Two Dutch doctors, a married couple working for Médecins Sans Frontières, do a clean amputation just above the knee of the mujahed, saving his life moments after we arrive—yes, by donkey—at their makeshift medical facility in Paghmon, a province in eastern Afghanistan. I wait outside with the other mujahideen, and when the doctors step out to tell us everything is okay, they take one look at me and start to laugh. “What the hell are you doing here by yourself?” the man asks.
“It’s a long story,” I say, and leave it at that. The doctors clean and bandage my hand and give me some medicine for the amoebas. And then, those two angels sent down from wherever angels are sent down from tell me they will be leaving for Peshawar by truck in a few hours, and wouldn’t I like to accompany them? “Yes,” I say. “Oh, yes.”
IT IS THREE DAYS and many miles later. The doctors drop me off at Robert’s house in their car, which was waiting for them at the border, and when I walk inside Steve is in the living room, drinking a beer and chatting with someone who looks eerily like conservative pundit P. J. O’Rourke. “Hi, Deborah!” says Steve. “Welcome back. Do you know P. J. O’Rourke?” Introductions are made—from afar, lest my fumes overwhelm them—niceties exchanged, but the whole scene feels surreal, like a hallucination. “What happened to your hand?” Steve asks, noticing the bandages.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I say. “Just a cut.” I don’t have the strength to tell the story right now—You see, a man was taking me to relieve myself and got his leg blown off . . . Actually, I can’t imagine a time I will ever be able to tell that story. Teetering just this side of sanity, I turn to P.J. “So,” I say, “what are you here to write about?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe traffic,” he says, with a roguish smile.
“Oh,” I say. “Traffic. That’s nice.” I am suddenly overwhelmed by the same feeling I used to get whenever I was tripping on acid and simultaneously trying to hold a conversation with anyone who wasn’t. I realize I have to escape. I excuse myself to go take a shower.
When I get up to my room, there’s a message scrawled on a piece of paper, in Robert’s handwriting, sitting on my bed. I pick it up and read it. Call Pascal, the note says. He’s back. Pearl Continental Hotel, Room 509. And Deb, don’t forget, he’s Satan.
I run downstairs and pick up the phone to dial. Pascal answers. “Oh, Deborah, my darling. How are you? How was your trip?”
Fine, honey, and yours? Did I mention that not a day went by in those icy mountains when I didn’t berate myself for ever trusting you? “That was some move you pulled,” I say, not answering his question. “Abdul Haq had never said he’d let me in with you, did he? I was never really slated to go, was I?” I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The bones are jutting out of my cheeks.
Pascal makes some lame excuses, says he was sure he told me 6 A.M., not 9 A.M., and maybe I just heard him wrong, transposed the number in my head. “Fuck you,” I say. There’s nothing else, at this point, I can say. But before I can politely hang up, Pascal starts grilling me about my trip.
“I heard you got inside. With the Shiites. Where were you? What did you photograph? Did you see any battles? Any dead people? Tell me, tell me what you saw.”
“What? Nervous I saw better stuff than you?” I say, knowing full well this is exactly why he’s interrogating me. “Well, you can rest easy. I saw shit.” I tell him about the nighttime mortar, about our endless reconnaissance trips, about the destroyed village I wasn’t allowed to photograph. I tell him about the rocket-propelled grenade launchers the mujahideen fired off into an empty hillside, about how I shot only a few pictures of the staged spectacle just to make them happy but then had to pretend to take an entire roll just so they would stop. I tell him about my donkey ride, about the doctors who got me out.
I do not tell Pascal about the exploding mine or the maimed soldier. I don’t want to give him the ammunition—to berate me for being a lousy photojournalist, to allow him to justify leaving me behind. In fact, so embarrassed am I by the nature of my injury and by the fact that I did not have the courage to shoot when I know I should have, when Photomagazine asks me to submit my Afghanistan diary for publication along with my photos, I will rewrite two of the entries before handing it in, blaming the piece of shrapnel in my hand on that first explosion, the one where the mujahideen laughed at my ash-covered face.
“What about you?” I say. “Get anything good?”
“Oh, Deborah, I saw the war. The real war!” These are the words that will forever ring in my ear whenever I think of Pascal: “J’ai vu la guerre, la vraie guerre!”
His voice starts to crescendo. He’s clearly enjoying himself. He tells me he was in Jalalabad. That there’d been a huge firefight while the Soviet troops were giving up their positions. That it was horrible. Horrible. That he took such great pictures. Amazing pictures. That the pictures were so good, he transported the film immediately to the airport in Islamabad to send it off with a passenger flying that very day to Paris. (So that’s how you get the pictures back.) That Stern was going to give him ten double pages. Paris Match wanted to give him six. He made a bundle, he says, and wouldn’t I like to go out and celebrate with him with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot at the American Club?
I’d rather rub broken glass into my corneas. “So nice of you to ask,” I say, “but it’s not going to work out tonight.” I tell him I just got back, that I’m really tired, that maybe we could have lunch tomorrow. But I have no intention of ever seeing Pascal again.
“C’est dommage,” he says. “I’m leaving tomorrow on the first flight to Karachi . . .” And you wanted to get laid one last time before heading back home? My heart bleeds for you, cowboy. “. . . I guess I’ll see you back in Paris, then.”
Not if I can help it. “Yeah, sure, back in Paris,” I say. I fret over running into him at future news events, photo exhibits, dinner parties. But my worrying is in vain. Less than a year after our trip to Afghanistan, Pascal will quit photojournalism, marry Élodie and start a family. And our paths will never cross again.
I hang up the phone and start searching for some soap and shampoo, realizing I’d left my backpack in the front hallway by the living room. I wave hi to P.J. and Steve again, and as I pass by the kitchen, I spot Martin, a British journalist who’d also gone inside with Abdul Haq’s men. He’s sitting at our large communal table, the site of many a lively discussion, drinking a beer and reading a month-old copy of Time, his legs propped up on another chair. He takes one look at me, holds his nose, and chuckles. “Just get back from inside then, did you?” he asks, burping. “We got back a few days ago.”
“I know,” I say. “I was just on the phone with Pascal. I hear you guys saw some pretty hairy stuff.” He looks like he’s not exactly sure what I’m talking about, so I elaborate. “You know, Jalalabad. The firefighting, the fierce battles . . . Pascal said it was pretty outrageous.”
“That joker!” Martin laughs. “He’s incorrigible. We saw zippo, baby, zilch.” He tells me that Pascal got so frustrated by the lack of action, he made the mujahideen fire off their rocket launchers just so he could get some pictures. That he made one of the soldiers crouch down and hold his ears as the thing exploded. “Excellent visual stuff, but no real bloody fucking war, if you know what I mean. I couldn’t even file a decent story.”
Of course. It all makes perfect sense, actually. Pascal lied to Élodie. He lied to me. Several times. He probably lied about those bombs in Beirut, for all I know. Mon dieu, you should have seen those bombs, he always said, laughing. You should have seen those bombs. And now his pictures of Afghanistan, appearing in beautiful, glossy, double-paged splendor in magazines in every kiosk in every city, are lying to the world at large.
I find my soap and shampoo, head to the bathroom, and peel off layer upon fetid layer of soiled clothing. Later, I will burn them in a pile of trash, but for right now, I stand in
the hot shower, soaping myself over and over and over again, scrubbing the blood, the urine, the silt, the ash, the shame, the grime and the war from my body. Beneath me, the standing water is black. I empty the tub and start all over again.
ZURICH, SWITZERLAND, 1989
PIERRE
THE PHOTOGRAPHER IS PACING BACK AND FORTH, shaking his head, staring up at the bombed-out house and then back down at his cameras. He stops, crosses his arms and kicks the tip of his steel-toed boot into the pavement twice. Then he runs his fingers through his chin-length black hair and starts to laugh. “C’est de la merde!”—“This is bullshit!”—he says, speaking to no one in particular. After a minute or so, he sighs, fishes a roll of film out of the pocket of his black leather jacket, one of those biker numbers with lots of diagonal zippers and secret compartments and pointy lapels, and shoots off a few frames anyway.
I, too, have been pacing in front of the house here on this quaint Dutch street, shooting a few random pictures here and there, but I’m not laughing anymore. When I first arrived half an hour ago, panting and out of breath from having practically sprinted from the Arnhem train station, I was hoping to see the kinds of things I’d read about in the wires this morning: vigilante mobs reclaiming a drug-infested neighborhood, the still-smoldering ash of the heroin den they’d loaded up with dynamite and exploded, throngs of supportive neighbors carrying antidrug signs, junkies walking around jonesing and looking confused, local policemen trying to keep the peace. The random moments of pure chaos all photojournalists crave.
Instead, I saw what my rakish colleague now finds so amusing: a slightly singed town house with its windows boarded up. A pathetic hand-lettered sign strung between two lampposts and written, alas, in Dutch: KLARENDAL DRUGS VRIJ! (What the hell does that mean?) A quiet, middle-class neighborhood of modest attached homes, empty save for the presence of us press people: two television camera crews shooting stand-ups, a couple of journalists interviewing a kid on his bike and half-heartedly jotting down notes and me, standing idly, stubbing out a cigarette with the ball of my foot, watching the TV and print reporters create stories out of nothing and worrying about how I’m going to make enough money shooting a boarded-up house with no back story in Holland, a place nobody cares about anyway, to cover my expenses.
I walk over to the photographer. “Tu as raison,” I say—“You’re right”—“c’est vraiment de la merde.”
He looks me up and down. His eyes move from my cameras to my face, spending equal time on each. I mirror his inspection, noticing the following: a Nikon F2 (good body) with a 20-millimeter lens (tremendous width and depth of field but distorts reality), broad shoulders (good body), a motor drive on the F2 (noisy and unnecessary), laughing eyes (brown), a Nikon FM2 (acceptable) with a 180-millimeter lens (nice piece of equipment, long but easy to manipulate), black jeans (snug.) He also has a Leica (odd, since I wouldn’t have pegged him as the serious type), a black Domke camera bag (practical, well padded) and a voluptuous pair of lips (red, also well padded).
“Pierre,” he says in a thick Parisian accent, holding his hand out to shake mine. His dimples are deep, winsome and, like the boyish grin that carves them, at odds with the rest of his attire.
I introduce myself and watch a flash of recognition cross Pierre’s face. It has been almost a year since my foray into Afghanistan, a year during which I was offered an exhibit of my work at a photojournalism festival. A year filled with dozens of magazine and newspaper assignments and long, liquid lunches with kindly photo editors who were willing to take a chance on a rookie. A year when I was published and profiled, flatteringly, in the two trade glossies all French photographers read, Photomagazine and PHOTO. A year in which I turned twenty-three and suddenly realized that my hard work was starting to pay off, if not exactly monetarily then psychologically. I’m no Sebastiao Salgado or Joseph Koudelka—not at all—but in the small, incestuous world of photojournalism, I’m generating a small burst of heat. And yes, it feels nice.
“From Gamma?” Pierre asks.
“Yeah,” I nod, trying my best to remain nonchalant. “From Gamma.”
Gamma, even after I screwed them over by jumping ship to Contact while in Afghanistan, nevertheless offered me a staff position with their agency when I returned to Paris. They promised to pay for half of all my expenses, to develop, edit, store, distribute and sell my film, to advance me money against future sales and to feed me as many appropriate assignments as they saw fit. In return, I would have to participate in permanence—weekend duty (which sometimes, unfortunately, meant a bit of paparazzi shooting, which I hated), I would have to sell my pictures only through Gamma, even if the assignment had come through my own personal connections and, within reason, I would have to jump on any plane, train, car, bus, boat, motorcycle or scooter the agency saw fit for me to jump on at any given moment. Since I’d decided to stay in Paris and not move back to the States, since Contact was in New York and was not offering me a similar deal, I accepted Gamma’s offer and apologized to Michel for my lapse in good judgment with regard to Pascal. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we all do stupid things sometimes.”
When Michel was later fired, for reasons I never understood, Henri—nicknamed L’ours, “the Bear”—took over his job as news editor and promptly decided that, besides wars and fast-breaking news, which are the assignments most of the Gamma photographers covet, I would be useful in covering the drug addict and derelict beat, which no one really wanted. It was Henri who, in his inimitable brusque, ursine manner, shoved me out the door of the agency this morning and told me to buy a train ticket to Holland and find the junkies and the vigilante neighbors and the dynamited drug den in Arnhem vite vite vite, even as I protested that the story seemed iffy and trivial and would most likely be finished by the time I got there.
Pierre’s smile widens. “I’ve heard all about you,” he says. “The crazy American girl. I heard about your exhibit in Perpignan. I’ve seen your pictures all over the place—that heroin park in Switzerland, the Afghan war diary in Photomagazine. You do wars and drugs, right?”
“Right,” I say, “that’s me.” A pigeonhole, even. Please, stroke my ego some more.
“Cool,” he says, in English with a French accent. The French, especially the cool ones in Perfecto jackets, love the word “cool.” Pierre stares down at the Leica hanging from my neck, a graduation present from my parents, and then picks it up to fondle it. “An M6. Cool.”
“The coolest,” I say.
He takes a narrow manila envelope with the word “Sipa” splashed across it out of his camera bag, sticks his one roll of film inside and, blushing, licks the seal with a playful flutter of his tongue.
“Sipa, huh?” I say.
“Yeah, been with them for a little while now.” He shoves the envelope back in his camera bag, a nuisance to be dealt with later. “So,” says Pierre. “You want to go to a bar with me and smoke some hash?”
I smile. “Sure,” I say, “I’d like that.”
PHOTOGRAPHERS ALWAYS SNIFF one another out. Most of the time it’s just guys checking out other guys, however, so they don’t notice things like voluptuous lips. (As a group, photojournalists are pretty much as heterosexual as they come.) But most photographers, like good anthropologists, will take notice of their competitors’ stuff—everything from camera equipment to clothing to even small details like film envelopes—as a means of determining each other’s standing in the socio-professional pecking order.
I became a photojournalist during the late eighties, the last days of the manual camera. Before the Canon EOS was introduced in 1991, no one had yet come up with an auto-focus camera that actually auto-focused. Besides, auto focus was for wimps. So having a Nikon F2, F3 or FM2 signified both a technical proficiency with manual cameras as well as a seriousness and commitment to photojournalism. Even cooler was a black Nikon camera body with a few well-placed dents and scratch
es on it. It said to the others, I’m a rugged person, and if these dented, scratched cameras could speak, oh, the stories they could tell. Olympus or Minolta owners, on the other hand, were strictly second-tier—local photographers, beginners, maybe even amateurs.
If your cameras had motor drives, that could mean a number of different things: 1) you covered a lot of press conferences; 2) you did a little sports coverage or fashion work on the side; 3) you liked the authentic-sounding noise it made; or 4) you lacked the confidence to leave it at home. For me, the whole issue was moot. Motor drives weigh a lot. I never owned one because it was all I could do to carry what little equipment I was already carrying without breaking my back.
I did have that Leica, however. It was an M6, the kind with the built-in light meter. Owning a Leica M-series camera put you in a whole other league. The Leica was the Porsche of the camera world; it was small, light, exquisitely crafted, mechanically perfect and very, very expensive. It was the “it” camera for the “concerned” photographer—a loose definition for a photographer who cares deeply for his subjects, who spends years and years shooting a single, thematically unified story on subjects like prisons, sweatshops or anything remotely related to Ethiopia. With a Leica slung casually over your shoulder—always with the lens facing in toward your rib cage to protect it, otherwise you’d be pegged immediately as an amateur—you could always pretend to be a concerned photographer, whether or not you’d ever stepped foot in Ethiopia.
Inside the Leica you kept a roll of Tri-X 400 ASA black-and-white film. This was for your very important “personal” work. By the end of the Vietnam War, color film had become de rigueur in the world of magazine photo publishing. While Life still did accept and always would accept black-and-white photo-essays, if you wanted to have your pictures published in Time or Newsweek or in any of the other newsmagazines around the world, you almost always had to shoot in color unless you were specifically assigned otherwise. But color lacked subtlety. It was crass. So the artiste photojournalists, channeling their inner Cartier-Bressons, all started carrying at least one camera body (preferably the Leica) with black-and-white film wherever they went. That way, they could work on loftier, noncommercial images while being financed to shoot vulgar color ones for the magazines. Some of the more self-righteous photographers shot only in black and white, but they were either unfazed by a life of poverty or, like Cartier-Bresson, they’d been born into wealth.
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