Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (3 page)

MY BROTHER WAS
twelve when my father died, and as hard as his death was for me, for my brother it must have been even worse. They’d had a more mature relationship. They’d shared a love of literature, and my brother often discussed with my father the history books he was reading. We were two years apart, but as kids, we were together all the time. A voracious reader of history and military campaigns, my brother had labeled me “Baby Napoleon” while I was still in my mom’s womb, but he was the true leader of our childhood campaigns. He created giant battlefields for war games with our toy soldiers. The rules were too intricate for me to follow, but I loved to sit and watch him direct armies across the sweeping plains of our bedroom floor.

After the funeral, both of us retreated into separate parts of ourselves, and I don’t think we ever truly reached out to each other again. I can’t remember ever discussing my father’s death with my brother. Perhaps I did, but I have no memory of it.

Suddenly the world seemed a very scary place, and I vowed not to let it get to me. I wanted to be autonomous, protect myself from further loss. I was only ten, but I decided I had to earn my own money, so I could save for a future I couldn’t predict. I got a job as a child model and opened a bank account. My mother was wealthy, but I didn’t want to have to rely on someone else.

In high school I started taking survival courses: month-long mountaineering expeditions in the Rockies, sea kayaking in Mexico. I needed to prove to myself that I could survive on my own. I left high school a semester early, and at seventeen I traveled for months by truck through southern and central Africa. I’d completed the credits I needed to graduate, and was sick of the pressure, wanted to forget about college and those silences at home filled by the murmur of television and the clanking of cutlery. Africa was a place to forget, and be forgotten in. My brother was already away at college. I assumed he’d come up with his own way to deal with the loss. I thought he could take care of himself.

He was smarter than me, more sensitive too. He lived much of his life in his head. In high school he fell in love with the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald, with the fantasy of that lost world, and had gone to Princeton—I think in part because he hoped to discover that that way of life, Fitzgerald’s world, was still alive. He was an idealist, impractical. He worried constantly about money, yet on impulse would buy a white double-breasted suit he saw in an ad. It hung in his closet unworn for years. I used to tease him about it—the waste of money, his lack of common sense.

I never thought of him as an older brother. It would have meant accepting that he was somehow looking out for me, that I wasn’t independent, that I needed someone else.

Carter Vanderbilt Cooper. That was my brother’s name. Strange. I rarely say it out loud anymore. I thought we had a silent agreement, that we would both just get through our childhoods and meet up as adults on the other side. I imagined one day we would be friends, allies, brothers laughing about our past fights. I’m not sure why he didn’t keep his end of the bargain. Maybe he never knew about our silent pact. Maybe it was all in my head.

“WHENEVER WE PASS
this temple my youngest points out and says, ‘My brother died here,’” a mother in Kamburugamuwa tells me, her eyes watering. “I explain to him, ‘Don’t worry. He’s in another world. He’s in heaven now.’”

We’ve set up a camera in a classroom near the temple, and a half-dozen women sit outside, waiting for their chance to talk. Some clutch grainy photos of their lost children; some hold only their memories. Each wants to speak, however, wants her pain known, her child’s absence felt.

“My daughter was very serious in her studies,” one mother tells me. “My son; he was always messing around with the other kids.” Both her children drowned in the temple. Their bodies were found near each other.

“I can’t go home anymore,” she says. “In my head, I see them messing around. I feel like my children are still playing out in the garden.”

We will not be able to use all these women’s words. It’s too much detail, too many interviews to transcribe. So many mothers are waiting to talk, however. I can’t turn any of them away.

“How do you go on?” I ask one mother.

She does not understand the question. “We have to go on,” she finally says. “What choice do we have?”

“We all suffer together,” another woman says, and for a moment I imagine she somehow knows my history, then am embarrassed that I would think that. She was with her six children at the temple when the wave hit. One of her daughters died. The rest survived by clinging to a coconut tree.

“It’s better to talk,” she says, “to tell stories to each other. It helps to overcome the grief.”

What she says is true, I know that much, but I still find myself unable to do it, even though my pain isn’t nearly as great. After my father died, my mother still talked about him, reminding us of things he’d said. I’d listen, nod my head, but I couldn’t join in. I couldn’t say a word. Walking in this village, listening to these people, is as close as I can come.

A fisherman named Dayratna stands in a grove behind his shack, hanging his daughter’s wet schoolbooks in the branches of a tree. He wants to dry them out. The books are the only reminder he has of his daughter. Everything else—her photos, her clothes—were swept away. Dilini Sandarmali, that was her name. She was eleven years old.

“When I tried to remove my daughter’s body from the temple,” he whispers, his voice hoarse from crying, “I found her lying with two of her friends.”

Dayratna is not sure what to do next. He won’t return to work, because he can’t face the sea. “I don’t want to see the ocean again,” he says wearily. “I curse the sea.”

At first you want to know what happened in each house, to each heart, but after a while you no longer ask. Too much has already been said. The words fail to have meaning, fail to get at the depth of the sorrow. I look into the eyes of these mothers grieving for their children.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I say. It comes out sounding so small.

I find it hard to listen to these people’s stories. They remind me so much of what I’ve lost, though compared with their suffering, mine seems minuscule. A minor misery, swallowed by the sea.

There was a time many years ago, when I first became a reporter, when I thought I could fake it. Go through the motions, not give away pieces of myself in return. I focused on the mechanics: storytelling and structure. I had conversations, conducted interviews, and I wasn’t even there. I’d nod, look in others’ eyes, but my vision lost focus, my mind turned to details. People became characters, plot lines in a story I was constructing in my head. Their mouths moved, I heard only lines of track, bites of sound. I listened for what I could use; the rest I fast-forwarded through.

When I had what I needed, I’d pull out. I thought I could get away unscathed, unchanged. The truth was I hadn’t gotten out at all. It’s impossible to block out what you see, what you hear. Even if you stop listening, the pain gets inside, seeps through the cracks you can’t close up. You can’t fake your way through it. I know that now. You have to absorb it all. You owe them that. You owe it to yourself as well.

“Sometimes you have to look very narrowly down the path,” an aid worker in Somalia once said to me. “You can’t look at what’s lying on either side of the road.”

I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but I certainly get it now. Crystal clear. If you are going to engage, then there’s only so much you can stand. It’s best not to stop in one place too long. A week or two, maximum. You can buy yourself more time if you have somewhere to stay away from the carnage. Then the story becomes a place you go to, venture from. It’s an office, one that you prepare yourself for every morning.

In Sri Lanka, we sleep in a luxury hotel a few hours’ drive away from the worst of the devastation. Each night we return to edit our footage and wolf down some dinner. A few tourists lounge in the last light of day: black-bikinied painted blondes with collagen lips, and Speedo-clad men with overhanging bellies and sunburned scalps. I see them laughing by the pool, sipping drinks with umbrellas, telling jokes in Russian and German. At first I’m shocked; I scream at them in my head, “Don’t you know people have died here? How can you still lounge by the pool?” But I say nothing, of course. Why shouldn’t they lounge? Elsewhere in the world life continues. That’s just how it is.

When we leave Kamburugamuwa, I notice that we’re quiet. Even Phil has been silenced by the sadness of it all. A truck filled with Buddhist monks chanting through a loudspeaker passes us by. Their deep-throated droning wafts over what remains of the small village. Maduranga is standing by the water’s edge. Alone on the beach. A sad little boy. He throws stones at the sea.

IN APRIL 1988,
my brother showed up at my mother’s apartment and said he wanted to move back home. She lived in a duplex on New York’s Upper East Side. It was a penthouse we’d moved into when my brother and I were in high school. The building faced the East River, and each floor had a wrap-around terrace, which gave anyone in the apartment the feeling of being on a ship. Driving along the river, you could see the balcony off my room silhouetted against the skyline. Whenever I was approaching the place in a taxi on the FDR Drive, I’d count to see how many seconds it took me to see the ledge.

My brother was living in his own apartment in the city. He was an editor for
American Heritage,
a history magazine, and also wrote book reviews for
Commentary.
He’d recently broken up with his girlfriend. They’d met in college and had dated for several years, but I wasn’t aware how serious it was. The truth is, I didn’t pay much attention. When they broke up, we talked about it on the phone, but not in any great detail. I’d never broken up with someone I was in love with, and I didn’t appreciate the pain of such a loss.

That day in April, when Carter told our mom he wanted to move back home, he came to a race of mine. I was a junior at Yale, a coxswain on the lightweight crew, and the team was in New York competing against Columbia University. Carter had never been to a race of mine before, and I was excited that he was coming. When he arrived, however, he seemed disheveled, distracted. I knew instantly that something was wrong. He watched my race, but left soon after. When I stopped home, my mom told me that he was upset about something and had taken several days off work. She’d gotten him a recommendation for a therapist, and Carter had agreed to start seeing him.

I slipped into the guest room where he was sleeping—his old bedroom was being used largely for storage—and sat on the edge of his bed. That night, he seemed scared, fragile, and that frightened me, made me angry. I resented his weakness. I asked him how he was, and we talked about his job a bit, but I really didn’t want to know too much. It sickens me now to realize all this, to see how selfish I was. I could have done something that might have helped. I could have talked to him, opened up, let him know that he wasn’t alone. But I didn’t. I left for school early the next morning.

A few days afterward, my mom told me that Carter liked the therapist and had returned to work. He’d also decided not to move back home. I was relieved, eager for any reason to stop worrying about him, to pretend that his crisis had never happened. I assumed that whatever problems he was having he’d confide to his therapist. I later learned he did not.

IN EVERY TRAGEDY,
people search for miracles, signs that sustain them even when surrounded by death. We’ve been in Sri Lanka for more than a week when Chris, our interpreter, tells us about a small church in the town of Matera.

“Very strange comings and goings,” he says, clearly excited. “Levitating statues, miracles even.”

The church is named after a five-hundred-year-old relic, Our Lady of Matera, a finely carved figure of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus that has stood in an alcove near the altar for as long as anyone can remember.

When the first wave struck, Father Charles Hewawasam was at the altar, preparing communion for some one hundred parishioners seated on simple wooden benches inside. The choir in the balcony had just begun to sing the first few lines of a hymn, “While Shepards Watched.”

Father Charles didn’t see the wave. He remembers hearing a crash, which he thought was a traffic accident on a nearby street. Seconds later, he was swimming in water. There were screams, and bodies, cars floating in the nave, chunks of stone and wood. Everything smelled of the sea.

“I remember three bodies floating near the altar,” Father Charles tells me when we arrive at the church. He is in his early thirties with black hair combed neatly and parted on one side. He still limps slightly from an injury to his leg, and speaks soft British-accented English, looking you straight in the eye when he talks.

Father Charles introduces us to a nine-year-old boy named Dimaker, who was standing in the balcony when the water swept over the congregation beneath him. Dimaker sang in the choir, and was still holding his hymnal when he says he saw the statue of Our Lady of Matera rise from its pedestal in the alcove and leave the church.

“She was not taken by the water,” Dimaker explains, motioning with his hands to show how the statue seemed to levitate. “She went on her own. It was a miracle.”

Twenty people died in the church that morning. Some were killed by the initial impact; others drowned trying to escape. Father Charles didn’t notice that the statue was gone until later that day, when Dimaker told him what he’d seen.

“I believe she went out to sea to be with the people, her children,” Father Charles tells me. “She went with the people and she carried Jesus. She had the same struggle as the other people.”

For three mornings after the tsunami, Father Charles tells me, he went to the ocean’s edge and prayed for the return of the statue. “We need you,” he’d say out loud. “You have to come back.”

Each day, he attended to the burials of his parishioners and looked after the needs of the wounded. Several people from his congregation were missing, and parts of the church had been badly damaged. Father Charles believed he couldn’t complete his mission without Our Lady by his side.