In Search of a Hero
I first saw his picture in a monthly journal. It was not one of those glossy magazines that tells of the latest hairstyle of David Beckham, but one of those distinguished journals that can be found in the medical section of a library. The picture was printed alongside an interview with the man of the day, a fifty-something year old scientist and professor of public health, who had saved many lives by struggling to eradicate existing diseases and discovering the causes of new ones. This man, by living for many years in difficult conditions in god-forsaken parts of the world and knowingly and repeatedly risking his own life, helped make a difference to millions – many of them yet to be born.
My eyes scanned the article, unable to absorb the details. I was fixated on a black and white fuzzy picture. It was him, thirty years back. A slender figure, a shy smile, an expression that said “I can help change the world”. I shuddered when I realized in the hind sighted spectrum that thirty years gave me, he had.
I sat there in the library, staring at the picture of this young man. Was there a way I could talk to him about his inspirational life’s story? His was the kind of life that many people wish they had lived.
In my naïve debut-writer’s determination, I’ve decided that I would find him even if I had to track him down in deepest, darkest Africa, where he could be researching another mysterious, exotic virus. Then I would ask him to share his life story, not just with the readers of a medical journal, but with the rest of us.
I had no doubt that someone like him, who had travelled the world seven times over and battled against humanity’s oldest enemies, would embrace the opportunity to pass a message into the future – into the eager hands of a new generation thirsty for leadership; desperate for idols who are not involved in corruption scandals and embarrassing extramarital affairs. A painfully cynical, thick-skinned generation that has seen it all. My generation.
I discovered that he was scheduled to talk at the university of a nearby town in a few weeks’ time. Of course I would go and see him there.
Scrambling with dozens of others into the lecture hall, I found a seat in the back and listened to him speak. In a low, calm voice, he spoke of places where different laws ruled and survival depended not only on strength, but also on pure luck and on the benevolence of others; of help coming from a million light years away.
This was exactly what I imagined he would say. His voice was empty of any emotion; probably buried deep in order to see the things he had – and not weep.
I felt my heart beating, my palms sweating. What was happening to me? Was I falling for a man I didn’t even know, someone twice my age? No, I reasoned. I was falling for an idea, for an ideal of someone who has walked the walk.
When I approached him at the end of the lecture, he seemed distracted. He patiently answered the questions of the students who queued to talk to him, and smiled kindly at a young woman with flushed cheeks who was struggling to form a coherent sentence.
“Thank you for your lecture,” I said. “I’d like to ask you a few questions, would that be possible? It’s for a writing project I’m working on.”
He nodded and wrote down his email address on a piece of paper, which I stuffed into my bag. On the way to the station the sidewalk glided beneath my feet like an electronic walkway at an international airport.
“There he is,” I remember thinking. “Not just a faded figure in an old picture. Not a character in a history book. He is real.”
A couple of days went by before I gathered the courage to type a short message that hovered on my glowing screen at four in the morning.
“Dear Professor,” I wrote, and paused for a few moments. What was it that I wanted to say?
“I want to express my deep appreciation of your achievements…”
Delete. Delete. Delete. I am merely a writer, a juggler of words. Why should he care about my appreciation?
I wrote a short, polite message. I wrote that his life was an inspiration, and could I please write about it – so others could become as inspired as me.
He wrote back the next morning. A modest man, he replied that he was humbled. He simply did what he could under the circumstances but it was others who were the real heroes, not him.
How could I make him understand that we need stories like his? Louis Aragon’s words rang in my ears like the aftermath of an explosion, sung in the honey-and-cigarettes coated voice of Georges Brassens, real and unreal at the same time.
“Life resembles those soldiers without weapons, who were equipped for another fate. What good does it do them to wake up in the morning, them, whom they find in the evening disarmed, uncertain,” chanted Brassens, and all I could think of was the need for someone to shine the light in front of those who stumble blindly in the dark.
I wrote again, using my best arguments. I wanted to hear more about the past, his past that had no doubt changed the future of many.
“No one person can be everywhere and make everything better for everyone,” I wrote. “But if one can inspire others to do more, to make a small difference, then they’ve performed a miracle – like an eye-surgeon who removes the cataract from an eye that hasn’t seen in years.”
This time it took him a while to reply. Did I cross a line?
But he did reply, a few days later, with a short, polite message.
“I have to think about it,” he wrote. “Give me more time.”
What does ‘more time’ mean? By the time we learn to live, it is too late anyway, sang Brassens into the night, as words appeared before my eyes on the glowing screen.
“Please,” I wrote, “Others need to hear about you to believe that heroes have not gone the way of dinosaurs and dodo birds.”
He didn’t reply for ten days. And then I wrote again, in the middle of a night when I couldn’t sleep because the crickets were rubbing the bases of their front wings as though if they didn’t sing their song that night they would never sing again. This feeling resonated in my heart. It was a selfish desire – the need to sing this song of praise; praise for things I wish I could do; things I hoped others would go on doing, even if he would one day do them no longer.
Just like the crickets that live to sing fifty nights and then perish, there are words that need to be written before they remain forever still; hanging for eternity in the same vast space of nothingness that absorbs unfulfilled promises and regrets.
And then I saw him again. Perhaps it was fate that had stuck its long, crooked finger in the pie.
It was at a conference that I covered for the local paper. I was pleasantly surprised to learn he would be talking there, and I nervously waited for his session, although I had not come for it. I sat on one of the uncomfortable seats, awaiting his lecture. And he arrived early – a man who is always prepared, a man who does not like to be surprised. When he saw me sitting there – one of the few who arrived on time, he walked right up to me, something unsettling in his gaze.
“My life is my own,” he said to me, his dark eyes glaring with authority like an iron shield against me. Against someone who wanted a hero to admire, a flag to wave in front of millions of bored, glazed eyes reading ghost-written celebrity biographies.
I didn’t know what to say to the distinguished professor, for he was right, his life was his own. And so I didn’t say a thing. I knew – I had messed up. It was beyond repair. I knew I had to let go. And so I did. I turned around and left – my heart heavy with the realization that if even our heroes don’t believe in us, perhaps we are a doomed generation.
Daniela I. Norris is a former diplomat, turned writer. She has lived, worked and published short stories, essays and articles in Angola, Peru, Israel, Canada, France and Switzerland. The Year Spring Turned into Winter, a first collection of short stories, was out in 2008. Crossing Qalandiya: Exchanges Across the Israeli-Palestinian Divide, co-authored with Shireen Anabtawi, was published in May 2010 in the UK by Reportage Press. Daniela currently resides near Geneva, and is working on a series of political thrillers. For more information about Daniela’s work: danielanorris.com and genevawritersgroup.org.
