As for Doru, on the Monday following that first weekend with Paul, I took the train to Geneva, paid for his new car, and drove it back to Paris with him the following day. We argued during most of the trip. Doru said it was impossible to fall in love with someone during a single weekend. I said it wasn’t. On the night he arrived, I handed him a set of keys to my apartment, packed my bags and moved into Paul’s place in the Sixteenth Arrondisement.
Three days later, after an emotional good-bye with Paul, I returned with Doru to Romania to cover the elections. The four-day cross-country drive to Bucharest through Central Europe was most unpleasant, if picturesque. In Germany, we argued constantly, about nothing and about everything. In Austria, which really does look like the set for The Sound of Music, we kept getting lost. In Hungary, during a rare moment of peace, I tried patting my hand on top of Doru’s knee while he was driving. It was nothing more than a gesture of friendship, but he recoiled, pushed it away and told me never to touch him again. “Save it for your new boyfriend,” he said.
Then, a week or so later in Bucharest, just before Marion’s arrival to celebrate her birthday, I ran into Luc, who was also on assignment. He reacted to my sudden new devotion to Paul like a true Frenchman, that is to say sadly but stoically, with a lengthy philosophical monologue concerning the meaninglessness of love in a life whose inevitable end is always death, followed by an invitation to spend the night in his room. I told him I’d come up for a drink, nothing more, and when I did he dropped this small bombshell: “One of my old lovers called me. She might be HIV-positive.”
“What?!?” I felt like I was choking. Luc and I had been intimate together fewer than a half a dozen times, but a couple of those times we hadn’t used a condom.
I tried to be fairly conscientious about using condoms. The summer I’d worked at Magnum in 1987, feeling doses of both liberal guilt and morbid curiosity, I’d volunteered a couple of evenings a week—whenever I could get away, really—at Bailey House, an AIDS hospice in Greenwich Village. There I saw, firsthand and in Technicolor, the havoc wreaked by that still-new, still-mysterious disease: the Kaposi’s sarcoma, the blindness, the nausea, the slow and steady wasting away. I held hands that felt like chicken’s feet. I brushed hair that was falling out. I saw the ambulances and the hearses arriving in equal numbers, helped load gurneys into one, watched a coffin go into the other. I helped to clean out the rooms, disinfected them until their odors of decay were barely perceptible to the endless streams of new arrivals. Only afterwards, as I would wind my way through the cobblestone streets of the Village on my way to the Christopher Street subway station, would I break down and cry.
But did it stop me from playing Russian roulette with my own sex life? Of course not. Sometimes, making arbitrary judgment calls in the dark, I’d allow myself get swept away by a latex-free moment, which I know is inexcusable and stupid, but there you have it. AIDS was something other people got. Invisible Kryptonite.
Or so I told myself. But sitting there in Luc’s hotel room in Bucharest, listening to him speak, realizing that I could be touched by the same, well, plague! as those poor wretches in Bailey House, I became inconsolable. “What do you mean might?” I said.
My mind raced immediately back to Paul: sitting on the banks of the Seine with him, running around the Pompidou, waking up early every morning for six days straight just to stare at his sleeping face. Luc held my hand, smoothed his fingers gently through my hair. “I mean she had a test six months ago which came out negative, but she just found out her ex-lover is positive. She’s going tomorrow for a new test.”
“This can’t be happening,” I said. “Not now.” Not when I’d finally found love. Not when I’d finally understood how beautiful my life could be, any life could be. Oh God, no! I thought. “Goddamnit!” I screamed. I punched my fists into Luc’s chest, yelling obscenities, furious and manic. Then I cried myself to sleep in his arms.
A few days later, we found out that the woman’s test had come out negative. So did the tests I took over the next two years just to make sure. But the whole mess was yet another wake-up call: even with proper precaution, love could be just as risky, just as deadly as war.
When I returned to Paris, Paul had already left on a five-week trip to Moscow, but he’d borrowed my keys from Marion, sneaked into my apartment and left a gigantic, treelike yucca plant standing in the corner with a note attached to it. Take care of me, the note said. I need lots of water, sunlight and, most of all, love. Yours forever, Pasha. He’d adorned the note with a cartoon sun, some water droplets and a heart.
I detached the note, sat on my bed, and broke down again, my tears staining the felt-tipped words.
Later that summer, when Paul and I moved into our new apartment on the rue St. Joseph, the first thing we carried over the threshold was that plant. We held the clay pot between us, taking tiny sideways steps, careful not to let the top-heavy trunk topple over. “Here’s a good place to put it,” he said, motioning with his head and leading me to the window.
“Yeah, that looks perfect.”
We set the plant down by the open window and stepped back to admire it. Paul spoke first, giving voice to the words already percolating in my head. “It’s growing quite nicely,” he said. The leaves were rustling in the wind, dappled in a pool of midsummer light.
“Yeah,” I replied, squeezing his hand. “It really is.”
“I CAN’T DRINK IT. It’s disgusting,” I say, spitting out the sugary Russian juice with the distinct taste and texture of sediment into the kitchen sink. Paul and I waited in line for over an hour today at a drab Soviet produkty store to buy it. While we were waiting, I asked Paul if produkty was the Russian word for “juice.” He laughed.
“No, it means ‘produce,’ ” he said, “but it was an honest mistake.” Besides the juice and some flaccid-looking pickles, the shelves in the store were empty.
The line to buy juice stretched toward Pushkin Square, where a much longer line was snaking around Moscow’s newly constructed, first and only McDonald’s. We carried eight enormous bottles of juice back to our apartment past happy Russian comrades sitting down to trays literally overflowing with Big Macs and french fries, all of us, in our own way, proud, bison-toting hunters.
“What do you mean you can’t drink it? It’s sok. I grew up on the stuff,” Paul yells from the bedroom, where he’s getting dressed for our dinner party. We’ve invited only our Russian friends over tonight because the last time we tried to mix in a bunch of expatriate Americans, the two groups didn’t get along. The Americans, being typically American, were unintentionally patronizing. In return, the Russians, being typically Russian, were intentionally rude.
“Yeah, well, I grew up on Spaghettios,” I yell back to Paul, rinsing my mouth out with tap water, “but that doesn’t mean I’d want to eat them for dinner tonight.” I spit the tap water into the sink. I refuse to swallow it because a few people now have told us it’s contaminated with fallout from Chernobyl. It might be just a rumor, like most information around here, but why risk it? Tomatoes the size of small volleyballs have started to appear in the outdoor markets, and I’ve seen more than a dozen shoppers testing produce, when they can find it, with their very own Geiger counters.
Paul bounds into the kitchen, barefoot and shirtless in his jeans—a sight that, after more than a year together, still makes me dizzy—and grabs a swig of sok from my glass. Licking a few drops of juice from his top lip, he pronounces it delicious.
“It’s delicious if you like pond scum,” I say.
“I love pond scum,” he deadpans, kissing me on the cheek.
Paul returns to the bedroom to finish dressing while I sneak a peek outside through the curtains in the living room. The curtains are drawn, as per our landlord Misha’s request, so as not to arouse the suspicions of snooping neighbors, who might accidentally or perhaps intentionally let i
t slip to someone they shouldn’t that three foreigners have taken up illegal residence at Number 10, Ulitsa Malaya Bronaya. By Soviet law, Andy, Paul and I should not be living here but rather in specifically designated foreigner housing called diplomatichisky corpus (dip corpus, for short) where the KGB can keep a good eye on us. Unfortunately, dip corpus apartments rarely become available, and when they do, they’re expensive. So Misha, a friend of a friend, has agreed to let us live in his apartment while he spends the summer with his wife, Tanya, and five-year-old daughter, Sasha, in their dacha. It’s a good arrangement for everyone. We get a cheap, nice place to live, Misha and his family get $100 cash every month—between four and five times the average 1991 monthly Soviet salary—and if we’re all careful, none of us will get arrested. Even with all the rule bending going on in Moscow, it’s still hard to know how far one can push the bounds of glasnost until someone cries foul.
The other great thing about the arrangement is that every other weekend, Misha and his family come into Moscow to do their laundry (in a makeshift plastic contraption they hook up to the bathtub) and to buy food, which means that Paul is in charge of watching Sasha. He lives for those afternoons with her, and she, in turn, worships him. They go on long walks together, throw bread crumbs to the ducks in Patriarch’s Pond, talk about life. Seeing them bond like that makes me even more crazy with love for him. Clearly, Paul will be a good father one day, despite being abandoned by his own. We decide that if we should have ever have a daughter, we’ll name her Sasha.
Misha’s apartment, our illegal sublet, is on the second floor of a beautiful, old building in the center of Moscow, just steps away from Patriarch’s Park, made infamous as the spot where Berlioz slips and falls under the tram wheels in Master and Margarita. It’s also one block away from the fish store that never seems to have any fish and two blocks away from the bakery that sometimes has bread.
Like all stores in Moscow, the stores in our neighborhood are marked only by the name of their alleged commodity: “Fish,” “Bread,” “Shoes,” “Meat,” “Gifts,” “Produce.” There are also a couple of stores marked “Purse repair,” but I’ve never seen anyone ever go in or out of them.
I have my nose and right eye pressed against the glass of the window to try to assay the length of the line at the bakery down the street. It’s a block long. I yell to Paul in the bedroom and tell him to hurry over to the bread store so he can get back before our guests arrive. They’re scheduled to show up soon, but Russians are notoriously late, always by at least an hour. This is not because they’re rude. It’s just that here in Workers’ Paradise, time has no intrinsic value.
Paul yells back that he’ll be out in a minute and asks if Andy’s come back with the vodka yet. We sent Andy out two hours ago on his favorite mission, vodka search and retrieval. When we first arrived in Moscow in June, he had to run all around the city looking for vodka trucks that happened to be off-loading new shipments through the back-alleyway entrances to the stores; he’d slip the drivers ten extra rubles over the selling price, and they’d slip him a couple of bottles.
But now, with the new kiosks sprouting up all over town, it’s getting easier and easier to use rubles to buy not only vodka, but scarce foreign goods as well—things like Marlboros, bananas, pineapple juice, lighters, cognac and an end-of-the-summer glut of down jackets from China. At the kiosk near Metro Universityet, I even found a couple of old (pre–toxic shock pamphlet) boxes of Tampax.
The problem with the kiosks, however, is that you can never predict which one will have which merchandise on any particular day. And sometimes, if your favorite kiosk proprietor hasn’t paid off the right person, your favorite kiosk will explode into flames, leaving a pile of burnt wood and ash in its place the next morning.
There are two Western-style, foreign-owned grocery stores that carry most of the basic food items we could ever want to buy, so long as we buy them with hard currency. But with a box of granola selling for two or sometimes three times its normal rate, we can only rely on these shiny establishments as our stores of last resort. Even so, for tonight’s dinner, we went to the new one off Mayakovsky Square and splurged on fifteen dollars’ worth of Italian tortellini.
All told, it will have taken the three of us almost an entire day to scavenge for tonight’s food and alcohol, not counting the two hours I had to wait yesterday for Dima, my black market contact at the podarky (“gift”) shop on Kutoozovsky Prospect, to show up with the two large tins of black caviar he’d promised me.
By the time our Russian friends arrive, Paul’s come back with two loaves of bread, Andy’s made it back home having only finished off half a bottle of the seven bottles of vodka he found and the caviar is on the table. Our guests include two filmmakers, a journalist, an actor, an editor and other various Russian intelligentsia who all hang out in the same tusovka—which roughly translates as “gang” or “clique,” but is more of an intrinsic philosophy of Moscow social life.
Though the conversation is held in Russian, I’m sloshed enough to at least partially understand and even participate in the discussion, which becomes more and more animated with every new shot of vodka consumed. Our friends spend the evening both reveling in the fact that they are eating tortellini and smoking Marlboros at a Russian apartment rented for dollars (albeit illegally) by Americans as well as worrying with an almost preposterous fear that something will somehow happen in their ill-fated country which will close the golden doors of glasnost that Gorbachev has finally pried open.
“It can’t go on,” says Katya, a documentary filmmaker, the daughter of a famous Russian actor, and the de facto anchor of her tusovka. “They’ll find a way to beat us down yet.”
I try to argue, in my infantile Russian, then in English with Paul as my translator, that it’s fatalistic to assume something dire will happen. A few of our guests start to laugh and shake their heads. “Look at Czechoslovakia,” I say, trying to sound smart, “look at Poland—”
Katya cuts me off. “You don’t understand this country,” she says, the tone of her accented English pleasant, factual and decidedly nonjudgmental. She takes a long drag on her cigarette for extra emphasis. “This is not America. Or even Czechoslovakia or Poland. There is no logic here. We are Russians, doomed by geography and history to live miserable, dark, cold, snowy and pathetic lives.” She pours another round of vodka shots for all of us, emptying the fourth or perhaps fifth bottle of the evening, and holds her own glass aloft. “Na zdarovyeh!”—“To our health!”—she says, her voice soaked in irony.
“HOW CAN I SAY THIS POLITELY? They’re boring,” says Bob.
It’s 9 P.M. in the middle of August, and I’m talking on the phone with Bob Pledge, the president of Contact Press Images. I joined Contact, the agency that had represented my pictures of the Afghan war, a few months after the Romanian orphanage picture debacle at Gamma. Bob was very excited about my Soviet women project when we talked about it in Paris, but now that he has the contact sheets in front of him, he’s reconsidering.
“How boring?” I ask.
“Pretty boring,” he says.
“Great.” I’m having a bit of a career crisis. I’ve spent so long staring at a viewfinder filled with grim images that I seem to have forgotten how to frame a normal picture. The camera has begun to feel strange in my hands, heavy around my neck, like an extra appendage I no longer need. Shutterbabe, or at least the idea of her, is slowly dying.
I had an assignment to shoot the Bush/Gorbachev summit, but it bored me silly. Grip and grin, they call it, those handshakes between heads of state that are set up specifically for the cameras. I had to spend an entire week leading up to the summit sweet-talking bureaucrats from the Foreign Ministry, taking them out to lunch at the new Pizza Hut in order to procure the proper accreditations and press passes to the most sought-after events—the treaty signings, the press conferences, the visit to the tomb of the u
nknown soldier, the “casual stroll” through the Kremlin grounds—while making sure to keep myself off the lists for the peripheral pools—Raisa and Barbara visit hospitals, Raisa and Barbara sit down for a cup of afternoon tea, Raisa and Barbara dedicate a bronze duck statue.
Once I snagged the good passes, I then had to show up at the Foreign Ministry at the appointed time, only to be shuttled through metal detectors, loaded on to a bus and dumped into a room or inside a roped-off outdoor space for a good hour or two before the two presidents were scheduled to arrive for their three-second handshake/stroll/salute. When George and Mikhail would finally show up, it was all I could do not to get trampled by the other photographers, who would suddenly turn into a flashing pack of mad, rabid dogs. Many times, I ended up missing the picture altogether, getting shots of snarling Secret Servicemen or Bush’s left ear instead.
“Why don’t you shoot some street scenes? All the magazines keep asking me for current Moscow street scenes,” Bob is saying, his voice scratchy over the endlessly clicking international line. Another journalist told me he thinks that the KGB records every international phone call, which would explain the clicking if it’s true. Whenever I’m on the phone with my parents, I picture an enormous room filled with KGB agents, all sitting at their metal desks with earphones and notepads, frantically scribbling down every word out of my mother’s mouth—“Can you believe it? Your father started snoring right in the middle of the bar mitzvah. . . . Yes, I swear to God! . . . Richard, please, turn down the TV, I’m trying to talk to Debbie.”
“What kind of street scenes?” I ask Bob.
“You know, breadlines, babushkas, street peddlers, Red Square, Lenin’s tomb, whatever. Leave the Soviet women project alone for a month or so. I don’t think it’s working.”
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