The Distance Between Us. Masha Hamilton
“It is you. Plenty of independence. And no one cares what you wear.”
She gives him a comical glance. “Shit, Mike, look at you. They gave you a title and you’re a whole different person. Now maybe that’s for the best, in your case.” She grins, glad she can still tease.
Mike hesitates a beat. “Think it over for a couple weeks. And in the meantime, go to Vienna; cover a round of peace talks. They start next Wednesday.”
So this is his counteroffer. It doesn’t sway her. “Me writing peace talks? Get real, Mike. All analysis, no action? My copy will stink.” She leans forward in her seat. “I want to go home.”
“Jerusalem’s not home, Caddie. It’s an assignment.I used to cover it. Jon is covering it right now.”
“Okay, an assignment. But it’s where my stuff is. My books. My CDs. My underwear, for God’s sake. Look, maybe I’ll take your job, but not right now. I’m not going to run away just because I got shot at. You understand?”
He squeezes the arms of his chair with both hands. “I’m trying to work with you here, Caddie.” He massages his forehead like it’s bread dough. “If I talk them into letting you go back, there has to be no reporting.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she says.
“Your instincts are off; they’ve got to be. Besides, we already promised Jon at least six weeks.”
“Six weeks?”
“Caddie.”
“Okay. Sure.” That can be negotiated later.
“And soon, very soon, we discuss this New York transfer again,” Mike says. “But seriously.”
“Right-o.”
“In the meantime, you can listen to your music or snorkel in the Red Sea or explore the holy sites. They owe you nine weeks’ vacation anyway. Until Jon leaves, until we talk, stay off the job.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean it, Caddie. No fooling around. This isn’t only from me. It’s orders from on high.”
“On High,” she repeats, liking the weight the editor gives the phrase. Liking that she will be defying On High, the very thing that betrayed her.
Two
THEY ZOOM UP the narrow, winding embankment to Jerusalem, the road everyone takes fast and careless as if they’re racing to shake the hand of God, as if they’re so joyful to be in the land of Abraham that they’re willing to die the moment they get there. The windows are down and Caddie strains forward. The air blasts her face, supports her shoulders and forces shut her eyes. The car leans and at that moment the memory of Marcus intrudes. She can’t feel his full weight, only his hand, its fierce pressing at the small of her back, and his breath at her ear as though he were whispering.
“I don’t know why,” she says, pushing his image away. “For Christ’s sake.”
“What?” the taxi driver asks.
Caddie clears her throat. “Nothing.”
The driver nods knowingly. A person muttering as she enters the Holy City is not uncommon; he takes it in stride. Caddie’s colleagues will not so easily overlook it.
“Your first time?” the driver asks with misplaced confidence. She guesses from his accent that he is from eastern Europe, and two weeks ago she would have engaged him in conversation, asked where he was born and how he finds it here, what he likes and what he doesn’t, how many children and grandchildren he has and what they do, because you never know where a good story might begin.
Now, though, she wants to eavesdrop on her own thoughts. She shakes her head. “Nope.” Leans back and closes her eyes. The driver, giving up—what a shame, his passenger is lousy for conversation—turns up the radio and begins to hum along.
Caddie mentally lists the photojournalists she’s known who died. Samuel Harris, a freelance television cameraman she had drinks with in a Vienna bar: hacked to death by a crazed mob in Jo’burg. Yuri, on assignment for Russian TV, who didn’t talk much but was always smiling: reduced to crumbs by a roadside bomb in Lebanon. Reuters photographer Sandra Hutchison, who shared a breakfast with Caddie in Cairo: taken down by crossfire in Sierra Leone.
Caddie has refused to allow herself to picture these deaths. She walked away each time the topic came up in a group of reporters, hating the sentimentality in the voices of some of her colleagues, the undercurrent of greedy thrill in others. Part of a journalist’s job is to stay detached, no matter how severe the tragedy or how close it lands. Reflect the story; don’t absorb it, because if you allow yourself to feel the full force of sorrows and horrors, you will succumb to them—that much Caddie knows. The desperate moments will at best numb her, and at worst cripple her, and she will be unable to collect the quotes or the color, do her job. The repercussions of random destruction or deliberate hostility often lead to the most profound moments in people’s lives. She has to be there fully to record that, and so, Caddie has learned to shut down a piece of herself. Disconnect, at least some.
Besides, getting drawn in was dangerous; everyone knew that, everyone who lasted. Kevin Carter—the name, to Caddie, was like a warning signal. Nothing, not even the Big One he won for his shot of a vulture lurking next to a cadaverous Sudanese child, could rescue him from the opaque morass he sank into once he lost his detachment, once the clear spot inside him went muddy. The horrors he’d witnessed were bad enough—including that near-dead child dragging herself along the ground, who brought to mind his own daughter. Then came the shrill criticism he faced for not helping the kid to the feeding center, for being caught up in the composition of a great photo, for sticking to the role of one who records—his job, after all.
A “Carter Moment” is how she’s thought of it since. When a journalist teeters between getting the story and getting into the story. Compassion serves a limited purpose, as Carter proved. Three months after taking home that Pulitzer, he hooked up a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and gassed himself inside his red pickup.
Measured closeness and a dose of dulled feelings—that’s what she has had to learn. That gets her the interview and keeps her safe.
Usually.
She opens her eyes and shrugs to rid herself of the doubts that stick to her like a burr. They’re off the highway now, driving among the blond bricks of the city, following a finger of Jerusalem to its very palm. The driver drops her at the corner of her sinewy street and she walks the rest of the way, a few steps behind a nun. Three Hasidim hovering around a newsstand glance her way as she passes. A young Israeli in leather sandals spits out the shells of sunflower seeds as he hums a tune she recognizes, “At Khaki li Ve’echzor,” about a fallen soldier. Someone’s wash hangs from a rope strung between buildings, dark clothes coupling with pale sheets.
What a concoction, Jerusalem. It took Caddie no short while to come to terms with its heap of competing religious rituals: rabbis issuing eerie and obscure edicts about light switches and women’s wigs; imams with their barely coded urgings to the street; priests swinging platters of incense and muttering in inconsequential Latin. All of it colliding and overlapping like an exaltation of crows within a city that often seems far too compressed.
She remembers striding off into Jerusalem alone that first day nearly five years ago, eager to absorb the territory she’d been newly assigned to cover. She tramped through the walled Old City, paused at an Arab café for a sesame-covered bread ring, and practiced her Arabic with the owner. She fumbled with the still unfamiliar shekels, then boarded a bus full of Israeli soldiers and eventually got lost in Mea She’arim.
By day’s end, she sensed what lay over the city like a quilt: large rules with horrifying consequences. Rules way beyond the superficial restrictions of manners she’d known before. Absolute, binding, primitive rules that got their backbone from blood and