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by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  That night, after apologizing profusely, after making love to me with such tender contrition I thought he might cry, he told me, once again, that he felt guilty about having sex with me, that he loved Élodie, that I should get my own goddamned hotel room.

  It was becoming a nightly pattern.

  “But I can’t!” I’d tell him. “You knew that from the start.”

  “I know, but I feel stuck now!” he’d yell.

  “Oh, yeah?” I’d yell back. “Well, you should’ve thought of that before you invited me to come here with you, because so do I!”

  I was stuck. Never mind that with every visit to these mujahideen groups I realized just how dependent I was on Pascal to get me inside. Never mind that with every one of his mood swings I trusted him less and less and was fearful of letting him out of my sight, lest he should try to make arrangements to go inside that wouldn’t include me. The simple fact was that I did not have enough money to cover more than two or three nights in the Pearl Continental (all the cheaper motel rooms in Peshawar were booked solid), which would have left me with nothing for food, transport or emergencies in the long days, perhaps weeks of waiting to follow. And the last thing I wanted to do was to have to stoop to asking my parents to wire money. Never mind that I knew it would stretch them financially—with three more daughters either in or about to enter college, they were stretched just about as thin as a family could get—my pride simply precluded it. I valued my independence and my freedom and my privacy and my new sense of myself as a self-sufficient professional far too dearly to make that call.

  Five minutes after one of our altercations, and you could time a watch by it, Pascal would calm down and apologize: I’m sorry I yelled at you. I’m sorry I accused you. I’m sorry I pushed you. I’m sorry I don’t love you.

  It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, I’d say. I never expected you to be a saint. And I certainly never expected you to fall in love with me. I could never fall in love with you either. I only expected you to help me. To keep me warm at night. To take me to war. That’s all.

  “Come on,” he’d say, taking my hand, “let’s go to the American Club.”

  The American Club was the only place in Peshawar allowed to serve alcohol, so you could be sure that any CIA spook, journalist or aid worker you needed to speak to would be there at night. It was at the American Club where I befriended one of the only other women covering Afghanistan, a New York Times stringer named Donatella, who took me under her wing, gave me an entire notebook’s worth of contact names and numbers and told me not to trust anyone. Anyone. Not the spooks, not the mujahideen, not that guy Kurt over there, not the bartenders, not those two aid workers sitting in the corner and for God’s sake, not the French journalists. Especially that pretty-boy frog I’d been shacking up with.

  “You mean Pascal?” I asked Donatella, knowing full well who and what she meant.

  “Keep your eye on him,” she said.

  “Oh, he’s okay.” I feigned confidence. “I trust him. I mean, he invited me here. We’re going inside together.” Of course, after a week of spinning our wheels in Peshawar, I was starting to doubt we’d ever see the war, ever get inside. That’s why all the other journalists sitting around us were so drunk. Waiting took its toll.

  When I told Donatella that Pascal was pretty sure we’d be going inside with Abdul Haq’s group any day now, she looked at me skeptically. “Haq doesn’t like women,” she said. Donatella was the first woman Abdul Haq had allowed to accompany him on his most recent raid inside Afghanistan, but Haq knew Donatella’s words in The New York Times would be read by presidents and policy makers. Even so, it had taken her a lot of cajoling to procure a seat with the Khalis brigade. The more she explained to me, the more ludicrous it seemed that I’d ever have a chance of hitching a ride into Kabul with Khalis, with or without Pascal’s help. Because unlike Donatella’s words, which filled column after published column, my as-yet-unshot photos were highly unlikely to ever see the light of day.

  Most of the other photographers covering Afghanistan had at least five or six assignments from various international publications—from Paris Match or Der Spiegel or Il Venerdi or The Independent—regardless of whether or not they actually saw a day of war. Their day rates would be paid, their film reimbursed. Pascal had at least seven magazines waiting for whatever images of Afghani soldiers at war he might produce. My one piddly conditional assignment from U.S. News & World Report, which I only got because I happened to have lunch at the American Club one day with their correspondent Emily MacFarquhar, who took pity on me because I’d gone to college with her daughter Larissa, was practically a joke.

  The pending assignment had been arranged back in the States not through Gamma, the photo agency I was supposed to be working for, but rather through Contact, another photo agency that had been courting my services. I met the president of Contact, Bob Pledge, when I was a senior at college; my black-and-white photo thesis had been nominated for a prize in the W. Eugene Smith Humanitarian Photography Award, and Bob had been one of the judges.

  Most photojournalists worked with these agencies in a not-so-mutually-beneficial relationship that initially benefited the agency much more than the photographer. The photographer basically had to front the money for his or, in my case, her trip. Sometimes the agency threw in the film, sometimes it didn’t. Some agencies split expenses with the photographers, others didn’t. Once a photographer decided to jump on a plane, to jump on a story, the agency was then supposed to be in charge of finding assignments from magazines like Time or Newsweek that paid measly “day rates” of $350 at the time of my trip to Afghanistan, a range which had not budged since the early eighties. The photographer had to then split his fee with the agency, along with equally dividing the earnings for individual photos used in the magazines, if any.

  What little money there was in photojournalism rested in archive sales after the fact, with the average photojournalist earning, at that time, somewhere between five to thirty thousand dollars a year from such sales along with assignment money if he was lucky. So while a photographer working steadily for ten years might have a lean year or two, for temporary want of a war or a flood or a famine or two, he could theoretically live off the money from archive sales during the down times, especially as his archive grew in size and scope. However, more often than not, a fallow year meant missed mortgage payments, delayed alimony payments, increased credit card debt. World peace could really kill your cash flow.

  Gamma was a bigger agency, with a convenient office in Paris (at that time, Contact only had an office in New York), and with their vast international network of photo distribution, I’d be sure to earn more money with my pictures in their archives. But Contact was more prestigious, smaller. Annie Leibovitz was a member; so was David Burnett.

  Ultimately, however, I placed a call from our hotel room to Jeffrey, Contact’s assignment editor in New York, to let him know I’d work for Contact instead of Gamma during my time in Afghanistan, not because of Leibovitz or the prestige or Bob, but because Pascal, when he found out I’d signed on with Gamma, became so enraged he knocked over a lamp. When he calmed down, he let me know in no uncertain terms that if I were working for his agency Sygma’s direct rival, there’d be no way we could go inside Afghanistan together. No way. Not possible. And I had no intention of traveling alone.

  When I called Michel at Gamma to tell him of my decision, he was furious. But when I explained that it was because of Pascal, he suddenly softened. Grew paternal, even. “Pascal? From Sygma?” he said. “Putain, Deborah . . .” (There’s that word again, I thought. Whore.) “. . . be careful.”

  “Just be careful,” Donatella was saying, “I don’t want to see you get hurt.” She slugged down the rest of her beer and asked me if I wanted anything from the bar.

  “Another beer,” I said. I handed her some money.

  Sh
e pushed my hand away. “It’s on me.”

  When she stood up, I stared over the length of the bar at Pascal. He was chatting up the head spook, sitting directly under a concentrated cone of amber light, glowing. Smoking a cigarette whose fiery embers flew through the air with every exaggerated flail of his hands. Bombs. He’s making bomb motions with his arms and laughing with the spook, I thought to myself. I knew, because I’d seen those exploding arms before, the couple of times I’d heard him tell his Beirut stories. “Mon dieu,” he’d say, laughing, “You should have seen those bombs!”

  Mon dieu, indeed, I thought, continuing to stare, feeling my heart race despite my head. People should not be allowed to be born that beautiful. They get away with too much. Beauty is truth? That last couplet always bothered me. In art, in an urn, maybe, but in people, no way. In fact, sometimes I think physical beauty may be the biggest scam ever played upon mankind.

  Pascal finished recounting his tales and then came sauntering over to my table. He was dressed in his uniform of choice. Levi’s. Paraboots. A photographer’s vest. And underneath the vest, a clean, pressed blue button-down shirt, opened at the collar to reveal a red bandanna tied around his neck. In our hotel room he had a whole stack of these blue shirts, all pretty much the same. And six more red bandannas. You’d think I would have seen through this. I mean, who packs seven neck scarves to cover a war? He presented me with a Kahlua and cream just as Donatella returned with my beer. “That’s okay,” I said, grabbing a drink in each hand, “I’ll take both.”

  “Hello, Miss Donatella, how are you?” he purred. When Pascal spoke English, he sounded like Inspector Clouseau. No h sounds. It came out as, “Eh-lo, mees Doe-natella, ow ahr yew?”

  “Just lovely, Pascal, ’ow are you?” She smiled. “Deborah tells me you’re taking her inside. With Haq, of all people. Impressive.”

  “Yes,” he said, lighting another cigarette to avoid her dubious stare.

  We soon had a crowd around our big wooden table, a rabid pack of cowboy journalists, smoking cigarette after cigarette, all of us drinking ourselves into a stupor. Even though I was still a novice, I was starting to realize that this is what war journalists do. You go out in the morning, make contacts, or not, try to work, or not, dodge a bullet or two, or not. Then you run back to the bar and join the others so you can get drunk and brag, like Pascal, about that bomb in Beirut or, like the grizzled Italian cameraman, about the Tonton Macoute in Haiti who wanted to adorn his hut with your severed head, or, like the BBC documentary producer, about how you personally saved an entire Bangladeshi family from drowning during last monsoon season. All the while you’re stubbing butt after butt into the communal ashtray with precision and dramatic purpose, as if daring God to strike you down. And if you hang around with the same journalists in the same godforsaken city long enough, you get to hear the same war stories again and again, the bombs growing bigger and more deadly with each retelling, the black humor becoming darker and more cynical until every single word is drained of meaning.

  Sometime around midnight, I was dully staring over at a dart game in the back corner of the bar when I realized I recognized one of the players. His face looked vaguely familiar, but it was covered with a beard and attached to an emaciated body, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out where I might have seen that face or Giocametti body before. But he caught me staring at him, put down his darts, and ran over. “Deborah!” he shouted, embracing me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  The voice gave him away. “My God, Robert, is that you?” Already thin to begin with, Robert appeared to have lost nearly thirty pounds, and this together with his unkempt beard made him look a bit like what I imagined Jesus must have looked like, if he’d been hung from the cross in a frayed Brooks Brothers shirt and old khakis. Robert and I had been good friends in college—and once lovers during a giddy, drunken weekend at a friend’s lake house in New Hampshire—and it was so incongruous seeing him there, in that strange bar, in that strange city so far from Cambridge, Massachusetts, that I thought I was having an alcohol-induced hallucination.

  Robert told me he’d decided to move to Peshawar after graduation and that he’d been writing freelance articles on the war for the London Times, as well as teaching English and math to nine- and ten-year-old Afghani boys, the future generation of mujahideen. “You know, ‘If I give Ali three Stingers and Mustafa takes two, how many Stingers will Ali have left?’ Stuff like that.” He laughed, keenly attuned, as always, to the absurdities of life. When he caught me studying his emaciated stomach, he explained that he’d had a few bouts with dysentery. “Nasty little buggers, those amoebas,” he said. He eyed Pascal, trying to form an opinion. “And who’s this?”

  Pascal stuck out his hand to shake Robert’s with dramatic flourish and purpose. “Pascal. Agence Sygma. Bonjour.” When Pascal introduced himself like that it made me cringe. Turning to me, still speaking in French, he said, “C’est ton ancien petit copain, n’est-ce pas?”—“He’s your old boyfriend, isn’t he?” His voice was laced with arsenic.

  Robert responded, in perfect French, “Pas exactement.”—“Not exactly.” The two men stared at each other as men and lions are prone to do. After a pause Robert added, also in perfect French, “Never assume that all of us stupid Americans can only speak English.” He smiled. “N’est-ce pas?” Pascal threw a proprietary glance my way and then excused himself to go join another table of drunk journalists recounting their never-ending war stories. Over the din of the bar I could hear the BBC guy shouting, “Liberia? Now that’s a pig fuck if ever I’ve seen one.”

  Robert took Pascal’s vacated seat. “Well, he seems like a perfectly nice asshole,” he said. We spent the next half hour gossiping, and then Robert and his housemate Steve, one of the many conservative activists who’d flocked to Peshawar to watch the mujahideen kick some commie ass, brought down the house with their guitar and harmonica version of the old Chuck Berry song “Maybelline.” Only in this version, the title female’s name had been switched to Gulbuddin, so the song came out as “Oh, Gulbuddin, why can’t you be true? Oh, Gulbuddin, why can’t you be true? . . .” Rumor had it that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, rebel leader of the Hezbi Islami-Hekmatyar group, liked to kill journalists. Since most of the people hanging out at the American Club that evening had nightmares about stuff like that, they laughed and sang along in a raucous, drunken chorus. Years later, after the Soviets were long gone and the notes from Robert’s song had long since faded, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar would become the president of Afghanistan.

  Sometime after midnight, the party moved to Robert’s house, which offered a welcome change from the dreary Pearl Continental. Because Robert was a resident, the spacious house he shared with Steve, various other Western roommates and their pet hawk, Zia al Hawk (named after the former president of Pakistan, who that summer had died when the plane he was flying on blew up), felt homey, lived in. And as a large group of us began to smoke opium on the intricately woven Afghani rugs in the living room, it felt downright womblike.

  Robert’s roommates, some of whom smoked with us, others who slept through our revelry, were a motley crew. Lisa, a conservative like Steve, was a freelance writer for the Washington Times and the Asian Wall Street Journal. Bill, a liberal, produced for CNN. Sparkle, who lived up to her name, was Bill’s wife and spent much of the day with her typewriter. Joe shot pictures for the Associated Press. Steve smoked a lot of opium, wrote an article here and there, told a lot of jokes and basically kept the house running smoothly. (Lisa would go on to write Dan Quayle’s Murphy Brown speech, Sparkle would go on to divorce Bill and write detective novels, Steve would continue his humanitarian fieldwork in war-torn countries, Robert would get his Ph.D. from Oxford and Joe’s body would be found approximately a year later, for reasons not entirely clear, at the bottom of a swimming pool in Thailand.)

  There were other faces, other stories assembled that night
in that smoky living room, but as the opium started to take effect, as the disparate tales of searching and self-discovery blended one into the other, everything became fuzzy and pink, like cotton candy. With Pascal passed out on the floor, Robert crawled over to me, eyes half mast, and said he often thought about that night we’d spent together in New Hampshire, how it was nice. And good and true. And what I saw in this impertinent—he pointed to Pascal—bandanna-wearing shit, he’d never understand.

  “He’s taking me inside,” I said, repeating the mantra. “We’re going inside together.”

  Robert lay his head in my lap. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “So you’re using each other.”

  I digested the words. “If you want to look at it that way, yes.” I could have elaborated. I could have told Robert that sex with Pascal was like listening to Bach’s Double Concerto, only better. Or explained that the only thing I really cared about was getting inside that war. Or warned him that I had no overly pressing need for things nice and good and true. Like love. Or him. Or admitted that the night after our tender tryst in New Hampshire, the one he remembered with such fondness, I jumped into bed with one of his best friends while he was passed out in another room. But Robert closed his eyes, fell asleep and the moment, thankfully, was lost.

  I looked around the room and realized I was the only one left awake. I took Robert’s head in my hands, lifted it off my knees, and gently laid it on the carpet. He didn’t stir. Then I woke up my crazy French lover with a kiss and a shove to the ribs, and the two of us slipped out into the cool night, the human detritus of the evening sprawled haphazardly all over the floor behind us.

  The next day, finally, we had a breakthrough. As Pascal and I lay in bed, nursing twin hangovers, the phone rang. Pascal answered, as usual. I wasn’t allowed to answer the phone in case Élodie called. It was Abdul Haq’s people. They said they were all set to take us inside the following day. Pascal sprang out of bed and started dancing naked around the room. “See, Deborah, I told you everything would work out okay.” He lifted me up and tangoed me across the floor.