The Story Page 10

  — CHAPTER 7 —

  FROM THE NILE TO THE SEINE

  “Paris!”

  Abe was calling me in Cairo from his office in New York. The connection was poor. “I’m sending you to Paris—as correspondent.”

  “Gosh, Abe,” I said, momentarily speechless. Then I thanked him for rewarding my tour in Cairo with a promotion.

  “You don’t sound thrilled.”

  “I’m delighted,” I replied too quickly. “But there’s no news in Paris.”

  Correspondents would kill for this job, he replied curtly. I could feel his anger. He was offering me the number two slot in Paris, a big step up in the Times hierarchy. Why did I hesitate?

  Then he chuckled. “You are the only woman in the world who would rather stay in Cairo than spend the next three years in the world’s most romantic city.”

  Abe loved delivering good news, a rare enough event in 1986, the finale of his brilliant if tumultuous reign as executive editor. My lack of enthusiasm had spoiled the moment for him.

  “I’m really grateful for the new job,” I lied.

  What I didn’t say—at least, not then—was that I feared I might find France a letdown after Egypt. Richard Bernstein, my shy friend and a gifted writer, was the Paris bureau chief who would cover the big stories. I would be left with the rest.

  Cairo had been a thrilling initial assignment. In just over three years, I had reported from seventeen countries and was more or less my own boss, driven by my own definition of the beat. As Abe had predicted, I was drawn most to the rise of what was slowly beginning to be called “Islamic fundamentalism” and would later be known as “militant Islam”—a trend within Islam as old as Islam itself which was slowly taking hold yet again, this time as a postcolonial response to the dictatorships that ruled in the name of Arab nationalism and independence.

  * * *

  I discovered much about the Arabs, and even more about myself, during that initial tour. For one, while the competition for a story in Washington is exhilarating, being a foreign correspondent is far more so. There had been so many magical moments: sunset sails on the Nile; wandering through the Damascus bazaar with its exotic scents, colors, and sounds; and walking alongside a riverbank on the outskirts of Khartoum, Sudan, as fishermen scrambled ashore from an old wooden trawler at sunset, falling on their knees, bowing toward Mecca.

  There were also moments of intense sadness, fury, fear, and frustration. My decision, for instance, to equip the bureau with primitive computers at a time when frequent power outages required us to send important letters and requests for interviews by messenger had been folly. So, too, was jogging in the streets. After I was tracked by a pack of wild dogs, I stopped. Gamal Mohieddin banned me from driving after I wrecked our already dilapidated car three times. I survived an elevator crash in my building by hanging from the lamp embedded in the lift’s ceiling as the elevator plunged. Food poisoning nearly killed me twice—once after sampling “local cuisine” on Ethiopian Air. But such challenges were related to my job, not my gender.

  Abe was understandably proud to have sent a woman to head the Cairo bureau. He wanted Times readers to learn about the many subtle and significant ways in which Arabs, and women, in particular, were affected by the growth of militant Islam. Since I was increasingly convinced that the treatment of women strongly correlates with a society’s development and prosperity, I was happy to focus on discrimination against Arab women and the fear that led to it.

  However badly women are treated in some Arab countries—and their status varies dramatically from country to country—working for the Times in the Arab Middle East was advantageous for me professionally. For one thing, Islamic militants and other fanatics were still relatively chivalrous then: they didn’t intentionally kill or kidnap women in Lebanon and other war zones where my male colleagues were perpetually at risk.

  For another, I could befriend Arab women, which was far trickier for male reporters. If a minister refused to see me, I would enlist his wife’s help over lunch or tea. Only a foolhardy husband would willingly incur his spouse’s wrath for stiffing her friend. While Arab women are often portrayed as victims, many wield enormous power. Upper-class Egyptian women, especially, were then, and remain today, as tough and sophisticated as Parisians or New Yorkers, but warmer. Many are tyrants in their own homes, deciding where their children go to school, when and whom they marry, whether their husbands accept new jobs. They know who has married whom and why, and who is sleeping with whom—invaluable gossip in any society but particularly in closely knit Egypt. They know why someone’s idiot nephew, rather than a more qualified candidate, has a plum job or contract. Back then they knew what Mubarak ate for breakfast or dinner, and why this or that minister was really fired. Moreover, my Egyptian women friends usually heard the best political jokes first.

  Because I was a Westerner, the official and informal rules that restrict Arab women seldom applied to me. Keenly aware of them, however, I sometimes profited from the virtual invisibility of women in the most restrictive Arab countries and used it to gain access to places from which men were barred. In Saudi Arabia, I wrote about riding in the back of a public bus in the stifling rear compartment to which women were relegated.1 Wearing an abayeh, the head-to-toe black cloak that Saudi women wear in public, and pretending that I was a Saudi woman visiting a relative, I tricked my way into a Saudi prison from which my male colleagues would almost surely have been barred. I filed a front-page story on how several American workers for Aramco, the all-important Saudi-American oil company, had been abused and tortured by Saudi police in one of the kingdom’s jails.2

  Finally, status usually trumps gender in the Arab Middle East. Almost everyone I dealt with professionally was aware of my newspaper’s clout. That alone usually assured me a cordial reception, though I was also helped by the tradition of Arab hospitality and the awareness that I was genuinely interested in the people I covered.

  Relationships matter in the Middle East. I met Jordan’s King Hussein when I first interviewed him as a graduate student. In official interviews over the years, he made important policy statements. He was even more candid speaking on background over coffee and cigarettes. Once, during a break at an Arab summit, he tried, but failed, to teach me to water-ski—harder than making peace between Arabs and Jews, he joked. I wrote a condolence letter when his beloved wife, Alia, was killed in a helicopter crash in 1977, and got the first interview with Lisa Halaby, the shrewd, charming American woman who became Hussein’s fourth wife in 1978 and his last queen—“Noor al-Hussein,” he named her (“Hussein’s light,” in Arabic.) Though I interviewed many Arab leaders repeatedly during my decades of work in the region and though he made several terrible mistakes during his forty-six-year reign, King Hussein’s decency; his relatively just, tolerant rule; and his desire for peace distinguished him.

  I also began to sense my limitations as a reporter. Despite Egypt’s love of revolutionary slogans and rhetoric, it was a deeply conservative society, with strong divisions. Although I tried hard to report on the lives and frustrations of the poor, I had far less contact with the fellaheen, Egypt’s long-suffering farmers and working poor. While I wrote many stories about their plight, the Egypt I knew best was one of Savile Row suits and Dior dresses in Cairo and Alexandria. Social life in both cities revolved around dinner parties at people’s homes. Conversation flitted among French, English, and Arabic. My French was tarnished by creative grammar and an American accent. And my Arabic remained primitive. But Egyptians were ready with translations and explanations.3

  Personally, the job also took a toll. Being single at age thirty-five in Egypt was as much a curiosity as my gender. Most Arab women my age had been married for years. The officials I interviewed would invariably ask about my husband and I was unprepared for the alarm that telling them I was not married evoked. Half of the ensuing interview would invariably be devoted to questions about whether I was lonely on my own, or to other topics that Americans consi
dered intensely private. Those officials were not making a pass or avoiding tough questions. For Arabs, family is the center of life, particularly for women. That a woman should be deprived of its protection is profoundly disturbing to many Arab men and women.

  So, soon after my arrival in Cairo, I decided to acquire a husband and two children as a guise. My fictitious husband, George, lived in Washington. I neglected to name my mythical children, select their gender, or decide why George and the kids were not with me in Cairo. Few Egyptians were curious about any of that. What counted was their presumed existence. A husband and children ensured that I was not alone: George was looking out for me.

  After a particularly boisterous lunch in Alexandria, Frances Cook, then the American consul general there, and a few Egyptian friends who were in on the ruse accompanied me to the souk to buy a proper wedding ring. George, the kids, and, above all, my new diamond-encrusted snake ring had the desired effect: they eliminated further personal questions and saved time. When I would finally marry twenty years later, I wore that ring, which by then had been accompanied by much good fortune.

  I loved foreign reporting, but part of the mission did not suit me, and this, too, had little to do with being a woman. Mainly, it had to do with the way people, male or female, react to war. Some women may be cut out to be war correspondents. Not me.

  The discovery came in the summer of 1983 in Lebanon after the devastating Marine Corps bombing in Beirut. After years of covering the civil war, Tom Friedman had grown cautious. When I unpacked a bulletproof vest the foreign desk had provided, he chided me. “If you need that,” he said, “you’re too close.” But some reporters, like John Kifner—a talented veteran of several Middle Eastern posts, who would succeed me in Cairo—seemed to relish that part of the assignment. Kif, as everyone called him, never forgave me for urging Abe to pull him out of Beirut after several of his colleagues there were kidnapped.

  I was afraid much of the time in Beirut, and afraid to acknowledge that fear to my editors or even my colleagues, most of them male. Instead, I would drink away the day’s trauma with friends like David Blundy and Liz Colton—a correspondent for Newsweek who later became a foreign service officer in Afghanistan and other challenging posts—and diplomats at the Hotel Commodore, which was thriving on the war’s misery. It was always full, thanks to the rotation of reporters looking in on war. Innocents like me were routinely offered a choice of rooms: Would I prefer the shelling or the car bomb side of the hotel?

  Lebanon’s endless violence should have been enough to make anyone flee. But it was covering the evacuation of Christians from the Lebanese mountain town of Deir el Qamar that taught me that a war correspondent’s life was not for me.

  Inga Lippman, a freelance photographer in Beirut, interested me in a planned evacuation of the town, arguing that it would help show that almost nothing is black and white in a civil war like Lebanon’s. Yes, some twenty-five thousand Christians who sought refuge in the town from fighting in their own villages had been encircled for two months by Druze soldiers and prevented from leaving. The Druze, an eleventh-century Muslim sect, an offshoot of an offshoot of Islam that had fought a civil war with the Maronite Christians in 1860, still resented the Christians. But members of the Phalange, militant Christian militiamen, took refuge among the town’s civilians, and the Druze refused to lift the siege unless they surrendered. As I would see repeatedly in other Middle Eastern conflicts, civilians were being used as pawns. When the Druze finally agreed to let the Red Cross remove women, children, and the elderly from Deir el Qamar, Inga and I headed there.

  It took us about two hours of chatting and drinking tea at a series of checkpoints variously manned by Christian, Lebanese Army, and Druze militias to reach the outskirts. At the final station, three-quarters of a mile from the town center, logic, charm, threats, pleas, bribes, and feminine wiles all failed. There was sniper fire along the road, the Druze captain warned us. If our car’s tires were shot out, the evacuation would be impeded.

  “Then we’ll walk,” I told him. Inga stared at me in disbelief.

  Certain that two unarmed women would never take the dare, the captain grinned. “If you please,” he said, motioning us toward the town.

  I heard the first bullet about two hundred yards down the road. After the fourth shot, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. Since Inga would not permit me to take such a risk alone, I had endangered both of us needlessly. I told her we were turning back.

  “The hell we are,” she snapped at me. It was as dangerous to turn back as to go ahead at that point, she said. We were going into town if she had to drag me. “So shut up and count the rifle shots,” she said. “You’ll need it for your story.”

  There were seventeen. It was a good story; the Times put it on the front page.4 But it hadn’t been worth the risk. I had let my hunger for a scoop prevail. I turned out to be just as susceptible to the adrenaline of war as any of the macho male reporters I disparaged, perhaps more so. As a woman, I felt I had to prove to editors who had resisted sending me to Lebanon and to the region in general that I could deliver the goods. But no story was worth such recklessness. It was a lesson I would have to learn repeatedly. Journalism’s incentives—the prizes, praise from editors and peers, promotions—rewarded risk, not caution.

  * * *

  To avoid clashing with Richard Bernstein, the Paris bureau chief whom I greatly admired and whose friendship I still cherish, I decided to stake out new reporting territory in France that avoided foreign policy and national security. So I wrote about art heists, the fashion industry, and the nobility of truffles.

  Abe loved the stories. “Off to a great start! More! More!” said one “hero-gram” that Anne Aghion, the bureau manager, dropped on my desk. Yes, this was a plum assignment, a step up on the paper’s professional ladder. But after the heady turbulence of the Middle East, this was not the way I imagined spending the rest of my career.

  All too soon, however, the Middle East reached out to me in Paris. Only a few weeks after my arrival, I found myself covering a series of terrorist bombings that risked turning Paris into Beirut. That December, I returned to Egypt to help with our coverage of the Achille Lauro crisis, the now infamous Italian cruise ship that had been seized by Palestinian terrorists sailing between Alexandria and Port Said, Egypt. The hijackers had killed a disabled American-Jewish passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, and thrown his body overboard from his wheelchair. They then agreed to abandon the cruise ship in exchange for safe conduct and flew to Tunis, Tunisia, aboard an Egyptian jetliner, eluding capture by America. It had been a terrible but fascinating story to cover.

  The story that would change my life and lead to my first book also had nothing to do with fashion, contemporary French politics, or even the Middle East, but, rather, with history, memory, and the obligation of civilized people to confront evil—themes that along with terrorism and national security came to dominate my work.

  Soon after I had moved to Paris from Cairo, I was asked to write about a court ruling affecting Klaus Barbie, the infamous Nazi Gestapo chief in the occupied city of Lyon during World War II. The so-called Butcher of Lyon had been languishing in a French jail for four years while the courts sorted out for which crimes he could be tried in France. In late December 1985 a French appeals court ruled that he could be charged with having killed or deported not only Jews but also French Resistance fighters.

  Critics of the decision argued that by permitting Barbie’s crimes against the Resistance to be heard in the same trial as his crimes against the Jews, the courts had blurred the traditional French distinction between “war crimes,” or crimes against combatants, and “crimes against humanity”: those committed against civilians for reasons of race, religion, or political views. Simone Veil, an Auschwitz survivor, a former president of the European Parliament, and then among France’s most distinguished conservative politicians, called the decision “shocking.” In an interview, she told me that the inclusion of the Resistance victims
was a “denial of the specificity of Hitler’s genocide against the Jews” and a “terrible banalization of the Holocaust.” Alain Finkielkraut, a prominent writer, warned that neofascists in France were already accusing Jewish critics of the ruling of trying to “monopolize” the status of victim. “They are saying that this is the Jews’ new greed,” Finkielkraut told me over lunch. This was the “modern face” of anti-Semitism in France, Europe’s ancient scourge. And it had come bubbling to the surface most vividly in France’s discomfort over the impending Barbie trial.

  I sensed that the French feared that the trial would raise awkward questions about those who had collaborated with Barbie in Lyon and with the collaborationist Vichy Government during the war. From France’s defeat by the Germans in 1940 until liberation in 1944, the Resistance had been a relatively small movement. Most of the French were either pro-Vichy or just keen on survival. After the war, French historians had grossly exaggerated the numbers and achievements of the “glorious” Resistance, which, until 1942, had fought a largely lonely battle against the Nazis.

  I attended some of the trial in Lyon, France’s third-largest city, that began in the spring of 1987. A vast ornate hall in the Palais de Justice had been renovated at a cost of more than $2 million to accommodate the more than nine hundred reporters, hundreds of witnesses, forty attorneys, and throngs of spectators. At the end of the two-month trial, despite thousands of pages of reporting and commentary, the Barbie conviction skimmed the surface of French society. Lyon was not Paris. What happened there didn’t matter as much as events in the capital. And Barbie was German, not French. So his prosecution never became, as many had feared it would, the trial of France itself. The trial did not rewrite French history, at least not for the next decade: it had not forced a confrontation with the past or with the racism that had led to the deportation of sixty-five thousand Jews, the vast majority of whom had fled to France from the Nazi threat.