From This Day Forward (18 page)

 

CR: After our East Coast misadventures, we went back to California to start packing up. But before we left for Greece, I had to fulfill my TV contract to produce twenty-six episodes of
Serendipity
. The
Times
was ready for us to go and we had to stay until I was finished. That was the first time my work took precedence. Steve was great about it, saying, “If you have to stay, you have to stay. We won't go in January, we'll go in March.” The movers were at home packing up around
me while I sat at my typewriter frantically trying to finish all the final paperwork, so I wasn't paying much attention to the packing. Months later, when I was in Athens unpacking, I kept smelling this awful odor that got worse and worse as I dug deeper into a big box. Finally I got down to the problem: the movers had packed a full potty seat! A friend of mine had been visiting with her one-year-old right before the packing started. There was also a dead mouse, but I think he died along the way. Probably the stench from the potty seat got him. My inattention to the packing also deprived us of a moment of sentiment that it turned out we had each been anticipating. In
Fiddler on the Roof,
Tevye's last act before leaving home had been to remove the mezuzah, the symbol of a Jewish household, from the door. My sister's husband's Irish-Catholic mother had given us a mezuzah as a wedding present (she also sent her family's christening gown at the appropriate points), and separately, we each imagined Steven taking it down as we got in the cab to leave for the airport. But when he went to get it, he discovered the mezuzah was already packed up and on its way to mark our next doorpost, our doorpost in Greece.

 

SR: As we got ready to move, we worked hard to get the kids, who were then three and five, interested and excited about their new home. Cokie put up posters all around the house of the Acropolis and the Agora, and other Greek temples and monuments. Becca kept looking at the posters and the books we showed her. Finally, she said with tears welling in her eyes, “Daddy, are we going to have to live in one of those tumbled-down houses?” She thought all the buildings in Greece were ruins. But they weren't. In our future was a lovely house, surrounded by orange and lemon trees, in the first suburb north of Athens. The name of the street was Agias Sophias, which translates as both Saint Sophie and Holy Wisdom. And we would need plenty of the good saint's wisdom, and protection, for our little family during our years abroad.

GROWING UP IN GREECE

The romantic notion of a foreign correspondent, to quote our old California friend, is of a “hard-living, hard-loving writer on the road.” No spouse or kids at home to limit options or nurture guilt. But we had learned from our days in California—a foreign country to most Americans, after all—that it was actually better to live abroad as a family. Not only did you take your best friend and lover with you, but children, more focused on circuses and cookies than parliaments and politics, provided a fresh view of the cultures you were covering. The hard-living, hard-loving types came home to empty apartments and out-of-date address books. Steve came home to the life and laughter—and yes, the stresses and strains—of St. Sophie Street. One of the stresses was Cokie's work. She was eager to move, and give up her job, but she also knew that she needed something stimulating to do in Athens. Producing TV shows was out—they were all in Greek. Part-time reporting for American radio seemed like a good bet. But Steve's sensitivity to the situation was not all that great, as a stopover in London on our way to Greece made clear.

 

CR: Before we left for Greece, I went to talk to the networks and said, “Look, I'm learning Greek, I'll have access to Steve's Telex, I'll be involved through him in all the news, can't you use me?” CBS handed me a tape recorder and said, fine, file for radio. But I knew I couldn't count on that; I needed to hedge my bets and talk to everyone I could. My next stop was Westinghouse, which at that time had a big radio network; there, I also got some encouragement. At NBC, which is where I'd been working, I was told to call on the London
bureau chief when we stopped there on the way to Greece. I dutifully made an appointment at NBC in London, but Steve wanted to buy a Burberry's trench coat. He couldn't sit for the children while I went to NBC because, he insisted, he couldn't be a foreign correspondent without the right trench coat. So I missed my appointment at NBC.

 

SR: I don't remember the story quite that way. I was all for Cokie working, and encouraged her to become a radio reporter, because I thought that medium would use her skills well. But was I also self-centered and insensitive at times? Without a doubt. And the trench coat
was
cool. Lots of rings and pockets and epaulets. It made me a feel a bit like Snoopy, getting off a plane in a new country, carrying my typewriter and muttering to myself, “Here's the world-famous foreign correspondent….” Butin many ways it was the kids who adjusted to their new life first. One of my earliest images of Greece is putting Lee in school and watching him disappear down the corridor with his new teacher.

 

CR: It was so easy with Lee because there was an American school and he was able to start kindergarten right away. But he did have one complaint: “Didn't
The New York Times
know that I just learned to read when they sent us here?” With a different alphabet he couldn't read the billboards and street signs. Becca was much harder to find a place for. Eventually, a slot opened at the one American-style preschool and she happily went off on her own, at three and a half, to “The Early Childhood Education Center.” Just hearing her pronounce the name was worth the price of tuition.

 

SR: After we'd been in Greece only a few weeks, it was time for the Orthodox Easter, their most important holiday. A military government was running the country and the foreign press corps was invited to an Easter celebration at an army base outside of Athens. The soldiers were performing all the
traditional rituals, roasting a lamb and dancing, and we were sitting there and watching, still feeling a bit tentative and out of place. We looked around and Lee and Becca had dashed out onto the dance floor and were dancing with the soldiers! I turned to Cokie and said, “Well, I guess we've finally arrived in Greece!” Or at least two of us had. That was actually the only pleasant encounter we had with the military regime. It was a tense time, with many Greek nationalists either in jail or out of the country. I had to be very careful in talking to people about the government because I could get them in trouble with the junta. The Nixon Administration backed the regime, so it was particularly dicey for an American journalist. Fortunately, the government did not last long after we got there.

 

CR: When we first arrived, I was frankly less concerned about the grand goings-on of government than I was about the everyday business of finding a house for us to live in and schools for the kids. We were lucky on the house front, we found one quickly, but our stuff took a good while to get to Greece, so we lived in this rather cramped apartment hotel. That was a challenge. I did do one smart thing—airfreight about four boxes of toys so the kids had things to play with. In Greece, parks and playgrounds are closed during siesta and I had to keep the children quiet because people were sleeping. I kept suggesting that they might sleep, too, but they didn't see siesta as a charming Mediterranean custom, they saw those afternoon hours in bed as nap time for babies.

 

SR: But even the toys were a hassle. When I went to customs to collect them, the young guy who was checking the boxes was fascinated. Greece didn't have anything like these fancy American toys, and he kept playing with them. Finally, I gave him a plastic helicopter and said, “Here, take it.” It was the closest I had ever come to bribing someone.

The kids adapted very well. They never learned a lot of
Greek because they both were in English-speaking schools, but they did learn one critical Greek phrase,
exi biscota, parakalo,
which means “six cookies, please.” There was a bakery at the corner, and they could walk there with their drachmas in hand and buy cookies. For children who had been driven everywhere they ever went, they loved being able to do things on their own like that.

 

CR: That first spring, right after we arrived, we went down to Corinth and the kids were climbing around the ruins. Archaeological sites make wonderful playgrounds for kids, because they can run until they tire out. It's not like a museum, where they have to behave and be quiet. The back of the site at Corinth had clearly been a row of shops, and the children set up imaginary stores there while we toured the site with the guidebook. When we came back to the kids, we found Becca hawking her wares. “What is your shop, Rebecca?” “It's a statue shop.” “And what are you selling?” “I'm selling statues from Corinth, Delphi, and Santa Monica!” That was the known world of Rebecca Roberts!

 

SR: One of the first friends we made in Athens was the real estate agent who helped us find the house. We didn't know that it was across the street from where George Papadopoulos, the colonel who had run the military junta, had lived for seven years. The whole street had been closed off during his reign, but he had just been deposed in a coup, by another group of colonels, which is why the house had come on the market.

 

CR: There was still a little guardhouse across the street, which was great because it was so safe.

 

SR: The stories were that Papadopoulos had used our house for his family, or maybe for his mistress. We were never quite sure. The kids found in one of the drawers a set of hair curlers,
and they kept waving them around saying, “We have Mrs. Papadopoulos's curlers!”

One of our first evenings in Athens our real estate agent invited us out to dinner at a Greek taverna. We came to love tavernas. Talk about family values. They were these wonderful, informal spots, often with gardens, even in the middle of the city. It was a perfect place to eat with young children—they could run around and not bother anybody. We usually asked for five chairs for the four of us because Becca would often conk out in the middle of the meal, stretch out across two chairs, and go to sleep. During our first taverna experience, our agent served us a goat from his home island. One of the things we learned quickly was that all Greeks were very proud of their origins. Their village or their island had the best—the best olives, the best wine, the best tomatoes, whatever. The agent was very proud of the goat, and I innocently asked him how he had managed to get it from his home island to Athens. “On a leash,” he replied. I had a mental picture of this smiling little goat, walking onto the ferry, headed for slaughter in Athens! It dimmed the pleasure of the meal a bit.

 

CR: We had had a Seder with our California friends a month early, but now it really was Passover, so we celebrated with a little ceremony in our apartment hotel, just the four of us. There was a synagogue in Athens, old and very traditional. I asked Steven to go down to the synagogue and see if there were stores in the neighborhood selling matzoh. I told him to get some pita bread if he couldn't find matzoh, because at least it's unleavened bread and in a pinch we could substitute it for matzoh. Steven came home with a piece of cheesecake! I said, “What is this? We're having a Seder with a piece of cheesecake?” And Steve answered, “Well, it's Jewish.”

 

SR: Hey, you have to be ready to adapt to new cultures.

 

CR: After about three months things were settling down. The kids were in school, we had moved into our house, and we already had guests, a couple from New York who had been friends from Washington days. I was thinking about sending a cable to CBS saying I was ready to do some work, could they use me?

 

SR: We were sitting in the house on a Monday morning, talking with our friends, and the Telex—sort of a private telegraph machine—rang upstairs. The message: “Assume you know. Coup in Cyprus. Makarios presumed dead.” I didn't know. So I quickly called the Reuters office and learned that a group of right-wingers associated with the military government in Athens had overthrown Makarios, who was both the archbishop and the president of Cyprus. Immediately the airport in Nicosia closed down, so no reporters could get onto the island. Over the next few days dozens of reporters from all over the world gathered in Athens, eager to fly to Cyprus as soon as possible. Finally, we got a call on Thursday that the airport was opening and a flight was leaving immediately.

So I raced to the airport and found myself in the departure lounge surrounded by all these war correspondents wearing fancy bush jackets and safari suits. They all seemed to know each other, and they kept saying things like, “Hey, remember that day in the Golan Heights?” I was sitting there in a drip-dry sports shirt, watching these guys and saying to myself, “I can't cover this war. I can't even dress right for this war.” But I had actually been to Cyprus once, a few weeks before. During that period when the airport was closed, I'd written a long background piece on the politics of Cyprus, which ran that morning on the front page of the
International Herald Tribune.
I got on the plane still feeling very shaky about my role when I noticed that all these self-important war correspondent types were tearing my story out of the
Tribune
and stuffing it into
one of the many pockets of their bush jackets. Then I realized: “I may not have the right clothes, but at least I know where this island is, and most of you don't!”

The first two days were very calm. I went over to the Turkish sector for dinner with two other
New York Times
correspondents who had flown in from Israel and Lebanon. But at five o'clock Saturday morning I was rudely rousted out of bed by machine-gun fire. I dashed to the window of the hotel, which was right on the border between the Greek and Turkish sectors, and Turkish paratroopers were dropping out of the sky. The Greeks had machine guns on the roof and were firing down into the Turkish sector. Shortly after I was woken up by gunfire in Cyprus, Cokie was woken up by a phone call in Athens.