Buying the Night Flight (28 page)

But far worse than anything were my own feelings that I had to face. Why, when I talked from Moscow to Nick Shuman, my editor in Chicago and a wonderful friend, did I not tell him about it? I told myself I was afraid the Russians would hear and that I wanted to spend my last ten days there interviewing dissidents and not get thrown out, but this was specious. It was because I began to feel myself somehow guilty -- guilty because I was a woman and reason ably attractive and thus the source and chalice of Evil.

***

What stayed with me was not only the terror of that evening in Tbilisi, which came so unexpectedly that ever after that I believed that anything could happen anywhere, that any man could change from normal person to brute, but also the slow realization and concretization of my situation as a woman -- and the situation of all women, internally and externally.

When I got to Vienna, I wrote out the entire situation to Nick in a letter. I could not bear to tell him on the phone -- I was too ashamed, yes, still feeling too guilty simply for existing. I went from there to Egypt to get the first interview that Mrs. Anwar Sadat, new as first lady, had ever given. And when I arrived home in Chicago two weeks later, I walked into the office expecting them to say something, to do something, even to write something. As Mike Royko, one of the few angry men around there, later put it, "What if a Russian woman journalist had been beaten up in this country? It would be around the world in five minutes!"

I waited. Nothing happened. No one said anything, although innuendos drifted back to me: "A girl like Gee Gee has to expect things like that.... " "She probably brought it on herself.... " Even

my mother said, "Dear, I'm surprised it hasn't happened to you sooner."

I was beside myself. I couldn't speak of it. In my own mind, somewhere deep in that feminine psyche, I had been coded like other women to believe that
I
was wrong: that I, by simply being, was evil. As impossible as it might seem, particularly for a "woman of the world" like me, the fact is that I spent a full year still reenacting the horror, still having nightmares, still believing that any man could change anytime as Ivan had. During this time I said nothing to the office, but I brooded. At times I hated them for not standing up for me, for not "protecting" me against that world out there (little girls should be protected by men) and for accusing
me
of evoking it. Yet at the same time, I was accusing myself, so how could I realistically or fairly blame
them?

And since finally I would have to react, I did it in the most clumsy and absurd manner possible, just as I had done when I wanted to go to Santo Domingo. Unable to speak of the Georgian experience, when I wrote a memo a
year
later about going to the Middle East to our respected editor, Daryle Feldmeier, I inserted deep in the middle of the memo a bitter paragraph. "Yet," I wrote, "if you are all to let me down as you did after my attack in Russia, I do not expect you to.... " I am embarrassed to include the rest.

Daryle, a dear friend, was staggered. He had given orders that anything I wanted done when I returned be done -- but I had asked for nothing.

It was an emotional confrontation. I began to cry. Nick had tears in his eyes, as did Daryle. They had been wrong, yes, but so had I been wrong. Programmed as are we all, I had been done in by the old female "genes." Despite everything that had been put into me to change me, despite all the education and opportunities, despite all the experience in the world, I was still a walking dictionary of all the old female beliefs, and fears, and traumas.

But I learned in Russia -- and in the eerie aftermath -- something that was as simple and as sure as my childhood beliefs: If men could do this to women, and if other decent and intelligent men could think there was nothing wrong with it and really rather like it, and if I, with all the blessings and benefits that had been poured into me, could still act in the absurd and agonized way I did, there is some thing deeply and darkly violent and destructive between the sexes -- along with that which is creative and loving and transcendent. No theories of economic deprivation can ever begin to explain this. But I had had so many of the loving and transcendent relations with men, too -- as family, as lovers, as fellow seekers, as colleagues -- that dark events like this marked me but never defeated me.

Men of Iron

"When the pope came here, we could see our Polish masses all around us. Before, it was pretty clear who they were. Now we saw who we were."
-- Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Solidarity national spokesman

Not by accident, much of my early professional life had been passionately-dedicated to studying and understanding Latin America, and in particular Central America and the Caribbean. There was reason and purpose in this: I loved Latin America, yes, but I also knew that one can know most about a nation if one studies how it treats its neighbors--just as one can know most about a man by knowing how he treats his wife. So, later, when I went to Russia, and then ten years later, in 1981, to Poland, it was very much a part of this never-ending and fascinating study.

What does one learn about the Soviet Union through its satellites? What kinds of mechanisms had the Poles hammered out consciously or worked out subconsciously to deal with their powerful neighbors? Was it the love-hate relationship that the Latins had for us? Was it similar to the Finns, who had arrived at a
modus operandi
with their neighboring Soviets by which they would keep their freedom by never, ever criticizing the Soviet

Union publicly? It was neither; the Poles dealt with the Russians, as with their other powerful neighbor, the Germans, through a kind of suicidal romanticism that allowed them spasmodically throughout history to rise to great, brief heights of heroism as a slap at fate--and then to sink back again until the next shining "moment."

Yet, after the dramatic "August 1980," it had seemed that this pattern was over, that there was indeed something new in Poland.

It was a wintry Sunday when my Lufthansa jet took off from Frankfurt's bustling and commercially Dionysian airport and headed east: east to where the harsh borders of Russia and the Orient meet. And as we sped toward Poland, the skies thickened into a great, gray curtain hanging in the sky beneath us. Occasionally this fog would part and fleetingly we could see the snow-covered landscape. Eventually we landed in Warsaw in a rain so thick it could have been raindrops frozen in the sky.

Since it was my first visit, I had really very little idea of what to expect. Poland, that hot and tumultuous and glorious August of 1980, had erupted. Communist Party control of the country was not only broken by the extraordinary phenomenon of the Solidarity free trade unions; it virtually collapsed of its own outer corruption, inner inertia, and squalid arrogance. The Eastern bloc of totalitarians ruled over by Mother Russia had never seen anything like it, and even the Russians did not know what to do with this new type of child. But now it was winter, and the Russians knew very well how to wait in winter, always their cruel but real and proven friend.

What would I find? How would I operate, how insert myself into this new type of society, half free and half still totalitarian? I had not the faintest idea, for I had not had time even to plan this trip. No one in Warsaw knew I was coming (which at times, of course, can also be a great advantage).

A young German businessman and I made our way into the city, our taxi cutting the thick gray blanket that enveloped it -- symbolic of the entire Eastern bloc -- like a slowly moving dull knife. Dull, dull -- everything was dull, gray and dull, smothering, in the gray, rainy surface of this city with its granite gray facade.

But soon I found that I was privileged to be present at the moment when a window to gray Poland -- to this closed, totalitarian, shrouded, silent society -- had momentarily opened. And inside there was a shining, shimmering, new reality that for eleven days I could hold in my hands like some precious but oh-so-breakable blown glass treasure. After twenty years as a journalist I could still feel poignantly and totally the fresh excitement of a new land and a new historic experience. To hear these voices -- no longer shrouded, true, open, honest -- was indeed like hearing the voice of God.

The "Polish revolution," if that is what we can or should call it -- different as it was from all the other revolutions I had covered -- was probably intellectually the most stimulating story I had ever covered. Part of it was that the Poles are indeed a highly intellectualizing and inward-turning people. Part of it was the fact that I found myself in the middle of a political society that was turning itself inside out -- and in which everybody had his own distinct ideas about how to save it. Every morning I awoke and arose filled with excitement about the conversations I was to have, the ideas and schemes for salvation I was to hear. For this was a society in which people were rationally and cautiously but systematically (and often against their own historic romantic and suicidal natures) involved in the desperately intricate business of freeing themselves.

In this country, which only months before had been held tight in the straitjacket of the Soviet Union, on the second night, I sat in the Interpress office at 6:00 p.m. in the early winter darkness, with the great Warsaw Opera House etched across the sky outside. I was listening to Andrzej Wroblewski, the deputy editor of the party newspaper,
Polityka,
a writer and self-described "romantic socialist." "I regret to say that people are fed up with the system,"

Wroblewski was saying. "If there were a poll on whether people wanted socialism today, most would say, 'No.'"

Wroblewski, who was strikingly handsome, then went on to analyze the generational problem. "I think that my generation was committed to a sentimental or romantic version of socialism --
egalité, fraternité,
all of that," he said thoughtfully. "The younger people today have nothing to do with ideas. They assess things as they are. Being unsentimental or brutal in their assessment, they analyze it for what it gives to them. Does it give the prospect of a better life? I would rather blame our generation. It was too idealistic, inclined to forgive too much of our system .... "

There were several ways in which, as the days rushed by and as I went from interview to interview, walking often ten miles a day in the absence of ready taxicabs, I began to analyze this totally fractured and disintegrating society -- and it was one of the most difficult analyses I have ever had to make. For, when I asked Marek Brunne, the spokesman for Solidarity, one turbulent afternoon, "Who is in control in Poland?" this frantic man answered, with total honesty, "Nobody is in control! Really! Nobody!"

First I tried to analyze the "Polish revolution" in terms of sociology -- it was clear that this time, in contrast to former "uprisings" in 1968 and 1976, the workers and the intellectuals were together. It was this solid ground swell that was so shattering to the system and so uniting to the often-divided Polish people.

Then I began to analyze the role of the Catholic Church and, in particular, the role of the Polish pope, John Paul II. I posed my questions about the Church phenomenon carefully. I did not ask, "Did the Church play a role in the Polish revolution?" I asked, "Could the revolution have happened without the pope?" And I got interesting answers.

Sitting in the busy Solidarity headquarters in Warsaw one after noon, I asked this of Janusz Onyszkiewicz, the national Solidarity spokesman. "When the pope came here, we could see our Polish masses all around us," he answered. "Before, it was pretty clear who they were. Now we saw who we were." I was deeply moved by those simple yet eloquent words describing how a people had suddenly been pulled together by a spiritual unity that they had not known existed among them before.

Then I journeyed to Cracow, the aristocratic city in the south whose graceful old buildings from the medieval times were left untouched by World War II, and there I learned even more about the pope's interesting and crucial role.

There are scenes and moments I deeply treasure, and this was one of them. Interpress, at my request, took me up to the extraordinary Catholic newspaper,
Tygodnik Powszechy,
and to its editor, Jerzy Turowicz, an old gentleman of obviously fine tastes and cultured mien. In the warm old room there were many informal and glowing photos of Pope John Paul II, during the thirty years he worked and wrote as a young priest in Cracow. Books and shelves filled with old file covers lined the walls, adding to the atmosphere of the room. I felt in the midst of a loving embrace.

Turowicz first told me how his beloved paper ("exceptional in this part of Europe," he said modestly) had wondrously survived, even through the Stalin days. And how much things had changed since "August." "Censorship is ten times more liberal," he said with a certain sense of wonder. "Every week we publish things that a year ago we couldn't have imagined. Every week we get closer to reality...."

But could it have happened without the pope? (I am always single-minded and obstinate about getting certain questions answered.) "No," Turowicz said thoughtfully. "When he was first elected, people were depressed and resigned. His being chosen gave to the people some partly irrational and some partly rational hope. He was a moral authority who came from our experience. He changed the whole psychological atmosphere in Poland, especially his visit. We saw ourselves as a real country, able to manifest and express ourselves quite fully. And nobody could impede us. For the first time we saw ourselves all united, even the party members."