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by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  It was still light when we neared the main square of Tîrgu-Mureş. The crowds were thick, impenetrable by car, so Nicolas just left the car where it stood in the middle of the street and yelled at me to follow him. We ran, pushing our way through the sea of people, until at last we reached ground zero. There, in the center of town, a column of tanks and a line of heavily armed soldiers encircled the open plaza, totally in control. Despite our psychotic sprint, we were too late. There would be no more fighting. For Nicolas, it was a total bust. Without the sound of gunfire and shrieking mobs, radio reports about purported violent clashes between ethnic Hungarians and Romanians tend to lose a certain amount of gravity. As for me, I wasn’t thrilled to have missed the fighting, but columns of tanks and soldiers standing guard are not bad, as photo opportunities go. I started shooting, circling the scene looking for good angles.

  TÎRGU-MURESÐ, ROMANIA, 1990

  About an hour later, as darkness fell, Nicolas found me. “I got a good interview with one of the soldiers. It’ll have to do. You on an expense account?” he asked.

  I told him I wasn’t.

  He told me he was. “You’re welcome to share my room,” he said.

  I thought about it for a moment. If we’d arrived in the middle of an angry ethnic battle, my pictures would sell, I’d get an assignment or two, some magazine would pay for my room. But as it was, we’d arrived too late. I’d thrown the tickets to Budapest on my nearly maxed-out credit card. Once again, I seemed to be hemorrhaging money to pay for my job. “If we can get a room with two beds, sure,” I said.

  At this point, Nicolas looked exasperated. “Of course we can get a room with two beds. My God, what do you take me for?”

  “A man,” I said, under my breath and not really to him.

  That night, in his black underwear and black T-shirt, Nicolas fell asleep in his bed. I fell asleep in mine.

  The next morning, when I returned to the town square, the tanks and soldiers were still there. I was in the middle of framing a close-up of the barrel of a gun, with blurred tanks and a line of soldiers in the background, when I spotted the word “Gamma” in my viewfinder. Surprised and curious, I pulled my camera away from my eye, and there, right in front of me, was a tall, lanky man with enormous lips and two large Gamma mailing labels stuck to both the front and the back of his acid-washed jeans jacket.

  “Excuse me,” I said, approaching him. “Where did you get those stickers?” The man had a smooth, feminine chisel to his face, but also the jutting chin, prominent Adam’s apple and aquiline nose of a nobleman. He wore sneakers with his jeans, and his straight, dirty-blond hair appeared to be soft and feathery, like a baby’s. Around his neck hung a single Nikon with a 20-millimeter lens.

  “Sorry, no English,” he said.

  “Français, tu parles français?” I asked. The man nodded. I asked him, in French, where he got the stickers.

  “Bonjour,” he said, ignoring my question, “I don’t believe we’ve met. My name is Doru. What’s yours?” He kissed my hand. Then he blushed.

  “Deborah. Nice to meet you. Now tell me where you got those stickers.”

  Doru said my boss Henri had sent the stickers to him and to his best friend, Ovidiu, last month during the revolution, when they’d become permanent stringers for the agency. Gamma kept a stable of hundreds of stringers all over the world to cover the random spot-news events that their France-based staff photographers might not be able to reach in time.

  Ovidiu waved at us from behind the column of tanks. He was much shorter and darker than Doru, but he was dressed almost identically. And right there, in the middle of Ovidiu’s own acid-washed jeans jacket, was another package-sized Gamma mailing label. Ovidiu shouted something to Doru in Romanian, which I could tell from his body language must have been “Do you need me?”, but Doru waved his head no and motioned his friend to keep shooting.

  “You do know you and your little doppelgänger over there are wearing mailing labels,” I said, an arrogant mock to my tone.

  Doru played along, pretending to be shocked. “No! Really? I had no idea!” He had an angelic smile. He told me that he and Ovidiu, being Romanian, were nervous about getting beaten up by a mob of angry Hungarians. Since they didn’t have press passes to prove they were working for Gamma, they figured the stickers were the only solution.

  I was angry at Henri. It was hard enough making a living as a photographer. Not only had I arrived in Tîrgu-Mureş too late to shoot any battles, I was stuck spinning my wheels with two oddball, wild-’n’-crazy guys from the same agency. If any of our pictures should happen to sell, we’d automatically have to share the profit, which, on a $250, quarter-page photo would produce exactly $41.66 per person after Gamma took it’s 50 percent cut.

  After shooting a tense late-afternoon demonstration by a mob of agitated Hungarians carrying signs and candles in their clenched fists, Doru, Ovidiu and I found a French television crew who would be returning to Paris the following day and who promised to carry our three envelopes of film back with them. When we got back to the hotel, Nicolas was in the lobby, trying to politely seduce the hotel operator into getting him an outside line to France so he could file his story. I introduced him to my new sticker-covered friends and told him to join us for dinner after he’d filed. He promised he would and dashed off to the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” Doru said when Nicolas was out of earshot, “but who’s Johnny Bravo Ray-Ban Man?”

  “I met him on the plane,” I said. “He’s harmless. And pretty smart. And he’s letting me stay in his room for free, so be nice to him.”

  “Oh, I get it,” said Doru, with a tone that implied he was no fool.

  “No, you don’t. Really. We’re just sharing a room,” I said.

  After a dinner of greasy chicken Kiev, where the conversation was held half in Romanian (for Ovidiu’s sake, who spoke little French) and half in French (for my sake, who spoke not a word of Romanian), the four of us went back to Nicolas’s hotel room for a drink. Doru produced one of those ghastly communist cigarettes, the kind where you have to squash the paper end between your fingers. “Don’t smoke that stinky thing in here,” I said, taking out my pack of Marlboros. “Here, have one of these.”

  Doru took a cigarette from my pack and rolled it through his fingers like a fine Cuban cigar. He lifted it up to his nose to breathe in its aroma. “Ah, Marlboro. The symbol of free markets, capitalism, liberty.” He was smiling, trying to pretend his whole poor-little-commie act was a joke, but the overall effect was far more wistful than ironic. He lit the cigarette, took a tentative first drag. Then, slowly, he exhaled. “My first one,” he said, his eyes moistening, if barely, despite himself.

  As we smoked, Doru explained that because his father was a career diplomat, he and his brother were able to spend many of their early childhood years living in Switzerland, years that he recalled as an endless fantasy world of rich cheeses, sweet chocolates and fresh, unpolluted air. Then, the posting was over, and Doru’s family was forced to move back to Bucharest. They lived better than most, but that wasn’t saying much. Doru’s father had to resort to things like smuggling in a tape of Animal Farm so that his sons might begin to understand their contradiction-filled lives.

  “I used to cry myself to sleep, dreaming about chocolates,” Doru said. He smoked the remainder of his cigarette slowly and carefully, savoring both it and the moment with equal affection. Then he stubbed it out. “You want to work together again tomorrow?” He pulled a drunk Ovidiu to his feet.

  No, I thought. Tomorrow, I want to save you. I want to stuff you with chocolate and take you home with me. I want to bring you to a library and let you pick out any book you want. You thought Orwell was good? Wait until you read Bulgakov, Kundera. There’s so much I can show you.

  “Sure,” I said. Then I showed him to the door, where he kissed me playfully on both cheeks and where, once again, he lifted
my hand to his mouth. Doru had explained earlier that this hand-kissing business was not an affectation but rather a Romanian tradition. Hey, I’d said with a smile, I’m all for tradition.

  The next day, Nicolas and I both received calls from our bosses telling us in so many words to get our butts down to Bucharest. Rumor had it that the demonstrations would be getting bigger and angrier. Something was bound to happen. We were to leave Tîrgu-Mureş immediately. At about the same time as the phone calls, Doru and Ovidiu showed up, wearing the exact same clothes as they had worn the day before.

  “We’re leaving for Bucharest. You two want a ride?” Nicolas asked, nonchalantly packing his piles of precisely folded black clothes into his black suitcase. He repeated himself in Romanian for Ovidiu’s sake.

  Doru looked at me and blushed. “That would be great.” Ovidiu just nodded, his eyes betraying the frustration of his limited tongue.

  I told Doru to go get his bags, but he sheepishly explained that neither he nor Ovidiu had any bags. “It’s just us and our cameras,” he said. “We’re ready to go right now.”

  We checked out of the hotel, jumped in the car and drove south into the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, where the road began to twist and turn as the hills grew ever steeper. About an hour outside of Bucharest, Doru suggested we stop for dinner at a charming hotel in the picturesque mountain village of Piteşti. “They have dancing there,” he said, “live music. It’ll be fun.” Nicolas was all for fun, Ovidiu was hungry and I live for dancing to live music, so we all agreed to stop.

  When we walked into the cavernous restaurant, the tables were covered with heaping plates of food, clear green bottles of water, darker bottles of wine and full ashtrays. But all the patrons, save for a few too drunk to stand, were crowded onto the dance floor, swaying maniacally to the loud beat of the wedding-band version of “The Lambada.” The female singer, wearing a gaudy red sequined dress, belted out the tune as if inspired by God. A few of the revelers were actually weeping with joy.

  “Why are they crying?” I yelled into Doru’s ear so he could hear me.

  He grabbed my hand and yanked me onto the dance floor. “It’s the Lambada!” he yelled back, as if the tears required no further explanation. When I looked confused, Doru repeated himself. “The Lambada! You understand?”

  “No,” I yelled back.

  The noise was overwhelming, and Doru looked like he was searching for a way to explain something very complicated with as few words as possible. “They are free,” he shouted, suddenly picking me up and cradling me in his arms like a child. He began to spin me around. “They are crying because we are free.”

  After a while, the band stopped trying to play anything else. Every time they’d start up with a Romanian song, the patrons would sit back down at their tables and begin to eat, or smoke their cigarettes, or drink their wine. “Lambada!” one would yell from one corner of the room. “Lambada! Lambada!” shouted another, and then soon the whole place was begging to hear that silly melody just one more time, simply because it was foreign, Ceauşescu was dead and they could. The lady in the red dress capitulated and sang the song eight more times while we were there, and as we left to continue our voyage, we could still hear her voice echoing through the mountains behind us.

  That night, when we arrived in Bucharest and I saw a crowd of demonstrators gathered in front of the Inter-Continental Hotel, I decided to check into my own room. This had all the trappings of a potentially big story—masses of people, a recently collapsed government, poverty, breadlines, anger, upcoming elections, colorful flags with holes in them. I figured Gamma would definitely find me an assignment. Besides, Nicolas was starting to get on my nerves.

  “Why the separate rooms? You and Nicolas have a lovers’ spat?” Doru asked me, as he helped me carry my bags up to my room.

  “Doru, I told you. We’re not sleeping together. I was just trying to save money.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. Then he thanked me for dancing the Lambada with him, kissed my hand, and walked out the door of my room, which, at $120 a night, was more money than a typical Romanian could ever have hoped to have earned in an entire month.

  Procuring a steady assignment to cover my costs, however, proved more difficult than I had assumed. Within the next few days, every news organization, every journalist, every photographer I’d ever met on the roving international war circuit had all convened on Bucharest. The lobby of the Inter-Continental was filled with enormous metal cases of television equipment, burly men wearing photographer’s vests and carrying cameras, frantic daily writers wearing their deadlines in the creases of their brows and a murky, almost impenetrable cloud of cigarette smoke. The whole situation was, in the delicate vernacular of my fellow news gatherers, a pig fuck. A gang bang.

  Doru and I were out in the streets every day shooting demos. He only owned one wide-angle lens, so I shared mine. Every time he asked to borrow one, he would look down at his feet and hunch his shoulders as if apologizing, his face stricken with a mixture of embarrassment and rage. Doru, like every Romanian barking in the streets, was angry.

  Ceauşescu had been buried for nearly three months, but life in Romania had not improved. Bread was still hard to come by, and when a loaf did become available, it was usually stale. The Securitate—the infamous Romanian secret police force—still seemed to hold sway. Gas was scarce, toilets and elevators didn’t work, you couldn’t find a pair of shoes even if you had the money to pay for them. People needed a scapegoat, and for the moment, it was the provisional new guy in charge, Iliescu. Conspiracy theories abounded. Iliescu had stolen the gold faucets from Ceauşescu’s palace. Iliescu was a pawn of the Securitate. Iliescu was the anti-Christ. The Romanians had been lied to for so long that basic concepts such as fact and logic seemed to be utterly immaterial.

  When Doru and I would finish shooting the desecrated flags and the raised fists and the open mouths filled with petulant songs, we’d write our captions in the backseat of a taxi heading out to Otopeni airport. There, we’d scour the departure hall for a kindhearted and open-minded passenger to carry our freshly exposed film back to Paris. “Don’t worry. We do this all the time. Just try not to put the film through the X-ray machine. Make them hand-check it. A messenger will be waiting for you when you exit customs,” we’d promise.

  Then, to make good on our promise, we’d have to immediately leave the airport and zoom back to the phone queue in the basement of the Inter-Continental, where at least thirty journalists at any given time were all waiting—while cursing and pacing and smoking and scribbling—to place an international call. The hotel had dedicated ten clunky red plastic rotary-dial telephones for this purpose. They were all lined up next to one another on the far wall, which made it an ideal place to spy on your colleagues if, like me, you were so inclined.

  When we finally made it to the front of the line, we’d call Henri and give him a physical description of the incoming passenger—“tall, brown hair, beard, carrying a guitar case” or “short, fat, pimples, Madonna T-shirt”—as well as any news, hearsay or gossip we might have overheard on the current situation in Bucharest. Being Bucharest, it was mostly just gossip: “We hear the police might arrest people tonight,” “Someone told us the Securitate has hundreds of spies pretending to be demonstrators,” or even, “We spoke to a guy who said Ceauşescu is alive and living in Bulgaria.”

  Henri in turn told us he was able to sell our demo pictures here and there, but he had yet to procure any steady assignments. Meanwhile, my hotel bill was growing ever larger.

  Over yet another inedible dinner of fried potato cubes and burned meat (“What kind of meat?” I once dared ask, to which a surly waiter replied, “Why do you care?”), I was trying to decide whether or not to cut my losses and head back to Paris when Doru, blushing, suggested I move in with him. I could sleep on his couch. He would be a gentleman. We were working together and sharing our meager profits anyw
ay, he said, so we might as well share cheap accommodations.

  I politely thanked him and said I would gladly accept his offer.

  That evening, after helping me unpack my clothes, Doru covered his living room couch with fresh sheets and a blanket while I changed into an oversized T-shirt and brushed my teeth in the bathroom. When I came out, he was sitting on the floor, watching the news on television. “This is your space,” he said, pointing to the couch. “I will sit here on the ground.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You can sit on your own couch to watch the news,” I said, slapping the cushion next to me, but Doru remained on the floor.

  “No,” he said, his voice firm. “I am a gentleman. I will stay here.”

  When the news was over, he stood up from the floor and once again kissed my hand before heading off to his own bed. “Good night, my little Deborah,” he said, pausing for just a moment to stare into my eyes. “Sweet dreams.” There on his couch, alone in the dark, I tried to sleep with my fingers still tingling from Doru’s lips. And my dreams, when they finally came, were far from sweet. (They were lewd. With a Lambada soundtrack.)

  The following night, we were in the same odd formation—me on the couch, Doru in front of me on the floor, lights off, television blaring—when Doru, staring straight ahead, complained of a bad back. This was a normal complaint, coming from a photographer, but in his voice I heard a small trill of innuendo. He asked if I wouldn’t mind rubbing his left shoulder. I told him I’d be glad to rub both.

  Still sitting on the floor, he removed his T-shirt and pretended to pay attention to the images of Romanian demonstrators on the news, the light on his chest varying in intensity with the relative brightness or darkness of the TV screen. “That doesn’t look like Bucharest. Where is that?” I asked him, now straddling him from behind and kneading my fingers through the knots in his shoulders.