Even now, on this supposed photo safari with a haughty, handsome man called Davenport, she had no illusion that she was being cultivated as anything other than a trophy, a collectible on a par with the stuffed antelope heads and worn lion skins that adorned his camp in the chattering bush of the Serengeti. She had known him a thousand times over, knew his tactics and conversation down to every predictable ploy and suggestion. But she considered the safari a peace offering to Joe Shelby—a pause when they might both reflect on the excesses, pull back from mutual anger, and she had no desire to break what little remained of their faith, despite this man’s assumption of triumph from the very moment she had stepped into his four-wheel-drive Toyota in Nairobi for the long drive south.
—
Boarding school led to a spell at art school, where she discovered her limitations with oil and canvas but, citing boredom, ennui, made no attempt to transcend them. One of her mother’s suitors, gazing on her near-anorexic frame and the dark, impenetrable looks she had inherited from her father, suggested that she model for fashion magazines and she tried that, enjoying the pouting and flouncing, the ferocious attention and flattery, but more interested by far in the mechanical devices of the business—the Hasselblads and motor-drives, the lenses and lights—than in modeling itself. She achieved easy success, in demand for those sultry, androgynous shots—usually in black and white against gothic backdrops of turrets and towers—that depicted women as vaguely menacing, and certainly unpredictable beings in long expensive gowns cut to the navel over a pale, shallow, vulnerable cleavage. At airport newsstands, she saw herself peering haughtily from the covers of Vogue and Marie Claire and Elle. She thought it amusing and scary and unlikely to last and probably ending in tears.
With her first commission check, she bought a secondhand mechanical Leica with a single lens. That, she was told, was what the masters like Cartier-Bresson used—none of these modern automatic devices with motor drives, still less digital image making. Between assignments as a model she taught herself how to process and print monochrome images, grainy representations of the Parisian demimonde, of her mannequin colleagues in their downtime, without makeup or glamour, puffing on joints and snorting cocaine with mascara-ringed empty eyes. Alone in the ruby glow of her darkroom, her attention was devoured completely by the chemical interactions that conjured stark, grainy blocks of black and white with few intermediate stages of gray.
The modeling business was good. It earned money and a fast life, flying in Gulfstreams to shoots from Morocco to Mongolia. She took easily to the proffered lines of narcotics the photographers produced after—sometimes during—the shoots. Far more than the cloying haze of marijuana, Faria Duclos sought the bright burn of cocaine in her bloodstream, the ritual chopping of white powder, its formation into aesthetically pleasing lines and the sense of inordinate self-confidence it created. Even without the hunger-killing drugs, her physique was a natural for the business of modeling. She seemed alight with an inner furnace that burned off every last calorie. Her hair became photogenically frizzy without a coiffeur’s attentions, another function of her father’s genes. Art school lay somewhere forgotten in a turbulent wake: with her Leica and her growing collection of other cameras and lenses she came to think that, if only she mastered the techniques of reading and manipulating light, she would some day produce the depths and riches of a Caravaggio canvas on film. Her upbringing had given her fluency in French, Arabic and English so that, in most places where the procession of lights, cameras, clothes, models, hairdressers and frenzy moved, she was able to win the trust of and photograph the people who had not asked to host a shoot but tolerated it, usually, in return for temporary work and outright bribes. The dogs bark, her agency boss liked to say, but the caravan moves on. And everywhere along this route the path was lined with men, of canine tenacity who would take but never love, seduce but never embrace, whose preferred terrain was the cocktail party, the moored yacht, the candlelit dinner and the boudoir. In her heart they confirmed her belief that she would never meet her protector, her shield, so she would be alone, live alone and die alone. Now Joe Shelby seemed to have joined that unsavory gallery of people who had faltered, and her sin was the worse because, foolishly, she had trusted him.
Jeremy Davenport shifted beside her in the hide where he had suggested they watch and photograph a leopard circle and kill a tethered goat by a salt lick in the Serengeti. The arm placed across her shoulder was supposed to be casual but she shrugged it away. He was not too concerned, knowing that, usually, it was the sight of the attack, the blood and the bone, that coaxed forth less rejectionist emotions.
She knew the precise moment that her life as a model came to an end. There had been a shoot in Jordan, where the director hired the entire ancient site of rock carvings and temples at Petra. The caravan was on its way there, overnighting in Amman, when Faria and her colleagues awoke to find the hotel ringed by protesters demonstrating against the presence in the same building of an Israeli trade delegation. Where the models, photographers, makeup teams and hairdressers had been anticipating a line of limousines awaiting them, they were greeted by a furious crowd hemmed in by riot police with shields, truncheons and rifles. From her hotel window, Faria photographed the protests and their aftermath—the police lines, the stinging tear gas and the first thrill of live gunfire. When the shooting stopped, she ventured forth, photographing the dead and the wounded with a grim fascination for the raggedness of the wounds, the sickly cocktail of blood and cordite, the fatuous abandon on the faces of corpses on the hard concrete of the hotel parking lot. She moved in close for the wide-angle images that became her hallmark. She photographed a bloodstain on an abandoned black-and-white checkered kafiyeh headdress, not realizing at the time that the blood had spilled into an approximate image of the geographic frontiers of the state of Israel. When the professionals arrived in town that night from London and Cairo and Jerusalem with their edit packs and laptops and bulging camera bags, she alone had rolls and rolls of exposed film to barter. When her photograph of the bloodstain—overlaid against a computer mock-up of a map of Israel in flames—appeared on the following week’s cover of Paris Match, Faria Duclos was ready to leave modeling for good.
She had a healthy bank account, an apartment from her mother’s dwindling fortune and an instant following among a raffish army of male photographers in headbands and flak jackets and ragged fishing vests only too keen to trade their hard-earned wisdom for a chance to court her. After the riots in Jordan, the region was aflame. The very future of the Hashemite dynasty in Amman hung in the balance. The West Bank and Gaza trembled with yet one more uprising starring suicide bombers and young, masked men wielding slingshots and rifles. Islam was poised to take over the world. She took an apartment in west Beirut near Hamra Street with her films and her cameras. She switched from her model’s glittery regalia to baggy black pants and shapeless tee shirts, and tied her hair back in a rough pony tail that accentuated the gaunt, angular planes of her features. She purchased her first bulletproof vest. She had no wish to be sought out for her looks: what mattered now was the images created of others, not of herself. She made new friends among the region’s traveling circus of reporters and photographers, and kept close ties to her old friends in the cocaine market. It took only a few spurned advances, and a rapidly growing portfolio of exclusive images, for her colleagues in their faded jeans and Kevlar tunics to realize that Faria Duclos was a contender.
She had no time at all for the region’s convoluted sophistries—the power balances and shifting sands of Iraq and Syria, Egypt and Israel. She told no one of her own history, with an Arab father and a mother who kept hidden her remote Jewish ancestry—her own private contribution to the region’s nuances. Here, there were just good guys and bad guys. The bad guys were the dictators and oppressors—whatever their faith. The good guys were the oppressed—the region’s most fertile harvest: the veiled widows with their graveside ululations, the teenagers flung back crazily by a bull
et in the chest. Even victimhood was ambiguous. Ultimately, virtue could be divined only in death, at that enchanted moment when the soul left the body while the spirit transposed itself into the parallel world of the afterlife. Therefore, Faria Duclos believed, she needed to be ever-present in the places where violent death was likely to occur most frequently.
Only rarely did she encounter other outsiders so close to the crossing point between this world and the next. Competitors and companions only seemed to get in the way, spoil the luxury of time that she devoted to burrowing into the situations she wished to exploit. In the Middle East, she found it just as easy to wear the chador of Islam as to pass in long tresses and modest skirts among the Jewish faithful. Where others sought a quick-fix, one-day jolt of pictures, she was happy to spend days, weeks living among her subjects until she felt she had grasped the essence of what she wished to portray. Often enough, her patience carried its own special dangers because people trusted her enough to take her into situations far more perilous than the normal clashes so typical of the region. She had accompanied Israeli special forces into Iraq and, in Africa, the Sierra Leone rebels had unusually taken her along to witness their perpetration of a mass mutilation, as if going to a soccer game. At her first encounter with Joe Shelby, she was irked to discover an intruder on her patch, because she had spent a considerable amount of time winning the confidence of a particularly brutal mercenary sniper operating from a half-built Gaza high-rise, a man who specialized in the murder of Israeli civilians, using an old and powerful Steyr-Mannlicher rifle, its long barrel wrapped in rags to break its profile and prevent glare, to spread the terror of the unpredictable through Jewish settler communities. Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence unit, had been unable to locate him. But Faria Duclos had. And, to her chagrin, so had Joe Shelby.
—
From a breeze-block vantage point in the shell of the high-rise, looking through the powerful scope at dusk, the sniper had shown her an Orthodox Jewish woman with three small girls entering their home behind the barbed wire of a settlement one mile distant. The following morning, the sniper said, he would let her choose which one of the three would die.
Joe Shelby snuck into the high-rise in the early hours as Faria Du-clos wrestled with the choice forced upon her by the sniper. Without really thinking through the consequences of her actions, she had sought this vantage point along the faultline between life and death, between a child’s body drawing breath and a child as a lifeless object on the concrete sidewalk outside her home. But, now she had taken up this position, she realized she could not pursue her craft without bearing witness, and even becoming party, to cold-blooded murder remote from the heat of battle. She was no longer an observer, a chronicler, a dilettante among the murderers and fighters. The sniper had turned her into a participant, an extension of his own divine status as master of other people’s mortality. From her studies she recalled a text she had studied for the international baccalaureate. Ahead of all her classmates, she had understood Andre Gide’s notion of the acte gratuit, the arbitrary choice to be made without reason or reference to antecedents or morality. Now it was on offer and she wanted no part of it. The sniper—he called himself Tawfik but did so with a heavy German accent—thought otherwise.
“If you don’t choose, baby, you go first, with this,” he said, waving a silenced pistol towards her.
“Tawfik, we can’t do this,” Joe Shelby said as the deadline ticked closer.
“But you must do it, my friend.”
Jeremy Davenport shifted beside her. For a moment she was back in Gaza three years earlier faced with the sacrificial choice.
“What do you want to shoot? The leopard or the kill?”
“Neither,” she said. “Not like this.”
The leopard was hungry, sniffing at the wind, salivating at the rich odor of its prey, prowling with hackles raised. Its eyes were the most beautiful she had ever seen.
“Any minute now. Get ready,” Jeremy Davenport said, easing his body alongside hers in a way that suggested his anticipation of an outcome he did not think was in doubt with his own fiancée far away on the coast and Joe Shelby on some kind of walkabout, God knew where.
“No. Not now,” Faria Duclos said. She rose slowly, breaking cover from the hide, walking straight across a clearing in the savanna towards a taut, hungry leopard. She had chosen a wide angle lens, knowing that would necessitate a close-up.
In Gaza, the moment of choice would come with first light when the settlement began to stir and the children were given their breakfast and told to put on their dark, navy-blue head scarves and long skirts for the ride to school. They would follow their mother from the front door to the parked Chevy Blazer on the toy-town streets of the settlement behind its guard towers and razor wire, shy and pliant in her wake. For twenty or thirty seconds they would be exposed on the sidewalk with their bright orange school satchels on their backs. The steel-jacketed bullet would precede the muzzle crack, scything through the windless, morning air, cool enough still to prevent eddies of heat from disrupting its trajectory. The child—one, two or three depending on the number they called—would fall too fast to scream, the circuits closed down by massive trauma. A mercy killing, the sniper called it. A kosher killing for the oppressed masses of Palestine, he said with a hollow laugh.
“So. One, two or three? Who goes first?”
The sniper had spent the night with his back against the wall, carefully avoiding any movement that might draw attention to the jagged hole in the breeze-block that served as his platform. Now, with the sun easing over the horizon, preposterously big and orange, he rolled into his position, back from the hole, with the camouflaged rifle barrel resting on the lower edge of the narrow aperture. Behind him, Faria Duclos chose her biggest lens of a type that extends its focal length through the use of a bright, polished mirror as its front element.
“I will say it,” she told the sniper. “One. Two. Three. Tell me when.”
She wriggled back from the sniper, moving her mirror lens until its mirror caught the blaze of the morning sun.
—
The woman had left the front door of her home. She wore a head scarf and a long, black coat stretched tight over her pregnant belly. Perhaps he should shoot her—two Jews for the price of one bullet, Tawfik was thinking. He had her in the crosshairs and his finger rested lightly on the trigger that he would squeeze, not pull. Unconsciously, reflexively, he controlled his breathing so that the image in the telescopic sight remained steady. The woman peered anxiously left and right, scanning the streets of the settlement for any hint of abnormality, unusual silence. Then she turned and gestured to her children.
“One. Two. Or three. You have five seconds.”
Tawfik the sniper was focused solely now on the image in the crosshairs. The three girls—one only slightly taller than the next, as if they had entered the world with the minimum delay between birth and conception—emerged from the house.
“Quickly. One. Two. Or three. Or I shoot you both.”
Tawfik saw the children’s dark, braided hair flowing from below their head scarves. He saw their shining brown eyes and white, just-cleaned teeth. He saw their bright orange satchels and worn leather sandals and dark stockings. Outside the narrow, rock-steady tunnel of the sniper-scope, he did not see the sudden flurry of movement in the settlement’s guard tower, the raising of the heavy machine gun as the Israeli soldiers gestured and pointed to the flickering of bright light from a half-built high-rise across the divide in the Gaza Strip.
The noise inside the concrete shell of the sniper’s eyrie was deafening as the heavy rounds clanged home and Tawfik’s body exploded, captured in its disintegration by a whirring motor-drive.
She walked towards the leopard and raised her camera. The light was poor but the animal’s eyes glowed a bright amber. Looking through the range finder, she saw the leopard bunched and poised as if to pounce. The light, at one-fifteenth of a second, in that moment of stasis that bound her to t
he animal, would douse her film in deep, natural tones, Caravaggio tones. Behind her, she heard the slide of Jeremy Davenport’s hunting rifle, but knew she was blocking a clear shot unless he moved off to the side and exposed himself to the leopard. She heard the goat’s hysterical cries, and smelled the stink of its urine and feces. In the perfect, frozen seconds of the leopard’s indecision and her own beginnings of fear, she took four frames that would capture the animal’s ferocity and wisdom. Then, quite suddenly, the leopard was gone and she turned back to Jeremy Davenport.
“You still want to fuck me?”
His hunting rifle drooped at his side and she knew his secret answer would be that he did not dare.
—
Returning, amused and celibate, to what had been their shared hotel room at the Norfolk Hotel, Faria Duclos found that Joe Shelby’s gear—his scuffed tote bag and laptop, his whisky and cigarettes and spare notebooks—had all been cleaned out. He had left in such a hurry that he had taken both their Kevlar vests with him and she made no move to replace hers. She waited three days for a call, stretching listless by the hotel pool until the sun scorched her, nurturing some vague hope that he would call to tell her of a new assignment, a new adventure that he had embarked on in a hurry, unable to reach her, but aching nonetheless to see her, hold her, ride with her into the fray once more. Yet, when the telephone did ring and she leaped naked and panicky from the shower to grab the receiver, the voice was barely recognizable, a drunken, sneering parody of Jeremy Davenport saying: if you want to know where your boyfriend is, he’s fucking my girlfriend in a little love nest in Mombasa.
Faria Duclos flew back alone to Beirut. She did not require clarification from Joe Shelby. She did not demand a face-to-face rundown on what had happened. That was obvious enough. What had happened was what always happened. Sex went hand in hand with treachery. The only constant was death. Death was the leveler, the common denominator to be explored, challenged, mined for truth. To imagine that, even as she prepared to pardon him, he was with the princess Kimberly; the sequences of treachery, the monstrousness of betrayal, were almost too much. Jealousy cast blue-movie close-ups and clinches across logical thought patterns and better judgments, offering precisely the images, the details, she did not wish to see—the intimate tenderness, the private exchanges of promises and fluids. It goaded her with an overwhelming feeling of stupidity: how could anyone be so dumb, so blind to what was happening? What had the intruder, the invader to offer that she had not? Why had she been found wanting? And, ultimately, it provided her with the obvious answer: this pain was caused only because you trusted the betrayer, and you had never trusted before, so do not trust again.
A Walking Guide Page 7