Lara Marlowe - The Things Ive Seen: Nine Lives of a Foreign Correspondent

On a spring morning in 1981, I handed over a coin at the kiosk on the avenue Hoche, picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune and turned to the back page. There was a photograph of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the father of the nouveau roman, whom I had just interviewed. I didnt know then that sub-editors , not reporters, write headlines. The title on the article was different from the one I had thought up before posting my copy to Neuilly. The bastards , I thought; they ran an article by somebody else.

Then my eyes fell to the byline, where I read, for the first time ever in a daily newspaper: by Lara Marlowe. I yelped for joy, leapt in the air and ran around in circles. My life as a journalist had started.

I wrote another article, another and another. Some were rejected. There were setbacks. Nearly three decades and several thousand articles later, I am still pleased to see my byline.

I turned thirty, then forty, then fifty. Middle age did not creep up on me; it jumped out and said boo. But two filing cabinet drawers full of articles were proof of the passage of time. They confirmed the breadth of my French experience , chronicled eight years in Beirut, recounted nearly a decade of blood letting in Algeria. From the siege of Sarajevo to NATOs punishing bombardment of Serbia, I had seen the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Without my realising it, my life fell into neat, historic segments. France and Ireland were my home base and refuge, and I often found their footprints in the regions where I travelled. But Lebanon, Algeria and Yugoslavia dominated the 1990s; Afghanistan, Iraq and the United States the first decade of the new century. I watched the Americans bomb Kabul, then Baghdad. Vietraqistan, as the American journalist Mort Rosenblum calls it, was the recurring theme of the noughties.

Much of my work was done from the safety of Paris. But without ever intending to be a war correspondent, I reported from frontlines in Central America, the Horn of Africa, the Caucasus and, especially, the Middle East and Iraq. The wars I covered, big and small, short and long, added up to some fifteen conflicts, depending how you counted.

Among the images that swarm through my mind is a narrow, monastic room in a retirement home in Bourj Hammoud, the Armenian quarter of Beirut. An icon of the Virgin hangs between two beds, in which lie a husband and wife, aged one hundred and five and ninety-seven respectively. Both are blind. They listen to Radio Yerevan in their waking hours. The old man bears a scar on one cheek, etched by a sabre at the Battle of Tannenberg, where he fought on the side of the Tsars army in 1914. The following year, when the Turks began the first genocide of the twentieth century, he made the long march to what was then Mesopotamia, and across the desert to Lebanon, where he met his wife.

Had his life been happy, I asked him. I hate my circumstances now, he said. But the things I have seen, no one has seen.

I once asked my dear friend the French academician Michel Don whether I should write fiction or non-fiction. Anyone can write a novel, Michel replied. You have seen things no one else has.

Writing novels remains the mirage that tantalises one through the slog of daily journalism. Yet I have loved this profession as one loves a place or a person . No adventure matches that paring down of belongings to a single suitcase and heading for the airport. Journalism, I realise now, has given me a far more pungent taste of life than any ivory tower.

Indeed, journalism has given me many lives. Each time I have moved on to a different country or conflict, the world has seemed new. And every time I have escaped a close call, Ive wondered whether, like the cats who have been my companions, I am exhausting my nine lives.

In my reporting, I strive for authenticity: to freeze the fleetingness of time, to preserve people and situations in all their intensity. It is a paradox, for ours is a transient medium. As a French colleague liked to remind me, newspapers are meant to wrap fish the next day.

Like the proverbial fisherman, some of my best stories got away. I searched fruitlessly through archives and old diskettes for three articles that fell victim to last minute confusion, rivalry among editors, and the dictates of political correctness at TIME Magazine, which employed me for eight years.

I loved the story of the Kuwaiti newspaper editor Faisal al-Marzouk, because it had a happy ending. On the day Iraqi forces fled Kuwait City in February 1991, a wealthy woman pleaded with me to find her brother, who had been taken to Basra by the Iraqis, along with hundreds of Kuwaiti civilians . Eventually, in the middle of a cold night on the IraqKuwait frontier, I stuck my head into a dozen coaches filled with newly released prisoners. In each one I shouted: Is Faisal al-Marzouk here?