The Distance Between Us Read Online Free PDF Page A

City is not uncommon; he takes it in stride. Caddie’s colleagues will not so easily overlook it.
    “Your first time?” the driver asks with misplaced confidence. She guesses from his accent that he is from eastern Europe, and two weeks ago she would have engaged him in conversation, asked where he was born and how he finds it here, what he likes and what he doesn’t, how many children and grandchildren he has and what they do, because you never know where a good story might begin.
    Now, though, she wants to eavesdrop on her own thoughts. She shakes her head. “Nope.” Leans back and closes her eyes. The driver, giving up—what a shame, his passenger is lousy for conversation—turns up the radio and begins to hum along.
    Caddie mentally lists the photojournalists she’s known who died. Samuel Harris, a freelance television cameraman she had drinks with in a Vienna bar: hacked to death by a crazed mob in Jo’burg. Yuri, on assignment for Russian TV, who didn’t talk much but was always smiling: reduced to crumbs by a roadside bomb in Lebanon. Reuters photographer Sandra Hutchison, who shared a breakfast with Caddie in Cairo: taken down by crossfire in Sierra Leone.
    Caddie has refused to allow herself to picture these deaths. She walked away each time the topic came up in a group of reporters, hating the sentimentality in the voices of some of her colleagues, the undercurrent of greedy thrill in others. Part of a journalist’s job is to stay detached, no matter how severe the tragedy or how close it lands. Reflect the story; don’t absorb it,because if you allow yourself to feel the full force of sorrows and horrors, you will succumb to them—that much Caddie knows. The desperate moments will at best numb her, and at worst cripple her, and she will be unable to collect the quotes or the color, do her job. The repercussions of random destruction or deliberate hostility often lead to the most profound moments in people’s lives. She has to be there fully to record that, and so, Caddie has learned to shut down a piece of herself. Disconnect, at least some.
    Besides, getting drawn in was dangerous; everyone knew that, everyone who lasted. Kevin Carter—the name, to Caddie, was like a warning signal. Nothing, not even the Big One he won for his shot of a vulture lurking next to a cadaverous Sudanese child, could rescue him from the opaque morass he sank into once he lost his detachment, once the clear spot inside him went muddy. The horrors he’d witnessed were bad enough—including that near-dead child dragging herself along the ground, who brought to mind his own daughter. Then came the shrill criticism he faced for not helping the kid to the feeding center, for being caught up in the composition of a great photo, for sticking to the role of one who records—his job, after all.
    A “Carter Moment” is how she’s thought of it since. When a journalist teeters between getting the story and getting into the story. Compassion serves a limited purpose, as Carter proved. Three months after taking home that Pulitzer, he hooked up a garden hose to the exhaust pipe and gassed himself inside his red pickup.
    Measured closeness and a dose of dulled feelings—that’s what she has had to learn. That gets her the interview and keeps her safe.
    Usually.
    She opens her eyes and shrugs to rid herself of the doubts that stick to her like a burr. They’re off the highway now, driving among the blond bricks of the city, following a finger of Jerusalem to its very palm. The driver drops her at the corner of her sinewy street and she walks the rest of the way, a few steps behind a nun. Three Hasidim hovering around a newsstand glance her way as she passes. A young Israeli in leather sandals spits out the shells of sunflower seeds as he hums a tune she recognizes, “At Khaki li Ve’echzor,” about a fallen soldier. Someone’s wash hangs from a rope strung between buildings, dark clothes coupling with pale sheets.
    What a