Foreign Correspondence

by Geraldine Brooks

  “If my father was with us, he’d insist we go to Jenin for some bargain-price vegetables,” said Mishal, but he didn’t think the saving was worth the detour to the West Bank town.

  Still, it was clear that Mishal moved easily between the three worlds of Jews, Israeli Arabs and West Bank Palestinians. I thought of Cohen: anxious about Nazareth, an enemy in Jenin. Mishal’s Israel was a much bigger place.

  Driving away from Nazareth later that night, I felt relaxed in a way I rarely had before on journeys to Israel. As a reporter there, my business had most often been the seeking of extremes. Reporters look for the quotable people, the articulate. Unsurprisingly, those people turn out to be the hotheads, the passionately committed. Meanwhile, real life is happening elsewhere, in the middle, among the Mishals and the Cohens, who care more about their families and jobs than ideology. These people are elusive to journalists precisely because they aren’t out wielding a placard or writing an op-ed or even all that ready with a fully formed opinion if stopped on a street corner.

  But it may be in the quiet center, among the bankers of Netanya and the carpenters of Nazareth, that the real history of a place is written after all. As another carpenter from Nazareth observed a long time ago, it is the meek who shall inherit the earth.

  11

  Cherchez la Femme

  The rented Renault made an ugly sound as it struggled up the mountain incline. Outside, little pinhead snowflakes fell gently from a steel-gray December sky. In the highlands set back from the coast, the famed mild winters of the South of France can be raw and bone-chilling.

  I raised my voice over the engine’s wheeze. “ ‘Motte d’ Aigue,’ ” I read to Tony. “We’re looking for a village called ‘Lump of Points.’ ”

  Theoretically, St. Martin de la Brasque would lie just beyond. But it was hard to be sure. The village didn’t make it onto any of the local maps. And no one seemed to have heard of the place.

  On either side of us the mountains of the Lubéron rose green in their year-round sheath of oaks and cedars, pines and stunted thymes. Rows of vines, hard-pruned for winter, quilted the valley floor. Their leaves had turned red, then yellow, and fallen. And the saws had been through, turning summer’s generous sprawls into two-armed skeletons shaking nubby fists at the louring sky.

  It was Cézanne’s landscape, and I loved it, as I continued to love so much that was French: the poetry, the novels, the films, the cuisine, and the beautiful little corner of the Alpes Maritimes where Darleen and Michael had built a whitewashed house on a couple of terraced acres. On a brilliantly sunny December day in 1984, Tony and I had been married there.

  But there was so much about France that I had also come to despise: the murderous arrogance of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, the corrupt self-interest of French foreign policy in the Middle East.

  I was living in Sydney in 1986 when a French government bomb blew up the Greenpeace protest boat, Rainbow Warrior, in a New Zealand harbor, killing a young Portuguese photographer. At the time I was working for an Australian weekly, the National Times, and I wrote a cover story on the bombers that was illustrated by the Tricolor of France, scrawled with the French word for shit, merde.

  The day the issue appeared, I got a call from the local Le Monde reporter, who thought her readers would find this flag desecration arresting. She wanted a comment on what it revealed about Australian attitudes toward France. I told her that most Australians saw the French as scumbag international outlaws, and then I invited her over to my place for a garlic-studded gigot wrapped in fresh rosemary.

  Sylvie turned out to be much more the sort of correspondent I’d had in mind when I wrote away for a French pen pal in 1968. She came to dinner with her partner, Jean-Pierre, who had actually been a cobblestone hurler of that angry Paris spring, one of the beaux étudiants avec colère I’d admired on the TV news.

  Jean-Pierre had tossed his engineering studies to become a Maoist intellectual, one of the founders of the leftist newspaper Libération. But by the time I met him in the mid-1980s, France’s conservatives were once again in the ascendant. Jean-Pierre’s tousled curls had started to turn silver and his little boy was about to turn two. He sat at my table, swirling the wine in his glass as the gigot turned slowly over the open fire. “Paris,” he said. The boredom in his voice turned the word into a sigh, followed by a sound that defied accurate transliteration—part raspberry, part jeer. “It is finished for me.”

  He yearned, he said, to encounter “something primitive.” He proposed to explore the Outback. I saw them off from Sydney—their toddler Benjamin clutching the last baguette he would see in months. I hoped that what they found wouldn’t be more primitive than he bargained for.

  In central Australia they were bewitched by Aboriginal art—the richly colored Dreamtime maps through which individuals passed on pieces of the store of tribal knowledge. The paintings spoke the language of the desert landscape with a fluency few other works had matched. At a time when only a handful of Australians appreciated these paintings, Jean-Pierre and Sylvie became connoisseurs. Soon they were mounting major exhibitions back in France.

  When an invitation arrived for the first big show in Montpellier, I smiled. I thought about the day my sister had taken me to see the Rodin sculptures. I wondered if there would be a little girl in Montpellier whose love affair with art would begin as she stared at those powerful, mysterious images of a faraway desert and a life at the ends of the earth.

  In December 1995, France exploded in the worst unrest the country had seen since those heady days in 1968. Everywhere, workers were striking and rioting in protest at government attempts to dismantle social security and favorable work rules.

  Tony and I read accounts of the unrest with growing interest. During our years as Foreign Correspondents, arriving in places just as other people rushed to get out of them, we’d learned that troubled times often made for great tourism opportunities: empty hotels, uncrowded sightseeing, bargain prices. It was close to our wedding anniversary. We could have a romantic visit to the site of our nuptials, catch up with Sylvie and Jean-Pierre in Montpellier, and do what I’d longed to do since finding Janine’s old letters: search for the elusive village of St. Martin de la Brasque in the foothills of the Lubéron.

  EN gRÈVE read the hand-lettered sign at Marseilles airport, where a strike by customs officers left no one to check bags. EN gRÈVE read a similar sign on the unmanned tollbooths of the autoroute, where no one waited to collect the usual fistful of francs. And, just as we’d anticipated, since everyone was en grève, no one was en vacances.

  Our hotel, a converted olive mill in the village of Lourmarin, was empty. As a result, the manageress upgraded the modest room we’d reserved to the best suite, on the top floor, with a balcony overlooking the château and the fields beyond.

  In the morning she had plenty of time to talk to us about the charms of the region as we sipped our café au lait. But her rich vein of local knowledge ended abruptly when we asked her about St. Martin de la Brasque. Placing another log on the fire, she paused, raised an eyebrow and curled her lip, converting her face into a bouquet of rococo squiggles. “Phut,” she said. If the British have a stiff upper lip, the French definitely have at least one extra facial muscle to facilitate these magnificent sneers. “I know nothing about it. Rien.”

  The only map in our possession that gave us any hint of St. Martin’s location was the one on a tourist postcard that Janine had sent me years ago showing the Vaucluse region. Vaucluse means “the closed valley.” Janine lived somewhere between the Grand Lubéron mountains and the Durance River. On the postcard she had underlined the town of Pertuis, and on the back she had written that St. Martin was “près de cette ville.”

  As we finished our coffee, the manageress made some phone calls. She returned with the news that St. Martin was in fact only five villages east of Lourmarin. “But it is nothing,” she reported. “It’s a town of truck drivers, vineyard workers and people who work in eggs.”


  “Eggs? They have poultry farms?”

  “No—Eggs—it’s the big town south of here.”

  Aix. Aix-en-Provence. St. Martin was a village of laborers and commuters.

  As Tony and I drove up the mountainside past the patchwork of vineyards, I imagined Janine’s father working his meticulous way through the vines, knowing from experience where to prune, where to let be. It was he I thought we would find in St. Martin, if we ever found St. Martin. I hoped he would be able to tell me news of his daughter, my bright young pen pal from so many years ago. Janine herself, I imagined, would be long gone from these little villages; pursuing a career in nearby Marseilles, Montpellier, Lyon or maybe even Paris.

  Finally St. Martin announced itself with a modest sign and an avenue of speckled plane trees. In a minute or two it disannounced itself with a duplicate sign, slashed through by a black bar. Now I understood why, when I wrote to Janine, I didn’t need to give a street address—her name and the name of the village were all the direction my letters required.

  We turned the car around and drove back through the village, more slowly. Many of the old sepia-stuccoed houses had gray, concrete block additions. Some had been torn down and replaced with boxy new structures. Apart from the handsome row of trees, St. Martin felt no obligation to be picturesque. We parked in the square. It was still lunchtime, and the town’s few streets were silent. The faint snow had turned to a misty, Londonesque drizzle. A lone old man and his black and white dog ambled slowly down the street.

  We left the car and wandered to the bar-tabac, into that familiar warm French fug of fresh-ground coffee and strong tobacco. The walls were decorated with the important business of village life: the standings of the Martinoise boule players and the latest news from the Société des Chasseurs. Inside, the sole customer stood hunched over a pinball machine called Star Flipp, emblazoned with an icon of Marilyn Monroe. Like the rest of France, the machine appeared to be en grève. The youth thumped it petulantly, but no bells rang.

  We ordered a coffee and asked the barmaid if she knew the family of my pen pal. “Oui,” she said. “Bien sûr.”

  “You know Janine?” I asked.

  “Mais oui, elle habit …” and she rattled off directions to a house on the town’s edge.

  Even after my experiences in Israel, I almost fell off my bar stool in shock. After twenty-five years, Janine was still there, right where I left her. The barmaid said Janine had married a builder and managed his business from her house. “If you want to find her at home, now would be a good time,” she said. “Soon she will have to go to pick up her boys from school.”

  We drained our bitter coffees and headed for the eastern edge of town. In a few minutes, following the barmaid’s directions, we had arrived at the foot of a steep hill dotted with newish, modest-scale villas. On the unfinished balcony of one of them a builder was at work. But by the time I got out of the car and climbed up to the house he had vanished. I walked on to the next villa and knocked on the door.

  A young man answered.

  “Excuse me,” I said in French, “I’m looking for Janine.”

  “Oui,” he said. He turned back into the house and raised his voice to call the name. A petite woman in a big sweater and leggings appeared at the door. Her dark hair was cropped in a shapely bob that emphasized her soft brown eyes.

  As I introduced myself, I opened my hand and showed her one of the letters she’d sent me, the elegant writing on the pretty pale blue stationery. She stared at me and then at the letters. Her hand fluttered to her brow.

  “But it is twenty years—no—more,” she said in French.

  Still, she remembered me well. I had been her only pen friend. She explained that I had knocked, by chance, on her mother’s door. Her house was nearby, but she was spending the day with her mother, who was ill. She seemed anxious to talk, so we made a rendezvous for the following day.

  Janine’s parents’ house in the village had long since been demolished, its cramped, medieval rooms too small and irregular for modern taste. Her entire family lived now in new villas on the hillside, all built by Janine’s husband.

  Janine’s villa was the last on the curve of terrace, before the pines and scrub oak reclaimed the mountainside. Patches of raw concrete, a cement mixer parked by the entrance and churned-up mud in the driveway gave the house that unfinished look so common to the homes of architects and builders too busy working on others’ projects to get the last touches done on their own. But tucked away on adjoining terraces were a big swimming pool, drained for winter, and a separate clubhouse-cum-games room complete with pizza oven and pinball machine.

  Janine greeted me at the door and ushered me into a large room that overlooked the valley below. From this terraced hillside the valley stretched away in a long misty view of vineyards and orchards. From here, it was easy to understand why someone born in this place might never leave it.

  A fire blazed in the hearth, its fuel the wood from those same vineyards. At first I mistook the wood for prunings, but then I noticed that the pieces of vine stacked to dry by the hearth had roots attached.

  “They are pulling up many vineyards these days,” Janine explained. “It is my father’s work now.” The Lubéron had never been one of France’s great wine regions. What it supplied was vin ordinaire, and these days other wine regions—including Australia’s—were filling that market more cheaply. The vintners no longer had a market for so many grapes, so Janine’s father was spending the last few years of his working life grubbing up the vineyards he had spent years nurturing into productivity. “Then he sells them for firewood,” Janine explained.

  I realized that I had seen her father on the terrace by her mother’s house. A big, bereted man with a weathered face, he was maneuvering a tractor loaded high with vines. I had thought the scene picturesque. Now it seemed melancholy.

  The table decoration spoke to another link with the land. Instead of a vase of flowers, a large dish of sprouting wheat grains occupied the center of the table. “Is it your son’s science project?” I asked. Janine laughed. “No. It is a tradition for the time of year. You start the grains at the beginning of December, and if they are high and green by Christmas it means you will have a rich harvest in the coming year.”

  Since our brief meeting the day before, Janine had found a photo I had sent her of myself. She had placed it on the mantel. It was the picture I had sent in 1969—the one that I’d thought made me look angry and radical. What I really looked like was a kid who’d forgotten to brush her hair.

  I’d hoped Janine would speak English as well as she wrote it as a sixteen-year-old. But she had forgotten everything. As she glanced at her own letters, she said she now couldn’t decipher the English sections she had written so flawlessly.

  My French had improved a bit since I left school, because I had been forced to use it while reporting in North Africa and when visiting my sister in the nearby Alpes Maritimes. I also had assistance from Tony, who didn’t share my tin ear for pronunciation. But Janine’s accent gave us both some trouble. It was heavily Provençal, with words like bien becoming “bang” and main becoming “meng.” The conversation proceeded in a choppy relay, with Janine often repeating herself, me kibbitzing with Tony on what she’d said, the two of us figuring out a response and Tony saying it in an accent she could comprehend.

  Janine hadn’t had any reason to use English since she left school. The ruthless selectivity of the French educational system had directed her to a secretarial course. She was twenty when she met and married Juan, a Spanish immigrant whose family had come to the nearby town of Pertuis when he was nine.

  “We came because we wanted to eat,” said Juan, who had wandered in with a large hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. He was a tall, handsome man with curly blond hair and a tanned face etched deeply by laughter lines. There had been no work in his parents’ home town of Valencia. “There was a lot of racism when we came, but now we are French,” he said with a convinci
ngly Gallic shrug. These days, it was the more recently arrived Algerian and Moroccan immigrants who bore the stigma of foreignness.

  This corner of provincial, rural, France had been all Juan and Janine had ever needed. At the age of forty, Janine had never visited Paris. I’d longed to see Paris, even though I’d had to travel halfway around the world to do it. For Janine, it was a day’s drive that she’d never bothered to take.

  There was a wedding picture of Juan and Janine hanging on the wall. “Actually, it is a picture of one of our weddings,” Janine explained. France’s Napoleonic laws are even stricter in their separation of church and state than those of the United States. Religious wedding ceremonies aren’t legally recognized and have to be preceded by a civil marriage. In 1984, Tony and I had two French weddings, the first presided over by a mayor whose tricolor sash sat majestically across his impressive embonpoint. The next day a rabbi married us again, under a chuppa rigged from Tony’s grandmother’s shawl and some pieces of wood bought at the last minute from the local bricolage.

  Janine’s situation was even more complicated. Her family was Protestant, a remnant of the Vaudois—a medieval movement considered heretical by the Catholic Church. In the sixteenth century brutal religious wars between Catholics and Protestants decimated Lubéron towns, including St. Martin. Juan was Roman Catholic. So they had to be married at the mayor’s in St. Martin, then at the Protestant church in Lourmarin, then at the Catholic church in Pertuis. Since then, they had raised three boys—now seventeen, fourteen and nine—“all of them,” laughed Janine, “with no religion!”

  Juan had taken his rifle out of its canvas covering, disassembled it and was cleaning the parts carefully on the dining-room table. When I asked what he had been hunting, he pulled from a sack a brace of small blood-speckled birds. Using one tiny corpse like a hand puppet, he made the bird’s beak open and close as he trilled an imitation of its call.