Flirting with Danger

by Siobhan Darrow

  Northern Ireland is one of those conflicts where the U.S. news media took a stand long ago and developed a knee-jerk sympathy for the IRA as the underdogs against British rule. I carefully monitored myself for any residual prejudice against the Catholic side from my childhood but I was also anxious to tell the less-heard Protestant viewpoint. As reporters we often cover the side that is most vocal, whoever plays the better victim. Sinn Fein were masters at getting their story out and fawned all over the press. The Protestants hadn’t quite grasped that essential aspect of modern warfare: get the press on your side.

  I was surprised to see the Orangemen in action. There was something archaic about these men who marched in bowler hats and sashes and went to bonfires burning the Irish tricolor and the pope in effigy. They were nothing like my mother. I was out covering a bonfire one night where just about everyone sported a tattoo and a beer can. I called my mother on my cell phone to describe the scene to her.

  “I’m with your people,” I told her.

  “That crowd certainly aren’t my people, I can assure you,” said my mother in her haughtiest voice.

  Sometimes I met people in Northern Ireland who could rise above their cultural and religious identities and find strength in their identity as humans—as fathers, as brothers, as people who simply wanted to live in peace. Usually something so terrible had happened to them that all those symbols of their identity had lost meaning, like a man I met the day after a cease-fire was declared by the IRA. His teenage daughter had been the last victim of sectarian violence—that round, anyway. She was a seventeen-year-old Catholic. She was shot dead in bed. Her crime? A Protestant boyfriend.

  “I forgive her killers,” her father told me and my crew, sitting in his garden two days after her death. “Revenge just keeps it going—you kill my child, I’ll kill yours. Somebody has to stop the cycle. If my daughter’s death stops this cycle, she won’t have died in vain.”

  We stopped the camera. I thanked him, went into our van, and burst into tears. I have so many stored up for every mother I’ve interviewed who lost a son to an IRA bomb or every Balkan villager who has lost his home, and every husband who lost his wife in a plane crash. I have been collecting tears for so long that now the tiniest pinprick can unexpectedly unleash a torrent.

  Then there are the ancient tears. They have waited a long time to wet my cheeks and come out of their dark well of hiding. The old ones mix with the new ones. A small girl’s unshed tears. Tears so old and in need of shedding that any hint of sadness lures them to the surface.

  It was during moments like these that I couldn’t imagine ever doing anything else with my life. To witness people in their darkest moments reach inside themselves and find courage inspired me to do the same.

  The “Swan” and the Land of Bunkers

  When I sat down to think about the array of men I was dating in my thirties, I could finally see what any sensible person would have noticed right away: none of them wanted the same things I did. Trevor was an action junkie who was addicted to adrenaline, completely miswired for anything resembling a relationship; Julian was young and undomesticated, still looking at women as notches on his belt buckle. When Mel came along, talking about a burning desire to settle down and make babies, I thought he was the guy I had been waiting for.

  OK, so he was forty and still lived with his mother in Beverly Hills, but that was because he came home when his father died and stayed a few years longer than expected. Sweet, I thought. This guy cares about family. Maybe I should have suspected something when I came to visit and we slept in his older sister’s long-vacated room, frilly pink bedspread and all. I noted the parallel to my father and his unnatural attachment to his mother. But I could hardly write off every man simply because he had a mother. The other sign I underestimated was his constant worry about his weight. He was tall and skinny, but always stepping on and off the scales. Over the years I’ve learned to be wary of a man without a huge appetite. If they hold back at the dinner table, chances are they may show similar restraint in the bedroom.

  There was something comforting in this tall, lumbering, matzo brei–eating Jewish male. He was smart and funny, and seemed to be just the type of person I should make a life with. Plus, he was a budding screenwriter, like everyone else in Los Angeles, so he could easily pack his computer and come to be with me wherever I had to go. I was smitten on our first date: dinner overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Angeles. Mel compared himself to a swan, wanting to mate for life. I was used to meeting men who were more apt to liken themselves to alpha-male baboons in search of a harem. I fell hard for it, responding with the story of a black swan I covered in England. When the swan’s mate died, he seemed to be dying of loneliness himself, prompting a nationwide search to find him a new mate. Mel and I looked deeply into each other’s eyes. It seemed right.

  Then I started calculating. I was thirty-six. I had about a year more on my contract in London. If Mel and I could get to know each other transatlantically, when my contract came up we would be ready to settle down together. That way I could still have a couple of kids before I turned forty and have a reasonable engagement period before marriage. Like many other single women my age, I was getting obsessed with my biological clock. I had even reached the point where I was estimating the number of ovulations I had left in life.

  “If I ovulate twelve times a year and I have eight more fertile years, that leaves only ninety-six chances to get pregnant!” I moaned to Francesca in a panic.

  “There’s always that doctor up in Scotland that cloned Dolly the sheep,” Francesca offered.

  “Yeah, maybe I can just clone myself, if worse comes to worst. At least I’d know what I was getting,” I said.

  It was more than an idle thought. I had just come back from reporting on Dolly, the famous first clone, who lived on a remote farm near Edinburgh. Meeting Dolly, a cuddly Fin Dorset lamb, was more exciting than the usual tin-pot dictator or guerrilla leader. As I put my hand in her pen and patted her woolly body, I felt I was reaching out and touching the next century. She had been made from a mammary cell of her so-called mother, hence the name Dolly, as in Dolly Parton. Dolly gave the media a chance to come up with all kinds of nightmare scenarios. Will we clone ourselves for spare parts? Will parents want backup children in case of damage or death? Will Saddam Hussein clone legions for an army? I had none of those concerns; instead, I thought of Dolly as a way out of depending on a man to fulfill my dream of motherhood.

  Mel seemed right, and I daydreamed that my father had set us up from heaven. Maybe he had hooked up with Mel’s recently deceased father to create a celestial shidech, Jewish matchmaking. I congratulated myself that I had waited for the right one to come along, someone who wanted the same things I did. And Uncle Leon would be so happy that I had found a Jewish guy. Mel was smart and funny and just neurotic enough to appreciate all my insecurities. He nicknamed me Cataclysmia, Melodramatica, Catastrophia, and Abandonia, making fun of my predilection to over-dramatize any hint of trouble in our relationship.

  Usually, whenever a friend or relative came to London to visit me, news would break and I would be sent off to cover some crisis. I knew if Mel and I were to have a chance, I needed to be in London when he flew over to see me. I asked CNN not to send me anywhere for a month. In the preceding six weeks I had been in Moscow, Budapest, Belfast twice, and Edinburgh. My producers in Atlanta were understanding and said I could stay and cover London stories and let some of the other correspondents do the traveling.

  Sure enough, the day after Mel arrived there was a midair plane crash in India. The producer who called pretended to feel bad for a moment, but then got back to business, insisting that there was nobody else who was available. Always the good soldier, I agreed to go. It didn’t matter that my boyfriend had just flown halfway around the world to see me; I didn’t have the guts to say no to CNN. Leaving Mel and Max alone in my apartment, I got on the next plane.

  After landing in New Delhi, I drove four hours t
hrough the night to the chickpea and mustard fields where a Saudi Airways aircraft and Kazakh Air cargo plane had collided. Falling from the sky at twenty thousand feet does terrible things to a body. It bloats heads and torsos so they look like swollen caricatures. The makeshift mortuary set up at a nearby school presented a whole new experience of death. The bodies were brought in, lain out gently, and draped in white muslin as smoke swirled about the rooms from the Hindu prayer fires. The burning incense scented the air sweetly with sandalwood but couldn’t quite mask the intolerable, putrid stench of human death. Bodies waiting for identification were carefully lined up, like empty vessels, no longer able to carry the spirits that once inhabited them. Family members came to identify them, but there was none of the Balkan or Caucasian wailing at the side of a loved one. Instead, I saw a resigned acceptance of transmuting spirits. Perhaps in a society where life is viewed as transitory, there is greater peace with death. I did a couple of stories on the crash, as well as one on the treacherous air-traffic control conditions at the New Delhi airport. The experience did nothing for my already considerable anxiety about flying, but like so many things, I tried to keep it from my mind. I got back to London just in time for Mel to leave. He tried to be understanding, but this was no way to have a relationship.

  I knew I had to make time for Mel if it was ever going to work. But sure enough, the next time we planned a visit, I was shipped off to Albania. Perhaps I should have been thinking about my relationship; instead I became engrossed in another news assignment. It was a rare chance to go to a country that had always intrigued me. Albania was the most secretive and backward of all the former Communist states. After five decades of Stalinist repression, it was considered one of the world’s most isolated countries. It was also Europe’s poorest country. Enver Hoxha, who had ruled Albania for decades, was so paranoid he broke off ties with the Soviets and Chinese for straying too far from Stalinist ideals. After years of deprivation and poverty, cut off from the rest of the world and told they lived in paradise, Albanians were shocked when the old regime fell and television from the rest of Europe was suddenly available. It showed them a world of luxury and decadence that they didn’t even know existed. In a land with few cars, where people still depended on horse-drawn carts, where rock and roll, jeans, and even beards had been banned as symbols of Western capitalism, Albania made the former Soviet Union look like southern California.

  Now Albania was making the transition to democracy, but the country’s desperate poverty paved the way for trouble. Albanians were easy targets for get-rich-quick cons. Pyramid schemes flourished. Then one huge pyramid swept the country and collapsed suddenly, taking many people’s savings with it. Albanians started rioting and the country descended into a shooting gallery as angry citizens broke into weapons-storage facilities and started firing stolen guns indiscriminately in the streets. After decades of strict law and order, a taste of freedom brought on dizzying chaos. It was as if a nation of children had been let out of school and was having a giant temper tantrum. Schoolteachers, artists, waiters, and businessmen all took part in a frenzy of stealing and looting. It was not so much a murderous rampage as a way of rebelling, letting off steam.

  In his paranoia, Hoxha had built 700,000 bunkers across this tiny country to ward off attack from the United States, the Chinese, and the Soviets. They were concrete pillboxes big enough for a man and his gun, an indestructible reminder of the impoverished country’s insular mind-set. Almost every visible piece of open landscape was bunkerized. Now, after the collapse of the old order, they stood like poisoned toadstools, blighting a beautiful Adriatic country and condemning its people to a mentality of distrust and fear of the outside, rendering them badly unprepared for the enemy that had erupted from within. I was fascinated by the bunkers; they were both tragic and humorous. Some Albanians grasped the irony, and sold small alabaster bunkers as tourist souvenirs. I bought as many as I could carry, and to this day I have eight dotting my living room. Whenever we were out shooting our story of the day, I’d insist on stopping to film one more bunker. They were always stuck in some incongruous place, in a schoolyard, a vineyard, the beaches, farms, front yards. They even watched over the dead in the cemeteries. I did almost two dozen stories out of Albania about the looting, shooting, and embassy evacuations, but it was the piece I did on the bunkers, those useless bulwarks against invasion from the outside, that told Albania’s real story.

  Besides the bunkers, there was the relentless sound of gunfire. Armed with ransacked weapons and unlimited ammunition, Albanians fired their guns day and night. Usually they weren’t firing at anyone, just randomly into the air. The noise didn’t stop for weeks. I couldn’t hear birds chirping. I couldn’t hear car horns sounding. I just heard gunfire twenty-four hours a day. I heard it when I woke up in the morning and when I went to sleep at night. I sometimes wondered if a stray bullet might come through my window, but I’d quickly put that thought away and cover my head with a pillow, as if it might offer some protection.

  As with everything, I got used to it quickly. The gunfire was so loud, my mother could hardly hear me over the phone line when I called to tell her my visit home with Mel had been delayed.

  “Is everything OK?” she asked tentatively, never making a big deal about the dangers of my job.

  “Oh, yes, they are just shooting into the air, not at us.” I wanted to alleviate her anxiety but I also wanted to bask in it for a moment. I was not used to hearing her worry about me.

  “Yes, but whatever goes up has to come down somewhere.”

  She had a point. I thought we should be walking around wearing helmets but nobody else was, and I would have been embarrassed to overtly show fear. She changed the subject. “How are the carpets? I bet they have fine ceramics,” my mother inquired, making sure I didn’t miss a shopping opportunity wherever I was.

  The situation deteriorated so much that eventually all the foreign embassies decided to evacuate their staffs. U.S. helicopter pilots were reluctant to fly in at first, deterred by the constant gunfire. The Italians, who had more experience on the ground in Albania, were the first to start ferrying out embassy dependents. Once the marines saw, via CNN, that the Italians were braving the random fire to bring out people, they sent choppers into the U.S. embassy compound.

  At the same time that Albanians were marauding in the streets with their pilfered arms, and the marines were ferrying foreigners out to safety, President Bill Clinton pulled a muscle in his leg. Producers in Atlanta, who had been briefly interested in this country they had never heard of because there were lots of guns going off, instantly lost interest. But as usual, my producers wanted me to stay on indefinitely.

  Making sense of a country stuck in the fifteenth century, like reporting on a sheep from the twenty-first century, was all in a day’s work. But finding a way to share my bizarre world with a man was proving impossible. I had expected to be in Albania for five or six days, but I was there for three weeks. Mel went home.

  In principle, Mel liked the idea of a tough modern woman hanging around wars, but not the reality of flying across the ocean to see me, then for me to disappear. I couldn’t blame him. He had good intentions and really thought he wanted an accomplished woman who could match his intellect and ambition. But when it came down to it, he really seemed just to want someone like his mother: a polished, well-educated woman who stayed at home and devoted herself to taking care of him. Maybe I should have known when he said, “My mother is a huge part of my life. Anyone who loves me has to accept that.” What that meant, I found, was that everything, including me, came second to his mother. But I suppose in my turn I was saying everything came second to CNN.

  After six months of traveling back and forth, talking with me via phone and e-mail, Mel announced that he was “confused,” a code word I recognized in modern lingo that means “I want out.” I wondered whether it had anything to do with meeting my family. We had just had a visit to Highland Park, New Jersey, where Mel got a full dose of t
he eccentricities of my tribe. There was the usual gathering of strays that my mother collects, ranging from a visiting Chinese professor who barely spoke English to her “park friends,” the assorted dog fanatics that my mother picks up at the park when out walking her beloved charges. She always finds some needy and often strange human to invite over.

  Uncle Leon may have pushed him over the edge. He was so excited to see this big Jewish guy with a great education that he couldn’t stop himself from interrogating Mel on his intentions. “So, Mel, are you thinking of marriage? You know I never married and I regret it every day of my life. A man is nothing without a wife and family, nothing. When I see a nice young man like you I hate to think you’ll end up alone,” Uncle Leon lectured, employing his usual subtlety. “You know Siobhan has a college degree from Duke University.” I was waiting to see if he’d mention the fact that I have no cavities. He often urges me in his weekly letters to get my teeth cleaned. Sure enough, that was next.

  “Doesn’t Siobhan have a great smile? A man doesn’t want a woman with missing teeth, and all the Darrow girls have good teeth. My father was a dentist, so we understand the importance of good teeth.” Mel looked aghast.