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

of the village, as it has been for more than a hundred years. Inside, there’s a big table for sorting mail and a bench, for sitting. Neighbors linger to exchange gossip or scan the notice board for what’s going on in the village. Usually that’s not too much, which is pretty well how we like it.

The mail in my box is mostly the modern clutter of catalogues, bills and telephone-company solicitations. Most of it goes straight into the big recycling bin by the table. But among the letters I carry home are a few that remind me of my father’s eclectic daily haul. A recent letter from Mishal in Nazareth contained the joyful news that after all this time, he and his wife had become proud parents of a baby girl. There are stamps from the new Palestine Authority, postmarks from Nigeria and Iran. Other letters, from Kurdistan or Sarajevo, have been hand-carried out of chaos and mailed from Ankara or Vienna.

These days the writers aren’t pen friends, just old acquaintances from a life I’ve left behind. Raed, from the West Bank, stoned my car in 1987; now he writes to tell me how he’s faring in college. Deebi helped me when I was thrown in jail in Nigeria; now he writes despairing news about death sentences on his fellow environmental activists. Nazaneen was a brilliant teacher from a wealthy family when I met her during the Kurdish uprising after the war with Iraq. Now she’s a refugee, working long hours selling vegetables in a London suburb. And I am no longer a Foreign Correspondent, just someone who corresponds with foreigners.

Unless civil war breaks out for a second time in Virginia, it is unlikely that I will ever see a battlefield again. These days I don’t cover uprisings or get arrested on suspicion of espionage. I bake bread, piece quilts, turn the compost heap and sit on the porch, rocking my son to sleep. The place I live has less than half the population of St. Martin de la Brasque, and a letter can find me here with just the name of the village as address. Of all my pen pals, it is Janine’s whose life now most resembles mine.

My father was appalled when I moved back to the United States in 1993. Ten years earlier, when I was studying in New York, he had written me a long letter lamenting Darleen’s expatriation, hoping that she would never forget she was “born an Aussie, when Aussies were true Aussies.” He warned me of the debilitating materialism of the United States—“I forecast what’s happening (damn my country of birth!) 20 or more years ago”—and wrote about the beginnings of his love affair with Australia.

“In the big war it was amazing. My Yank brothers were lost without their tools, their mobile kitchens and fresh food supplies. We Aussies made do, we extemporized. The only way to stop these Aussies doing something progressive was to encase them in a block of cement.… Odd stuff coming from an ancestry that on three sides was [in the United States] before 1776—but that’s it, I’m only sorry I wasn’t born an Aussie.”

His Australian patriotism had become almost a religious faith, and it pained him when Darleen and I both “married out.” He was sure, when I brought my American husband home, that Tony would see Australia as he had, and settle thankfully into life as an Aussie bloke. But Tony, born in Washington, D.C., had grown up witnessing major news stories unfold on his doorstep: civil rights and antiwar marches, the rioting following Martin Luther King’s assassination, Watergate. As a reporter in Sydney, he found it hard to adjust to Australia’s quieter politics or to muster much passion over its less acute social problems. The fairness that made Australia such a decent place to live also made it, for him, an unsatisfying place to work. After a sweet three years in our little sandstone cottage near the harbor in Balmain, he was restless. And when the offer of the Middle East posting was dangled in front of us, I had to admit that somewhere deep inside I was, too.

Six years later it was Tony’s turn to be homesick, and it seemed only fair that we should spend some time near his family. We found this village in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and to my surprise I began to feel settled here in a way that I never had in any place other than Sydney.

Even though Tony had traded in his foreign-correspondent khakis for the sports coat of a national reporter, I was still working for the foreign desk. I’d developed a skill in dealing with chaotic situations and had become what’s known in newsrooms as a fireman, or, less politely, a “shit-hole correspondent”—a person dispatched to cover the worst of places in the worst of times.

At first I thought our Blue Ridge village would be a perfect base for a fireman-foreign correspondent, a tranquil retreat in between hectic assignments. But after a year, the village’s very peacefulness proved my undoing. Instead of craving risk, I craved quiet. Each trip, getting out the door became harder and harder. Under fire in Somalia, I’d find myself thinking of my shipment of autumn perennials, worrying whether Tony would know what to do with them if they arrived before I got home. In my years on the road, I had run up a domesticity deficit. And the time between assignments was never enough to balance the books.

A light snow was falling as I packed for a flight to Bosnia. Journalists were getting shot there, and I was worried that the military camouflage on the helmet I was taking would make me look too much like a combatant. After puzzling over the problem for a while, I figured that if I stretched a pair of black panty hose over the helmet and tied the legs together on top, in a bow, it would cover the camouflage