“No, really, I do,” he said, sitting up, checking his hair in the mirror across from the bed, smoothing an errant piece with his palm, lighting a cigarette. “I really do. I think I love her, my little Élodie.”
Oh, please. “You think so?” I said. Pascal handed me a cigarette and, ever so gallantly, lit it.
“Yes. I mean, maybe. I mean, maybe what we’re doing is wrong.”
Spare me the postejaculatory self-flagellation. “Well, it’s only wrong if you think it’s wrong.” It’s only fun until someone loses an eye. “It all depends on your moral compass.”
Pascal absently fondled my breasts. “My moral compass? What’s that?”
Bonehead. “Never mind,” I said. “Can we talk about this when we’re dressed?”
“Sure.”
Love? Who did Pascal think he was kidding? He was like me, like every other war-besotted journalist. An unapologetic hedonist. An adrenaline addict, hooked on fresh blood and the high of survival, on the headlines, the deadlines and the steamy après deadlines. He was—we all were—stuck in a state of prolonged adolescence, justifying every puerile action under the clever guise of contributing to a noble cause.
We were newswhores. Journalists. Holy and just. Upholders of the word, disseminators of the image, incapable of loving any one thing or any one person more than the story, more than ourselves.
“Why do you want to cover wars?” Pascal asked me, now lying on his back, blowing smoke rings up to the ceiling.
“I want to make an impact in public policy,” I said. “I want to show the world how horrible war is, how it’s not necessary, how there must be better means to achieving political ends.”
The bullshit was choking me. It’s not that I didn’t want to make an impact on public policy or think war was horrible. It’s just that by saying so I was putting the chicken before the egg. My true impetus for wanting to cover wars was, at its core, selfish. War was exciting, and I despised being bored.
THE ELDEST OF FOUR GIRLS, I grew up in Potomac, Maryland, a leafy suburb outside Washington, D.C., where we moved from our small Adelphi, Maryland, apartment in 1971 when I was four years old. There were seven models of homes in our newly constructed subdivision, all variations on the same modernist theme, with siding and doors of different hues to distinguish one house from another. Our split-level four-bedroom (dark brown siding, red door) was neither the biggest nor the smallest of the lot. From the outside, it looked a lot like the house in The Brady Bunch.
My parents, loving, supportive and always well meaning, had both grown up in cities—my mother in the Bronx, my father in Kansas City—and they were convinced that children needed grass, space and clean air in order to thrive. I understood the sentiment, even appreciated the reasoning behind it, but I never accepted its truth. I wanted asphalt. Access to public transportation. A quick way out. People and things to look at. Instead I got grass, lots of grass, grass whose freshly cut blades always smelled to me more like boredom than promise.
My neighborhood public elementary school, in keeping with the times, was constructed in the shape of a flower, with each petal housing different grades. There were no internal walls, no rows of desks, and each morning we’d all gather on the floor in our different “pods” to sing “Joy to the World” (the Jeremiah-was-a-bullfrog! version, not the Christmas carol) and various peace-and-love ditties by Peter, Paul and Mary.
Afterwards, the teachers would set us loose in the hexagonal-shaped room, where colorful easels, called “centers,” were set up, each one describing an educational task that needed to be completed by the end of the week, such as “Draw your family” or “Write your autobiography” or “Find out which of these objects floats.” I’d take some crayons, draw my father, mother, three younger sisters and me with a rainbow and sun behind us. I’d whip off my life story, remembering to include the part my dad liked to tell about how I was born with an opposable thumb. (“An opposable thumb?” the teacher’s aide said. “There’s no such thing.”) Then, without placing a single object in the tub of water provided, I’d check off rubber duck, wood chip and ball, leaving metal washer, penny and rock blank, I’d answer a few questions about pioneers or jellyfish or whatever else we happened to be studying, and by the end of Monday, I’d be done.
In the earlier grades, I had kindly teachers who would take pity on me and on my friend Ellen, who finished all of her assignments by Monday, too. They’d drop us off in the fifth- or sixth-grade pods for an hour or two, where we’d learn about pi or long division and practice our cursive while our classmates added three apples to two pears and traced the dashed outlines of oversized letters with fat pencils. One day in second grade, Ellen and I decided to memorize fifty digits past the decimal point of pi. Just for kicks.
As I grew older, however, and as my teachers ran out of things for me to do, I had to learn to keep myself busy. Mostly, I’d wander off to the library, housed in an open rotunda in the center of the flower, but after plowing through all of Roald Dahl, all of the Little House on the Prairie and Pippi Longstocking books, all of Harriet the Spy and Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, Little Women and Black Beauty and The Phantom Tollbooth, all of Judy Blume and a large smattering of the Encyclopedia Brittanica, especially the sections on space and on my hero John Glenn, I’d pretty much depleted that source of entertainment, too.
After school, while my mother was upstairs watching TV or struggling with dinner, banging a box of frozen peas against the Formica counter, while my father, like all the other doctor/lawyer daddies in Potomac, was making his way home from his law firm in D.C., I would listen to my Free to Be You and Me album in the family room and fantasize about a life where I’d “run off to see the world” like Princess Atlanta, or perhaps cross prairies in my covered wagon into uncharted and dangerous territory, like Laura Ingalls Wilder. A life where I’d chance upon giant peaches and ride horses into the sunset, where I’d sport gravity-defying braids and be mischievous and sassy and witty, where I’d circle the earth in my spaceship, solve lots of mysteries, save unfortunate people from doom and grope lots of boys in darkened closets. A life where I wouldn’t have to grow up and drive car pools and wear housecoats and cook meat loaf and watch The Days of Our Lives every day to keep up with the story.
Being a girl in the suburbs in the seventies was a tricky business. The mixed signals were everywhere. On the one hand, all the mothers I knew, all of my potential role models, were stay-at-home moms. On the other hand, we had The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The choice, to my young eyes, seemed obvious. Mary’s life kicked my mother’s life’s butt.
My mom, who’d conducted at Carnegie Hall at the age of sixteen, who in high school was a virtuoso on the cello and on the piano, had wanted to become a doctor. But her father, himself a doctor for the Veterans Administration, told Mom he could not spend what precious little money he had on educating a daughter in the ways of medicine. So she got her master’s in education, taught in an elementary school for a year, got pregnant with me, and that was it for her career. She claims she does not regret this, but I was there, and I don’t buy it.
But if the signals on the home front were confusing, the signals at school were often more so. In my large public high school, the kind of high school that prided itself on sending its football team to the state championship every year but employed a guidance counselor who had to look up Harvard in the Barron’s guide when I told him I wanted to go there, it might as well have been 1955 instead of the early eighties. To fit in, to be popular and have boyfriends and invitations to keg parties and access to the higher echelons of suburban teenage power, a girl needed to be a pretty, thin, curvaceous, blond cheerleader. While she didn’t necessarily have to be dumb, she could not be smart. She had to wear makeup, lots of it, and constantly talk about her diet. She could aspire to a life as a small business owner (T-shirts, wedding invitations, Lucite napkin holders), or perhaps a dietitian, but
that was only before she’d have the kids and settle down in her new Potomac house with her doctor or lawyer husband and her mink stole in the walk-in closet.
In the throes of adolescence, all I cared about was fitting in. I didn’t want to spend every weekend alone, babysitting and bored. I didn’t want to play Dungeons and Dragons with the pimply kids in my gifted classes. I wanted to get invited to the keg parties and kiss boys. I wanted to be normal. It became clear that I’d have to lead a double life, to hide my inner Pippi Longstocking under a lacquered Barbie mask. Since curvaceous, tall and blond were out of the question, I became a cheerleader to compensate. I bought eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara, lipstick and blush and learned how to apply them every morning before school. On the day report cards were handed out, I’d hide my A’s and admit only to C’s.
I became so adept at fitting in that I was voted homecoming queen for Christ’s sake. But all the acting and hiding and pretending took their toll. I got stoned a lot, wrote bad teenage poems about plastic people who sold their souls to various devils, which I kept hidden behind my bookcase so no one would ever find them. I read Sylvia Plath, flirted with the idea of suicide. I tried to figure out whether I was crazy or whether everyone else around me was crazy, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I threw violent tantrums, once kicking an enormous hole in the wall of my bedroom. I started cheating on my jocky boyfriends, having secret, midnight trysts in my bedroom with the boy down the street, a slight, delicate-featured kid barely taller than me, a brilliant and wacky and tender boy who made me feel like I was flying but who was such an outcast in the social hierarchy that we’d ignore each other the next day in the school hallways.
Toward the end of my junior year, I sat down with my parents and told them I had to get out of Potomac. In fact, I wanted to get as far away from Potomac as I possibly could. My father had taken me on a business trip to Japan once, and I asked him if he knew anyone there, a client or even a friend of a client, who might have an extra room in their home for me. Within a week, he found one. You have to love the kind of father who finds you a free room in Tokyo and then transfers all of his frequent flyer points to you to pay for a plane ticket he could otherwise ill afford, simply because you sat him down in the kitchen one night and told him you were so fucking bored that if you had to spend one more summer hanging out at the neighborhood pool twirling your lifeguard whistle around your finger, you would probably kill yourself.
That summer in Japan when I was seventeen changed my life. Since my host, Mrs. Nakamura, had to shuttle back and forth between the hotel she owned in Utsunomiya and her apartment in Tokyo, since her teenage daughter spent the entire summer locked in her room studying for her college entrance exams, I luckily had a lot of time on my own. Supporting myself with money earned teaching dance to Japanese students and English to Japanese businessmen, I spent my days exploring the crowded, neon-lit streets of Tokyo, blissfully alone, and my nights with new friends, drinking, dancing to Duran Duran and making out in the bars of Roppongi. I thrived there in Japan, reveled in the daily nuisances, took enormous pride in my own self-sufficiency. Before long, I felt my divided inner and outer selves fusing slowly back together, becoming whole once again.
Anything and everything now seemed possible.
And it was. On my way back to Potomac, I had an affair with a young movie actor on a beach in Hawaii, who later that fall invited me up to New York during a press junket for his new film. I wrote an article about my Japan trip on spec for Seventeen and got it published, which then turned into a gig writing book reviews. I applied early to Harvard and got in. I auditioned for a film and got a small part. I cut all my hair off and fell in love—really in love—with Gabe, a well-read, semi-outcast, punk-rock drummer whose hand I proudly held while walking through the judgmental hallways of our high school. After seventeen years of feeling like a fish out of suburban water, I’d finally found the ocean.
Why war? Please. Why not war?
I CIRCLED PASCAL’s hairless chest with my finger. “What about you, why do you want to cover wars?” I asked him.
“Same as you,” he said, “you know, to make an impact on public policy . . .” He blew out three more smoke rings, a floating ellipsis he’d fill in later. Or not.
From there we moved on to the usual. Where did you grow up? Any brothers or sisters? What did you study in school? The kind of things people usually ask each other fully clothed, but I’d lived amongst the French long enough now to have embraced their ethos: fuck first, ask questions later. “What does your mom do?” I said, always curious about mothers.
Pascal smiled proudly, his eyes staring beyond me. “She was a mountain climber. I used to climb with her all the time.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the glass ashtray by the bedside.
Of course she climbed mountains. Now I got it. I was no pouty-lipped, long-legged, miniskirted stunner like his girlfriend, but I reminded him of his adventurous mère. How Oedipal. “And now what does she do?” I handed him my cigarette to extinguish.
“Nothing. She’s dead. Fell off a mountain.” He whistled and made a falling motion with his hand, slamming it down on the bed for emphasis. “Just fell off.” He was trying to be blasé about it all, hardened, but his blurring eyes spoke otherwise.
“Wow. I’m sorry. I had no idea,” I said. Then, after an awkward pause, I added, “I imagine you don’t do much climbing anymore.”
“Au contraire!” he exclaimed, a little too loudly, a little too pertly. His eyes dried up and a devilish grin spread across his face. “I go all the time. Why wouldn’t I? We can’t live in the past, you know. I was just climbing two weeks ago.” I was about to say something like “Huh?” but then Pascal started to cackle. Like a hyena. “That’s funny, Deborah, huh? That I still climb?” He was shaking my shoulders now, trying to get me to laugh. I felt my neck whipping back and forth. “Funny. Ha ha ha. Don’t you think it’s funny?” His eyes looked possessed, psychotic. The giggling grew more manic. He sprang out of bed, howling and searching the floor for his clothing. Bending over, he thrust one leg in his jeans, then the other, too impatient to bother with the underwear.
“Stop it, Pascal!” I yelled. “You’re freaking me out. It’s not funny.”
When I admitted to Chip that I was going to Afghanistan with Pascal the day before my trip, he’d laughed and said, “I wish you luck. He’s insane.” Since most war photographers are slightly off-kilter, the statement didn’t alarm me. I figured it was jealousy speaking, not anything to be concerned with. Besides, I always thought that if I had to be stuck on a desert isle—or a war-torn mountain—with only one person, I’d take insane over dull any day.
But now I was starting to wonder.
Pascal glanced over his shoulder at me, his eyes frozen, empty, like ice. The tempest had run its course. He pulled his pants over his hips and turned to face me. Slowly, deliberately, and ever so confidently, he zipped up his jeans. Daring me, once again, to stare. To be hypnotized by the power of his perfectly chiseled da Vinci–man symmetry. “S’il te plaît, Deborah,” he said, his muscles finally relaxing. “Je plaisantais”—“Please, Deborah. I was just kidding around.” He started to laugh again, this time jovially, even lovingly. He walked over and kissed the top of my head. Then he grabbed a towel from the bathroom, wrapped it around me, and escorted me to the bathroom. “Take a shower,” he said, leading me toward the tub. “And get some sleep. I’ll be back in two hours or so.”
“Where are you going?” I said. The towel came unhitched in front and fell to my ankles. I bent down to pick it up, suddenly embarrassed by my nudity, and wrapped it snugly around me once more.
Pascal said he was going to meet with Abdul Haq to discuss our trip. He said it would be better if he went alone, without me. When I started to protest, said that I should be there to represent myself, he smiled, cupped my face and said, “Deborah, you really do have a lot to learn
.” He said Muslims are peculiar about women. That we’d have a better chance of hitching a ride inside if he just told Haq that a “friend” would be coming, too, without revealing my gender. “Trust me,” he said. “This is the way things are done around here.”
Trust me. If any phrase in any language gives me pause, makes me suspect the exact opposite, it is this one. Why start a sentence with it, if not to point out the danger of believing whatever harebrained notion follows?
Then again, who was I to argue? This would be Pascal’s third trip inside Afghanistan. I’d never been to a real war before.
THE SNOW HAS STOPPED and the sky has begun to lighten by the time the mujahideen decide to abandon our broken-down truck. We have not slept or eaten for the past twenty-four hours. Through the mesh screen covering my eyes, I can make out the jagged outline of a vast mountain range in the distance dividing earth from blue air, with only the tops of the snowy peaks illuminated by the rising sun, like electric whipped cream. Between us and the mountains lies an enormous, flat, snow-covered expanse, as yet untrod. “We walk,” Hashim says, marching in place, pointing across the pristine valley to the mountains. I have no way of judging whether the mountains are near or far, an hour’s walk or a day’s. The only other mountains I’ve ever seen had chairlifts. And buses to take me to them. “Go there,” he says. “To mountains. Careful mines . . .” He points to the field and makes his hands explode. “Boom,” he says. Then, pointing above us, he says, “Planes . . .” Like a kid, he flies his hand through the air and makes a vroom-like noise between his lips. “Soviet planes. Danger.”
The soldiers start divvying up the supplies, strapping random packages onto their backs, hiding their weapons under the thin brown wool blankets they wear over their shoulders both as extra layers of warmth and as portable prayer mats. Hashim removes my backpack from the truck bed and places it on his shoulders. I thank him for the gesture, glad not to have to carry it for the next few hours (days, months?) of hiking, but then Hashim lifts up the edge of my burka to grab for my camera bag, too. “No, no, it’s okay,” I say, pulling it back. “It’s not too heavy.” I may be inexperienced in the ways of war, but I’m savvy enough to know that a photojournalist, like a soldier, should avoid being separated from her weapons.
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