Days Like Today (2 page)

Generals listened to his broadcasts. They approved. Here was someone who got it right, they’d think; at other times they’d be enraged by what he was saying. They’d want to meet him so that they could correct some detail in his reports or change the overall impression he’d given. They knew that he didn’t care about anything except the truth and that, if he believed them, he’d pass on their version to the world. He was willing to listen to any side. But he also spoke out. He reported his thoughts and that was what his audiences loved. Over the years they had come to think that they knew him. And they felt that he was a friend. He had the right reactions. He was sympathetic in the manner of an artist, not merely an observer; he made people believe that his point of view was correct because it was the only reasonable one.

Joan didn’t understand how he could have survived everything he’d seen – as well as the guilt of being a bystander to others’ suffering – and how he could continue to go back and back again to the horrors without having some sort of religion to sustain him. And yet he didn’t. Neither
did most of his fellow reporters, although that didn’t surprise her – so many of the ones he introduced to her were obsessed by competitiveness and self-aggrandizement.

He’d been brought up to put his trust in a mild form of Christian ethics mixed with the principles of Humanism: a system of belief that didn’t take seriously the forces of evil in the world. Being present at the battlefront had done nothing to strengthen those ideals, nor had it undermined them. The ethical basis of his upbringing held firm. But he lost faith in the idea of God as soon as he saw how many massacres were instigated or avoided by purely human endeavor. They were caused by man and could be changed by man.

The less he believed in God, the more he valued the importance of what he wore into the danger zones, how he wore it, what he carried with him and the order in which his possessions were packed or unpacked. A few of his finicky notions had begun as practical time-saving devices and as the result of losing a shoe, twisting an ankle or getting a sleeve caught. But the rest had to do with a kind of therapy. While he was concentrating on getting all the details in place, he didn’t have time for nerves.

He told her often enough that he’d been scared out of his wits on assignments, but he always said that kind of thing jokingly, as if consciously exaggerating. She understood that he wouldn’t want to talk about feeling afraid. Fear was something he lived with all the time, even when not on duty; it was part of everybody’s psychological defense system and in his case it would have to be working overtime.
He didn’t mention his good-luck charms either, except laughingly, in a way that was slightly coy. Yet whatever they gave him was a necessity. They seemed to be vital to his sense of hope.

He had more lucky charms than a tennis player or a teenage girl. And he took them all with him whenever he set out for danger.

The collection had started a long time ago. Some had been his as a child, others were small trinkets he’d picked up on his travels, usually one per trip. But the majority had been sent to him by fans. Only three had lasted from the very beginning: a silver teddy bear, a blue enameled St Christopher medal and a gold-colored souvenir keg from the neck of a whiskey bottle. The keg was the largest – about the size of a fingernail – but practically weightless.

Over the years there had been many additions and subtractions as new items were proved to bring either good or bad luck. There was the safety pin, the dime, the brown bead that looked like a vitamin pill, the flat metal ring that might have been the backing for a button; a theater ticket, now no more than an illegible scrap of cardboard; a red metal paperclip. The paperclip had arrived at Christmas and he’d used it to attach an official letter to his passport. It had been responsible for gaining him entry to forbidden territory. It had brought him a lot of luck, so it had been kept.

He traveled light. A waterproof shoulder bag held the essentials, including the tape recorder, extra notebook, pencil and pen and the Swiss jackknife with its nail file, corkscrew and fish-scaler. There was room for a shirt, two
pairs of underpants and socks, a T-shirt, sweater, a raincoat that folded into a pack hardly bigger than a slice of bread; and a pair of sandals in case he lost his shoes or had them stolen.

The duffel bag contained more shirts, boots, an old wool shawl that could be used as a blanket, a second suit, a portable phone and a laptop computer, which he’d never used. He hardly ever took anything out of the main bag, other than an extra shirt.

Gradually he had varied his routine of preparing for the front line. At the time when they first became lovers, he allowed Joan to do most of his packing. But after a few years she was hardly permitted to go near the shoulder bag and certainly not to approach the sacred talismans in the security belt, all of which had to be packed in the right order. He might give her a list of what he wanted, but he always took care of the most important things himself. And if he allowed her to slip something in at the last minute, that was an exception.

‘What’s this?’ she asked one day, coming into the bedroom while he was packing. ‘Your magic underpants?’ She reached over and held up the garment for inspection. He snatched it from her, saying, ‘That’s exactly what they are.’

‘Max, they’re full of holes. How did you get them past me? I haven’t been washing anything like this – I would have noticed.’

‘It’s all right. I wash all these myself.’

‘At least let me sew up the tears.’

‘No sewing, no replacement. They’re fine.’

‘We could sell them to a museum and say those were bullet holes.’

‘Don’t joke about it.’

She opened her hand above the array of trinkets, being careful not to touch them, which he wouldn’t have liked. They were laid out over the bedspread in a sequence that – apparently – corresponded to the order of acquisition.

‘A man of many charms,’ she said. She put her arms around him. And he didn’t push her away, but his mind was on other things. He continued to pack while she rubbed her face against his shirt.

She didn’t understand how a man of his intelligence could really believe that primitive rituals could save his life. That was faith as misplaced as the extravagant notions held by high-school girls and boys who were anxious to ward off pregnancy

‘If you tell the truth and do what’s right,’ he’d once told her, ‘you automatically fall into harmony with the world: your pace is one step ahead of the bomb and one behind the mine going off.’

‘Because you deserve to escape?’ she’d asked. ‘Because your good intentions actually mean something?’

He’d shrugged, saying that he couldn’t explain it any other way and that if there was a chance in hell of his being right, he certainly wasn’t going to start changing his habits: in fact, it made him slightly uneasy to refer to the matter at all.

He knew as well as she did: there was no physical armor that could protect you against modern weaponry. And as
for psychological defenses, they worked only on and against the mind. They got you out there and they got you through it. They were important. But they couldn’t save you.

She’d thought up many theories to account for the discrepancies in his behavior. One had something to do with surrogate emotion and the suppression of anger. But none of them lasted; in the end she knew him too well to be able to explain him and she stopped trying to question what he was or how he thought. Often she didn’t understand her own motives, either.

The only time he made a comment about suffering a possible reaction from his work was once when he said to her, ‘The ones who survive are all crackpots.’ He seemed to think that he was just stating a fact and that there was no sense in trying to change it. Presumably the other war correspondents – who weren’t in some way damaged – didn’t survive. He said nothing about the ones who stayed alive and continued to broadcast despite the fact that they were so stupid, lazy and dishonest that they regularly used large chunks of other people’s material, sometimes simply by asking a girlfriend to translate published or broadcast passages for them. He was too engrossed by the iniquities of politics to become exercised about lesser questions: every discipline had its cheats.

In his profession the cynical were looking for money and fame; the morally committed took their trips into the death zone because they would have liked to be priests and saviors – to make people better, to force them to look at them
selves; and to lead them towards an understanding of the brutality and irrationality of certain actions. Max was one of the moral ones: there was no doubt about that. As Joan began to know him better, she sometimes thought of him as a valiant knight, like a figure from a storybook – a man who was driven into danger by his sense of chivalry: to rescue the truth.

She loved to listen to him talk about his work. Even when the facts were unpleasant, in the recounting he could transform them into something close to art. He told her stories of poverty, disease, political and military mismanagement, torture and imprisonment. The long stream of reported injustice would have been too much for her to bear if it hadn’t been for the fact that among the victims and dispossessed there turned out to be as many liars, chiselers, frauds and killers as among their oppressors. That added a touch of monstrous comedy to the tales. At times she thought of his job as a combination of police work, priesthood and stage management. And he seemed to know everyone.

His acquaintance included soldiers of every rank, ambulance drivers, librarians, poets, assassins, Red Cross workers, photographers, health inspectors, forgers, explorers, helicopter pilots: anyone who wanted to talk. And women; women from all over, of differing ages and shapes and various degrees of beauty, suffering, health, deviousness, intelligence and despair.

What he got up to out there with other women didn’t matter to her. Out there would stay where it was. She was sure that any amorous adventure he might engage in while
on an assignment would be a thing he’d consider, from the very outset, temporary. She didn’t really believe that he’d ever be tempted, because he was so fascinated, appalled and excited by his work that nothing could distract him. While his concentration was fixed on it, warfare itself became a substitute for the erotic.

The first marriage hadn’t been in such bad shape as he’d hinted. Not that his version was dishonest: as anyone sensible or practical would do, he tried out the new relationship before deciding to leave the old one. And Joan, knowing that he was married, had still been eager to hand over her life to him. She’d wanted to throw herself into her fate, making the attachment more intensely romantic by believing that right from the start it was too late to turn back. But as soon as she really fell in love with him, she stopped having fun being the other woman. She wanted to be the main woman – the real one. She was ready to fight for him.

Then came the surprise: there wasn’t any fight. The first wife stood back, agreed to a divorce: disappeared.

Joan grabbed her good fortune and held on. She and Max married. They settled down; they had children. They continued to love and, for a while, to be happy.

For the first three years of their marriage she was able to concentrate on him to the exclusion of everything else. And after the children were born, she usually managed – in the early days – to get them tucked in for the night so that she and he could be alone. But with time, that changed. When
the family was suddenly all together again, the children needed reassurance that she still loved them; they’d call down from their rooms that they couldn’t sleep; they’d ask for glasses of water and – simplest of all – they’d cry. Even the baby would become additionally demanding when Max was at home. And then Joan would worry that because of her need to be with him, she was neglecting her children.

Sometimes it seemed to her that he’d passed his fears on to her: that she’d been delegated to keep them safe until he got back – that he left all the dangerous emotions with her and took with him only his talismans, his special clothes, his lucky boots – like a child going off to war with a pea-shooter and a rabbit’s foot.

She worried about his comfort, feared for his safety and his sanity. Within moments of his departure she longed for him to come back. And the more she feared, the more surely she believed that, while he was gone, he was protected by the way she felt about him.

On the two occasions when he’d been wounded, she’d known about it before being told. The first time, she was in the kitchen and about to reach up for a coffee cup; the second time, she was with a friend at a play. That initial warning instant, at home in the kitchen, hadn’t told her what her alarm might indicate, other than that something was wrong. When the same thing happened again, she knew that it had to do with Max. She was convinced that when he was closest to death, her love was what shielded him.

She was glad that his first wife hadn’t wanted children. That had been one of his greatest disappointments in the
marriage: his wife had refused to have children until he changed to a less dangerous branch of his work.

Joan had imagined that children would bind her and Max more closely to each other, but soon it began to seem that always – at just those moments when it was important that he and she should be together – the kids did what they could to come between them; they wanted him all to themselves and at the same time they resented him for interrupting their hold on her. Max would load on the entertainment for a solid two hours and then pick up the phone for a baby-sitter.

They’d go out to restaurants. They’d walk arm in arm. Once they checked into a hotel for a couple of days, leaving the kids with relatives who boasted afterwards about how well-behaved the children were: good as gold – no trouble at all.

While he was away she read the children bedtime stories. All they ever wanted to hear about was kings and queens, fairy-tale princesses, castles and dragons: the past as it never was, the era of Romance. She loved their insistence on the stereotypes and clichés of good fortune. She saw it as an innocence to be fostered. When they grew up, they’d be bored by the trials of true love and the daring of knights on horseback. They might even want pictures of car crashes and machine-gun massacres, blood and wreckage. They’d be able to appreciate their father’s work and to know why he’d had to be away from them so often. But until they were older, his absences were going to disarrange what should have been the regular pattern of their lives.