UNTIL
The vast fields of Russia make islands of the villages. Yet, the long
roads you travel to reach them lead you to find a remarkable way of life.
In our journeys across Russia, we've never had a desire to compare it as
being worse or better than other countries. We've simply gone along
each day gathering incidents as naturally as any good Russian plopped in the
woods picks mushrooms. We have shared these stories out of the feeling
that our world has been held hostage too long to the worst, even when it is
good that holds all the meaning. It is neither unrealistic nor
idealistic to choose to give a voice and a face to the good in our world.
It is what makes us human, as opposed to being trees. We cannot truly
know one another " 'til we have faces" as C.S.Lewis put it.
It was like the two people walking down the road. You
first needed to come close enough to recognize the object before you as a
person and be able to see their face to start to feel something. If
you got close enough to talk to one another, there was a chance of touching
each other's hearts and "recognizing" each other. It had happened
repeatedly to us, first with Masud, and then with Andrei and Katya; with
Pyoter Grigorovich, and the mufti in the Caucasus. As a prisoner of
war it had happened to Helmut Eishorn. And it was what people felt
after seeing a series of short films we made called This Too is America.
It was a project conceived of as a way to share views of America too rarely
seen. We were given film and computer equipment by Mary Lou Crockett,
a remarkable woman and considerable philanthropist from California, whose
foresight was ahead of ours. We were then given a laptop computer by
Brewster Academy that would enable us to play the films wherever we went.
We played them in classrooms and people's homes, at the market and on street
corners to anyone interested. That is, we played them to strangers as
easily as to friends--and with the same result: delight. After a
number of showings, Nikolai surprised me when he turned to me one day and
said, "The best kept secret in the world is the true spirit of America."
Even when you tried to share "the secret," however, it was not always easy.
It had taken years for Masud and me to come to see one
another--and even longer for him to see America. What made that
finally possible was a simple photo album. The album was a present for
Nikolai from a man he had never met. It was not even an album, per se,
but a box of some two hundred photographs, journeys across America, done
over a forty-year period by a man named Stephen Gottschalk. Stephen
was not a professional photographer. He simply lived with a camera in
his hand for the joy of it, and out of a deep love for people and his world.
His work was not only striking, it was a wholly unapologetic view of the
good in our world found in some of the most unlikely places. Where
someone else might merely have seen an old woman, he shot a close-up of her
pink crocheted vest, its sheer vibrancy demanding your attention more than
her tattered dress or wrinkled elbow.
Instead of the taut muscular bodies of runners in the Boston
Marathon, he chose to capture a boy waving to the crowd from a speeding
wheelchair pushed by his father. The fresh, light-filled look on the
son's face has gripped the attention of a boy in the crowd at the edge of
the picture who has not released his hands from his last clap. He is
staring intently at this smiling boy flying along so very grateful for life.
There was an exquisite close-up of the pensive face of an
elderly black man named Mac. It was followed by a night-lit shot of
the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. There was another of three young
black girls, undoubtedly sisters, all dressed in identical bright red
dresses standing at the end of the reflecting pool of the Washington Mall.
The Washington Monument is rising dramatically over their heads while bowing
down to their feet in the water--as the girls stare happily at their own
beautiful reflections.
There was one photograph of a Vietnam War protest in
Berkeley, California followed by one of a boy in a straw hat looking like an
innocent Huckleberry Finn. There was a tailor bent over a sewing
machine, a catcher over home plate, and an elderly woman over a yard
sale table, staring at something that has brought back a fond memory.
Together, they made a startling picture of life in America.
Yet to Nikolai, what made the gift so meaningful was that it was something
so personal from someone he did not know who had reached out his hand in
friendship through what he loved most: the beauty and holiness of life.It
was the closest thing to samizdate work Nikolai had seen outside the works
of Russian authors and artists. The term became a part of Western
vocabulary in the 1970s and 80s, coming from the two Russian words, sam
(self) and izda`vat (to publish). Rather than being looked down on as
of lesser quality, or as second-rate, in Russia, samizdate was the most
respected and trusted work of all. It made its way by its own worth to
all corners of Russia, from hand to hand, and from kitchen table to kitchen
table; out from under the noses of the Moscow Party chiefs to the most
remote regions--not through publicity, but in defiance of it. As a result,
Nikolai wholeheartedly embraced Stephen's work and showed it at every
opportunity.
The day he showed the album to Masud, he asked me to wait in
the kitchen while they went into the family room. After two hours they
emerged. I don't remember now what Masud said to me. I only
remember the look on his face. He stared intently at me--as if he was
trying to see something else in my face that he had not seen before. I
finally said something to him that I had wanted to say for a long time:
"That's my America, Masud."
It was a turning point, as definite as drawing a line
in the sand. America had been given a face which Masud, for the first time,
had not reacted against, but responded to.
The peoples of the world are enormously different--even as members of the
same family can be. We have all seen how difficult it is to live with
the differences and have paid an enormous price for the strife they have
caused.
Unquestionably, " 'til we have faces" the differences will
continue to mask what there is to be seen. Thus, moments of discovery
like Masud's, are much to be desired when the mask is ripped off and we see
something more in each other.
Such moments act like yeast leavening bread, working changes
deep in the heart. You suddenly feel something you didn't feel before.
It is but the first feeling, and one that leads to both higher and deeper
thoughts.
If for now there are differences, let there be differences.
But let there be a discovery of something more until we are no longer
"foreigners nor strangers". We have written, as only we can, from our
own experience. It is truly a samizdate work: a discovery of the
good in mankind that cannot be promoted--but only honestly shared.
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