Buying the Night Flight (33 page)

They brought me tea. When I tried to lift it to my mouth, the boy said coldly and suspiciously, "You're trembling."

"Of course I'm trembling," I said with not at all disguised anger. "You're frightening me to death." Then I sat back and glared at him.

After a while they picked up somebody else,
The New York Times
's Juan de Onis, who had been the top Latin America correspondent for years and a good colleague. So now there were two of us. But eventually it ended, and it ended almost at the exact moment the funeral ended.

Soon people like Clovis Maksuud, a journalist who later became Arab League ambassador to the
U
.
S
., and other friends discovered my "captivity" and phoned. Now those same hostile boys became the soul of Arab hospitality and attentiveness. Did I want tea? I did. Did I want to go home? I did not, goddamn it. "Look," I said, "you brought me here. You've half scared the life out of me and you've made me miss the funeral of a friend. Now sit down and let me interview you."

They did. They were like puppy dogs. And during the next few days I was to stay in Beirut they came over daily with bits of information. One's information networks are not always planned ahead.

But the story of my "captivity," brief but nevertheless real and frightening, did not end there. From Beirut I moved through Cyprus and on to Israel and soon found myself being interviewed by Israeli television. As it happened it was on Friday, on the eve of Sabbat, so most everybody saw it. Soon I was getting flowers from unnamed people and people would recognize me on the street. The Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv, always jammed, was telling me, "Any time you want to come back, we have a room for you," and they gave me a duplex suite the next time I did come.

Finally I asked
Daily News
correspondent Jay Bushinsky what was going on. "You don't seem to understand," he said. "They are not sure you
aren't
the Israeli blonde who led the raid on Beirut."

Later my friend Yehoshophat Harkabi, the foremost Arabist in Israel and the man who was intelligence chief during the Six-Day War, explained what I had been caught up in. "There was an 'Israeli blonde,'" he said, "but it was a man in a blond wig. We never send women on these raids. And there was a reason." He paused. "In ancient times there are many stories about blond Jewish women commanders against Arab armies -- Judith, for instance. It is a bit of psychological warfare."

Yes, I thought wryly as I left, a bit of psychological warfare that might have killed me!

But the whole saga was not yet to end. As I was leaving Tel Aviv for Jerusalem one day, I picked up my mail at the embassy and was rewarded with a copy of the story I had written after my "capture." Across the front page of the
Daily News
was emblazoned, O
UR
G
IRL
H
ELD
B
Y
G
UERRILLAS
. There was my smiling picture and the story, which had been completely rewritten into a caricature of sensationalism. As Nick von Hoffman always told me, "You are their white virgin in the jungle." Here, I surely was. And it was I and not those nameless editors who would have to live with this.

I called Jay, shaking with rage.

"What shall I do?" I asked. I could actually feel the blood rising and swelling in my veins.

Jay, always practical and usually right, said, "Don't do anything. No, don't call. No, by
all
means, don't write. Wait twenty-four hours before you do
anything.
" And so I did. I waited twenty-four hours. During those twenty-four hours my originally watershed level of fury grew to flood proportions. At 4:00 p.m. the next day I called the paper from Jerusalem and exploded. I kept my friend and editor Nick Shuman on the phone for one and a half hours, knowing that the spending of money was always a far more sensitive issue than any editorial.

Every time he would say, "We'll talk about this when you come home," I told him -- quite honestly, "If you don't talk now, I'm not coming home. In fact, I'm quitting." It worked quite neatly, but only because I thoroughly meant it.

In the end I demanded and got two rounds of apologies from every editor involved, but it was small consolation. I was the one, not they, who would always be "Ms. Terror Filled the Room," as one of their better lines put it. Sometimes it seemed easier to deal with male guerrillas than my clear and "rational" colleagues in Chicago.

A Western Woman in Islam

"Avoid the cliché of your time."
--Vladimir Nabokov

"You will never be able to work as a woman in the Moslem world," I was told over and over when I went to the Middle East for the first time in the fall of 1969. It was just more of what I had heard all my professional life: the litany of "You can'ts." But this time I almost believed them. After all, Moslem women were as oppressed as any on the face of the globe. Besides, the Middle East was a violent place, far more violent than Latin America.

As I have mentioned, however, I found that I became a kind of "third sex" to the Arabs. It was all explained to me several years later when an Egyptian male journalist said to me, "We restrict our own women because they have been raised under Islamic precepts. But you are a Western woman and a Christian--you are not expected to live by our beliefs." In addition, as with the various guerrilla movements, I was the Western female creature: the woman of the men they hated, for their power and for their success, but now also a woman in their very own realm who was fascinated by them and would gladly spend hours listening to them. Again I was appreciated not for what I could accomplish but for how
they
saw me and for what
they
read into me. But I did not have to go the Middle East to learn that.

In the Arab world I lived and behaved like the Virgin Mary. This was crucial, for they watched me carefully. One night in Amman, Jordan, the hotel clerk said to me, really in a pleasant and well-meaning way, "Miss Geyer, when we need the men correspondents, we look in two places: the telex room and the bar. With you, we only look in the telex room." That was a great compliment -- it was also my protection.

In Cairo that first night I sat in my room in the Nile Hilton, drinking in the sight of the great river with its glorious pinks and golds. Where would I start? The next morning I called -- cold -- an Egyptian newspaper critic whose name had come to me from someone, I don't really remember who. He was cordial. "Come on over," he said, and I did. He asked me to go to a luncheon with him; and at that luncheon in a beautiful villa near the pyramids I met remark able people. Clovis Maksuud sat next to me... . From

then on I got to know just about everybody in Cairo. Soon I found that as a Western woman I was having exceptional luck in a most unlikely area: interviewing leaders--ironically, leaders whose own women were often kept in purdah.

I think I have mentioned before that I do not particularly like leader interviews. I find "leaders" boring. With only a few exceptions like Eduardo Frei of Chile and Gerald Ford of the
U
.
S
., they tend to be egomaniacs; they issue tiresome pronouncements about what "the people" want when they are talking about what they want; I would much rather talk to a Jorge Luis Borges or an Arch bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador--those are the real
menshen.
But you do it. You do it (1) because it is an important part of the profession of journalism, since we have to know what our "leaders" are thinking, if anything; (2) because it may help you know more about his people and his reign; and (3) because it makes you famous.

If I am to be truthful, let me admit right off that I would like to be like Oriana Fallaci. I would like to spin in on them, crashing the door behind me, and say, "All right, Anwar, why don't you wipe out Qaddafi ... ?" But I would not be capable of acting that way even if I were high on hashish. I work, rather, in what I call the "absorptive" style. I go into "His" office and sit there. I am sympathetic. I may well look a little pathetic. I present "Him" with a vacuum and he virtually always fills it. I do present questions -- and I can present them very directly indeed if need be -- but 95 percent of the time I have found that that is not necessary. Men tend to open up and reveal themselves if you present them with the proper psychological presence, particularly a female one.

I almost forgot that there is certainly at least one other major reason for doing the "leader interview." This is because they are so goddamned hard to arrange that if you love the game and the chase, there is nothing quite so invigorating!

An exception to all the above was my first interview with Jihan Sadat, wife of the then-new Egyptian president. It was in 1971 and was the first interview she ever gave to a Westerner. At their beautiful seaside home in Alexandria she sat in the swing, wearing a beautiful flowered dress that made her look very much like the romantic heroine she is. She was lovely, with dark, liquid eyes and a spiritual manner, and I liked her immediately.

When she and Anwar were first married, she told me, and their fortunes were at their lowest ebb, they had spent their last few coins at a fortune-teller's. The woman told them, "You will be the first lady of Egypt," which sent them into spasms of laughter. She was obviously deeply and, even then, still passionately in love with her husband, who was physically and emotionally worthy of that passion. But at the same time what was most touching to me was the degree to which she truly cared about women and about women's rights -- on the deepest and most rational level, as I liked to think I did. She believed, given the bitterly retrogressive qualities of Moslem life, that women must, like the peace process in the Middle East, move "step by step." She believed in "showing people" what women could do, instead of telling them. She was not a preacher, except by example -- the opposite of me.

But by the time I saw her again in 1974, she was deeply disappointed; she had not been able even as the president's wife to get the most simple legislation on women's rights through the parliament of old sheikhs. Then, she was quite desperate, talking of sterilization in exchange for a water buffalo for the
fellahin
families who were destroying any hope for Egyptian development with their wanton population growth.

By the time Anwar Sadat was killed by the assassins' bullets in those dark days of October 1981, Jihan Sadat was extremely unpopular in her own country. Never mind her graciousness and charm! Never mind the wonderful impression she made for Egypt wherever she went in the world! Never mind her conservative dress! Jihan Sadat had tried not to be free or independent in our sense, but only to give women the most basic of rights, like requiring that divorces started by their husbands be heard before a judge. The treatment of Jihan Sadat gave me great cause for concern as to whether women were really progressing in the world.

For several years I also worked on seeing President Sadat, trying always to do it in the straight and official way. But nothing worked, despite my many contacts and friends. By the fall of 1974 it had all made me so angry that I picked up my phone in the Nile Hilton and phoned Mrs. Sadat's secretary and explained my plight. By the following day Mrs. Sadat had intervened and even had the precise date for the interview set.

In the four hours I spent with Anwar Sadat at their home up the Nile at The Barrages, a sensuous spot with the arms of the Nile delta stretching out into the sun and reflecting gold in all directions, I found one of the few charming men in power that I have met. His chocolate-colored face was beautiful, with its black olive eyes. We sat at two ends of a formal, gilded couch in his ballroom of an office, and he talked and I laughed. The more funny and witty he became, the more I laughed, which pleased him just as much as it does all men.

This was just weeks after the famous Rabat conference, where the Palestine Liberation Organization had been named the "sole representative" of the Palestinian people and where the
PLO
second in command, Salah Kahlef, or Abu Iyad, had tried again to assassinate King Hussein of Jordan. Naturally, I asked Sadat about this.

"I had him here last week," he said, beginning sternly enough. "He was sitting right where you are. And I told him, 'Abu Iyad, if you try to assassinate King Hussein one ... more ... time.'" We both laughed. Then I asked him if he were not afraid that they would try to assassinate him. Now the levity dropped. "Of course not," he said. "They know my family."

I thought of that seven years later when I was analyzing the Moslem fundamentalist groups who had assassinated him.

Knowing a little about Sadat's personality and about his sense of apocalyptic mission in the world, I did not find myself in the least surprised when he went to Jerusalem three years later. This is one of the obvious advantages of the "leader interview."

But by the time I saw him again, in 1980, he was a deeply different man. Now he sat in the luxuriant garden of The Barrages, a haggard, lined, aged replica of himself. He had also grown quite desperate for the full peace with Israel, which he knew he had to have (and this had to include a real Palestinian solution to the West Bank, which the Israelis were busily annexing) was being totally stalled by the Israelis. He had always known that his peace was a gallant gamble, but a gamble. It needed movement; it required phasing and timing; and that just wasn't happening.