Combat Camera

by Andrew Somerset

  I lost track of the Danes soon after we arrived. I was there to take pictures, and they weren’t there to wait around for me. The streets were utter confusion and thanks to my inability to speak German I soon had no idea what was going on. Rumours flew in a half-dozen languages: the East Germans had moved tanks in around the wall, the police were arresting people who had crossed without papers, unification talks had begun, and so on. Lessons of the wars: ninety percent of all rumours are false, and the rest are just plain wrong. I went with the flow.

  I made for Checkpoint Charlie with my cameras because the checkpoint itself was a symbol of the Cold War. It made for a good visual. This was a place with guard towers and barbed wire and men with machine guns, a serious place. People had been killed there. Ronald Reagan stopped to have his picture taken there. But now the guard towers were all empty and the barbed wire was torn down and the guards were all smiling with their guns slung across their backs. You didn’t even need documents to get through. The guards just left the gates up.

  Checkpoint Charlie was a street party. Musicians walked down to the border crossing and played for the crowd, and people sang and danced in the street. The crossing itself was jammed with cars and foot traffic. It took hours to get through. People waiting in line shut down their engines and got out of their cars and talked to each other. Berliners made coffee and sandwiches and they brought them down to the checkpoint and gave them to the people waiting there.

  I photographed an East German family crossing through Checkpoint Charlie in a Trabi, a cheap and noisy East German car with a dirty exhaust, like something out of an old movie. As the Trabi passed through the checkpoint the crowd started to cheer. Mother smiled and laughed and Father rolled down his window and shouted something and gave the thumbs-up to the people gathered there, and his kids’ faces were pressed against the glass in wonder, as if they were entering Santa’s workshop. I caught the kids just like that, a wide-angle shot with the crowd cheering and the soldiers in the background, bemused and sheepish, another photographer leaning in to make his shot, and the German flag reflected in the glass of the window. You’ve probably seen the photo. It ran everywhere. It was in Life magazine’s photos of the century.

  But maybe you’ve never seen it at all.

  By the late afternoon, people had lit fires in the streets to stay warm. I shot some photos of the scene, thinking that to look at the photos you would not be able to tell if this was a brave new world, or the Weimar Republic. Some of the shops and restaurants were still open and people were sharing food in the street, but now places were starting to close as they ran out of food. There were so many people out in the streets that traffic just stopped. Drivers just abandoned their cars where they stood.

  The Potsdammerplatz was jammed. It was impossible to work in that crowd: thousands of people chanting and singing and pressing in to chip at the wall with hammers and crowbars and even stones, police looking on in sympathetic impotence. It hardly seemed possible that anyone could start shooting, and the crowd in any case was heedless. They wouldn’t dare.

  The Germans already had a name for the people chipping at the wall with hammers: wallpeckers. I wanted to get in close to the wall and get a shot of the wallpeckers at work, something that would make the signature shot for the story. I got in there and shot several frames of a man whaling away at it with a carpenter’s hammer. After he chipped a hunk off the wall he held the hammer out to me, so I took it and whacked at the concrete a few times. When I looked up, the man was gone. Whacking the wall with a hammer felt better than taking pictures of other people doing it, but I still had a story to do. I passed the hammer on to the first man I saw and then shot him knocking chips off the wall with it.

  Later, a man with a more serious weapon, a sledgehammer, succeeded in knocking a big hole through the wall, and I shot several frames of people reaching through the hole to shake hands with the East German guards. Then a group of young men started pulling at the remains of the slab and succeeded in pulling the whole thing down. The crowd surged clear as it began to topple, like a stone falling in water, revealing two teenaged East German soldiers in ill-fitting feldgrau. The crowd cheered madly and the soldiers just stood there and smiled sheepishly, with their rifles slung, clearly unsure of what they were supposed to do.

  Towards evening, construction equipment moved in from the East German side and knocked down a big section of the wall. Every time a slab fell, the crowd erupted in cheers. People began setting off fireworks, with no fear of provoking shooting. The police simply watched. I shot some frames of police and soldiers from both sides trading caps and badges as souvenirs. None of them ever wanted to fight each other, anyway.

  When the big slabs fell, people surged through the gap and hugged strangers and danced. Bottles of cheap wine passed from hand to hand and empty bottles rolled underfoot. There was broken glass all over the place. People climbed up on the hoods and roofs of parked cars to get a better view, danced on the cars. Autobody shops getting rich. Some people climbed on top of the wall and stood there, which only days earlier would have got them shot.

  I tried to photograph it all, but I couldn’t keep steady and I couldn’t get a clear shot. I was reduced to making the Hail Mary shot, where you put on a wide-angle lens and hold the camera up in the air and just keep shooting in the vague and desperate hope of getting something publishable. At one point, someone began to spray the crowd with champagne, which ruined my thirty-five to seventy zoom. There was champagne all over the glass and it was hell to clean it. Eventually, I just wrote that one off.

  When the light started to go I moved back from the wall, where things were calmer, and I found a family from the East sitting on the curb eating oranges. They couldn’t get oranges at home, so when they saw a bag in a shop, they bought it. The kids, a boy and a girl, about six and eight, sat on the curb and feasted on them, their hands and faces sticky with the juice. It must have played hell with their digestion, but that was a problem for tomorrow. I knelt in the street and made several frames of those kids, eating their oranges. I think those were the happiest pictures that I ever took.

  When the sun went down I found a place to stay in a mechanic’s garage, where the owner had set out some cots. I gave up my cot for a young woman who was heavily pregnant. Everyone had told her that she shouldn’t go to Berlin in her condition, but she had ideas of her own. Those ideas caught up to her just before midnight, and one of her friends was sent out into the night to find a doctor. By one in the morning, with a medical student in attendance, she had given birth to a healthy baby boy right there in the garage, among the patient, half-assembled automobiles, the silent toolboxes, the drip pans sheened with oil. I took a photo of her with the baby before she was taken off to the hospital, and I promised to track her down and give her a copy. But I was never able to find her. It was as if I had dreamed it.

  It was all over when you were just a little kid. The Cold War was over. History was over. War was over. Nobody understood how. It just happened, because enough people thought they could do it, and thought that if enough people did it, nobody could stop them. And right then, in Berlin with the daylight fading into deep blue, we all believed the nukes could be beaten into radioactive ploughshares and that we could stop poverty and we could save this rotten planet. The world really could be a better place. And people hugged each other in the street and cried with happiness, and I sat on the pavement taking pictures and wishing that I owned all the oranges in the world, if only so that I could give them all away.

  That was how it all seemed, for a few days in November. But people forget that the year of Europe’s great revolution was also the year that Slobodan Milosevic was elected in Yugoslavia. You can rack up all the debts you like, but sooner or later, you have to pay the bill.

  And I guess the surest sign I’m getting old is expecting you to think that all this matters somehow. That’s the self-importance you get into with nostalgia. You make the mistake of thinking that all your memories could ac
tually amount to something more than a hill of shit.

  Anyway, you’re beginning to stir.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The next gas station, oasis of the endless highway: two ancient pumps and a sign on a rust-scabbed pole, white paint flaking off the metal and red-brown stains weeping from the scabs. A small shop, set back from the road. A row of cars, half-cannibalized, rusting at the edge of the woods. The gas gauge reads below a quarter tank, hunger eats at your belly, Melissa complains that she needs to pee. It’s about time.

  We’ll stop at the next gas station. An unwelcome image arises of Zane’s own self as parent to a sticky-faced child with a road-swollen bladder. Stop that right now, young lady, or you can get out and walk. When Zane was eight, his father made that same old threat, carried through with it over his mother’s angry protests, left him bawling at the side of the highway. Abandonment hit him like a deboning knife. The car was back in five minutes but it did nothing to heal Zane’s hurt or to stop the attendant tears. Shut up, said his father. Did you really think I would just leave you there? Five full minutes of maternal rage had already flensed Zane senior to the nerve endings. The rest of the trip passed in silence.

  Later, Zane understood that his father would have laid a charge of child endangerment against any other parent for abandoning an eight-year-old by the roadside, whatever the reason, and he threw the incident back at his father in a teenaged fight best forgotten but never quite forgiven. Twenty years later you discover a more truthful perspective but it’s too late to take back what’s gone before. When the glaciers melt and retreat they don’t leave you much.

  Zane signalled to turn into the gas station and Melissa commandeered the rear-view mirror, ran a careful hand over her face, felt the puffy eye and swollen lips, the blood matted in her eyebrow, the bridge of her nose now verified as approximately straight. Her first sight of the damage, as he’d refused to let her use the mirror while he was driving. An experimental fingertip explored bared teeth, searching for chips, then pressed against her upper incisors. This, presumably, was painful. There appeared to be some give. She rubbed her good eye and groaned.

  “My whole face hurts.”

  Not much you can say to that. Zane pulled in beside the pumps and killed the engine.

  A boy in his late teens issued from the shop, ducked his head and lifted the hood of his yellow rain slicker against the drizzle. He walked to the driver’s side window. Long blond hair falling out from under his hood, pimples. Zane cranked down the window, thought of the chattering valves and asked him to check the oil while he was at it. He popped the hood release and cranked the window most of the way closed, to keep the rain out. As the kid lifted the hood, he tried not to stare at Melissa’s face, and failed.

  Zane paid in cash and then parked the car at the edge of the lot, beside a rusted-out pickup with flat, cracked tires, its windshield an opaque network of cracks, no glass in the driver’s-side window. He stepped out into the rain and splashed through the puddles to the shop. Inside, he raided the shelves: two bags of chips, a bag of peanuts, four bottles of fruit juice, two cans of pop and a loaf of bread.

  “Breakfast of champions,” he said.

  The attendant nodded and failed to smile.

  Zane found a small, flat tin of Aspirins, then checked the rest of the first aid shelf and picked out some small bandages, a pair of tiny scissors, and a bottle of disinfectant. On impulse, he picked out a pair of cheap sunglasses and added them to the pile. The kid worked the cash register wordlessly. Zane paid and took the bag and the bathroom key, and the bell over the door tinkled at him as he walked out into the drizzle.

  He dug the Aspirin and disinfectant out of the bag and handed them to Melissa with the bathroom key. She took her bag and ran for the bathroom. She’d neglected to pack a jacket. While he waited, Zane ate two slices of bread and drank half a bottle of juice, standing beside the car in the drizzle for the opportunity to stretch his legs. He checked his cellphone. It was coming on for eight, too early to get Jack, who worked on New York hours. You finally have a story, and it has to wait.

  Melissa emerged wearing a clean shirt and made a face as she walked by, heading for the store. He waved at her to stop but she ignored him and went in. He checked his cellphone again: time’s a-wasting. Presently, Melissa returned bearing two cups of coffee.

  “At least I think of the essentials.”

  “Let’s take a look at that cut.”

  He took her coffee from her and set it on the hood.

  “I walked in there, first thing that kid did was ask if he should call the cops. I had to convince him you were my dad come to rescue me from a bad boyfriend.”

  “Did you actually put disinfectant on that?”

  “He’s a sweet kid. He woulda done anything for me.”

  “Fluttered your eyelashes at him, did you?”

  “I can’t flutter shit right now.”

  She flinched as he dabbed at the cut with the disinfectant. The cut was angry and deep and the swelling held it open.

  “Hold still. You don’t want this to get infected.”

  “So it seems you don’t inspire much confidence.”

  There was no question that the cut needed stitches.

  “Anyway, I convinced him,” she said.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  This demanded delicacy. The effort defeated him. “Lie.”

  “You walk around with a face like this, people ask questions.”

  “What’s wrong with the truth?”

  “Who’s gonna believe the truth?”

  He dabbed with the disinfectant again and she winced.

  “You want to explain all this to the cops? Shit, Zane, you got guilt written all over you.”

  He put the cap back on the disinfectant and she made to get back in the car, but he stopped her. He opened two of the small bandages and used the scissors to cut them down to form makeshift butterfly sutures, and then carefully pressed the cut closed, stuck the bandages in place and leaned back and raised her chin to look at his handiwork. Closed evenly, at least: good enough. If you get lucky it might not leave a scar. He found the sunglasses and put them on her face and appraised the result. Her hair was damp with the drizzle. The cut and his makeshift sutures still showed, and the sunglasses failed to hide the bruising.

  “You really look like hell.”

  “You’re so sweet.”

  “We should really get a doctor to look at that.”

  “Next town.”

  “And we should really think about calling the cops.”

  “The cops never do shit anyway.”

  She rummaged in her knapsack and took out a few things and threw them in the back seat of the car. Then she picked up the bandage wrappers and the empty plastic bag and Zane’s juice bottle and she walked to the trash can and dropped the knapsack into it.

  “Stuff best forgotten,” she said.

  Fair enough, he thought. You should have had your camera out, should have caught that on film. But to hell with it: I’m too tired for this shit. The picture probably would have been garbage anyway, wouldn’t have made any sense without a caption to explain what she was doing. Winogrand said, there are no pictures when I’m changing film. Winogrand was right.

  “You drive.” He walked to the passenger side and got in and reclined the seat as far as it would go. Exhaustion spread through his bones as he settled into the seat, seeped from bone through sinew and muscle, settled into his ankles and knees. “Eat your breakfast. That’s why I bought it.”

  “I’m gonna stop for a real breakfast in the next town.”

  Here’s hoping a real breakfast doesn’t mean bacon and eggs. She pulled onto the road, headed west, her driving jerky, out of practice.

  “I was looking at the map.” she said. “If we make Thunder Bay by early afternoon, do you think we can make someplace like Kenora by nightfall?”

  Probably not. Maps make things look much more manageable than the
y really are. Zane wasn’t even sure where they were. We are somewhere, we are anywhere, we are everywhere. You move around too much and the roots die. Every place starts to look the same.

  “We’ll just drive ’til we stop,” he said. His eyes were already closed.

  Melissa stopped for lunch in Marathon, where Zane overrode her objections and diverted her to the hospital after spotting the blue hospital sign on the road into town. It would take too long, she didn’t like doctors, there would be questions; regardless, she needed stitches. You don’t get that looked at, you’ll end up looking like Tiger Williams. She said Tiger who.

  The hospital was smaller than he expected. You picture a hospital, but you get a clinic. If not for the sign he would have driven past and kept right on looking. In the waiting room, an assortment of local colour waited on the doctor: an eight-year-old boy with a fish hook in his cheek, a pregnant woman with red hair, a young Indian man cradling an arm that appeared to be broken. The room swelled with that sense of polite and enervated expectation that is peculiar to hospital waiting rooms, to that interminable limbo that follows an accident, when those not critically injured await repair.

  Into this scene Melissa entered as a small bomb loaded with impatience, reiterating her excuses.

  “This is going to take too long.”

  “Just for once, do as I say.”

  Zane pointed at the chair facing the triage desk, cracked vinyl spilling foam rubber. The triage nurse looked up at Melissa and gave Zane a dirty look.