“You’re calling all the way from Australia?”
“No! From here, at the Town Hall.” The woman, even more confused, muttered something grumpily. “She says the Cohen you want doesn’t live there.” Disappointment clouded my face. But my translator pinched his fingers together again, in the “Wait a minute” gesture. He listened for a moment, took a pen, scribbled, then put down the phone. “It might be her son. She gave me his number in Netanya.” Netanya, a bigger town, lay just a few miles farther north. “But she said he can’t know you, because he doesn’t speak English.”
Could Cohen’s mother not realize her son had known enough English to correspond in the language? It seemed unlikely, but the scrawled phone number was the only lead I had. I decided to call it while I still had a Hebrew-speaker on hand. We dialed. No answer. There was nothing to do but thank my helper and head back down the coast to my hotel.
From my room, I tried the number again. This time a younger woman answered, switching quickly from Hebrew to English as she heard my accent. Yes, she said, Cohen lived there. She called him. In Hebrew, I heard her warning him, “She’s speaking in English.”
Then he was on the line, the disembodied voice of the boy who was the repository of so many teenage fantasies. It was a deep voice, thickly accented with the heavy gutturals of Hebrew-speakers who don’t have much practice with English. I tried to explain who I was. His reply, after a long silence, was grave and guarded. Yes, he agreed, he was the Cohen who had lived on Amami Street.
“But I don’t remember you,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “it’s a while ago. You were sixteen.”
“I was sixteen? But now I’m forty-one!” Silence again. Then, finally, “I don’t know what to say.” I told him I’d like to meet him. There was yet another long silence. “Why?” he asked. “Why, after so much time?”
It was a question I barely knew how to answer. How could I explain to this taciturn stranger who didn’t even remember me that he was part of a fantasy-obsession that shaped my life? I mumbled something about having recently found his letters and wanting to meet him at last. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said. He took my number and hung up, without even saying goodbye.
I put the phone down, the euphoria of the early evening turned to discouragement. As I tried to sleep, my mind again started spinning scenarios for Cohen, just as I had as a fifteen-year-old. Maybe he was a Mossad agent, and he needed to have me checked out.
I had worried about the logistics of finding my pen pals. It hadn’t occurred to me that they might not want to be found.
I was in a heavy jet-lagged sleep when the phone rang at 9 A.M.
“Good morning, how are you?”
It was Cohen, his voice transformed from cold suspicion to friendliness. In the background was the sound of jangly machinery and many people talking. “Can you be at your hotel at 2 P.M. today? Good. I’ll come there,” he said, and rang off.
Elated, I wandered down to breakfast, my favorite meal in Israel. I loaded the plate with yogurt, cucumber, tomato and smoked fish—an array of foods I’d never dream of eating early in the morning anywhere else—and settled down in a sun-splashed corner of the dining room with a copy of the Jerusalem Post. On page 3 there was a story about the effort under way to refill the Hula Swamp. It seemed that the Zionist pioneers had died of malaria and exhaustion in order to perpetrate an environmental atrocity. Now, modern Israel was anxious to redress it.
It was always hard to fathom the pace of change in Israel. The last time I had eaten breakfast in the dining room of that beachside hotel, all the waiters had been Israeli Arabs and the whispered buzz between them as they tidied the buffet and cleared the tables was the gentle murmur of Arabic. Now the staff was entirely Russian, and the muttered words were “Da, nyet, horosho.” The last time I was there, Arafat had been a hated terrorist in faraway Tunis. Now he was down the highway in Gaza and as much a part of the domestic political landscape as any other outspoken Israeli mayor.
To fill the hours before the meeting with Cohen, I called some correspondent friends in Jerusalem. One of them, an Australian TV reporter, was just back from six weeks home leave in Sydney. She was curious about my pen pals, and I explained that I acquired them because, at the time I was growing up, Sydney felt like the ends of the earth.
“It still feels like the ends of the earth, matie,” she said. “For one thing, there’s the length of the flight and the feeling that you’re getting out at the world’s last stop. And then you turn on the TV and there’s a whole program about someone who’s had a possum piss in their ceiling and can’t claim it on insurance. You find yourself thinking, ‘If I stay here another six weeks, will I care about that possum, too?’ ”
I understood why Australia felt remote to her. Living in Israel, she was part of what was perhaps the most plugged-in community on earth. To Israelis, world news was like oxygen. From dangerous neighbors to foreign patrons, there was barely a corner of the planet whose doings were irrelevant.
But, for me, Sydney felt much more globally connected than most American cities. The United States can afford to be insular. It’s so big that what happens elsewhere hardly ever matters much. How else to explain the lack of foreign stories on the nightly network news, or the certain social death of being introduced at a cocktail party as someone “just back from Bosnia” or Somalia or, God help you, Eritrea? Suddenly you’re trying to converse with someone who appears to be in a stand-up, eyes-open form of deep REM sleep. The mouth gapes soundlessly while the eyeballs dart and spin in search of someone else—anyone else—to talk to.
In Sydney, immigration has been so recent, so diverse, and so extensive that a person you meet at a party may well be from Bosnia or Eritrea, or their next-door neighbor might be. In the 1991 census, Sydney people listed 271 places of birth outside Australia, or 86 more places than have seats in the United Nations. More than a quarter of the population still speaks a language other than English at home. Israel now is the only country whose population is more culturally diverse, measured by inhabitants’ countries of origin.
Cohen called my room promptly at two. I hurried downstairs but couldn’t find him by the desk or in the plush lobby. I noticed a man outside on the step, fidgeting. He looked like a taxi driver waiting for a fare. It took awhile until I realized there was no one else who could possibly be Cohen.
He was medium height, thick-set, olive-skinned, with dark curly hair and Ray-Bans. Not Mossad, I decided. Maybe more the shadowy furtive style of a Shin Bet internal security agent. When I greeted him, he seemed edgy. He wouldn’t come into the hotel; refused my offer of lunch or a drink. “Let’s walk,” he said, and so we wandered off down the hotel-lined promenade.
He pointed out his car, a battered blue sedan, parked a few blocks from the hotel. He opened the door and we sat inside, and tried to fill a gap that for me was twenty-four years wide, and that for him, with no memory of having ever written to me, spanned a whole lifetime.
“My mother was very confused when you called her,” he said. “I’m confused, too.” He remembered nothing of our correspondence, and was stunned when I put his old letters in his hands. “I can’t write English so good anymore,” he said. He chuckled as he skimmed through the letters with their relentless talk of football. He still played, he said, one night each week.
We picked up his story where the correspondence left off. Cohen had left school and joined the army the year after we stopped writing. He was in an artillery unit when the Yom Kippur War broke out. During the war’s swift and brutal course, he crossed the Sinai. It was all the risk or adventure he ever craved. Forget Mossad and Shin Bet. After the army, he went to work as a teller in a bank, and he had been there ever since.
As the afternoon sun beat on the car, I felt sweat running down my face in tiny rivulets. But gradually, in his halting English, Cohen began to tell me the things he’d never put in his letters.
He was the son of parents who had been part of one of
Israel’s most dramatic immigrations. They were Yemenite Jews, descendants of the community thought to have arrived in the mountainous toe of the Arabian Peninsula around the time of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. Cohen’s parents were brought to Israel in the emergency airlift after the 1948 Independence War. In 1949, Yemen was still a medieval society of mud-brick houses ruled by an imam who wanted to protect his people from the corruption of modern life. There were no cars, no hospitals or phones, and the gates of the walled towns closed at sunset.
Yemen’s Jews had suffered discrimination. One law said they couldn’t ride camels in case a mounted posture raised their heads higher than a Muslim’s. But they also had been esteemed for their craftsmanship and learning in a culture that was still largely illiterate. In Israel in 1949, no one needed silversmiths and bookbinders, so the Yemenites became peasants. For years, the people of the airlift were the underclass of Israeli society, more similar in their customs to the Arabs they had lived among for centuries than to Israel’s secular European Jews and native-born sabras.
Cohen’s father had been only sixteen when he arrived with his bride and was placed in a camp for new immigrants. They were put to work picking oranges. Eventually they scraped together enough money to start their own business and now had a poultry farm with two hundred chickens and a small grocery store.
“It was a very hard life, but you have to understand that my parents believed it was kodesh—holy—to come to Israel.” Isolated from the rest of the Jewish world for centuries, Yemenite Jews took their faith literally from the pages of the Bible. Before the airlift, they had never seen a plane. But when one arrived to take them, they believed it was a fulfillment of the words of the prophet Isaiah: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles.”
As we talked, Cohen became more relaxed and even began to seem pleased that I’d reminded him of a forgotten part of his youth. Before we parted, I asked if he would like to bring his wife to dinner with me at the hotel the following evening. He said he would check with her and give me a call. It was his wife who phoned later that day. In English far more fluent than her husband’s she invited me to dinner at their apartment in Netanya.
I expected to be able to locate their place without any difficulty but found myself lost instead in a warren of new streets and apartment-block construction. The huge wave of Russian immigration had flooded once sleepy seaside towns like Netanya. It had become a city in the four years since I had last been there, sprawling north and south in a maze of new streets over sand dunes and uprooted orange groves.
Cohen lived well away from the beach in a vast agglomeration of gray, weather-smeared apartment blocks. Inside, the three-bedroom flat had a hotel-room impersonality. The walls were stark white, free of artworks or knickknacks. The furniture was spare and standard: a leatherette lounge suite, a dark wood-veneer cabinet, a television and a scattering of toys belonging to their four-year-old.
The cool anonymity of it all contrasted with the warmth of Cohen’s wife. Ample-hipped, with wide, dark, heavily lashed eyes, she was as outgoing as Cohen was shy, greeting me with a hug and sitting me down at the kitchen table as she served the dinner. Her family also were Yemenites—a huge clan of six brothers and six sisters.
She bustled to and from the refrigerator, chattering as comfortably as if I were an old friend. She had met Cohen through a phone call. “He rang, and I thought he was a friend of my sister’s,” she said, “so of course I was nice to him, and we chatted for quite a long time. We were laughing and getting on really well when suddenly he realized that he’d dialed the wrong number—he didn’t even know my sister.”
The two of them decided they’d better meet. “As soon as I saw him I knew he would be my husband.”
By this time the kitchen table was covered with an array of dishes: macaroni, mushroom pie, tuna salad, assorted cheeses, Greek salad, avocado, hard-boiled eggs. It was a kosher dairy meal—no meat. But there also was something Arab-style in the way the meal was served: in the mass of items, the wide and plentiful choice, I recognized the kind of meal with which an Arab honors a guest.
In Israel, even ordinary lives brush up against extraordinary situations. The little boy who fidgeted restlessly at the table had been born in the midst of a Scud attack during the war with Iraq in 1991. “I was in labor when the sirens sounded,” Cohen’s wife recalled. There was no way she could make it to a room sealed against the possibility of poison gas. “I told the nurses just to give me a gas mask and leave me.”
She was able to draw on four years of military experience to get her through the ordeal. She had wanted to serve, unlike many Orthodox girls who claim exemption from serving in the army on the grounds that a woman shouldn’t take orders from a man not her husband. She loved her job as an army instructor, reenlisting for an additional two years after her first tour expired. Then she went to work for the trade-union movement. Now she stayed home to look after her son, who was enrolled part time at a religious day-care center. At four years old, he already davened like an ancient rabbi, bobbing and bending as he raced through the Hebrew prayers.
I asked Cohen about his army reserve duty during the intifada. He deflected my query, just as he’d left so many of my questions unanswered when I was his pen pal. But when his wife got up to put their son to bed, he abruptly returned to the subject. He told me quietly that he was sent to quell rioting in the West Bank town of Jenin in December 1987, just as the uprising began. “We had no idea how heavy would be the violence,” he said. In those first days the soldiers had no riot gear. Cohen wasn’t even wearing a helmet when a teenaged Palestinian dropped a concrete block from a rooftop. “It just missed my head and landed here,” he said, leaning forward and touching the vertebrae of his upper back. “I never told my wife.”
Technically, Cohen should still have been doing military service for about a month a year until he turned forty-five. But over time the explosions of artillery shells had impaired his hearing and, to his immense relief, the military doctor had recently excused him from serving.
One reason Cohen wasn’t needed was that, since the implementation of the 1993 Oslo accords, Israeli soldiers hadn’t been required to police the streets of Palestinian villages. “With the Arabs, we give, we give, until maybe we are in the sea. But we have to try. We have no choice.”
After dessert—warmed-up packaged blintzes—Cohen pulled out photo albums. Their wedding picture showed a traditional Yemeni bride, decked in a silver cowl and golden veil with a necklace of sweet herbs framing her face and intricate henna patterns painted on her hands. There were pictures of Cohen in the Sinai, a lean teenage warrior, not so different from the fantasy Israeli of my youthful dreams. But that hollow-eyed young man in stained khakis wasn’t who Cohen wanted to be. It had been a role imposed on him by a life that I, in my faraway, tranquil Sydney suburb, had romanticized. He, forced to live it, had hated every minute. At the time the photographs were taken he had just seen three of his platoon killed and one have his leg shredded by a mortar. He had no idea how many teenage Egyptian soldiers had been slain in turn by the artillery piece he fired blindly into their positions.
Be careful what you wish for, says the old proverb. You might get it. In peaceful Concord, I had wished for adventures. As a reporter, I’d covered five wars. As Scud missiles threatened the Cohens in Israel, I camped in the Saudi desert with the French Foreign Legion and rafted 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.
Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey Page 15
