Buying the Night Flight (36 page)

Psychoanalysts and journalists both develop a "trained instinct"; they hear and see events and know, by something about them, that they represent things far beyond themselves. And there are always small telling signs. When I mentioned on
Washington Week in Review
that something terrible was going to happen in Afghanistan only weeks before the Russian invasion, it was more than a premonition. One day that fall the Afghan regime posted a list on the prison with the names of
nine thousand political prisoners
who had been killed in prison. The news was so outrageous that I knew it must represent a wholly new era. In Lebanon in 1974 the discovery of the first SAM-7 missiles in the northern Tripoli
souk
was a signal that all-out war was coming. In Egypt in 1973 the Egyptians were saying things like, "It would be better to be destroyed in war and rebuild -- at least we would be doing something." There was an unmistakable air of desperation in Cairo, and it was too bad so few of us were "listening" to see the war coming.

Women journalists on the spot are also often aware of the way in which our own positions and feelings closely parallel situations within countries and peoples. Once in Riyadh, for instance, a young American woman, Martha, who was teaching in the girls' college, and I had a long talk about the "shame" aspects of the Saudi culture -- and how those attitudes affected us. Martha was wearing floor- length skirts, long sleeves, and shawls. She admitted that she instinctively lowered her eyes when she saw Saudi men. I admitted that I, too, felt an overwhelming sense of shame when in these cultures.

"Would we respond with this demureness and guilt unless it responded to something inside us that said, 'Yes, that is basically right'?" I asked. We agreed that it reawakened certain shame aspects of our own background -- which I found a disturbing but totally female thought and reality.

Indeed, I discovered over and over again that these odd kinds of "exchanges" flowed back and forth between women correspondents and the men and women of the countries we covered and worked in -- and even, in an odd but real sense, between us and the countries themselves. Men, particularly in countries that were in traumatic stages of development, often spoke far more openly and emotionally to me than to male correspondents.

In the fall of 1974 in Saudi Arabia, for instance, I was quite accidentally sent to interview a young Saudi planner. The tempter was "How would you like to interview the first Saudi Bedouin boy to get his doctorate in the United States?" Since no one could turn down an offer like that, I soon found myself sitting with this slim, pleasant, intense young man with blazing black eyes who had just returned home.

At one point I happened to say to him, "You must be very proud of yourself. And your family must be very proud of you." To my amazement Faisal Bashir almost burst into tears. His dark face clouded even darker. "Proud?" he said, almost jeering at himself. "I'm not proud. I'm very ashamed. My mother needs me. They are with the herds somewhere up in Iraq now. I should be with her. Instead, I am here."

Before I left, I asked Faisal Bashir if he minded if I wrote about him, quoting his anguish, and he said to go ahead. In fact when I did write about this, he sent me a kind letter of thanks. Somehow I was never able quite to put aside the memory of that haunted young man, such a quintessential type in today's troubled and inex act world of development: a man so troubled, so conflicted, so haunted, in spite of the fact that he was doing great good for his people.

Then, when I returned in 1980, suddenly I got a message to call "Faisal Bashir, deputy minister of planning." Though I had remembered him, I had forgotten his name, so I was delighted. "You must come over and see my office," he said on the telephone, effusive and excited.

What a pleasure it was to see him! He was still slim, still darkly intense, but quite a man of the world now. He had moved into an elegant, wood-paneled office in the marble-hailed Ministry of Planning, and was outgoing and all charm.

"Here I am, deputy minister of planning of Saudi Arabia, trying to implement the policy that will destroy the life that made me," he told me, a certain wistfulness and at the same time wonder in his voice. And the destruction of the old way of life that he had suffered over so much in 1974? "It was inevitable," he said now. "From the human element, it's true that I am working against the forces that created me. One more generation and it will end. Give us ten years, two more plans, and then Saudi Arabia will reach the stage of maturity in economic life."

Suddenly a small smile played on his lips. He got out the new issue of
National Geographic
magazine. The story of Saudi Arabia starts out with quotes from him. He was also a star on the TV special,

The Saudis.
They described him as "electronic magic." His American wife "advises" him. We both smiled.

I was happy, really happy, to see Faisal Bashir again. I was happy to see a balanced, immensely creative, and productive person at the core of a developing country. And perhaps I understood him because, on another level, I, too, had been "first" -- as a woman in so many areas -- and had hammered out so many of the same traumas. There was one big difference: his planning budget was $236 billion!

Again I found, in Saudi Arabia, that men in positions of power talked differently to me. They spoke honestly and, ironically, seemingly without hesitation and without embarrassment. They spoke of their traumas about their own women and they spoke of their own traumas vis-à-vis the United States; most of the new leaders had been the first generation to be educated, and almost all of them were educated in the United States. They had an inordinate love for the United States. Yet they felt that the
U
.
S
., in large part because of its support for Israel and its despising of the Arab world, did not appreciate them: a dangerous equation for our policy.

I wrote this -- and I spoke about it. One day in Chicago I was speaking about it to the prestigious Chicago Committee of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, and I happened to be sitting next to the president of one of the big oil companies. There I was, a girl from the South Side, telling this immensely powerful man about the Saudis' real feelings--and he was sensitive enough to listen and, I am convinced, to understand. It was an interesting role: Again, the woman as the interpreter of man to man, yet on a new level.

***

In contrast to what appears, Saudi Arabia is a country haunted by women. On the surface -- on the streets and in the public places -- it is a society quite simply without women. In the universities, even, women "see" their own professors, if they are male, only on television screens.

And yet the Saudis admit that they are "in turmoil" over women. Women are the terrible underground obsession, an obsession, more over, that could ultimately destroy what they are trying to build.

They talk about women "working," yes, for how can they keep the intelligent and ambitious educated Saudi women down? So they plan for them to work in all-female offices, schools, hospitals, and banks. One man suggested using computers at home. The number one development goal of the new development plan of Faisal Bashir, for instance, is to get over the need for foreign workers --but they cannot do this unless they utilize women's skills.

A further irony lies in the fact that when women there remain in their most dramatically traditional and primitive "place," that "place" could actually destroy the society men are trying to build. Thus arises the obsession, and somewhere way in the background are the whispers telling the Saudi men, who so need totally to control, that it is actually they who are being controlled.

On that same trip, in 1980, I had a strange reaction that was so spontaneous -- and so intense and angry -- that I knew it must represent something more. When I was leaving Riyadh to go home, I was seated in the Saudi plane near a window. All the other seats around me were free. A Saudi woman, completely covered with that ugly black veil, came up and started to sit down next to me. I was suddenly so repulsed by the veil that I waved her off (not at all my usual way) with an angry, "Why don't you take the free seats?" She fluttered away like a smitten black moth, and I sat there sulking, troubled by the knowledge that she had wanted to sit next to me for safety, because women in these areas cannot sit next to men on planes. But I did not want to be contaminated by a woman who had accepted this fate -- if I threatened her, she also threatened me.

***

When anybody tells me that I am imagining the things that still tie and imprison women, I tell them two stories:

Once, about to take off on an assignment, I needed a prescription for the Pill as well as the usual shots. Chicago is filled with Catholic doctors: to be avoided under such circumstances at all costs. So, I got out the Yellow Pages and went down the list of doctors, finding a fine Dr. Shapiro right in the neighborhood. A Jewish doctor -- that was what I needed. Off I went.

Dr. Shapiro was a fine sort, but I must admit that he seemed a little surprised to have me, known to him after all from the papers, suddenly drop in on him. Where had I heard about him? Why had I come to him? What could I tell him? Because he was Jewish and this was my day to avoid Catholics who might lecture me on birth control, and increase my guilt?

I started out -- indirection in such matters has always been my way -- by asking him for the necessary shots. Then, finally, I stammered out, "And doctor, I would like to get the Pill."

This pleasant, friendly man suddenly dropped all pretense of friendliness and became the righteously angry father. "And are you married?" he demanded. I shook my head. "And you want me to give you the Pill...?" He went on and on. Finally, he had his son, a charming young man, come in from the adjoining office -- and he gave me the Pill, and apologized for his "old-fashioned" father.

Dr. Shapiro, you see, was a professor at Loyola Medical School, the largest Catholic medical school in the area!

Thinking back on this, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. That I should have accepted such treatment... that I should have had put inside me such feelings about myself in the beginning and still have had them at thirty-three ... certainly shows clearly the cruel absurdities heaped upon women of my generation and all those before. How really extraordinary, when you think about such things. How really sad.

***

Then, early in the 1970s, when I was covering the Middle East, I started to find myself growing physically weaker and weaker. Once, in Iran in the spring of 1973, I actually collapsed on the Teheran airport floor and had to be on intravenous feeding for three days. When one doctor could not tell me what was wrong, I went to others. In fact I went to twelve doctors in twelve countries.

Each one gave a different -- but similar -- diagnosis: they all placed the "stomach problem," for that was what it was, right squarely in my little female mind. The Israeli doctor told me peremptorily and pedantically, "If you would get married and have children and settle down, you wouldn't have these emotional problems." The American doctor suggested that it was due to the fact that I stayed with my mother when I was in Chicago Finally, irritated and impatient, I asked, "Doctor, why don't you do the stool test?" Something none of them had done.

The next day the doctor phoned me and said, "Gee Gee, I think you'd better sit down." I was prepared for the worst: He was going to tell me that there was nothing wrong with me. "You have a very bad case of amoebic dysentery," he said. "You must have had it for two years, for you have what we call a carrier case or a chronic case. It is quite serious."

To his consternation I began to laugh uproariously. It took only a few days, with the right medicine, for me to feel enormously better. In five weeks I was cured. For two years all those male doctors had only presided at my misery; clucking like "old wives," they made fun over what could have meant death. As a woman I was at the mercy (or lack of it) of male doctors who still looked at a woman in 1973 -- a woman who had obviously been traveling constantly through infectious areas -- and saw only what Freud had seen fifty years earlier in woman: hysteria.

By then I was indeed hysterical, hysterical with rage over their ignorance and over the disdain and hatred for women that sustained it.

Avida and Kemal

"The Jews and Arabs of Jerusalem cannot afford to get to know each other because, if they did, they would have to acknowledge to themselves that part of what the other side says is right."
-- Meron Benvinisti, Israeli scholar and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem

The Moslem Arab world was supposed to be a difficult, even impossible assignment -- it wasn't. Israel, on the other hand, a country I long had idealized, a country whose people I admired enormously, a country with citizens far more similar to mine, was supposed to be easy, a cinch -- it wasn't, either. This again only confirmed the rule that a journalist has to "be there," because nothing is ever what we expect it to be. Indeed, Israel presented me with the greatest and the most profound moral quandary of all, with a sort of professional and personal wandering in the wilderness.

I had first gone to Israel in the fall of 1969 as an admirer of the Jewish people and of their phoenix-like rising in their new-old state out of terrible historic suffering. I would have liked to go to Israel long before. But since we had a fine correspondent stationed permanently in Tel Aviv, the
Daily News
editors naturally sent me first to the Arab world, where in its vast entireties of desert and garden we had no one.