Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

across the Tigris River with Kurdish guerrillas. In 1991 the Gulf War ended for me in an Easter Sunday trek through mountain passes into Turkey, fleeing Iraq with the thousands of Kurds seeking shelter from Saddam’s helicopter gunships.

I arrived home the following weekend, after months away covering the war. I went to see my sister Darleen. After more than twenty years, we were finally living in the same city. But it was London, not Sydney. For foreign correspondents, London was an ideal base from which to cover the Middle East, Africa and the rending of the Iron Curtain. For Darleen, it was the home she’d chosen when she married her English husband Michael. She was working as a magazine editor and raising her two children in an old house on the edge of a woodsy common.

It was a London spring day: wisteria in bud, the dog at my feet shifting his sun-warmed body to scratch a flea. The thought of such days had kept me going during the dull, hot, prewar weeks in Saudi Arabia and the tense, chilly postwar nights in Kurdistan.

My brother-in-law ambled across the terrace with a glass of wine in one hand and the products of his efforts at the barbecue in the other. “Sorry about the sausages,” he said. “They’re a bit black and crisp.”

Black and crisp. Sorry about the rocket, the rubble, the charred flesh, the headless human husk. Black and crisp.

To be a witness to the extremity of human behavior, you have to pay the price of admission.

What is the price of experience? asks William Blake.

Do men buy it for a song?

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No. It is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.

Journalists usually get their experience at a discount. When we go to war we rarely die, we don’t have to kill, our homes aren’t pounded to rubble, we aren’t cast adrift as exiles. If we are bruised at all, it is by the images we carry, the memories we wish we didn’t have. I would always have them, dark pictures in a mental album that I could never throw away.

I had been so cavalier, as a teenager in Sydney, about willing experiences on other people. As we gazed at the pictures in Cohen’s photo album, I could only imagine what the contents of his mental album must be like. As a reporter, I had only visited the front lines of wars. I hadn’t had to stay there, battle after battle, breathing the stink of dried blood and rotting flesh. By the time the adrenalin rush wore off, I was back somewhere safe, generally somewhere with room service.

I had wanted Cohen to be a brave Zionist warrior, when all he’d coveted was a quiet suburban life just like the one in Sydney that I was so busily wishing away. Even after the determined ordinariness of his letters, I’d continued to wish drama upon him. A day or two earlier, I’d been ready to sign him up as a shadowy secret policeman or a remorseless spy. I studied the real Cohen—the shy banker slumped contentedly beside me on the sofa—and set him free at last from the heavy burden of my imaginings.

There wasn’t much more to say to each other. As I rose to leave, I mentioned I was heading on to Nazareth, to try to find my other long-ago pen pal. Cohen wrinkled his brow. Although Nazareth lies only a couple of hours’ drive from Netanya, Cohen had never ventured there. When he said so, my eyebrows rose in surprise. Israel is tiny—the size of New Jersey, one fortieth the size of my Australian home state of New South Wales. I couldn’t imagine living a lifetime in such a small place and not exploring every inch of it.

But Cohen merely shrugged. “Why would I go? I don’t know anyone in Nazareth,” he said. “Aren’t you afraid to go there, a woman alone?”

Why should I be afraid? Nazareth, after all, wasn’t the West Bank. It was part of Israel. Its Arab citizens had been Israelis since 1948—a year longer than Cohen’s own Yemenite parents.

Yes, he nodded, that was so. “But still, they are Arabs.”

Still, they are Arabs, and when I turned my car westward at Haifa and headed into the Galilee, I felt I had crossed an invisible border. In that region of Israeli-Arab towns and villages, the roads suddenly got rougher, and soon I heard a dull thunk as my right front wheel dropped into a gaping pothole.

In the proclamation of Israeli independence in May 1948, the Jewish leaders called upon the Arab inhabitants of the state of Israel to “play their part in the development of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship.” I knew that proclamation by heart; it was part of the arsenal I had unleashed so long ago on my Palestinian schoolmate Monique, in our history class arguments.

While Monique didn’t have her facts tidily marshaled in those days, she had been right when she replied that Arabs who stayed had never enjoyed full and equal citizenship. Instead, they were placed under military rule until 1966—required to get a pass from the army to travel from one part of their own country to another.

Even now, the contrast in government spending between Arab and Jewish areas remained stark. And that contrast had just cost me a front tire. My lame car limped to the side of the road and I got out to inspect the damage. I barely had the trunk open to search for the spare when the very first car to pass by pulled over. The young Arab driver was the first of three who stopped to offer aid. It was an instant reminder of the reflexive hospitality Arabs show to strangers. If one had to have a flat tire, this probably was one of the best stretches of road in the world on which to