twos, as a peasant would buy them. After I had gnawed on a piece of roast mutton and a slab of bread, I smoked one of the cigarettes while I waited for more business.
There was none. All the potential goat buyers had looked over our stock and gone somewhere else. Nobody came near us again. The goats drowsed and munched, the loudspeakers clattered over our heads.
There was still no news on the air, no mention of two American fugitives, but plenty of noise. Cora slept on-in spite of the blare. Once she mumbled something in her sleep, and put up her hand to push at th e yashmak that muffled her breathing.
It came away, exposing her face. I leaned over to replace it. She pushed it away again, muttering, still asleep although on the point of waking if I did it again. In our secluded corner it seemed safe to let her breathe freely as long as I was there and awake to cover her face if anyone came too close. I took up my stay-awake position, my hands locked around my knees, and sat there guarding her in a kind of half-doze, neither asleep nor awake, feeling a faint surprise at myself for being more concerned about her rest than my own, and thinking how strange it was that fate, or destiny, or inshallah or whatever it is that arranges those things, if they aren’t just sheer accident, should put the two of us down together in a Balkan marketplace with a bunch of smelly goats that had a better chance for freedom and survival than we who had stolen them and were driving them to exhaustion.
I first met Cora in Rome, although I saw her most often afterwards in Paris. Paris was her natural environment if one was ever created for a woman.
She was a phenomenon. A woman with brains, beauty, drive, a sure instinct for what constitutes news in the field of international relations, and the ability to write well about it does not crop up often. There are dozens of working news-hens with one or more of the attributes, because without at least one they couldn’t survive as reporters. Cora had everything.
She began to attract attention, first as a stringer for Allied Press and then as a regular, in the years just after the war. In the beginning we – meaning her competition in the European news gathering field – thought her success as a reporter stemmed mainly from her looks. She was so photogenic that cabinet ministers and important military figures enjoyed having their pictures taken with her, and didn’t mind handing out a few quotable items while the photographs were being snapped. The rest of us were inclined to write her off as a pretty flash-in-the-pan who would fade when her chin began to sag.
We were wrong, as we soon found out. She could write crisply and convincingly. She had a good reporter’s nose, she was quick to learn any language that was important to her job, and on top of her other accomplishments she had a studied, possibly synthetic, but generally effective personal charm, that she could turn on and off like a light. It was one reason I never liked her very much. She used her charm consciously, as a tool of her trade, stepping up the voltage when it was worthwhile, turning it off when it served no purpose. She never wasted it simply to be charming. But when she was after a story she could soap, wheedle, and coax co-operation out of a bronze statue or, an even more difficult job, a Party member. The rest of us, not having her advantages, had to work through conventional channels, setting up painstaking pipelines to tap available sources of information and hoping that no one else would cut in on our private systems, as Cora often did by turning her high-powered voltage on somebody who was being paid to supply one of her competitors with news. More than one reporter sitting tight on a story he had been building for weeks began to sweat when Cora was around. She was a very good newspaperwoman, and not too scrupulous.
So there were understandable feelings of mixed
There was none. All the potential goat buyers had looked over our stock and gone somewhere else. Nobody came near us again. The goats drowsed and munched, the loudspeakers clattered over our heads.
There was still no news on the air, no mention of two American fugitives, but plenty of noise. Cora slept on-in spite of the blare. Once she mumbled something in her sleep, and put up her hand to push at th e yashmak that muffled her breathing.
It came away, exposing her face. I leaned over to replace it. She pushed it away again, muttering, still asleep although on the point of waking if I did it again. In our secluded corner it seemed safe to let her breathe freely as long as I was there and awake to cover her face if anyone came too close. I took up my stay-awake position, my hands locked around my knees, and sat there guarding her in a kind of half-doze, neither asleep nor awake, feeling a faint surprise at myself for being more concerned about her rest than my own, and thinking how strange it was that fate, or destiny, or inshallah or whatever it is that arranges those things, if they aren’t just sheer accident, should put the two of us down together in a Balkan marketplace with a bunch of smelly goats that had a better chance for freedom and survival than we who had stolen them and were driving them to exhaustion.
I first met Cora in Rome, although I saw her most often afterwards in Paris. Paris was her natural environment if one was ever created for a woman.
She was a phenomenon. A woman with brains, beauty, drive, a sure instinct for what constitutes news in the field of international relations, and the ability to write well about it does not crop up often. There are dozens of working news-hens with one or more of the attributes, because without at least one they couldn’t survive as reporters. Cora had everything.
She began to attract attention, first as a stringer for Allied Press and then as a regular, in the years just after the war. In the beginning we – meaning her competition in the European news gathering field – thought her success as a reporter stemmed mainly from her looks. She was so photogenic that cabinet ministers and important military figures enjoyed having their pictures taken with her, and didn’t mind handing out a few quotable items while the photographs were being snapped. The rest of us were inclined to write her off as a pretty flash-in-the-pan who would fade when her chin began to sag.
We were wrong, as we soon found out. She could write crisply and convincingly. She had a good reporter’s nose, she was quick to learn any language that was important to her job, and on top of her other accomplishments she had a studied, possibly synthetic, but generally effective personal charm, that she could turn on and off like a light. It was one reason I never liked her very much. She used her charm consciously, as a tool of her trade, stepping up the voltage when it was worthwhile, turning it off when it served no purpose. She never wasted it simply to be charming. But when she was after a story she could soap, wheedle, and coax co-operation out of a bronze statue or, an even more difficult job, a Party member. The rest of us, not having her advantages, had to work through conventional channels, setting up painstaking pipelines to tap available sources of information and hoping that no one else would cut in on our private systems, as Cora often did by turning her high-powered voltage on somebody who was being paid to supply one of her competitors with news. More than one reporter sitting tight on a story he had been building for weeks began to sweat when Cora was around. She was a very good newspaperwoman, and not too scrupulous.
So there were understandable feelings of mixed
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