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by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  If I were to envy anyone in the profession of information gathering, it would be the newspaper reporters. They usually know the native language of and live in or near the places about which they write. In the field, they carry nothing more taxing than notebooks and pens, and they have the freedom of movement that working alone provides. Their expenses are paid, they’re not constantly changing reality by sticking cameras in their subjects’ faces, and their idea of “getting close to a story”—as Julian once explained to me way back when in Harare—doesn’t mean placing themselves in the middle of the crossfire to get a good shot. Their idea of getting close to a story means standing back. It means examining the big picture, figuring out the larger implications before dealing with the specifics. It means reporting and understanding the story well enough to write it.

  But that’s only if I were to envy anyone out here today. Actually, at this very moment, the only people I really envy are the men and women I see in my Upper West Side neighborhood, the ones gliding up and down Broadway every evening pushing grocery-laden strollers or carrying tiny infants in those new, navy-blue Swedish baby carriers with the little anchor appliqués. The ones walking their cherubs to school in the morning before heading off to their own places of work, or strolling en famille on the weekends to check out the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History. And I want to know what kind of jobs these men and women have that allow them to live comfortably and happily without always having to jump on a plane at a moment’s notice to fly away to politically unstable places like Haiti. I want to know how they pay for their mortgages, their baby-sitters, their tuitions and all of those grocery, clothing and pediatrician bills while still having time to push their kids on the swings. I want to know if they even like these jobs, and if so, I want to know how I can sign up for the same kind of balanced life. Assuming, of course, that I can actually get pregnant.

  Put simply, I want the life my mother’s generation of women were, for the most part, denied. Paul and I have discussed it in detail. We’ve decided that when we have kids, at least one of us will need to have a flexible work schedule. Since I want to be the one with such a schedule, and Paul doesn’t, the choice is easy. I’ll work part-time, he’ll work full. Shouldn’t be too hard, right?

  Klaus and I catch up. I tell him about moving back to the States, about the soul searching that made me quit photojournalism, about the desire to lead a simpler, more mainstream existence. He nods and says a lot of uh-huh’s, as if he understands, but I can tell by his eyes that he thinks I’ve gone bonkers. “Well, at least come say hi to all of your old pals. We missed you in Bosnia,” Klaus says, leading me over to a shady spot where all the usual camera-toting news junkies are standing around in their regulation circle, comparing equipment, shooting the shit and smoking.

  “Yeah, sounds like it was a real party,” I say.

  When the other photographers notice me approaching, they gasp. As if I had died. As if I’d come back as a ghost.

  Then slowly, one by one, they embrace me and offer their very real, very warm greetings. Much warmer, in fact, than when we used to all work together.

  “Salut!”

  “How the hell are you?”

  “Comment ça va?”

  “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  Now it’s Alain’s turn. “C’est pas vrai!”—“Say it isn’t so!”—he says, hugging me and kissing me on both cheeks. Alain is one of the few Gamma photographers whose company I really enjoyed during my tenure there. Then again, he came to France from Vietnam, I came from America, and this bonded us as confreres more than anything else in a country like France, where xenophobia is as woven into the fabric of the nation as foie gras. Alain also has the distinction of being one of the last people to see Gad alive. After hearing the gunshots that ripped through Gad’s body, Alain and a Village Voice reporter hid out in a ditch for as long as they could. Eventually, they were captured and interrogated by Iraqi soldiers.

  But Alain doesn’t like to talk about that.

  “C’est vrai,” I say, smiling. “How are you?”

  “Fine, fine,” he says, pulling out his pack of Marlboros and offering me one.

  “No, thanks,” I say, “I quit.” An awkward silence descends. It’s clear from Alain’s body language that the mere act of saying “I quit” has constructed a waist-high wall between us. I enjoyed smoking, in the same way I enjoyed shooting pictures in nutty places, but I can’t justify doing either one if I’m committed to having a baby.

  “You quit, huh,” he says. “So what are you doing here anyway? We’d heard you’d quit photography, too. Had a kid. Went back to America to change diapers.”

  A few dirt-kicking, bent-chin snickers erupt from the all-male group, and I feel my cheeks turning crimson. My former colleagues, some of whom I’d considered friends, are clearly making fun of me. Laughing at my expense.

  “You heard wrong,” I say. I am annoyed at the implication. Never mind the truth, that I’d gone back to America and started an entirely new career. So what if I’d gone back to have a couple of babies instead? Would that have been so horrible? I see what photojournalism did to a friend and mentor back in Paris, one of the few older women I know who still works in the field. I understand the steep price she paid because I was there at her dinner table on the day she turned forty, when she announced with brimming eyes that she’d had dozens of important exhibitions and awards but no children.

  I see the middle-aged single women who work in my new profession, the often angry and sad ones who were born late enough to reap the early benefits of feminism but not late enough to give up on the whole notion of pretending to be a man in order to succeed. These women have offices crammed with Emmys, but homes with rooms barren of possessions and memories save their own.

  I see the one successful female producer I know of that generation who actually did manage to spawn a few kids between Emmys. I see the way she prides herself not only on having returned to her job within days of her first child’s birth but on having covered a war when she was eight months pregnant with her third. I do not wish to begrudge any woman her choices, especially the pioneers, but neither of these two feats strikes me, personally, as particularly prudent. Yes, I know men return to work within days of their children’s births, but men don’t have lactating breasts or postpartum recovery issues such as uteruses hanging out of their vaginas. And yes, male journalists cover wars no matter the gestational age of their fetuses, but men don’t have to carry those fetuses around in their bellies or protect them from whizzing bullets.

  While all of this seems obvious to me, I know it is only my opinion, based on nothing more scientific than my gut. It is also my opinion—and a bizarrely unpopular one, at that—that, be they male or female, journalists with children should not cover wars. Then again, I also don’t think they should skydive or shoot heroin or drive without seat belts. Or climb mountains off of which they might fall. A parent dying under such circumstances could really fuck up a kid but good: make him angry, provoke him to act out in ways he shouldn’t. Like grabbing a telephone receiver and smashing it into his lover’s head.

  If such opinions make me a bad journalist and a bad feminist, so be it.

  As the assembled group of photographers continue to laugh at Alain’s diaper joke, my first cowardly impulse is to say something like “Diapers? Me? Yeah, right,” just to fit in, to turn the teasing around. Instead, in a moment of sudden clarity, I ignore the men and their smug laughs and stare directly into Alain’s eyes. “I’m not a mother yet,” I say, “but if everything works out the way I’d like it to, I will be soon. And then I guess I’ll just have to figure out what sort of work I’m able to do afterwards.”

  The photographers stop laughing. A few even look ashamed, but the invisible wall between us is now firmly cemented, and I’m standing all alone on one side of it. Clearly, I’m out of the fraternity. But it’s a club whose member
ship I suddenly no longer desire.

  How many times did I curse my body? How many times did I ponder how much easier my life would have been had I just been born with a Y chromosome instead of an extra X? How many times did I regret the enormous trouble my body caused me, the way it bled and attracted assaults and made me an easy target for any man with a gripe and a will to act upon it? How many times did I wish my body weren’t curvy? Or small and weak and useless as a weapon of self-defense?

  What an ingrate I was. What a unique gift to have a body that can serve as the vessel of a future life. What a stroke of good design to have breasts that will sustain it. What an important responsibility to be cast as the keeper of the flame instead of the igniter of fires. What ecstasy to feel such a deep, ferocious, overwhelming primal urge, not only to love and to procreate, but to nurture.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  The silence that has befallen us all feels uncomfortable. I break it with a “Well, okay, I guess I better get back to my bus,” and then the men and I pose for a few pictures with our arms around each other as if we’d actually see one another again to trade snapshots.

  An hour later, the photojournalists have all made it across the border. (They always do.) But the only good pictures that will come out of this trip will be taken by a Magnum photographer named Alex Webb, who’s famous for his stunning, color-saturated, semiabstract images of Haiti. The pictures he produces on this trip for The New York Times Magazine, however, will lean more toward social commentary than art, and their biting irreverence will cause enormous controversy, even vitriol in the photojournalist community, especially amongst those photographers unable to take a joke at their own expense. My personal favorite is a shot of the American troops landing in Port-au-Prince. It’s one of those curtain-yanking images that pulls back to show the lights and the wires and the stagehands. In it, struggling against the wind and dust whipped up by the landing helicopters, a massive swarm of photojournalists—one of them with his pants falling off—are all jockeying for position, their cameras poised and ready. Directly in front of them is a massive swarm of soldiers lying prone on their bellies, their guns also poised and ready. But far less convincingly so.

  As for us TV people, who are hoping to shoot some good patriotic theater of our own, crossing into Haiti will be more problematic. I can tell by Pascale’s downtrodden look that she and John have had no luck getting us and our many tons of equipment over the border. John announces that some of our group, a random assortment of producers and correspondents from the Today show and Nightly News, will be allowed inside Haiti. Others, whose faxed list of names arrived too late, will have to return with the bus to Santo Domingo. My name is on that list.

  Never mind that the following day, Jimmy Carter will broker a peace accord with Cedras, rendering any fears I may have had of getting killed moot, not to mention ruining the story for anyone covering it with a lens instead of a pen. (Except for Alex, of course, but he’s a genius.) After throwing up one more time before boarding the bus, I decide that even if our paperwork manages to get through, I’m taking the next plane back to New York, my career and promotion be damned. My body’s message is clear and succinct: get thee to bed.

  The bus starts to roll, heading back in the direction from which it came, away from the Haitian border. Pascale, who was looking forward to her first armed conflict, is staring glumly out the window. “Cheer up,” I tell her. I know how she’s feeling. I can still remember the way I felt when I was left behind by that other Pascal back in Peshawar. How I was desperate to see a war. Any war. How I wanted to inhale that drug, to let it run through my veins and wake me up to what was real. How I wanted to prove I could do it, to myself and to others: Oh, yes, well, that reminds me of the time I was with the rebels in Afghanistan . . . But now, six years later, I’m barely able to conceal my glee at the thought of returning home to my cozy apartment in Manhattan.

  “Maybe you’ll make it inside tomorrow,” I tell Pascale. “Or the day after that. And if not, hey, there’ll always be another war.”

  “WE’LL BE ABLE TO TELL if the amoebas are back after we see the results of the lab work, but before I prescribe any of the strong stuff, is there any chance you’re pregnant?”

  I’m sitting in a gastroenterologist’s office on the Upper East Side three days after getting back from the Haitian border. My stomach has gotten worse. I have not been able to hold down any food for days now, and this along with the diarrhea has made me extremely weak and dizzy, to the point where Paul had to literally carry me into a taxi to get me here. “I can’t believe you made it out of Afghanistan in this condition,” he’d said, as I lay my head on his lap in the backseat of the cab.

  “Yeah, well, different time, different place, different body,” I’d replied, suddenly grateful to be riding in a warm car with my cheek pressed against my husband’s thigh instead of cold and all alone on the back of a donkey.

  I tell the doctor that we’ve been unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant. That even though my period is now over a week late, I’d taken yet another home pregnancy test just this morning and it, too, had come out negative.

  “Yeah, well, I never trust those things, especially if you’re only a week late.” She orders another blood test, and the next day she calls me at home, where I’m still lying in bed, to tell me I have a nasty case of gastroenteritis, but that I can’t take any medicine for it because I’m five weeks pregnant.

  “What!”

  “You’re pregnant,” she says. “Congratulations.”

  I cry for a very long time. Then I call Paul at work, and he cries. Then I cry again and drag my vomiting, weak and fluxing body over to Barnes & Noble to buy What to Expect When You’re Expecting. Just like any normal expectant mother might do.

  Then, on my way home from the bookstore, I have a peculiar thought. Or perhaps not so peculiar, on account of the pea-sized miracle now growing inside me. I’m walking up Broadway, on a brilliant, crisp fall day with bright yellow leaves swirling in tiny sidewalk tornadoes, and I’m thinking: Maybe there really is a god. Maybe all that barfing on the road to Haiti was a deliberate sign from my unborn child, some higher power’s delicate way of saying go home. Maybe the signs are all around us—from the missed plane that crashes to the opening of a tulip, from the murder of a beloved friend in Iraq to the helpful person who finds you sprawled unconscious in Harvard Square and carries you to safety—but we’re all just too ignorant, proud and foolish to read them.

  I’ve doubted the existence of a god for so long now, ever since that day I had to swallow and digest Auschwitz. But what if even the Holocaust was meant as a sign? A terrible, incomprehensible and unbearable reminder to all of us who were spared of how precious and precarious our time here is. What if the fact of the concentration camps is the only way of proving to us, by means of comparison, that we are not tattooed numbers but people, each one unique, with a name and a story to tell? That our lives, in all of their frequently mundane, often arduous, and sometimes grossly unfair glory, are worth living.

  In fact, who am I to say God—or whatever you want to call something greater than us, beyond our pitiful comprehension—doesn’t exist? Even Albert Einstein, that genius of all things quantifiable, could not abide by atheism. I suppose the closer he came to figuring out all of the how’s in the universe, the more urgently the why’s cried out for answers.

  At the end of that November, back in Potomac for Thanksgiving, I decide to attend my ten-year high school reunion. I’m three months pregnant now, hardly showing but finally able to tell people the news. I run into Ellen, the girlfriend who’d helped me memorize fifty digits past the decimal point of pi back in second grade, back when we were wandering through the hallways and petals of our flower-shaped elementary school, fidgety, eager for information and mind-numbingly bored. She’s a doctor, she tells me, happy with the way her life worked out. “Me, too,” I say,
and then, after giving her a brief synopsis (job, marriage, pregnancy), I suddenly stop and with a mischievous smile say, “So, Ellen, can you still do it? Can you still remember it?” I begin my recitation. “Three point one four one five nine . . .”

  Ellen starts to laugh. “Two six five, three five eight, nine seven nine . . .” She wrinkles her nose. “I can’t remember the rest.”

  I rack my brain. “Three two three, I think it was. Three two three and then, well, it all kinda goes fuzzy.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re getting old,” she says, still laughing. “Only pi goes on infinitely. But you’re right. Definitely three two three.” She stares down at my stomach. “Teach it to your kid, you’ll remember it again.”

  I smile. A memory flashes into my head, an image of Ellen and me standing in the playground at school. Her hair is in pigtails. We’re young, maybe six or seven years old at most, and we’re holding hands. She’s wearing a striped shirt, red and blue, I think. Her mother has just died. A heart attack, as I recall. She is crying. I’m trying to comfort her but can’t find the words. “I will,” I say. I hug her tightly, my eyes starting to water. “I promise I will.”

  Later, as I’m pointing people out to Paul, as the band is playing “Stairway to Heaven,” Gabe, my first love, almost father to my almost child, walks over with some of his friends to hug me. It has been nine years since we’ve last seen each other, nine years since I took a trip down to his college in Louisiana to see if we could make it work again between us. After a bit of mindless chitchat, after introducing him and the others to Paul, I tell him the news. “I’m pregnant,” I say.

  Gabe takes in the information, smiles. Puts his hand to his heart then touches it to my belly. “Oh, Debs,” he says, “that’s so great. I’m so happy for you.”