Saturday's Child (65 page)

I was due in San Francisco that February, to be the token woman on a panel about the future, an invitation I'd accepted for three reasons: Fritz Capra was on the panel, and I liked his work; I'd stay with Toni Fitzpatrick, and we'd get to visit; and Marilyn and I had planned earlier that when she landed in California that week for the Rutgers sojourn, I'd drive her down the coast and show her Robinson Jeffers's Big Sur country before we both flew back to New York and she settled down in New Jersey. When she did finally phone in late January after the weeks of silence, I told her I did not intend to meet her in California, and that from here on in, it was over for good. I said I'd see her civilly in New York and that I wished her good luck at Rutgers. Period. I then went to San Francisco and came directly back with no Big Sur asides, although I wept my way through a lot of Toni's Kleenex, herbal tea, and cabernet.

It's not so easy to undo carefully laid plans, especially when the spirit is
only three-quarters willing and the flesh is tofu. Marilyn would be arriving in New York a few days later,
and
a few days
before
her lodgings in New Jersey became available, and now had no place to stay. Of
course
I should have told her to look up her old UN friend or explore that interesting phenomenon called a hotel. Of course I didn't. Of course I thought I had it under control. Of course I was kidding myself.

If all this had been going on with a man, I like to think that I would have recognized my emotional masochism and not been such a moron. But women were supposed to be
different
, you see. Anyway.

Lover arrives in blizzard. Long conversation by blazing hearth. Both parties crying. Expressions of love, loss, rage, pain, betrayal, ethics, confusion. Decision: This Time We Both Mean It, Merely Dear Friends.

Oh yeah. Forty-eight hours of
that
, and we were off and flying. Soon we were making plans for a Vermont weekend where she would teach me how to ski and for a trip to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, later in the spring, for the annual Bach Festival. When I drove her to New Jersey some days later, I took her past my father's house—as life would have it, in New Brunswick, the same town where she'd be quartered. We parked across the street from the house, and sat and talked quietly for a long time in the car, watching no one come or go along the snow-shrouded sidewalks.

I think now that that was a turning point, one of those moments when you decide that if, no matter how you try, you cannot stop yourself from feeling something—in this case, a passionate loving—then you might as well go all the way. I think now that the deliberate vulnerability I showed her that day I meant as a sign, a kind of surrender—not to
her
, but to
It
, this power that so gripped me with loving her. One must be careful not to mistake the poignancies in one's life for tragedies, but it's possible that one loves this way only once—and is willing to risk being left by such loving utterly devastated only once. I would in time come to regard it as an existential loving, a devotion in the face of nothingness. But that day, without understanding the connections I didn't know I was making, I spoke about my father—his legendary intellectual ability versus his demonstrated capacity for withholding emotion. She spoke about her own childhood, having been a too-bright, too-spirited, too-tomboyish working-class little girl in a prim culture that embraced conformity like a straitjacket and regarded the battery of children as ordinary discipline. We talked about
how cruelty coarsens the spirit, how lying corrodes the soul. For that hour, we were just two grown children trying to comfort each other, huddled in a chilly car while snow crystals spent their symmetries on the windshield to melt against an invisible wall.

Once Marilyn was established at Rutgers, she lived as much at Perry Street as in New Jersey, or perhaps more, with the excuse that the UN library was in New York. Again, life adopted fairly sane rhythms. Friends came to dinner and met her. She and Blake talked music. In March we took the big ski trip—which, as far as I was concerned, was heaven for the Jacuzzi and hot-toddy part but not so great for the careening-downhill-on-slippery-stuff-while-wearing-long-waxed-pieces-of-metal aspect. (Marilyn, who'd skied since age four, insisted on being my teacher—not her brightest idea.)

In April, as I was wrestling with the novel's revisions, Simone de Beauvoir died. News of her death came on the same day the United States bombed Libya, killing and maiming civilians “by accident” in a so-called smart-bomb surgical strike ostensibly to stop terrorism from killing and maiming civilians. In tears, I pushed the revisions to one side and sat down to write a tribute to her that would run in
Ms.
²
She had been to me an intellectual mother, reliable, generous with her support, astringent in her advice. When I first tackled the novel, I'd written to her about my nervousness in attempting it and my guilt at stealing time from political work in order to indulge myself in fiction. She'd answered swiftly and firmly, writing, “For now, forget politics and write the novel, Robin. For you, in any event, they will be the same thing. It will demand an act of courage. Bon voyage.” Now she was gone. Yet she comforts me still, oddly, all these years later. Recent biographical revelations and publications of her sweet, at times insipid love letters to Nelson Algren
³
help me laugh at my own sillinesses; her lifelong disastrous decisions about money and love help me forgive some of mine. She was always one freelance assignment away from
almost
getting out of debt, always torn between her political
responsibilities and her longing to be left alone to write. She was as vulnerable in her heart as she was formidable in her brain. And she had, as they say, “issues” with her mother. I miss her.

The months with Marilyn living so near or at Perry Street seemed at once a beginning and an ending. Shopping for groceries together, ambling through Greenwich Village arm in arm, going to concerts or movies, gardening on the roof, getting happily stoned on grass and talking for hours on end or laughing until our face muscles were sore, making love even longer and better as time went on—it seemed so promising that I gave myself to it totally. But I also believed that we were doomed, that when she returned to the other side of the world at the end of May it would be the last time we would see one another. I was trying with all my heart to live “in the moment,” but was afraid that when she left I'd crash into depression, so knew I'd need the demands of work to prop me up. With the revisions at last finished and the novel entering production, I'd begun research on
The Demon Lover
. But I needed more than cerebral work; I needed some preoccupying activism that would insist I function and be of use. There's nothing like practically addressing other people's suffering to give one perspective about one's own puny dilemmas.

In 1985, I'd been approached by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), with an invitation to visit the refugee camps and write about the condition of women. It had taken a year of negotiations, because I wanted to go alone, not as part of a journalists' group busing from camp to camp as if touring zoos; I wanted to wander through the camps, to see a minimum of buildings and installations, and to focus on women and children; I wanted to be free to avail myself of extra-official contacts acquired through my own networking with Arab feminists, and, most important, I wanted female interpreters—because the kind of intimate communication I hoped to inspire would be impossible through men. By the spring of 1986, these apparently unorthodox requests had been met. So on May 29, the day Marilyn left for New Zealand via California, I flew to a briefing at UNRWA headquarters in Vienna, then on to a sweep of Egypt, Israel/Palestine, the Gaza Strip, West Bank, Lebanon, and Jordan, for a six-week stay in the refugee camps.

That trip is described at length in
The Demon Lover—
probably the most excerpted and quoted part of the book. My return to the region two
years later, during the
Intifada
(“Uprising”) is covered in a long essay in
The Word of a Woman
. Both trips were brain-searing and heart-rending, and it would be a violation of the many Palestinian women I came to know and love (and the Israeli feminists and peace activists I also grew to know and respect), even to attempt to abridge those encounters here. How to summarize the memorable women in the camps of Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, West Bank, Gaza—former peasants, teachers, artists, ex-guerrillas, housewives, doctors, students, factory workers? The personal stories, the confidences entrusted, the mutual tears shed, the defiant laughter, the whispers when men were around, the radicalization of the women interpreters? How to summarize Rashideyeh Camp in Lebanon, where the hunger became so great that, after the rats had been caught and eaten, the men petitioned the mullahs for dispensation to eat human flesh—but no one had to ask who would cook it, because everyone knew that was the job of women, who were already “unclean”? Nor is it possible to express the flush of proud humility when word has spread about one's coming—all the way from the southern tip of the Gaza Strip to the north part of West Bank—so that women rush up in welcome, exclaiming through the translation, “Ayee, we know about you. You are the woman whose eyes weep with us. My cousins in Rafah Camp call you ‘the American woman with an Arab heart.'
Marhaba
. Welcome.”

Much of my nonfiction prose since the early 1980s consists of firsthand reports about the lives of women in different countries across the globe, and none of that can be summarized, either. Yet this memoir would be absurdly incomplete without at least a sampling of the vivid presences of those women. For me, they
are
the international Women's Movement, despite, at this writing, fashionable trends in what might be termed a pseudo-feminist “establishment”: slick professionalization of a leadership willing to work hand-in-fist with corporate globalization, overly academic emphases that can wind up having a neocolonial effect, attempts by some in the human-rights movement to co-opt global feminism into being a ladies' auxiliary of narrowly defined “human rights,” and donor-driven funding that ignores what women need, want, and specifically ask for. Well, these, like past fads, will run their course. Meanwhile, it's the real, flesh-and-blood women, who live and die far from any kind of establishment in New York or Washington, D.C., who will eventually transform
society. Certainly such women have permanently transformed the way I view the world. Many of them have honored me with their trust and their insights; their realities have become part of my reality, and so belong in this memoir. I can at least offer samples of their voices, the way their unforgettable stories have sequined my life, like koans.

Tahrir is only fifteen, a refugee who has fled Burj el-Barajneh Camp in Lebanon, one of the Beirut-area camps under steady siege by Israel in 1985. She's proud of her English and honor-student grades at an UNRWA school. She's beautiful, a bud of young womanhood flowering into her own energy.

“I want to teach,” she says. “I want to end the killing and start the living. I hate death so much. I hate people being cruel.” When I ask her, as I've asked so many others, what message she wants to send to women in the rest of the world, she thinks for a long time. Then, her smile a dazzle of optimism, she's ready.

“Tell them,” she says carefully, “what my grandmother and mother always told me—that it is women's job to save the world. In our
own
way, which isn't the men's way. Tell them,” she adds, “that whenever a woman anywhere fights for herself, she fights for me. My name, Tahrir, means ‘Freedom.'”

We embrace. “
Bahibbik ya ukhti
,” I murmur, “I love you, my sister.”

Later I learn that the day after entrusting me with her message, Tahrir is killed by a shell.

When I began working in an international feminist framework, it was largely at conferences. That's all very well, but big meetings are, like any self-selecting group, unrepresentative of most “real people.” I discovered that there are international globe-trotting jet-sets of feminist elites just as there are national ones. To get at the authentic situation, you have to go
to
it—to the women in the region, in the villages, to the people who never get to go on delegations. There you find depths of human suffering you could
not have imagined and, sometimes, heights of human courage you might never have believed.

But first you have to do your homework, because these women have more pressing things to do than educate your ignorance in a private tutorial. That homework must also include ongoing self-scrutiny. It's delicate to be an activist in a global context when your country is currently the only superpower. I've sarcastically referred to myself as a sensitive Roman at the height of the Empire, well aware that my sisters abroad—especially in developing countries—may perceive me as that Roman, no matter how much cross-cultural awareness I labor to develop in myself. This, by the way, has nothing to do with guilt politics, which I regard as conveniently paralyzing, ripe for backlash defensiveness, counterproductive, and boring. It has to do with responsibility and a political will to change—and change doesn't happen without some clumsiness. But it
is
possible, for example, to transform privilege into access. That means you learn to say, “Okay, so I have certain skills and connections. Rather than hoard these, ignore them, or pretend to divest myself of them, how can I make of myself a bridge so that other women can acquire those skills and take advantage of that access?” Or to say, “Okay, so I got invited. I'm a European American, which means I better make damned sure that the U.S. presence is plural, and not lily-white.”

Actually, I'm rather vain about how the U.S. Women's Movement usually functions in international situations. The French and Germans, for instance, will be there with their brazenly homogenous delegations, claiming that their own immigrant populations “aren't interested in feminism.” Then in we'll tromp, Yankee Doodle Dandies. Let's say there are five of us. Immediately you know there has to be a Native American, an African American, a Latina, an Asian American, and a European American. But wait: there also must be representation beyond race or ethnicity, which means doubling or tripling up. So the Native American might be in a wheelchair (and married), the African American a Jew (and single), the Latina a small-business entrepreneur (and a mother), the Asian American eighty-four (and a lesbian), and the European American a fourteen-year-old rural quilt maker sporting baggy pants, a be-ringed pierced belly button, and an Appalachian drawl. This makes for a comical motley crew, and when we caucus all hell breaks loose—but in public we're not separate
fingers, we're one fist. At such moments I indulge myself in a sentimental fit of matriotic pride, although the Europeans sometimes ridicule our multicultural pains. Hélène Cixous once huffed Frenchly at me, “You Americans! You are obsessed with this race fairness issue!”—a glass-house comment if I ever heard one, from the folks who brought us colonial Algeria, Senegal, and Rwanda, for starters.