Buying the Night Flight (18 page)

As I observed these developing nations and peoples, I understood their complexes; I felt with them in their traumas; I comprehended their absurdities. The revolution within me and within women had many of the same components of the revolution that they were going through. This also gave me a kind of freedom and perhaps special empathy in reporting. For I treated these people with respect, yet I did not feel I had to pamper them because, in truth, I was one of them.

Other difficulties of being a woman in this profession took an amusing turn on one Chilean assignment. While traveling in the south of Chile with then-president Frei, I was working with (correspondents almost always just naturally teamed up)
Newsweek's
Milan Kubic. I found him to be an exceptional journalist and a pleasant colleague. Our bevy of Latin and North
American journal lists had come down in a separate press plane, and the plane was not returning to Santiago for another day. That presented a problem, for none of us wanted or needed to stay another day in the remote southland.

During one of the rallies that took place near a large forest, while hundreds upon hundreds of people roved about us, while children ran and shrieked and while Frei himself was speaking over a loud speaker, I stood for about twenty minutes talking with the minister of finance, a cultured gentleman named Santa Maria. He was a pleasant, gray-haired, elderly man, and we talked mostly about how they were trying to transform Chile through the economy. For some reason I mentioned to him my one problem: getting back to Santiago. To my surprise and then delight he responded at once.

"You can have my seat in the president's plane," he said pleasantly. "I am staying down here to visit with family. Just be at the bottom of the steps to the plane well before takeoff time -- I will personally put you on."

I was delighted with my good luck, for getting about is one of the great problems of journalists. So there I was at the appointed time. Minister Santa Maria duly wished me well and put me onto a plane that was two thirds empty. I arrived quickly back in Santiago while the rest of the press corps waited it out in the South.

I did catch a glimpse of Milan, whom I had informed of this, standing well behind the stairs to the plane. It seemed to me, even at that distance, that he had a peculiar, petulant look about him.

I did not give this episode another thought until, as I continued to make my way around the world, I kept running into Milan's account of this little event.

First I heard about it in Vietnam, from astonished male colleagues. Then I heard about it in Latin America, again from the same sort of group. But it was the last time I heard about it that it really irked me. In the winter of 1969 I was driving from Beirut to Damascus for an interview with Yasser Arafat. When our car stopped at the always-troubled border, our group had a jovial reunion with a group of journalistic colleagues in the car just ahead of us, among them the
Los Angeles Times's
Bill Touhy and Milan Kubic. It seemed to me that we had had a particularly jolly few minutes.

In Damascus and later in Beirut, however, the men in the first car asked me in various versions, "What is the matter with Kubic?" In effect, as soon as they had reboarded their car, Kubic went into a diatribe about me: that day in Chile I had taken "his" seat on Frei's plane; I had gotten it by "sleeping" with Santa Maria; that was the way that "blondes" operated in this field, in which women should be kept out, etc., etc. It was exactly the same story that he had been telling all over the world, and which had come back to me through close male friends in the profession.

At first I was angry. Then I grew more and more amused. Finally, one night in a madcap mood, I wrote Milan a tongue-in-cheek letter. I noted that, since this story had become so much a part of his life and was obviously so important to his well-being, I should and would help him spread it around. However, I felt it only fair that he include with it a "minority report": my side of the story. First I wanted to know: "Which seat was it that was really yours, since two thirds of the plane was empty?" I thanked him for the compliment -- it was indeed hard and even tiring being a beautiful blonde and having to seduce every man, even for a plane seat, and even harder to seduce Santa Maria while standing in the forest with hundreds of people around.

A month later I ran into Milan, whom I really liked and certainly admired, in the lobby of the Nile Hilton in Cairo. I walked right over and greeted him heartily. He took one look at me and quite literally fled out of the lobby.

But in one way he was right. It is very different being a woman in this business.

***

As I watched, Chile proceeded along its hazardous, hopeful path, as the Catholic Church and the Marxists fought it out over ideologies as different as olive oil and Perrier water, I was learning more and more about being a journalist. I was learning how to psych out a society, to find out where the weak points were, to discover who would talk, who had something to say, and where he or she hung out. Putting the intricate puzzle together: that was my great joy.

In everyday working terms I would come into the country and check into my favorite hotel and then spend perhaps most of the first day sitting on my bed and making call after call after call. From there I went on to interview after interview, and soon learned who were the interesting people. Usually these were not the leaders but the people just behind them. I kept notebooks (and have kept them still); they are the palpable representation of my innermost thoughts and, of course, of the work.

I also found ways of making myself "one" with a new place -- rather like a puppy or a cat scratching into his bed. I would never, for instance, check into a hotel and go to sleep, no matter what the hour, without first walking all around the hotel and environs. In that way I made the place mine, I integrated it into myself; and I virtually never felt out of place or lonely. I was creating a reality out of pieces -- and it, of course, was creating me.

And I learned how to pack. I always find it curious that people are so interested in how I pack, so ... I take three light, washable dresses of different styles and for different needs; a heavy sweater with fur collar; a handsome raincoat; one long dress; a bathing suit; a nightgown and light robe; and one kind of crazy thing so I don't get bored with myself. With this I can usually go from the Arctic to the tropics. My biggest problem is carrying along all the papers, files, and books I need.

If it is a solitary profession, it is also a kind of loving involvement with history. To insert yourself lovingly into another culture means a very special kind of love affair. The director Robert Bolt has said, "The comparison between a love affair and the making of a film is not so exaggerated as it sounds. There is the same day and night preoccupation, the same switchback of elation and gloom, the same absurd intensity. A film-maker gives to his film the sort of anxious attention which is only properly bestowed upon a woman." It is the same being a foreign correspondent. Sitting alone sometimes in a cafe, I would be overcome by the mystery, by the joy, by the sense of watching or of being watched. I got a sensuous thrill out of the travel, the excitement, the observing and exploring. I have always felt sorry for people who couldn't love other peoples and other countries; I
adored
each new place. And the mysteries became ever more mysterious.

***

One day at lunch in Rio, one of the United Press correspondents mentioned that Walter Rauff, the second-most-wanted Nazi, was living in Chile on the remote southern island of Tierra del Fuego. There had been an extradition fight over him, but the time period had run out, so he was able to remain in Chile. Yet while people knew where he was, no one had succeeded in interviewing him. Many had made the long trip down to the bottom of the world and had sought him out in the remote fishing village where he lived, but all had been coldly turned away. When I returned to my hotel that afternoon, I put a notation in my book under Chile (I have always kept a book listing countries and ideas and names and phone numbers of people there) and vowed the next time to try to see Herr Walter Rauff, mass murderer.

Several months later, when I again found myself in Chile, I flew down to Punta Arenas, the pleasant modern city on the wild and historic Straits of Magellan. The next day I arranged to fly across the Straits to the barren, isolated island. At the oil camp there the workers were nice--they even fed me lunch at the company dining room--but I was impatient to move on. Already it was early after noon and I had another eighty miles to reach Porvenir, the remote fishing village where Rauff lived in utter seclusion. This last portion of the trip was taken in a jeep. Once in that barren cluster of houses that is Porvenir, I asked a policeman for the house. He climbed in the back of the truck. "We had a warning that somebody might attack him some time ago," he said, "and we try to watch his house."

Porvenir -- the word means "future" in Spanish. It is a place where the cold gray waters from Antarctica slap at the black rocky beaches and the wind wails day after day. Black-necked swans fly overhead, white salt beds dapple the land, and the camellike guanacos race in packs of thousands across the unrelieved loneliness of Tierra del Fuego, the last place on earth.

When the door to the Pirata crabmeat factory opened to my insistent knock, there stood Rauff, a short man with chiseled Prussian features, now in his sixties and dressed in a neat brown tweed jacket with a tan neck scarf.

"Yes, come in," said Rauff. "It's nice to have company. But, no, I cannot give any interview. I am not news anymore, and I don't want any publicity."

I sat down and tried to convince him. I lapsed into German; I spoke Spanish with him. He was glad to have company, he said in both, but that was it. Even then I sensed that he was torn between wanting to talk and not wanting to talk. He was living a very simple, very quiet life there in Porvenir. The fishermen of the village could not understand how their kindly neighbor could be accused of killing 100,000 people.

He chatted informally as he moved about his cozy little room, with its shortwave radio and its Germanic touches, but of one thing he was certain -- I had to leave. That very night. I knew of no realistic way to stay, so I said nothing.

It was 5:00 p.m. Rauff stood by his radio, trying to call the main "airline" office in Punta Arenas. Then it was 5:05, and 5:10. He paced. "One thing I cannot stand," he said, "is when people are not punctual. I am always punctual."

Now it was time for the "evening plane," really a bush plane, back to Punta Arenas. But before going to the "airport" he took me for a ride in his truck with his big dog, Bobby, barking nervously in the back. We drove out the five miles to the Straits of Magellan, the historic passage that divides the island from the mainland, and this evening the Straits were wild, with stormy whitecaps.

Along the way Rauff showed me the fishermen's camps, wooden shacks huddled along the beaches. "And I, who loved big cities, have to live here," he murmured.

"Why do you stay now?" I asked.

"There are many people who would like to get me," he answered matter-of-factly. "Here -- they see everyone who comes and goes."

Being with Walter Rauff was a strange experience. I knew he was wanted by West Germany as the second-most-wanted Nazi war criminal. Yet he could obviously be a charming and a cultured man. I felt safe with him because the evidence against him shows that he was what the Germans call a
Schreibtisch
murderer -- a man who kills by signing papers at a "writing desk." He was as remote from his actions as the place he had now put himself.

How does a journalist relate or not relate to such a man? How should one? There are no rules; you make them up as you go along. My own feeling was to be outwardly nonjudgmental, in much the same way as good law officers try to be with criminals. Obviously, that would have been impossible were he still in power.

We were standing in the little shack, with its radio equipment, in the primitive airport. The man on the radio kept asking the distant bush plane,
"Cuando van a venir, chicos?"
And then I heard, in Spanish, the reply,
"No vamos a poder aterrizar esta noche a causa del tiempo, pero
--We won't be able to land this night because of the weather, but almost certainly we'll come tomorrow early."

I looked up and looked at Rauff. He looked stricken. I was staying.

Now it was 7:00 p.m. and he was sitting in his little living room drinking coffee, which he served with the impeccable neatness that attended every one of his efforts. The hot water for the powdered coffee was in a neat pitcher. His napkin was in a special holder. Everything was perfectly in order in the warm, wood-paneled living room with its simple furniture. Outside, the bay was darkening, and it was getting cold, very cold. "I like the house cold at night," Rauff was saying. "I have an automatic switch that turns the heat on at seven thirty in the morning when I get up."

Then, in a conversation that kept changing from moment to moment, I decided to wade in -- I asked him of what he was actually accused. His face tightened.

"They say I killed ninety-six thousand Jews," he said unemotionally. "They know I never killed one man, and we never killed one Jew there." He paused. "That was a gentleman's war."

Again the conversation changed. "I usually make package soup in the evening," he went on, "but that is not good enough for a guest. So let us go downtown and have dinner at the hotel. I will show you the 'nightlife' of Porvenir."