'A gripping tale of savagery and courage' Noam Chomsky
'Fascinating and captivating' Irish Times
'A beautiful book... Full of pain and longing but also joy, adventure, and excitement' Janine di Giovanni
'A superb account of the life and work of the best reporter I have ever known' Patrick Cockburn
When Lara Marlowe met Robert Fisk in 1983 in Damascus, he was already a famous war correspondent. She was a young American reporter who would become a renowned journalist in her own right. For the next twenty years, they were lovers, husband and wife and friends, occasionally angry and estranged from one another, but ultimately reconciled. They learned from each other and from the people in the ruined world they reported from: Lebanon, torn apart by a vicious civil war as well as Israeli and Syrian occupations; Iran, where they were the only journalists to interview the Middle East's chief hostage-taker and dispatcher of suicide bombers; the Islamist revolt that claimed up to 200,000 lives in Algeria; the disintegration of former Yugoslavia and two US-led wars on Iraq. This is at once a portrait of a remarkable man, the story of a Middle East broken by its own divisions and outside powers, and a moving account of a relationship in dark times.
'A gripping tale of savagery and courage' Noam Chomsky
'Fascinating and captivating' Irish Times
'A beautiful book... Full of pain and longing but also joy, adventure, and excitement' Janine di Giovanni
'A superb account of the life and work of the best reporter I have ever known' Patrick Cockburn
When Lara Marlowe met Robert Fisk in 1983 in Damascus, he was already a famous war correspondent. She was a young American reporter who would become a renowned journalist in her own right. For the next twenty years, they were lovers, husband and wife and friends, occasionally angry and estranged from one another, but ultimately reconciled. They learned from each other and from the people in the ruined world they reported from: Lebanon, torn apart by a vicious civil war as well as Israeli and Syrian occupations; Iran, where they were the only journalists to interview the Middle East's chief hostage-taker and dispatcher of suicide bombers; the Islamist revolt that claimed up to 200,000 lives in Algeria; the disintegration of former Yugoslavia and two US-led wars on Iraq. This is at once a portrait of a remarkable man, the story of a Middle East broken by its own divisions and outside powers, and a moving account of a relationship in dark times.
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Overview
'A gripping tale of savagery and courage' Noam Chomsky
'Fascinating and captivating' Irish Times
'A beautiful book... Full of pain and longing but also joy, adventure, and excitement' Janine di Giovanni
'A superb account of the life and work of the best reporter I have ever known' Patrick Cockburn
When Lara Marlowe met Robert Fisk in 1983 in Damascus, he was already a famous war correspondent. She was a young American reporter who would become a renowned journalist in her own right. For the next twenty years, they were lovers, husband and wife and friends, occasionally angry and estranged from one another, but ultimately reconciled. They learned from each other and from the people in the ruined world they reported from: Lebanon, torn apart by a vicious civil war as well as Israeli and Syrian occupations; Iran, where they were the only journalists to interview the Middle East's chief hostage-taker and dispatcher of suicide bombers; the Islamist revolt that claimed up to 200,000 lives in Algeria; the disintegration of former Yugoslavia and two US-led wars on Iraq. This is at once a portrait of a remarkable man, the story of a Middle East broken by its own divisions and outside powers, and a moving account of a relationship in dark times.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781801102537 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 10/28/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 15 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Lara Marlowe was born in California and studied French at UCLA and the Sorbonne, then International Relations at Oxford. She started her career in journalism as an associate producer with CBS's '60 Minutes' programme, then covered the Arab world from Beirut for the Financial Times and TIME magazine. She joined the Irish Times as Paris correspondent in 1996 and returned to Paris in 2013 after serving as Washington correspondent during the first Obama administration. Marlowe was made a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 2006 for her contribution to Franco-Irish relations.
Read an Excerpt
Prologue It will be the past and we’ll live there together. Not as it was to live but as it is remembered. It will be the past. We’ll all go back together. Everyone we ever loved, and lost, and must remember. It will be the past And it will last forever. Patrick Phillips, “Heaven”
I1 November 2020 am sitting at my desk in Paris on a Sunday evening, hoping to catch up on email before the new week starts. The phone rings, which is unusual in our era of digital communication. It is the Irish Times foreign affairs editor Paddy Smyth. Paddy and I rarely talk, though we have been friends and colleagues for a quarter-century. “What’s happened?” I ask Paddy, fearing I have missed a story on my patch, perhaps a terrorist attack or an assassination in France. I am not eager to write an article that evening, or set off on a story the following morning. It is infinitely worse than that. “We weren’t sure if you heard that Robert Fisk died,” Paddy begins as gently as he knows how. At first I am incredulous. This must be some kind of bad joke. My former husband is only seventy-four years old and is fit as a fiddle. I recently saw This Is Not a Movie, a documentary about him, co-written by his wife. Robert was still tearing around the Middle East, dodging shellfire and denouncing those he called “the bad guys”. Just a year before, when I ran into Robert at Dublin airport, he appeared the very picture of good health and contentment. “We will publish a piece in tomorrow’s paper,” Paddy continues. Details are scant, he says. I misunderstand him to mean biographical details, rather than facts about Robert’s death. I begin to spout information, asking Paddy to share it with whomever is writing the article for The Irish Times. The chronology of Robert’s life, which I know by heart, pours out in haphazard fashion. I recall Robert’s mock chagrin that his birthday fell on 12 July, the day when Orangemen celebrate the Battle of the Boyne. Attuned to the ironies of history, he recounted that his father, William, whom he referred to as “King Billy”, was deployed to Ireland “on the wrong side” during the 1916 Rising. Bill Fisk became the borough treasurer of Maidstone, Kent, for which he was awarded the Order of the British Empire. Robert’s mother, Peggy, née Rose, was a housewife and amateur painter who was thrilled to be appointed as a magistrate in her middle years.
I blather on to Paddy. Robert loved revisiting his own life. His paternal grandfather, Edward, was first mate on the celebrated Cutty Sark, so we travelled to Greenwich to see the restored clipper ship. Robert was delighted to find Edward Fisk named in a black-and-white photograph of the crew. He took me to Yardley Court, the minor British public school in Tonbridge to which he was sent as a boarder at the age of nine, and which he hated. Robert’s ineptitude at maths made him ineligible for Oxbridge, but he graduated with a first-class honours degree in Classics from the University of Lancaster. His alma mater later gave him the first of his half-dozen honorary doctorates. He recalled his glee as a schoolboy upon discovering “the dirty bits” in the erotic poetry of Catullus. His favourite joke about ageing television correspondents was that they were still waiting for their laundry to come back after they covered the Battle of Thermopylae. Though he was in some ways a quintessential British public- school boy, Robert was also a pacifist in perpetual revolt against authority. He got himself expelled from cadet training by destroying his rifle. “I love the wily rebel who threw his rifle in the river / And the little boy in you who wanted to drive steam trains,” were the first lines of the first poem I wrote to him, in 1987. Robert had a following in Ireland, a country he came to love with his first serious journalistic assignment, covering the Troubles in Belfast for The Times. Though he was lucid about the excesses of the IRA, he saw Northern Catholics as underdogs and victims. He would later compare their status to that of Shia Muslims in Lebanon and Iraq. Robert’s doctoral thesis at Trinity College Dublin became In Time of War, the definitive book on Irish neutrality during the Emergency, as World War II is known in Ireland. He bought the cottage opposite Finnegan’s Pub and Maeve Binchy’s house in Sorrento Road, Dalkey, before I met him. We later built our dream home, imitating the style of the Ottoman mansions that adorn Beirut, overlooking the sea in Dalkey.
When, in 1976, the foreign editor of The Times asked Robert if he wanted to go to Beirut to cover the Lebanese Civil War, Robert said he “felt like an Arab king being offered a country by Winston Churchill”. The assignment changed the course of his life. For the next forty-five years – fifteen of them with me – Robert interviewed generals and guerrillas, wounded civilians and their tormentors. He knew more about the region’s history than many of its inhabitants did. He accurately predicted its future. When Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David accords with Israel, Robert wondered in print if the Egyptian autocrat had signed his own death warrant. He saw how Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon radicalised and Islamicised the region. He warned that the evacuation of Palestinian fighters after the siege of West Beirut left women and children defenceless, a premonition of the Sabra and Chatila massacres which he covered with award- winning eloquence. When Yasser Arafat concluded his ill-fated Oslo peace accords with Israel in 1993, Robert explained to my naïve bosses at Time magazine why it could not work. He knew that Israel would not give East Jerusalem back to the Palestinians or stop seizing Arab land in the West Bank, and that the Palestinians’ right of return, as consecrated in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, was an existential and irreconcilable issue for both parties. Under the Oslo accords, he said, Israel would turn the PLO into its policemen. He predicted that the 2003 US and British invasion of Iraq would destroy Iraq and hand it on a platter to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Robert’s message never varied. He regarded war as the total failure of the human spirit. He railed against the double standards that led journalists and politicians to regard violence by Muslims as “terrorism”, while Israel, the US and NATO were never labelled “terrorists” for the civilians they slaughtered. He protested endlessly that the Palestinians were not responsible for the Holocaust, but that Arabs needed to admit that the genocide had happened. He denounced those who equated criticism of Israeli actions with anti-Semitism. He said every war contained the seeds of the next one.
Robert’s immense physical courage was matched by his moral courage. He braved hate mail and condemnation by media pundits and government officials. Although he was not alone in criticising the tyranny and corruption of Arab despots, Robert was far more daring than most of his colleagues in investigating the criminal ravages of US and Israeli military offensives. He never forgot that the Armenian Holocaust was the first genocide of the twentieth century. He refused to allow the dispossession of the Palestinians to be erased from history. In the Middle East, too, Robert had a following. Arab universities invited him to lecture. Diplomats and Arab officials were eager to meet him. When Vintage Books republished T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom in 2008, they asked Robert, perhaps the Englishman most closely associated with the region since Lawrence of Arabia, to write the preface. Lawrence wrote: “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour.” This was, Robert wrote, “exactly what happened to us in Iraq” at the time of the 2003 invasion. Robert understood Europe and its history equally well. Amid the euphoria over the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact, he told me, “Watch out. I know what Eastern Europe is like. Ugly, right-wing, neo-fascist nationalists will start coming out of the woodwork.” When commentators enthused about the possibilities of the internet and social media, Robert predicted they would be a powerful vehicle for disinformation and indoctrination.
Robert was not only a journalist and historian, he was a master of the English language, il miglior fabbro. A Lebanese colleague told me Robert’s descriptions were so vivid that reading one of his articles was like watching a video of the event. They were translated often into Arabic and republished in Beirut newspapers. The Arabic version of Pity the Nation, his masterpiece about the Lebanese Civil War, was also a bestseller. Though Robert’s spoken Arabic was rudimentary, I watched him painstakingly check every line of the Arabic translation before it went to print. Some of these details were recorded by obituary writers at the beginning of November. To me, they provide only the faintest outline of the man who was the most important influence in my life, the man who gave me Lebanon, Ireland and journalism. No one ever loved me as much as Robert did. No one hurt me as much either. There was never anyone like him.I have lost him for the second time, I keep thinking as I tune in and out of the telephone conversation with Paddy. He says The Irish Times learned of Robert’s death from a hospital source, but the newspaper lacks independent confirmation. In shock and confusion, I think there is some doubt about his demise. So I hang up and dial the house we built together in Dalkey. We kept the same telephone number when we moved there from the cottage in 1999. It was my Dublin phone number for twenty years. I never dialled it after Robert remarried in 2009, but I still know the number by heart. His widow answers the telephone. She is poised, but I can hear the strain in her voice. “He went to Vincent’s hospital with a high fever and pneumonia on Friday night,” she says. I had spoken to her only once before, in the late 1990s, when she rang our hotel room in Tehran. I am intrigued by her unplaceable accent. “Was it Covid?” I ask. “No. They wasted time doing a Covid test, and while that was happening, he had a massive stroke. He never regained consciousness. He didn’t suffer… The church service and burial will take place tomorrow.”
“Why didn’t you call me? I would have come over for the funeral.” She says she didn’t know how to reach me. “What time is the service? Where is it?” “In the chapel in Dalkey at 11.30. The hearse will go to Kilternan cemetery around 12.30.” “I will try to come over,” I say. “There are limits on the numbers because of Covid – a maximum of twenty-five,” she cautions. “With all the people who confirmed, we are probably twenty-five already. The church said they cannot and will not accommodate more. You can stand outside if you want to, but the weather is cold and windy. “Robert loved this country. He was very proper about obeying Irish regulations,” she continues. “He had many friends but also enemies. I don’t want Robert’s funeral to be marked as one where rules were broken… You can come to the outdoor part, at the cemetery.” We hang up and I look at the clock. It is already 8.30 p.m., too late to catch a flight to Dublin that evening. I do not know what Covid regulations are in force, or how many flights are operating. I ring my friend Patricia O’Brien, Ireland’s ambassador to Paris, who is immensely sympathetic. “The first flight is not until 10.40 a.m. You cannot make it to Dalkey in time for the church service,” Patricia says. “But you could make it to Kilternan cemetery by 12.30.” I buy an Aer Lingus ticket online, and ring Louis Deacon, the friendly Dublin taxi driver who often helps me. He will meet my flight and drive me straight to Kilternan. Robert was eleven years older than me, but I always thought I would die before he did. My parents and grandparents died young. His father, whom Robert resembled physically, lived to be ninety-three. I assumed he would live that long, if he could continue to elude violent death in the Middle East.
At the end of the day, this man who cheated death a thousand times died of natural causes. Robert used to imitate the clack- click sound of the bolt being released on a Kalashnikov pointed at his chest by an angry gunman. Being a war correspondent had taught him how easy it was to die, he said. It took only the slightest misjudgement over crossing a road, or the way one looked at a gunman. Robert was a force of nature. I used to tell friends that living with him was like being plugged into a 220-volt electrical socket. I find it impossible to believe that I will never see him again, never hear his cheery voice, unless in dreams. I dreamed of him on the Friday night he died. The romantic in me wants to believe he was saying goodbye. I sit in the back of the taxi, wrapped in an old, long black wool coat and the black beret that Robert said made me look like a Resistance heroine or an IRA gunman. I keep my eye on my watch as we speed down the M50. “How much farther is it, Louis? We must be there by 12.30.” Louis is not accustomed to my being ill-tempered and impatient. He exits the highway one off-ramp too soon, and we wander. I nearly lose my sang-froid. Since 1983, I have kept hundreds, probably thousands, of appointments with Robert. Countless times I travelled with a quickened heartbeat, excited at the prospect of our reunion, not wanting to keep him waiting. We met in airports and hotels, at border checkpoints and at our homes in Beirut, Paris and Dublin. In Kuwait City and in Sarajevo, our bulletproof vests clanked “like turtles”, Robert said, when we ran into each other’s arms. This is our last rendezvous, my only chance to say goodbye. I must not miss it. A double rainbow hangs above the pretty wooded valley of Kilternan, the length of the horizon. The wind is icy, but mercifully it isn’t raining. An Irish army piper in a kilt is lifting bagpipes from the boot of a car in the otherwise empty parking lot. “Are you here for the Fisk funeral?” I ask. He nods Yes. “They haven’t arrived yet?”
“No,” the piper says. “You’ll see them coming. They have to enter there, where you did. There is only one entry.” Despite the cold, I feel easier waiting outside, pacing and watching for Robert’s arrival. At long last the black nose of the hearse inches into the cemetery drive, followed by a few cars. The piper takes up his place behind the hearse. Three women alight from the first car. I recognise Catherine Sheridan, our dear neighbour from across the road in Dalkey. “Hello, Lara,” a woman in a long black velvet cloak with a jewelled broach says to me. We are wearing face masks because of the pandemic. I do not recognise Robert’s widow, whom I have seen only in press photographs and film posters. A mahogany coffin with brass handles can be seen through the display windows of the hearse, covered with a large spray of white lilies and mixed purple flowers. I greet a few old friends, starting with the broadcaster and author Olivia O’Leary, who has been close to Robert since Belfast in the 1970s, and her daughter Emily Tansey. Conor O’Clery, the great Irish Times correspondent who was, like Olivia, a colleague from Belfast, and who covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan with Robert, is there with his Russian-Armenian wife Zhanna. It is an added cruelty that we cannot hug one another. Robert’s widow and Catherine take the lead, directly behind the hearse, as we walk the few hundred metres to the waiting grave. I fall to the back, beside Conor and Zhanna. “He was the love of your life,” Zhanna says softly, out of earshot of the other mourners. It is the most moving thing that anyone says to me after Robert’s death, and I nod, stifling a sob. The widow and Catherine sit on a bench overlooking the grave while a vicar says a few words. I had expected the actual burial to take place in our presence, shovelfuls of earth to be tossed atop the mahogany coffin. Instead, a large panel covered with fake grass is dragged over the dark rectangle into which the casket has been lowered. My journalist’s curiosity kicks in. Do they think it too upsetting to fill in the grave in our presence? Are they going to reuse that shiny mahogany coffin? Will Robert be buried in a linen shroud, like a Muslim? It occurs to me later that gravediggers and shovels must be a thing of the past, that the cemetery will use heavy machinery to complete the task.
In Loving Memory, Robert Fisk, 30 October 2020, says the brass plaque on the astroturf with the floral spray. The double rainbow still hangs on the horizon, as if it had been arranged for the occasion, like the Irish army piper. I can hear Robert quoting Hamlet: “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” An officer who helped organise the brief ceremony approaches me. “I remember you from Tibnin,” he says kindly, referring to the Irish UN battalion headquarters in southern Lebanon which Robert and I visited often. “You must feel very sad too. I am sorry for your trouble.” The widow and Catherine stand up and walk a few metres away. I slip onto the bench facing the grave. “I thought we would be buried near my family, but it was not to be,” she says, chatting with other mourners. “We’ll be here now. Robert always said, ‘I want to be wherever you are’.” My mind races back to a time when we planned for our deaths as a precaution, given the violence of the Middle East. Before we moved to Beirut together in 1989, we drew up wills, leaving everything we owned to one another. A friend found it terribly romantic, but we treated our possible demise as something to be laughed at. Robert told me that he wanted this inscription on his tombstone: Robert Fisk, Foreign Correspondent, Beloved of Lara. In those days, Robert wanted to be buried in the cemetery outside St Patrick’s Protestant church in Dalkey, “with my feet to the east, to face the good Lord on Judgement Day.” He was only half-joking, for although Robert was not religious, he was steeped in the Anglican tradition. Robert used to remind me that each year we unwittingly pass the anniversary of our own death. Muslim Arabs believe that God inscribes the date of our death on our foreheads with the tip of his index finger. So 30 October 2020 was the invisible date on Robert’s forehead.
“Is there life after death?” Robert frequently asked friends and interviewees. He said it as a joke, but I think he genuinely wondered. If there is an afterlife, he promised he would be the first journalist to file from there. Perhaps he is already interviewing God. I imagine him furiously typing up the interview, as he always typed, with only two fingers. Surely there are no deadlines in heaven? In life, Robert devised elaborate schemes to sneak copy out of Soviet-occupied Kabul and various Arab dictatorships. How would one transmit copy from the great beyond? I imagine Robert’s alert, intelligent face, the way he raises a finger to say, “Now hold on a minute, Mr God…”, the way he peers quizzically over his eyeglasses to signal, “You have got to be kidding.” I feel certain Robert has tough questions for God. He liked to recount the story of Winston Churchill’s son Randolph reading the Bible in one sitting, on a bet from Evelyn Waugh during World War II. From time to time, Churchill’s voice could be heard through the tent flap exclaiming, “Isn’t God a shit!” Robert admired William Howard Russell, the Irish-born correspondent for the London Times who is considered to be the first modern war correspondent. During the Crimean War, Russell angered the British establishment, all the way up to Queen Victoria, by denouncing what he saw as the needless sacrifice of British cavalrymen in the Charge of the Light Brigade. Russell went on to cover the Sepoy Rebellion against the British East India Company, and the US War of Secession. He met Abraham Lincoln and later witnessed the 1870 Battle of Sedan, embedded on the Prussian side, in the Franco-Prussian war. Napoleon III was captured at Sedan, precipitating the Paris Commune and the advent of France’s Third Republic. No other correspondent, I suspect, could match Robert’s record, unless it was the great war reporters of the two World Wars. Robert seemed to regret having missed those conflicts, whose history he knew in detail. He long kept his father’s medals from the Great War in our china cabinet in Paris. A photograph of one of his father’s medals appears on the dust jacket of his last book, The Great War for Civilisation.
By the time I met Robert, he had already survived the Lebanese Civil War, the Iranian revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the beginning of the Iran-Iraq War. Together we reported the last years of the Lebanese Civil War, the 1990s’ war between the military and Islamists in Algeria, the break- up of Yugoslavia and two Iraq wars. He was the only western correspondent to have interviewed Osama bin Laden three times. Those interviews grew out of my chance meeting with Jamal Khashoggi, the slain Saudi journalist, in Algiers in 1991. Robert liked the phrase “Let’s wind the tape back.” Usually it was during an argument, to lead one back to the start and renegotiate a misunderstanding. As I sit on the bench in Kilternan cemetery on that cold November day, staring at his grave beneath the arc of a double rainbow, I mentally wind back the tape, through our saga of love, adventure, and heartbreak. When we rushed to Dubai to cover the downing of Iran Air flight 655 by the USS Vincennes in July 1988, I saw for the first time what an extraordinarily lucky and resourceful journalist Robert could be. He was still with The Times then. I covered the story freelance for The Irish Times. We spend a sleepless night driving from one Gulf port to another, in the hope of chartering a boat to Bandar Abbas, where the bodies of the victims have been taken. The tiny emirate of Sharjah allows British citizens to leave without exit visas. In the middle of the night, correspondents from the Guardian, Daily Telegraph and Independent board a boat bound for Bandar Abbas. As a US citizen, I am not allowed to depart. Robert makes a snap decision on the quayside to stay with me. “I hope you realise how much I love you,” he says as the small boat pulls out of the harbour. “I just watched my competitors sail away on a story without me, to be with you.” He later tells me it was one of the most difficult decisions he ever took as a journalist. Robert’s romantic sacrifice pays off. The following morning, on the spur of the moment, the Iranian embassy in Dubai organises a press plane to Bandar Abbas. The journalists who chartered the boat are considered illegal aliens and are detained for twenty-four hours, while the rest of us come and go and file our stories. No wonder some of Robert’s rivals are jealous to the
point of fury. The Iranians have taken the wreckage of the Airbus, and the remains of the 290 civilians who were killed when the missile blew the airliner apart, to a warehouse cold-storage facility. Intact corpses of men and women are lined up in plastic bags and plywood coffins, sorted by gender. Male reporters are not allowed to look at the women. Arms, legs, heads, and torsos are piled up at one end of the gymnasium-size cold room. We are then bused to the former Intercontinental Hotel, where the Iranians offer us a lunch of grilled lamb. After what we have just witnessed, the mere sight and smell of meat makes me feel sick. “Come with me,” Robert says, leading me to the hotel telex room, in a cubbyhole behind the reception desk. He charms the telex operator and sits down immediately, composing his front- page news story directly onto the keyboard. The line cuts after a few hundred words, but Robert files more from a payphone at the airport, after begging airport staff for Iranian coins and getting London to ring him back. Robert’s tour de force on the Iranian Airbus story isn’t over. That night, the Iranians fly us back from Bandar Abbas to Dubai on a civilian airliner, the first to repeat the trajectory of the downed aircraft. While most of us sleep with exhaustion, Robert befriends the pilot and interviews him. The pilot explains that the Vincennes’ military transponder could not communicate with the civilian airliner. In Dubai, Robert interviews civil aviation sources who confirm what the Iranian pilot has told him. The days when Abraham Lincoln told William Howard Russell that The Times was “one of the greatest powers in the world” are long over. Robert has been dismayed to watch his newspaper grow more right-wing and sensationalistic under Rupert Murdoch’s ownership. His editors want speculation about a kamikaze airliner, not evidence of the US Navy’s incompetence. I witness a furious telephone argument in our Dubai hotel room. The incident eventually prompts Robert to leave The Times for The Independent.
When radio technicians asked Robert to speak on the telephone so they could test sound levels, he invariably quoted Yeats’s poem “When You Are Old”. Since his death, I joke with friends that I have become what I always knew I would be one day: a nostalgic old lady. Yeats’s text, with its portent of lost youth and lost love, feels incredibly poignant. Memories of Robert flood back, especially the happy and funny moments: our Christmas mornings in Dalkey, drinking champagne as we open presents beneath the tree; the surprise birthday parties I threw for him in Beirut; the way we sang “Lili Marlene” and “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” with our interpreter Ljiljana Matijaševic´ as we drove through Serb-held parts of Bosnia. Ljiljana had survived the Blitz in London. In May 1989, during General Michel Aoun’s“war of liberation” against Syria, we travel to Jounieh, on the Maronite coast north of Beirut. The doorman of the Aquarium Hotel shows us three jagged cones from Katyusha rockets, half-buried amid singed shrubbery in the hotel’s flowerbeds. Two days earlier, the Syrians fired a barrage of so-called “Stalin’s organs” from West Beirut. “The hotel gardener was working in the field across the street. He was cut in half by a rocket,” the doorman says, pointing to the place where his colleague died. I am still thinking about the unfortunate gardener when our evening aperitif on the hotel balcony is interrupted by blinding flashes of white light and deafening explosions. Another Katyusha bombardment. I race into the bathroom and cower beneath the sink. Robert follows, to comfort me. “Damn! I forgot my gin and tonic,” he exclaims. As the explosions continue, Robert runs back to the balcony to retrieve his drink.
Robert had an uncanny sense of danger, the result of instinct as well as experience. He seemed to have antennae tuned to the proximity of kidnappers, gunmen and high explosives. In the wake of the Iraqi rout from Kuwait in 1991, we ventured into south- eastern Iraq. I still worked for Time magazine then, and my editors were urging me to go to Basra. Robert and I head up the highway with a driver, then stop. “I don’t like this road,” he says. “People go up it, but no one comes back.” I grudgingly return to Kuwait City with him. “Where are you?” the chief of correspondents gasps when I call New York. He is extremely relieved that we did not continue to Basra, because all the journalists who went there were taken prisoner by Saddam’s forces. After covering the 1991 war from Saudi Arabia, and the liberation of Kuwait, we travel to southern Turkey and northern Iraq, to witness the exodus of up to a million Kurds who have been driven out by Saddam. It has been a hard trek. At the PTT office on the Habur Bridge between Turkey and Iraq, I am dismayed to learn that my visa to Baghdad has come through. My editors at Time want me to go to Amman to collect it, immediately. Baghdad is only 500 kilometres away, as the crow flies. But in the Middle East one is often forced to travel by circuitous routes. It takes two days to retrace my steps and reach Baghdad. On arrival at the Al Rasheed Hotel, I turn on my shortwave radio to hear: “The British war correspondent Robert Fisk has been arrested by Turkish authorities.” Robert saw Turkish soldiers stealing food and blankets from Kurdish refugees at a mountain camp called Yasilova, which he reached after he was mistakenly shunted onto a CIA helicopter. US agents and British Royal Marines are engaged in a tense standoff with the Turks there. Of course, Robert filed a story. Alan Parker’s 1978 film classic Midnight Express, about an American student sentenced to life in prison in Turkey, flashes through my mind. I have visions of my lover being mistreated or tortured. I find a colleague from Reuters news agency in the coffee shop of the Al Rasheed. “If your partner was arrested in Turkey, what would you do?” I ask him. “I would go there immediately,” he answers.
Robert is released before I can organise the journey. He has told a Turkish court that he was “shocked, shocked to see the Turkish army betray the high ideals of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who my father taught me was a titan of the twentieth century”. In those pre-Erdogan days, when Atatürk’s memory as the founder of the modern Turkish state is still sacred, no formulation could be more awkward for a Turkish court. Shut this guy up, get him out of here, they must have thought. Robert relishes telling me about his adventure. I see Robert arriving at our suite in the Majestic Hotel in Belgrade with an enormous bouquet, purchased under bombardment, to apologise for having accidentally de- programmed the French mobile phone I use to file our stories. I remember him weeping with joy on learning that he has won yet another press award. He had at least eighteen British and international press awards, more than any other foreign correspondent. They filled several shelves in his library in Dalkey. Robert was part Tintin boy reporter and part James Bond. As the years passed, a third Robert superseded them: an unrelenting crusader for wronged and oppressed peoples, who catalogued atrocities and injustice with frightening intensity. The job of a journalist was “to be neutral and unbiased on the side of those who suffer”, he said. Robert was fearless, and his fearlessness was contagious. “You are going there to report, not to die!” he insisted whenever I expressed anxiety about heading for a war zone. “Don’t be so vain as to think that the bullet (or shell or bomb) should choose you among thousands of people!”
These memories rush at me in haphazard fashion as I sit beside Robert’s grave. I get up to go, and notice that the rainbow is still there. I glance around at the lingering mourners and begin to recognise friends of Robert whom I have not seen for decades. All wear masks over wrinkled faces. Their complexions are ashen and their hair is white, like a ghastly Halloween disguise. I feel like Proust’s narrator at the end of In Search of Lost Time, when, reunited with the characters of the novel, he is stunned by their decrepitude. We buried our youth with Robert. I doubtless look as old and haggard as the others, but in my mind, I am a twenty-six-year-old researcher/associate producer for CBS News. I have a powerful sense of Robert’s presence inside the casket beneath the flowers and astroturf panel. But the man I imagine is a youthful thirty-seven-year-old, merely napping before he heads out on yet another exclusive story. I have mastered the art of time travel and turned the dial back thirty-seven years, to a time when we were hungry to learn and love and when it meant so much to be alive. I have gone back to the beginning.