Flirting with Danger (15 page)

Learning their history helped me understand my paternal family’s terror of outsiders. It helped me understand too the kind of fear, to the point of paranoia, that existed in my father’s family, and gave me an insight into why it must have been so hard for my father to break free of his own mother to be a proper parent to his children. Boris and Iveta filled out a lot of family history. My father’s mother had come to America to escape the pogroms in Kiev. Her twin brother had been killed by a stone that was thrown through the window of their home by a rampaging crowd. Their mother was holding him in her arms at the time. For generations they had distrusted the outside world of non-Jews. In America that suspicion never waned, and my father’s family never accepted me and my sisters into the family.

After Uncle Leon told his sister, Rosalyn, that I found our relatives in Russia, I told Leon that I wanted to meet her. She hadn’t seen me or my sisters—her only nieces—since we were small children thirty years earlier. Her first words to me when we finally met were, “You have such Jewish eyes.” I had mixed feelings about seeing her. I wanted not to like her. I had assumed she was an ogre. But she looked like my father, and my first sight of her linked me to him immediately. She was articulate and bright. She had curly hair. She had a dog. I liked her and felt slightly guilty that I did. Should I forgive her for ignoring us all those years?

When I spoke to my father through the psychic in London, I felt
a message from him telling me to go to his grave. I had not been since his death. I didn’t even know where it was. I had always worried it was unkempt and without a tombstone, that somehow he would be an embarrassment in death as he had been to me in life. The psychic drew a map, relaying instructions from my father, telling me which side of the cemetery, overlooking a hill, next to a tree. Francesca made fun of my willingness to listen to a psychic, but she promised to come with me the next time I came to America.

We got instructions from Uncle Leon on how to find the cemetery but had nothing but the makeshift map to guide us once we were inside the grounds. We found him easily; he was just where the woman who talked to the dead had described. His grave was simple. I brushed leaves off it gently, wanting to do something loving for him, to acknowledge him as important to me. We knew he had wanted to be buried next to his older brother, Norman, so we attached the ivy from my uncle’s grave to my father’s so the two brothers could be joined, just as my sister and I felt joined by our journey there.

The Serb Side

I
never paid much attention to the breakup of former Yugoslavia. Even though I was in the news business, I found coverage of the Balkans complicated and confusing. Besides, I had my hands full in Moscow. Then one day I was sent to Croatia. Suddenly I had to learn a lot in a hurry. When new borders were being drawn in ethnically mixed areas, large populations of Serbs found themselves in Croatia and vice versa, fueling a spiral of ethnic cleansing. One flash point was in Zagreb, the beautiful capital of Croatia, which in late 1995 was being shelled by the Serbs. The Croats had just retaken land lost to the Serbs during fighting in 1991 and driven the Serbs living there out of their homes. Now the Serbs had dug into the surrounding hills and were retaliating. A story I had thought little about was going to become very real, urgently real to me. That’s the life of a reporter.

Atlanta had ordered us onto the next flight from Moscow to Trieste,
Italy. I had to move so fast that I didn’t have time to think carefully about what I was heading into, and what I would need to bring. I figured that nothing in the Balkans could be as brutal as what I’d been covering in Chechnya, so I suppressed the trickle of fear creeping into my belly and ran home to pack some things. Packing as a foreign correspondent can be a funny game. It always seemed that if I packed for two or three days, I’d end up staying away for a month. If I packed for a month, I’d be back in under a week. This time I took everything I had.

As soon as I landed in Trieste with my crew, we rented a van and drove into Croatia, about a five-hour drive. It was night when we crossed the border. I was bracing for a band of thugs to stop us at various checkpoints, with gun-toting goons drunkenly waving the butts of their rifles in our faces, the kind of unnerving thing I got used to in Chechnya. But we came to a normal border crossing with regular guards, who were even polite. We drove without incident into Zagreb, which surprised me with its cosmopolitan looks and charming buildings. The Esplanade Hotel, where we checked in, was full of old-world elegance.

The next morning, I was just starting to enjoy a glass brimming with fresh-squeezed orange juice, a delicacy that hadn’t hit Moscow yet, when the peace was shattered by Serbs, who started lobbing cluster bombs into the city. The air-raid sirens were blaring, and ambulances went screeching past our hotel. We raced after them to capture the scene. It was chilling to see such a graceful European city under siege. Chechnya had seemed more suited to such savagery, where men with long beards still strutted around with sheathed knives, and where visitors like me were immersed in the daily horror without reprieve.

Here in Croatia, war was surreal. Well-dressed women shopping for the latest Italian fashions had to run for cover and crouch in
alleys when shop windows suddenly shattered, splattering their finery with blood. It was shocking to see and report on, but as the days wore on I found especially strange the way we could observe and then pull back, going in and out of the action at will. We would go into the streets and cover the shelling, then return to our luxurious hotel for a bath or a sumptuous meal. As if we were stepping into a movie, we could shoot footage of carnage during the day, and leave when we had enough. We edited our footage in the comfort of a hotel, ordering room service. I could munch on a club sandwich while deciding which shot of a ransacked house or terrified refugee would work best in our story. This was “managed” war. I could cope with it far better than the constant, almost primal terror I felt in the more barbaric version of warfare under way in Chechnya.

I always thought of the United Nations as an ineffectual and bureaucratic organization, until I went to Croatia. Though UN forces were not exactly efficient, their presence clearly helped warring forces to exercise some restraint. UN officers often called us via cell phone to tell us where to find villages that were being retaken by the Croats. We would get onto a modern highway and, after stopping for a Coke and snacks at a gas station, turn off at the war exit and film the skirmish in full view of the UN monitors. Sometimes we stopped at UN compounds for lunch. We carefully checked out the nationality of the monitors. Nepalese curries were my favorite, although the Fijians had good food too. I thought if I spent time thinking about what we might eat, I could avoid thinking about what we might see.

I was grateful that only a limited amount of my day had to be spent in a war. I spent time at the underground mall across from the hotel, replenishing my wardrobe, which was still hard to do in Moscow. One day, as I went looking for shoes in the relative subterranean safety, I wondered if I had lost all sense of perspective. Or
was I trying to delude myself into thinking I wasn’t afraid? I was so used to lurching from one crisis to the next that I felt ill at ease sitting still. Had I chosen a daily dose of insanity to make sure my attention never wandered inward, to ensure that I only skimmed the surface of life? I had never planned to cover wars, but I was starting to realize that no matter how hard my job was, it seemed easier than confronting my own struggles. And yet covering other people’s wars made me feel hollow inside. I tried to do something normal for myself every now and then, to remind myself that I existed as more than just a vehicle to relay someone else’s story. One day I went for a manicure in the hotel. I felt deadened and hoped the touch of this woman rubbing cream into my dry skin would revive me. There was something inviolate in the beauty of perfect nails. Sometimes I went back to my room for a bubble bath while the city was under siege. I told myself it was OK to take twenty minutes off to soak in the tub and daydream, ignoring the shelling outside, but I always felt a nagging sense of guilt.

Coming into Croatia for the first time, I had to cram on the plane to catch up on the story. In general, Western news organizations saw the Serbs as the bad guys in the Balkans, since Serb forces there were clearly taking directions from Slobodan Milosevic, the Serb leader in Belgrade who was later demonized in 1999 for massacres in Kosovo. But I knew that there were two sides to every story. And this time Croats were retaking Krajina, a portion of land lost to the Serbs several years before, and conducting their own atrocities against Serbian civilians. Compared with other correspondents, I had a slightly different perspective, coming in from Moscow. The Serbs share the Orthodox Christian faith with their Slavic brethren in Russia, and many Russians believe that the Serbs, who suffered at the hands of Croatian fascists during the Second World War, are justified in behaving like bullies today. Russians also
believe that the West blames the Serbs for all trouble in the Balkans, ignoring the vicious fighting engendered by Croats and Bosnians and Kosovars.

One morning we arrived at a village that had just been overrun by the enemy. It had that postnuclear look I had come to know in Chechnya: all the trappings of life were visible but life itself had been extinguished. There were no people stirring; only remnants of life lingered, lives left in a hurry. Photos were scattered on the ground; a child’s toy lay where it had been dropped in the haste to flee. Dogs had been left chained in gardens to starve; their masters would never return for them. I needed to give them a chance at life, so I unleashed them when I could. Livestock wandered around dazed and hungry. Lives had been ransacked. In this case the victims were Serbs, chased out of their homes by Croatian forces. So I told their story. I described burned Serbian houses, lost Serbian lives. I interviewed a seventy-year-old Serbian grandmother whose painful history was etched into the deep lines of her face. She had survived Jesenovac, a Croatian-run concentration camp during the Second World War about seventy-five miles southeast of Zagreb. Serbs and gypsies were gassed and tortured there by Croatian forces collaborating with the Nazis. Serbs say hundreds of thousands perished, while Croats insist it was only sixty or seventy thousand. It is the kind of disputed memory that is at the heart of the hatred between Serbs and Croats and perpetuates the war in the Balkans. It is a rallying cry of Serb nationalism.

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.