Buying the Night Flight (49 page)

"But," I persisted, "they must have given you what was in the pipeline?"

Aziz shook his head soberly and deliberately. "They stopped completely. They have given us nothing ... nothing ... nothing." Was it possible that Iraq, the "best friend" of the Soviets, was breaking with them? The next words confirmed that they were, for they constituted an obvious opener to Washington.

"The major reason for our non-relations remains the Arab-Israeli conflict," he said. "We do not ask the U.S. not to take sides. We are a realistic people. We only ask for a balanced attitude. Consider the French. They have strong relations with the Israelis. They have even built up their military apparatus. They care about the security of Israel, but they do not support the invasion by Israel. The U.S. is still patronizing Israel -- and all of its policies. Americans are not only supporting Israel, they are guarding the Israeli invasion politically, economically, and militarily -- and that is an anti-Arab attitude.

"What we'd like to see is for the American attitude to get closer to a balanced attitude toward the conflict. Then Iraq would not have objections toward resuming diplomatic relations. We are not permanent enemies of the United States."

The surprises did not end there. He then went on to say that while they still took a hard position on Israel, they would "accept what our Arab brothers wanted." In effect they would accept a separate Palestinian state, which is what King Hussein and even Yasser Arafat had told me and some others.

He went on. For years the Iraqis had been the most brutal of the brutal, the assassins of the assassins. They had sent assassination squads out all over Europe, killing anyone who tried to escape, murdering the moderate Palestinian leaders. But in the last year that had stopped. They had also stopped supporting radical Palestinians, like George Habbash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

"After 1973," he told me, "Iraq was active in the rejection front [i.e., the radical Palestinian groups]. They were radical but nationalist. Because of ideological weakness of the leadership, many of these groups lost their ideology and political independence step by step. Now they are totally communist. We support only groups that are patriotic, independent, and progressive."

We went from the serious things -- which could quite literally affect the future of the world -- to the humorous. A slight smile played across his face when he talked, contemptuously, of the disorganization of his Iranian neighbors.

"In every spot along the border, there is a struggle on the Iranian side," he said. "It is up to the officer. If a religious man is in charge, it is total confusion. If a military man and a religious man are in charge together, the men will fit well if the religious man is in Teheran."

When I asked him whether they had indeed intended to overthrow Khomeini himself, Aziz smiled enigmatically, but with just a touch of devilishness. "You know, we had some experience in our party with trying to change regimes," he said. And then he went, year by year, down the Ba'aths' coup-ridden history until it got very funny indeed, and we both were laughing heartily. He ended up with, "We now have a conviction that a regime cannot be toppled from behind frontiers. We cannot topple Khomeini ... but maybe the war could be an assisting element."

He smiled.

Within a year and a half, of course, that formulation had rather dramatically changed. By then, the Iranians, driven by their ongoing internal frenzy, threw wave after human wave against the Iraqis, defeating them. But that was not my problem and not my business: my business was to report and capture moments of history -- and that was what I had done in Iraq that strange December.

***

By the next night I was growing strangely disquieted. I had decided to wait until very early the next morning but, now that I had what I had come for, I simply wanted to fly away: across the poor man's desert, over the cruel border posts, and back up the friendly golden hills to Amman. At the last moment I got a young NBC Jordanian driver and we decided to leave at 10:00
P
.
M
., even through it meant doing the whole long drive at night.

The boy, they had told me, was a good driver -- and completely safe and responsible for a woman traveling alone. This, as it happened, did not turn out to be the problem. As we approached the large traffic circles outside of Baghdad, where each spoke emanating from the circles flung you into a totally different -- and fixed -- direction, he suddenly went kind of crazy. He swerved here and there, seemingly unable to decide where to go, or why.

Finally he was actually in the lane turning off toward Kerbala, clearly marked in both Arabic and English, when I started to scream: "No, no, no ...!" After all this all we needed was to be in Kerbala, the closed and holy city of the Shi'ites at midnight! A Christian Western woman during a Moslem holy war! When I finally got him out of that lane and onto the right road, marked
RUTBA
, I suddenly realized what was the matter: the poor boy could not read. For the rest of the trip he was wonderful. And for most of it, through the bitter cold of this winter night, through the unrelieved bleakness, I slept well under a blanket, swigging an occasional drink of Scotch from the little miniatures I had purchased in preparation for the trip at the foreign money shop and watching the darkness rush by outside while thoughts of my life rushed over me in waves.

At 1:00
A
.
M
. we swept by Rutba, a town asleep and in darkness. The streets were empty and still; the cement villas had their shades drawn down like eyes closed to a harsh world. I noticed an oddly picturesque little hotel where I thought would have been fun to have lunch.

At 2:00
A
.
M
. we stopped at a shabby little place for coffee. I sat up and watched the young man. He was fine. Now he was in his element, and he knew exactly what he was doing. I was pleased that he was so serious.

By 3:00
A
.
M
. we were sweeping across the great red-brown plain, with its rocks and volcanic markings, and the sky was totally black. Every minute that brought me closer to Amman made me happy. From time to time we were stopped by guards along the road, and always they had those tough, leathery, harsh faces of the Iraqi tribesmen in this endlessly harsh land. They looked long and hard at my passport and at me, but each time they let us go through.

I thought about a lot of things in those strange and prescient hours. I thought about what I had given up for this life, about the joys and comforts of the other life of home and family and predictable love. I thought about how those things weren't so predictable anymore, either. I thought, without rancor but with sadness, about how the women of my generation who had taken this other -- this night -- flight had had to do it all alone: without really any close support from the men we loved and without even in our souls knowing whether what we were doing was fully right for women. I thought about how, despite that, we had done what we had to do with honor and dignity. And then I thought about the other joys and rewards.

The night flight: the hundred thousand stars, the serenity, the moment of sovereignty. After my interview with Tareq Aziz and his story of the war, it was as though I were holding within me a totem, a magic amulet. Only those who care about information -- unique or first information -- can understand this. It was a kind of protection for me. I hoarded it. I protected it. The next day I would begin giving up the thing I had discovered. But it would really be no loss, because then began the next stage, the stage of being the courier, and the pleasure of seeing the information one has gathered dispersed throughout the world.

The "night plane" was only an all-night taxi ride through a bleak part of the world? The hundred thousand stars only blackness? No. The sense of serenity and of sovereignty and of completeness was there, and Saint-Exupéry is right that there is no buying it, no matter how you try. It is something you can only earn, something you find only for yourself, create only for yourself, and ultimately interpret only for yourself. It goes only to those willing to risk their comfort and their lives and their sacred honor for it. In this, as in so many aspects, it is like a very great love -- and everyone has some of the night flight inside herself.

We came, through the bitter cold of Rutba and Ramadi and all those shabby towns of desperate dreams, finally to reach the border about 4:00 A.M. An old bus, scabrous and shaky, had stopped and its poor denizens were lined up with their odd bags and old sacks tied together with rope and placed pathetically in front of them. They were freezing in the bitter cold. It was as if they had been told to put their whole lives in front of them and that was all they could find. I was reminded again that this is a brutal world for the people who must truly live in it and are not privileged voyeurs, like me.

The old Lebanese woman, whom cruel turns of fate had made a searcher of women crossing this bleak border, was asleep in her small hut as the guard took me there. The winter winds were howling now like wolves across the endless desert plain. Outside, at four o'clock in the morning, it was total darkness. When the Jordanian customs man switched on the light, the woman shot up in bed. She was old and plump, wearing the traditional Palestinian robe-upon-robe, and she was to search my purse -- my symbol of being in another world -- before I crossed the border and returned to what was in effect the Western world.

Suddenly, without warning or apparent reason, her broad, brown face shriveled with pain. "Lebanon," she said to me, and it was like an animal's cry of pain. She put her hands on her ample breasts. "From Lebanon," she said. Then she imitated planes dropping bombs. "All family killed," she went on. "I ... I now here." Her arms motioned to the bleak outside, and it looked even more like a hell.

***

I had tried to give the poor woman some money, but she wouldn't take it. It had just been another of those moments -- and there are far, far too many of them in this part of the world -- when a single human being, driven beyond any capacity to bear, suddenly cried out to all of us.

And as we sped now toward Amman, this lost lone woman seemed very much a metaphor for the Iraqi-Iranian war -- and for a lot of the people I had known in my life, and what I had given my life to. For just as she was one more tragic victim of the continuing saga of borders and refugees and too many people without homes from Lebanon to Ethiopia to Somalia to the Yemens, so was this war and all my stories at heart a war and a story about borders--and about her.

Everything in my curious life seemed to flash across my mind as we sped through the night, in flight from the most dangerous and unknown parts of the world and toward the light and the known. For as morning began to come upon the winter desert, as it happened we were just then reaching the friendly, low, and golden hills that lead to Amman. We stopped for a few minutes at a funny little cafe for coffee. The two Jordanian men who ran it, both friendly and pleasant, nevertheless looked at me -- stared, really -- as if I were a creature from another planet. They were not, of course, wrong, but I believed, as I always have, that I belonged as much there as anywhere.

Then, almost as if it were an omen, we started climbing the beckoning hills just as the sun began shedding its golden morning light about us. Now, in place of the cold darkness, a kind of shimmering mist lay over everything. It was like coming out of a cave into a new dawn. The night flight had ended, with its serenity and also its fears, but the moment of sovereignty somehow remained -- and still remains -- with me, the final mark of transcendence and human control over the mundanities and cruelties of the world.

On Becoming a Columnist

"I don't have any ideas that are more than seven hundred words long."
--A columnist

I recall exactly the moment I decided to come home again. It was November of 1974, and I was sitting quite squashed and exhausted against the window in a large jet plane en route from Dubai to Bahrein to Dhahran to Riyadh to Jedda. Two enormous and blubbery Gulf sheikhs in their flowing white robes had jammed themselves in the seats next to me. I was perspiring in the endless heat and dreading the endless stops and starts ahead of me, not to speak of arriving in the steamy Red Sea port of Jedda without a hotel room at midnight. Then, for some reason I turned around.

There on the three seats just behind us sat three falcons. Yes, falcons. Their razor-sharp talons were tethered to a long plank of wood, which lay squarely across the three seats, but their hoods were off and the jet black, beady, threatening eyes all focused oddly upon me. Their keeper, a Bedouin in long robes, stood at the edge of the seat calling each by name: "Ahmed ... Zakki ...."

I turned my head back. Perhaps it was time to give up this strange life. After all, I had been overseas, usually traveling constantly, for nine months of each of the previous eleven years. It had been extraordinary -- a wondrous life -- but could it not be time to move on? I had had at least one fiancé tell me (and not sweetly) that my favorite three words were not "I love you," but "Room service, please." As I sat that darkening evening on the plane, crowded by sheikhs and falcons, it suddenly occurred to me that when I died it would be just "going to the last transit lounge."

Even then the words
foreign correspondent
, voiced to some stranger on a plane, still filled me with a deep sense of excitement and yearning. But little by little, as the years passed and I saw "one more war" and one more country that I had loved fall to some squalid self-righteous totalitarianism, and as eighteen-hour flights every three days and eighteen-hour days began to take their toll, I began to see the need for some sort of change.