Lynda Schuster - Dirty Wars and Polished Silver: The Life and Times of a War Correspondent Turned Ambassatrix

DIRTY WARS AND POLISHED SILVER

Copyright 2017 by Lynda Schuster

First Melville House Printing: July 2017

Parts of this book appeared in slightly different form in the following publications: Granta, The Christian Science Monitor, and Thought Catalog. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

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Ebook ISBN9781612196350

Book design by Jo Anne Metsch

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Schuster, Lynda, author.

Title: Dirty wars and polished silver : the life and times of a war correspondent turned ambassatrix / Lynda Schuster.

Description: First edition. | Brooklyn : Melville House, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017006719 | ISBN 9781612196350 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Schuster, Lynda. | War correspondentsUnited StatesBiography. | Women war correspondentsUnited StatesBiography. | Foreign correspondentsUnited StatesBiography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Editors, Journalists, Publishers.

Classification: LCC PN4874.S3455 A3 2017 | DDC 070.4333092 [B] dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017006719

v4.1

a

For Noa, who changed everything

ALSO BY LYNDA SCHUSTER :

A Burning Hunger: One Familys Struggle Against Apartheid

One does not, in retrospect, record what one has experienced, but what timewith its increasing shifts in perspective, with ones own will to shape the chaos of half-buried experienceshas made of it. By and large, one records less how it actually was than how one became who one is.

JOACHIM FEST , Not I

Everything is copy.

NORA EPHRON , Heartburn

In search of adventure and not quite seventeen years old, I wash up on a kibbutz in Israels northern Galilee. As in most teenaged existential crises, I know precisely what Im fleeing: a dreary Midwestern upbringing, my parents messy divorce, the fear that Im never going to win a Nobel Prize. What Im seeking instead is unclear.

The geography alone makes adolescent angst worthwhile. Beyond the settlements eastern boundary, the terrain snakes steeply down to the now not-so-mighty Jordan River, then up to the Golan Heights, snaggle-toothed against a heat-hazed sky. Mount Hermon, of biblical renown, looms moodily to the north. Damascus is just over the horizon.

My roommate Selena, whos from Canada and has a cigarette permanently soldered to her bottom lip, doesnt like the place because she cant get decent coffee. The kibbutzs original settlers come mostly from Britain. Tea drinkers. Someones always asking us around for a cup. That suits my other roomie, Sybil, a cheerless South African vegetarian, who grew up on a strong black brew, splash of milk, no sugar. She intends to live here for the rest of her life and has no use for anyone who doesnt try to fit in.

Just suck it up, she says to Selena.

Go fuck yourself, Selena says.

Sybils jealous of the attention the kibbutz boys pay Selena. They come in a pack to our room, reeking of newly released male hormones and speaking Hebrew-accented English. Everyone knows the boys dont really respect volunteers like us; were just spoiled suburban brats on a lark, in their estimation. They pop up on our side of the kibbutz for one-night stands or to wheedle a pair of the latest jeans that we foreigners bring from abroad. Selena dismisses them regally, flips her chestnut mane and lights another cigarette, blowing lazy blue-gray speech balloons across the room.

Sybil looks up from her book. Aim it elsewhere, hey?

I roll over and bury my head under my pillow, too tired to butt in, too tired even to shower off my bodysuit of dirt from toiling in the apple orchards. Slaving, is the way one of my co-pickers describes it. Were up at 4:30 every morning, stumbling through the cool-hot air to the dining hall to choke down tea and stale bread with strawberry jam. The roosters are just beginning their maniacal wake-up calls when we crowd onto a tractor-pulled cart, our orchard transportation. For hours we clamber up and down ladders in brain-boiling heat, squinty-eyed from the stinging perspiration, to get at the farthest reaches of the trees. Just the way to find myself! I think, doubled over from eating too much unwashed fruit.

But it beats chicken duty. I did that exactly one time. It started at midnight. The lights in the coop were turned off, as if this would keep the birds from noticing that they were being rounded up for deportation. As instructed, I blindly grabbed two handfuls of poultry by the legs and slipped-skated across the feces and feathers to the doorway, where someone shoved the shrieking birds into cages on a waiting truck. Then back inside the coop to grope another batch: the chickens crapping and pecking at my arms, me wondering whether staying home and going to my high school prom might not have been so bad after all. Hand them off to the cage people, shit-slide the length of the coop for more, relinquish them to their fate. Repeat until dawn.

After that, apple picking is pure pleasure.

Selena tries to get the work coordinator to assign her the cushy jobs, wiping off the tables in the dining room or folding underpants in the laundry. Sybil stomps off every day to the hangar-sized kitchen to peel potatoes, mutilate cabbages, and wrestle frozen chickens into submission. The other people in our group do likewise. Were a random sprinkling of pre- and post-college students and backpackers, mixed in among a British group from Manchester. The Brits seem relentlessly uninterested in doing anything. One of them, after spraying his room with shaving cream, is found wandering naked and babbling on the sizzling tarmac of a nearby airstrip. Hes packed off to a local asylum, then shipped home to England.

Simcha, my Hebrew teacher, says the place is a magnet for misfits.

I suppose that includes mebut nice Jewish girls dont run away from home to join the circus. They go to a kibbutz. When I went to the Israeli embassy, the dark-eyed official looked at my passport and didnt seem to noticeor carethat I wasnt the required age of eighteen. The next opening on a kibbutz ulpan (a work/study program) will be here, he said, pointing to a small speck on a map. Upper Galilee, near the Golan Heights. Very beautiful.

I said, Ill take it.

Like it was the last car left on the lot.

I feel almost immediately at home on the kibbutz. Maybe its the sense of living in a perpetual overnight camp: the rows of squat little bungalows and rooms, the dining hall, swimming pool, laundry, clinic, SUV-sized mosquitoes. A self-contained miniature hamlet where, in the waning half-light of sunset, the sad-sweet singsong of the muezzins call to evening prayer wafts across from a mosque in the Arab village on a nearby hill. Nothing says youre no longer in Middle America quite like a minaret.