Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “Okay,” I say, actually relieved to unburden myself of the project. It was a dumb idea for a photo-essay anyway, born only out of a desire to do something safe and interesting on an intellectual level, not a visual one. A photojournalist, especially a photojournalist whose livelihood actually depends on selling photos, has to choose her subjects carefully. Lots of things that are intriguing to read and learn about do not necessarily translate visually. Like computers. Or early cognitive development. Or quarks. Or Soviet women.

  Then there’s the more fundamental problem: I’ve realized I don’t love doing portraiture. I can’t be Annie Leibovitz, with her truck full of lighting equipment and industrial fans, her stylists, hair and makeup people all fluttering about her, fulfilling her festooned visions of famous faces. I can’t be Richard Avedon, with his stark white backgrounds and his large-format eight-by-ten Deardorff camera, collecting human torsos in a vacuum. I appreciate their work, but I’m starting to understand that what I love most about photography are the contextual accidents, the “decisive moments,” as Cartier-Bresson called them—images with irony, with narrative juxtaposition, with stories to tell.

  In fact, my favorites among my own photos were never actually produced on assignment. They were accidental, serendipitous street shots, homages to photographers like Cartier-Bresson, to Gary Winogrand or Robert Frank, not to Leibovitz or Avedon. Like the time I was shooting two Gypsy girls in Nîmes and a gust of wind blew their miniskirts up at the precise moment a priest stepped into the background. Like the old man I was shooting in a Parisian park who, as he was pushing his twin grandchildren in their stroller, suddenly stopped and placed his head in his hands as if he were either crying or giving up, while the stroller kept rolling ahead. Like the bulldog I shot whose owner, holding the leash proudly above him, shared the exact same jowls.

  NIMES, FRANCE, 1990

  PARIS, FRANCE, 1988

  PARIS, FRANCE, 1988

  Bob’s right. I need to get back to the street. “I’ll have twenty rolls for you by the end of the week,” I say. “Okay?”

  “That’s my girl,” he says.

  I hear keys jingling in the front door and the sound of laughter. When the door finally opens, Andy is standing there with his arms around two leggy Russian women. I recognize them and their cleavage from the footage Paul has shown me of his documentary. They are Irina and Svetlana, and they are hard-currency prostitutes, which, even if I hadn’t seen Paul’s footage, I could have easily figured out from their Western-style clothing and thick makeup. One dark, one fair, they both have the kind of lithe bodies and delicate facial features that might have earned them Ford modeling contracts had they been born in Duluth instead of Dnepropetrovsk.

  One of the unusual by-products of glasnost in Moscow is the loosening of the definition of the word “prostitution.” I was surprised when I found out that the typical Soviet hard-currency prostitute is not a streetwalker, and she is not the kind of woman who asks for payment up front. She’s what we Americans would simply call a gold digger. She’s pretty. Often quite smart. She expects gifts in return for her good company: makeup from France, clothes and shoes from Italy, plane tickets to London. She also expects a liberal powdering of pocket change, which can take the form of any hard-currency denomination, but should preferably come in tidy stacks of either dollars or deutsche marks. In fact, her standard of living is now so much better than the rest of the Soviet population’s that in a recent survey of twelve-year-old Russian girls who were asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” hard-currency prostitute topped the list.

  “Champanskoyeh, Debrichka! Drink, drink . . .” Andy’s holding out a wobbling, half-drunk bottle of Russian champagne to me and slurring his words. Ever since we’ve arrived in Moscow, Andy has concentrated his daily efforts in two parallel directions—drinking and getting laid. The latter seems to agree with him, even though he’s too broke to sustain most of the girls’ interest for long, but the drinking is starting to take its toll. Paul, ever the optimist, keeps thinking he can save his friend from this downward spiral. He even managed to get Andy a ten-dollar-an-hour job working with him as a desk assistant at ABC. But Andy arrived hungover and two hours late on his very first day and was promptly fired. A few nights later, he returned home at 4 A.M. with vodka breath, two black eyes and a bloody nose. When we asked him what had happened, he couldn’t remember.

  I take one look at the scantily clad girls and tell Bob I’ll call him back. Then I grab Andy and drag him into the kitchen, leaving the women by themselves in the living room. I admonish him for being drunk and for bringing Irina and Svetlana back to our apartment. “Andy, you promised,” I said. While I have no problem with Andy’s sexual proclivities, I do mind the excessive drinking, and I don’t like it when he brings these women back to our apartment. Not only is it against our landlord’s slightly paranoid rules for keeping us all out of jail, it relegates me to the tiny bedroom I share with Paul, often for hours on end. He promised Paul he would try to look for his own apartment when we arrived in Moscow, but after three months, he’s still sleeping on the living room couch, our own renegade teenage son.

  Andy just smiles sheepishly. “I’m sorry,” he says, looking down at his feet. “I won’t do it again. This is the last time. I promise.” He hugs me, tells me he’ll make it up to me. Then he stumbles back over to the couch, where the two women have saved him a place between them.

  I drag the phone into the bedroom and dial Paul’s number at work.

  “ABC News,” he says, proud of his new job. He was hired on the spot less than a week after our arrival, and he has already distinguished himself as smart, capable and able to leap through the type of bureaucratic hoops that could easily cripple even the most seasoned Moscow-based journalists. Once, when it was 1 A.M. and two 747 jetfuls of TV equipment that had just been flown in from New York got stuck in customs at Sheremetevo Airport, Paul simply hired five Russian army trucks, convoyed them to the airport, figured out which customs agents required bribes, and transported the entire payload back to the ABC bureau before daybreak.

  “Pasha, it’s me,” I whisper.

  “What’s the matter? Why are you whispering?”

  “It’s Andy,” I say. “He’s brought home two new women. They’re the ones from your video. They’re in the living room. And he’s drunk again.”

  Paul and I do not fight often, but Andy has become a bit of a thorn between us. I’ve grown to love Andy, warts and all, but I’d love him a lot more if he weren’t living in our apartment. The last time Andy pulled a stunt like this, I told Paul if it ever happened again, he’d have to choose between us. “Shit. Okay,” Paul says. I can here the sound of an edit deck rewinding in the background. “I’ll be home as soon as I can. I just have to finish up a story.”

  I bar myself in the bedroom and try to study some Russian, but I can’t concentrate with all the grunting and laughter seeping through the open transom. I try to picture the scene on the other side of the door, wondering if the women are actually enjoying themselves as much as their squeals would seem to suggest. Andy’s a kind man. Though fueled by the hormones of a teenage boy, he has the heart of a child. He likes to laugh when he’s getting laid, as if sex were an amusement park ride, the kind that spins you around really fast and then drops the floor out from under you. And he’s gentle, even when drunk. Does that make sleeping with him any easier to justify?

  An hour later, when I smell the postcoital cigarettes and hear Paul’s keys in the door, I walk out into the living room. Andy is playing our Roxy Music Avalon CD, and he’s sitting with Irina and Svetlana on the couch, drinking beer and stubbing out a butt. There are at least seven empty bottles and a full ashtray on the coffee table in front of them, along with the now empty bottle of Russian champagne. Andy’s shirt is off. The women are dressed, though Irina’s nipple is peeking out of her aquamarine spaghetti-strap top. She kisses Andy�
��s neck while Svetlana gently strokes his chest. I greet Paul at the door. He gives me a quick kiss on the cheek and marches over to the living room couch.

  “Okay, girls,” he says to the women, his voice firm but gentle. He’s clearly uncomfortable in his role as policeman, and he shoots me a look of frustration. I raise my eyebrows and stick out my neck to urge him on. “It’s late,” he continues. “Time for you ladies to go home.”

  “Oh, Pasha, let ’em stay. They’re not hurting anyone.” Andy has his aw-shucks innocent face on, the one he uses when he knows he’s been caught doing something naughty.

  Paul is usually a sucker for that face, but this time he says, “No, Andy. It’s time for them to leave.”

  “Oh, but Pasha—”

  “No, Andy.” He bids the women farewell and shuts the door behind them. Then he walks over to the couch to sit down next to his friend. I go into the kitchen, where I can still watch and eavesdrop. “Andy, this is not working,” Paul says, his arm draped paternally around Andy’s still-bare chest. “Deb and I, we’re trying to build something here together . . .” He waits a beat. “. . . and it’s not a brothel.” Paul’s gentle laugh defuses the tension and, taking his cue, Andy joins him.

  Then he adopts a more serious tone. He tells Andy we like having him, but that we’re not his parents. That he has to grow up, cut down on the booze. That if he wants to have drunken ménages à trois with hard-currency prostitutes, he’ll have to find another living room in which to conduct his business.

  I can hear Andy’s voice start to crack. “But I like it here with you guys. . . .” His words trail off.

  “Andy,” Paul says, unable to look into his friend’s welling eyes, “I think it’s time for you to . . .” But before he can get to “move out,” Andy is slumped over, passed out on the couch.

  I go into our room and bring out the spare bedding. Paul thanks me with a glance and puts the pillow under Andy’s head. Then he spreads the blanket on top of him. “Andrushka,” he says, using the Russian diminutive of Andy’s name, the affectionate version an adult would choose to address a beloved child, “what are we going to do with you?”

  ON A COOL AUGUST MORNING, at around seven-thirty, I am awoken by a call from another Andy, Andy Hernandez, my friend and fellow Moscow-based Newsweek photographer. “Get dressed and get your butt outside,” he says. “Gorbachev’s missing.”

  “Missing? What do you mean missing?” I try to rub the sleep from my eyes, briefly wondering if I’m dreaming. I see Paul in a half doze next to me. The phone feels cold against my ear. I’m awake.

  “Missing as in no one knows where he is. Rumor is he’s been arrested.”

  The words sink in, and I sit bolt upright in bed. The president of the Soviet Union is missing. This can’t be good. I rouse Paul. He looks up at me with that squinty-eyed, drowsy morning face. I tell him what I’ve been told. He has the same reaction as I did. “Missing? What do you mean missing?”

  “I’m not sure,” I say, as the two of us hastily throw on our clothes. Though it’s only August 19, there’s already an autumn chill in the air. I grab my leather jacket, shove a couple of rolls of film in the pockets, hang two cameras around my neck, and try to swallow. Presidents don’t just up and disappear without political consequence. At least I don’t think they do.

  Who would have arrested him?

  Paul’s head emerges from his sweater. He’s smiling, unable to contain his excitement. “I bet it’s the KGB,” he says, reading my thoughts as usual. “Or hard-line communists. Either way, there’ll be a reaction.” He’s practically giddy with anticipation.

  “Great,” I say, feeling nauseous. I sit down on the bed to get a grip.

  Paul stops dressing. “Oh, come on, Debs,” he says. “This isn’t the Gulf War. Gorbachev’s missing. That’s all.”

  When the Gulf War started, I was sick with the flu, Paul and I had recently moved in together and I had a vaguely foreboding feeling about the whole thing. From where I stood, far away from the amber waves of grain, Bush’s obsession with Saddam seemed scripted, the buildup of American troops looking more and more like a very expensive and dangerous publicity stunt. Gad called me in Paris, wanting to know when I’d be leaving for the Gulf, if I’d like to work with him when I got there, share car and hotel expenses with him. I blew my nose and told him I wasn’t feeling well, that I was on antibiotics, that the war was crap, that our movements would be restricted, that Bush was a nincompoop and that I would probably just sit this one out. I told my editors at Contact the same.

  Though these excuses were all true, I was too embarrassed to tell anyone, even Paul, another equally important reason for my ambivalence. At the time it seemed too wimpy, too girlie. I mean, what was I going to say, that I was in love with Paul, and suddenly the thought of dying in a war seemed much less romantic? My self-image was at stake. So was my career. I was supposed to be a photojournalist; I was supposed to be brave, scrappy, fearless, on a plane the moment a bomb drops, as full of macho bravado and testosterone as the boys. I was supposed to be Shutterbabe, intrepid superhero. But ever since I’d met Paul, I couldn’t even menstruate without contemplating the loss.

  Luckily, Paul had understood this without being told. He brought me soup and nursed me back to health. He sat with his arm around me on our couch in our cozy apartment on the rue St. Joseph, watching the smart bombs falling on CNN and playing the clown to make me feel less guilty. “Now tell me,” he’d say, pointing to the SCUD falling on the TV screen, his intonation mimicking a third-grade teacher’s, “which is better—A) sitting here with me or B) standing under one of those? And no fair choosing ‘none of the above.’ ”

  Later, when I broke down after I heard about Gad’s execution, when I collapsed and started shaking and screaming because I couldn’t deal with the dissonance between my fury over Gad’s death and my elation at having eluded the same fate, Paul let me sob into his shoulder until his T-shirt was soaked.

  But today, here in Moscow, with Gorbachev missing, Paul wants to see the news, not watch it on TV. Which, because it’s the sentiment by which I used to live, I understand. “Come on,” he’s laughing, tickling me and pulling me off the bed. “Gorby needs us.”

  I tell him if it’s all the same with him, I’d rather just stay home and organize my socks. But then I stand up, and Paul says things like “That’s my girl” and “It’s probably no big deal,” even though I can tell he feels otherwise. If it were really no big deal, he wouldn’t be carefully arranging his Hi-8 camera and microphone in his bag and unloading an extra battery from its charger. He peeks into the living room to check on Andy while I finish checking my equipment. “Not home yet,” he says, which doesn’t alarm us anymore. He scribbles a note for his friend, and we head out the door. The revolution has begun, it says.

  I’m still slightly queasy and my heart is pounding as we run down the stairs of our apartment building, two by two. But when we step outside onto the sidewalk, we both stop, silent. The early morning sun is streaming down Malaya Bronaya. Birds twitter in the trees. An old lady with a broom made from twigs is going through the motions of street sweeping. It’s 7:45. Moscow is still waking up.

  Paul starts to laugh. “See, told you,” he says, as we walk down the street. “Nothing’s happening.”

  That’s because everyone’s still drunk, I think to myself, but in deference to Andy I keep my mouth shut.

  We decide to head to Red Square, for no other reason than it seems the most logical place to hold a demonstration if a demonstration were to be held. We go on foot, taking Malaya Bronaya to Pushkin Square, walking past the McDonald’s and the statue of Pushkin, and then slowly making our way down Gorky Street until we reach the Intourist Hotel. Nothing seems amiss. Gorky Street looks like it always looks at this hour, mostly empty, too wide and haphazardly dotted with idle street sweepers, stumbling alcoholics (Is that Andy?), and shuffling
workers in their gray imitation-leather shoes and permanent scowls, carrying empty plastic bags that they hope to later fill with loaves of bread or slices of pig lard.

  We stop the first person we run into. He’s a middle-aged man, wearing a windbreaker to match his melancholia, and we ask him if he’s heard the news about Gorbachev. He looks at us as if we’ve just told him the funniest joke he’s ever heard and walks on.

  We ask a few more random pedestrians if they’ve heard any news about Gorbachev. They, too, think we’re nuts and walk on. Holding my hand, Paul leads me down a set of stairs, into the underground walkways beneath Manezhnaya Square, and then out and up the cobblestone plaza of Red Square toward St. Basil’s Cathedral. “Maybe they’ve got Gorby locked up in there,” he says, pointing to the cathedral and smiling conspiratorially. “Like Rapunzel.”

  “Good theory,” I say, playing along. I glance skyward. “Except, of course, Gorbachev is bald, so . . .”

  We are trying to giggle the tension away. For the moment, it’s working.

  St. Basil’s looks resplendent in the morning light, its multicolored onion domes sprouting skyward like gigantic dollops of psychedelic soft-serve. Legend has it that after St. Basil’s was built, Ivan the Terrible—true to his sobriquet—had the architect’s eyes gouged out so that he should never again be able to design something as perfect or beautiful.

  I’ve been meaning to shoot some stock images of St. Basil’s, so I step back into the middle of the plaza to frame my shot. I’m in the middle of snapping off a few when I see Paul run over to shoot a small group of demonstrators who’ve just taken up a position between St. Basil’s and the entrance to the Kremlin. The only words I can make out on their Cyrillic signs are Gdyeh Gorbachev?—”Where is Gorbachev?”

  Now that’s stupid, I think. Didn’t they learn anything from Tiananmen? Unless a banner is written in English, it might as well be a tree falling in one of those peopleless forests. I explain this to one of the men, and he takes out a black marker and writes, “Stop coup d’état,” on the plastic bag slung over his shoulder.