When I saw the photo, I was so shocked that for a few seconds I didn’t even realize it was me there; that I was the woman. I didn’t remember pulling back my hair. I certainly wasn’t unhappy in the café that day. Maris and the baby were coming to visit. The only memory I had was of being glad to sit down after shopping and then my annoyance at realizing the guy was still taking pictures. That’s all.
I flipped to the next one. Lainzer Tiergarten the day of the picnic with the Easterlings. I’m offering bread to Mickey Mouse, the boar. We seem to be smiling at each other. Love at first sight. Maris is standing nearby with the baby in her arms. Nicholas has his hands in the air and is laughing. If that first picture was Hell, this one was Heaven. Everyone, including the boar, is happy. I’d been shaken by the first picture, but this one exuded such happiness that, despite myself, I grinned.
As I said, there were five other shots: two on the Johann Strauss the night of the prom, one in front of the Opera, one walking my dog down by the river. The last was of me from behind as I crossed the street back to the café. An old man in a silly hat is watching me and pointing. He’s telling his wife something and they’re both laughing. That son of a bitch photographer took another picture of me five seconds after saying he’d stop! But it was such a funny picture that I giggled; if you didn’t know what was going on, you’d think the old man’s pointing out my ass to his wife. After I’d looked at them over and over, I dropped them into my lap and pulled the dog over to hug. Who was this guy? How long had he been following me around taking pictures? And what pictures! Each one was startling, special. I was suspicious, but intrigued as hell. It was perverse and impressive.
Maris came over later that day. After she put down the baby for his nap, I got out the pictures and showed them to her without saying where they came from. I wanted her first impression. You know how famous Maris is becoming for her model cities. I wanted to hear what an artist had to say before I took any further step.
They were in the original order. She spent the most time on the first, but stopped almost as long on the one of me walking the dog. When she asked if they were done by the same person and I said yes, she said it was hard to believe. One looked like part of the series of me in Vanity Fair by Herb Ritts, but the Opera one reminded her of a 1920s Bauhaus photograph, something by Moholy or Herbert Bayer. The corker, though, was the café shot; it was as good as any picture she’d ever seen. Who was the photographer? She wanted to know if he had a book out because she’d get hold of it.
I told her how I’d met the guy. She shook her head but didn’t stop looking at the pictures. I asked if she didn’t think the whole thing was bizarre and she said yes, but they were brilliant nevertheless. Maybe it was her own strange sensibilities, but she didn’t think the man who took them was strange. I rolled my eyes and said, hey, he followed me around for days, obviously, without my ever knowing it. He was James Bond and Peeping Tom rolled into one! Not to mention a good photographer. How long had he been there before I knew it?
She said if he ever came around again and bothered me, I should just tell him to go away. But she didn’t think he was going to do that. Then she said something that got me. “We’re afraid of everything these days, you know? Terror dominates pity.” I had no idea what she meant by that and asked her to be clearer. Shuffling through the batch, she held up the picture of me in the café. “This man doesn’t want to scare you. He doesn’t want anything from you. If anything, he wants to tell you something. He’s saying that you’re in trouble.”
My stomach clenched and I asked whether it was so obvious. She said, “Well, kind of.”
I have that small television in the kitchen which I usually turn on to CNN when I’m in there for any length of time. Once in a while I look up if something sounds interesting, but usually it’s only background noise in English.
Yugoslavia’s only a few hundred miles away from here, and since it exploded, Austrians have kept a close eye on what’s going on down there, for obvious reasons. Dubrovnik is the favorite target these days, and it’s obscene the way they’re destroying that beautiful town for no reason other than spite.
Two days after Maris’s visit, I was making lunch while listening to the latest report from the battle zone. Bombs exploded and people ran for shelter. There was the sound of machine gun fire and an ambulance raced by. An old woman loomed up in front of the camera, hands to her face.
A reporter’s voice came on, describing what was happening. I was chopping onions and trying to remember if I’d bought chives. The voice on TV said, “Blah blah blah Leland Zivic.” I knew in the back rooms of my brain that the name meant something, but I was too concerned about chopping and chives.
Another voice came on, this one smoother and sweeter than the other. I looked up only because someone laughed, which sounded strange in the middle of all that gunfire.
There he was! His name was written across the bottom of the screen with PHOTO JOURNALIST below it. I grabbed a marker and wrote it with indelible ink on the wood chopping block. I’d worry about scrubbing it away later.
The reporter said Zivic was famous for his photographs of trouble spots around the world. He’d been in Rumania when Ceausescu fell, Liberia when Doe was executed, Somalia at its raging worst. When asked what he thought about the Yugoslavian conflict, he said something like “Forty years of peace in this country. Then from one day to the next they’re going into maternity wards and shooting newborn children. Does anyone besides the politicians understand how that happened? The trouble with wars is that they all look alike to the people who aren’t involved. Only the skin color of the dead is different.”
The reporter said, “If that’s so, why do you keep risking your life to take these pictures?”
Zivic nodded as if the reporter had made a good point. “Because if I do my job well, people will see wars aren’t the same; they aren’t just body counts and anonymous casualties. Death should be shown in such a way that it will be remembered.”
I know one of the film correspondents for CNN. After a long time on the phone, I got through to her in Hollywood. Explaining what was up and where I’d just seen him, I asked her to trace down Leland Zivic for me. Good woman that she is, she didn’t ask why I was interested.
It turned out he had an apartment in London and was represented by an agency there. She gave me both of the addresses and phone numbers. I assumed if he was on television in Yugoslavia, it wasn’t likely he’d be answering his phone in London, so I called and left a message on his machine: “This is Arlen Ford. Please call me when you get a chance.”
I expected to hear from him soon but didn’t. At first I thought he hadn’t answered because he was still on assignment. In grisly moments it struck me that he might be dead. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, but his photographs sat on the table in the living room and naturally I looked at them a lot. His London numbers were stuck on a yellow slip above the telephone, and “Leland Zivic” was big and black in my handwriting on the chopping block. I’d give it a week or two before trying to wipe it off.
Opening the mailbox one morning, I saw it was empty except for a postcard. The writing was unfamiliar: neat block letters; postmark, Sarajevo. A 1930s’ photograph of New York’s Thanksgiving Day parade. Giant floats of Pinocchio, Uncle Sam, and the Tin Woodman of Oz drifted at odd angles above the street, casting huge shadows across the buildings. They were tethered by ropes to ant-sized people below.
I read: “I’m afraid to call you and will do so only if you give the all clear. Since I dropped the pictures off, I’ve been wearing a crash helmet in case you go nuclear. On a scale of one to ten, how angry are you at me for them? How did you get my telephone number? Is there life on other planets? Answer any or all of the above questions at your leisure.”
Sarajevo had recently been under fierce attack. Was that still going on? I pictured him in an underground shelter or command post, writing the card as bombs flew overhead. How amazing of him not to mention what was goin
g on there! People have so little courage nowadays that when we do meet someone who has it by the pound, it’s hard not to be impressed. Only a little twist of fate had permitted me to know what Leland did for a living. Otherwise, I’d still have thought him just another geek with a camera who’d gotten too close. Yes, I was uncomfortable with what he had done to me, but also touched and intrigued that this interesting, modest man liked me. I called his London apartment again and said only, “The coast is clear,” and then started waiting again.
Did you ever notice how life picks up when you’re expecting an important or interesting call? The telephone itself starts to dominate the room. You’re always on edge as you move around the house because any minute it could ring and be he. And if it doesn’t ring at all, you become even more nervous. Or I do. I didn’t know this guy, yet he had taken these remarkable and distressing pictures and last been spotted dodging bullets in Yugoslavia. Days went by. God knows, I wanted him to call. Then I thought maybe my phone message had been too curt and he’d been scared off. I thought about what to say if he did call. Ask about his job? Or why he took the pictures? Would he turn out to be interesting, or only brave and dull, with an eccentric fix on retired actresses? I never said his name out loud but once in a while would try it out on my mind’s tongue. Leland. That sounded American. Zivic did not.
It was late at night. I was in bed, rereading Mariette in Ecstasy – have you gotten it yet? Please do. It makes life in a cloister sound transcendently beautiful and full of possibilities. The phone rang. I was sure it was you because you’re the only person who calls so late. But I didn’t recognize the voice, so when he said my name, I asked, “Who is this?”
“Leland Zivic. Can we talk?” His voice was completely different from the way I remembered it. Of course, what did I have to remember from the only time we had talked? Three sentences? Thinking about him, I must have imagined many different voices to suit the image in my memory. The one I heard now was soft and neutral. Low, but not so that it was distinctive or anything special. He said he’d planned to be witty and make excuses, but he couldn’t today; he just wanted to talk. Was that all right? I asked what was the matter, and he said he was in Yugoslavia near the war. I told him I knew because I’d seen him on TV. His voice got very quiet then and, oh, wow, you should have heard it. He said he’d seen things the last couple of days I wouldn’t believe. He was a photographer and took pictures of war. Normally it never bothered him because it was just a job. But maybe because his father’s family came from there, this time it was bad, really bad. Wait a minute, Rose, I’ve got to stop and light a cigarette. Just remembering his voice gives me a chill.
Here we go. Anyway, his voice sounded scared and lost. He’d called because he wanted to talk to me. His words were rushed and breathless, like a confession to me and a conversation with himself. It took me completely off guard. I’d hoped when we first spoke that it would be interesting but relaxed. This was already a hundred thousand volts in my ear. I told him to say whatever he wanted and tell me anything. I sat up in bed and pulled my pajama top tighter. I wanted to look presentable for him even though he was a world away!
He said, “I’m in a slasticarna. That’s a Yugoslavian pastry shop. There’s cake all over the floor. Can you imagine that? Cake. The whole floor is fluffy goo. The man and woman who own the place are down on their knees, trying to clean pink and blue icing off the floor. All the windows are blown out of the shop and everything’s a mess, but their phone’s working and they let me use it.”
I asked whether there was fighting where he was and he said yes, but it wasn’t bad now. It had been a couple of hours before, but it had calmed down. He said it was very kind of me to talk to him so late. I told him it was nothing, that I’d only been reading and trying to fight off the urge to sneak into the kitchen for something to eat. He asked me to tell him about my kitchen, which took me completely by surprise. When I said, “What?” he said, “Describe it. I want to have a picture of Arlen Ford’s kitchen in my mind.”
“Um, okay. The kitchen. Well, it’s white and wood. Very simple, but everything’s there.”
“Do you like to cook?”
“Very much.”
“Me too. That’s when I feel cleanest. Everything makes sense. A woman who smokes and likes to cook. That’s good.”
There was a loud metallic noise, a scraping sound, from his end.
“What’s that?”
“It’s outside. A woman and boy are dragging a man on an upside-down car hood past the store. There’s a hospital near here.” He stopped and there was a long pause. I felt I was right there and could see that man on the car hood. I asked if he wanted to talk about what he’d seen there. There was another silence, as if he were trying to decide. “No. I want to tell you why I took those pictures of you.”
Naturally my heart hopped into my head and started pounding all across my temples. The moment of truth! Let me tell it to you in his words, as best I can remember. It was so beautiful and touching.
He said, “I’ve been down here for a few weeks. It was all right at the beginning. I was here before on vacation and on assignment for the winter Olympics a few years ago. But now the whole country’s eating itself alive. When it got too much, I asked for R and R in Vienna. Give me a few days off and some calm scenery and I’ll be ready again. I’ll give you all the blood and flames you want for your front pages. They said okay, so I went up there and just walked around, did nothing. Went to museums, took off my watch, made no plans. But I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d seen, which is rare for me. Maybe because there are so many Yugoslavians in Vienna. I’d see them and wonder if they’d lost someone in the war, or if they were worried about family back home. Overload. Sometimes you get overloaded doing this and can’t shake it off by closing your eyes or taking a vacation. It sticks like a cockleburr on your brain.
“I rented a bicycle at Nussdorf and rode it up along the river to Klosterneuburg. I was black. My thoughts were so dark and sad that day. What was I going to do? Go back to Yugoslavia and take more pictures of dead people? Blood and bodies? I know a photographer who changes the position of bodies so that they’ll look more fascinating in his pictures.
“Right in the middle of that darkness, I saw you. You and your red dog. Unbelievable! A vision! As God said, There are nice things in the world too. Arlen Ford walks her dog by the Danube. What were the chances of that happening? Meeting up with you like that?” He stopped and said something in another language to someone nearby. They spoke quickly back and forth before he came back on. I asked what was happening. He said the guy who owned the store “wanted to know when he was getting off, so Leland had just given him a hundred dollars American and would hand him another fifty if we talked much longer. I told him that was crazy, but he said it was the best-spent money in weeks.
Then he said, “Let me finish this story. I was about to take a permanent swim in the Blue Danube when you suddenly appeared, looking even better than you did in your movies. I felt like a thirteen-year-old. First, I almost fell off the bike, my eyes bulged out… So I stalked you. I admit it. There you were; I had a camera. I wanted one shot. One great shot of Arlen Ford to put up against all the others of Hell I’ve had to do recently. And then I got greedy. After that one by the river, I followed you home and staked out your place.”
Naturally, I told him that made me very uncomfortable. He said he knew and apologized, but wasn’t sorry. That’s kind of ballsy, huh? I mean, especially if he wanted me to like him. But he did it because they were necessary pictures. That was his word. It wasn’t only me he was photographing; he was trying to take pictures of things that would keep him alive. Good things: movie stars and their red dogs, people in wine gardens, old couples sitting in their Sunday best on a bench by the river. It became a kind of crusade for him. There’s that nice Heuriger down the street from my place, and the Gasthaus that has the good fried chicken? He sat there and talked to people, then watched my house a while. I told him it
was weird and wanted to go on with the thought, but his voice hardened and he said, “Wait a minute.”
Lulled by our conversation, I’d forgotten where he was and what was going on around him. I heard him speak another unknown language to someone nearby. A man barked something and Leland said, “Shit! They’re that close?”
I asked, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” He said they were about to be a bull’s eye and he had to go. He’d call again when he could. Was that all right? I said of course, but he’d already hung up, and that was that. Imagine what I went through trying to sleep that night!
The next postcard arrived two days later from a town named Mostar, which reminded me of North Star. I went around thinking he’s on the North Star now. All he wrote was:
Two friends meet on the street.
FIRST: “I just married a woman with two heads.”
SECOND: “Is she pretty?”
FIRST: “Well, yes and no.”
That was it. No message, no further report.
“Then I came in from shopping one day and saw the answering-machine light blinking: “Arlen, it’s Leland Zivic. Sorry you’re not there.”
From the Teeth of Angels Page 13