Foreign Correspondence (20 page)

Joannie moved into the apartment in New Brunswick and called her mother to ask advice about how to defrost the refrigerator. The next day she called again. She had misplaced the phone number of her therapist. “She said she needed to talk to her because she was anxious about a statistics course.” As Elizabeth put down the phone, the familiar fears for her daughter returned. Joannie was still rail-thin, and Elizabeth knew very well how easily an anxiety attack could trigger a dangerous eating episode.

The next day Joannie was found dead. The autopsy couldn’t say whether the direct cause was heart arrhythmia brought on by an electrolyte imbalance, or aspiration of vomit. The years of near starvation had taken a terrible toll on all of her organs, and that last binge was one insult more than her frail body could bear.

• • •

“We are still trying to recover our balance,” Elizabeth had written to me back in 1982 when she broke the news of Joannie’s death. Fifteen years later, she still is trying.

Joannie never wrote to tell me that she had become a Catholic in her final years, adopting the religion I’d cast aside. Hers was the Catholicism of the liberation theologians and the social-activist Maryknolls, very different from the rigid, conservative Church I’d known. Elizabeth had been drawn to the caring nuns and priests who had tried to help Joannie. After Joannie died, Elizabeth too had converted. And in the taking of the Eucharist she found a connection with her daughter.

But the questions have never stopped. Even after all the therapists and discussion groups and social workers, there remains no answer to the question of why Joannie became ill, or why, after she came so close, recovery in the end eluded her.

A relative of Joannie’s who is a psychiatric pharmacologist at Yale believes Joannie suffered an imbalance in her brain chemistry during the multiple hormonal changes of adolescence.

But Elizabeth is sure that “something much deeper than chemicals” was involved. She asks if I know the story of “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen. When the Snow Queen tosses a piece of ice, it lodges in a little boy’s heart and freezes it. He can no longer feel love. In the fairy tale, a little girl named Gerda searches the world for the boy and, when she finds him, her love melts the ice.

“Joannie’s heart was frozen,” Elizabeth says. “She was always trying desperately to warm it. But for Joannie no love was warm enough.”

Alongside the tall stack of letters from my fifteen-year correspondence with Joannie there is a smaller, still growing pile that bears a similar handwriting. There are postcards from Menemsha,
and letter-cards sold for the benefit of UNICEF or Catholic Relief Services or the League of Women Voters.

Elizabeth and I write to each other now. Her latest card has a pen-and-ink sketch of a Martha’s Vineyard townscape. “We had a brief thunderstorm a couple of days after you left, when the sky was spectacular—it seemed feathered with the soft gray breasts of countless doves.”

Elizabeth’s letters are a link with that other, long-ago correspondence. But they have become much more than that. “I suspect you realize how much your visits mean,” she writes in her latest letter, “because of course in my mind I’ve adopted you. How could it be otherwise?”

And in my mind I’ve adopted her. How could it be otherwise?

She was going to be you
.

Joannie wasn’t going to be me. But I’m grateful for the ways in which my life has allowed me to be her.

10

Arab, Jew and Aussie

1. contact book (purged?)
   
2. passport & visa
   
3. $ + local currency + Amex
   
4. notebooks & pens
   
5. shortwave + extension aerial + batteries
   
6. Pocket Flight Guide
   
7. sunglasses, sunscreen, hat
   
8. ½ doz. passport photos
   
9. ref. books + notes + novel
   
10. maps
    
11. canteen + water-purify tabs?
    
12. dried food?
    
13. pocket knife?
    
14. antibiotics, field dressings, hypodermic
    
15. deodorant, moisturizer, lipbalm, Handiwipes, Evian, hairbrush, tampons, toothbrush & paste
    
16. underpants and bra
    
17. long skirt, 2 khaki pants & vest, 2 long-sleeve shirts, 2 T-shirts, sneakers
    
18. king suit, pumps & stockings
    
19. chador?
    
20. BP vest?
    

For eight years this twenty-point checklist sat in a drawer of my bedside table, ready for the late night calls: “Saddam’s gassed the Kurds.” “Khomeini’s finally kicked it.”

Everything on the list, except item 20—the bulletproof vest—could be crammed into a nylon duffel bag that just fit under an airplane seat. (The first rule of Foreign Correspondence: never check in any luggage. It’s unfortunate to arrive at an Arab summit in Casablanca only to find that your underwear is touring sub-Saharan Africa without you.) It took me about a year to fine-tune the list. It was the
New York Times
’s uncombed correspondent John Kifner who taught me to pack what he called a “king suit,” even if the assignment I’d set out on didn’t seem likely to call for a visit to royalty. You never knew when the local dictator might invite you to tea. Kifner also advised making space for a fat novel. Most assignments didn’t leave a spare minute for recreational reading. But some (anything that involved waiting for an interview with Yasir Arafat or a plane out of Khartoum) could provide enough time to get through Proust.

Other lessons came from experience. Iraqi secret police riffling through my contact book showed me the wisdom of purging the names and numbers of local dissidents. And the words “Don’t leave home without it” took on new meaning the day I found myself miming “tampon” to a Farsi-speaking pharmacy clerk in Iran.

• • •

Covering the racetrack in Sydney, or writing about the decline of basic industry in the American Midwest, I’d never imagined myself as someone whose packing list would include a chador, much less a bulletproof vest. After a year and a half with
The Wall Street Journal
in Cleveland, I’d gone home to Sydney, to get on with what I still thought of as my real life, my Australian life. But then the
Journal
decided it needed an Australasian bureau, and so I became a Foreign Correspondent who wasn’t foreign, writing features about things that were familiar to me yet exotic to my readers. Since the
Journal
didn’t have a pressing interest in hard news from Australia, I was free to write pretty much what I liked. In between corporate stories I’d roam the Outback for weeks, profiling a bargeman who delivered supplies to remote Aboriginal settlements in the Northern Territory, or saddling up with one of the last of the Queensland cattle drovers.

In 1987, I’d just filed a piece on how New Zealand scientists were using the country’s vast population of methane-producing, flatulent sheep to study global warming when the
Journal
’s foreign desk in New York called. New York never called me. On the foreign editor’s international priorities list, Sydney rated a notch or two ahead of Djiboutiville. As I answered the phone, I worried she was calling to chastise me about too many tasteless sheep-fart jokes.

Instead, she was offering me one of the paper’s plum jobs: Middle East correspondent covering a beat that ranged over twenty-two countries. The job had become vacant because its previous occupant decided to return to Washington after spending several days in an Iranian jail. The Iranians had accused him of being a Zionist spy. The
Journal
got him released after pointing out that he wasn’t even Jewish.

One small problem about me replacing him: I was.

• • •

Three years earlier, on a wintry day in Cleveland, I had stepped into a tiled tub of purified rainwater, sunk to my knees and let the liquid close over me. Looking up at the blurred yellow shapes thrown against the tiled walls by the electric light, I exhaled and watched my last breath as a Gentile bubble upward.

I broke the surface, the water sluicing off my bare skin in sparkling cascades, and proclaimed the Shema—“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God. The Lord is One.” Tradition teaches that a convert is a Jewish soul trapped by mistake in a Gentile body. Immersion in the ritual bath frees the soul again. Perhaps that trapped soul explained why, fourteen years earlier, a Sydney girl who had never met a Jew walked around with a Star of David dangling against the collar of her Catholic-school uniform.

Daddy, back home in Sydney, had been delighted when I wrote to say that the romance with Tony seemed serious. “So fascinating to think we might have a genuine Jew boy in the family,” he wrote. “I suspect it’s in the genes somewhere.” When he was a soldier in Palestine, he had fallen for a young sabra. She had ended the relationship because he wasn’t Jewish.

Tony didn’t care if I was Jewish or not, and seemed bemused when I announced I wanted to convert. The night of my mikvah, he came reluctantly to hear me read my Torah portion, dragging himself through the synagogue door burdened by the same childhood memories of boredom and dread that dogged me every time I had to enter a Catholic church.

I was trying to fill what Salman Rushdie has described as the religion-shaped hole in modern lives: a place that yearns for links with past communities and for a coherent reason to do the right thing rather than the expedient one. Now my links were with Tony’s three-thousand-year-old Jewish heritage, a heritage that had always insisted that religion passes to the child through the mother. Unless I converted, our children wouldn’t be Jews. Somehow, Tony’s forebears had kept their tradition alive
through the Babylonian exile, the Spanish Inquisition, Russia’s pogroms, the Holocaust. I didn’t want to be the one to bring it to an end.

And so on that frozen Midwestern morning I became a Jew. In a few weeks more I became a Jewish bride. Barely four years later I finally arrived in Israel.

My life had given me the teenage fantasy I’d cooked up as I wrote to my Israeli pen pals and dug my mother’s vegetable garden pretending it was an embattled kibbutz. But it was my fantasy revised beyond recognition. When I arrived in Eretz Israel in December 1987, it wasn’t as a swamp-draining Zionist pioneer but as a Foreign Correspondent with a reservation at the Jerusalem Hilton.

I was there to cover the eruption of rage that would become known as the intifada. Within a day of my arrival I found myself in the no man’s land between Palestinian rocks and Israeli rubber bullets. I’d made a classic rookie-correspondent error, a colleague told me over drinks at the bar later that night. In an uprising or a war, you reduce your risk of getting hurt by half if you get behind one group of combatants. “Never get in the middle,” he said. “You have to choose your side.”

But what was my side? My colleague was talking of physical placement, but his words hummed with the internal dilemma I’d faced ever since my arrival. I’d become a Jew out of sentimental identification with the world’s eternal underdogs, but the place in which I had arrived wasn’t my father’s tiny, defenseless little Israel, encircled by enemies. It was a tough state, using an army to put down civilian unrest. I had become a Jew because I wanted to be on my husband’s side in the world. But in the streets of the occupied territories in the winter of 1987 that side was no longer an unambiguous place to be.

As I reported the course of the intifada, I found myself
making friends with both Arabs and Jews. But the relationships were always strained. The Palestinians demonized Israelis, the Israelis dehumanized Palestinians. On each side it was rare to find a shred of empathy for the other.

On the phone to Australia, conversations with my father were equally tiring. The enthusiasm he’d shared with me, that had given us some common ground, was now a place of prickly disagreement. His Zionism had hardened over the years into a faith that brooked none of the ambiguity that troubled me. He was as ardent as any West Bank settler, and kept up a steady stream of letters to the Sydney newspapers espousing the rightness of a tough Israeli response to the Palestinians.

I had been covering the intifada for a year when Arafat decided to make a symbolic Declaration of Independence for the occupied territories, to boost the young stone throwers’ flagging morale. On the day of the announcement, the Israeli army deployed, to leave Palestinians in no doubt as to who controlled their “independent” land. The army declared the entire West Bank a closed military area. But soldiers couldn’t block every shepherd’s path, so early in the morning I crammed into the back of a rattling old Fiat with a group of Palestinian students. We bumped over a rocky trail through olive groves to the Arab town of Ramallah, joining a steady trickle of illicit traffic as we reached the edge of the city.