It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War

by Addario, Lynsey

  Oh, Raza is moaning, I thought. That’s good. He is alive. I still had no idea what had happened, but for some reason I understood that it was a good sign that Raza was making noise. Everything hurt as the head-scarfed nurse stood over me with the needle that still hadn’t been injected in me. What had I been doing that morning? Was I dreaming?

  Teru appeared before me, at the foot of my slab. His faced looked as if he had just finished a boxing match, but he was standing on his own two feet. I wondered what Teru, from New York, was doing at the foot of my bed. The nurse stuck the needle in me. She never answered my question about whether it was clean. Who cared if I got HIV? I was in excruciating pain. The refugees. Mardan. We had been in Mardan all morning. It was starting to come back. There were so many people in the room, standing around, looking at Raza and me, splayed out on the tables. Refugees, I recalled. The New York Times. I had been photographing. The skid, the crash. It was real. Teru explained: “We are in Pakistan. We were photographing at the refugee camps with Raza, and we have been in a bad car accident.” A doctor started immobilizing my arm by bandaging it close to my body. My bones were broken. My back burned. My Pakistani dress, a salwar kameez, was melted onto the raw patch of flesh on my back where my skin had rubbed off in the friction of the accident. My hands were a raw mix of pus and blood. My ankles were sprained and swollen, and my ribs hurt. Where was my head scarf?

  Teru and I were transferred to an ambulance, and Raza wasn’t with us anymore. The paramedic, Khalid, sat at my feet and leaned over me, saying his name over and over again, pleading with me to repeat his name so I wouldn’t pass out. “Khalid. My name is Khalid. Say my name.” He was relentless, and I was grateful, vaguely aware that he was trying to keep me alive. “Khalid. Say my name: Khalid.” I was horizontal, arm taped to my side, drugged up on morphine, when I realized that my camera bag wasn’t with us.

  “Khalid, where is our car?” I said. “Where is my camera bag? Is the car far from here? We were on our way to Islamabad.”

  “No,” Khalid said. “The car is close to here.”

  I could see only within the confines of the ambulance but assumed we were traveling along the highway toward Islamabad.

  “Khalid,” I repeated his name as instructed, “can we stop at the car to get my camera bag? I need my cameras, my phone.” I only half-expected him to agree.

  He turned back toward the driver and said something in Urdu, then turned back to me: “OK. We can stop at the car.”

  I felt the ambulance make a detour and eventually come to a stop. I was so curious what the remains of our demolished car looked like, but my arms were taped alongside my body to hold my broken bones in place, and I couldn’t muster the energy to raise myself up to look outside. The back doors to the ambulance flung open behind me, and a Pakistani policeman stepped in and announced that he had been tasked with guarding our car so that no one could steal our belongings. In an effort to prove that he hadn’t pilfered anything from our bags, the policeman then stood over me, lying flat on my back and wrapped with flimsy gauze, and held out my little change purse.

  “Look,” the policeman declared triumphantly as I struggled to keep my eyes open. “All your money is here!” And he riffled through my little travel wallet, showing me that he had meticulously separated out all the different currencies, arranging them in order by country.

  “Thank you. You can have the money,” I said. “Where are my cameras? Where is my camera bag? I wanted my cameras and my telephone.”

  He immediately produced my black Domke camera bag, in perfect shape. And at that point someone—either Khalid or the ambulance driver—obviously felt some sort of urgency to return us to the original mission of rushing us to the hospital, and the doors behind me closed, the police officer who had safely guarded our things disappeared, and we continued on our way toward Islamabad.

  I asked Khalid to fish my orange cell phone out of my bag. He handed it to me, and as I held the phone I wasn’t sure whom to call. One side of my brain told me to call Paul; the other side of my brain wondered who Paul was. My mind was cloudy. Paul. Fiancé. Call. Paul. I scrolled through the names in my contact list and found “Paul Baby” and wrote a text: “Baby I have been in a bad car accident. But I am ok. Please call my parents and let them know I am ok.” I then dialed my friend Ivan, who had started working with CNN and was in Pakistan at the time. Ivan answered the phone, and I vaguely remember asking him to call my friend Kathy Gannon, who was still living in Pakistan from the days when she helped me secure my first Taliban visa, to find out what hospital we should go to as we made our way back to Islamabad. Somewhere in the reserves of my memory, I was able to recall that Kathy knew the country well. My eyes started closing again when my phone rang. It was Paul. “Baby, I am OK. Please call Kathy Gannon and find out what the best hospital is in Islamabad. And can you call my sister Lauren and tell her I am alive?” Lauren was my oldest sister, to whom I often turned during a crisis. In childhood she had been my protector, and she was solid and nurturing during any crisis—truly maternal. I must have sensed that Lauren would be the right person, rather than my mother, to handle the news and to disseminate it to the rest of the family without drama. I then called Dex, explaining that we had been in a car accident and asking him to meet me at the hospital. And then I passed out again.

  The next time I woke up I was being wheeled down a hospital corridor on a stretcher, watching the lights on the ceiling and the upper halves of bodies scurry past me. The medics were rambling on in Urdu when I heard “ … driver expire … ,” and I knew they were talking about Raza. My heart broke.

  “Where is Raza?” I pleaded—to no response. “Where is my driver, Raza?”

  Silence.

  They wheeled me to the emergency room at the Shifa International Hospital, where a sea of familiar faces met our arrival: Ivan, Dex, Pamela Constable from the Washington Post, Kathy Gannon. I couldn’t move and was flying on morphine. Ivan had brought along a CNN security adviser who doubled as a medic to look me over with a series of quick tests to ensure that I didn’t have brain damage. He put a flashlight to my eyes and asked me to follow it. He was already one step ahead of the doctors at Shifa.

  I noticed Dex, in crisis mode, scurrying around the emergency room with a clipboard of papers to register me and Teru at the hospital.

  “Dex, where is Raza?” I asked, knowing he would be honest with me.

  “He is dead, man. Raza is dead.”

  The words sank in—driver expire—and I started to cry.

  I felt that Raza’s death was my fault. We weren’t in a dangerous place or driving at some ungodly hour of the night. We weren’t being chased by Taliban or insurgents or running on no sleep. It was one of the few times in my career when my driver and I were actually operating in a safe environment, on a full night’s sleep, caffeine and food in our stomachs, driving along a perfectly paved road. But I still felt guilty.

  When, a few hours later, his sons came to collect Raza’s belongings, and visited the hospital room where Teru and I were being treated temporarily, I started crying uncontrollably. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.” Raza had been the breadwinner for his wife and eight children.

  Kathy came to my room before leaving that night. She stood at the foot of my bed and offered some advice to Dexter: “Do not leave her alone for one minute in this hospital. Monitor everything they give her. They will come at all hours of the night to administer tests, and someone must be with her.” And then she explained that she had asked her private doctor in Islamabad—a trusted doctor who treated the foreign diplomatic, aid, and journalist communities—to pass by and check on me daily.

  For three days Paul struggled to get a visa to Pakistan. Under normal circumstances, that could take weeks for a journalist. To make matters worse, the accident happened on a Friday afternoon. He somehow persuaded the ambassador to open the consulate over the weekend to issue him a visa. In the interim Dexter and Ivan rotated shifts in my room. The Pakistani staff wa
s thoroughly confused by their presence—women in Pakistan didn’t usually have men who weren’t husbands or family members in their room—so I told everyone that Dexter and Ivan were my brothers.

  There were other problems. The first night, a handful of male nurses arrived at my bedside at about one in the morning, ready to take me for an MRI or a CT scan. In lieu of a rolling stretcher they grabbed the edges of the sheet from my hospital bed and picked me up in the sheet, jamming together the shattered bones of my collarbone and chafing the open wounds on my back where I had lost layers of skin. I screamed bloody murder while Dex yelled at them to be careful, as they shifted me from the sheet to a rolling stretcher. They ushered me down the hall onto an elevator and down to a basement room, where I was placed on a table at the entrance to a monstrous, tunnel-like machine. I drifted in and out of consciousness as I waited for the mysterious scan to begin. Nothing. What seemed like hours passed, with no progress, when I turned to Dex to ask what was happening. He turned to the male nurses and said, “Dudes, what is taking so long?”

  The men stood over me awkwardly, and one cocked his head as he offered up: “Madam has metal.”

  Dex was confused. He turned to me: “Dude, do you have metal on you?”

  I still had my underwire bra on. No one had dared to remove my clothes since I had arrived at the hospital. My rust-colored salwar kameez was still stuck to the open wounds on my back, and my bra was still fastened around my chest.

  “Dex, I have a bra on.”

  “Well, take it off.”

  “I can’t take it off. I can’t move my arms. You take it off.”

  The Pakistani nurses were completely riveted.

  “I can’t take your bra off. Paul will kill me.”

  “Dex. You are fifty years old. You have seen tits before. Take my bra off!”

  The poor nurses were confused again.

  “It’s a simple bra with a front clasp,” I explained to Dex.

  He nodded, and I passed out again.

  • • •

  THE SCANS FROM SHIFA Hospital revealed no internal bleeding and no damage to my head. I had a smashed collarbone; loss of skin on my back, arms, and hands; two sprained ankles and possibly sprained ribs. I felt as if I had been thrown into a washing machine on the spin cycle. Every three hours a nurse would come into my room and administer morphine directly into my veins. With each injection my body felt as if it were sinking into a warm bath and then rising up to float through the room, weightless and painless.

  In a rare window of lucidity, I started looking through my e-mails and asked Dex to bring in my computer so I could download and look through my pictures from the refugee camps. I wanted to file a selection of images from my hospital bed and get them published in the paper, as if somehow this horrific day would have been justified by our work. Or maybe I was so accustomed to filing at the end of a long, exhausting day on a breaking-news story; I had once filed under fire in Fallujah from beneath the protection of a Humvee. The instinct to file the images from the camps before they got outdated was automatic.

  Paul arrived in my hospital room on a Monday morning, clipboard in hand, in the midst of one of my doped-up hazes. I remember seeing him and his concerned but reassuring face and knowing everything would be OK. And I knew the nurses would be relieved to finally see my fiancé by my bedside to replace my questionable “brothers.”

  The day before I left the hospital, the Turkish ambassador arrived at my bedside with a posse of diplomats and offered Paul and me a place to stay in the Turkish Embassy in Islamabad once I was released. The nurses continued watching the flurry of activity in and out of my room with curiosity. Almost immediately after the ambassador left, another set of visitors arrived: Haleem, my sympathetic-to-the-Taliban interpreter from the “Talibanistan” story the year before, along with one of his cousins. I was mortified that my hair was uncovered and I was wearing a hospital gown with skin exposed in front of two deeply religious men. Each visitor had a very long beard and wore an ankle-length kurta, a loose-fitting collarless shirt. Haleem toted a bag of hand-picked oranges, and Paul invited him and his cousin to sit down.

  I thanked them for coming. “How are you, Haleem?” I asked.

  “Well. We are fine,” he said, “though my cousin’s house was hit by a drone yesterday …”

  Life in Pakistan went on.

  • • •

  A FEW DAYS LATER Paul and I flew back to Istanbul, and on May 19, 2009, I had a titanium plate put in my shoulder. I was completely unprepared for the post-op misery. I only wanted to be healthy again, to be able to walk down the aisle at our wedding in six weeks.

  Night after night I woke up screaming and weeping with daggerlike pains shooting through my shoulder and chest. For the first time in my life I was injured; I could not take care of myself, and I realized how long I had taken my independence for granted. The simplest tasks became impossible without the use of my left shoulder and arm: I couldn’t bathe, I couldn’t put on my own bra, and I couldn’t fully dress myself. In the weeks leading up to our wedding, Paul spent every morning before work walking me to the shower, washing my body, toweling me off, putting on my underwear, clasping my bra, dressing me, and preparing whatever I needed for the day while he was off at work. I knew that seeing me so fragile and vulnerable was taking a toll on him emotionally, wearing him down. He was taking care of me, running a hectic news bureau, and planning our entire wedding—alone. I had never relied on someone so completely before, and I felt guilty for being so helpless. Paul’s determination to nurse me back to health was humbling.

  Only once did he allow his own suffering to show. He was sitting at the desk in our living room, looking at his laptop, and suddenly he started to cry. He had received an e-mail from Bill Keller, the executive editor of the New York Times, who wrote to say how relieved he was that I was OK. Keller’s simple words broke something in Paul. I could hardly bear to see it.

  I spent the end of May and the beginning of June lying on my back, sleeping, or watching the cargo ships float along the Bosporus outside my window until Paul came home from work. My attention span wasn’t focused enough to help him with our wedding planning, to read a book, or to watch a movie. I tried working at my computer, but the pain was often so excruciating that I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t work or go on assignment, and I couldn’t earn money. It was the first time I couldn’t rely on determination, physical endurance—or myself—to do anything.

  Some weeks later I was well enough to have lunch with my Istanbul friends Jason and Suzy. Jason looked concerned. “When are you going to just stop all this war zone stuff?” he finally said. “Why not get pregnant?”

  It was a valid question but a deeply private and anxiety-inducing one. I didn’t want to discuss it over lunch with friends when I was still physically and emotionally fragile. The suggestion that my work had become too dangerous, or that somehow getting pregnant was an adequate replacement for photography, struck chords deep down in me about my work, my life, and how I chose to balance the two—especially as I approached my wedding date. The car accident in Pakistan was just one more example of me walking away from a near-death incident relatively unscathed, and each time I survived I knew my luck wouldn’t last forever. Paul, like my parents and sisters, never asked me to stop working; he never asked me to tone down my life or shy away from risk. He knew better than to ask me to change, or to compromise what I believed in. But every traumatic incident inspired inner dialogue that I wasn’t necessarily ready to confront, and in this case it was especially easy to chalk the accident up to chance: It was just a car accident! That could happen anywhere! I talked things through with Paul, updated my will, and moved forward.

  But I got angry when my friends challenged a resolve that was already often painful to maintain. As I moved out of my twenties and into my thirties, my friends’ advice evolved from “stop running around war zones” to “stop running around war zones and get pregnant.” It was even more infuriating. In my ear
ly twenties my response was simple: “I don’t have a man. And I prefer to be doing exactly what I am doing.” Since Paul and I had gotten engaged, however, he had talked repeatedly about his desire for a family. I knew I wanted a family eventually, but I was finally at the height of my career, shooting all the assignments I had dreamed of shooting, for some of the best publications in the world. The last thing I wanted was to interrupt that momentum for a baby that I wasn’t yearning for at that point in my life. Unlike many of my female friends in their midthirties, I was definitely not sensing my biological clock ticking; in fact, I often wondered if I had been born without one.

  And I couldn’t just have a baby and go back to Afghanistan. If I took a month off, I was likely to be replaced by one of the other, say, two hundred freelancers vying to get my assignments. If I took six months off to have a baby, I believed I would be written off by my editors. I was in a man’s profession. I couldn’t think of a single female photojournalist who was married or had a child. If Jason didn’t think I struggled with all this, he was wrong.

  • • •

  OUR WEDDING TOOK PLACE at Paul’s father’s home in southwest France: a stone castle in the midst of rolling cornfields, off a narrow country road lined with English plane trees that made of it a green tunnel, specks of sunlight bursting through the leaves. I thought of the opening passage of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, even though he was referring to life in a city, every time we sped along the road from the stone house toward medieval Lectoure, the nearest town.

  September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, from trips on roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. There are children, dogs, families with old pieces of luggage bound by straps. I make my way among them. It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light.