By chance, my father and I were together when we heard the news. We had both just flown to Washington DC – he from Paris, I from Istanbul – to care for my grandmother, who¹d had a heart attack. Before the words “major earthquake in Haiti” came over the car radio, we were already under the impression that we were living through a serious family emergency. But after those words filtered through, the family emergency became far, far more serious.
My brother Mischa and his wife Cristina have been living in Haiti for nearly three years. Cristina, an Italian lawyer, has been working for the Justice Section of MINUSTAH, the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti. My brother is a novelist and journalist. Their first child, Leo, was born ten months ago. At the time the quake struck, Cristina¹s father Bruno was visiting them in Port-au-Prince. I have a reservation on American Airlines to fly from Miami to Port-au-Prince on January 27; I too was planning to visit. A strange thing is that since moving to Turkey four years ago, I’ve been writing with increasingly hysterical alarm about the lethal admixture of corruption, shoddy construction and a major fault line in Istanbul. I got the city wrong, but I certainly wasn’t wrong about what the aftermath would look like.
My father and I were driving back from the hospital when the radio announcer said those four words. There was no news on any other station. My Turkish cell phone didn¹t work in Washington. “Call Mischa,” I said. My father dialled; no one answered. “Call again,” I said. I said it over and over, he did it over and over. I’m not sure how many times we dialed that number after that; probably several thousand. We didn’t grasp it fully, though, until we got home and checked the Internet.
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