Читать книгу Only in America - Matt Frei - Страница 6

There are many reasons to feel queasy about starting a new job in a strange country. But fear of dying isn’t usually on the list. I was on my way to Washington DC. We had lived in Asia for almost six years and were preparing to take up a new posting in the United States. Penny, my wife had dispatched me early to find schools for our children George, Amelia and Lottie, a car and a house to live in. After a nomadic decade of moving from one post to the next I had learned that the secret to a happy foreign correspondent is a foreign correspondent’s happy spouse. My track record in scouting out good accommodation had been proven in Rome (a penthouse flat in a crumbling palazzo), Hong Kong (a crumbling flat with a fabulous view) and Singapore (an old British officer’s house with lazy fans and a large garden). Now it was Washington’s turn. The pressure was on. As I settled into my seat on the plane I could imagine us all lounging on one of those traditional American porches.

I hadn’t been back to DC since my first and only visit in 1988 as a young radio reporter. Then I had come to cover the election of President George (HW) Bush. If someone had told me I would be returning a decade and a half later to live in America and report on the presidency of another man called George (W) Bush I would have laughed. To have father and son elected to the same coveted job was odd enough. To have them share exactly the same name – but for one humble H – would have struck me as bizarrely unimaginative. At least they’d save money on the monogrammed napkins at the White House. The thought occurred to me as I surveyed the movie menu and looked forward to a long transpacific flight without young children and the torture that pits their restlessness against your nerves. The journey was going to be blissful.

It was for about six hours. Until we reached a point somewhere over the Pacific. I thought I could see the sunrise over San Francisco, having just witnessed the sunset over Japan. I had already drunk half a bottle of white wine, my sense of timing was clearly impaired and I was stuck into a soppy film that would have seen me walk out of the cinema on terra firma but almost had me in floods of tears at 30,000 feet. Tear ducts are suckers for high altitude and low pressure, apparently. Suddenly the narrative was interrupted and a completely different voice entered my head, mixed with static crackle. It was the captain, an American with a reassuring baritone and a slight Southern drawl. ‘I’m afraid to tell you, ladies and gentlemen’ – pilots, it occurred to me immediately, should never use emotive words like ‘afraid’ – ‘that we have to report an engine failure in engines two and four.’ There was a pause, which I didn’t much care for. I had suddenly lost interest in the film. The tear ducts got a grip on the unfolding situation. They shut down. I was hungry for more information about our plane. I wanted to know a lot about engines two and four, but also, come to think of it, about one and three. The captain cleared his throat. ‘We will be heading, ah, I mean, returning, to the nearest airport, which I am afraid to tell you is … Tokyo. It’s five hours from where we are now, but it’s a little closer than going on to San Francisco and … we may have to make an emergency landing. I will keep you posted, folks.’ You could feel and hear the collective sobering up of three-hundred-plus passengers. Seats that had been almost horizontal were suddenly ramrod-straight. A man and a woman in the row next to me held hands and starting praying. This was, I thought, a bit premature. But it changed the mood in my section of the plane as if the Grim Reaper himself had arrived with the drinks trolley. As it happened some wanted to order more drinks. Others regretted the ones they had already consumed. I seem to remember straddling both camps. The static resumed: it was the captain again. ‘I understand that some of you may be alarmed. But I jus’ wanna reassure you. This is a very, very big bird but she can fly on two engines real good.’ I remember reading something along those lines. But was the breakdown in grammar from the cockpit an indication of engine issues the captain wasn’t letting us in on? Or was it just vernacular? Turning the 747 into a ‘bird’ was both reassuringly colloquial, betraying the confidence of a veteran pilot, but also, perhaps, alarmingly flippant. It certainly struck me as very American. All around me guttural Cantonese and high-pitched Mandarin tones were flying around like swallows before a storm. My fellow passengers were desperate for a translation that I could not nor would have wanted to give and that took five minutes to come from a Chinese-speaking stewardess. After that a few more people started muttering silent prayers. I ditched the film and went to the sky map, a handy device in moments of impending emergency; handy, that is, for working out the geography of disaster. Where would we crash-land? Who lived nearby to save us? To recover our bodies? Would there be South Sea garlands for the survivors? It was the white wine that was thinking. The little dot that represented our plane had done an outrageous U-turn over a large area of blue that displayed not a single speck of land. I zoomed out. Why not land in Hawaii? I couldn’t think of any other islands in this part of the world. Hawaii, though, was a few thousand miles to the south. We were flying over the middle of the Pacific and now we were indeed heading back to the place I had come from. What a waste of flying hours. After all this time in Asia I had become mildly superstitious. Was this a signal? Should we be going to America after all? We had been so happy in Singapore. Washington, DC, had been attacked by terrorists. My brother Chris had had a narrowish escape in New York. His apartment was next to Ground Zero but he had been on business in Paris at the time. In Singapore the only danger came in the form of stray branches from tree pruning on the airport motorway, the occasional snake in our house or being struck by lightning on the golf course (if you were stupid enough to carry one of those large umbrellas). Had I made a terrible mistake?

In the end we were spared the emergency landing, although it was alarming to see scores of fire engines and ambulances racing down the runway next to our plane. Apparently we made the evening news in Tokyo and the morning news in San Francisco. A new plane was rustled up and after a five-hour delay we recommenced our crossing of the Pacific Ocean. I arrived in Washington thirty-five hours after I had left home. I should have missed two days of my life, but because of the thirteen-hour time difference I was only a day behind. The mental maths was doing my head in. My body clock had been fast-forwarded, then rewound and then binned. Even as a seasoned traveller I had never, ever experienced jet lag like this. I should have been asleep when everyone else was awake. My brain felt like a poached egg encased in pastry. My senses were numbed, my limbs ached and I was not in the least prepared to deal with three Washington estate agents from three rival agencies. All called Kathy.

In a moment of fitful enterprise before leaving Singapore I had contacted these agencies, hoping to see as many houses as possible in the short time I had available. Little did I realize that I had broken an unwritten but widely respected etiquette in the world of Washington property. You choose an agent and then you stick with him or her to the bitter end. It is easier to get a divorce in the United States than to change agents. So to start your hunt for the dream home as a polygamist was hardly a good idea. There was also a matter of verbal misunderstanding. I was happily using the term ‘estate agent’ until the concierge in my hotel informed me that this conjured up images of managing the properties of the dead more than the accommodation of the living. I should try ‘realtor’. But that was difficult to pronounce and, in any case, sounded like something out of Viking lore. We were indeed divided by the same language, I thought, and in my mental state such subtle points of translation actually caused physical pain.

I spent much of the first day of my new life in America wondering if, when and how I should tell one Kathy about the other two. Acute jet lag makes the mind obsess acutely about little things. Eventually the Kathies would find out, wouldn’t they? And how many other BBC correspondents could there be in Washington at that time looking for a place to live? At least two as it turned out. I rang the Kathy I designated as Kathy 1, cross-referencing her name with her phone number. She had seemed to be the most forthcoming when I had called her up earlier from Singapore. ‘I’m dying to meet you in the flesh!’ I now lied, perhaps crossing a red line of familiarity.

Kathy 1 shot back: ‘Well, Matt, there’s a lot of it!’

‘Properties?’

‘No, flesh.’

I liked Kathy 1. After Singapore I was taken aback by humour that didn’t come from friends, books, TV or films. We arranged to meet later that afternoon.

I put the phone down and rang Kathy 2.

‘I am so, so glad that you called, Matt. I have just been chatting to the most delightful gentleman, who happens to be a friend of mine, who has the most gorgeous house in Georgetown. It is superb for entertaining. You and your family will adore it. Meet me in one hour, if you can.’

I was sitting on the side of the hotel bed, looking like a forlorn character in an Edward Hopper painting. My shoulders were rounder than the dome of the Capitol. My eyes had gone AWOL. My skin felt like old cornflakes and looked so pale it was translucent. I was meeting a woman who had got it into her head that I was going to entertain like an ambassador and resemble a well-scrubbed anchorman.

I turned up at the allotted location. I was early. The house was wonderful, huge and looked at least four times my budget. I was clearly wasting my time. Then I noticed an elegant woman sitting in a Jaguar on the other side of the road. She was waiting and fiddling with her phone. She had clearly seen me, but made no attempt to communicate. So she can’t have been my date. I looked at her. She looked away. It was summer. The air was ablaze and I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, what everyone in Singapore would have worn. But not, it turns out, in ‘the Nation’s Capital’. Then my phone rang. It was Kathy 2.

‘Where are you, Matt?’

‘Oh. I’m outside the house. Where are you?’

‘I’m outside the house, too …’ and with that the elegant woman in the car looked out of the window of her Jaguar and caught my eye. Despite numerous nips and tucks, her upwardly mobile cheeks fell like wet cement. She got out, straightening a pink Chanel suit. Her trussed-up hair seemed to obey a higher master. In her fifties, Kathy 2 was what I imagined the quintessential Georgetown hostess would look like: elegant, urbane, and horribly disappointed by her new client. One reluctant handshake later she was ringing the doorbell of the house, probably mentally preparing her excuses for the dear friend who would find a man resembling a bedraggled mature student darkening his illustrious doorstep.

‘Hello, Jim,’ she said. ‘This is …’

But before she could end her sentence and uncurl her disapproving upper lip, Jim blurted out: ‘Matt Frei. But of course. I recognize you from the news. I lurved your stuff from Asia. Come in. Please come in.’

First a non-crash and now this. I might have jet lag but there was a God.

Kathy 2 changed her tone as if day had banished night. After this she offered to drive me round town and show me Washington. Having almost never been recognized by anyone, I was immensely grateful for this windfall of minor celebrity and wondered whether it could translate into a 350 per cent discount on the exorbitant rent charged by Jim for his glorious mansion. Alas, it was not to be. I politely declined Kathy 2’s offer of a tour of her city. She promised to get back to me with other properties ‘better tailored for the needs of your family’. In other words, cheap. I went back to the hotel to ring Kathy 3.

‘You’re already talking to two other agents. It’s a small world, you know, and there really isn’t that much around to show you at your budget. Anyway, I am already dealing with a guy called Justin Webb. He also says he’s from the BBC. How many of you are there?’ I had been busted and the in-house competition was hot on my heels.

Later that day I decided to rent a taxi and take a tour of Washington. The driver was a noisy Nigerian, so huge he seemed barely to fit into his enormous Lincoln town car. I wanted him to drive me round town on the clock for at least an hour, a dream commission for any taxi driver anywhere in the world, I thought. But not in Washington, where taxis charge you by zones and where they make the most money by shuttling you on short trips across zone barriers. So I offered him $50 and the deal was done. He spent the rest of the trip virtually screaming into one of those tiny mobile phones that look like large earrings and are almost invisible. As he swerved from one lane to the next he also swerved from English into his native language. He appeared to be having a furious row with his wife about who should collect the laundry. He was also oblivious to the fact that he had a passenger. I tried to block out the bickering and concentrated on looking out of the window, watching the familiar images of the capital float by.

There is a strange sensation that overcomes the new arrival in America. So much of what you see is instantly recognizable from television and films. A glimpse of Capitol Hill with its splendid white dome in the distance triggers a hundred ill-defined memories from flickering screens. You almost expect someone to jump out from behind a bush and scream ‘CUUT!’ The White House seems so small at first sight that you almost believe it is made of plywood and will fold up like any other film set. The size of the building exists in inverse proportion to the amount of power that emanates from it. Is this really what all the fuss is about? So much of what you see sets off reassuring recognition. So much of what you hear sounds alien, even alarming.

It is the sound of a superpower at work. Helicopters shuttling to and from the White House or the Pentagon. Motorcades. I counted five on my first day. Who are these people? Police cars with whining sirens demanding attention. Ambulances. Fire trucks. It sounds as if the whole of Washington is under siege, on its way to hospital, jail, the morgue or an important funeral. Then you look at the faces. They seem happy. It is summer after all. The pavements shimmer in the heat. They are full of chairs and tables where people in shirtsleeves are spooning lunch out of the kind of polystyrene containers you get on aeroplanes. They don’t seem to mind. The queues outside the Greek deli on 19th Street stretch the width of the pavement. Everyone is patient. No one seems to mind waiting. This place is chilled, I think. But whoever runs the ambulances, the police cars and the fire brigade is behaving as if World War III has broken out. So is the guy on the radio. We are only a few weeks away from the first anniversary of 9/11 and the local radio station we’re tuned into is humming with breathless reports about terror alerts, the conflict in Afghanistan and the failing diplomacy over Iraq. The drumbeat of a new war has begun. For now, however, it is a distant but regular thud on the horizon.

On the taxi radio the news is interspersed with advertisements. ‘Special discounts for all military personnel,’ the gravelly voice promises. The word ‘America’ seems to be mentioned an awful lot by just about everyone from advertising baritones to high-pitched politicians to the President. ‘America is better than this’, ‘America won’t stand for it’, ‘America’s favourite chocolate’, ‘America drinks Florida Orange Juice … no-pulp guaranteed’, ‘America is on the lookout for new enemies’, ‘America’s way of life will never be destroyed’, ‘Only in America …’

My head was spinning. America wasn’t just a country. America was a being and America was, it seemed, deeply pissed off. The Nigerian cab driver seemed unaware of the chorus of self-regard seeping from the speakers. The overall impression throbbing in the pastry-clad egg of my brain was that this city and country were much weirder than I imagined and far more difficult to decipher: half holiday destination, half barracks gearing up for conflict. The taxi dropped me outside my new office close to Dupont Circle, an area that used be an encampment for the homeless. On my first visit to Washington in 1988 I was chased through Dupont Circle – in those days an open space dotted with trees and surrounded by traffic – by a man in rags wielding a nail file. He was probably harmless but in those days Washington was still known as ‘the murder capital of the USA’ and my mind immediately pictures me being slashed to death in a vicious nail-file attack. Today, Dupont Circle is the heart of the capital’s gay district, where boutique hotels and coffee bars compete for attention with interior design shops and art galleries. In the fourteen years since my last visit some parts of Washington – by no means all – had changed almost beyond recognition. With its pavement cafés and bathroom-tile shops, the capital seemed more European. In so many other ways, however, America had moved further away from Europe than ever before.

I had witnessed the groping, open or clenched hand of America’s largely benign colossus from far-flung provinces but now I had been summoned to the capital itself. The BBC had allowed me to roam the world for almost two decades. I had been based in Jerusalem, Berlin, Bonn, Rome, Hong Kong and Singapore. Whether it was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the civil war in Bosnia, the isolation of Libya, the collapse of Christian Democracy in Italy, the expansion of China, the invasion of Afghanistan or the liberation of East Timor to a greater or lesser extent the hand of Washington, heavy, subtle or conspicuous by its absence, could always be felt in all of these places. America was everywhere and I had been reporting from – and on – the receiving end of its policies for seventeen years. Inevitably, the motivations of America seemed much clearer from five thousand miles away than they did up close and personal in the place where the decisions were made. There was the political hothouse of Washington. And then there was the vast multilayered country sprawling around it.

Fred Scott, a BBC cameraman born in San Diego, exudes the nasal nonchalance of someone who was brought up within earshot of Pacific surf. He spent a lot of time in Asia and once put it like this: ‘When you try and decipher America, Matt, think of India. Both are huge, complicated countries, where the difference between rich and poor is vast, where religion plays an important part in politics and everyday life. Both have nukes and both speak the kind of English that no one else does.’ It turned out to be sound advice although I am still looking for the equivalent of the caste system in the US.

For now the politics of Washington were incidental to the domestic issues that were occupying my full attention and providing my first personal glimpses of the States. I had failed spectacularly on just about every front. The first two Kathies had shown me so many houses whose addresses were never numbered in anything less than 1000s that I had lost track and my head was reeling. Did I like 3317 P Street or 3317 O Street? Was the nice garden – I’m sorry, I mean ‘yard’ – in 4567 Warren Street or 4512 Windom Place? I did, however, manage to get a car. I bought the giant, hulking people carrier in which my predecessor had ferried his family around. It was as long as a boat, as wide as a tank and had an insatiable thirst for petrol. I mean gas. The inside was so enormous that I suffered bouts of agoraphobia. And wherever I went I got hopelessly lost. On the face of it the road grid of Washington is dead simple if you know the alphabet and can count to fifty-five. Numbered streets go east to west. Lettered streets go north to south. Unfortunately outside the centre of the city, parks, hills and creeks interrupt this logical pattern. Streets are abruptly cut off and dismembered as if an angry child had thrown the puzzle map in the air and the pieces had landed at random.

For a country that prides itself on the efficiency of the free market, I soon discovered that America can also be surprisingly bureaucratic. In order to exist as a foreigner here you need a social security number, which involves descending into the bowels of the local Social Security Office. Nothing, however, rivals the fifth circle of hell represented by the Department of Motor Vehicles, the dreaded DMV. How can America’s famed love affair with the car flourish when the courtship involves an unavoidable trip to the DMV? It makes you regret the rest of the relationship and contemplate the bicycle as a preferred method of transportation. Or public transport. Or perhaps it is merely the test of true love for the automobile? The DMV is a frightening place that has achieved something unique: it mixes Hitchcock with Orwell and Monty Python.

What I hadn’t realized is that the DMV headquarters on C Street, in the shadow of the glorious Capitol, functions as a refuge for citizens of no fixed abode. In the winter it provides free heating, in the summer free air conditioning. I turned up at 7.45 a.m. to find a queue of two hundred or so, many of whom looked not only as if they had no fixed abode, but no access either to a moving vehicle they could call their own. In order not to get kicked out they all pretended that they were there on official business. They drew a number that designated their order in the queue – I’m sorry, line. I waited for three hours just to be told that I had brought the wrong papers. The man who informed me of this had clearly failed to read and learn the DMV’s customer service commandments about courtesy and efficiency pinned up on the board. I didn’t have the guts to point them out. To add injury to insult he informed me that the car I had bought from my predecessor was worth $2000 less than I had paid for it. ‘Sure hope he ain’t your friend!’ he added, laughing. The sad truth is that he was.

It also didn’t help that, unlike 92 per cent of America’s driving population, I belonged to that tiny, benighted minority that failed their multiple-choice driving test. Some questions were easy. Like: ‘If you come across a funeral procession, do you A slow down B speed up and drive through it or C come to a complete stop?’ The two questions that made the difference between success and failure were: ‘What is the minimum distance you have to maintain from a fire truck with sirens on?’ I hadn’t a clue. And one about car insurance. I cheated and called up the insurance broker to get the right answer. She gave me the wrong one and that was it. I flunked the test. A kind woman at reception whose enormous girth swivelled cheerfully on a small chair helped out: ‘Oh, honey, I am sorry. You can always use a study aid,’ she said at the top of her voice. The people around me started to take an interest. I was the only one wearing a suit. I was the guy they had all put their faith in. And I had failed. Then I saw the large notice on the wall aimed at the clientele. No eating! No fighting! No pro-fanities! I felt like doing all three. Unfortunately there is no escape from the DMV if you want to drive a car legally or have a driving licence. In a country where only 25 per cent of citizens have passports, the driving licence is the photo ID of choice, without which you can board no plane, send no parcels and retrieve no shirts from the laundry. The DL is de rigueur. Especially during the ‘global war on terror’. In America you want to be able to prove who you are at all times.

By the end of my first week I had hit rock bottom. I had acquired a car I was not yet allowed to drive. I had not found a house for us to live in. And I barely had time to visit the schools that would mould the future of my precious children. I was camping out in my predecessor’s home for a few weeks, before the American owners returned. I had dragged Penny and the children away from their friends, from our idyllic house in Singapore with its frangipani and avocado trees, its pool and the sultry tropical languor that provided a welcome anaesthetic from the more mundane tasks of family life. Asia was intoxicating in the best possible sense. Washington was proving to be a major detox. And in late August it was just as hot as Singapore, if not hotter. But the formal dress code of jacket and tie meant that one was walking around in a permanent mobile sauna. The mosquitoes were the size of birds, trained for combat and confident in their belief that no city authorities would ever have the temerity to kill them with insecticide. I began to dream of the grey clouds of DDT that enveloped our house in Singapore every two weeks and killed everything with tiny wings.

Penny flew in on the day that the heavens opened with late summer vengeance over Washington. I was stuck thirty miles away at IKEA buying bedding and cutlery and I couldn’t make it to Dulles Airport to pick up my own family. This was not good. I rang Gerald, a taxi driver frequently used by the office. He bailed me out and met a confused, bedraggled troupe of surly children and their mother in a country they had never visited before and were not entirely sure why they had to move to. The passport queue was two hours long. The customs officer behaved as if he was closely related to the prick at the DMV. The family had been hit on the head by the hammer of transcontinental jet lag. The British Airways stewardess had been excessively rude even by the standards of the mile-high gulag at the back of the plane. And because of the torrential rain, the drive from the airport to our house took an hour and a half.

I looked out of the kitchen window as they finally arrived. It struck me that none of them wanted to get out of the car. They all sat there, rooted to their seats like wax figures. Not smiling. Lottie, the youngest – not even a year old – could always be relied upon to be irrepressibly good-humoured. She was in tears. ‘Welcome to Washington,’ I muttered without conviction. Gerald shook his head. Penny glowered. Things could only get better. And they did.

Some foreign postings are love affairs: passionate, all-consuming. They are prone to deep disappointment but always cherished and remembered as an intimate and special bond. Other are arranged marriages. The beginnings are more prosaic and businesslike but they can blossom into something precious. Washington was the latter. It had started on a dog-tired note with an exhausted groom – me – and an indifferent bride – America. It wasn’t made easy by the fact that the rest of the world had very entrenched, preconceived notions about the bride, which became more and more virulent as the relationship took shape. For those judging America from abroad the middle ground had been eroded. President Bush’s famous statement about loyalty after 9/11 – ‘you are either with us or with the terrorists’ – had become a self-fulfilling prophecy for the rest of the world. You were now either with Bush or against him, with America or against it. In response the world became less willing to differentiate between an administration and an entire country. Criticizing an aspect of government policy immediately threw you open to charges of being anti-American, just as lauding a piece of policy made you into a snivelling sycophant, Bush’s poodle, Uncle Sam’s lackey and someone who was hell-bent on force-feeding their children Big Macs.

Washington is the window into America’s political soul. It is the Rome and the Athens of the twenty-first century, a city of raw power and a citadel of refined ideas. I was lucky enough to be dispatched there during a crucial juncture in the constant cluttering evolution of this huge country. I was a political tourist with family in tow, trying to find my way around the corridors of power, discover what made the colossus tick and set up a home. Invariably the broad tapestry of politics is interwoven with very personal experiences, many mundane, a few dramatic. They conspire to build a subjective impression of America which aims to be neither complete, comprehensive nor even very fair. It is, however, personal.