Working alone now in a man’s world, she had no wish to be known as an easy lay, a castoff of the great Joe Shelby. She accepted assignments as before from the magazine that employed them both, but insisted that her instructions relating to his articles come by e-mail, through an intermediary editor, not from the writer direct. Covering the same stories as Joe Shelby, she traveled alone, trailing him like a distant phantom, revisiting the scenes he had observed only after he had left, avoiding the hotels where he stayed, aware of his every move, but making no attempt to reestablish their covenant. She heard rumors of frailty, malfunction but shied from confirming them.
Old Joe has taken his African princess to London. Shelby’s hanging up his flak jacket. Joe’s out on a limb, traveling alone, strung out on Scotch. Joe’s sick, but he won’t say what’s wrong. Shelby has Parkinson’s, AIDS, MS. Joe’s dropping out with his bimbo in Primrose Hill. What happened to Shelby of Sarajevo? Where’s Mr. Exclusive now? Whatever became of Captain Wilderness?
Trailing him, she imagined herself as a dark bird of prey on large, silent wings, circling in the thermals of his travels, the sun at her back and her quarry within sight. She had no wish to confront him, demand explanations for the finality, the brutality of his breach with her. She did not want to be told how he and his Eva were doing. Looking back to the garden party in Naivasha, she understood that Eva Kimberly was the opposite side of the Shelby equation. Studying her photograph in magazine articles about her business success, she saw what Joe Shelby must have seen in her: symmetry, order, the light side of the moon where chaos never intruded. She had the same well-formed features as the British liked to see in television announcers and the wives of royal princes, a near-irresistible pull for an Englishman of the north, a potent emblem of wholeness, arrival—the kind of woman a man would take home for tea. But Eva Kimberly would never reach out to the Joe Shelby who thrived on disorder and mayhem, who would chance his all on a turn in a remote, dirt highway, who fed on humanity’s worst offerings, breathed in the smoke of the slaughterhouse as if it were incense, torn between darkness and light, purity and defilement.
—
She marked her progression with a trail of credit card slips, half-eaten room-service meals and forensic traces of white powder on glass-topped tables, lavatory cisterns, handout glossy magazines. She journeyed alone and fed her addiction alone. She did not replace the Kevlar vest he had taken from their shared room at the Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi. She shuddered sometimes when she thought of the particularly irresponsible risks—and then laughed, sniggered, a schoolchild caught out in a misdemeanor. There had been Kosovo and Sri Lanka and Afghanistan—any place where depravity provided the benchmark of human behavior. She had traveled by Land Rover on sandy tracks in southern Angola, and by camel across pale deserts in Chad. She ran with the Albanian rebels and huddled with Palestinians as the rocket fire of Israeli jets made the earth tremble. In southern Sudan her airplane miraculously survived a direct hit from surface-to-air fire. She laughed as the light plane bucked and spiraled. In Sri Lanka, the shrapnel almost blinded a woman reporter walking next to her, but somehow passed her by. If she had quiet time, downtime, then Joe Shelby invaded it, corroded it, besmirched it with the memory of treachery. So she avoided quiet time. She sought out the worst and craved the one defining moment, the crystallizing image between life and death when she would absorb humanity’s baseness unto her camera and unto herself. She found it, finally, in an unlikely place, in someone else’s home with a corrugated green zinc roof and tobacco barns in the yard, in the high, dry brightness of southern Africa’s winter, zenith and nadir at once.
Chapter Six
CHINHOYI, ZIMBABWE1. MAY 2000
They had traveled together, five journalists and photographers in two cars, to investigate reports that people calling themselves veterans of some indistinct war before her time had taken over an isolated, white-owned African farmstead, threatening its owners, a couple in their early thirties with two young daughters, Emma, aged six, and Jemima, aged four. Driving quickly from the safety of the capital, they soon reached the turnoff from the main dirt track onto a narrower, unpaved lane marked by the farmer’s family name—Van Deventer—painted on an old ploughshare nailed to a wooden post at the roadside. Her colleagues pulled over, eyeing a group of thirty or maybe fifty of the occupiers two hundred yards away down the farm road. The consensus was not to drive onto the farm, not to sever escape routes before the situation could be assessed. The feeling was to talk, negotiate with the occupiers, if that were possible, but only from a position that could be exited at speed. The engines of their cars turned in the stillness. The occupiers bunched as a group, shimmering in the heat-haze like some medieval band, bristling with weapons of crude and intimate destruction—knobkerries and makeshift spears, honed pangas whose blades caught the brittle light. When they moved, they moved as a single threatening group, with dust clouds rising at their feet. They marched with a synchronized high step, like a war dance, and they chanted. “Hau, hau.” It was the throaty roar of southern Africa’s crowded explosive townships, of massed guerrilla armies, a statement of intent. The mood among her colleagues was in favor of speedy, tactical withdrawal. Who needed photos that had been taken before? Who needed to take risks for old news?
Faria Duclos alone dissented. She recognized this moment from her own past, from Rwanda where Joe Shelby had wavered, denied her the opportunity to meet the destiny that had always awaited her. If she hesitated now, she would again be walking away. This time, she would not be diverted by his doubts and calculations.
She climbed from the car, abandoning her canvas bag full of gear, taking only two light cameras equipped with wide-angle lenses and a stock of film. Ignoring her colleagues, she climbed over the farm gate, advancing down the long empty track that led to the occupiers. She heard her colleagues call: come back. The occupiers, the so-called veterans, too young to have known real war but blooded and hardened in their own way, paused and called: be gone white trash, hamba. There was a voice inside her, Joe’s voice, that said: turn, run, now, you can still make it; vault the fence, climb into a car, speed away and laugh and be none the worse. But that was the voice of a false prophet, a mendacious advisor. She was committed now. The options had closed and they all knew it, the occupiers and her colleagues. In the quiet, she heard a car drive away, then pause. She walked on and raised her camera, a stick figure in the heat, a woman in black advancing without hesitation, so spindly thin she seemed to slice the air without moving it, casting no shadow. On either side of her, in this fallow, dry season, the fields that would not soon be replanted with corn lay bare and stubbled, stretching to distant perimeters of bush and torn fencing. The land was silent. The track was deserted save for the occupiers. Silence and emptiness—the warning signals, Joe Shelby’s alarm bells, crying danger. But she wanted danger, she wanted proof that she had not been wrong when he sought retreat. The silence had a particular quality. The stillness of the air beckoned her with knowledge of very recent, indefinable events. No birds sang. No crickets chirruped. If she failed now, then the people outside this dark circle would never know the horror of what she suspected—knew by now—must have happened. If she turned, she betrayed her own truth and the truth of her business. If she retreated, the avenging sword was forever blunted and sheathed. But that was secondary to her mission. If she turned now, they would run her down like a fox.
Through the range finder of her old Leica with its wide-angle lens, the mob still looked distant even when she was close enough to smell the sweat of rage and blood and recent sexual emission, see the dust on dull faces sculpted with runnels of perspiration. Again she heard her colleagues exhorting her to flee, return to safety while she yet might. But it was too late for that. If she turned they would be upon her. If she showed a fear she did not feel they would take it as their invitation. She would not give the mob that pleasure, that pretext to hound her. “I do not run for you bastards,” she told the leader with his ganja-red ey
es. And walked through them, to the farmhouse they did not wish her to see, to the incontrovertible evidence—the woman, the girl-children, defenseless in death as they had been in life, the semen still seeping from their still bodies, blood not yet coagulated on cheery print dresses, the husband shot with his khaki shorts pulled down to his ankles, over his knee-length woolen socks, with his balls in his mouth, even the dogs silenced in a pool of their own blood and feces—deep reds against pale skin, a chiaroscuro juxtaposition, the passion of Van Deventer. Hah!
She recorded the images from close range, with 19mm and 24mm lenses, so close that she smelt the co-mingling of blood and seed, sweat and evacuation. The lines of pure terror were drawn indelibly across the faces long after the departing of the last breath, a rictus that no blessing or unction would ease. To the touch, the skin of the victims was still warm. In the room around her, with its worn, comfortable sofas and old television set, its stack of folding tables for TV dinners and wall trophies of antelope heads and stuffed tiger-fish mounted on varnished timber, she felt the spirits moving around her, seeking a place in the afterworld, craving release from the manner of their bodies’ destruction. The spirits sought grace, redemption. And she sought the same from them—release from the harpies and demons, entry into a world of light and calm.
With the occupiers regrouped and restive, murmuring and sullen at her back she took what she later called her family portraits—mother and daughters, man and wife, sister and sister. That was half the job done, the victim half. Now for the perpetrators. She turned and faced them, moving close to them, photographing them as a group, moving in to capture inscrutable, individual stares and slack mouths. The peril was immediate, personal. Clear and present. Between her and the men with their shark-black eyes, there was no barrier, no distance, no room for escape. They were young, frightened, angry, defiant. They carried blooded machetes and homemade clubs stained dark with coagulated plasma. They had slept and lived rough, wearing vests full of holes, and hand-me-down sneakers or no shoes at all. Some wore new headbands that resembled a farmer’s Sunday-suit tie. One had placed a pair of girl’s panties on his head, like a bonnet. They would move together, a shoal, inspired by one another’s rage until it built to a collective frenzy, beyond individual accounting. Remotely, in the outbuildings of the farm, she heard the crackle of a fire taking hold in bone-dry thatch, heard the cries of farm workers whose turn had now come. She heard shots fired and the thud of machetes on skin. She heard screams, but kept on photographing the faces before her—the rogue’s gallery, she would call it—the bravado and fear and dullness and fury. She did not speak. She knew her spell would soon expire, but she knew she had this moment to herself as long as the magic of her audacity numbed them. Only when her entire stock of film was almost used did she walk out back of the farm, through tall, ocher grass under a blue sky marbled with white, jolly clouds, and on through the bush. She turned once, to complete the sequence, as the farmhouse itself began to burn, casting unholy flickers over the discarded bicycles around a swimming pool turning green, the strident purple hedges of bougainvillea, the rusting barbecue and the dense lawn of emerald kikuyu grass. Then, before the occupiers had chance to give chase, she ran, on across the bush, four miles to the adjacent homestead, through tawny chattering scrub and mopane trees, stopping only when she knew she had outrun them. In that moment, finally, she trembled and tears scoured hollow cheeks. She shivered with fear and wept in exultation. She felt an almost irresistible desire to urinate. She had found and crossed the threshold she had only approached with Joe Shelby in Rwanda and she was free, finally, to abandon the quest for it.
PRISTINA, KOSOVO. JUNE 2000
In their world, it was almost inevitable that they would meet. Friendships formed and dissolved and re-formed easily among the close band of their peers. For all they were rivals, they congregated inevitably in the same places, in the same theaters of competition, the same bars that became known as their watering holes. So often, since the schism between them, they had been in the same towns, sometimes in the same hotels. Now, in the drear reaches of the Balkans, where the minarets and domes jostled for space in the air they breathed, what had surely been foretold came to pass. She did not know why, but he called her. She had not seen him in nine months. She had heard rumors, stories about a condition, an illness, a curse that had struck down the man he had been, and brought forth a cripple from his body. But she had not seen him. He called her to say he was in trouble, that there was no compunction but he needed help he was sorry to ask for. She was more curious about his plight than angry at his presumption, conscious more of his need for help than of his treatment of her, his hurtful rejection. She would help a colleague, of course, and he was asking for help as a colleague. But he was asking her—and no one else, least of all the thief princess bitch—and she alone was going to him and that had to have meaning. He did not say what kind of help he needed. She did not ask.
They met outside the elevator in a hotel in Pristina—a rendezvous point he requested. With a telescopic walker’s pole in his right hand, he seemed curiously unbalanced, tipped over. His left arm hung from his vest, straight and motionless, and the sleeve of his shirt had unraveled, flapping weakly as if he did not have even the strength to fold it back. He leaned heavily to the right on the walking pole. His face had changed little, but the shock in her voice betrayed them both. How could this apparition be the same man at all?
“What happened, Joe?”
“I wish I could tell you.”
Joe Shelby had been taught that if he studied hard, his effort would be rewarded, and, usually, it was. He had learned human destiny could be controlled by individual human will. Among his school friends, in the rough-and-tumble alleyways of his hometown, in the grimy cauldrons of habitation below the Pennine Hills, he was acknowledged as a leader. He believed that, if he conceived a plan of action, he could also carry it through. In his family, that was a luxury, a novelty. His grandmother left school at thirteen to work in a cotton mill. His father had never been able to struggle totally free from the clinging legacy of being born in a household that prized a brown wages envelope on a Friday night above college degrees. Joe Shelby’s grandfather had been a shipyard overseer of working class men, but a working class man nonetheless, his cap as flat as the vowels of his northern English accent. Where Eva Kimberly traced her lineage through knighthoods and commissions, Joe Shelby’s line ran through machine shops and the lower ranks, the foot soldiers, not the officers. Where her family album showed the sepia prints of gatherings on the shaded terraces of large houses with servants paraded just off-camera, his memory book traced a progression from row houses to flat, muddy beaches where three-penny donkey rides were the closest his forebears came to the sleek polo ponies and hunters of her ancestors.
Joe Shelby’s father had advanced the appropriate rungs on the invisible ladder of class, from overseer to manager, but he was still a man who had grown with oil behind his fingernails and grease on his hands. On the rare occasions that Joe Shelby visited the few aging aunts and uncles, widows or widowers in their narrow terraced homes, with gas fires hissing in sitting rooms that were always tidy and lonely, he saw them not simply as old people resigned to death’s approach, but as the bridge across the generations, to a time when his forebears had been as impotent and exploited as the peasants of Kosovo or Zimbabwe, their expectations truncated in time and scope by the system that made a very few rich and powerful, and a very many poor and powerless. Joe Shelby’s gift from his father, really, was his freedom to choose, his freedom to leap any hurdle simply because he wished to do so, and could will himself to do so.
Now the spell had broken.
The weakness had spread from his left arm to his left leg. His foot had begun to trail. In London, he had tripped, inexplicably, on a tennis court as he tried to maneuver himself into an ungainly swing at the ball. Walking through the city, he caught sight of himself in a store window, leaning forward as if in a gale, to compensate for
the awkwardness of his leg. The physicians ran tests, took measurements, required him to show his prowess at pinching and gripping. His specialists talked of second opinions, at Queen’s Square in London and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, in the United States of America. There was talk of putative, experimental treatments—steroids and plasma exchange, even traction or exploratory surgery between the cervical vertebra.
When the siren call summoned him back to the Balkans, he did not hesitate. Ignoring the weakness, Joe Shelby flew in, posthaste, from London, bidding Eva Kimberly farewell with a promise that the long-awaited visit that night to the opera—Tosca with Plácido Domingo—would definitely be postponed, not canceled. Next week. Soon. At La Scala or wherever it took. And don’t worry, he told her, he would be fixed: he had an appointment, soon, at the fancy clinic in the United States, where they worked miracles. It was, he said, a last trot around the paddock before that encounter.
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