Buying the Night Flight (41 page)

I don't know whether to cry for the poor Angolans or for us.

After five days in "revolutionary Angola," I was ready to leave: ready and more than eager. Travel in Africa was awful, and in order to go south to South Africa and on to Rhodesia I had to go through Mozambique -- otherwise I would have to travel all the way back to Europe and all the way south again. But Mozambique, which is also in the post-Portuguese colonial period clutches of a "new Marxist" government, had not even responded to my visa request. When they did, months later, their message read, "You are not in our plans." By then how glad I was!

I was getting itchy. I wanted to leave. Now "the government" told me they had "lost" my passport. I was growing downright mad. Then that Monday, da Almeida eyed me sidewise in a strange manner and, after making the usual ritual observations about what an odd time it was to have an "economist" in Angola, said, "I think you are going to leave tonight."

We were all seated in our regular places on the roof at 11:00
P
.
M
., having our usual good-natured and laughing evening, when the manager of the hotel himself came up to the table. "Miss Geyer, your passport is in my office," was all he said.

I was jubilant, and Lee insisted upon accompanying me to the lobby. "Mr. Griggs, why don't you stay here," the manager told him, and so Lee, always very much the gentleman, remained behind. Once in the manager's small office at the back of the lobby, I suddenly heard the door shut behind me, and I half-turned. Then I saw that I was trapped. Three very young, very ugly-looking black thugs stood in front of me. I immediately saw that one had my passport. I wasn't exactly frightened -- at that moment -- because I was so very surprised at all of this.

"The government has issued an order for your deportation," one of the thugs announced grimly. I remember feeling rather pleased and thinking to myself, "Well, now I'll be able to leave, at least." But then they started to push me out the back door and it didn't all seem such a good idea after all.

At this all, my Teutonic upbringing raced to the fore. "I have to pay my bill," I said, absurdly. This angered them -- perhaps they thought I was making fun of them -- and they growled and started to push me again. I did, however, in that moment, not miss noticing the flicker of a smile of hope pass over the manager's lips.

Once in the car, flanked on both sides by these thugs, it all seemed even less of a good idea. "Where are we going?" I asked, hearing my voice come across in Portuguese with an anxious ring.
"Al aeroporto,"
one answered. But we didn't go toward the airport at all, we went ninety miles an hour through the empty and hostile streets to the old Portuguese
cuartel
or prison on the sea. We crashed through the gate and slid to a halt in the courtyard amidst the ominous cluster of scabrous, 1876 buildings.

It was then that I lost my taste for the whole adventure, because they opened the trunk and there were my bags. So they had gone through the room while we were at dinner! That was ominous. And then I remembered that just before going to dinner, the door to my room had suddenly opened. A young black man had started to come in but had stopped, very surprised to see me there, and backed away. I had thought at the time that he had just been a room man.

Once inside the peeling old room, for some reason I gained heart. Once we were talking -- once I could engage in the process and the exchange, even though I was under arrest -- most of the fear left me. Fear, they tell me, is connected intimately with the unknown and once you know where you are, it takes its hesitant leave. That is to a great extent true. At least for me the truth of the matter was that I became very "interested" in the whole exchange.

The interrogator was a young mulatto man, very Portuguese looking and obviously well educated, and he kept honing in on only one subject. "We want you to tell us whom you have spoken to in Luanda," he kept repeating. "And you are not going to leave until you do."

Here, all of your journalistic and personal ethics -- or lack of them -- come in: that and just common sense and decency, which is of course what ethics is. So there was no way in hell or heaven that
I
was going to tell them the names of the people I had spoken to. That is probably the first area of a journalist's responsibility. But as he kept hammering in at me, I found myself basically wondering only one thing: "Why?" Why did he care? Who was he? What did he represent? Why were they doing this? Actually it was much like watching myself in a suspense movie.

Gradually, from the tone and tenor of his questions, the reality began to dawn on me. Revolutionary Angola was in the hands of the
MPLA
, whose president was Agostinho Neto. But within his "government" there was also a man named Nito Alves, the minister of the interior, and Alves was known to be on the severe "outs" with Neto. It was an obvious supposition, at first, to think that they had picked me up because I had been interviewing their Cuban visitors, but that wasn't it at all. These were Nito Alves's men, and they wanted to know whom I had interviewed because I had written -- and filed it from Luanda by public telex -- that Alves was increasingly against Neto.

They thought someone in Luanda had given me the priceless information that they were in effect conspiring against Neto, which they were. The situation was even more dangerous than I thought. For I was not even in the hands of "the government," but in the hands of the Alves satellite group -- and that group was indeed conspiring against the government. It was a ready-made "She-died-while-trying-to-escape" type of situation, or a "But-we-never-sawher" type of situation. A few drops of sweat ran down my brow and I tried to brush them away. I didn't want my epitaph to read, "Shot By Mistake."

I had read about the Neto-Alves feud in
The Washington Post
, but my Chicago street sense told me absolutely not to say this to them. They would think I was making fun of them. So what to do? I don't recall thinking about this consciously, but suddenly I saw myself, as from afar, carrying out a little drama.

Gee Gee was hanging her head appropriately and saying, in Spanish and Portuguese, "I am truly very embarrassed to tell you this.... I really don't quite know how to tell you this ... This is very embarrassing to me, but..." They were looking suddenly interested, and Gee Gee, another person, was saying, "You know I live in Washington and ... well, you know how my government is ... and, before I left, the State Department took me aside and completely brainwashed me ... and they told me exactly what to say and ... I am truly embarrassed, but I didn't really see anyone in Luanda as you know because you've been following me and all the information and everything I wrote came straight from the State Department."

And Gee Gee hung her head, so appropriately, so humbly, so convincingly.

They hadn't been watching me, of course. And the State Department does not brainwash people. But subconsciously I knew quite enough to feed their prejudices. Here were Marxists who blamed everything on the United States and they were easily taken in by anything that supported their prejudiced conclusions. In fact they were delighted!

And as I continued to hang my head in, oh, such embarrassment, the interrogator primly used me as an ideological example for the young Angolan troops who were sitting around the little room on the floor.

"You see," he said with barely concealed glee, "here you have, right here before you, exactly an example of what we have been telling you about. They say they are objective journalists and then they come here, after having been brainwashed by the ... " On and on he went, with such pleasure, while Gee Gee hung her head -- and thus got safely out of Angola without compromising anyone except "the State Department," confirming a myth that existed already in their minds.

Kate Webb, the wonderful Aussie who was United Press's star reporter in Vietnam and was captured herself for two weeks with the Viet Cong, later told me that I had indulged in a little bit of Marxist "self-criticism," thus utterly delighting and even soothing them.

Whatever, after his little ideological speech to the young soldiers the interrogator began (how insulting!) to lose interest in me and even in the names he had so fervently wanted. I could see his attention becoming frayed and moving elsewhere. He sighed heavily. "When we can get a car, I guess we can take you to the airport." He looked at his watch. It was 2:00
A
.
M
. by then. "You can get the seven
A
.
M
. flight to Paris." Then he left -- and the interesting part began.

For the first time in the week that I had been in Angola, I was able to talk to some of the real revolutionary soldiers. I sat there in that dank, Humphrey Bogart-style little room in the old Portuguese prison and talked for more than two hours with the little black soldiers, most of them only thirteen or fourteen years old. Their voices hung in the still night air as they told me, in their simple and true way that was so different from the ideologues', what the war in the jungle had been like. And I felt wonderfully like a journalist again, instead of a prisoner.

By 4:00
A
.
M
. they came to get me and take me to the airport to be "deported," and I had one fleeting, admittedly unworthy and petty thought -- a wave of resentment washed over me that I had already bought a ticket to Paris on my own, because had I not, they would have had to buy me one. On the other hand, I had bought it with black-market Angolan money and so the entire trip from Luanda to Paris and back down to South Africa cost me only three hundred dollars!

On the way to the airport, through the oppressive dankness of the dark early morning, the interrogator made one more try. In one column I had referred to a woman by the made-up name of "Marcella" and he insisted upon knowing who Marcella was. Actually she was a young Angolan housewife who worked at one of the embassies, but now a reckless mood came over me.

"All right," I said, now feigning a willingness to work with him, "I'll tell you." He looked around in the car, and even in the semi-darkness I could see his eyes light up. "You go out the front of the Presidente Hotel," I began, making up the apocryphal story as I went along, "and you walk around the park. At the first corner you go to the right for three blocks. There are a bunch of shacks there and you turn and walk about half a block.... On the left, in a little white house, you'll find Marcella. She's a Portuguese woman, about sixty years old, and she has six children. Her husband has gone back to Lisbon and she's very bitter about being left here.... "

It was all made up -- and it was only after I was in Paris and mentioned it to a friend that he reminded me of a certain story by Albert Camus, in which a prisoner tells a similar story and the jailers go to the place -- and find exactly the person. It sent a terrible chill up my spine.

At the airport they deposited me in a room with several young Angolans who were directing the few planes in and out. It was early morning still, and the air was cloying in the Angolan heat. Rats were scurrying about the floor, so I secured my feet on a chair. And all the while, as we sat there snoozing, from an old, high radio from the 1930s came the music of "Radio Cabo Verde," singing its way suddenly out of my childhood and into this strange African night with "You Belong to My Heart," which had been one of my mother's early favorites. At that moment I grasped the reality of the existentialist moment.

***

So, yes, I got to Paris, and I wrote in the lead of my long piece which was printed all over the world:

PARIS
-- Most travelers do not come to Paris by way of Angola. I had not planned on it myself. But the new Angolan government decided I should see Paris in the spring -- and I didn't see any realistic way to refuse them.

But "incidents" like these, having intruded into your life, do not just then leave you alone. They remain to haunt you and taunt you. What remained with me, I guess, was the kind of fear that comes from the fact that each time I was arrested or held, it happened so unexpectedly that it seemed to come out of nowhere. If you know you are being watched, or stalked, or sought out, then at least you can plan for it -- it is another kind of "knowing." This incident in Angola, as well as the ordeal in Soviet Georgia, left me with the terrible feeling that anything can happen at any time and that anyone can turn without any warning into some kind of monster. It is something I have not got over and something I doubt I ever will quite get over.

Fear and courage are the web of our work and in our lives, yet ironically correspondents seldom talked about them. When they had taken me into that prison that night in Luanda, I took God aside with an arrogant little promise. "If I get out of here alive," I told Him confidingly, "I will never complain about anything again." It was a foolish promise (what can one expect when one tries to bribe God?), mostly because I assiduously kept trying to observe it long after it was at all appropriate to real life.

"Mystery alone is at the root of fear," Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, and, as in many things, he was right. "Once a man has faced the unknown, the terror becomes the known." Dial one day read me the part where he says that in our strange business you become deeply close to your colleagues, and when you hear that one has died "out there," while performing your shared chores of life, often you cannot really believe that he is gone. "They land alone at scattered and remote airports, isolated from each other in the manner of sentinels between whom no words can be spoken," he wrote. "It needs the accident of journeyings to bring together here or there the dispersed members of this great professional family. Life may scatter us and keep us apart ... but we know that our comrades are somewhere 'out there' -- where, one can hardly say -- silent, forgotten, but deeply faithful. And when our path crosses theirs, they greet us with such manifest joy, shake us so gaily by the shoulders! Then, bit-by-bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning.... "