Victor Zorza Writes About Everyday Life in Third World : Mud Hut in Himalayas Replaced Kremlin for Noted Columnist

In the Himalayas, where the enormous sky and silent mountains know how to put a man in his place, a former Kremlinologist and Washington columnist lives in a mud-and-stone hut that clings to the side of a hill.

He draws his water from a well and cooks a breakfast of flat Indian bread over an open fire made from wood he has scrounged for himself. The villagers, at first suspicious of this strange foreigner, now tell him of their worries about the harvest and of problems with their wives. He writes it all down, then sends it out as a weekly column for the Times of London.

A decade ago, Victor Zorza was living in Washington and prowling through stacks of Soviet Bloc newspapers, always looking for clues that might help explain the Soviets to his Western readers. He lived comfortably, an odd duck of a columnist who didn’t go to briefings or Washington lunches, but who had an international reputation as an extraordinary analyst of Soviet policy.

In 1968 his column won the British equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for predicting the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yes, Zorza thought, he was making his contribution to the world.

Then in 1977, his 25-year-old daughter, Jane, died of melanoma, one of the most painful forms of cancer. Zorza and his wife, Rosemary, wrote a book about it, partly as a catharsis and partly to promote the kind of hospice in which their daughter died. But as they were finishing that book, “A Way to Die,” in 1979, Victor Zorza had a heart bypass operation. His doctors told him afterward he probably had a year to live.

“That was the final trigger,” he said. “I said to myself, ‘If that’s so, then this thing I’ve wanted to do all these years, I’m going to do it.’ ”

That thing was to write about “three-quarters of the world’s population,” the rural poor of the developing countries, in a different way than covering their lives after a mud slide, cyclone or other natural disaster.

“After all, that is not the truth about people’s lives,” Zorza, 60, said, talking by a crackling fire in a cold, run-down hotel a day’s bus ride and walk from his village.

He wanted routine family squabbles and political melodrama--proof that illiterate paupers are rich men when it comes to the complexities of emotion. He wandered all over India before settling in the Himalayas, in a village of 300 people whose power struggles center on the divide between the high-caste Brahmans and the Harijans, or untouchables. He insists on keeping the name of the village secret to protect the privacy of the people. They speak a Hindi hill dialect, so he works through an interpreter.

Zorza has lived in this village off and on since 1981, but he always takes long summer breaks in England with his wife. He has also spent time in other villages around India for different perspectives. At this writing, he has moved from his original village to a new one in another part of the Himalayas, but he says this may only be temporary. The original village is where he has done his best work and where his emotions run deepest. His columns about it have appeared in the Guardian, the Washington Post and most recently in the Times of London.

Zorza has gone from predicting the fall of Nikita Khrushchev to untangling the intrigue between the Brahmans and Harijans over the annual buffalo sacrifice. He has drawn on even greater investigative gifts to examine the jealousies between two brothers who share one wife and among four brothers who share three.

“The eldest brother can command any wife exclusively for as long as he wishes,” that particular column explained. “The other three brothers take turns with the two remaining wives, but no permanent attachments are formed. Tradition disapproves of anything that might split the family up into couples.”

He has surprised both himself and his doctors by not only surviving but thriving. “Apart from the separation from Rosemary,” he said, “I’ve never been happier in my life.”

But he is ready for the worst. “I’ve told my family that if I do die in the village, I don’t want any fuss,” Zorza said. “I don’t want them all to come rushing to India because what’s the point? And I think the village would be a good place to die. This is where I belong now.”

Zorza has always been a messianic man driven by the larger cause. For decades his Kremlinology column was his obsession, a vehicle for telling the West that the Russians didn’t have to be enemies. He worked seven days a week, far into the nights, certain that the future of the world depended on it. But in the last decade, he said, he has slowly become convinced that the East-West conflict is not as serious a threat to humanity as is the despair of the world’s poor.

His new mission is to establish “a new genre of journalism,” to convince the serious press that it should have reporters regularly covering the ordinary lives of the rural poor. After all, he said, that is how most of the people in the world live; it is Americans who are peculiar. He argues that if they understood these people on an emotional level, Westerners would not just respond periodically with guilt money and crocodile tears. Unless there is understanding, Zorza said, he is sure that there will be a slow disintegration toward social breakdown or a massive revolt of the world’s have-nots against the haves. “This cannot go on,” he said.

In the meantime, he has sacrificed seeing much of his son, Richard, a public defender in Boston, and living with his wife, who remains in their country house outside London. She developed breast cancer last year, and although Zorza went back to see her through the mastectomy, he returned to India a few months later.

He said he and Rosemary are not separated in the usual sense of the word, that they are still happy as “man and wife.” He said she accepts his decision to live in the village, although not as readily these days as she did at first. “The separation is weighing much more heavily on us than we thought it would,” he said. He is thinking of spending more time with her next year.

On one level, his story is that of the idealist who had the nerve or the need to give up everything. But in looking at his life closely, it is impossible not to see that a major theme over 60 years has been, simply, death. Zorza has run from it, fought with it, defied it and now, in his village, come to terms with it. Certainly he has thought more about it than most people.

He is a Polish Jew, the only one of his family to have survived the Holocaust. He almost died at 16 in a World War II bombing raid on the German-Russian border. He lied about being Jewish to save his life.

Then, in England, he masqueraded as a Roman Catholic for years after it was no longer necessary, always afraid in the back of his mind that if 6 million had died once, they might again.

He denied to himself for months that his daughter was really dying, remaining in Washington while she was in a hospital in London, facing it only after he confessed to her his own fears about death in the final days of her life. That changed him profoundly.

“Talking to her about life and death made a far more human person out of me,” he said.

That pushed him a little nearer to his village, adding a human dimension to something he had already considered in theory. Jane had always wanted him to write about the poor, particularly after a trip she took to India, which left her horrified by the misery she saw. But it was not until after his heart operation, when he was faced with his own death once again, that Zorza rejected the advice of his doctors and finally went off to the mountains to stare the inevitable in its face. There he conquered it, for now.

It happened one morning on his usual two-hour walk. He had left the hut, forgetting to take his daily medication to ease the constriction of his blood vessels. Until then, he had been certain the medication was responsible for his survival. It wasn’t until he got to the top of a peak, out of breath and exhausted, that he realized that he had not taken it. “I opened my eyes and I said, ‘That’s it! I’m out! I’m free! I’m clear!’ I was a new person, no longer needing to think about dying.”

Victor Zorza is a taut, compact man, with a perpetually furrowed brow and a face lined and tanned by the sun. He is almost bald, with a full, graying beard. On this afternoon he was encased against the chill in several thick sweaters and a heavy pair of hiking boots. He looked like he might be a serious trekker in town for a little rest and recovery. But the fact is, he is not a relaxing man to spend time with.

He has been described over the years as a perfectionist and an extremist, but a better word might be absolutist. Like many people devoted to a cause, he does not often step back and look at life with irony or much humor, preferring to see the world in more cataclysmic terms. But then, perhaps only such a disciplined believer could live the kind of life he does.

“It’s a very physically taxing existence,” he said. “I enjoy walking in the mountains, but I don’t enjoy the hardships of life. I don’t wear a hair shirt. But I do find it bearable. I don’t have reason to complain.”

He always gives 100% to whatever he is doing. In the case of this interview, that meant he talked nearly nonstop for several hours, in a soft English accent with an Eastern European lilt, making sure to drive his points home.

He came to this hotel because he is adamant about not having visitors at the village. He says an American college professor who had read his columns found his way there, uninvited, in 1983 and asked questions about the village tradition of polyandry, the illegal practice of two or more husbands for one wife. The villagers blamed him for the unexpected visitor, certain that the stranger was an official sent to arrest them. After the professor left, Zorza said, the villagers made life so uncomfortable for him that he had to leave for a while.

“They were never angry with me; they were angry with outsiders,” he said. “They will never tell a guest he’s unwelcome, but they make it very clear.”

Zorza returned to the village last October and spent the fall and winter working his way back into the people’s good graces. He says he can’t risk the appearance of another outsider. “It would destroy five years of work,” he said.

He begins his research after breakfast, taking a long walk through the dry, barren hills to the fields, where he meets up with the villagers as they’re taking their morning break.

“I sit around and chat,” Zorza said. His interpreter is an Indian free-lance journalist, Veenu Sandal, a woman in her 30s and a member of the family he lives with when he is in town.

“I used to ask questions, but I’ve learned that that is very counterproductive because your questions betray what you’re interested in,” Zorza said. “The villagers want to please, so they’ll tell you what they think you want to know. They are very, very intelligent. So you wait for them to tell you things that are on their minds. You hear from person A about person B, and about person B from person C, and you slowly build that up. In that respect it’s not unlike Kremlinology, because it really is putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.”

Growing Understanding

He goes home for lunch--usually rice, boiled cauliflower, carrots or cabbage and dal , an Indian lentil stew. He writes down the important points of the morning chat (he finds taking notes in front of the villagers too distracting for them) and then begins work on a column. “Sometimes I may work on a particular story for three months before it is ready for the telling,” he said. “At any one time I may have a dozen possible column topics in mind.”

Year by year in the village, he said, he understands a little bit more. “Some of the things I’m writing now are the very opposite of what I used to say before,” he said. “The people who in the past I regarded as goodies I’ve found are baddies, and vice versa.”

In the early years the villagers lied to him a lot, he said, usually by exaggerating their poverty in hopes of getting money from him. “By our terms, they are indeed very, very poor,” he said, “but not in Indian terms. Often the harvest doesn’t last through until the next season, but they borrow and they manage. They don’t go absolutely hungry.”

One thing missing from the columns is a sense of Zorza himself. Although they are written in the first person, his is a sterile, detached style, with one declarative sentence after another. Zorza says he does that deliberately to avoid imposing his Western judgments on the villagers. But it leaves a reader wondering how much Zorza himself has changed since he came to the village.

Ego, Intensity Intact

His old Washington friends would see that the considerable ego and intensity are still there. But Zorza says he has changed “into a person guided more by emotion and feeling for other human beings.”

“Like so many other do-gooders, I used to think that I just loved people and that my work was for the benefit of the people of the world,” he said. “But they were people in the abstract. The world was a sort of artificial construct. Now I know that it’s people in the flesh whom I live with and care for.” He looks back on his Washington life as “utter nonsense,” a time when “I didn’t see the world beyond my column, nor myself apart from it.”

It has become dark outside, with quiet streets and bright stars in the cold sky. Inside, the fire has finally warmed the room. Zorza is drinking tea and consuming most of a bar of Swiss milk chocolate, clearly content for the moment to be back in civilization, such as it is.

He has been in much better health in the village, but he still has been sick much of the time with diarrhea and stomach troubles. Those are the times, he says, “when I begin to doubt whether I really want to be doing this. Sometimes I get very tired, physically tired, and I ask myself, ‘Am I right in putting a higher value on a visionary ideal than on the happiness of my immediate family and myself?’ ”

There is a long pause. Finally, slowly, he says: “The answer to that won’t be known for several generations. You see, if what I’m doing is taken on by others, it will still take several generations to change people’s attitudes . . . but by going home I’d be giving up all this.” His soft voice begins rising. “No, there’s something still to be done,” he says, with conviction. “And it very badly needs to be done.”

Now he becomes impassioned: “And I’m not just talking about the abstract forces of history! I’m talking about human beings! And I know how they live!”

The next morning is quiet, warm and intoxicating. The sky is a deep blue, the kind only seen high in the mountains. Zorza is sunning himself on the hotel balcony. He already has said this morning that, yes, to die in the village would be fine. Now he is happily imagining his funeral.

The villagers would take his body to the banks of the river for cremation, he says, “and the drummer would drum, and his sons would dance and people would make funny remarks about this strange foreigner.”

He is warming to the subject. “But the best thing about it,” he says enthusiastically, “would be the obituaries. Because instead of concentrating on my achievements in Kremlinology, this would be a good enough story for them to talk about the village. And you know I’m a newspaperman first and last.” He seems a little disappointed that he won’t be around to write it.

“And they could not help examining my motives and reasons,” he says, “and maybe they would even publish some columns posthumously. And then, maybe, people will see that it’s worth doing.

“I think it would be the best death possible.”