Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  The apartment was another story. It was a tiny one-bedroom, and we were four people. Phyllida and her boyfriend took the bedroom. Annie was given the couch in the living room. And for the next six months, except when I was working in Israel or Afghanistan, I slept in the closet.

  Parisian home number two was the pullout couch in my colleague Hubert’s living room on the rue Vieille du Temple. This was an improvement over the closet, but barely.

  So as I stood there at dawn in front of apartment number three on the rue St. Denis, a tired vagabond with a camera bag on one shoulder, an overnight bag on the other, and a two-inch freshly coagulated scab running down my arm, it suddenly occurred to me that despite the house keys in my pocket, I was not home. The streets of Les Halles were all but deserted save for the green men with their brooms and their trash cans and their giant dog poop vacuums, and the bread guys delivering their brown bouquets of morning baguettes to Café Costes on the corner.

  “Come home,” Marion had urged me on the phone. Luckily, she lived nearby.

  I walked across the street, turned half a block north up the Boulevard Sébastopol and punched in “B394” on the keypad outside Marion’s building. The door clicked open, I let myself in, and I walked up the six flights of stairs to her apartment. She answered the door in her pajamas. The sun had just started to stream through her window, and the combination of the pajamas and the light brought tears to my eyes.

  I handed her the box of chocolates, the little ones with the pictures of the Alps and pastoral Swiss villages and church spires as wrappers. “These are for you,” I said, smiling.

  “Ooh, Swiss chocolate. Yum! Let me see your arm.” She grabbed my hand and stared at the wound above it. “Ooh! Lovely. Let’s get you cleaned up, shall we?” Marion was my only French friend who spoke to me in English. She was schooled in proper British diction, and when she said things like “lovely” or “shall we,” she sounded a lot like Mary Poppins. One day when we were talking about her boyfriend, I taught her the phrase “little shit.” She liked it a lot, using it often and correctly.

  I fell asleep on Marion’s bed, a new bandage on my arm. When I woke up, she had a baguette, butter, raspberry jam and fresh coffee laid out on the table. Just like home.

  “STABBED? SHIT.”

  “Yeah, shit,” I say to Pierre.

  He pauses to think about it for a moment, weighing and measuring his words. And then, sympathetically and without a hint of irony, he says, “The planets were probably really out of alignment that day.”

  “The planets . . .” I say, pausing as if I were really pondering the possibility. “Yes, the planets. You’re probably right.” I kiss him maternally on the nose.

  He runs his thumb over my scar back and forth, trying to erase it. Exhausted, I fall asleep with my head in the crook of his neck. With his free hand, he strokes my hair. A few hours later, I wake up in a cold sweat. In my dream, sweet, sexy, goofy, wolf-loving, leather-clad Pierre had held a knife to my throat and decapitated me.

  The next day, we head out on foot back to the bombed-out house. Besides some additional police tape, it looks the same. Pierre wants to head back to Paris, but I convince him to look for junkies with me one more time. And this time, we find one.

  He has mocha skin, overgrown black facial hair, a long, aquiline nose, sunken eyes. He could be twenty. Or forty. With junkies, you can never tell. We spot him two blocks from the bombed house, pacing aimlessly in front of a billboard seeking donations to end hunger. Though the junkie must be well over six feet tall, he looks far less robust than the image of the starving African kid looming larger than life behind him. It’s a mild autumn day, but the man’s shoulders are hunched, as if to ward off the coldest of winter winds, and his hands are shoved deep inside the pockets of his loose, filthy jeans.

  I tell Pierre to let me do the talking, and he just stands there in his black leather jacket and muscles smiling. “Qu’est-ce que tu vas faire?” He laughs. “You are just going to go up to him and say, ‘Hello, my name is Deborah and I’d like to take a picture of you shooting heroin’?”

  “Yes,” I say, “that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”

  Pierre looks at the ground, kicks his steel-toed boot into the sidewalk, and shakes his head in bemused disbelief. But when I walk away, he obediently follows me down the block to meet the junkie. Up close, I notice that the man’s hands are not in his pockets to protect them from the cold. Rather, he is absentmindedly and quite vigorously scratching his thighs.

  The man starts to walk away, but I call out to him. “Hi,” I say, “don’t leave. We want to talk to you.” I tell him we are photographers. That we’ve been sent to cover the house bombing. That we’d like to shoot pictures of him, if he wouldn’t mind. His eyes dart back and forth from Pierre to me suspiciously, examining the camera equipment, the clothing, the press pass I wear in a clear plastic pocket in my photographer’s vest. Then he speaks.

  “It was a nice house, that house they blew up,” he says in English with some sort of an Arabic accent I’m unable to place. “A nice house.” His arms across his chest, he’s now scratching each elbow simultaneously. After a few minutes of polite conversation—what’s your name? (Ahmed), where are you from? (Egypt), how long have you lived here in Holland? (five years), are you addicted to heroin? (yes), for how long? (five years), can we take pictures of you shooting up (if you pay me)—we’ve struck up a deal. Since giving Ahmed plain old cash would be construed as journalistically unethical, Pierre and I are to buy him a container of orange juice, some yogurt and a loaf of bread. In exchange, we can shoot pictures of him doing heroin.

  I can tell that Pierre, who’s nodding his head in agreement with the plan, hasn’t understood a word. “Tu as compris?”—”Did you understand?”—I ask him.

  “Pas du tout.” Not at all.

  “It’s simple,” I tell him. “Ahmed needs some groceries. We’ll buy them for him and, in exchange, he’ll shoot up for us.” As the words leave my mouth—or rather, because they leave my mouth—I’m immediately struck by their callousness. So is Pierre. For the first time in the two days since I’ve known him, his smile fades.

  “Oh, I get it,” he says. “This isn’t journalism. It’s a transaction.”

  Well, yes, I think, sort of. Ahmed needs food and maybe he even needs a little company. I need a picture. Perhaps “barter” is a better word. “Call it whatever you like,” I say to Pierre, “but it’s still journalism. Look, if you want to go back to your wolves and your falcons, go back. I can’t afford not to shoot these pictures.”

  Pierre looks at me. He looks at Ahmed. He looks back at me. And then, in his heavily accented, almost nonexistent English, he says to Ahmed, “Okay, zen, ve go?”

  “Yes,” says Ahmed. “We go.”

  Pierre shoots me a look of pained resignation.

  We buy the yogurt and the bread and the juice at a nearby store; Pierre mimes his offer to carry the plastic bag, but Ahmed just waves his arms no and says, “I’m okay.” His thigh-scratching has become intense, he bites his bottom lip, and he leans forward—braced against that nonexistent wind—on a mission to reach his syringe. I look over at Pierre. He suddenly looks tiny in that big, black jacket with its shiny zippers and oversized lapels.

  As we trot along, trying to keep up with Ahmed, I attempt to load my Leica with a roll of color film. But to load a Leica you ideally need three hands: one hand to hold the camera, the other to load the film and a third to hold the removable metallic underside of the camera. As usual, I put the thin, cold piece of metal between my teeth, but while I’m simultaneously running and trying to ease the plastic tail of the film into the tiny slats of the camera’s spool, my teeth lose their grip on the metal and it falls with a clang on the sidewalk. When I bend down to pick it up, I catch a glimpse of the scar on my arm.

  The sight of it unhinges me, as it often does, and I’
m flooded by images I’ve worked hard to suppress. They come to me like slides in a rapidly spinning carousel, projected in the dark of my mind. I see Zurich, the clothes on the floor, the startled men, the blood-soaked washcloth. I see the junkie in the public toilet in Paris. He had half a lemon with him. What did he need the lemon for? Was it to clean the needle or boil the heroin? I can’t remember. I see Steve at the Pussycat Lounge, staring at himself in the mirror and ejaculating into his palm, and I see him wiping his hand on his Led Zeppelin T-shirt afterwards. I see the mujahed and the mine and the way the flesh hanging from his knee looked fake and the diarrhea on the infants and the grateful smiles of their mothers as they thanked me for the Tic-Tacs. I see the flasher in the Combat Zone and Venus and her lollipop and Sunil and the couple passed out in front of the museum and the dust in Ramallah and the Palestinian boy who showed me the round scar on his calf the size of a rubber bullet and the mujahideen who fired off their Kalashnikovs into the frigid night air yelling, “Down with America!”

  Call it the curse of the photographer. Unlike the memories of my childhood—fuzzy around the edges, suffused more with movement and smell and sound than with the rigidity of graphic lines and shapes—most of the memories I have since becoming a photographer are four-sided and flat. When you learn to properly frame an image in the viewfinder of a camera, you start to frame and catalog everything you see, whether you photograph it or not. And suddenly, memory has the shape of a rectangle. The vastness of a forest becomes twelve trees with a rock balancing out the foreground. A person becomes a close-up of the crow’s-feet around his eyes. A war becomes red blood in white snow. Sometimes I feel like my brain has become nothing more than an overstuffed spiral notebook full of negatives, printed at will in a disorganized flurry by the tiniest provocation.

  We arrive at what appears to be a perfectly normal-looking attached house in the middle of a perfectly normal-looking block. There is a separate entrance to a basement apartment. We walk down the small, steep flight of stairs, and before we even turn the corner into the room, a noxious but unidentifiable stench blasts our nostrils.

  The room is fairly dark, illuminated by one bare bulb and the few slivers of daylight that creep in from two small windows. “That’s Gunther,” Ahmed says, pointing to a blond man passed out amidst half-eaten food cartons, crumpled newspapers, extinguished cigarette butts, metal spoons, old scraps of paper and foil and a small puddle of what looks to be his own urine. The leather belt that was used as a tourniquet around his arm is loose now, his face calm and strangely angelic. Ahmed puts his groceries on a makeshift milk-carton table and clears a spot for Pierre and me on the floor in front of his bare mattress. “Sorry about the smell. The toilet hasn’t worked in weeks,” he says, with no more regret in his voice than a Park Avenue hostess making excuses for the sawdust her contractors left behind. In a small, tidy heap, at the bottom of the stairs in the far left corner of the landing, is a pile of human excrement.

  Pierre offers me a cigarette and I take it gladly. Then he offers one to Ahmed, who waves it away while reaching into his pocket, from which he excavates a small treasure wrapped in silver foil. I take one drag from the cigarette, but then I spot the powdered heroin in Ahmed’s hand, and I immediately stub it out. I grab my Leica. I stop thinking about the fact that we’re in a trash-filled drug den and start concentrating on the immediate task at hand. Suddenly, I am no longer an American girl chatting with an Egyptian junkie in his shit-filled basement. Suddenly, space loses its third dimension, time breaks down into the fractions of a second and motion—frozen for eternity in a viewfinder—ceases. I am a machine, a mere mechanical extension of my camera.

  This should be shot in black and white, I think to myself, but my camera is loaded with 400 ASA Ektachrome color film instead; Gamma won’t be able to sell it if I shoot in black and white. I briefly contemplate using a flash, but decide to try to use the ambient light—a mixture of daylight and tungsten—instead. The mixed light will give the picture a reddish hue, but I figure this is preferable to the flash, which would just flatten the image, leaving it devoid of contour, emotion. Then I notice that with a wide-open aperture, I can barely get by with an eighth of a second shutter speed, so I fret over the flash once more but now Ahmed has started to boil the heroin in a spoon and I’m stuck. Okay, no flash. I’ll just push the film to 800. That’ll give me a fifteenth of a second, and I’ll be okay. The image will be grainy, blurred by any small movements Ahmed might make, but it’s the best option I have. Pierre follows my lead and keeps his flash in his camera bag. But then he looks into his viewfinder at the light meter and turns to me, dumbfounded. “Uh, Deborah, there’s no light,” he says.

  “No flash,” I say. “You’ll ruin my pictures if we shoot at the same time.”

  “What pictures?” he asks, almost in a whisper. “We won’t have any pictures at this speed.” Pierre is used to shooting his wolves in the blinding snow and his falcons in the desert sun; in that kind of light, even at 1/500th of a second, he could have all the depth of field he’d ever need.

  “Push to eight hundred,” I say, slightly annoyed.

  He looks through his viewfinder once more. “I can’t shoot at a fifteenth!”

  “Just do it!” I snap.

  Pierre senses my annoyance and stops talking.

  Close-up of spoon and lighter. Snap. Close-up of tourniquet around arm. Snap. Close-up of needle entering skin. Snap. Close-up of blood entering syringe. Snap. Horizontal medium shot of Ahmed’s torso, his bent elbow in the center of the frame. Snap. Vertical shot of same. Much better. Snap. A few more medium shots from different angles. Snap. Snap. Snap. Wide shot of Ahmed passed out on his mattress with the brown stains and Gunther passed out in the background and the food containers and newspapers and the cigarette butts and far, far off at the edge of the frame the pile of shit at the bottom of the stairs. Snap.

  With Ahmed passed out, Pierre hands me another cigarette and lights one for himself. These we smoke, all the way down to the filter, in silence. Pierre extinguishes his in the swill at the bottom of an old beer bottle, and then, with a sudden manic surge of energy, he jumps up. He takes the grocery bag, empties its contents onto the table, and starts to fill the bag with trash from around the room. He throws away cigarette butts and milk containers and empty Coke cans and beer bottles and old pieces of cotton and the paper wrapping from the alcohol swabs and some week-old rice and a chicken bone and some crumpled-up paper and a plastic fork with one tine missing and a broken needle and even a few dust bunnies from the corners of the room. I grab the bag from him and hold it open. In goes a shard of foil. In goes a gum wrapper. In goes half of a lemon, its fragrant juice squeezed out long ago. But when Pierre reaches the excrement, he stops short. “I can’t do it,” he says. He looks as if he’s about to cry.

  ARNHEM, HOLLAND, 1989

  “I’ll do it,” I say. I lay down our garbage bag and pick up an empty one off the floor. With my hand covered by the plastic, like I’d seen dog owners do in Central Park the summer I worked for Magnum, I scoop up the pile and shove it in the garbage. I can feel myself gagging, but I stop just short of throwing up. I take the now full bag, tie the two plastic handles together, and place the entire enclosed mess at the bottom of the stairs.

  “The room’s still dirty,” says Pierre. Tears fill his pleading eyes.

  “I know,” I say, “it’s a mess.” But you can’t help every fucked-up person in the world, I think. You can’t help every junkie, every starving African kid, every screaming, frightened Vietnamese girl covered in napalm who happens to cross your path. It’s just not possible.

  Shutterbabe? Shudder, babe.

  On the back of one of my Gamma envelopes, I scribble a note to Ahmed: Dear Ahmed, Thanks for helping us. Take care of yourself. Love, Deborah and Pierre. With a piece of gaffer’s tape, I stick it on the un-opened orange juice container. I figure if he ever needs to reach me, he can call the a
gency phone number written on the envelope. But I know he’ll never call. I motion for Pierre to come, and he grabs the garbage bag on the way up the stairs. On our way back to the hotel, we throw it out in a public trash can. Later, riding on a nearly empty train back to Paris, we decide to leave the window of our compartment wide open despite the snap of autumn.

  Pierre will be so traumatized by what he has seen today that he will not be able to pick up his camera for an entire week. Then he will go back to Canada to be with his wolves.

  I will file the rectangular memories in a sturdy drawer in my brain, go back to my tiny apartment on the rue St. Denis, sleep for an entire day, and then I’ll call Patrick Zachmann and tell him I don’t want to apply to Magnum. I’ll tell him it’s because I’m not ready, but I won’t tell him it’s because I know I’ll never be ready. I will edit the slides from Arnhem and hand over the good ones to the agency. The pictures will definitely not be worth a thousand words, but they’ll merit at least eight: “This is Ahmed shooting up. It is sad.” Over the next year, Gamma will sell that picture of Ahmed enough times for me to pay off my expenses from the trip. The photographs of the bombed-out house, the ones I was sent to shoot, will never earn me so much as a single franc.

  When Pierre comes back from his Canadian wolf expedition, he will take me on a long ride around Paris on his Honda. We will become friends, lovers, whatever you want to call it, and we will spend many blissful nights together whenever either one of us gets too lonely. We will never talk about Ahmed or his basement or the garbage bag. And the scar on my arm, while it will never fully disappear, will fade into an almost imperceptible line.

  PART TWO

  STOP

  MANA POOLS NATIONAL PARK, ZIMBABWE, 1989