Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [184]
I understand that not everybody who has money is bad. Not all vets are rip-off merchants. Of course not. Only why do we have packs of abandoned pedigree dogs sniffing around our gates?
It is evening once again. I turn the key in the door and van Gogh hurtles to greet me from wherever he is, every time. No matter how his stomach may be hurting, no matter how soundly he might have been sleeping, no matter what it was he was eating. He is a radiant perpetual motion machine of love. Everyone may abandon you, everybody may take umbrage against you, but a dog will never cease to love you.
I take him, I lead him to the car, I drive him over the road. I leap alongside him to get him to jump about with the other dogs in the square. I show him how he ought to play with them. I run the obstacle course with him to help him overcome his fear, and I take him over to other men. I take their hands and stroke van Gogh’s ears with them, and try to persuade him they are not dangerous.
WHAT YOU SEE AT THE END OF THE WORLD
June 2006
I was recently in Australia at the annual Sydney Writers’ Festival and couldn’t resist a little tourism. Having failed to resist it, I now can’t keep quiet about what I saw. The following are just the jottings of a tourist.
I have never seen a chapel or a naval base like these, although I have seen plenty of both. I had been told I must see a really curious place of worship, only it was in a naval base. Admittedly, it was an old Australian base, but still … So there I was at the checkpoint with my knees knocking, long conditioned to the knowledge that checkpoints are bad news. You don’t get through them, or, if you do, only under guard.
In the goldfish bowl sat a cheery, suntanned officer who glanced casually at our passports and did not stick a rifle in our backs and tell us to get out. He was delighted that somebody was interested in visiting his base. “Have you come to see the chapel?” he asked. “Do you know how to get to it? You want to drive there? Of course. No probs.”
He groped somewhere behind him and let us through. A recently democratised Soviet citizen’s brain had difficulty coping with such free and easy behaviour: how could we be admitted to a naval base without having the car inspected, without even a look in the boot? What if it was packed with explosives? You even get checked nowadays if you want to drive into the Luzhniki Sports Complex in Moscow, just to relax and smell the flowers. This Australian officer, so woefully lacking in vigilance, continued whistling to himself, loafing in his chair, his body language totally at variance with my expectations.
At last we reached the chapel. Picture it: Australia is at the end of the world, you can’t go any further, and this naval base is right at the end of the end of the world, on a stunning, high promontory jutting out into the Pacific Ocean. It hovers above it. Our chapel was at the very end of this end of the end. When you enter you are suspended above the ocean, and moreover the chapel’s far wall, behind the altar, is made of glass. When you look at the altar it is like praying to the expanse of the ocean and the lofty, amazingly blue sky above the sea. Your prayer is to that great Ocean of Peace to protect and preserve you. A chapel in a naval base is built not for open-mouthed tourists, of course, but for those putting out to sea, and sometimes never returning.
This is a chapel which discriminates between faiths no more than the waves, which are wholly indifferent to the religious affiliation of those they swallow. Red-headed, fair-haired, curly-haired, hook-nosed, the Pacific engulfs them all impartially.
No doubt the chapel has a nominal affiliation, and I can probably guess which, but as you stand before the altar looking out to the end of the world, this place feels pagan. All those ingenious interventions placed between man and nature, this sect, that cross or another, or no cross at all, dissolve