Before they can say no, Doru and I run out to the hallway and bound up the stairs three at a time. We hear the soft, plaintive moans before we even enter the room. There, crammed together into a single crib, on a blanket sodden with their own urine and feces, lie five listless toddlers. They range in age from perhaps one to four years old. Two have no legs. Another looks like he (or is it a she?) has cerebral palsy. One has drool running down his chin, and the fifth one seems mentally retarded. When the children notice us standing over their crib, they flap their hands expectantly, five little baby birds, patiently waiting in their soiled nest for the return of a phantom mother.
I start to shoot, and Doru follows, our faces hidden behind lenses, our minds trying to concentrate on camera mechanics: f/2, 125th, shit, not even a 60th, but that hand fluttering is going to be too blurry. The smell! Don’t throw up. Flash? No flash. The picture will lose all emotion. Okay, just focus on the one kid lying still. The others can be blurry. Yeah, that’ll look good. Wish I had a step stool. I’m too low. Doru’s taller, he’s got a better angle. Let him shoot the wide shot. Baby birds. They look like baby birds, flapping. So much flapping. Oh my God. What is wrong with this country? I’ve got to get out of here.
VULTURESTI, ROMANIA, 1990
“I’ll be right back, Doru,” I say, which makes him jump, because up until now we haven’t spoken a word to each other. I run down the stairs clutching my mouth and pinching my nose, the sight and the stench finally overpowering me. There’s got to be a bathroom around here somewhere. I’m poking around closets and administrative offices along the corridor when I stumble across a door that leads to a moldy shower room. A trickle of tea-colored water leaks from one of the shower heads, splattering onto the mossy concrete floor. I step inside, hoping to find a toilet, and that’s when I see him.
There, in the middle of the room, lying on a wooden plank suspended midair between two chairs, is a tiny, naked, blue corpse.
I start to scream.
Doru is the first to arrive, shouting in French, “What is it?”, then Ovidiu, then the two nurses, lumbering lazily behind.
What is it? What is it? I think. I’m pointing to the body, my finger shaking. Oh, it’s nothing, nothing at all. Just a dead kid, that’s all. Here in the middle of a shower room. What kind of a fucked-up place is this anyway? I catch myself hyperventilating. Breathe normally, I think to myself. Breathe normally.
“Shit,” says Doru.
Ovidiu shakes his head.
The nurses take one look at each other and try to stifle a laugh. It’s nervous laughter, to be sure, but it’s laughter nevertheless. Laughter in a shower room at the foot of a child’s corpse. I stare at them, my mouth agape. “My God, Doru, tell them shut up.” But no translation is needed. My voice is stern enough that the women fall silent.
Romanian words pass back and forth between Doru, Ovidiu and the nurses until finally Doru translates: “They are sorry for laughing. Children die here all the time, so they were only laughing because you screamed. He committed suicide yesterday. He hit himself against a wall. Just kept hitting himself against the wall until he—”
I interrupt him. “Suicide?!” I scream. The boy was six years old. Eight at the most. Children die here all the time? What, one a day? A couple a month?
Doru snaps at me, more out of defeat than anger. “I’m just translating, okay?”
My voice rising in pitch, I tell Doru to ask the nurses how many children die here a month. He refuses. He looks at me with pleading eyes. “Deborah, please calm down. You’re trying to understand something that is incomprehensible.”
But I can’t calm down. “So why is this dead body here?” I ask. “Do they plan on burying him, or are they just going to leave him here to decompose?” Breathe normally.
Doru sighs. More Romanian words fly over the corpse. He tells me that they’re waiting for the doctor to perform an autopsy. “It’s Romanian law,” he says. “Anyone who dies in an institution has to have an autopsy.”
Of course, I think. It’s the law. I’m trying to remain calm. “Can you ask them if they follow any laws about feeding orphans? You know, making sure they don’t die of starvation?” I feel like hitting someone. “What about mattresses? Any laws about mattresses?” I glare at the nurses, and even if they don’t understand my French, they catch the drift.
“Calm down, Deborah.” Doru scowls at me. “It’s not their fault. They’re just following orders.”
Right. They’re just following orders. And there’s a dead body in a shower room. And there are children tied to beds. And flapping hands. And expressionless stares. And tattered clothes and emaciated bodies. You can’t fool me. I have seen footage like this before. It was black and white and grainy, the camera slowly panning across men, women and children standing gaunt behind barbed wire, branded with numbers and yellow stars, staring out with the wide-eyed dissolution that comes from knowing—really knowing—that there is no God.
Okay, so there’s no Zyklon-B coming out of the shower nozzles. Just water and rust. And no ovens. And obviously the scale and the scope and the impetus and the infrastructure are all completely different. A child in the camps would have felt his innocent laughter turn to screams then to suffocated silence within the short span of fifteen minutes. Here, at the Vulturesti Hospital for Unrecoverables, life is snuffed out the Romanian way—slowly. Asphyxiation by neglect.
After my Sunday school teacher taught us about Auschwitz, my dad took me to the bookstore to buy The Diary of Anne Frank. I read it so many times, the pages fell out. I started having recurring gas chamber dreams, and these dreams followed me into adulthood. In the dream, I’m naked and shorn and all alone amongst naked, shorn strangers when the gas is turned on. Like all the other women shrieking and thrashing and clawing and trying to breath, I throw myself against the door, hoping to pry it open or at least to find a crack for oxygen. Just when I realize that the door is locked and the seal is airtight, just as I feel myself being smothered and squashed by the other bodies trying to push their way up against the door, a hole appears in the wall. It’s small, just big enough for one mouth. My mouth. I breath through the hole, filling my lungs with fresh oxygen. When I turn around, everyone else is dead.
“Yisgadal, v’yisgadash, shmay rabah . . .” I stare at the stiff, cold cadaver lying naked before me and recite what I can remember of the mourner’s Kaddish. I’m not religious, but the words bubble up anyway, as if they’d somehow been encoded into my DNA. “Oseh shalom bimromav . . .”
Doru lets me finish my ancient mumblings, grabs my arm and leads me out to the dusty courtyard behind the orphanage. He offers me a cigarette. While we smoke he rubs my neck between his thumb and forefinger. “Stop trying to understand it,” he says, breaking the silence. He stubs out his butt on the ground. “It will only make you crazy. Like me.”
When the doctor finally shows up, smelling of whiskey and stale Romanian tobacco, he greets the nurses with familiarity, and they accompany him into their administrative office for a cigarette break. This leaves no one but Ovidiu, Doru and me to watch over the orphans.
The little girl in the blue nightgown will not leave my side now. “Mama, mama!” she yells, trying desperately to make her point. Her face is heart-shaped, with a huge forehead and flirtatious blue eyes partially hidden behind blond wisps of hair. She looks to be about five years old, maybe six. I put down my cameras, sit on a bed frame, lift her up and hold her in my lap. At first she hugs me, nuzzling her head deep into my shoulder. Yes, okay, I’ll take this one home. Just wrap her up, and I’ll take her straight home. I hug her back. Suddenly, the girl recoils. She sits up, arches her back. Before I realize what’s happening, she has grabbed my right breast in her hand and is clamping down hard on my nipple with her teeth. I scream and push her off me.
Just then, the two nurses emerge from the gray cloud of smoke in their office. They are carrying a sm
all, corroded saw and walking toward the shower room.
“Ask them what they are doing,” I say to Doru.
Doru stops them in the hallway, then runs back to the administrative office. I hear him yelling at the doctor. The two emerge, a wall of ice between them, and head to the shower room. “Follow me,” Doru says.
“What’s going on?” I ask, practically running down the hallway to keep up. Ovidiu is right behind me.
“The autopsy. Let’s go.”
As we approach the entrance to the shower room, we spot the two women. They have already started to saw into the dead boy’s skull, two lumberjacks cleaving a log between them, bisecting the forehead just above and parallel to his eyebrows. They chat amiably together as they go about their macabre task, their faces glistening and their armpits stained with sweat from the effort of trying to cut bone with a dull blade. The doctor walks into the room with us and leans against the far wall. Then he pulls out a toothpick and begins fishing around in his teeth with it, bored and otherwise idle.
What the hell is going on? I poke Doru and ask him why the nurses are performing the autopsy rather than the doctor, never mind that they’re using a rusty old saw to do it. He just shakes his head and shrugs, defeated. “Because they are,” he says. “Because the doctor is a fucking lazy bastard. I told you. This is Romania. Don’t try to understand it.”
I am simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the gruesome sight before me. I grab my Leica and hold it up to my eyes. Doru reaches for his Nikon. Ovidiu takes a last look at the sliced forehead and walks out. A few minutes later, I hear him retching in the courtyard.
I know, above all else, that I must keep myself from thinking. I shoot a medium shot of the saw cutting into the skin, trying to concentrate on lens and shutter and light, but I am caught off guard by the lack of blood. Theoretically, I understand dead hearts. But somehow it’s still surprising to see an incision that doesn’t bleed. I become hyperconscious of my own breathing, picturing platelets and plasma streaming through my arteries, branching off into the capillaries, then racing back up through my veins, darker, weaker and screaming for oxygen.
At what point after the boy bashed his head against the wall did his blood cells finally realize it was no use going back to the heart for more oxygen? And at what point before the boy bashed his head against the wall did he reach a similar conclusion? That it just wasn’t worth it, that there was no oxygen to be had.
One of the nurses holds the bottom of the boy’s face, her palms clamping down on his cheeks, her elbows braced on the table, while the other one tries to stick her fingers underneath the top of the incision just along the hairline.
The rapid-fire clicking sound of Doru’s motor drive echoes in the cement room. The nurses are now peeling the boy’s face off, pulling at it as if stripping the skin from a mango. Hair disappears under the retracted scalp. Eyes, then nose vanish under the folded-down forehead flap, leaving nothing more than exposed sinew—shiny, red, anonymous.
When the women finally extricate the brain, they motion for the doctor to come take a look, but he stands defiantly with his arms crossed, his back still leaning up against the far wall. He and Doru exchange angry Romanian words, but the women just shrug, poke the wrinkled organ a couple of times with their fingers and start in on the chest cavity.
They cut a vertical slice in the center of the boy’s rib cage, again with the rusty saw, and pull out, one by one, his vital organs: a liver, two kidneys, the stomach, the coiled-up intestines and, finally, the heart, silent and still. This time, one of the nurses actually walks over to the doctor with the heart in her hands and asks him to examine it. Once again, he refuses. Doru glares at the doctor but does not speak. The nurse looks back and forth from Doru to the doctor, sighs and returns to the body still carrying the flaccid heart cupped in the palm of her hands. She lays it down on the plank right next to the boy’s elbow, and starts to throw everything else back inside, in no particular order, the way you’d pack a bag if you were in a hurry.
I’ve got to get out of here.
I stop to change my film. Without the camera to shield my eyes, I start to feel weak. Queasy. The room tilts. I see the heart lying there, inert and cold. I see the women shoving it back inside the chest cavity. I see them sewing up the opening with a needle and black thread. I see the doctor, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke over the corpse. I see him holding up some official-looking papers, leaning them against the wall and signing them, his cigarette dangling from his mouth. But I see all these things in slow pixilation, a slide show punctuated by the sound of Doru’s shutter release, my eyes darting around from image to image in what feels more and more like a two-dimensional space. I picture the cavity behind my eyes, and instead of a brain I imagine an enormous roll of film, winding maniacally inside a bloodless metallic skull. A simple recording device, nothing more.
The women throw the body into a burlap bag, carry the bag to the broom closet, open the door to the closet and push the bag inside, wedged between a mop and an old cardboard box.
I ask Doru if the nurses plan to just leave the body in the closet like that.
He says it wouldn’t surprise him if they did, but after consulting with the women, he explains to me that someone from the morgue should be by soon, in a week or two tops.
I wander by myself out into the courtyard, and with one whiff of the puddle of vomit Ovidiu left behind, I throw up. Once I start, it’s hard to stop, and by the end I’m dry heaving, trying to regain control over my body. I am in bad shape. My hands won’t stop shaking. My left knee is in spasm. I can’t catch my breath. The sounds vibrating in my ear are garbled, as if muffled by a towel. My nose is running, my heart feels arrhythmic, my eyes are watering.
The brain, unlike a roll of film, seems to have an infinite capacity to record and, even worse, recall. Especially the more shocking images. It would be so much easier if, after every thirty-six gruesome frames, I could toss it out and replace it with a fresh brain. That way I wouldn’t have to remember or interpret, for the rest of my life, the faceless, disemboweled dead boy with the heart ripped out of his chest.
When the heaving finally stops, I wipe my mouth and eyes with the back of my sleeve and look up. I concentrate on breathing. After a while, my knee stops trembling. My hands fall limply to my sides. I look up into the sky, and it’s as if I’ve opened the pages of a pop-up book or put on a pair of cardboard 3-D glasses. First the clouds pop out, then a bird. I see the sun and the way its rays hit the newly formed buds in the trees. I see the separate planes of the orphanage building, I see the horizon receding in proper perspective. Everything that had previously turned flat now has heft, shadow, dimension, depth. I see a broken tricycle. It’s the first toy I’ve seen all day.
“DEBORAH, THESE ARE TOO GRISLY! I can’t distribute them! No one will publish them!” I waited an hour and forty minutes down here in the basement of the Inter-Continental for this phone call to Paris, and now Henri is barking in my ear, telling me my orphanage pictures are too hideous to publish. It’s been two days since I sent him the film. I was sure some magazine or another would have bought the story by now. But of course a magazine can’t buy a picture that its photo editor never gets a chance to see.
I tell Henri to just leave out the autopsy photos and send the others around to the magazines. I suggest that he might want to consider just sending the black and white I shot instead of the color, which would be less “grisly.” I ask him if he received my fax with the handwritten text I wrote to go along with the photos.
He tells me I should know by now that magazines don’t normally accept text written by photographers for publication. Or black-and-white film, for that matter, which is why he hasn’t even developed the Tri-X yet. Then he chastises me for disappearing for three days without any contact. “I found you an assignment to cover pre-election demos in Bucharest for Libération, and you were off on a honeymoon
with Doru in the countryside!”
I tell him it wasn’t exactly a honeymoon. I remind him that I found the Libération assignment myself, and that it would not be starting for another couple of weeks. I ask him to please, when he gets a chance, send the black-and-white film to the lab to be developed.
He tells me to get off the phone, to get my ass outside and to start shooting.
I feel numb. I hang up the phone and go for a walk outside, leaving my cameras inside my bag. I walk through the demonstrators milling about in University Plaza, past the empty shops with their long lines of Romanians spilling out of them, waiting to buy bread. Or shoes. Or scraps of tough, inedible meat. I meander my way back to Doru’s apartment. “What did Henri say?” he asks when I walk in the door.
“Not much,” I say.
“Did he sell the orphan pictures?” There’s an edge of frustration to his voice.
“No. Not yet.” But I do not elaborate. Since returning back to Bucharest from Vulturesti, we’ve been bickering a lot over small, stupid things, resorting to a mostly monosyllabic discourse. I can’t tell if it’s our emotional reaction to what we saw at the orphanage or if it’s Doru’s way of protecting himself, distancing himself from me. For my part, because Doru is counting on those orphan pictures to sell, and because I just don’t have the heart to tell him that Gamma is sitting on them, I feel a little devious. Which makes me snappish.
Doru gathers his equipment together and shoves it inside the new Domke bag I had my mom ship over for him from the States. He said he’d pay me back for it one day, but I told him, “Don’t be crazy. It’s a gift.” Doru now has two cameras in his bag, his Nikon F3 and the Nikkormat I gave him. The Nikkormat is the camera I shot my thesis with, and before that the Pussycat Lounge. It’s the camera that made me fall in love with photography in the first place. I told him it was too heavy and clunky for me when I presented it to him as a gift. He was polite enough to pretend he believed me.
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