Then We Were One

By Fred A. Reed

Shocked by his brother's death from psychological trauma sustained in the Vietnam War, Fred A. Reed sets out on a journey of personal discovery. By way of Greece, the Balkans, and the mystical Anatolian highlands, in pursuit of iconoclasts in Syria and Lebanon, he comes under the spell of Islam. In its embrace, he finds renewed brotherhood and liberation.

International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is a specialist on Middle East politics and religion. He has reported for La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada, Montreal Gazette, and Le Devoir. He is a three time winner of the Governor General's Award for Translation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Talonbooks
• Release date: Oct 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9780889227293

Fred A. Reed

International journalist and award-winning literary translator Fred A. Reed is also a respected specialist on politics and religion in the Middle East. Anatolia Junction, his acclaimed work on the unacknowledged wars of the Ottoman succession, has been translated in Turkey, where it enjoys a wide following. Shattered Images, which explores the origins of contemporary fundamentalist movements in Islam, has also been translated into Turkish, and into French as Images brisées (VLB éditeur, Montréal). After several years as a librarian and trade union activist at the Montreal Gazette, Reed began reporting from Islamic Iran in 1984, visiting the Islamic Republic thirty times since then. He has also reported extensively on Middle Eastern affairs for La Presse, CBC Radio-Canada and Le Devoir. A three-time winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation, plus a nomination in 2009 for his translation of Thierry Hentsch’s Le temps aboli, Empire of Desire, Reed has translated works by many of Quebec’s leading authors, several in collaboration with novelist David Homel, as well as by Nikos Kazantzakis and other modern Greek writers. Reed worked with documentarist Jean-Daniel Lafond on two documentary films: Salam Iran, a Persian Letter and American Fugitive. The two later collaborated on Conversations in Tehran (Talonbooks, 2006). Fred A. Reed resides in Montreal.

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Contents

Introduction

Mesa Verde

Athens

Wairoa

Urfa

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Credits

Fred A. Reed

Introduction

Death is man’s great obsession. It reveals all that has gone before; it is the ultimate moment of truth, the final reckoning whose ineluctable advent illuminates our lives.

—Thierry Hentsch

I see them standing, dressed in identical shorts, sweaters, socks and shoes—identical down to their haircuts—on the pier at Balboa as it was sixty years ago, looking out over the small-boat harbor and beyond, to the Pacific: two little boys, the two brothers that we were.

As closely matched at first as our clothes, the threads of our two lives were to pull slowly apart as we grew to manhood and went our separate ways, then to fray and disentangle with fatal finality.

We had been two.

Then we were one.

To the survivor is left the tale. To him the struggle to retrieve from the depths of memory blurred now by age and distance the temper and texture of an era and, through it, to capture the ever-receding, mirage-like image of those two boys and men, those two brothers and sons: my own, and his, my late, long-lost and younger brother, James Blanchard Reed.

Who is that survivor? Who the I that tells the tale?

And in the telling has he withstood the temptations of self-pity and self-promotion, of concealment and misdirection, of fabulation and invention?

What we do know is this: he is the older and the taller of the two little boys standing with their backs to their father’s camera on the early morning pier. Now, at dusk of a life’s long day, like a spirit wrestler he grapples with fading memory. Outlines have blurred, features dimmed.

And yet moments and places, faces and voices surge to the surface, diamond hard, perfect and precise in their physical and emotional detail. Those moments are not random; they make up the essence of this assemblage of the fragments of two lives: the onrush of ideas, the thrill of music heard for the first time, enduring friendships, the love of a lifetime, a shocking death.

Such are the twin components of memory. Our recollections rush forward, clamoring for attention, jostling one another, arms extended. Tell my story! one shouts, his voice soon drowned out by another, more insistent, crying, No, mine!

And the final, urgent plea, perhaps that of my own voice, Remember me!

To them all, this memoir lends a tender, imperfect and passionate ear.

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For years, in my professional career as a literary translator, I invested the emotional and intellectual worlds of others, the better to force them through the osmotic membrane of language. Now the process is reversed. I must today pass back through that membrane the emotional and sensate world of the childhood I shared with my brother, Jim, and become the narrator, not only of my own life but also of a second life cut short. As I do, feelings now swirl and eddy close to the surface in currents of a force and complexity I had not imagined but should have expected.

Then, determined to speak in my own words, I set out to observe and to suggest in ways precise or elliptical the complexity of the world. To seek out connections that, at first glance, appear wholly disparate but partake ultimately of the same essence. To locate what is hidden beneath that which hides. My method was to place myself at the cardinal point, at the historical or spiritual moment that would mark like a white stone the start of my search and thence to range forward and backward across historical time and geographical space in the attempt to illuminate both that point and that moment.

The books that have preceded this one attempted, clumsily and imperfectly, like music heard from afar, to reconcile two civilizations and two cultures that today appear inimical to each other and yet partake of the same spiritual core.

Now, in the pages that follow, these two lines of force converge, transposed, upon two closely parallel yet divergent lives, those of the little boys and the men they became, the two brothers standing on the pier at Balboa.

The voices that cry out for attention are not all happy ones. Some are those of shame, of remorse. For years I’d contrived to suppress those voices, to elude the questions they whispered in an unguarded moment, just before sleep or upon awakening, at dawn. They are the insistent voices we recognize as conscience; as the imperative of a debt to be repaid; as guilt at having survived where another has died, as regret, as self-justification.

Among the strongest of these voices are those of my family. The mother and father of this story stand before my eyes as fallible, yet loving; as devoted, yet dedicated to the physical, moral and intellectual growth of their two sons with an intensity that was often hurtful to experience. But that intensity could only have been the normal combination of parental uncertainty—what other training did they have than that acquired on the job?—and determination to do right by, and perhaps to control and direct, two boys whose behavior ranged from boisterous to moody, from bumptious to introspective, and who would surely have been too much for any mother and father to handle.

And yet the outcome would be disaster, which would take the form of flight, dissolution and death. Family history, the interplay of genes, the weakness that is our common lot, the confluence of the planets: none of these factors, taken separately or even together, can begin to explain what happened, any more than they could halt the inexorable clockwork mechanism of fate located neither in the stars nor in an individual’s fatal flaws but somewhere beyond, in an unfathomable dimension.

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Southern California in the late1950s had the feel of a mid-summer’s day, the kind that begins bright, hot and still. But such is the rearrangement of the molecules in the air that, imperceptible to the eye yet tingling the nerve endings, by late afternoon cumulus clouds billow up against the horizon and electrical storms burst with full fury.

The day may have dawned clear then, fine and cloudless. Yet the atmosphere, as I look back across six decades upon an adolescent’s sensibilities, throbbed with the ominous, diffuse yet deadly.

Such was California in its era of innocence. Public morality had not yet collapsed. The social fabric woven from the strong and enduring threads of piety, political conservatism and propriety, and from concern bordering on obsession for what the neighbors might think and would most probably say, had not yet been ripped beyond repair.

Illusion; all of it.

Just beneath the surface lurked the hypocrisy of public corruption; the scraps of roughly woven burlap that made up a social fabric stripped bare in the works of writers like Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West and James Ellroy. My hometown wore its prim self-regard like the bandage on Jack Nicholson’s split nose in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, that autopsy of the water wars and of the real estate speculation that made possible the Los Angeles where two brothers grew to manhood and where our paths parted.

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Soon the storm broke, bending trees double and scattering lives like dry leaves before it: the war in Vietnam.

In 1954, Vietnamese resistance forces overwhelmed the French colonial army at Dien Bien Phu. The Geneva Accords that sealed France’s defeat divided the country into two entities, setting the stage for the greater conflict to come. The United States initiated hostilities in 1959, as Washington had resolved to establish an anti-communist bulwark in the south. After the briefest of respites, the monster that would devour a generation, shed the blood of millions and destroy three Southeast Asian nations had shaken itself from its brief sleep, and awoke thirsting once more for blood.

Vietnam was far away, a land of sinister and exotic charm, into which strode quiet, self-confident Americans with the assurance of victors-to-be. At home, the campaign of public justification that would make military involvement appear essential to national survival was already in full cry, pervasive yet invisible. That campaign adhered perfectly, in its language and its logic, to the dictates of the social conservatism and conformism of the day, to the doctrine that the United States was inherently different from the rest of the world.

The factors that shape society always manifest themselves in pairs: against action ensues reaction; against oppression, resistance. Against the invading Americans, the Vietnamese would fight with tenacity and sacrifice. Against the lies propagated to justify the war, life would push back with equal intensity.

As growing boys, then as adolescents soon to be confronted by the ineluctable fact of conscription, we understood nothing of these universal laws; grasped nothing of the struggle unfolding far away that would soon sweep us up, then engulf us. Yet in the conversations of our parents and of the adults around us, in the behavior of our teachers, in the silences and the elisions, we felt everything.

Beneath these feelings loomed the ultimate question, one that we could not articulate, one that I can only dare ask now in old age: how could devout, socially conservative, educated and intelligent parents whose love for their sons was beyond doubt, have acquiesced in the crime of war? How could they have agreed to dispatch their two boys—those two identically dressed little boys—to a faraway land as apprentice killers and as corollary, unquestioning victims? How could they have become willing facilitators, proud proxy executioners of the state?

Such was the genius and the power of the American ideological system as it blazed with meridian intensity on the clear day that was the late 1950s in Southern California, that it transformed a family—our family—into the unwitting, accepting conduit of atrocity. For such would be the fate wrought upon the Vietnamese who had made the foolish, courageous and inescapable decision to assert their national rights and, in doing so, to resist the plans others had drawn up for them.

The crime and the atrocity would rebound, in ways as diverse as they were inexorable, against their perpetrators. They would also, in the event, rebound against us, the four members of our family. For though we were innocent, we shared in the guilt.

Thus, in an indirect and roundabout way, the story I must tell is one in which cruelty and abuse are visited upon the children through the agency of the family by the state that it had been taught and conditioned to fear and to revere, those precise functions that religion reserves for God.

As such this fragmentary account of two lives must indict the criminally guilty, absolve the misled and redeem the victim. It must also lay to rest the guilt of the survivor, in full knowledge that the shadow of guilt will accompany me until the ultimate stroke of life’s clock. Finally, it must sever the symbolic chain of cruelty and violence. All in full recognition that these are abilities I do not possess.

This then is the story of two boys and two men, two sons and two brothers torn apart by death. It is at the same time the story of a path first trod at the end of adolescence when I encountered the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, a meeting that, in turn, threw open the doors to a world whose latent existence I could never, in the insular world of Southern California childhood, have conceived.

The quest for that meaning with which we seek to invest our lives followed the curving, ascending, rocky path that Kazantzakis laid down in his work. It arched through full-blown social and political engagement as a Marxist and trade unionist working against the system that I, like so many of my generation, identified as the source of the Vietnam War, to a posthumous meeting with the Kurdish mystic and Islamic reformer Said Nursi, whose character, life and teaching finally, now as I enter my eighth decade, reconciled me with the life I have led, and that I now lay before you, dear and respected reader, in the pages of this book.

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As children we inhabit a never-ending present. Time passes so slowly that even sundown may never come. The week ahead is beyond comprehension, next year as remote as the dimmest star in the farthest galaxy. Our parents are distant and incomprehensible beings, radically distinct from what we know ourselves to be: creatures of the here and now, of immediacy, sliding like surfers along the cusp of time’s unfurling wave, racing like bicyclists on their glittering mounts, insouciant before the wind.

Childhood and youth, in their inability to imagine the future and, in their rejection of the past, are a time of immobility, an age of the contemporaneous, the fixed and unbending. Thus it has always been and thus it will always be; we are as insects forever ensnared in amber, captives of the present as we stare at our unchanging face.

Age dramatically inverts this proposition. The present turns porous, friable. No sooner has it arrived than it becomes the past; no sooner have we reached the future than it becomes the present. Where once, as children, we stood at the midday point and our body left but a small pool of black at our feet, now the evening shadow we cast is a long one that stretches behind us into a past that we are continually attempting to revive but that is constantly receding.

For time, like emotion, possesses neither width nor breadth, neither thickness nor substance; it cannot be studied under a microscope or apprehended from afar by the most powerful telescope. It is the locus of music, which exists only within it, in a constant state of the future melding into the present only to be instantly replaced by a past whose emotional harmonics and dissonances resonate in our ears.

The stuff of time, like that of memory, is its perfect immateriality. With these materials I, teller of tales that may seem tall but are true, now set about my work.

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The Arroyo Seco, 1943.

(Photo: James F. Reed)

The act of drinking from the stream that ran through the Arroyo Seco earned us a sharp rebuke from Mother …

Mesa Verde

Therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.

—Deuteronomy 30:19

First we were two: my little brother Jim and I. We grew up in a remote corner of infinity; a bounded and intimate landscape bordered by oak-forested hills. Through the gully, thick with scotch broom and poison oak, ran a creek where we hunted crayfish—crawdads we called them—in the languid waters.

The hillside that stretched upward from the stream was forbidding in its wildness and its vastness. Coyotes lurked there. We could hear their mournful howl on summer nights. In response, their domestic cousins, the neighborhood dogs, would break into barks and yelps of frustration as if yearning to join their wild relatives in the hunt for rabbits and opossums and ground squirrels and quail.

Jim and I knew it as Hayward’s Hill—though we never knew who Hayward was—and it marked the far limit of our terrestrial domain. When we climbed, panting, through the undergrowth to reach the top, the entire world lay at our feet: to the southwest, the silhouette of Los Angeles City Hall and, on a clear day, before smog blanketed the land, the gleam of the Pacific Ocean in the distance. As we turned in the opposite direction, below us lay, in miniature, our home and our street, Mesa Verde Road, set amid rolling fields of oats and, to the west, a rampart of eucalyptus trees. The words "mesa verde" in Spanish mean green hilltop: a misnomer, for it was green only in springtime and parched during the rest of the year. Beyond, as our eyes crept upward over the Annandale Hills, the ochre-brown flanks of the San Gabriel Range, touched with patches of dark green, strode in measured ranks into the distance.

Hayward’s Hill and the softly rounded hilltops that surrounded it formed a spur of the main massif that lay farther to the northwest. In early spring the hillsides blazed bright red-orange with millions of poppies. From the softly rounded summit, every detail of our house stood out in perfectly defined miniature: the dark-shingled roof and white sideboards, the white picket fence and beds of ivy that blanketed the soft slope of the land to the street; the red-brick walk and steps that led down to the mailbox; even the tuft of the Chinese elm that Father had planted to shade what would be our patio. Occasionally we spotted a walking figure, as silent as the tumbleweed that came bounding and somersaulting down the street driven by the autumn wind.

From the summit Jim and I waved our arms like semaphores. No one noticed, for no one had been looking. Only the piercing shrieks of Mother’s whistle—two short and one long blast to summon us home—could span the distance magnified by childhood’s eyes and by time frozen in memory.

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The creek that trickled its way through the gully flowed from Johnson’s Lake, a minuscule semi-swamp fed by an artesian well that seemed as natural to us as it was pure anomaly in the semi-desert geography of Southern California. Mother would take us there for a walk, perhaps a half-hour from home at our little-boys’ pace, to feed the ducks and mud hens that paddled busily or floated indolently on the turbid green waters. Occasionally, across the lake, we would catch a glimpse of a swan—or had it only been a goose?—peeking from the bulrushes.

Farther downstream the creek emptied into the Arroyo Seco, the deep ravine that had once delimited the eastern frontier of Rancho San Rafael. The Arroyo set out our natural boundaries as well, as if it were the chaos that surrounded our perfectly ordered and circumscribed world. Cutting today through Pasadena, it had once teemed with deer, wolves and mountain lions. Big cats may survive to this day in the thick vegetation of the canyon walls; early-morning hikers are warned to exercise caution. Though we plump little boys would have made an appetizing meal, no such concern troubled us as we followed the creek from the lake, and then clambered down through the thicket beneath the Laguna Road Bridge to the canyon floor.

One photograph of the Arroyo’s pristine sublimity survives in the family album that lies open on my worktable. Taken from the La Loma Bridge, one of the three that linked our tiny corner of Pasadena with the city itself, the snapshot depicts a stream meandering through stands of live oak and cottonwood and willow. The concrete flood control channel, through which mud-brown runoff from Devil’s Gate Dam farther upstream would churn and tumble during winter rains, had not yet been built, had not yet domesticated the benevolent and destructive forces of nature that had carved out the Arroyo. Residences lined the canyon’s rim but they were invisible to us, the explorers of a pristine lost continent. Birds chattered in the dense foliage; tiny fish fluttered in the shallows. Jim and I, the younger following the elder’s lead, knelt to splash cool water on our faces and then slurped it up from our cupped palms.

The act of drinking from the stream that ran through the Arroyo Seco earned us a sharp rebuke from Mother, to whom I’d related our adventure. If I catch you boys drinking that water again …, she warned, the terms of the threat unspecified. We trifled with Mother—our protector and stern taskmistress—at our risk, and never drank again from the stream, which not long afterward was redirected out of reach through a deep, fenced culvert.

The poison oak from which we periodically suffered, the coyotes howling at night, the rumors of mountain lions: none of these things frightened us, for they were part of a natural world in which we moved with innocent ease, meshing with it, of it. But Mother’s anger we did fear: not her hand, for she would not strike us except in cases of extreme indiscipline (or, as I would find out later, offense to music), but the burning intensity of her gaze.

Where the Arroyo broadens out into an alluvial basin as it winds its way past South Pasadena to join the Los Angeles River stood the neighborhood farm. Mr. Wurz, the farmer with the white walrus mustache, grazed a few head of cattle and sheep there. Once a year he would harvest the oats, his horse-drawn harvester-thresher moving jerkily as though in a silent film across the field behind our house that stretched from one of the wealthy estates lining San Rafael Avenue to the eucalyptus grove.

Only a chain-link fence separated the field from our backyard. On one side of the fence, under the Chinese elm, lay a sanctuary of shade; in the intermediate space between, Father had succeeded, against all odds, in coaxing roses from the hard California clay. He fought constant battles with the slugs that would strip them of their leaves just as he’d earlier fought the potato bugs that infested the family victory garden.

From the other side of the fence came uninvited guests: opossums made their carefree way along the electric wires high above us, and garter snakes slithered through the chain links. In ignorant fury we hacked their heads off with a hoe, the same hoe Father wielded as a weapon against the moles that burrowed under his front lawn, leaving mounded trajectories as proof of their subversive depredations.

When later the field was subdivided, and new houses were built where once oats had thrived, Jim and I sold cold homemade lemonade to the construction workers. The war had ended. Southern California was booming; internal immigrants from the American Midwest and from the Deep South poured in to work in the aircraft and armament factories. Surrounded by encroaching suburbia Mr. Wurz, with no more oats to harvest, sold his farm, which was then transformed into a riding stable.

At the extremity of the field, between the estate and the building sites, stood a lonely acacia tree. It, like the nearby eucalyptus grove, partook organically of the natural environment; they had always been there, and always would be. Both in fact had been imported from Australia less than a century before.

The acacia tree served as our arboreal playground. The two of us would clamber through its gnarled branches, up among the narrow blade-shaped leaves, where birds would stop for a rest before flitting on. As we climbed, so we fell; missing my step, I hurtled to earth and to a month with my right arm immobilized in a plaster cast. The eucalyptus grove had none of the acacia’s feathery intimacy. Its intense odor, curling bark, the upper branches that rustled in the wind and dusky fallen leaves thick on the ground, breathed mystery. We ventured there rarely, wary of its dark and impassable thickets.

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Few childhood memories touch me more deeply than those of my tiny self and, later, with my kid brother Jim just behind or alongside me, astride a succession of tricycles, scooters and then bicycles—first up and down our driveway, then along Mesa Verde and through the quiet streets of our neighborhood. As we grew older, we ventured out across a widening radius to the city and beyond in an arc, that if followed to its end point, would encompass the Middle East and, in sorrow, New Zealand. The interstate highways that later terminally disfigured the Southern California landscape and accelerated the disintegration latent in its social architecture had yet to be built.

We were free to wander, our liberty bounded only by fatigue and the imperative to be home when Mother’s whistle summoned us to dinner. Our parents did not ask how far we’d gone, and we volunteered no information. Our world was a benevolent and ordered place. At the table, food awaited. We took our seats and wolfed it down in the manner of explosively growing preadolescent boys intensely inhabiting the present moment we knew for certain would never end.

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Just as Jim and I were fiercely contemporary in the way that only little boys can be, we took the landscape, the fields and trees, the hillocks and ravines that made up our natural environment, as unchanging and eternal. Yet it was only hardly less fleeting than our young lives. Johnson’s Lake, where Mother took us to feed the ducks, sprang from the human re-creation of the landscape. And, like almost every other feature of that landscape, it told a complex tale that was to determine, indirectly, who we were, and what we became, as those who inhabited it before us created the society that forged the personality of our minuscule world.

Had the National Geographic magazine, to which Father was a longtime subscriber and I an avid reader, ever bothered to scrutinize our minute corner of Southern California instead of the barrel-stave makers of Bohemia, the herdsmen of the Kenyan plateau or the coming-of-age rites of the Trobriand islanders, they would have found a society no less rich in its intimate history and in its complex rituals.

The magazine’s account would have been picturesque, even exotic. It would have told the story of our heritage. It would have described the Arroyo Seco, the dry gulch with the meandering stream where Jim and I roamed like free creatures out of time, oblivious to the passage of Spaniards and Mexicans and to the eradication of the native peoples before them.

For in the mid-sixteenth century, the Spanish colonial authorities had turned their attention northward. Cortez and Coronado, the conquistadores who had vanquished the mighty Aztec empire, dispatched scouting parties in search of the fabulously wealthy Seven Cities of Gold of Cibola, thought to be located on the shores of the Gulf of California. The Spanish not only found no cities, but no gold, and a century later decided to settle what they called Alta California. The Arroyo Seco, the limit of Jim’s and my known universe, lay