Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  The machine-gun fire is unrelenting, coming in angry spurts and cackles, crackling over the voice of the enraged tank commander, who’s shouting Russian words I either don’t or no longer understand. “Paul!” I scream again, raising my head for just a second to let the sound escape, and just as I do, I see a man no more than a few yards in front of me fall to the ground. Blood squirts out of his skull and onto the pavement. It mixes with the rain and flows in small, quiet rivulets down the gradual slope of the pavement to where I lie paralyzed.

  I open my mouth to scream, but the sound that comes out is nothing like I’ve ever produced before. It’s guttural and shrill, a moan more screeching tire than human, and it comes from a place inside my body I don’t want to find again.

  Somehow, I get up the courage to crawl on my stomach, inching forward with elbows and knees toward the trolley cars, but they are now engulfed in flames, utterly impassable. If I could just get over the wall behind me, I’d be fine.

  I will beg.

  Still crouching, the gunfire to my back, my hands stretched beseechingly into the air, I start to shout. “Pozhalsta! Pozhalsta!”—“Please! Please!”—I yell up to the people behind the wall, and within seconds I am lifted up and over, skinning my knee and the side of my face against the wall on the way up.

  Stunned and in an oddly calm, psychotic daze, I wander aimlessly through the crowds on the other side of the wall after that, my hair falling out of its braid, my clothes soaked with mud, rain and the blood of an unlucky stranger. When the remaining tanks finally retreat, and the demonstrators joyously take over the one they set ablaze, I shoot a picture of a euphoric man in front of the burning trolley cars, his hands raised victoriously in the air like a quarterback’s after a touchdown. This is the photo Newsweek will choose to run as a double-page spread in their next issue, accompanied by three various others I also shot. I practically step on another man, whom I think I recognize as the one who got the bullet, but I can’t be sure. It was so dark back there, and he’s lying on the other side of the wall from where he fell. Whoever he is, half of his forehead is gone, and someone has just left him lying here all alone on the side of the road, his brains leaking out of his skull. In his pocket is a pack of cigarettes. He won’t be needing those anymore.

  I fall to the ground behind the man’s head and pull out my camera. Looking through the viewfinder, I make a vague attempt at proper framing, but not for Newsweek’s sake. Pictures of bloody heads missing big chunks of flesh are not published in America. No, this is more of a souvenir photo, a small keepsake to remind me of the darkness.

  MOSCOW, USSR, 1991

  MOSCOW, USSR, 1991

  I press the shutter. My flash goes off. I press the shutter again, then again, waiting to hear the high-pitched whir of a recycling flash, knowing full well that without the flash the pictures will come out completely underexposed. I take my eye away from the viewfinder and look down at my battery. It is finally dead.

  PAUL AND I MANAGE TO find each other amidst the residual flames and anarchy, and when he hugs me I begin crying all over again. “You’re covered in blood,” he says.

  “I know,” I say, giving in to the sobs. “I lost you back there.” My tears soak his shirt.

  “No you didn’t. I’m right here, see?” He takes my hands and puts them on his cheeks to prove his point, and when I don’t laugh he lets me cry a little more, using his thumb as a squeegee. A few minutes later he says, “Let’s go,” and I want to just stay there hugging and bawling and chewing on life, but I know we have to get Paul’s footage back to ABC within the next hour or so, and I need to call Contact on the satellite phone to tell them about my photos, otherwise what the hell were we doing back there boxed in between tanks and bullets? There had to be a reason.

  We walk quickly, both still dazed and disoriented, clinging tightly to each other as we make our way on foot back to the bureau. At first we try to speak, to make sense of what we saw—“That was pretty intense, wasn’t it?”—but after a while we submit to the silence that descends when words become impotent.

  It’s after 1 A.M., and yet the streets are still choked with people, their umbrellas, their smoldering cigarettes, their outrage. Because of the blood on my clothes and my scraped cheek, we are stopped periodically by curious barricade-sitters, who ask us to explain what we saw back there on the Ring Road, but our imprecise answers inevitably disappoint. Everyone wants numbers. How many died? We don’t know. We saw two, but we heard there were more. How many injured? A few. How many tanks were there? Five, maybe six or seven. How many shots were fired? A lot.

  Death is so much tidier when it’s reduced to statistics. Numbers are safe, empirical. Three dead, eighty dead, a thousand dead: these are the facts we crave, the stuff we can understand. Sure beats imagining one man, lying all alone in the rain, his brains slowly oozing out of his skull.

  Even six million is fathomable as a number. It is large, horrible and awesome in scope, but conceptually much easier to stomach than the thought of a single person—someone just like us—standing naked, cold and abandoned, waiting for the gas to be turned on.

  Paul and I finally arrive at the ABC bureau. When we open the door, both of us out of breath, we see a sight so incongruous with the madness we’ve just survived that it makes us stop and stare. There in the middle of the room, sitting on a foldout metal chair with her head upside down between her legs, is Diane Sawyer. Impeccably dressed, with perfect little pointy shoes, she is vigorously brushing her famous blond hair, tousling it, stroking it, making it perfect. When she finally flips her head up, the hair falling flawlessly around her face, she sees us staring at her and gasps. “Oh, my,” she says, her signature voice mellifluous and deep. “What happened to you two?” She addresses the question not really to us, but rather to the bustling room at large, which makes her query feel like one of awkward celebrity politesse, not curiosity.

  Paul, never one for catching subtleties in conversation (is any man ever?), starts to explain—“Well, you see, we were on the Ring Road . . .”—but before he can get another word out, a producer appears yelling, “Live shot!” and two tungsten lights go on, and last-minute makeup is applied, and there’s some discussion about a flyaway strand of hair, and then Diane says, “Okay, I’m ready.” She quickly blots her lipstick one last time.

  IT IS DAWN by the time we make it back to our apartment. The door has been left unlocked, and an acrid smell of melting plastic—and, what is that? metal?—is wafting from the apartment into the hallway. “Jesus, what’s that smell?” Paul says, and then he sees the smoke coming from the kitchen and runs inside to investigate while I dash into the living room to check on Andy. I see him lying naked, fast asleep on the pullout couch, his arm around a new and equally naked conquest. There are empty beer bottles, champagne bottles, vodka bottles and a half-drunk bottle of Jack Daniel’s spread haphazardly on random surfaces throughout the room. On the coffee table, pushed aside to make room for the foldout bed, are two ashtrays, both of them brimming with butts and bottle caps.

  “Goddamnit, Andy!” Paul yells from the kitchen, angrier than I’ve ever heard him. “Debs, come here, I need your help. He left the burner on. It melted the fucking teakettle.”

  I run into the kitchen. The teakettle looks like the watches in those Dalí paintings, only worse, melted flat and gooey and drippy all over the burner. Paul has filled a bowl with water, which he is throwing onto the smoldering mess to cool it down. He hands the bowl to me, tells me to fill it again and douse the area with water. Then he marches into the living room, his footsteps like thunder, and tries to shake Andy awake. “You idiot!” he says, his voice acrimonious, frantic.

  I throw some more water on the burner and then step into the living room, where I prop my tired body against the wall and yawn. “Relax,” I say to Paul. “It’s fine. We’ll clean it up later.” I notice the naked girl open her eyes, then, seeing me, sh
e quickly shuts them closed again, covers herself and pretends to sleep. Andy is still drunk, barely able to rouse himself, even with Paul helping him. He makes a valiant effort to sit up but then slips back down, a giant, brawny rag doll, his head falling limp on the pillow. Paul, shaking his head in disgust, muttering “Idiot” once again, this time more quietly, stands up and wanders over to the window. He rubs his bloodshot eyes and stares out blankly at the peaceful street, the new day unraveling below. “You could have died,” he says to Andy. To himself. To no one in particular.

  FOUR DOZEN OR SO babushkas are lined up along the brick wall, sitting on chairs or milk crates in their threadbare dresses and flowered head scarves, sunning themselves with closed eyes and skyward-tilted faces in the courtyard of the apartment complex on Krasnaya Armayskaya Ulitsa, Paul’s childhood home. It’s the end of summer. Snow will be coming soon.

  “You think he still lives here?” I ask Paul, as we wander from doorway to doorway, poking around. Looking for clues.

  “This is Moscow.” He laughs. “No one ever moves.”

  We are searching, if half-heartedly so, for Paul’s father, the one he never knew, the one whose anti-Semitic mother sent him back to the army when she found out her son had impregnated Paul’s Jewish mother. “Well, why don’t you just ask one of those ladies if they know him?” I say, pointing to the tidy row of shrunken apple-faced sunbathers.

  “Yeah, yeah, okay,” he says, and he walks over to talk with the nearest old lady. “Vih znayetye Pavel Sokolov?”—“Do you know Pavel Sokolov?”—he asks her.

  “Znayoo,” she says, answering in the affirmative and looking slightly miffed at having her afternoon tanning session interrupted. “Konyechno znayoo”—“Of course I know him.”

  I try to make sense of the rest of the short, rather curt conversation, but it involves words such as “doctor,” “stomachache,” and “appointment,” which confuses me, and then they’re on to Thank you, do you have his telephone number, I’ll call, sorry to bother you, good-bye, and then Paul is grabbing my hand, dragging me away from the babushka.

  “What the . . . what happened? Who was she?” I ask, completely befuddled.

  “Who, that old woman?” Paul says, making a game of it just to drive me crazy. He glances over his shoulder at the babushka, then returns my gaze with a smirk of irony. “Yes. Well. That was Grandma.”

  “What!”

  “My grandmother,” he says, stifling his giggles and shushing me with a finger to his mouth. He pulls my hand even harder, dragging me farther and farther away from the courtyard with quick and purposeful strides. After two interminable minutes, when we’ve gone far enough away from the strange little wrinkled woman that she has already become nothing more than a strange little wrinkled memory, he stops in the middle of the sidewalk and explodes with laughter. “We pick one babushka out of the forty-five sitting there, a total stranger, and it has to be my friggin’ babushka. The anti-Semite!” He’s laughing so hard, he has to bend over.

  I start laughing, too, as I watch Paul, hysterical now, practically hyperventilating, trying to fill in the details between breaths. He tells me he was so flummoxed when the old lady said that Pavel Sokolov was her son and that he was right upstairs in the apartment that served as his office, he didn’t know what to say. He knew his father was a doctor, so he made up some story about having a stomachache and not having time to stop by just now and that he’d call and make an appointment for tomorrow.

  “So, are you going to make an appointment?” I ask, still laughing, but then I stop and so does Paul.

  He sighs and catches his breath, that ever-present smile stretched across his face. He takes my cheeks in his hands, then rubs his fingers down my nose. He kisses my forehead, but tenderly, like a father. Like a man defining for himself the concept of family. “No,” he says. “I won’t. I don’t really feel the need to anymore.” He puts his arm around me, and as we walk away he holds his face up to the sun. “Come on,” he says, “let’s go home.”

  BETHANY BEACH, DELAWARE, 1997

  JACOB

  THE SUN IS RISING. Tom Brokaw is sleeping, his chair reclined as far back as it will go. A producer and freelance cameraman, seated next to each other in the back of the bus, are trading western hemisphere war stories. Standing in the aisle a few rows up, leaning his elbow on a headrest and surrounded by his minions, Bryant Gumbel is holding forth on the proper garlic-slicing method for a squid-ink pasta dish he recently discovered. And me, I’m sitting across from Tom, staring out the window at barefoot Dominican children and ramshackle houses passing by, trying not to barf.

  “These voodoo guys were fuckin’ carrying machetes, and we were like ‘See ya . . .’ ”

  “You have to cut the cloves into paper-thin slices, not crush them. Then you sauté the tomatoes . . .”

  I don’t know if it’s the talk of machetes, Bryant’s garlic, the bumpy bus ride, last night’s chicken dinner on the plane down here or some combination of the four that is forcing the bile up my esophagus, but I do know that if this bus doesn’t stop soon, Mr. Brokaw and his sporty field jacket will be covered in my vomit.

  It is mid-September 1994. Paul and I have just celebrated the first anniversary of our wedding (a lovely affair in a D.C. hotel, nice flowers, good dancing, lots of friends, funny toasts, many tears and an outrageously expensive white silk dress now embalmed for eternity in my closet). We live in New York City, on the Upper West Side, where we moved at the beginning of 1992, leaving our expatriate lives and snowy Moscow far behind. I work in television now, for Dateline NBC. I tried continuing with the photojournalism once I got back to the States, even went up to New Hampshire to cover the primaries, but my heart was no longer in it. I still loved the “photo” part of the equation—the street shooting, taking pictures of my friends, hanging out for hours in the darkroom—but the “journalism” side, the one that paid, was no longer appealing: the political rally grip-and-grins, the random portrait assignments from Newsweek, the daily attempts to find visually compelling, marketable stories that did not involve danger, guns, violence, war, drugs or even extended trips away from Paul.

  So when Paul decided he wanted to go to film school, and the task of supporting us fell on my shoulders, I unceremoniously sold off my beat-up Nikons (not the Leica, never the Leica) to a used-camera shop and took what I thought was a very safe and impressive-sounding senior production associate job at ABC News’s Day One. This led to an associate producer position at Dateline. Which, ironically, led to this bus trip across the Dominican Republic to the Haitian border, where an armed conflict threatens to erupt.

  President Clinton has just announced he will send fifteen thousand American soldiers into Haiti to restore order, which basically means he’s finally decided to oust Raoul Cedras and pave the way for Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s return. It also means no commercial flights are allowed to land in Port-au-Prince, so a group of us from the various NBC news shows (Today, Nightly News, Dateline) chartered this bus in Santo Domingo, where we all arrived by plane—some late last night, others, like me, in the wee hours of the morning. Boarding the bus with everyone before dawn, I felt like a kid setting off on a school field trip, except instead of bologna sandwiches, Fritos and room-temperature milk cartons, our specially catered boxed lunches contain gourmet chicken salad, individually wrapped blondies and big bottles of cold Evian.

  “No way we’d have all this food if Tom and Bryant weren’t here,” one of my colleagues whispers to me. Her name—weirdly enough—is Pascale. Plus ça change, plus c’est la meme chose.

  Pascale’s got a point about the food, but I’m more impressed by the fact that we’re riding a chartered bus to cover an insurrection. “Here, have mine,” I say, handing her my lunch. “I’m too nauseous to even look at it.”

  To pass the time and to concentrate on something other than my gurgling stomach, I start fli
pping through the black loose-leaf notebook I was handed as I sped out of the Dateline offices. The notebook’s filled with recent wire stories and press clippings about the current situation, meticulously prepared by some poor, overqualified, Ivy-educated underling. It’s collated. Highlighted. Striated with yellow dividers and anal-retentively labeled tabs: “CLINTON: statement 9/1/94,” “CEDRAS: reply,” “ARISTIDE: NYTimes article,” “POLITICAL OVERVIEW: Time mag.” As I perfunctorily thumb my way through it, not really attending to the meaning of the words, my mind wanders back to the crumpled mess of ripped, espresso-stained Afghan war clippings I shoved in my camera bag before heading on a plane to Peshawar to meet that other Pascal, the mean one. The memory of that trip, though painful, now makes me smile.

  Like Afghanistan, Haiti is one of those countries whose political upheavals and murderous atrocities I’ve never been able to keep straight. In fact, the real reason I’m on this bus to Haiti is because I speak fluent French, not because of my expertise on the Duvaliers or the troubled history of the island. Plus my boss, Neal Shapiro, the executive producer of Dateline and a decent, good man, was desperate and asked nicely. Plus I knew Pascale would be going, and she’s pleasant company as well as half Haitian. Plus I’m one of the few journalists on staff with actual war experience.

  Because of the extremely hierarchical structure of a typical newsmagazine show, most television journalists do not begin their careers doing what most people would consider actual journalism. Instead, a majority of them go straight from college into jobs with such diverse titles as “desk assistant,” “production secretary,” “production associate,” or “assistant producer,” which all mean, essentially, professional photocopier, coffee fetcher, phone answerer, tape logger, correspondent hand holder, archive-footage searcher, flight and hotel-room booker and punching bag/blame taker if a story doesn’t make it to air on time. When I started at ABC, I was shocked by the amount of drudgery I was expected to perform. At the end of some days, my hand would ache from spending eight, nine, even ten hours scribbling—we had no computers—such inanities as “01:02:35: wide shot of tornado. 01:02:47: medium shot of tornado. 01:03:04: close-up, windshield wipers.”