The View from the Cheap Seats (43 page)

I

IT'S ALL ABOUT
life.

And in the midst of whatever else we're in, it's always about life.

II

I HAD KNOWN
Amanda Palmer for six months, and we were going on our first date. Our first date was four days long, because it was all the free time we had at the beginning of 2009 and we were giving it to each other. I had not yet met her family. I barely knew her friends.

“I want you to meet Anthony,” she said.

It was January. If I'd really known who Anthony was in her life then, if I'd known how much he'd played his part in raising her, I think I would have been nervous. I wasn't nervous. I was just pleased that she wanted to introduce me to someone that she knew.

Anthony, she told me, was her next-door neighbor. He had known her since she was a child.

He turned up in the restaurant: a tall, good-looking man who
looked a decade younger than his age. He had a walking cane, an easy comfortable manner, and we talked all that evening. Anthony told me about the nine-year-old Amanda who had thrown snowballs at his window, about the teenage Amanda who had come next door when she needed to vent, about the college-age Amanda who had called him from Germany when she was lonely and knew nobody, and about rock star Amanda (it was Anthony who had named The Dresden Dolls). He asked me about me, and I answered him as honestly as I could.

Later, Amanda told me that Anthony liked me, and had told her he thought I would make a good boyfriend for her.

I had no idea how important this was, or what Anthony's approval meant at the time.

III

LIFE IS A
stream: an ongoing conversation of nature with itself, contradictory and opinionated and dangerous. And the stream is made up of births and deaths, of things that come into existence and pass away. But there is always life, and things feeding on life.

We had been married for five months. Amanda phoned me in tears from a yoga retreat in the Canary Islands, to tell me Anthony had just been diagnosed with leukemia. She flew home. Anthony began treatment. It didn't look as if there was anything real to worry about. Not then. They can treat these things.

As the next year began, Amanda recorded an album,
Theatre Is Evil
. She started touring for it, a planned tour that would take the best part of a year.

At the end of the summer, Anthony's leukemia took a turn for the worse, and suddenly there were very real reasons to worry. He would need to go for chemo. He might not make it. We read the Wikipedia entry on the kind of leukemia Anthony had, and
we learned that this was not the kind you get better from, and we were sobered and scared.

Amanda had been a touring rock musician for a decade, and took pride in never canceling gigs. She called me, and she canceled the second half of her tour to be with Anthony. We took a house in Cambridge's Harvard Square so she could be close to him.

We had a small dinner for friends, shortly after we moved in, to celebrate the birthday of Anthony's wife, Laura. Laura is very beautiful, and very gentle, and a lawyer who helps people who cannot help themselves. I cooked fish for them. Pat, Laura's mother, came, and helped me cook.

That was a year ago.

IV

ANTHONY HAD BEEN
Amanda's friend. Somewhere in there, while she and I were dating, before we were married or even engaged, he became someone I talked to when I was lost and confused and way out of my depth in the thickets of a relationship that was always like nothing I'd ever known before. I called him from Australia and texted him from a train in New Mexico. His advice was wise and practical, and often—mostly—it was right.

He stopped me overthinking things; would offer hope, always with a matter-of-fact thread of darkness and practicality: yes, you can fix
this
, but you'll have to learn to live with
that
.

I discovered over the years to come that many of the things I treasured most about Amanda were gifts that Anthony had given her or taught her over the years of their friendship.

One night Amanda read me a story that Anthony had written, about his childhood, about food, about love. It was gripping. I asked for more.

With a mixture of nervousness and diffidence, Anthony gave me more of his stories to read: autobiographical sketches and confessionals, some funny, some dark. Each of the stories shone a light inside Anthony's skull and showed the reader the view from his past. He was nervous because I write books for a living, and he was relieved (I think) that I liked them.

I liked them very much.

I had worried that we would have nothing in common, apart from our love of Amanda. I was wrong. We both had a fascination with, and a delight in, stories. Do not give either of us gifts: give us the tale that accompanies the gift. That is what makes the gift worth having.

Ask Anthony about the walking canes I gave him. The joys of the gifts are in the stories.

V

I'M THINKING ABOUT
all those signs we put on our walls when we were teenagers and knew that we would live forever, in order to show how tough and cynical and worldly-wise we were:
NOBODY GETS OUT OF HERE ALIVE
was one of them
. THE PERSON WHO DIES WITH THE MOST TOYS WINS
was another
.
There was one of two vultures sitting on a branch that said
PATIENCE MY ASS, I'M GONNA KILL SOMETHING.

And it's easy to be cynical about death when you're young. When you are young, death is an anomaly. It's not real. It only affects other people. It's a bullet you'll dodge easily. It's why young people can go into battle: they really will live forever. They know.

As you stick around, as you go around the Earth, you realize that life is an ever-narrowing conveyor belt. Slowly, inexorably, it takes us all along with it, and one by one we tumble off the sides of the conveyor belt into darkness.

A few days after Amanda decided that she was going to stop touring and be with Anthony, we heard that our friend Becca
Rosenthal had died. She was twenty-seven. She was young and beautiful and filled with life and potential. She wanted to be a librarian.

Just before Christmas, our friend Jeremy Geidt went into hospital for a relatively minor operation. Jeremy was a crusty, foul-mouthed, gloriously funny actor and teacher who had come to the US in the early sixties with Peter Cook's Establishment Club. He had lived a remarkable life, which he would tell us about in booze-tinged anecdotes and perfectly deployed expletives. Jeremy spent most of the next six months in the hospital, recovering from the first operation, and dealing with a tumor in his throat. He died in August, suddenly and unexpectedly. He was old, but he relished life, chewed it like a dog with a rawhide bone.

They fall off the conveyor belt into the darkness, our friends, and we cannot talk to them anymore.

In November, Anthony's friends divided up the tasks of taking him to chemo, staying with him, bringing him home again (he could not drive himself back, after all). I offered to help, but Amanda said no.

VI

I MET AMANDA
Palmer because she wanted help in playing dead. She had been pretending to be dead in photographs for the previous fourteen years, and now she was making a whole record about it.
Who Killed Amanda Palmer,
it was called. We met and interacted because she wanted someone to write stories of her deaths.

I found the idea intriguing.

I wrote stories. I killed her over and over again in every story and poem. I even killed her on the back of the record. I wrote a dozen different Amanda Palmers before I ever knew her, each of them dying in a dozen or more inventive ways.

The deaths were inevitable. Of course, sometimes describing and thinking about death is our way of celebrating life, of feeling more alive, of grasping life tightly, licking it, tasting it, plunging our teeth into it and knowing that we are part of it. It's like sex, the tumbling into the tug and pull of the continuous stream of life. And life and sex are always tied in to death: the erection on the gallows, the final urge to procreate and live before the darkness.

We behave differently when we see the darkness looming. We become creatures of lust and fear.

Amanda pushed and helped him, and Anthony published some of his stories in a collection called
Lunatic Heroes
. He and his friends Nivi and Paul formed 3 Swallys Press to bring the book to the world. The launch event for
Lunatic Heroes,
in Lexington, Massachusetts, Anthony's hometown, was a dark event in a sold-out theater: Amanda read her introduction, and I read some of
The Ocean at the End of the Lane,
and most of all Anthony read from
Lunatic Heroes
.

I worried that he wasn't going to live much beyond the launch event.

I was scared for Laura, Anthony's wife, and scared for Amanda. I knew that any sadness I was going to feel at the loss of my friend was going to have to be put aside while I looked after Amanda, who would be broken and torn by Anthony's death.

It was going to be hard for all of us.

I felt the air from the wings of the angel of death brushing my face at that launch event, that night.

VII

LIFE HAS A
sense of humor, but then again, so does death.

Laura's mother, Pat, who helped me cook when we first moved into this house, died this year of leukemia.

Anthony, to our delight, got through the chemo, and, with the help of a newly released drug, he recovered. He is in remission—for now. He beat death, as much as any of us gets to beat death. For now—it's always a transient win, that one, and the reaper can wait. She's patient, and she will be here when the last of us has gone.

Anthony no longer had leukemia; but now he had a book called
Lunatic Heroes
.

There were darker stories that Anthony had crafted from his life that had not made it into that first book. Stories of obsession and desire. Stories of loss and fear and hate. The kind of stories that need you to be brave to tell them, braver still to publish them so that other people can look inside your head and know what makes you tick, and what makes you hard, and what makes you cry, that tell you that the hardest battles are the ones you fight inside your own head, when nobody else is going to know if you won or lost or even if a battle was fought at all.

Or to put it another way, and quote the Buddha, who knew about these things,

           
Though one may conquer a million men in battle, yet the noblest of victors is he who conquers himself. Self-conquest is far better than the conquest of others. Not even a god, an angel, Mara or Brahma could turn that triumph back into defeat.

VIII

WE WIN SOME,
but we lose many. We lose a lot. We lose our friends and we lose our family. In the end we lose everything. No matter who's with us, we always die alone. When you fight your battles, whatever battles you fight, it's always going to be about life.

We leave behind two things that matter, Stephen Sondheim said, in a musical I love and Amanda doesn't, and those two things are children and art.

Anthony's children are scattered: they are the people whose lives he has influenced and helped to shape. I count my wife as one of his children. Anthony's art is here, in these pages, waiting for you, as fresh, as sharp, as painful a hundred years from now when I'm dead and Anthony's dead and Amanda's dead and everyone we know is dust and ash and bones in the ground.

This book is a gift, and, as I said, it is the tales that accompany the gift that matter: the stories that show us the joy of event, of the shaping of memories, and the joy of a life lived, as all lives are lived, both in the light and in the darkness.

These pages are gifts, from Anthony to you, and they hold the tales that accompany the gifts, from someone who has walked into the darkness and now stands in the light, ready to tell you his stories.

This was my introduction to C. Anthony Martignetti's book
Beloved Demons
. Anthony died of leukemia in June 2015, at home, surrounded by his loved ones. We were there, his friends and family, around his bed. I was holding Amanda's pregnant belly as he left us, and feeling the movements of the baby we would name after Anthony.

W
e are in a metal shed in Azraq refugee camp, Jordan, sitting on a low mattress, talking to a couple who have been here since the camp opened two weeks ago. Abu Hani
^*
is a good-looking man in his late forties who looks beaten, like an abused dog. He hangs back. His wife, Yalda, talks more than he does.

There is a water jug on the floor. It is the only water they have. We have managed to knock it over twice, and each time we apologize and feel awful, as in order to refill it there is a five-minute walk to the four taps embedded in concrete at the corner of the block. The desert air dries out the thin carpet in moments.

The couple are telling us why they left Syria. Abu Hani once owned a small supermarket, but the “officials” who ran his town trashed it, mixed detergent into the grains and pulses, and took his stock. He spent his savings restocking the shop, but when he opened again they closed him down permanently. People were killed. On the local news they would show bodies that had been found, so people could identify their relatives: one time he saw a cousin's severed head on there.

Mostly their relatives just vanished. Yalda's brothers and
cousin were on their way to deliver blood for a transfusion to their infant nephew who was having an open-heart operation when they were stopped at a roadblock, and interrogated about the blood. The three men did not arrive at the hospital and were never seen again. I did not want to ask what happened to the nephew. Her mother, Yalda tells us, has lost her mind: she goes from police station to hospital to police station, asking about her sons—the police got so tired of this they wrote “deceased” next to their names, to make her stop coming and asking.

Abu Hani and Yalda tell us about the border crossing into Jordan, how they tried to leave their town without bribing a checkpoint officer, and how Abu Hani was taken into the office by the official and punched, kicked and jumped on in front of his wife and children for an hour and a half. All their money was taken from them. They left that checkpoint with him covered in blood, concussed, barely able to move and penniless.

“We woke up every morning glad we were alive, and went to sleep every night knowing we might not wake in the morning. There are so many ways to die in Syria now,” says Yalda. Their relatives have been imprisoned, gone missing, been murdered and killed in explosions.

The couple borrowed money from friends and the next time they went through the checkpoint, the same now-heavily-bribed officer saluted them. They reached the Jordanian border with nothing.

“I was scared of the Jordanian army on the border,” Yalda says. “I thought,
If the uniforms on the Syrian side were so brutal . . .
But when we crossed, the Jordanian army helped us, and welcomed us with a smile.” She tells us they were given cookies and water and blankets by the army, provided by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). “I got to the camp, and I felt like a child being welcomed by its mother,” she tells me.

I have not thought of Azraq camp as welcoming until now. A ghost town that opened at the end of April, it currently holds
around 4,000 people but is designed to accommodate 130,000 in its square white metal huts. It feels like the least welcoming place in the world, the only sign of life or color or individuality is the washing we see fluttering between buildings.

Abu Hani and Yalda now both have jobs in the camp. She greets new arrivals and he works as a porter for them (although people know he has back injuries and they give him light work). They want to save enough in the camp to replace broken hearing aids for two of their four children, both of whom are deaf. They worry that if she does not hear anything, their five-year-old daughter will forget the words she already knows how to speak.

We walk to the water supply to refill the family's jerry cans and make up for what we spilled, but no water comes out. They are waiting for the supply trucks to arrive. Jordan is the fourth-driest country in the world, and every drop of water in the camps is driven there from outside boreholes.

The crisis in Syria, the unrest that became a civil war that became a nightmare, created, as all wars have created since human beings started living in villages, refugees. They left their houses, if their houses were still standing, and they went somewhere else, somewhere they might at least be safe.

More than two and a half million people have fled the country in the past two years, and more than six hundred thousand of them have gone to Jordan. The Jordanian people and government have shown exceptional generosity. There are six million people in Jordan: the Syrian refugees make up 10 percent of the population. If Britain were to do the same proportionally, it would mean accepting about six and a half million refugees.

Syrians have come to Jordan because they speak the same language, have similar cultures and often relatives there, and because Jordan historically has taken in refugees—Palestinians, Iraqis and Kuwaitis have all fled there over the years. Sometimes they have even gone home again.

UNHCR doesn't like camps. The money that is spent running their infrastructure is money that could be spent on more direct support to people living in their own homes. But as the towns and the cities and urban centers have filled up, with a thousand refugees coming in every night, men and women and children, camps have become a necessity. They had two weeks to open the first one, Zaatari—planned for five thousand people, it grew to hold its current population of one hundred thousand.

Before I came out here, I tried to imagine what a refugee camp would be like. It would consist of several rows of tents in a field. It would be dusty, of course, because the field was in Jordan, where it is dry, and it would be a big field, because there were a lot of refugees. I had not imagined cities. Where Azraq is a ghost city of white boxes in a flint and lava desert, Zaatari is an anarchic dusty city of tents and boxlike people-containers, in which every streetlight is covered with a wild spaghetti-tangle of wires, stealing electricity to light people's homes, charge their phones and power televisions.

Kilian Kleinschmidt, the UNHCR camp manager who is mayor to this “city” of one hundred thousand, has resigned himself to an electricity bill of $500,000 a month, and now concentrates on putting in boxes on the lampposts that allow authorized electricians to access the power safely, and urging people to raise the wire tangles up off the ground during the rains. People move house in Zaatari by putting wheels on to repurposed fenceposts, lifting their houses onto them, and hauling them through the streets, while boys jump on and off, like a fairground ride.

I keep trying to work out how I got to Jordan. Things happen because they happen. UNHCR had noticed that when I retweeted their tweets and appeals, more people read them and acted on what they had read, so we spoke, and I linked to their sites, and read the links before I posted them. I volunteered to
get more involved, and UNHCR offered to take me to a camp somewhere to show me what was happening. I agreed.

Coco Campbell from UNHCR had been to school with Georgina Chapman, the fashion designer. I wrote a short film that Georgina directed last year. Coco asked if I would find out if Georgina would be interested in coming with me to see the refugee camps and what UNHCR did, and create another storytelling project together. I asked her, and she was. Georgina brought her husband with her, film producer Harvey Weinstein, who is, in all ways, larger than life. In Azraq camp, Harvey surprises his people by wanting to be there with us and by paying absolute attention to Abu Hani and Yalda. He tells the UNHCR representatives that he wants to pay for the hearing aids their children need, now. They tell him it doesn't quite work like that. There is a system in place and the children will get hearing aids.

Wherever we go in the camps children flock to Georgina. She smiles at them, and they cluster around her, cling to her legs, hold her hands. “She's like the Pied Piper,” says Harvey. We watch how, in Zaatari camp, people make lives, build a new normality as best they can. There are even shops: we eat the best baklava I have ever tasted in a bakery jerry-rigged from a container and a tent, rolled out on a metal table with a broom handle. Harvey wanders off, and I find him outside, talking with an old woman who lost her sons in the conflict, but made it to Jordan with her pregnant daughter. We ask who killed her sons, and she tells us she doesn't know.

It is a refrain we hear over and over, but we keep asking the questions, as people tell us how they came to the camps: Who bombed your house? Who shot you in the back as you drove on your motorbike to dig your children out of the rubble? Who cut off your cousin's head? Who killed your family? Who shot your son? Who cut off the food supplies? Who shot at you if you went
out of your house? Who beat you up? Who broke your hand?

People shrug. They don't know. There are, as Yalda told me, so many.

Back in the improvised baklava bakery, the baker's sister is telling Georgina about her miscarriages in Syria—they would move to escape the fighting, and she would get pregnant, but each time the shelling started she would lose the baby. She is twenty-six, she wears a pink headscarf, she is very beautiful. Her husband has left her for a new wife in the camp, one who can give him children. There are so many weddings in the camp. There are people who will rent you wedding dresses, although you have to buy the wedding-night lingerie.

Everyone I talk to in the camps has a nightmare story: they stayed in Syria, going through hell, until they could take no more, and then the journey to the border, with whatever they could carry, normally just a change of clothes for the children, would be a journey across hell. They put their lives at risk, and if they arrived at the border alive, it was worth it.

I look at Azraq camp, with room for another 126,000 people, all of whom will come, most of whom will risk death to get there, and I know that is another 126,000 nightmares.

I realize I have stopped thinking about political divides, about freedom fighters or terrorists, about dictators and armies. I am thinking only of the fragility of civilization. The lives the refugees had were our lives: they owned corner shops and sold cars, they farmed or worked in factories or owned factories or sold insurance. None of them expected to be running for their lives, leaving everything they had because they had nothing to come back to, making smuggled border crossings, walking past the dismembered corpses of other people who had tried to make the crossing but had been caught or been betrayed.

I keep going, talking to the refugees, to the people who run the camps and care for the refugees, and then, after accompa
nying Ayman, a Syrian volunteer nurse on his rounds, as he changes the dressings on a youth whose foot was blown off by a land mine and an eleven-year-old girl who lost half her jaw in a mortar attack that killed her father, I realize I can't think straight. All I want to do is cry. I think it is just me, but Sam, the cameraman, is crying too.

I imagine the world dividing into the people who want to feed their children, and the ones shooting at them. It is probably just an artificial divide but UNHCR is on the side of the people who want to feed their children, on the side of human dignity and respect, and it is rare that you know you have picked the right side. You are on the side of people.

This was originally published in the
Guardian,
May 21, 2014. Eighteen months later, well over four million people have fled Syria. Millions more have lost their homes, their towns, are “internally displaced” but have not yet crossed the border out of Syria. Political solutions and humanitarian solutions are needed. The heartbreak doesn't end.