“Timişoara. We should go there tomorrow. Too many photographers in Bucharest right now.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Let’s do that. I’d like to see Timişoara.” Then, suddenly, overwhelmed with a tenderness that I can only describe—if oddly so—as half maternal, half carnal, I bent over from my perch on the couch and kissed the back of his neck.
Doru quickly turned around and offered me his mouth. We stayed like that, locked in an awkward embrace, for a few minutes longer until he placed his head in my lap and hugged my legs tightly to his cheek, like a child. Then he stood up, sat down next to me on the couch, and began to gently undress me, pausing to kiss and caress any newly exposed skin. We made love on that couch in an almost trancelike slow motion, both of us trying to get the dance right.
Afterwards, weighed down by fatigue, I felt Doru pick me up and carry me from the living room into his bed. There, he covered me with his quilt and lay down beside me. When I opened my eyes, I caught him staring at me.
A few minutes later, Doru began to sob. I could tell he was trying to do it quietly, but the muffled sounds and the small vibrations woke me up.
“What’s the matter?” I asked. I turned to face him.
“Nothing, nothing,” he said. “I thought you were sleeping. Good night, my little Deborah. You gave me a beautiful gift tonight. I’m just happy, that’s all.” Then he turned away from me.
I hugged his back tightly to my stomach, wanting to understand.
After awhile, his crying jag now finished, he turned back around and said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to fall in love with you.” I detected a slight tinge of anger in his voice, a sudden sense of detachment in his demeanor. “You’re going to finish up here, go back to Paris, walk on the Champs-Elysées and sit in a quaint little café with a glass of Beaujolais watching the sun set behind the Arc de Triomphe.” His features then softened, and he cupped my face in his hands. “And I’m going to be stuck here forever, pining.”
“JESUS, DORU, do we have to go through this bullshit again? No, for the eighty-fifth time, I did not fuck Nicolas.” The first time Doru asked me this question, I was confused, because I thought baiser meant “to kiss” or just “a kiss”—the way I’d learned it in French class back in junior high school—and not “to fuck,” its more common and colloquial definition. Doru mistook my confusion for waffling and has been angry about it ever since. “And I did not fuck Gad either, if that’s what you were actually asking.”
I push him away from me and scoot to the edge of the bed, where I bury my head in a pillow. If I were to move another inch, I’d fall off.
“That’s not what I was asking,” he says.
“Yes it was,” I say. I pause, trying to decide if it’s even worth arguing anymore. “Besides, why does it even matter? Even if I did have sex with Nicolas, it would have happened before I met you. I’ve had sex with lots of men in the past. Why do you even care?”
“Because I do,” he says.
“Well, you shouldn’t,” I say.
I take small solace in the fact that he and Ovidiu, friends since childhood, have lately been arguing as well. I’m not exactly sure what is going on because they yell at each other in Romanian, but Doru tells me it has something to do with money.
“Gad’s quitting photojournalism,” I say, trying to ease the conversation away from yet another minor explosion of misunderstanding.
“Is that so?” Doru answers, not really interested. He inches over to me and cradles me from behind. His limbs are so long, my whole tiny body fits snugly between his neck and his knees. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be jealous. I know you and Gad are old friends.”
“We are.” I’m still not looking at him.
“I love you.” He kisses my ear.
“I love you, too,” I say, which is neither entirely false nor exactly true. In fact, I’m having a hard time understanding precisely what I feel for Doru.
“Sure you do.” He sighs.
“Stop it,” I say, wondering if Doru will ever feel comfortable sitting at a café sipping Beaujolais in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe.
DORU, OVIDIU AND I are in the parking lot of the Inter-Continental, scanning the license plates of the cars and searching for the little white Oltcit we’ve just rented. When we finally locate the car, a Romanian knockoff of the Citroën Visa, Ovidiu takes two Gamma mailing labels out of his camera bag and affixes one on either door. I point to a label and mime the word “why” with my palms facing up.
He just shrugs as if it should be obvious and says, “Securitate.”
Because Ovidiu and I cannot communicate verbally, except through Doru (which is tiresome), we’ve become adept at using our body and exaggerated facial expressions to converse. Ovidiu has a kind, plain face that lends itself to this task. He wrinkles his nose to show disgust. He rolls his eyes whenever Doru gets into one of his paranoid huffs. If he wants to thank me, even though he now knows how to say “thank you” in English and in French, he prefers to just squeeze my two hands tightly in his while looking into my eyes. If he catches Doru kissing me, he holds his hands to his heart, raises his shoulders and smiles. If the kissing between Doru and me goes on for too long, as it often does, he throws his head down in third-wheel angst and pretends to sulk. Either that or he taps on his watch.
But pantomime has its limits. Without words, it is not obvious to me why Ovidiu is worried about the Securitate. I ask Doru to translate.
Doru explains that because the license plates on our rental car are the type normally assigned to foreigners, we’ll be more prone to getting stopped by the Securitate, who, once they stop us, will want to extort our money. The press stickers will make them think twice before doing so.
We’ve rented the car to take us away from Bucharest. Doru thinks we shouldn’t waste any more time shooting political demonstrations in University Plaza when there’s an entire undocumented country full of post-communist ruins. A friend of his has just come back from Copsca Mica, for example. It’s a mining town that is so polluted with black ash that color pictures of soot-covered faces come out looking as if they’d been shot on black-and-white film.
We drive out of the city on a mission to find orphans. Doru has heard rumors of Dickensian-type conditions in some of the Romanian orphanages, which for some reason he keeps calling Les hopitaux des irrecuperables.
“Hospitals for unrecoverables? What do you mean by that?” I ask.
Doru stares at me with a look I’m starting to recognize. It’s the one where he’s standing on the far bank of the river, I’m standing on the near, the river is very wide, and we have no bridge. “You know, unrecoverable. Children who can’t be saved,” he says.
“Oh, I see. Children who can’t be saved . . .” I repeat absentmindedly. Doru checks his rearview mirror and looks pleased, like maybe the river is not as wide as he thought. Like maybe he could try swimming. Except now I’m actually digesting the words, translating them into English in my head. “Doru, excuse me, but what kind of a kid can’t be saved?”
Doru furrows his brow in confusion. “What do you mean?” Now he turns his gaze away from the road to look at me. “Lots of kids can’t be saved. Lame ones, retarded ones, the bastards, the blind . . .”
And I think to myself, the chasm is too wide. If either of us tries to swim to the other side, we will drown.
Since there are no Yellow Pages in Romania, the only way to search for orphanages is to drive around the country and look for them. On Doru’s hunch, we drive to a small town called Becini and start questioning the locals. I sit in the car while Doru and Ovidiu question shopkeepers, street sweepers and random pedestrians, but they all shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. No. Sorry. Can’t help you. Never heard of such hospitals. Try the next town. Maybe they have one.
Doru spots the former communist party headquarters of Becini and f
igures it’s as good a place as any to continue our inquiries. The local bureaucrat, a pudgy, chain-smoking man with pockmarked skin, assures us that no such orphanages exist anywhere in Romania. Pointing at me, he asks Doru where we plan to spend the night, since the one hotel in Becini has rules against lodging foreigners. When Doru can’t come up with a proper alternative, the man insists that we sleep in his office, which comes out sounding much more like an order than an invitation.
I spend a restless night. I’m snuggled between Doru and Ovidiu, wishing I’d brushed my teeth before bed and staring up at an enormous marble bust of Lenin. In the darkness, I can’t help thinking he looks like a cross between Mr. Clean and the red cartoon devil from the Underwood ham commercials. I’m about to tell Doru this, but then I remember he’ll have no idea what I’m talking about.
Sometime before morning, I need to go to the bathroom, but I don’t know where the bathrooms are. I rouse Doru, but he says that all the bathrooms are locked until morning, as are the doors leading to the outside. “What if there’s a fire?” I ask.
Doru looks slightly annoyed. “We’ll burn. Now go back to sleep.” He covers me with his jacket and his arm.
But I cannot fall back asleep. I stare up at Lenin, with his triangle eyebrows, his triangle nose and his self-satisfied smirk, and I am unable to shake the feeling that the man is mocking me.
The next morning, freed by the janitor, we pee and drive out of Becini. Ovidiu, who normally prefers to sit quietly in the backseat, starts to hum the notes from “The Lambada.” Doru joins in and soon all three of us are absentmindedly crooning together. We’re searching for a town called Vulturesti—where Doru thinks we might finally find an orphanage—but since there’s no Vulturesti indicated on the official map of Romania we bought back at the hotel, we resort once again to asking around. One man tells us it’s twenty miles north. Another says it’s forty-five miles to the east. A few people have never heard of the city. Ovidiu suggests we stop for lunch and continue our search on full stomachs.
Since restaurants in Romania are scarce, we’ve brought along some sausage, stale bread and water. We stop to picnic atop a hill in the middle of an open field, overlooking a town that could very well be Vulturesti. Or not.
When the food is gone, Ovidiu goes for a walk. Tells us he has to go relieve himself, but both Doru and I know he’s just being nice, trying to give the two of us a moment alone. Doru takes out a pack of Marlboros from the carton I bought for him and offers me one. With his Zippo lighter, also a present from me, he lights first my cigarette, then his own. Then he kisses me gently on the forehead. “What am I going to do when you’re gone?” he asks, smiling and blowing smoke rings into the spring air.
Gone? Don’t be silly, I think. I won’t go without you. We can make this thing work. We’ll get you a visa. You’ll come live with me in Paris. I’ll tell Matthew to cancel his ticket. You’ll move into my tiny apartment, and we’ll make love every night. Okay, every morning, too. You’ll work for Gamma, start earning some money. Okay, maybe not right away, but soon, like in five years or so when your archives start generating some cash—you know, the stuff you don’t necessarily want to shoot, but the stuff that’ll sell, like that picture I took of the Eiffel Tower during the Bicentennial with the fireworks behind it. That one stupid picture sells all the time. Of course, while you’re busy building up your archives, your debt to the agency will pile up. You won’t be able to help me with the rent, and you’ll probably get angry when you can’t even find fifteen lousy francs in your pocket to buy a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch. You won’t have time to read Master and Margarita, or any of the other books I’ve carefully picked out for you, because you’ll be too busy just trying to survive. You’ll think every male friend of mine wants to sleep with me, and you’ll ask me suspicious questions about where I’ve been. You’ll meet my parents, who will fly to Paris for a visit and take you out to a dinner of oysters and champagne at La Coupole, and you will resent this as well, because you grew up listening to smuggled Animal Farm tapes and pining for just the tiniest taste of Swiss chocolate. In time, you might even grow to hate me.
“Let’s not talk about that right now,” I say.
Vulturesti, when we finally find it, is a small, pastoral hamlet with gingerbread houses nestled into cozy hillsides. The smell of horse dung seeps into the car as Doru rolls down his window to ask a buggy driver for directions to the Hospital for Unrecoverables. To our surprise, the man knows exactly what we’re talking about. His wife happens to work there as a nurse. Horrible place, he says. Then he tells us to follow him.
When we pull into its gravel driveway, the orphanage looks like any other of the quaint gingerbread houses scattered through the hills of Vulturesti: it has a whitewashed exterior, an orange-tiled roof, a couple of windows with green shutters and a wooden door. This surprises me somehow. I guess I had imagined it would look more Gothic, more like a set design from Oliver Twist. Ovidiu and I stay in the car, while Doru goes in with the French lipsticks we’ve brought along as bribes.
A half hour later, Doru comes back to the car. The lipsticks are gone, and his face is ashen. “What’s the matter?” I ask him. “Where are the lipsticks? Can we go in and shoot now?”
Doru says something to Ovidiu in Romanian. Ovidiu just shakes his head and looks down at the ground.
“What? What?” I ask. “Speak in French, please. Doru, what’s going on?”
“They took the lipsticks. We can go in and shoot. But Deborah, it’s pretty bad in there.” Again, I picture a scene out of Oliver Twist: children in worn clothing, overcrowded rooms, broken toys, watery gruel, some dirty-faced kid holding out his bowl saying, “Please, sir, I want more.”
“Doru, I’ve seen bad before. I think I can handle it.”
But nothing—no thing, no place, no photograph, no film, no experience, no nightmare—could have ever prepared me for the Hospital for Unrecoverables.
Before we even get inside, we are surrounded by a chaotic swirl of children. They’ve seen us from a small, barred window, and they’ve come running out of the orphanage, squinting. Some of them are naked or nearly so, their bodies covered with bruises and layers of dirt. The ones who are clothed are dressed in ripped night garments in hues ranging from soot gray to muddy brown. Many of the boys have large holes torn in the crotch of their tattered leggings, and they stare at us while tightly grasping their penises in the way a normal child might clutch a favorite stuffed animal. One of the girls has fastened herself to my leg, wailing, “Mama! Mama!”, but most of the others just grunt. A dark-haired boy, maybe five years old, opens his mouth to scream. Nothing comes out. Another boy, nearing puberty, just rocks back and forth on the tips of his toes, slapping his own face at regular intervals. His penis—a man’s penis—hangs out of his underwear, flopping to and fro. I try to avert my eyes by turning back to the mute screamer, but he looks so much like that Edvard Munch painting, I can’t rest my gaze there either.
“Welcome to my country,” says Doru. His eyes are slits, and he bites into his upper lip with his bottom teeth. Then he spits on the ground. “Welcome to my fucked-up country.” He looks more embarrassed than horrified. The mute boy now reaches up to Doru, his hands stretching and trembling. Pick me! Pick me! Doru scoops him up, slings him over his shoulder, and begins to shoot. The boy holds on to his neck and refuses to let go.
A few minutes later, two custodians, dressed in crisply starched nurses’ uniforms, accompany us inside to the main room of the orphanage, a filthy, dank and airless box, its six bare planes created with equal parts poured-concrete and indifference. The place reeks of urine. I look over just in time to catch one of the boys taking a piss in the far corner of the room, his wet stream hitting and temporarily staining the surface of the wall slate gray. In the center of the room is a narrow aisle, bordered on either side by a single row of metal bed frames, all of them flecked with white paint chips. Ther
e are no mattresses.
Doru asks one of the women why there are no mattresses, and she explains that they were all destroyed by incessant bed-wetting.
One of the boys, emaciated and naked from the waist down, squats on one of the bed frames, his toes curled around the cylindrical slats, his right ankle tied with a piece of ripped cloth to its headboard. He screams and bangs his head against the cold metal, grasping the bars like an angry caged monkey. “Untie me! Let me down!” he says. The two nurses—can they even be called that?—ignore him.
Neither Doru, Ovidiu or I say another word, because language has suddenly become inappropriate. So we pull out our cameras, hide our faces behind them and start to shoot, each for our own particular reasons—Ovidiu because he’s human, Doru because he’s furious and me because, for the first time in my career as a photojournalist, it seems like the most morally appropriate action to take.
We know we have to record them all, each and every filthy orphan face, so we fan out across the room and begin to work. I start with the tied-up boy. When I approach him, he barks at me and tries to bite my hand. The nurses are off in the corner, playing cards, so the girl in the torn blue nightgown, the one who called me Mama, intervenes on my behalf. She whispers something to him, calming him down. Snap. I shoot the two of them together. Snap. I shoot another boy screaming hungrily into his rusty lunch bowl. Snap. And another one jumping up and down. Snap. And another one just sitting there, alone in his thoughts on a bed with no mattress.
VULTURESTI, ROMANIA, 1990
VULTURESTI, ROMANIA, 1990
VULTURESTI, ROMANIA, 1990
“Is there another room?” we ask. The women in the white uniforms tell us there is, upstairs, but there’s no need to go up there because that’s the room for the truly unrecoverable children.
Shutterbabe Page 21