Foreign Correspondence (24 page)

Outside, as the sun eased up, the honeycomb of buildings on the far hill turned from rose to gold to pearly white. A ray of sunshine glanced off the glass of a framed document on the bedroom wall—Mishal’s high school diploma. I studied his grades: they were excellent. I wondered why he hadn’t gone on to university.

At breakfast I steered the conversation around to a point where I could politely ask. Mishal’s reply was matter-of-fact. To go to university, he felt, would have pushed him up against a glass ceiling confronting Israeli Arabs. As an independent
tradesman, he could make a good living. But if he had become, say, an engineer, he would have had to find work either with the Israeli government or with private firms that preferred Jews. Israeli Arabs are exempt from military service, which is a mixed blessing in a country where a good army record is a basic job credential.

Mishal explained all this with no apparent resentment. I probed for some, but nothing surfaced. I hadn’t mentioned my own conversion, so there was no reason for him to tailor his opinions to my sensibilities. “Jews are good people,” he said. “They want to live and this is the only place they’ve got.” He said he’d never experienced discrimination. “I’ve heard people say that in Tel Aviv someone’s yelled, ‘Dirty Arab’—but it’s never happened to me. This is the best place for an Arab, really. I don’t bother the Jews, they don’t bother me. The standard of living is high, and you are free to say whatever you like.”

“We get the brains from all over the world here,” his father added. “German doctors, Russian scientists. I don’t care if they’re Jews or not Jews. It’s Babel—we’re all speaking a different language but we’re building something together.”

I wished my dad was with me to hear all this. Mishal and his father inhabited the idealized Israel that Lawrie believed in, the place I’d come to think of as a propaganda myth. For years I had thought that the pro-Israeli views in Mishal’s letters to me were his tactful reaction to my own ardent, adolescent Zionism. But after spending time with him and his family it was clear to me that the views were, after all, his real beliefs.

It was Saturday, and Mishal wanted to use his day off taking me on a tour of his favorite sights. We drove to the Jordan River and circled the Sea of Galilee. As we gazed at the ancient monuments and the fertile farms, he was as proud of them as any Jewish Israeli. Even the new settlements earned praise from him, although more land under Jewish construction left less
room for Arab towns to expand. Mishal had worked for the affluent professionals in one deluxe cluster of new villas, and with a word to the security guard we were waved inside the gated community. “No one is looking at what his neighbor is doing here,” Mishal said wistfully. “He has a drink, he sees a woman friend—they mind their own business.” He didn’t say it, but the contrast to his own unprivate life in the family compound and in Nazareth’s overgrown-village atmosphere was obvious.

He showed me the kibbutz where he worked for over a year as carpenter in residence, repairing locks, squaring wobbly tables, making doors close snugly. He enjoyed the communal meals in the dining hall. “Breakfast was nice,” he said, “good yogurt, fresh avocado and fruit, cheese and eggs.” He liked the way nobody fussed about the kibbutz girls in their thigh-high shorts. “Nobody’s looking at her—it’s a normal thing,” he said. By contrast, an Arab friend had refused to go with him to a hot-springs spa because they didn’t have separate hours for men and women, and the friend worried about people looking at his wife. “She’s not young, she’s had kids, nobody’s interested,” said Mishal. “But that’s the mentality.”

On the way back we picked up some food for dinner. Mishal liked to buy fresh milk and fruit from a particular Jewish
moshav
. Farther on, he turned up a winding dirt road where an old Bedouin in a Brooks Brothers shirt and crisply pressed pants lived amid scratching hens and rusty farm machinery. The old man poured us coffee from a long-spouted brass pot set on a brazier, and haggled with Mishal over the price of his wife’s fresh-made cheese.

“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.

E
N
g
RÈVE
read the hand-lettered sign at Marseilles airport, where a strike by customs officers left no one to check bags.
E
N
g
RÈVE
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.”