Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  It wasn’t easy to tell the Serb side. It was an unpopular side to tell. It is easier to relate a story with clear-cut good and bad rather than confuse people with explanations of what lay beneath Serb anger. Usually there is no black and white, especially when it comes to ethnic claims over land. I often felt a reflexive impulse to side with the one whose story was not being heard. And after the terrible reputation the Serbs had earned in Bosnia, I wanted to look at their side of the story when they were persecuted in Croatia. As a journalist, I often hope that showing both sides of a story will help resolve it. Only when all sides own up to their part in perpetuating conflict can reconciliation begin. Those who are being branded the bad guys often become even more frustrated as they sense that their views are not being heard.

  It wasn’t until later that I realized I might apply the same lessons to my own family. Maybe it was because I never learned my father’s side of things that I felt so drawn to trying to understand the less popular views around the world.

  Not long after covering Croatia, on a visit to the United States, I went to see Uncle Leon. I called a week in advance to tell him I was coming, because Uncle Leon doesn’t like surprises. He was thrilled and decided we would go to his favorite haunt, the Tiffany Diner.

  “I’ll go right down there and make a reservation for us, sweetheart,” he said.

  “Do diners really take reservations?” I had to ask.

  “Sweetheart, I’ll make sure they do, because every moment we have together is precious and I know what a busy lady you are.”

  When I found myself sitting across from him in Tiffany’s, eating my turkey meat loaf on white bread with mashed potatoes, something changed. I felt as if I were seeing Uncle Leon clearly for the first time, after years of thinking of him as part of the evil family that neglected us. Now I saw a kindhearted, open, loving man who just wanted for me all the things that had eluded him in life. For years I had accepted one version of events, never questioning my mother’s interpretation of my father and his family. The reality was much more interesting.

  In the past, whenever I had gone home to visit my mother’s house, Uncle Leon came to see me, taking the train up from Philadelphia. It often felt like a chore to see him. Instead of taking in his devotion to and acceptance of me no matter what I did, I was ashamed of his old-world appearance and manner. Unconsciously I associated him with my father, the enemy camp. But that night at Tiffany’s I looked at Uncle Leon through my own eyes. It was the first real conversation we had ever had, and I saw a person with a hard and painful past, but one who loved life and felt joy in its simple pleasures. It made me eager to hear stories about the family.

  As one of three brothers, Leon could never fulfill his mother’s dream—every Jewish mother’s dream—of having a doctor for a son. “I couldn’t cut the mustard, sweetheart,” he said often. His elder brother had committed suicide while attending Cornell University. Once it was clear that Leon was never going to be a doctor either, my father, the youngest, was the last hope for a doctor in the family. The family had poured all their resources into getting him to medical school. When he returned from Belfast with a young Protestant wife and small children instead of a medical degree, his family was enraged. They felt he had let them all down, which led to all those years of neglect.

  As for Leon, he had joined the Signal Corps after dropping out of law school. Three weeks before being shipped to Europe for D-Day he had a nervous breakdown. In those days, mental illness was handled harshly. He was given a year of shock treatment. “It felt as though they killed my brain repeatedly,” he told me at Tiffany’s that evening. “It took decades for my mind to heal.” It broke my heart. Uncle Leon always wanted a normal life, a wife and children, but he found it hard to reach out and he remained single. Instead he rooted for my father and came to see us when his mother and sister would have nothing to do with us. He felt loyal to his little brother and he loved his nieces. “You should be proud of what a devoted uncle you have always been to us,” I told him.

  “My greatest regret was not having a family of my own, sweetheart, and I don’t want to see the same fate befall you. It is my most ardent wish to see you married before I die.”

  “Believe me, it is my ardent wish to see me married someday soon too, Uncle Leon. I’m working on it, trust me.”

  The Spa War

  I told myself over and over that it was time to get serious about finding a man to settle down with. But then military conflict would break out somewhere else, my producers at CNN would ask me to go, and I would say yes. When I was sent to Israel, I was intrigued. After Chechnya and then Croatia, covering warfare in Israel felt like a vacation.

  Israel’s northern border with Lebanon had been a flash point off and on over the years. Southern Lebanon had been a staging ground for the Syrian-backed Hezbollah guerrilla fighters who were fighting with Israel over the nine-mile stretch of Lebanon that the Israelis occupied. Cross-border fighting was common, but it had escalated in recent days. It was April of 1996. CNN decided to mobilize its own forces on the border.

  When I arrived, it felt as though I had come to a spa. Qiryat Shemona was a popular Israeli resort town located in a lush oasis in the desert. The land was dotted with poppies, and the area was a popular hiking destination for Israelis. My crew and I slept in a comfortable hotel with clean sheets and room service. There were good restaurants and working telephones. The weather was divine—warm and sunny every day. It was strikingly civilized compared with the medieval brutality of Chechnya. The only thing that would remind me I wasn’t on holiday was the sound of heavy artillery at night from the unit stationed on the hills above us, lobbing shells into southern Lebanon. In answer, an occasional Katysha rocket landed in town or the surrounding fields. I felt none of the terror of being under siege by a Russian aerial bombardment.

  Warm wars are more tolerable than cold ones. I learned that the staff at CNN was divided sharply into those who would cover a cold-climate war and those who would go only to one in a warm climate. There are legions of cameramen and producers and correspondents who refuse to cover a military conflict of any kind unless the weather is warm enough for shorts. I came to this revelation too late in life.

  In Israel, I got up early in the mornings to get some exercise with Elaine, a CNN editor. Despite the shelling, I felt glad to be able to exercise while on assignment, instead of succumbing to the usual neglect and junk food on the road. We worried about the wisdom of wandering around outside, with all the shelling that was going on, but reassured ourselves: “Those Syrians have terrible aim.” Most of the town was in the air-raid shelters or had been evacuated. But there we were, doing our power walks through the hills, doing our best to ignore the rockets that fell occasionally in the pastures a few hundred yards away. For no rational reason, we felt sure they wouldn’t hit us.

  After a buffet breakfast, we often headed up to the Israeli artillery base to interview the soldiers who were firing their enormous guns after morning prayers, their rhythmic communion with God interrupted by the cannon fire. I felt safe with the Israelis. It seemed such a sanitized way to wage war—atop a hill, never seeing the enemy or the misery they caused on the other side of a ridge. Many soldiers would chat with their girlfriends on their cell phones from the battlefield. Like those soldiers, I didn’t want to connect with the carnage on the other side.

  There was none of the blank horror I’d see on the faces of Russia’s conscripts: the Israeli soldiers believed in what they were doing. They were bred to. At one point I came upon a group of soldiers inscribing one of the shells, To Sheikh Nasrallah, with love, referring to the chief of the Hezbollah on the other side of the border. When I asked one young soldier what he felt about the bloodbath Israeli shells caused when they hit the UN compound full of refugees in the southern Lebanon security zone, he shrugged. “They are civilians,” he said. “They are people too, and didn’t do us any harm. But these things happen in war.”

  Uncle Leon was thrilled I wa
s in Israel and he told me he was glued to the television. I often called to tell him just before I was on the air. “To think that a girl with Jewish blood is reporting on such a timely topic for Jews around the world.” He said, “It makes me so proud, sweetheart. However, a crowning accomplishment would be news of your marriage.” He was hoping, I’m sure, that I might find a nice Jewish boy in Israel. Instead I found Julian.

  After several of weeks at the war, I got a call out of the blue from Julian, a friend of a friend. A British journalist based in Israel, he invited me for a drink when I came back through Jerusalem. I’d never met him but he had seen me around and insisted on meeting me. I was flattered. I was exhausted from weeks of eighteen-hour days covering the story. I needed some romantic excitement.

  Julian was not my type. He was blond, and I liked dark men. He was sort of chubby and chain-smoked cigarettes and had an English-schoolboy way about him. Yet he had been brought up in Africa, so he had an earthy, wild quality that was at odds with his exterior.

  We felt an instant attraction to each other. We walked the ancient Jerusalem streets and talked of our sympathy for the Unabomber’s disgust with the modern world. We discovered in each other an inclination toward Luddism. He understood my waning tolerance for the profession we shared. We exchanged confidences as we watched the religious Jews bobbing at the Wailing Wall, pressing their handwritten wishes into the crumbling stone edifice dividing the city between Arab and Jew. The desert heat and the mysticism of the place heightened my senses and helped stoke the passion that was intensifying between us by the minute. We wanted to devour each other, and before night fell and the muezzins’ final call of the faithful to prayer, we raced up the two flights of stairs to his bed.

  For seventy-two hours we made violent love. The days were a blur. There was nobody else in the world but us. He said I reminded him of a lioness he once saw on the African plains. His intensity smashed through the numbness I had been feeling. He told me a hundred times a day that I was beautiful. He read me poetry in the bath, and jumped up from the table at restaurants to kiss me. He revived me, giving me back life that had been sucked out of me on the battlefields of my daily world. It was intoxicating.

  “You have been a hurricane in my life—blowing through with such amazing power and force and upsetting everything, leaving devastation in your wake,” he said as I got on the flight back to Moscow. I was in tears.

  By the time I got home, he had left five messages on my answering machine, each one more poetic than the last. “The state of my life mirrors the state of my bedroom—a sweet, mad energy has blasted through it, leaving lingering, delicious chaos behind. If only all the mess in this wicked world could be so sweet.”

  I felt dazed but happy. I had finally met someone like me, with a huge appetite for life and love. He called me constantly and spoke of how he wanted to have a tribal wedding in Kenya. We might have been together only a few days, but whatever we didn’t know about each other, we let our imaginations fill in, feeding the fantasy. We were two people so hungry for a connection, we just stampeded into the dream of a perfect future together. A friend who knew us both admonished me not to take too seriously these relationships on the road. “This one has a reputation,” she warned. I didn’t listen; I didn’t care. This was different, I thought, the real thing. He would change my world. We would run off and build a life together.

  Then I got caught up in Russian elections, while he was busy with Israeli ones. As soon as the nuts and bolts of reality tightened, with the complications of living in two different countries, he became distant almost as fast as he had jumped in. I was devastated and tried too hard to cling. That made it worse. It ended almost as quickly as it had begun.

  Lori tried to soothe me, even though she couldn’t believe it, since this one had seemed so promising. She was, as ever, wise and practical. “Don’t waste time pining over him; if he’s not the one, move on,” she counseled. “You have no time to waste.” She was more concerned about my biological clock than I was.

  Despite my disappointment, I allowed myself to see that at least I was getting better at choosing men. After Trevor’s neglect, my affair with Julian helped rebuild my confidence that I was desirable and that it was not always my fault when things did not work out. Maybe Julian hadn’t been ready for me. Maybe I had expected him to be something he wasn’t ready to be. But I felt naive. Here I was, an experienced journalist, skilled at cutting a clear path through murky situations in war or politics, but love threw me. It was getting embarrassing, telling my friends and family about another new man who didn’t work out.

  “Don’t be so desperate,” said my mother. “You have a great life; what do you need to have everything for? Why do you need a man anyway? You have that incredible job, you travel the world, and you have Max for companionship. Who could want more?”

  She was referring to my new canine friend. I always looked to my animals for clues as to how I was progressing with human relations. As my choice in canine company improved over the years, so did the men I attracted. Max was a big step up from Sara, the bloodhound, just as Julian was from Trevor.

  Max was a gray-and-white Tibetan terrier, one of many well-bred dogs thrust into Moscow’s streets: with the encroaching poverty caused by the reforms, many Russian families could barely feed themselves, let alone a dog. Many fine dogs were dumped in the apartment blocks where foreigners lived, since they would have a better chance of finding a home. Max had taken refuge that winter at the CNN bureau, another of Lena’s strays. We tried in vain to find a home for him, and it seemed incredible that no one wanted him. He was such an adorable soul I couldn’t bear the idea of turning him back out into the snowy streets.

  My mother was coming for a visit in less than a month. She would never turn away a dog in need. I called her in New Jersey and asked her if she wanted to take back a homeless Tibetan terrier. She said yes without hesitation. Max became her obsession even before she met him. Until she arrived, he was almost all she talked about when I called.

  “I bought a new bed for him,” she said. “I’ve called the Tibetan Terrier Society and they are sending me information about the breed. You know, they used to guard the Buddhist monasteries in Tibet.”

  She was evidently more excited about her new dog than about coming to see me in Russia. Only trouble was, by the time she arrived Max had been living with me and I was in love. I kept him for myself. She was heartbroken, and had to go back to New Jersey empty-handed.

  “If only you could find someone like Max,” she said unexpectedly, referring to my quest for a man. “Small and hairy and loyal.” It was about the most intimate conversation we’d ever had about my love life.

  My mother was right about one thing: men could probably smell my desperation. I badly wanted someone to walk into my life and take me away to a normal world where I’d have babies and bake cakes instead of traipsing through muddied fields littered with bodies of plane-crash victims. The world’s misery was taking a toll on my soul. I was tired of being dropped into other people’s tragic or profound moments. I was beginning to realize that I wanted to live some of my own.

  Cyberdating from the Front Lines

  I had been in Moscow almost five years before I got my transfer to London in 1995. I had loved Russia deeply, obsessively, but I had been cut off from the rest of the world for so long and taxed by the difficulties of day-to-day life in Moscow. I knew it was time to make my life easier.

  Moving to London was exhilarating. The royal family was at war, with Diana and Charles taking potshots at each other in the British media almost every day. CNN had an insatiable appetite for that soap opera, as well as for the unending trauma in Northern Ireland, where a yearlong cease-fire was crumbling. I seemed to have good luck with breaking news. My mother said that if I were sent to cover a dog show a riot would break out. In London I covered all kinds of stories, from IRA bombs exploding to eccentric old ladies who rescued donkeys from around the world to more plodding political anal
ysis on Britain’s position in the European Union. Whenever news broke, I had to jump and become an “expert” in a matter of hours on any subject, whether it was the repatriation of stolen Nazi gold or Albania’s economic crisis. I loved the range of stories and different people I met every day, from presidents to homeless drug addicts and everything in between.

  Even Uncle Leon from afar could tell how good the change was for me.

  Sweetheart,

  It was a joy and delight to catch you on the television reporting on the recent bombing in London. You look much better since your posting to England. Apparently the English food must be preferable to that in Moscow. I hope this factor helps with your prospects of finding a suitable mate in the coming year.

  Uncle Leon

  Uncle Leon was right. I was ready for a man, and tired of the slim pickings in Russia. The advent of e-mail radically improved my prospects. At least, it broadened my geographical scope. I discovered that essentially I could date anyone from anywhere in the world, even though I was still on the front lines in different parts of Europe. It had the added advantage, as so many cyberdaters have found, of allowing me to get to know a date from the safe distance of cyberspace.

  In London, my social life was still a disappointment. I had been so anxious to get away from Russian men that I never stopped to think what their British counterparts might be like. For the most part I found them inbred, pale, and wimpy. Many were unable to look me in the eye. Consider what Princess Diana had to go through with her quintessential British male. It soon became clear that there was nobody here for me.

  Jordan, a Hollywood-producer friend who acted as my Jewish godfather, tried to help by launching his own search for me in Los Angeles. He felt indebted to me for showing him a good time when he had visited St. Petersburg with a group of filmmakers a few years earlier. I had snatched him away from his boring tour group and taken him to some of my favorite haunts, like Peter the Great’s three-hundred-year-old collection of anatomical abnormalities, a grisly exhibit of deformed fetuses, two-headed lambs, and Siamese twins pickled in jars.