In the Soviet Union of 1990, almost everyone, from the lowly to the powerful, could be bought. The price was never very steep—a few hundred dollars, a bottle of whiskey, a pack of Marlboros. All around him, Paul was watching Western businessmen surrender their souls to the intoxicating power of being hard-currency gods amongst ruble-carrying mortals. He started to realize that if he didn’t get out of the business soon, the elixir would destroy him, too.
The turning point came when Paul and his two partners, Serge and Philippe, were arrested in Moscow by the KGB. It seemed that Serge, a megalomaniac Russian émigré who could play ten chess games simultaneously in his head, had neglected to return approximately $90,000 that had been mistakenly transferred from a Soviet client. Philippe, the bean counter of the group, a straight-laced École Polytechnique graduate with an amazing collection of silk ties, saw the mistake and instructed Serge to send the overpayment back. But Serge, being Serge, refused. So the angry Soviet client called the “friends” he’d purchased at the KGB, the KGB roughed up and arrested Paul and his partners, Serge surrendered a few crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, and with the circle of corruption now complete, the three men were finally released, with only a few small bruises to show for their physical travails.
Mentally—well, that was a whole different story. After the arrest, Paul had trouble sleeping. He would bolt awake sweating, shouting Russian words I didn’t understand. So, at my insistent urging and because he knew he had to, he quit.
However, he refused to give up on the idea of Moscow altogether. It is his birthplace, he says, his heritage, and he feels like he still has a lot of reacquainting yet to do. He also says he wants to show me his old apartment building on the Ulitsa Krasnaya Armayskaya—Red Army Street—and maybe even look up his long-lost father.
A few days before quitting his job, he came up with our current plan. With the Bush-Gorbachev summit coming up in Moscow, Paul is sure that some news organization or another there will be able to pay him for his bilingual skills. Then, in his spare time, he’ll produce a documentary. He says he wants to focus it on the effects of glasnost and perestroika on Soviet youth. It’s an interesting topic, but for Paul it’s also a highly personal one. He knows that were it not for the vagaries of fate, he’d be the one selling matrioshka dolls and Lenin pins on the Arbat.
“I just don’t get it,” Andy says, squeezing himself between the seat and our suitcases. Every inch of floor space in the train compartment is filled with Paul’s and my worldly possessions—some clothes, a boom box, thirty CDs, a purple floral bedding set, a pot, a pan, a teakettle, a wooden spoon, a serrated knife, my guitar, my cameras, three hundred rolls of film, two cartons of Marlboros along with a pink and blue Tati bag filled with cheap cosmetics for bribes and a collapsible drying rack. When I suggested we lighten our load and simply buy another drying rack in Moscow, or better yet, dry our clothes at the nearest Laundromat, Paul actually laughed in my face.
“I mean, think about it,” Andy continues. “How can the entire Eastern bloc fall apart while Gorby’s left standing? It doesn’t make sense. At some point, there’s got to be a revolution. Don’t you think?”
Paul says he doesn’t think so. He thinks the reforms of perestroika will gradually lead to a capitalist economy. I’m not so sure. I’m certainly no expert on the Soviet economy, but I do know that if my country were a place without Laundromats or even drying racks, I just might be tempted to revolt.
Which frightens me.
See, I’m going to Moscow to escape things like revolutions. After Gad was shot, I made a promise that I would stay away from any stories involving guns and tanks. It was a solemn and spoken promise: I actually opened the windows of our apartment and stared up into the gray Parisian sky, directing the words to Gad. It sounds melodramatic in retrospect, but at the time it didn’t feel that way.
Instead, I’ve decided to shoot a nice, calm, black-and-white photo-essay on Russian women. I stole the idea directly from a book on the subject by Francine du Plessix Gray, which I read after Paul and I moved in together. I’m not sure any magazine will actually be interested in such a photo-essay—in fact, I’m not even sure it will hold my interest for very long—but I don’t really care. It’s not dangerous. I’ll get to use my beloved Tri-X and think in shadows again, and for now, that’s enough. I can always freelance for Newsweek or L’Express on the side, and, besides, our living expenses in Moscow will be negligible.
Andy looks at me and laughs. “I’m not saying the revolution will happen now. But someday it will have to. Communism failed. We all know that. Gorbachev knows that. But if he thinks his fellow tovareeshch will be happy with a couple of lame perestroika reforms, he’s even stupider than I thought. Pechenyeh anyone?” He holds out a box of Déli-Choc cookies he bought back in Paris.
Paul grabs one of the chocolate-covered wafers and starts to explain. “Pechenyeh is—”
“ ‘Cookie,’ ” I say, interrupting him. “That one I could get from context.”
Paul puts his arm around my shoulder and beams. “How did I ever find you?” he says, full of friendly sarcasm. He takes a bite of his cookie.
I give him my usual response. “Does it even matter anymore?”
We both laugh. The rejoinder has become our private joke, a sardonic tribute to the gods of chance and fate. It started at a Grateful Dead show we saw in Paris last fall, a few months after we met. The band was crooning “Touch of Gray,” and I was watching the skin on the back of our friend Josh’s neck melt when I felt Paul squeeze my hand in his. I turned to face him. “How did I ever find you?” I said, not exactly meaning for the sappy words to escape.
Paul took my entire face in his hands and kissed my forehead. His pupils, black from dilation, stared into mine. His face looked angelic, even while dripping. He started to laugh. “Does it even matter anymore?”
I felt my cheeks slowly rising up into my eye sockets, surrendering themselves to the smile. “Of course not,” I said, “it doesn’t matter at all.” The two of us doubled over with laughter after that, howling in that particularly psychedelic way over the absurdity of deconstructing serendipity. We were in love. This seemed certain. Or at least as certain as it could ever seem.
Everything else was just narrative detail.
THERE WAS NOTHING REMARKABLE about the message Paul left me on my answering machine that April 1990, while I was living with Doru in Bucharest. It was the typical “Hi-I’m-a-friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend” thing I always got from post-collegiate Americans passing through Europe: “Uh, yeah, hi. Romania, huh? Funny message. Your poor parents. Anyway, this is Paul. I’m George’s twin brother, you know, Brett’s Penn roommate George’s twin brother. I think George told me he met you a couple of times. Brett gave me your number. I’m in Paris, just got here, wanted to see if you’d like to have lunch one of these days. Give me a call when you get back.”
Yeah, right, I thought, as I scribbled down the message. Not only was the link tenuous—the twin brother of my childhood friend Brett’s roommate—I had less than two weeks in Paris before I had to head back to Romania. During that time I was supposed to find Matthew some job leads, I had a long-standing date planned with Luc, a smart, nimble-handed, Rimbaud-loving war photographer I’d originally begun to see for hygiene but who’d gotten under my skin and was now wanting something deeper, I needed to edit my film and print up some of the black-and-white orphan pictures, L’Express wanted me to go to Lille to shoot welfare recipients, Libération wanted me to come in and meet with the journalist I’d be working with back in Bucharest, Actuel needed me to shoot a quick story on French rap artists, my dirty laundry was, as far as I could tell, sprouting mushrooms in the back of my closet, and Doru was expecting me to show up in Geneva with a thousand dollars for his car, which he then needed me to drive with him back to Paris so he could show his work to a slew of French photo editors in the back-to-back meeting
s he’d asked me to prearrange. In fact, had it not been for Marion, I would have just ignored Paul’s message altogether.
Marion couldn’t stop crying. She’d just heard about her boyfriend’s indiscretion, the one that would soon turn him into a father.
I figured if I introduced her to Paul, it might take her mind off of things. Because I’d briefly met his identical twin brother, George, I knew three basic facts about Paul before going in: 1) he was a Russian immigrant, 2) he moved to the U.S. as a child and 3) he was attractive. Back in college, during a weekend visit to Penn to see my old friend Brett, I had taken a snapshot of George sitting barefoot on a windowsill, reading a book with a corona of light around him. Christopher, my professor, spotted the image on my contact sheet and suggested I print it up for class. “There’s something ethereal about this photo,” he said. “Let’s blow it up and take a look.” Later, while I was printing it in the darkroom, two of the women who’d been working alongside me stopped what they were doing to stare at the photo of George floating in the fixer tray. “Who is that?” they asked, in full-throttled italics.
“Friend of a friend,” I said.
“Exquisite,” said one.
“I’d do him,” said the other.
I was secretly hoping Marion would have the same response. That she’d find him exquisite and want to do him and then she’d forget all about stupid Philippe. And that’s why, despite my insane schedule, I called Paul back and planned a brunch in the Marais for the three of us.
On a cool spring Sunday afternoon, Paul met me in the lobby of my building. He looked exactly like his twin, with a few exceptions. Instead of standing tall and erect, like George, Paul had a casual, unselfconscious stature, as if he had not quite figured out how to display his plumage. His smile, too, was much more open, unguarded, even slightly goofy. And unlike his brother, whom I remembered as an impeccable dresser, Paul was wearing rumpled clothing at least one size too big for him. But the face was clearly the same—boyish, fair and Russian, with high cheekbones and a strong, angular chin. “Hi,” he said, shaking my hand. “I’m Paul.”
“I know,” I said. “You look just like your twin brother.”
He laughed. “Really? What a coincidence.”
“Sorry. My sisters are identical twins. I should know better.”
“That’s good.” Paul smiled, holding the door of my building open and motioning me outside. “Then you’re not going to ask me, ‘So, if I hit you, does your brother feel it?’ ”
“No. I promise I will never ask you that. And I won’t ask you about your secret language or playing tricks on teachers or swapping dates.” Though the air still had a slight nip to it, the terrasses of the many cafés lining the streets of Les Halles were filled to capacity and beyond with beautiful people wearing denim and leather, blowing smoke into the clear blue sky. At the Châtelet fountain, a lone street performer was belting out a mournful “April in Paris.”
“Thank God,” said Paul, “that makes things much easier.” He seemed to be only half joking.
We picked up Marion and walked through the narrow streets of the Marais until we reached Le Loir Dans la Théière, a neighborhood restaurant with large, comfy armchairs, old wooden tables and lots of magazines piled up here and there. As the three of us gobbled down our omelets together, Paul regaled Marion and me with funny stories about trying to do business between Russia and France—flying from Moscow to Kiev carrying trash bags filled with rubles, the thugs his partner had to hire to drive them around and “protect” them, the Muscovite prostitutes who threw themselves at Western businessmen for a chance to change their miserable lives.
As he spoke, his dirty-blond forelock flopped over his left eye, and he rocked back and forth whenever he became particularly excited about something. If for some reason he became really excited, his Doc Martens would start to bounce along, too, as if his body couldn’t contain all the crazy plots and thoughts ricocheting inside him. At one point, he became so animated he choked on his espresso, which came spewing out of his mouth and dribbled down the threadbare button-down shirt he wore under his equally frayed tweed jacket. This made him laugh. Clearly, Paul liked to laugh, especially at himself.
“So, what’d you think?” I asked Marion afterwards, as we walked down the rue des Rosiers. Two Hasidic men with their black hats and side curls were laughing in front of the kosher pizza shop.
“He was nice.” She eyed me suspiciously. “Why?”
“Oh, no reason. Just wondered what you thought. I mean, did you like him?”
Marion laughed and said if this was my thinly veiled attempt to cure her of Philippe, I could forget it. That I should warn her next time I wanted to set her up with someone. That Paul seemed like a perfectly respectable and decent guy, if a bit short.
“Short?” I said. We were approaching the Centre Pompidou, its mass of blue tubes sticking out amidst the staid Parisian cityscape. The French love to deride the Pompidou, but I think it’s one of the greatest buildings I’ve ever seen. “He wasn’t so short. He was adorable. And so funny. Didn’t you think he was funny?”
“Yes, yes, he was funny.” She looked at me. “You like him.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. I know you. I can tell.” She was laughing now.
“No, I don’t.” A bare-chested man in the sunken plaza in front of the museum was blowing gasoline-fumed flames into the air, each burst whooshing like a blowtorch. “Besides, that’s the last thing I need right now.”
Okay, so maybe Paul had charmed me, I thought to myself, but I meant what I said. The last thing I needed was yet another man to complicate my already far too complicated, compartmentalized, episodic, nomadic, tank gun blood war crazy fucking life.
There was Doru to consider, first of all. We’d been fighting, sure, but some part of me still thought we could make it work, that the chasm separating us could be crossed. There was Luc, who delighted in reading to me from Une Saison en Enfer and who had recently suggested we go off and shoot the world together, all the wars, all the strife, all the death. There was Matthew, who’d be arriving in less than a month to live with me. During my last telephone conversation with him, he’d sounded ecstatic about coming.
Each man said he loved me. In fact, I’d never had so much love directed my way, at a time in my life when the barbed wire was loosening, when it was finally starting to dawn on me that what I really needed—more than adventure or a few good rolls in the hay or some well-composed photographs to one day hang on my wall—was love. Real love, the kind of love that spurs sonnets and melts two separate, selfish beings into a single euphoric pot of goo.
It is so simple, the woman on the bus in Zimbabwe had said. So simple.
Well, yes. And no. Being loved is one thing. Finding true love is quite another: n2 - n + 2 = x. The variables—the n’s—were endless. Like sharing the same language (Doru and I will never be able to find a common tongue.). Or having the same goals (I’m not sure I really want to spend the rest of my life chasing wars with Luc. Or with anyone.). Or being able to trust (What if Matthew finds another long-legged blonde from Nantucket to kiss?).
After dropping Marion off at her apartment, I decided to spend the rest of that Sunday afternoon wandering alone through the streets of Paris, my Leica around my neck. I walked north, meandering through the crooked streets and narrow sidewalks of the Sentier. I passed through Pigalle, the famed red-light district, pausing to shoot a picture here and there. Click. Men entering a strip club. Click. Men exiting the strip club. Boring, boring, boring. Waste of film, even. I climbed up, feeling the muscles in my thighs tighten with each ascending stride along the steep passage from Pigalle to Montmartre. The route was unfamiliar, but I kept the white domes of the Sacré Coeur church in my sights as a beacon, to guide me up and away. I’d visited Pigalle many times while living in Paris, and I’d always loved the
visual irony of the Sacré Coeur hovering in the sky above the strip clubs. It was like one-stop Catholic shopping: sin, climb, beg for forgiveness.
Just before the summit, I spotted an old woman, wrinkled beyond recognition, feeding a baguette to some pigeons. “Vencz ici! Vencz ici, mes petits amis!”—“Come here, my little friends!”—she said. As she spoke her cheerful words, the pigeon brigade grew, climbing onto her shoulders, sitting on her lap. One of the pigeons grasped the lady’s right forefinger with his claws. This bird she pulled close to her chest, nuzzling her nose in the feathers on his wings.
I approached the woman, my camera to my eye. “Ça vous dérange?”—“Is it okay?”—I asked, pointing to the camera.
“Pas de quoi!”—“No problem!”—she responded. “Take as many pictures as you like. They are my life, these pigeons. My only children. I bring them a baguette every day, and every day they come to visit me. I love them. They love me. It’s a good arrangement.”
I was shooting like a maniac now, circling the woman carefully so as not to disturb the warbling pigeons. Click. A bird flies out of frame. Click. The woman throws some crumbs. Click. Click. Click. I’m thinking to myself, with pained resignation, That’s going to be me. If I’m not careful, that crazy old lady talking to the birds is going to be me. Alone. Relatively happy, but incomplete. A baguette-wielding, postmenopausal surrogate mother to a bunch of French pigeons.
I climbed up the stairs leading to the Sacré Coeur just as dusk was approaching and sat down on a step amidst the other tourists chatting, smoking, kissing, playing guitar, staring out over the city and sighing at its beauty. Paris lay below us, a muted gray sea of tiny white buildings and diagonal boulevards, the Tour Montparnasse popping its awkward head out in the distance. A few dense clouds were blocking the sunset, turning the sky into a vast domed ceiling of slate. Before long, everyone knew, the sky would darken, the lights of the City of Lights would begin to twinkle, the day would end. A deferential hush fell over the crowd.
Shutterbabe Page 25