I peel one of my now hard-boiled eggs, letting the pieces of shell fall to the ground. I’m so hungry, I eat it in two bites, savoring the heaviness of the yolk as it squeezes through my esophagus and plummets like a rock into my stomach. I gobble down the other two equally fast, chasing them with some apple juice. Then I peel an orange, the rind getting underneath my fingernails, the sweet fruit bursting between my teeth. When the last section is gone, I light a cigarette and blow the smoke across the river.
Who knew covering a war could be so peaceful?
I stare up at the thickening soup of stars and think about the mother who shared her seat with me on the bus to Victoria Falls. How nice it must be to have such firm convictions about one’s role in life, to be able to say, “It is so simple.” I am envious. For me, nothing is ever that simple. Not men, not work, not morality, not love, not trust, not people, not politics, not sex, not God, and especially not motherhood. Especially not that.
I fall asleep. In my dream, I’m on the crowded bus to Victoria Falls, only this time I am cradling a little girl who looks like me in every way except for her black, straight hair. I feel her breath in small, sleepy spurts of air on my neck. I rub my hand across her tiny back, her vertebrae stretched like a single strand of pearls beneath her taut skin. I tell her it’s okay, everything will be okay. When we finally reach our stop, I try to rouse her. But she’s dead. I shake her. I cry out for help. It’s no use. With all the breast-feeding and chicken clucking and package shuffling and orange peeling and children laughing, no one on the bus can hear my screams.
THE NIGHT BEFORE our abortion, Gabe asked me, “Are you sure you want to do this?”
We were seventeen, sitting on my childhood bed with the rainbow sheets and stuffed animals. I had just received my acceptance letter to Harvard. Gabe would be going to a college far away in Louisiana.
“Of course I’m sure,” I said.
“Just think about it for a second. We love each other. We’d make great parents. I just don’t want you to think you have to rush into this.” In retrospect, these were heady, mature statements for a seventeen-year-old boy to make. But that was Gabe. While his other friends were busy playing pinball and smoking bongs in one another’s basements, Gabe preferred to spend all of his free time with me: driving around Potomac with the top down, blasting “Little Red Corvette” or Howard Jones singing “What Is Love?,” holding hands, laughing, debating the existence of God with the wind whipping through our hair. While the other boys relied on whatever myth and hearsay they could gather from their bragging buddies—“Oh, yeah, dude, a girl can’t come unless you’re doin’ her”—Gabe understood and was an avid student of the female anatomy. And while most of the boys in my high school used the phrase “I love you” as nothing more than a conduit for getting laid, Gabe felt these words in the depths of his melancholy teenage soul.
“I don’t need to think about it. I’m doing it,” I said, full of adolescent bluster and self-confidence. I had plans. Big plans. College, some sort of career, then maybe—just maybe, and much later—a family. But after a silent minute, I felt tears, love, trying to erode my resolve.
“Yeah, you’re right. What was I thinking?” Gabe said. He stroked the threadbare fur on my yellow stuffed bunny. Then, with a sigh and a quivering lip, he slumped over, his head in his hands. I felt his chest heaving up and down against mine as I held him close and tried to kiss away the briny mess from his cheek. But soon I was sobbing too hard to comfort him anymore.
“Everything will be okay,” I whispered, more to myself than to him. “We’re doing the right thing.” I let my fingers run through Gabe’s straight black hair, my mind already composing the elegy for the hair, the face, the fingers I would never see.
“I know,” he said. But I could tell he didn’t believe it.
Early the next morning, as I was getting ready to leave, Gabe called me on the phone from his mom’s house. “I can’t go with you to the clinic,” he said. “I just want to make sure your parents are going with you.” He paused, leaving me ample room for a reply.
“Yes, they’re going,” I said. “We’re all going. But I’d like you to be there, too.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t be there.” He didn’t elaborate. His voice cracking on the other end of the line, he ended the short conversation: “Just know I love you. I really do.”
I loved him, too. So much that I ached. So much that I would never really get over it. So much that I would spend the next half decade or so actively avoiding love, keeping my heart buried under layer upon internal layer of cement and barbed wire.
But not enough to give up my life.
SOMETHING WET AND SLIMY falls on my forehead, waking me. “Oh, gross!” I say out loud, startled more by the sight of the sunrise and the Zambezi (Where am I? I DON’T LIVE HERE!) than by the mucuslike substance now dripping down my face. I slept in my clothes, so I unzip my sleeping bag, stand up and try to shake the heaviness of morning from my body, wiping the stuff off my face with the bottom of my T-shirt. It’s clear and fairly odorless, so it can’t be bird droppings. Maybe it’s some weird tree sap I’ve never heard about. I glance up into the tall trees above me to investigate and suddenly understand everything. There, on a branch, are two very pleased monkeys, crushing egg after egg in their hands and sucking out the potent liquid within, screeching and hollering with joyous monkey glee. A third one is trying to rip into a box of cheese and crackers with his mouth. I quickly look down at the spot where my carton of food used to be, knowing it will be gone before even confirming its absence.
I’m such an idiot. I should have left the carton in Mark’s cabin. But this doesn’t actually disturb me as much as the fact that I’ve just dreamt about the child Gabe and I never had, only to be woken up by a glob of falling albumen. What’s that all about? A sign? I don’t believe in signs.
I formally declared my doubts about the existence of a higher power to my parents when I was nine, on the day my Hebrew school teacher taught us about Auschwitz. The teacher told us, his sleepy, Sunday morning classroom full of Jewish boys and girls, that because the Jews actually survived such a hell, God must therefore exist. I didn’t buy it. I mean, slavery in Egypt, the Crusades, the Inquisition: all comprehensible to me in the context of history and ignorance. But Auschwitz? In the middle of the twentieth century? In Europe? No fucking way.
“I don’t believe in God,” I told my father between bites of a pumpernickel bagel after class. As far as I was concerned, no real god would ever let Hitler strip, shoot, starve, asphyxiate, torture and shove six million Jews into the ovens. It didn’t make sense.
“Then you’re an atheist,” he said, without passing judgment. “Atheists are people who don’t believe in God.” Dad was always looking for excuses to slide another vocabulary word into the file cabinet he was building in my brain (“My, what a truculent doggie!”; “You’re eating the penultimate cookie.”). “I’m an agnostic,” he said, “which means I’m not willing to place my bet on either side of the debate.”
This sounded more reasonable to me than dismissing God altogether. “Nagnostic?” I asked.
“No, ag-nostic.”
“Oh. That’s what I wanna be, too.” And a lifetime of skepticism was born.
I stare back up at the monkeys, my stomach rumbling from hunger. I smoke a cigarette to calm the rumbling. Then, just as I’m wondering how I’m going to eat over the next week or two, Mark’s army buddy Ray arrives at the campgrounds in his blue pickup truck. The flatbed is filled with a padlocked trunk full of food, three cases of beer, a rifle, a kerosene lamp, bottled water, a tent and even a couple of folding lawn chairs. Ray and Mark fought side by side in the Rhodesian civil war, he tells me, so whenever Ray has any vacation time socked away, he drives up to Mana Pools to camp out, to help his friend shoot poachers and to reminisce about those halcyon days—“You know, when Rhodesia was Rhod
esia and everyone knew their place,” he says wistfully. Ray is in his mid-forties, white, unmarried, thin and balding, and he wears kneesocks with his army boots and khaki shorts. He also has the fattest Swiss army knife I’ve ever seen. I get the distinct impression that for Ray, Operation Stronghold—with its predominantly white commanders shooting poor black poachers—is a glorious excuse for revenge.
But Ray also makes a mean spaghetti carbonara, and I have no food. Hang out with a racist and eat or shun him and starve? The answer seems pretty clear. And while I would never defend bigotry, Ray did see a lot of his friends die in that war. That could make anyone bitter and angry, right?
What’s worse—because I really want to hate him—is that underneath Ray’s unreconstructed colonialism, his heart is kind. One morning, instead of waking up with the sky as my ceiling, I wake up inside Ray’s tent, utterly confused. I walk outside to find him sleeping on the flatbed of his truck, covered with a plastic tarp as a blanket but for the most part soaking wet. “It started to rain last night,” he says, shivering. “I didn’t want you to get wet.”
Over the next few days, I go out on a couple of patrols with the troops. Sometimes we drive a Land Rover. Sometimes they take me in the helicopter. But while we see a lot of elephants—and I mean tons of elephants—we never spot a poacher or a dead rhino or, for that matter, even a live rhino. We just spend hours and hours driving around the Mana Pools game reserve, tourists on safari who just happen to have a couple of Dutch FN automatic assault rifles at the ready.
Because I know Xavier wants only well-lit photographs, I shoot most of my pictures in the early morning or the late afternoon to avoid the harsh midday shadows. I prefer magic hour—that moment of burnished-gold brilliance just before sunset. If you’ve ever seen Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, which was shot almost exclusively during magic hour, you’ll know what I mean.
This leaves the hours of ten to four wide open. I spend most of them sitting in one of Ray’s plastic lawn chairs, either gazing out at the Zambezi or reading my García Márquez book or worrying about money. This is an expensive trip, and the only pictures I have are of a bunch of smiling soldiers driving around in a Land Rover, which hardly looks like anything approximating a war. This is a problem. As usual, I can’t afford not to sell this story.
So late one afternoon, right before magic hour, I ask three of the soldiers to come with me down to the Zambezi with their guns. I arrange them in a triangular formation in the tall reeds and tell them to squat in the grass and hold their guns as if they’d just heard a rustling in the trees that might have sounded like a poacher. “Look angry,” I tell them. It’s hard to keep them from laughing, but when they stop, the image in my viewfinder looks great—well composed, beautiful color saturation, great depth of field, shiny guns, scary soldiers. It’s just photo montée, I try to convince myself, every photojournalist out there does it. But I feel like a criminal.
I spot an elephant walking through the reeds on the banks of the river, his skin practically red from the fading sunlight. I dismiss the soldiers with a “Thanks, guys, appreciate it” and shoot off an entire roll of that elephant to make myself feel better.
MANA POOLS NATIONAL PARK, ZIMBABWE, 1989
The next day, in the cool crispness of the early morning light, I ask Mark to accompany me to the pile of rhinoceros skulls he keeps in his front yard. “Were all of these killed by poachers?” I ask him.
“Probably not,” he says. “I’m sure some of them died from natural causes. I just collect ’em. I find them lying around in the grass or people bring me some—”
“Never mind. Just sit in the middle of the pile and look at me as if these skulls make you really sad.” I shoot off a roll. “Great, Mark, thanks a lot.”
MANA POOLS NATIONAL PARK, ZIMBABWE, 1989
It’s just photo montée, it’s just photo montée, it’s just photo montée . . . Fuck. I might as well go into advertising photography at this rate. It certainly pays better, and you get a stylist and a makeup artist to boot. Let’s see, I’ve befriended a bigot because I was hungry, and I’m shooting staged photographs so that I won’t starve when I get back to Paris. At this rate, I’ll sell off my last remaining principle in less than a day or two.
“So is that it? Do you have everything that you need now?” Mark asks me, carefully stepping over the skulls so as not to crush them. “Or are you like all the other journalists who tell me they need to see a dead poacher before they’ll get out of my hair?”
“Well, now that you’ve mentioned it . . .” Sure, go ahead. Kill a man because I need the picture.
Mark tells me they haven’t found a poacher in over three months. Some war. He says I’m welcome to stay, but Ray will be leaving to go back to Harare in a week, taking his food and his lawn chairs with him.
“Don’t worry,” I say, “I won’t stay indefinitely. I’ll leave when Ray leaves.” At least it’ll be a free ride back.
Two days before we’re scheduled to return to Harare, I’m on late afternoon ground patrol with Mark and a few of the soldiers when we spot a flock of vultures circling slowly in the distant sky. Mark throws the Land Rover into fourth gear and we zoom over the dirt road, the wind tousling my hair into a tangled frenzy. The last time this happened, we found a dead elephant, so I’m not overly excited. But when we reach the vortex of vultures, there he is. A dead rhino. And in the spot where his horn should be is dried blood and ripped flesh.
We all step out of the vehicle and walk over to the slain beast. The stench of decay soaks the air, and the hundred or so vultures on the ground barely give way when we approach. Mark walks over to examine the carcass. “This guy’s been here at least a day or two, if not more,” he says, holding his nose and gagging. The gray skin of the rhino’s body, covered in white vulture shit, looks like something Jackson Pollock might have done. Mark steps away from the rhino, pulls out his map, and marks the spot where we’re standing with a red x. Then he calls over his soldiers. “Okay, men, this is the area to search.” He makes an invisible circle around the x with his hand. “Tomorrow morning, you’ll go out and look for their smoke. Let’s head back. I’ve got to radio this one in.”
“Smoke?” I ask.
Mark looks at me and smiles. “Even poachers like a hot breakfast,” he says.
The next morning, when I wake up, Ray is gone. He isn’t in his tent, he isn’t in his truck, he isn’t taking a piss in the woods. Dammit. I hope he didn’t leave on patrol without me. I find a dirty bowl, clean it out with the water in my canteen, add in some powdered milk and granola, and sit down in the lawn chair to eat. I watch yet another crocodile trying to look nonchalant while slithering thieflike through the water. Suddenly, I see Mark running down to our campsite, sweating and out of breath. “Deborah, you better come quick. Ray went out with my men in the middle of the night. They left on foot. Snuck up on the bastards. We’ll take the chopper. Come on!”
I grab my camera bag, overturning the cereal bowl in my haste. The adrenaline is gushing through my veins, half of me hoping that Ray will wait to shoot the poacher until I get there, the other half chastising myself for being such a sicko.
MANA POOLS NATIONAL PARK, ZIMBABWE, 1989
Once airborne, I feel the whip of the rotating helicopter blades vibrating in my rib cage. Mark’s staring out the bulbous window and searching through the trees below, yelling orders at the pilot. “There, there! Right over there!” he shouts. We land in a clearing and duck under the still rotating blades as we exit the chopper. Just inside the treeline, I spot Ray and five soldiers. They’re standing around, casually chatting, waiting for us. Behind them are the remains of a campfire, still emitting tiny tufts of smoke and encircled by the kind of things men don’t usually leave behind as trash—a sweatshirt, a knapsack, a couple of blankets, a pair of boots, a battered canteen. Oh, and two rhino horns.
“Hey there, Deborah,” says Ray, lo
oking ragged and tired. He’s got a rifle slung over his shoulder, and he’s smiling. “We got a little present for you. Wanna see him?” He steps aside and points down to the ground at his feet, where a young black man (maybe eighteen, twenty at most) lies on his stomach with the side of his face in the underbrush. He looks like he’s sleeping, his eyes closed, his expression peaceful. There are only two signs of anything amiss: the pool of blood that has started to spread out from under his body, and the bullet holes in his back. There are at least eight holes pierced through his brown, wide-gauge sweater, as if it had been consumed by a closet full of hungry moths. I have never seen human death this close. “The other two got away,” says Ray. “But we’ll get ’em. We’ll get ’em.”
Instinctively, I grab my camera and start shooting, crouching and circling in a small orbit around the dead man, trying to get the best angle so that the bullet holes feature prominently in the frame. I circle the body again, my movements like a feverish waltz—circumnavigating, twirling, whirling, spinning around and around and around.
I am a vulture. I don’t even try to pretend otherwise.
BACK IN HARARE, Julian picks me up at my hotel to drive me to an afternoon croquet party hosted by one of his diplomat friends. “You’re looking rather thin,” he says, as he opens the car door.
“Some monkeys stole my food,” I say, offering up my newest adventure story with a perfect dead-pan delivery.
Julian laughs and musses my hair with a friendly pat on the head. “How perfectly rude of them,” he says.
The truth is that I haven’t been able to eat anything since that bowl of cereal I spilled while rushing off to board the helicopter. Later that night, Mark had organized a celebratory barbecue up at his cabin, but when I sat down with my plate of chicken and corn, I couldn’t make the food go down my throat. Instead, in search of numbness, I drank a beer and four shots of really bad whiskey. But the alcohol backfired. I kept thinking about the poacher’s family. Who would be missing him across the river in Zambia when he neglected to return home within a few days’ time? His parents? A wife? Maybe a child? I asked Ray what would become of the corpse, and he just grinned. “What corpse?” he said. “This is a jungle.” Then he started to laugh. I spent the rest of the evening staring out over the Zambezi, drunk and crying.
Shutterbabe Page 17