Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  The croquet party, hosted on the lush grounds of an enormous home in north Harare, is in full swing by the time we arrive. It’s an older crowd, many of the guests chasing after their small, flaxen-haired children through the grass. Some teenage kids are flirting with one another while playing a game of badminton. Black servants wander through the yard carrying silver trays full of tiny cucumber sandwiches with the crusts cut off, while the few black guests try valiantly to look comfortable in such a setting.

  Julian brings me a gin and tonic from the bar. Everyone at the party seems to know him, and before long he’s swept away into one conversation or another. I’m not feeling very sociable, so I take the remainder of my gin and tonic and sit down at one of the empty, ornate metal tables on the patio. I watch as a mother and father swing their giggling daughter like a jump rope between them, the dad holding her ankles, the mom tightly grasping her forearms.

  It is so simple, the woman on the bus had said. So simple.

  Julian finds me out on the patio, toting a handsome couple behind him. They’re writers, he tells me, freelancers for Sierra magazine. They were just up in Mana Pools a couple of weeks before me, reporting the Operation Stronghold story. They need photographs. Perhaps I can help them. He leaves the three of us sitting there together.

  “Julian tells me you got a picture of a dead poacher,” says the man.

  “Word travels fast,” I say.

  I’m distracted by the two boys who are chasing their little sister through the grass, their fingers pointed into tiny finger guns. “Bang, bang!” they’re yelling. “You’re dead!” She’s petrified and crying, calling for her mommy.

  “So it’s true then?” the writer asks, shooting his wife a knowing glance.

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “He’s dead. Dead, dead, dead. Excuse me for a second.”

  I run over to the crying girl in the grass and pick her up. Then I chastise her brothers, who quickly turn their finger weapons back into hands. On my way back to the journalists on the patio, I carry the little girl, in her pink smocked pinafore, to the refuge of her mother’s arms. The woman thanks me and turns to her daughter. “Oh, honey, were they shooting you again?” I hear her ask as I walk away. From the corner of my eye, I can see the little girl nodding, her lower lip trembling, the words staying safely inside.

  “We’ll need your photos for our article,” says the man when I return. He hands me his business card. I take it, promising to send a complete slide set to Sierra when I get back to Paris. The sale will just about cover my expenses. But the steady money will come from the elephant pictures. Every magazine seems to need a good elephant picture now and then.

  “I’m so glad we met you,” says his wife, all smiles. “I mean, hate to say it, but without a dead poacher, there isn’t really a story, now, is there?”

  “No,” I say. “There isn’t.”

  VULTURESTI, ROMANIA, 1990

  DORU

  IT’S 3 A.M. IN BUCHAREST, and there’s not a coal miner in sight. I’m shivering, bouncing the balls of my feet against the car floor and rocking back and forth to stay warm. Gad’s wrapped in a blanket, and his head rests on a pillow that he’s placed between himself and the steering wheel. He’s snoring. It’s my turn to be on miner-lookout patrol, but I don’t think I’m going to make it. I keep clearing small, streaky circles on the fogged windshield with the side of my fist, but all I see are a couple of other photographers pacing, smoking cigarettes, jumping up and down and rubbing their hands together to stay warm. The protesters in the streets are either huddled together sleeping or gathered around makeshift campfires, listening to their radios and chatting about the revolution. All of us are waiting for something, anything to happen.

  “Gad? Hey, Gad?” I say, gently shaking his back.

  Gad sputters awake, mumbling something in German. Then, jolting upright, he throws off his blanket and grabs for his camera bag, which lies open and ready between the two of us, wedged in against the stick shift. “What? Are they here? What’s happening?” His brown, wavy hair is matted to his head, and it blends manelike into the matted but more reddish hair growing on his chin and upper lip. His front tooth is missing. He lost it in a motorcycle accident, and I know he has a replacement, but I haven’t seen him wear it for a couple of days now. Gad has little patience for grooming.

  “Relax,” I say. My own teeth are chattering. “Nothing’s happening out there. I’m just cold. It’s late. Can you drive me back?” We’re parked in front of the Inter-Continental Hotel, which is at most a fifteen-minute walk from the apartment building where I’m staying, but there’s no way I’m trekking alone with a bag full of expensive camera equipment at three o’clock in the morning. Ceauşescu and his communist dictatorship have only been dead for a little more than two months; if sold on the still-thriving black market, my cameras could feed, clothe and house a medium-sized Romanian family for the next year or so.

  “Sure,” Gad says, starting the engine, “let’s go. I’ll crank up the heater.”

  Gad and I have been friends since our junior year at college. Only back then I knew him as Johannes. Gad was his middle name, and he used to introduce himself by saying, “Hi. My name is Johannes. But you can call me Gad,” which, because of his heavy German accent, came out sounding like “Hi, my name is Your Highness, but you can call me God.” Somebody finally pointed this out to him, which cracked Gad up because he could never understand why people were always giving him such bizarre looks upon meeting him. So he simplified his life and became just plain Gad.

  Gad and I used to spend hours giggling and printing photos in the Adams House darkroom together, where we’d inevitably end up in some convoluted philosophical conversation about the nature of good versus evil. “Lighten up!” I’d tell him. “You take things way too seriously.” He’d reply, with a smile on his face and a Kafka book in his hand, that he couldn’t because there was just too much social injustice and malevolence in the world.

  We danced in the darkroom to Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al,” which Gad could play forty times over without getting bored. We gave each other love advice, criticized each other’s work. But our favorite thing to do was to gossip about Gilles Peress, who we worshipped for different reasons. Gad was intrigued by Gilles’s obsession with mortality; I just dug the man’s pictures.

  Though I am well versed in Gad’s philosophy, however, his history remains much more vague. Gad rarely talks about his past. In fact, when I ran into him here in Bucharest a couple of days ago in the lobby of the Inter-Continental Hotel, I was surprised not so much to see him again—because of our similar career paths, we were bound to run into each other at some point—but to hear him speaking fluent Romanian. After a quick embrace, I asked him how he managed to learn the language so fast.

  “I was born in Romania. We moved to Germany only when I was ten,” he said, and left it at that.

  We’ve been sitting here in Gad’s car, which some of the time doubles as his residence and smells like it, for a little over four hours. Someone told someone who told Gad that a bunch of coal miners might be coming into Bucharest tonight, armed with sticks and bludgeons, to join in the mass protests that have been taking place here every day in University Plaza. The protests have been for the most part peaceful, and sometimes musical, with hundreds of people singing in unison “Olay, olay-olay-olay . . .” while waving their blue-yellow-and-red-striped flags, the ones with the holes cut out of the middle where the communist seal used to be. Though inspiring to watch, peaceful demonstrations are boring affairs, photographically speaking. There are only so many pictures you can take of yet another earnest Romanian kid sticking his head out of yet another flag hole. It’s a rich metaphor, but it’s been done to death.

  But miners are often angry—being miners—and they tend to enjoy good, bloody skirmishes with the police. Which would mean good pictures. Because as every photojournalist knows, vi
olence sells.

  Gad backs out of our parking space. “I don’t know about you,” he says, “but I’ve had it.”

  “Me, too,” I say, “I’m exhausted.”

  “No, not just tonight,” he says, laughing. “I mean I’ve had it with this job. With photography. With sitting around in a car waiting for some miners to show up and beat up a policeman so I can sell a picture. It’s bullshit.”

  “I know, but—”

  “No. No but’s. It’s just bullshit,” he says, now turning the corner. “Your place is just down here, right?”

  “Yeah, second entrance from the left. So, what exactly are you saying?” I ask.

  Gad pulls the car in front of my building and wiggles the stick shift into neutral. The motor idles. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I want to go to law school, study international law. Help people for a change.”

  I stifle a laugh. “Law school? Help people? Oh, please, Gad. How will a law degree allow you to help these miserable people?” I point up at the darkened buildings around us. These people are so screwed, I think, they don’t even realize it yet. They’ve been shafted by everyone. Ceauşescu, his government, the secret police, even their neighbors, who could turn them in for no apparent reason if they felt like it. Nobody trusts anyone around here. They all run around paranoid and scared because—poof!—people disappear and never come back.

  “It will,” he says. He looks slightly hurt.

  With the car still idling, Gad and I spend the next ten minutes talking and debating in the dark, just like back in college. He tells me the whole reason he got into photography in the first place was to help people—the refugees, the oppressed, the victims of war—but that he now realizes he was just being naïve to think his camera could fix the world.

  “Gad, it’s naïve to think you can fix the world period,” I say.

  He winks at me, smiling that gap-toothed grin. “Yeah, but I can always try.”

  Before I leave, I tell him about the vulture dreams I’ve been having ever since my trip to Zimbabwe. Gad says he doesn’t need to have vulture dreams. He feels like one every day.

  “Yeah, but law school, Gad,” I say, smiling. “That’s like trading one species of vulture for another. Besides, if you become a lawyer, you’ll have to shave your beard. Shower. Maybe even wear your tooth.”

  “But law’s a powerful tool for change,” he says. “Always has been. Photography is losing that power. Anyway, I’ll get a razor. Buy some soap. Find my tooth. What’s the big deal?”

  “So you’re serious then?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I thank Gad for the ride and the discussion, tell him it feels like old times. He watches to make sure I get into the building, and I hear the escalating whir of his car backing up as I step inside. The elevator smells like urine, but I’m used to it by now. I open the door of the apartment, take off my coat, attach my flash unit to the charger plugged into the wall, disrobe, brush my teeth and slip quietly into bed next to Doru. His back feels warm and smooth as I press my stomach against it, and I kiss him between his lank shoulder blades.

  “Merci, ma biche”—“Thank you, sweetie”—he says, groggily turning to kiss my lips. Doru doesn’t speak English. I don’t speak Romanian. So we’ve had to settle for French, which feels odd, like a cat quacking with a dog. Since both of us, though fairly fluent, are somewhat deficient in French nouns, we’re always using the word truc, which means “thing,” and having conversations like “Where’s the thing? You know, the thing. The thing that stops up the thing in the bathtub.”

  “Oh, you mean the thing!”

  “Yeah, the thing.”

  Doru’s long fingers cup my face, and he buries his nose in my neck. “Et alors?” he says. “Your face is so cold. Any miners?” I’d invited Doru to come sit in Gad’s car to wait for the rumored rampage, but he thought we were nuts.

  “No. You were right,” I say. “No miners.”

  “Ha. Told you so. When are you going to learn to trust me?” he says, now kissing my nose, now my cheeks with those enormous lips of his. “Did you have fun with your little friend?” The last two words puzzle me. Petit copain—“little friend”—can also mean “boyfriend” in French. Communication between two people is difficult enough when both speak the same language, let alone two different languages. Add in a third, and simple words and phrases become tiny grenades, waiting to explode. But while I’m trying to figure out whether Doru meant “little friend” or “boyfriend,” his lips begin a far more feverish dance across my face. Conveniently, my brain shuts down.

  “You mean Gad? . . . Yeah . . . We talked . . . Reminisced about college . . . Things like that . . .” I say, punctuating each phrase with a kiss along the length of his wide forehead.

  “Uh-huh, things like that,” he says. I’m just about to reach down between Doru’s legs when he says, “So, tell me, did you fuck Nicolas or not?”

  I WAS IN JAMAICA, on a Christmas vacation with my family at the end of 1989, when the Romanian communist dictatorship collapsed in a violent heap. I had just spent three weeks covering the eighteen-city round-the-world scavenger hunt I’d been assigned for Géo magazine, before that I’d flown to San Francisco to cover the earthquake, I was about to head to Los Angeles to do a story on girl gangs and I was exhausted. Sunbathing in my flowered bikini, looking out over the calm blue waters of Montego Bay and sipping pineappley drinks, I followed the events of Ceauşescu’s undoing through day-old newspapers. I skimmed articles about the bloody street fighting in Bucharest and Timişoara, about the French cameraman who was crushed and killed under a tank, about the firing squad who had assassinated Mr. and Mrs. Ceauşescu in the middle of a picturesque outdoor courtyard.

  I wondered whether I should cut my vacation short and head to Bucharest immediately. I went for long swims and tried not to think about it.

  My twin sisters, Julie and Laura, were in their senior year of high school. My sister Jennifer was finishing her last year of college. I had not seen any of them for over a year. My mother and father had made one trip to Paris to visit me, but it had been almost a year since I’d seen them as well. We were having a wonderful time on the beach together, laughing, talking, reading books, eating coconuts, slathering suntan lotion on one another’s backs, being a family. I was happy to be on furlough.

  Reluctantly, guiltily, I decided not to go to Romania.

  A few days later, I flew to L.A. and hung out with a girl gang for two weeks. With a cold call to The New York Times’ L.A. bureau—“Hi. I’m about to shoot a girl gang initiation ceremony. I’m at a pay phone on Grape Street. They’re scheduled to beat each other up in half an hour. Wanna meet me here?”—I convinced Seth Mydans, the reporter who answered the phone, to jump in his car and come join me. Which meant I’d have a shot at selling the photos to the Times. I was learning not to count too much on Gamma, even if they were entitled to fifty percent of my meager earnings, regardless of the assignment’s origin.

  LOS ANGELES, 1990

  In fact, I was starting to figure out that if I wanted to get paid assignments, I had to do most of the footwork by myself. I took photo editors out to lunch, schmoozed them at cocktail parties and exhibit openings, called them incessantly with story ideas or to simply remind them I existed.

  So, just before heading back to Paris from L.A., I called a bunch of French editors to let them know I would be in the States in case any of them needed an American story to be shot. “As a matter of fact, I do,” said Jacques. Jacques Haillot, the teddy-bear-like photo editor for L’Express magazine, had a soft spot for me. And I for him. Because in a microcosm like photojournalism, a place inhabited predominantly by sexist pigs, Jacques was a rare gentleman. He assigned me two stories: crack and violence in D.C. and one of those vague, slightly lefty French examinations of race relations in the U.S., entitled “Being Black.” Few things fascinat
e the French as much as stories about other countries’ racism. I suppose it makes them feel better about their own.

  Jacques asked if I wouldn’t mind spending a month and a half in and around Washington, D.C., working with my favorite French journalist, Michèle. Michèle was fortyish, single and brilliant. She smoked at least a pack of Gitanes a day, drank wine like it was water, was forever misplacing her pens, incessantly twirled the short front lock of her black hair and liked to walk around her hotel rooms buck naked while dictating her illegibly written articles to her editors back in Paris. She was a wickedly funny impersonator, who could lampoon fat movie-going Americans eating their enormous buckets of popcorn with the same venom she reserved for French Catholic priests. But one of the best things about working with Michèle was that I never had to worry about her making a pass at me.

  I told Jacques I’d be delighted to hang out in crack dens with Michèle. And except for the addict who bullied us into paying him $15 after I shot a photo of him getting high, we had a rip-roaring time. Michèle especially loved the part where we got to drive around and watch the police arrest people. “I just adore American cops,” she said, fascinated by the policeman who helped tackle, cuff and book a perp without ever letting go of his Dove bar.

  While working on the various stories with Michèle in D.C., feeling particularly self-confident, I agreed to let Matthew join us for dinner. Matthew was the old boyfriend from college, a blue-eyed preppy with ringlet curls and the requisite Dead tapes and tapestry-covered bedroom walls. He had the distinction of being the only other person after Gabe I’d finally allowed to slip through the barbed wire protecting my heart after a string of meaningless, if fun, college affairs. He’d seduced me at the end of my junior year with his guitar, playing a soulful rendition of “Tangled Up in Blue” for a large, drunken crowd of people at a party while staring me straight in the eye. Afterwards, we decided to go skinny-dipping. Two weeks later, I was visiting him on Nantucket, where he was painting houses for the summer.