Our group is mostly Paris-based photojournalists. As each photographer arrives, he completes the exact same ritualistic motions as his predecessor, as if everyone had read the same instruction manual. Step one: shove camera bag under table. Step two: extract Leica and place on top of table next to bread plate. Step three: fish package of cigarettes and Zippo lighter out of breast pocket, put lighter on top of pack, place between wineglass and ashtray. Step four: smile conspiratorially and say, “Salut, les potes!”—“Hello there, mates!”—but don’t mention the word “miners” or let on that you’ve heard that they’re armed and heading into Bucharest tonight. Step five: reach for wine bottle, pour and drink. Step six: deride the Romanian vintage as undrinkable, then, while continuing to drink it, allude to the cultural superiority of the French. Step seven: ask, “So, what have you all been up to?” then laugh at your funny joke, because no one in this group would actually be stupid enough to answer.
I’ve tried to save the seat next to me for Doru, but he arrives late and is forced to take his place a couple of chairs down from mine. After a few minutes, I lean over to sneak a glimpse of him. He’s talking to another photographer seated next to him, his back toward me. When someone across the table from him starts insulting Romanians, calling them stupid and clueless, Doru sits there listening to him stoically, bristling but saying nothing. Because of his fluency in French and his almost perfect Swiss accent, Doru passes easily as a Westerner. So when the waiter comes over to take our orders, and Doru says no thanks, he doesn’t want any dinner, most of the photographers just assume that the Swiss photographer in the funny-looking acid-washed jean jacket is simply not hungry. It would never occur to them that Doru can’t even afford to order a Coke, let alone a small appetizer or soup, and that he would rather starve than lose face.
Doru was right. I did pity him. I do pity him. He grew up in a shitty country with an evil dictator, informants for neighbors, deadly levels of pollution, lousy employment prospects, urine-stained elevators and inedible chocolate. What he doesn’t understand, and maybe never will, is that the pity was commingled with love. I loved him for his black humor and for his Lenin jokes. I loved him because he was not afraid to cry. I loved him because, instead of fleeing Vulturesti at dusk, when the fading light made shooting pictures next to impossible, he insisted we stay through dinner, at which point he rolled up his sleeves, grabbed a ladle and served the orphans their soup himself. I loved him because he knew he was damaged goods, he knew he’d been deprived, and he knew that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it except maybe to make sure a couple of neglected and abused orphans had some soup to eat on the one night he happened to pay a visit. I loved him because I knew that, underneath all that jealous paranoia and scar tissue, he loved me, too.
But had I been in love with him? Did we fall in love with each other? No. I had not. We did not. It was a hard truth to face.
Love, I realized, has many forms.
In Hebrew, the word for love is ahavah, which is related to the word for giving, hav. This is not a coincidence of etymology. (I was a Sunday school teacher for five years. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff.) In fact, it reflects an ancient and entrenched Judaic value system: to love means to give, to give means to love. But Judaism does not value all types of giving equally. In fact, Moses Maimonides, twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, codifier of the Talmud, went so far as to define eight different types of charity—tzedakah, in Hebrew—and to assign each type of tzedakah a descending level of value.
At the ethical pinnacle of Maimonides’ scale is the teach-a-man-to-fish school of thought: help a person help himself. Second, third and fourth are unsolicited gifts ranked by levels of anonymity, the more anonymous the better. At the bottom are levels five through eight, ranked last because both donor and recipient are known to each other. These are further broken down by the degree of solicitation, the generosity of the gift and the willingness of the donor to actually give.
Seen in this light, my charity to Doru could either be interpreted as the highest form of charity or the lowest, depending upon the viewer. The way I saw it, I was giving him tools to help him succeed in his chosen profession—a camera, a camera bag, then later the car. But Doru saw things differently. In his version, also a valid version, he had to ask for help, and then he had to face me, his “donor,” every morning. I was the capitalist master, throwing him, the “less equal,” communist dog, a few scraps from my dinner table. Until finally, his pride could no longer take it.
“Nothing? Nothing at all? Not even a small salad?” the waiter asks Doru.
“That’s right,” says Doru. “I don’t want anything.”
Just then, Peter and David make their grand entrance, filling in the last two empty seats at the table. They walk slowly, deliberately, nodding graciously to the barnyard riffraff.
Peter and David have become the darlings of the photojournalism world. Identical twins with identical manes of shoulder-length curly blond hair and identical brown leather blazers, they pride themselves on doing the international war/demo/strife/revolution circuit with style and panache. Both twins work on contract, which means that unlike the rest of us agency shlubs, they never have to worry about footing half their bills or procuring day rates for their extensive travels. Hence, the expensive blazers. And nice apartments in Paris. And many, many camera lenses, of all shapes and focal lengths.
David takes his seat. Peter, still standing, addresses the assembled group. “Does anyone want to see the galleys of our latest book?” he asks, and before anyone can demur, he produces a copy he just happens to have brought along to dinner and starts to pass its pages around the table. Then he holds up his wineglass to make a toast. These photos, he explains, represent a year of hard work and commitment. He feels privileged and lucky to have been able, with his brother, to bear witness to the crumbling of the Iron Curtain during this historic moment of social upheaval. And he feels confident that the photographs enshrined in this, their latest book, will live forever as the document that will best tell the story of the last days of communism.
Marion looks at me, and with her back toward Peter, pretends to stick her finger down her throat. “At least he didn’t take credit for knocking Lenin off his pedestal,” she whispers. Doru leans over the table to catch my eye. He smiles, shaking his head in disbelief. I smile back, happy enough to be sharing a simple comic moment with him. I catch some of the other photographers trading snide glances with their colleagues—men who covered the same events, the same Prague spring, the same Solidarity, the same Berlin Wall, the same perestroika as the twins, with what I’m sure they considered the same if not greater skill.
And then, suddenly, from outside, a shot rings out. It’s a single shot, and it vibrates off the brick wall of the hotel, the wall that faces University Plaza. The shot is immediately followed by a distinct scream. We all drop our cigarettes and our wineglasses, our forks and our mock-up pages of Peter and David’s book. Shit, I think. The one night I didn’t bring my cameras. Like synchronized swimmers, the others simultaneously reach under the table for their camera bags, grab their Leicas from on top and run toward the window. We hear a second shot, then a third, but we are too far up, too far from the crowd. Someone in our group, I don’t know who, shouts, “Miners!” Then another one, in English with a French accent, yells, “Rock and roll!”, which is the international journalist cry for “Let’s go shoot pictures and dodge bullets!” In an instant, a dozen or so adrenaline-pumped journalists are running for the exit.
Marion, sprinting next to me, is giddy. “Rock and roll? This is much more fun than waiting for Philippe to call!” she says.
“In a manner of speaking, yes,” I say.
Only Doru stays behind. “Come on, Doru!” I yell. “Let’s go. I’ve got to go back to your place and grab my cameras.”
“But who’s going to pay the bill?” he says. He looks conf
used.
“Fuck the bill,” someone yells from the top of the stairs, when the elevator takes too long arriving, “we’ll pay it when we get back.”
“But we can’t just leave without paying the bill . . .”
When I look back, I see Doru standing there, all alone at our abandoned table, desperately fishing around his nearly empty pockets for money he knows he will never find.
“DÉJÀ VU, HUH?” I say to Gad, staring out his car window at the peaceful demonstrators. I found Gad parked as usual in the Inter-Continental parking lot, about an hour after our group from dinner fanned out into the quiet, minerless plaza. I never even had to go back to Doru’s to fetch my cameras. “I wonder what those shots were?”
“Probably some joker,” he says. “Probably some idiot who just wanted to watch a bunch of frantic journalists run around chasing their tails.”
I roll down the car window and breathe in the night air. It’s spring now, the beginning of May, not quite warm but mild enough to leave the window open. Gad looks at me. “Did you hear about Jim’s orphan photos? Six double pages in The New York Times Magazine,” he says.
“Yeah, I heard,” I say. I also heard that, two days after Jim’s pictures were published, some anonymous donor sent a whole truckload of new mattresses to Vulturesti. A mere three on Maimonides’ scale, but pretty damned great as far as I’m concerned.
Jim’s published pictures also had the effect of forcing Gamma to distribute my own photographs of Vulturesti. (Although not the black-and-white ones. Those I would have to develop, edit and print myself upon my arrival in Paris.) Henri even called me a few days ago to tell me that one of my orphan shots had just won the Déclic du Mois, a picture-of-the-month photo contest cosponsored by Kodak and Photomagazine. The prize? Free publicity and a quarter-page photo in Photomagazine, as well as eighty rolls—four bricks—of film. Exactly twice the amount of film I donated to Jim.
Karma? Divine intervention? Coincidence? You decide.
“Now, see,” Gad says, getting excited now, “if I were a lawyer, I could actually do something for those kids. I could figure out how to get around the red tape of international adoption laws, get each one of those kids placed in a happy, stable home.” He pauses, smiles, his head seemingly filled with the endless possibilities. “Do you understand now why I want to go to law school? Do you?”
Yes. Of course. Adoption trumps mattresses.
“I do. I understand,” I say. I pat Gad on his knee. And I think to myself, Maimonides would have really liked my friend Gad.
Ovidiu peeks his head in the car. He has learned a lot of English in the past two months, what with all of the Western journalists who’ve descended upon Bucharest. “Hi, Deborah,” he says in English, “you know Doru where is?”
“Yeah,” I say. “He walked Marion back to the apartment.” That is, he walked Marion back to the apartment after emptying his pockets of every last bill and coin he had to his name to try to make a dent in our seventeen-person dinner bill. When the rest of us came back to finish our meal, we saw it sitting there in a neat little pile. Seven American dollars, two dimes, forty Romanian lei, eight Romanian coins, a deutsche mark and a British pound.
“Okay. Thanks. Need find him. He owe me. Fifty dollars. Orphan pictures,” he says. Then he walks away.
“What’s that all about?” Gad asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say, opening the car door and stepping outside.
DORU AND OVIDIU eventually stopped speaking to each other over that alleged fifty-dollar debt. Similar petty squabbles over money later alienated some of Ovidiu’s other friends as well. When he visited me in Paris at the beginning of 1991, Ovidiu absconded with one of my wool sweaters, worth approximately fifty dollars, which I chalked up to retribution for the money he felt Doru owed him. As the years progressed, he fathered a son who, as a toddler, watched Ovidiu mysteriously keel over dead in the middle of his living room. Some friends, including Doru, suspected he had somehow killed himself, with pills or whatever. His corpse underwent the requisite autopsy required by Romanian law, but the coroner was never able to prove definitively whether Ovidiu did, in fact, commit suicide.
Doru, with help from his parents’ diplomatic connections, moved to Geneva, Switzerland, the day after angry Romanian miners invaded University Plaza, wielding truncheons and baseball bats. There, he earned a scholarship to complete his graduate art degree. After finishing his studies, he then moved to Paris, where he was finally able to sit on the Champs-Elysées drinking Beaujolais and watching the sun set behind the Arc de Triomphe. He married a French woman, ran out of money and found himself having to manage an American-style fast food restaurant in order to survive. After his divorce, he headed back to Eastern Europe, settling down in Prague as a staff photographer for a Czech business journal. When he found out about his boyhood friend Ovidiu’s apparent suicide, he sat in his car and wept.
As for Gad, the summer before his matriculation at law school, he traveled inside northern Iraq behind enemy lines on an assignment to cover Kurdish refugees for Newsweek. There, he was captured, shot and killed by Iraqi soldiers while trying to protect his Kurdish guide from harm. At first, Newsweek claimed that since Gad was only shooting for the magazine on a freelance basis, they should not be held responsible for recovering the body. When people in the photo community cried foul, the magazine finally reversed its stance. But by then it was too late. The only thing Gad’s mother was able to retrieve from the battlefields of northern Iraq was her son’s bloody passport.
GAD WATCHES OVIDIU disappear into the darkness. “People are so strange, aren’t they?” he says.
“They sure are.” I slam the passenger door shut. “Anyway, no use waiting around here for miners anymore. I’m going back to Doru’s to get some sleep.” I lean my head in the window, tell him I’ll be leaving for Paris the following morning. “Got a boy back there who says he loves me,” I say, beaming. “Pretty cool, huh?”
Gad flashes me that cockeyed toothless grin. “Yeah, pretty cool.”
“If I don’t see you again before the fall, good luck with law school.” I kiss the tips of my fingers and reach them through the open passenger window to touch his nose.
“Thanks,” Gad says, grabbing hold of my hand, squeezing it tightly, then letting it go. “And you have a safe trip home.” He yawns. “I think I’ll get some sleep, too.” And with that, he climbs in the backseat of his car, covers himself with a blanket and closes his eyes.
PART THREE
FIX
MOSCOW, USSR, 1991
PAUL
“NO. DOBROYEH DYEN IS ‘GOOD DAY.’ Zdrastvootyeh means ‘hello.’ Three syllables, zdra-stvoo-tyeh. You see, it’s right here.” Paul points to the Cyrillic letters in my textbook. His voice is loud to compensate for the rhythmic clatter of wheels and tracks beneath us.
“Zdra . . . stvoo . . . tyeh?” I repeat slowly. While Paul nods, I return his smile with a scowl. “You’ve got to be joking.” I snap the book shut. “That’s not a hello. It’s a compound sentence.”
Paul laughs, his deep-set blue eyes flickering as they catch the sun strobing into our train compartment. Because the windowpane is filthy, the light is refracted, creating a nimbus of feathery follicles on top of his head. “Don’t worry, before we get to Moscow, you’ll be speaking fluent Russian. I promise,” he says. He plants a kiss on my forehead. Outside, Polish farmhouses rush by. I stare out the window and feel a shiver run down my spine.
“It’s sort of creepy, isn’t it?” I say.
“What? Being a Jew on a train in Poland?” he asks. I nod. “Yes. It’s creepy.”
Paul can read my mind. At first I was convinced that there were tiny elves in my skull who were sending telepathic messages to his, but then, as Paul and I got to know each other, I realized his brain just makes the same erratic connections as mine. Whatever else we might choose to
discuss, eventually it all comes back to either sex or the Holocaust.
“Zdrastvootyeh, tovareeshch!” Andy sticks his head in the doorway to the compartment, smoking a Camel. His bicep is massive, and it bulges as he brings the cigarette to his lips. Andy, like Paul, has blond hair and a Slavic face, but while Paul’s fine features and delicate hands might have belonged to Count Vronsky, Andy resembles a younger, hairier, more dashing Nikita Khrushchev.
“Tovareeshch? What the hell does that mean?” I pull out my new Russian-English dictionary and thumb through it, but before I can figure out where the letter t comes in the Cyrillic alphabet, Paul is saying, “ ‘Comrade.’ It means ‘comrade.’ ”
It’s June 1991. Paul has invited Andy to move with us to Moscow, where each of us hopes to save ourselves and maybe even each other. Andy is Paul’s former college roommate as well as his best friend. Back when they met as freshmen at Princeton, the two had bonded over their shared disdain for Soviet-style communism—Paul because he was Russian and had spent his childhood in Moscow, Andy because his Ukranian father had been a prisoner in Stalin’s labor camps. After college, the two drove cross-country together, where they floundered around San Francisco for a few months until Paul’s departure for Paris, but Andy stayed and never really stopped floundering. He’s spent the past year smoking pot, teaching an SAT prep course to pay the rent, and growing more and more despondent. When Paul called him to suggest the move to Moscow, he filled out the paperwork for his Soviet visa that very same afternoon. Andy hopes that by spending time in Moscow, he can finally make peace with some of the demons of his father’s past, the ones that still haunt his own present.
Paul, meanwhile, is going to Moscow in hopes of beginning a new career as a journalist. He recently quit his Paris-based job as a partner in a French-Soviet trading firm when he realized he could no longer differentiate between the mobsters and the mid-level Soviet bureaucrats he had to deal with every day. He’d joined the firm in the early, heady days of Gorbachev’s perestroika with the naïve yet idealistic notion that he could teach a country run by apparatchiks about the benefits of capitalism. That ended quickly, after about the fifth payoff.
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