Posted Saturday night, January 9, 2021.
Dutch journalist Robert Dulmers kneeling by the grave of Bosnian Deputy Prime Minister Hakija Turajlić, who was murdered by Serbian gunmen, January 8, 1993. Photo by Christian Marechal, taken in the winter of 1993 at the Ali Pasha mosque, in Sarajevo. Via Wikimedia Commons.
In the waning days of the Cold War, temporarily retired part-time British spy Jerry Westerby, the honorable schoolboy of John le Carré’s novel “The Honorable Schoolboy”, affectionately nicknamed because of his boyish good looks and good nature, whose cover had been as a journalist, has made a private retreat to a village in Tuscany, where he’s “working” on a book, much to the consternation of a prying neighbor, the village postmistress. Another neighbor, Signora Sanders, who may have been Westerby’s father’s mistress, tries to satisfy the postmistress’ curiosity. It’s not clear she knows the schoolboy had been a spy, only that he worked for newspapers:
But what was he? What had he done with his youth? A journalist, said the Sanders, and gave what she knew of the family background. The father, a flamboyant figure, fair-haired like the son, she had met him again not long before his death...Like the son, he was never at peace: women and houses, changing them all the time; always roaring at someone, if not at his son then at someone across the street. The postmistress pressed harder. But in his own right---was the schoolboy distinguished in his own right? Well, he had certainly worked for some distinguished newspapers, put it that way, said the Sanders, her smile mysteriously broadening.
“It is not the English habit to accord distinction to journalists,” she explained…
But the postmistress needed more, far more. His writing, his book, what was that all about? So long! So much thrown away! Basketsful, the rubbish carter had told her...
Beth Sanders understood the intensity of isolated people, and knew that in barren places their intelligence must fix on tiny matters...Well, he certainly had travelled incessantly, she said…Today all journalists were travellers of course---breakfast in London, lunch in Rome, dinner in Delhi---but Signor Westerby had been exceptional even by that standard. So perhaps it was a travel book, she ventured.
But why had he traveled, the postmistress insisted, for whom no journey was without a goal; why?
For the wars, the Sanders replied patiently; for wars, pestilence, and famine. “What else has a journalist to do these days, after all, but report life’s miseries?”
---from “The Honorable Schoolboy” by John le Carré.
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