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CHAPTER ONE
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It is a hot spring day and I am in the basement of my parents' house
in Sydney, sorting through tea chests. Pine floorboards creak
above my head as my mother steps beside my father's bed,
checking his breathing mask. The old floor is thin and while I
can't make out her words I recognize the tone, its veneer of
cheerfulness layered on anxiety.
From my father, propped up on pillows, I hear nothing. He
barely speaks anymore. His voice--the beautiful voice that once
made his living--is silenced by the simple effort of breathing. He is
staring toward a picture window that frames a view of ocean
through a fluttering fringe of gum leaves. But he can't see it. His
eyes, almost sightless now, are the whitened blue of faded
cornflowers.
When my father moved to this beach house just after his
retirement, he should have had the leisure to sort his old sheet
music, to work on his half-composed tunes, read his cricket books,
enjoy his correspondence. Instead, he became ill that year and
never found the energy even to unpack. So I have come
down here to do it, because I don't think I will have the heart to
face these things once he is dead.
The dirt floor of the unfinished basement is cool against my
bare legs, and I take my time. Twelve years of dust has filtered
through the flimsy lids. Spiders scurry away, indignant, as I disturb
them.
My father squirreled away everything. There are yellowed
news clippings about his career as a big-band singer in Hollywood
and Hawaii in the 1930s, before he came to Australia. There are
dozens of dog-eared photographs of musicians with frangipani leis
lying incongruously against their tuxedos; even more of Australian
army mates in slouch hats at the Pyramids, in Jerusalem's Old City,
among the huge-leaved trees of New Guinea.
And there are letters, piles of them. Replies to every piece of
correspondence my father ever wrote. He wrote, I realize as I
unfold the brittle pages of fifty-year-old letters, to everyone. From
1931, there is a two-line note from Albert Einstein, in verse,
responding to a request for permission to perform a ditty about him
that my father had composed. Einstein writes: "Though somewhat
silly, I don't mind--there's no objection I can find!" There is White
House stationery--a 1969 reply from the chairman of the Council
of Economic Advisers thanking my father for his "good letter" on
interest rates. There is a 1974 response from the office of Rupert
Murdoch answering my father's complaint about the creasing in his
broadsheet newspapers. And a letter from an acoustical expert
thanking my father for his suggestions about raising the height of a
concert-hall floor to improve the way sound carries.
Each letter is a small piece of the mosaic of my father's
restless mind, its strange mingling of global interests and nit-picking
obsessions. Some of the replies raise questions: Why did he write
to the Israeli Minister of Defense in 1976? Where is the poem he
wrote about Winston Churchill that the Australian
Prime Minister thanks him for in a 1958 letter? My father is beyond
answering such questions now. I have left it too late to ask.
Near the bottom of a tea chest is a thick pile of airmail letters
that raises an altogether different set of questions. Held by a
withered rubber band, they are addressed, in various childish
handwritings, to me. As I pull them out and blow the dust off, I
recognize them as letters from my pen pals--from the Middle
East, Europe, the United States.
I stare at them, puzzled. It was my mother who saved our
school report cards, our drawings and poems, old toys and
memorabilia. While I have never doubted that my father loved my
sister and me, he rarely involved himself in the day-to-day business
of our lives. Yet here, among his things, is more than a decade of
my correspondence, from 1966, when I discovered pen pals, to
1979, when my parents moved to this house.
When I wrote to these pen pals, in the late 1960s and 1970s, my
family inhabited a very small world. We had no car, had never set
foot on an airplane and, despite my father's American relatives,
never thought of making an international telephone call.
In the evenings, families in our neighborhood would gather on
the front verandas of their houses and wait for the "southerly
buster"--the big thunderstorm that would break the heat, lay the
dust and leave the air cool enough to allow sleep.
I was waiting, too. Waiting for something to happen, and
wishing that I lived in a place where something did. Except for
relentless coverage of the British royal family, Australian
newspapers paid little attention to foreign places. The nightly TV
news was more likely to lead with the coliform bacteria count at
Bondi Beach than the body count in Vietnam. Yet, at school, our
history books were filled with tales of elsewhere. The Great
Men--and they were all men, in those days--were British,
American, German, French. I was aware from religion class that a
few women had made it to greatness via sainthood, but they came
from even more distant-sounding places--St. Theresa of Avila,
Bernadette of Lourdes. A St. Margaret of Melbourne or a Diane
of Dubbo was clearly out of the question.
My father's escape was the yellow-painted metal mailbox on a
post by the privet hedge. Almost every day it contained a letter for
him from somewhere else--flimsy aerograms or heavy bond
paper with official-looking seals. At the age of ten I learned that it
was possible for me, too, to write to strangers and have them write
back to me. Suddenly, I could see a way to widen my world by
writing away to all the places where I imagined history happened
and culture came from. When the letters came back from
Vaucluse in France or Maplewood in New Jersey, I studied the
foreign images on the stamps and dreamed myself into the lives of
the writers.
And now I have their letters again in my hands. I sit in the
basement, reading, as the light slowly fades and the surf thuds on
the nearby beach. Oldest of all, nibbled around the edges by
silverfish, are the letters from my very first pen pal, a
twelve-year-old girl nicknamed Nell who lived just across town,
and in a different world.
Better preserved are the more recent letters from my
American correspondent Joannie, to whom I wrote for more than
fifteen years. She became my distant, teenage soulmate and taught
me how evanescent, and how enduring, such a friendship can be.
Her letters give me glimpses of my girlish self. "Do you know what
the control mice died of?" she asks, reminding me of my grandiose
and doomed attempt, at the age of fourteen, to alleviate world
hunger by proving the edibility of garden weeds. I'd forgotten that I
once knew how to write the words "Live
Long and Prosper" in the original Vulcan. And did I once call
myself by the hideous nickname "Gez"?
The geography of this childhood correspondence has become
the road map of the adult life I have lived. Joannie's letters became
a magnet drawing me toward the United States. In 1982, I wrote to
tell her I had won a graduate scholarship to the Columbia School of
Journalism in New York.
The address of my pen pal in a little village in southern France
is only a hundred miles from the other little French village, on the
stony, sunlit hillside, where I married in 1984.
In my teens, I wrote to an Arab and a Jew in the Middle East.
Twenty-five years later, I arrived in Cairo on a hot autumn night to
spend six years covering the Middle East as a reporter. From
foreign correspondent to Foreign Correspondent: I have become
the envelope full of words flying around the world.
But I know so little about these people who shaped my vision
of the world. How has the reality of their lives matched the
fantasies I projected on them from the safe harbor of my Sydney
girlhood? I begin to wonder if it's possible to track down
forty-year-old adults using only the childish letters they wrote half a
lifetime ago. Gently gathering the fragile correspondence with its
faded addresses, I decide that one day soon I will try to find out.
