breathing seemed to steady.
In the weeks that followed we seldom went more than a day without seeing each other. And, as tends to happen between a man and woman of mutual attraction, one thing led to another. We would joke about it later, but there was almost a reverent overtone to our first lovemaking. It felt like a consummation in several senses of the word, a bond that we both sensed went well beyond the usual desperate coupling of people trapped between danger and tedium.
In her work, Mila henceforth became more of a questioner and an advocate. Although she never turned into what you would call a “soft touch,” which would have rendered her essentially useless, she was a tigress when it came to righting bureaucratic wrongs or neglect. And, so, when we later began working side by side on our sojourns into Africa, we were seemingly the perfect pairing: She was the outside agitator, always questioning the status quo, while I was the tinkerer within the system, making adjustments here and there. The dynamic served us well and, more important, served
those who needed us even better. As we grew closer in love, we grew also in our respect for each other’s powers.
Until, of course, our one huge failure in Tanzania, when our dynamic proved to be perfectly engineered for disaster—unbeknownst to Mila, thank God, even to this day. And now here I was in Jordan, tempting fate once more, wondering if our combination of skills might again prove volatile instead of magical. Except this time we and our friends would pay the price.
The muezzin went silent, his prayers complete, and a stillness fell over the hotel room. It was still dark, but my stomach was empty, so I rose to shower, shave, and dress for the day ahead. Time to start searching for answers to all these troublesome questions. Time to do my part, come what may.
7
Ramadan had indeed cast a pall on the buffet efforts of the kitchen staff. I made do with limp toast, watery yogurt, and grainy instant coffee. Previous experience in the Islamic world told me that things weren’t likely to get better. By the end of the month nerves would be frayed and tempers short. There were always a few murders attributable to the strain of fasting—a deprivation that didn’t even allow for water. As the days wore on, local judges would begin dismissing many a petty charge as the price of doing business during a time of sacrifice. At least this year the holiday was in October. Summer Ramadans were positively brutal.
No such worries for me, of course, although finding lunch might be tricky. I walked to a small market near the hotel for fruit and bread, so I could snack later in the privacy of my room. Then, having put off the moment of truth long enough, I hailed a taxi to Omar’s office.
“You are here for long?” the driver asked.
“A few months.” Then I considered my cover. “Or maybe for good. I’m taking a new job. We’ll see how it goes.”
“You are welcome in Jordan.” He nodded emphatically.
The closer we came to our destination, the more I worried. Omar and I had been through too much together for me to approach betrayal lightly. But if he had gone off the deep end, maybe I would be doing him—and the world—a favor. Black, White, and Gray had offered little to back their suspicions. Their only hard information was a two-page bio, most of which I already knew. I had heard Omar’s life story firsthand, back in the wild days of ’88.
We never would have met if not for Hans Wolters, a big German with a generous laugh whose life mission was to save the entire Middle East, Jew by Jew, Arab by Arab. Hans had begun his hopeless quest as a twenty-year-old tourist, one of those earnest young backpackers in a sweaty bandanna who sleeps in hostels and rides the same teeming buses as the natives, subsisting on falafel by day and ramen noodles by night.
He had arrived in Jerusalem only months after the Six-Day War, and upon reaching the stone gates of the Old City he found himself in a moral quandary: With whom should he empathize more—the plucky survivors of the death camps or their downtrodden conquests, the West Bank Palestinians? As a descendant of Crusaders and Nazis, Hans felt deeply indebted to both sides. So he volunteered for a summer of labor on a kibbutz, and then enlisted in the UN’s effort to feed and clothe the children of the Jabaliya Refugee Camp in benighted Gaza.
Two decades of this evenhanded approach made Hans the perfect choice to run the show once UNRWA began organizing its human rights observer patrols in late ’87, shortly after the intifada uprising began.
He found it a trying experience, especially as Palestinian boys began to die in the streets. The hardest part, he told me later, after a fifth bottle of Maccabee beer at the UN’s Gaza Beach Club, was to keep from thinking of the harsher officers of the Israel Defense Force as latter-day storm troopers.
“It is the Star of David, not the swastika,” he slurred in his Bavarian accent, his face a study in tortured inebriation. “But to see those skinny boys just standing there, waiting for the tanks…”
I wondered if the recent legions of Palestinian suicide bombers had brought on another crisis in faith. Or maybe Hans had finally thrown in the towel, after discovering like the rest of us that neutrality only meant you ended up despising both sides.
Yet back then, he had never tired in his role as our matchmaker, pairing the bold young sons and daughters of the Palestinian elite with international partners for each of our daily patrol teams. At any one time, ten pairs were on duty—five in Gaza and five on the West Bank, from Jenin down to Hebron—working almost continuously in a three-day shift while the ten teams of the next shift cooled their heels.
Hans delighted in the matchups that clicked and sulked about the few that didn’t, although only one actually ended in divorce, famously so, when a roaring, bearded Belgian earned a quick flight to Brussels by throwing a full pot of steaming coffee at his stubbornly proud consort.
I met Hans in late ’87, just as he began rounding up volunteers. I, too, was working at Jabaliya at the time, helping supply a children’s clinic for a now-defunct NGO known rather grandiosely as Save the Planet, a mission it tackled largely on the strength of $300-a-week employees like me.
I’d already been knocking around in the aid business for seven years, long enough to realize that Hans offered my best shot yet at true adventure. It was also a way to get my foot in the door of the many-roomed mansion of the United Nations. Once its blue globe adorns your résumé, you’re welcome on almost any of the mansion’s floors. Play your cards right and you’ve got a career, as well as a lifetime badge of neutrality, a universal entrée into the wider world of strife.
I joined too late to make the original cast of observers. But in March I got the call, and Hans shipped me off to Vienna, of all places, for a crash course in training.
Five of us took the course together. We were an eclectic bunch: a pipe-smoking Danish military officer in his fifties, an Italian accountant around my age who was always impeccably dressed, a rather hot-looking nurse from London in her twenties with the unlikely name of Antoinette, and a New Zealand PR man who had dropped out of the rat race at age forty-two and was forever declaring that everything was “bloody brilliant,” in sincerity when he liked it, in sarcasm when he didn’t.
For three days we listened to management trainers spout platitudes about administrative skills and conflict resolution, in the bowels of the Vienna International Centre, a hideous ziggurat of concrete on the Danube. Then, only hours before our departure, our trainers flipped off the lights and said, “We’ve put together a fifteen-minute video of what a refugee affairs officer does.”
It was a horror show of blood, screams, gunshots, and flaming cars. Before we even stopped shaking they shoved us into cars for the airport, and as soon as the wheels left the ground I ordered my first of four martinis. By the time we touched down at Ben-Gurion I was seeing double.
Hans paired me first with Munira Mirza, a prim and proper young woman whose father lectured in history at Al-Quds University. For the Palestinians, the observer jobs offered a certain prestige, mostly because you had to be well connected to land one. And by local standards the pay wasn’t bad. That went for me, too. I was finally making enough money to rent a roomy new apartment in an Arab neighborhood on the Mount of Olives, a sunny place with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Old City.
But everyone figured the jobs would be short-lived because we assumed the intifada would soon spend its anger, burning out like a matchstick. Even the worst pessimists among us couldn’t imagine it would drag on for six years.
It was strange and stressful work. Much like a beat cop, we spent our days making a rough circuit of our territory. Sometimes the dispatcher called in an incident, and we raced to the scene. But usually we found trouble on our own, and then expended our energies trying to avert more of the same. We engaged daily in dozens of small negotiations, trying our tact on a bewildering variety of officers from the IDF. Some were high, some were scared, and others were alternately bored, angry, nice, brutal, and fair-minded. You had about fifteen seconds to get a read on their mood and motivation, and about fifteen more to establish enough rapport to
defuse the situation.
Munira showed me the ropes. She had been on the job since December, and I learned more about what it meant to be a Palestinian in those first three months than I had in a year of working at Jabaliya. She also taught me the finely balanced etiquette of our pairings. None of the Palestinians ever wanted to be patted on the back or shown any sort of familiarity by an Israeli officer, which would brand them forever as a collaborator. None of the army officers ever wanted to lose face by having a Palestinian talk down to them or brandish one of our handheld radios in their presence.
In all our time together, I don’t think Munira once opened her mouth in the presence of a soldier, yet she almost always set the tone in our dealings with the vast, restive rabble of Palestinian teenaged boys known on the streets as the shebab.
By the time June rolled around, I was beginning to think I knew all there was to know about our odd new profession. Then Hans paired me with a newcomer named Omar al-Baroody, and it was my turn to be the teacher.
Omar was twenty-seven then, a graduate in urban planning from Birzeit University whose father had achieved a certain status and wealth as the owner of a few hotels on the West Bank. Our first week was rocky, the second rockier. I kept having to remind him not to carry the radio when we left the car, and he kept taking it anyway. Whenever we watched the shebab creep within stone-throwing range of the tanks, Omar always seemed on the verge of running to join them, balanced on his toes with eagerness burning in his eyes. In meeting army officers he perfected the art of the bristle, head thrown back and chest out, a smoldering glare in his eyes. We talked about it, of course, with Omar always professing ignorance of any attitude problem. Until one day, with only a week left in our hitch, everything boiled over.
It happened during a visit to an IDF central military office near Nablus. The Nablus route was my favorite, partly because of its stark beauty—not only the city, set between steep, barren mountains, but also the rolling landscape, which in the spring bloomed riotously with wildflowers. It also offered the most action. The Palestinians called Nablus “Jebel Amnar,” the Mountain of Fire. The Israelis answered that they would turn it into “Jebel Ramadh,” the Mountain of Ash.
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