The Devil Is a Black Dog
Page 7
After his sixth beer in that London pub, when his ego was washed away by the waves of alcohol, he decided he would call Steve and apologize. He was suddenly overcome by a fear that others would also realize how burnt out he was, that other editors would put him out to pasture and he would never again be able to return to the theaters of war.
It was only there, indeed, in the middle of a war, that Marosh really felt free. The world simplified to “yes” and “no,” to life and death. He liked how it clarified things, that there were no loans or credit, no competitors with better family backgrounds or better dispositions, that there were no chosen ones, and that everything was for the last time.
In his civilian life he felt like one of those whales that washed up on the shores of Brighton almost every year: he could breathe, but couldn’t maneuver.
It took Steve a while to answer his phone, but he was an annoyingly good guy during the whole conversation. Marosh could imagine him standing in his patterned robe in the middle of his living room, scowling.
Marosh had no alternative but to agree to every condition. He would travel to Chad, a relatively calm African country, to escort a young photojournalist and familiarize her with the “rules of engagement” described in the company’s guidelines.
Listening to his editor, Marosh swallowed one curse, then a second, as he felt a cold wave roll across his belly. His only response was, “What is the rookie’s name?”
“Rachel Lynn,” said Steve. “You’ll have a hell of a time, ’cause she is quite a looker. It will be fun working with her.”
Fuck me, thought Marosh, after he hung up the phone. He knew that type of female war correspondent. They were much crazier than men. They didn’t heed god or man if it was about a story. They were able to put themselves at any risk, just to prove they were up to the job—and they were as good as any man. It was not uncommon for them to be shot dead or gang-raped by an entire company of soldiers if they were captured. He could clearly remember one woman in particular. Her name was Amanda, and she had been captured in Iraq. Marosh was sitting in the canteen when she returned from her release. It was 113 degrees in the shade, with flies all over the plastic tables. It was said that four men had raped her, but after her medical evaluation she was drinking Budweiser in the canteen, near to where Marosh sat, smiling. Marosh would never forget that smile. It was the smile of someone who knew that over the next couple of days all the news would be about her.
“Rachel Lynn,” he grumbled, then asked for another beer and a whisky. He drank for a bit longer, and then took a taxi back to his hotel.
Rachel Lynn wasn’t anybody’s favorite, nor was she a Daddy’s girl. In fact, she hardly knew her father, because when she was just five he died somewhere in the Middle East, having been beheaded by an extremist organization. In the eighties, a beheading was still a huge sensation in the media, and the press had been stationed in front of the family’s apartment building for weeks. The family had to move en masse to avoid questions like “How does it feel?” “What are your thoughts?” and “Now, how will you carry on?” The front pages of the tabloids were meanwhile filled with the images of the execution, images cut from the video at the very moment they put the knife to his throat. That moment when a person realizes he is going to be killed.
Rachel’s mother had her first nervous breakdown when the family lawyers told her she couldn’t do anything to keep those images from being published. They were living in a darkened apartment and went everywhere in a car with tainted windows to throw off the reporters.
But, in the end, five-year-old Rachel discovered how her father died.
She had been playing on the playground of her kindergarten when a thirty-something blonde, cameraman in tow, sat next to her and asked: “How does it feel to know that your daddy was killed? That your daddy was killed in this nasty way by Mr. Terrorist? That he will never come back?”
Rachel wasn’t thinking anything; she just kept her eyes on the blonde woman as she put the microphone to her face, and felt so alone that she couldn’t move. Tears began to fall. The other kids watched the scene in silence until the blonde told the cameraman “Got it.” They packed up knowing that the crying kid would look good as a closing sequence to the piece.
Rachel came down with a fever that night; her mother had to call a doctor for her. The channel eventually apologized, but only after airing the story.
A beheaded father and a mood-pill-dependent mother determined Rachel’s childhood—though her father wasn’t physically present, he filled the absence with his ghost. Her mother constructed a perfect myth from the man who remained unknown to Rachel. From the age of five she tried to please a ghost; this went on until she became a teenager, then she decided that she would become a photographer as well. Her mother almost threw her out of the house when she learned of Rachel’s plan. Then, on a sunny Saturday morning, she told Rachel that she couldn’t compete with her deceased father. That was the last time they talked to each other.
She wouldn’t have it easy in her chosen profession, and all the friends of the family tried their best to turn her from her path. “One dead journalist is enough in a family,” they’d say.
But Rachel was talented. Her pictures were nominated for prizes at every exhibition.
She studied at Oxford on a scholarship, but a contract with one of the photo agencies was far from assured. Her pictures just didn’t interest the editors; her story ideas and notes lay unnoticed in folders on the desks of potential employers. Her failure lasted until she decided that in order to reach her professional goals she should use everything she had. Even her body.
The opportunity to apply herself arose with a low-ranking editor. She just let it happen.
Suddenly, all of her ideas were listened to as long as she endured the touch of the editor in some cheap motel room.
After the first occasion, she threw up in the toilet and showered for hours, but later on she learned to dispassionately use her body as tool. The midlife crises of men became her biggest ally. Rachel, at just twenty-four, became the most driven woman in every editorial office.
What she couldn’t achieve as a freelancer at Burbanks, she achieved at Marosh’s agency in four months. To lay the foundations of her career, she only needed to accept the dinner invitation of the chief editor and go with him to his weekend cottage in France while the editor’s wife brought their kids to the grandparents. After just four months, she had a contract to travel to Chad to shoot refugee camps with a top photojournalist.
Marosh had flown back to Cairo. The summer was in full swing; the city felt like a gigantic blazing oven left open. He drank watery beers in a downtown bar, all the while thinking about how he could get back the thing that was missing in his photos. He spent a week walking the streets of Cairo in daytime, and at night he smoked hashish in his sweaty hotel room, but the solution wouldn’t come. He checked his face in the mirror and found he looked older. His shirt was punched through with sweat in the warm summer night.
When the day arrived for his departure from the city, he packed his equipment, took a taxi to the airport, and caught his flight. He flew from Cairo to Libya and from Libya to N’Djamena. He took some snapshots for fun during the layover—but when he checked the pictures, he was so unsatisfied that he almost threw the camera to the floor.
He arrived in N’Djamena late at night. The city lay before him, unlit in the darkness of night. Marosh felt slugged in the head by the change in air pressure. He had tried several times to describe the difference between the sub-Saharan and Middle Eastern nights, but he never succeeded. In the heat of Africa a man does not sweat much. No, the heat seeps into your bones, your marrow, and changes the way you think.
The first day his feet had touched sub-Saharan soil he understood why genocide is so common in these countries. It’s the air, its pressure—steamy and hot like fire, a heat that is experienced as cold by anyone who was there for the first time. It disturbs people’s mindset, numbing it as the heat sinks into th
e cerebrum.
He caught a taxi at the airport and directed it to the Hotel Cosmos. He knew the city well, as he had been there during the civil war. The Cosmos was one of N’Djamena’s best hotels, with its own power generator for nighttime. Chad was considered peaceful—the last civil war was ten years ago—and the rebel groups, which were divided by tribal background and were fighting the Zaghawa government, which was organized on a tribal basis as well, hadn’t moved from the eastern part of the country in over a year.
Marosh had to wait a full day in the hotel for his female colleague to arrive, so they could begin photographing the country’s camps, which were crammed with refugees from Darfur. He was suffering from terrible insomnia; the morning found him sitting in a plastic chair, terrified and shivering. Maybe he really had gotten old. If God didn’t have something up his sleeve, well, this little trip to Chad might be his endgame.
Rachel disembarked from the plane, her skin almost sparkling from the strong sunshine. She wore jeans and a white blouse, the sweat immediately drawing dots onto her clothing. She teetered down the stairs from the plane and crossed the field with the other passengers to the airport. She filled out the necessary paperwork to get into the country, then traversed the terminal, which, with its dirty green walls, reminded her of a small-town train station in the English countryside.
She felt dizzy. Two weeks before her departure she had started taking Lariam against malaria. She debated the possible side effects for a long time, then finally decided to take it, ignoring the rumors about soldiers who went mad from the pills in Iraq; who upon returning home put bullets in their wives’ heads, or, in the better-case scenario, their own.
She hastened through the terminal, avoiding the black-market money-changers’ flashing eyes. Out in front of the airport she brushed off two taxi drivers, having to grab her luggage from out of their hands. Then she noticed Marosh.
The man shook her hand and offered to carry her bags, which she declined firmly. She bought a bottle of water in a nearby shop to ease her headache. The man asked if she would like to take a day to acclimatize, but this was out of the question. She wanted to fly to Abéché immediately, so they returned to the ticket counter to check in their equipment.
A small, two-engine plane was idling on the field, huge blue UN stickers adhered to its sides.
The two pilots were blonde, in their mid-thirties, and spoke with South African accents. Except for them and the two photographers, everyone else on the plane was black. Marosh took his seat first. Rachel sat next to him and fastened her seat belt.
“So you’re the ones who are going to the refugee camps?” asked the copilot over his shoulder as the plane started to taxi.
“Yeah,” said Marosh, nodding, his voice barely audible over the engines.
“Well, there is quite a bit of movement down there these days,” replied the copilot, smiling. The plane took off.
“It’s calm,” said Marosh, looking at Rachel. “African calm.”
Rachel looked back and tried to put a smile on her face, but couldn’t. She could barely see from her headache, so she clenched her teeth. Each question he asked, like where she studied, had she been in Africa before, she answered tersely. She didn’t initiate any conversation of her own for the duration of the flight. They flew two and a half hours east before the military airport of Abéché appeared. As they were landing they saw the French foreign legion’s Mirage jets taking off.
A jeep was waiting for them at the airport. They got in and headed east to the UN base.
The reddish-yellow gravel of the dirt road crackled beneath the wheels of the car as they passed the white, low buildings in the streets. Small, scraggy trees stood in front of the houses; in their shade men in jellabiya robes were sitting and smoking. The air was filled with the smell of the nearby market, which the desert wind blew all over the city.
The UN base in Abéché was an adobe building, painted white with steel gates. Inside the fort walls there were well-tended flowerbeds and a canteen where everything was sold at European prices. The porter showed them their rooms. His face was decorated with horizontal cuts, indicating that he belonged to the Sara tribe. The two were given rooms opposite each other, both of which had a green mosquito net over the bed and a dirty fan hanging from the ceiling.
“Will he speak poorly of me?” wondered Rachel while unpacking her stuff and examining her camera. “No. He doesn’t look like that kind of guy.”
Seriously dizzy, she took a Lariam with two aspirin. She drank from a plastic bottle; the lukewarm water churned in her stomach.
The UN security officer held his regular briefing late that afternoon. Beads of sweat were glistening on his moustache as he informed those present about the current political situation. There were only a few people sitting in the canteen, mostly project managers and UN technical staff. Rachel had almost missed the briefing; she arrived drenched in sweat, and every movement took great effort.
“You’ve almost missed the show, girl,” said Marosh, and indicated that she should sit in a plastic chair at his table. “Well, it seems our stay here will be quite interesting. The rebels are on the move, so the refugee camps are being evacuated. We’ll get exclusive footage, because we are the only journalists here right now.”
“Great,” said Rachel. Red circles pulsed in front of her eyes, and she was having trouble catching her breath.
“That is, of course, if you don’t get yourself killed. If you don’t do anything stupid.”
The man sounded like her family, her relatives. She envisioned her mother repeating those same words in her darkened room in London: that Rachel was just a girl and would get herself killed. Rachel’s face clouded over.
“Don’t talk to me like that,” she said. She covered her mouth with her hand: she felt nauseous. “I’m here as a professional photographer,” she continued, regaining her composure. “I took the safety training; I know exactly what the rules of engagement are. I know everything about the job, and fought my way to be here.”
“And I’m here to supervise you.”
“That doesn’t give you the right to talk to me like they talk to interns at the agency.”
After she said her mind, Rachel stood up from the table and walked out of the room.
It was getting dark, and the base took on a yellow pallor from the overhanging lamps. Insects attacked the light bulbs in swarms. The public faucets on the walls were full with them, and their buzzing could be heard all around the base. Marosh gazed after the woman for a while, then stood up and went to his room as well. While unpacking his equipment, he considered that, practically speaking, Rachel’s outburst was justified; he had no right to treat her like an underling. He was the one responsible for the current situation. He was the one who no longer felt the craft in his hands. He felt awful for talking to the woman like that.
Rachel was lying under the mosquito net, sweat imprinting her contours on the sheet. The air conditioning hadn’t worked in years, and the fan only stirred up the hot air. In her dream, she saw herself from the outside, at the age of five. She saw that little girl who was being asked how it felt not to have a father anymore. She saw herself alone, weeping. The loneliness of the dream lasted for a long time afterward.
Finally, another image emerged. She saw her father as he reached over her, caressing her hair and saying everything would be fine, because he had brought medicine. “It will just be a pinprick and everything will be alright,” her father said. “You won’t remember a thing by next week. This happens quite frequently at the equator.”
She saw the man sitting at the end of her bed; she felt his hand holding hers. “I hope I didn’t hurt you much. I didn’t mean to be rude to you,” said her father, who then wiped her forehead with a damp handkerchief. His voice was quite gentle.
“No hard feelings,” said Rachel. She didn’t dream anything else that night.
In the morning, Rachel got dressed, threw her backpack over her shoulder, and left her room.
“When do we go?” she asked, taking a cigarette from Marosh’s pack.
“Twenty minutes or so,” answered the man, lighting another cigarette.
“Great. I think I had a fever yesterday.”
“That happens quite often at the equator.”
The whole staff at the base was preparing for the evacuation from Abéché, waiting for the order from the security officer. Foreigners were allowed to stay at their own risk; only a few had returned to N’Djamena—the sort who took UN protocol literally and would cover a five-yard distance between two buildings by car just to be on the safe side.
The rest had stayed.
Excited conversations struck up around the tables.
“I’ve got a driver who will go to Goz Beïda,” said Marosh, standing up from the table to stretch. “But I think it would be better for you to stay at the base until you feel better.”
“I’m fine,” responded Rachel. This was, of course, not true. She was shivering and felt horribly weak. The dizziness returned as she rose from her chair, but Marosh didn’t notice.
“OK then. Let’s go.”
They walked out of the canteen, crossed the parking lot, cut between a row of dusty jeeps, then exited through the base’s steel gate.
Marosh felt a knot in his stomach when he remembered he would be taking pictures. He had to tell himself that he could get it back; all he needed was to get into the routine again. He didn’t need anything else, just the goddamned routine—the rest would be done by the programming in the camera. Over thirty this was generally true about everything, he thought with a smile. He watched as Rachel took out her Canon 2D—the same machine he had worked with in Iraq. Maybe the young can make it, after all. Maybe they’re not so covered in shit that God can’t see them, he thought, as he took out his own Canon and took a photo of Rachel.