JULIAN
MR. NDUKU BRUSHES A SPECK OF LINT off his gray polyester suit. “I’m sorry,” he says, sitting on the edge of his metal desk, “but it will not be possible for you to do this story.” Mr. Nduku is a midlevel bureaucrat in the Harare press office here in Zimbabwe, where I’ve come to cover a semicovert jungle war fought, curiously enough, in the name of rhinoceros conservation. A few days ago, he sent me a confirmation fax through the Zimbabwean consulate in Paris, granting me permission to cover the war—dubbed Operation Stronghold—and promising to arrange my transport into the jungle, where the antipoaching team has its headquarters.
“What do you mean?” I say. “I have your confirmation fax right here.” I start to rifle through my papers, but Mr. Nduku stands up and motions me to stop, his chubby palms patting down the air. He’s almost exactly my height, but at least four times as round, with extra folds of dark brown skin protruding out of his collar, as if he were being choked. Behind him, hung with yellowed Scotch tape on the cinderblock wall, is a ripped and fading tourism poster with a cartoon rhino standing on a map of Zimbabwe. In big black letters it says ZIMBABWE IS RHINO COUNTRY.
“Please,” he says, now placing his hand on my upper arm and smiling, “there’s no need to show it to me. I wrote the fax myself. I know what it says.” The smile is disingenuous. Taunting, even.
“Well, then, what exactly do you need?” I ask, pulling my arm away brusquely. I’m used to corrupt officials by now, and I know the language of bribery. I ask them what they “need” and they tell me how “happy” it would make them to acquire this bottle of Johnnie Walker Red or that carton of Marlboros or, even better, that pair of size-ten Nike sneakers with the aerodynamically enhanced arch supports. A smart journalist carries around such presents just in case, especially in less developed countries. In fact, many news organizations have budgets for these kinds of soft payoffs, sending their producers and their cameramen, their writers and their photographers off into the world with enormous sacks of ABC News baseball hats or NBC News key chains or Newsweek lapel pins or Time magazine ballpoint pens. Gamma doesn’t have the money for this sort of extravagance, so I carry around a couple of Zippo lighters I’ve bought in various airport duty-free shops just in case the “need” should arise.
But as I stare into Nduku’s eyes, trying to read him, I suddenly understand that a fancy lighter won’t cut it this time. I can see it in the way his gaze is just slightly askance, in the asymmetry of his smile, in the sideways cock of his head. It’s that interrogatory look: the same look the flasher gave me in the Combat Zone, the same look Aidan had that night before graduation. It’s the same look I’ve seen many times before—the one where the facial muscles are controlled by sinew connected to the groin.
“What do I need?” he asks, his smile widening. “Come to dinner with me tonight, and I can show you.”
“Excuse me?” I say, playing dumb. Wishing this weren’t happening.
“I said,” he says, now grabbing my hands and rubbing my left palm with his thumb, “that I can show you what I need if you come home with me tonight.” He brushes his body against my thigh. He is aroused.
I yank my fingers out of Mr. Nduku’s sweaty palms and take two giant steps back, bumping into a chair as I do. “I’m sorry, Mr. Nduku,” I say, “but that will not be possible.”
There are few things more abhorrent than having your hands touched by a stranger with a hard-on, especially one whose approval or services or interview or photograph you require in order to do your job. During one of my trips to Israel, I was interviewing and photographing Moshe—a white-bearded, octogenarian, ultra-Orthodox rabbi transplanted from Brooklyn—about his belief in the Messiah and his friendship with Yasir Arafat when, in the middle of our discussion, he turned off my tape recorder and grabbed my hands together in his coarse, bony grip. This would not have alarmed me so much were it not for the fact that ultra-Orthodox Jewish men are not supposed to look a woman in the eyes, let alone touch her hands. Then there was the whole issue of venue: because Moshe was not allowed to be seen even talking to a woman in public, he’d insisted we conduct the interview in my hotel room. But just as I was about to say something along the lines of “Excuse me, Rabbi, but what exactly do you think you’re doing?” he pushed me down on the bed and stuck his tongue in my mouth. That was more abhorrent, but not by much.
(And yes, if you were wondering, I beat the crap out of him afterwards. Would have thrown him down a flight of stairs had a horrified bystander not intervened.)
GOING TO ZIMBABWE to shoot Operation Stronghold was Xavier’s idea. Xavier was the editor at the helm of one of the more profitable departments at Gamma, called simply “magazine.” It took me a long time to figure out that “magazine” meant “feature stories,” and that within the Gamma hierarchy, doing magazine instead of spot news accorded one more status. It meant you were more of an artist, less of a cowboy, that you were well established in your career. Before I understood this distinction, whenever another photographer would ask me, “Tu fais du magazine ou du news?”—“Do you do features or spot news?”—I thought I was being asked if I worked for magazines or newspapers, to which I’d always reply, “Les deux,” meaning “Both.” This never ceased to impress, because first of all I was very young and second, normally only the best photographers from each agency were given the plum feature assignments.
I was also surprised to learn that shooting magazine paid well. Unlike news stories, where expenses are split between the photographer and the agency, feature assignments from a magazine like Géo included all expenses paid up front plus (at the time) approximately 10,000 francs ($1,800) a week in assignment fees. When Sylvie, the photo editor of Géo, one day called to tell me she wanted me to spend two and a half weeks traversing the globe shooting a round-the-world treasure hunt—for which she would pay my expenses plus 20,000 francs—I couldn’t believe my good fortune.
The downside of feature assignments, however—particularly in the case of the slick, right-wing Figaro magazine—is that the photos the magazines expected often required the use of expensive and cumbersome light kits and the blurring of fact with fiction. Feature photographs are often set up in a fashion the French call photo montée, a phrase derived from the verb monter, which has about twenty-three various definitions, ranging from “to mount” to “to edit,” but which in this formulation means “to stage.”
For example, let’s say I had a feature assignment to shoot hookah-smoking in Cairo. Instead of going to a hookah bar and just shooting the scene as it exists, I would move people and tables and hookahs around to my liking. I’d sit two Egyptians at a table on one side, and two Western tourists at a table on the other, and I’d make sure to put them on some sort of balcony overlooking the sparkling city below at precisely the hour of dusk. I’d bounce a Balcar or perhaps a Dyna-Lite or a Norman flash onto the ceiling for better illumination, and I’d direct another freestanding flash muted by a soft box onto my subjects, making sure to balance my exposure time and aperture to record both my subjects and the fading light in the background.
I thought photo montée was bullshit. It was advertising, not photojournalism, and it rankled my purist sensibilities. Besides, who wants to lug four large metal cases of flash equipment around wherever you go? To me it didn’t make sense. Even worse, the growing popularity of photo montée was just enough of a slippery slope for photographers like Pascal to create a battle, shoot it and pass it off as photojournalism without a second thought.
“Tu sais comment ça se fait, la photo montée?”—“Do you know how to do staged photos?”—Xavier asked me one day. I was sitting at a long conference table in the photographers lounge at Gamma, going through two foot-high piles of slide sleeves filled with various photos I’d shot over the past month, throwing out the bad ones, organizing the good ones. It was one of those tasks that, like bill paying, could become completely overwhelming if
left to fester for more than a month or so.
“Non,” I replied, not even looking up. “Et je n’ai pas envie d’apprendre”—“And I have no desire to learn.” Xavier was the one who’d made the “you have such lovely breasts” comment when I first arrived at Gamma. So I didn’t mind being rude to him. Besides, he was yet another ex-photographer turned photo editor, probably once roguish and charming, but now potbellied, balding and bored. He gave me the creeps. “Why do you ask?”
“Oh, nothing,” he said. He told me he had a feature story that needed to be shot, “some bizarre little war down in Zimbabwe,” he said, but that if I didn’t want to learn photo montée, I shouldn’t worry my pretty little head over it, because he could just have one of the other English-speaking Gamma photographers shoot it instead.
My response time was short: three seconds, maybe four. A feature story (easy cash) about a war (adventure) in Zimbabwe (faraway place I’d never been to)? “When do you want me to go?”
“Viens dans mon bureau, mon petit chou,” he said—“Step inside my office, my little cabbage.” Then he winked at me. I self-consciously crossed my arms over my chest and stood up to follow him. But then with a bow and a wave of his arm he said, “Après toi,” positioning himself behind me for the short walk down the narrow corridor to his office. As we made our way down the hall, I heard a grunting noise behind me followed by “Quel jolie cul!”—“What a pretty ass!”
I stopped in my tracks and turned around to face him. “Hey, fuck you, Xavier,” I said, unable to stop the words from escaping. “Just stop it already. You know, where I come from, words like that are called sexual harassment.”
Xavier laughed, mimicking my admonition in a high-pitched, American-accented falsetto. (“Va te faire foutre, Xavier . . .”) Then, with yet another wink, he said, “Yes, but this is not America, my little cabbage.” I wasn’t fluent enough in the idioms of the French language to tell him to take his little cabbage and stuff it.
Once inside his office, where I made sure to keep the door open, Xavier explained the situation to me. Because rhino horns were becoming extremely rare, and because one of the things for which rhino horn powder was valued in the Far East was its alleged ability to act as an aphrodisiac, the illegal poaching of rhinoceroses had become a big business in Zimbabwe—big enough that the poverty-stricken Zambian poachers were sneaking across the Zambezi River into Zimbabwe and killing not only rhinos but also the game wardens who tried to stop them from doing so. It was, Xavier explained, somewhat akin to the war the American DEA was waging in the Colombian foothills.
To save the rhinos and the game wardens who guarded them, the government of Zimbabwe decided to institute a shoot-to-kill policy against any poacher caught red-handed with a rhino horn. Xavier wanted me to go down to Africa, to the Zambezi River Valley, where the antipoaching squads had set up a base camp, and do a magazine-style photo-essay on the soldiers fighting there. He gave me a contact at the Zimbabwean consulate in Paris, told me to arrange everything quickly before someone from Sygma or Sipa beat me to the story and then, gesturing skyward with his hands, looking soulfully into the distance, he told me of his vision of how the photos should look. “Well lit,” he said. “A little blast of Balcar, maybe some fill light or a gold reflector. Pose the soldiers with their guns, make them look menacing and scary.”
I’d been told that Xavier was a mediocre photographer in his time. The fact that he wanted me to lug cases of freestanding flashes to go cover a war gave me pause. “Xavier,” I said, “have you ever covered a war?”
“No. Why?”
“Okay, well, here’s the thing. It’s not the kind of story that lends itself to photo montée.” I told him I preferred to work with natural light, especially when it involved traipsing through the jungle with armed men.
He asked me rhetorically if I’d ever shot magazine before, and when I said no, he looked at me smugly and said if I wanted to sell the story I should consider bringing a light kit.
“What do you mean if I want to sell the story? There’s no assignment yet?” I asked. So much for easy cash.
“No, not yet,” he said, twirling a pen like a propeller on the knuckle of his thumb. He told me not to worry. That Gamma would front the money. “You can pay us back half when we’ve sold the story to Fig mag, which I’m sure will happen when they see how well lit the photos are going to be, huh?”
Unfortunately, I wasn’t so sure Fig mag—short for Figaro magazine—would buy my rhino story, even if it was well lit. Figaro liked stories about French cheese makers, French wine makers, French aristocracy and French actors. They didn’t like stories about non-French people, unless the articles were about Algerian immigrants wreaking havoc in the suburbs of Paris or the text accompanied a photo-essay mocking British eccentrics. A war on rhino conservation in Zimbabwe had three strikes against it, as far as selling it to Figaro: 1) war, 2) rhinos and 3) black people. Because my finances were, as usual, on shaky ground, this was worrisome.
Working as an agency photographer was like indentured servitude. You could become so indebted to the agency, especially when a story you’d spent a lot of money on didn’t sell, that you’d have to keep working just to prevent the debt from escalating. With spot news photos, the risk was lessened by the fact that, because the news would make headlines for a few weeks or so, there was a much better chance that a few pictures would sell. Maybe not to Time or to Newsweek, and maybe not immediately, but to some magazine somewhere sometime. But with feature stories done on spec, photographers risked accumulating thousands upon thousands of dollars of debt if no one cared about the story they’d just spent two months shooting on, say, circuses in Cyprus or midwives in Malta.
My round-trip ticket to Zimbabwe alone would cost me around 6,000 francs (approximately $1,000). But it sounded like an interesting story, and I was just about due for a new adventure. I was also due for a new stamp in my passport. Because I was living in Paris on a tourist visa, I had to leave the country at least every three months or face the possibility of deportation. And besides, whether I sold the story or not, I figured I could always just shoot a lot of stock pictures of elephants. You can never have enough elephant pictures in your archives. I decided the financial risk was worth it.
“Okay, Xavier, I’ll go, but I’ll do it my way,” I said.
Xavier was staring at my breasts again. “And what way would that be, my little cabbage?”
“No Balcars, no reflectors,” I said. “And I’m not your fucking cabbage.”
“Comme tu veux,” Xavier said dismissively. “It’s your money.” He was cleaning his fingernail with a corner of a plastic slide sheet as I turned to leave. “Oh,” he said, stopping me mid-stride, “and don’t forget to shoot a photo of a dead poacher. There’s no story, my little cabbage, without a dead poacher.”
I LEAVE MR. NDUKU’S OFFICE pissed off and worried. While Xavier was concerned that I might fail to return with pictures of a slain poacher, I don’t think he ever imagined that I’d come back empty-handed. What a joke. The one man who can get me inside a war where men are killing other men over a mythical aphrodisiac won’t let me go unless I sleep with him. Since that’s out of the question, I now have no escort, no contact name, no way of knowing where the war is being fought, let alone how to get there. The Zambezi River Valley is a big place; you don’t just take a bus there and shout, “Hey, anyone seen a war around here?”
When I call Xavier from my hotel in Harare to tell him of my predicament, he doesn’t seem concerned. “What’s the problem?” he says. “If Nduku’s the gatekeeper, then you better be nice to him.”
Oh, sure, I think. Easy for you to say, you old lech. “That doesn’t sound like a solution to me,” I say. I slam down the phone and call back the Gamma switchboard. This time I ask for Marion.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry,” she says. She tells me to cut my losses and fly ho
me.
I hang up the phone and go down to the bar for a drink, hoping to calm myself down enough to come up with a less drastic solution than giving up. The weather is warm and sunny, so I decide to sit outside on the patio, drink my beer, read the Herald Trib and figure out my next move. As I’m reading a story on Lech Walesa, the midday African sun beating down, I overhear two journalists at the next table discussing a recent clash in Mozambique. “Pity I couldn’t have been there,” says one in a crisp British clip. He’s young, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties, with a head of curly, dirty-blond hair. Though he’s quite handsome, from the stoop of his shoulders he appears not to know it. He wears the instantly recognizable disheveled look of a newspaper reporter—hair needing a cut, shirt needing a button, a collar frayed and soft. His breast pocket holds a reporter’s notebook, a ballpoint pen and a dime-sized ink stain.
“Yeah, well, next time,” says the other, sipping his scotch. He’s a middle-aged man, black, American, serious and dignified.
I walk over to their table. “Mind if I join you?” I ask.
“Not at all,” smiles the young Brit, pronouncing the simple phrase with a mouthful of crisp t’s—Naw-ta-tall.
I lay down my paraphernalia and drag a metal chair over from my table, its legs scraping against the concrete patio. The younger one jumps up to take it from me, raising it aloft and placing it on the ground while motioning me to sit down with a polite “Please.” The older one introduces himself. I miss his name because I’m staring at the younger one, but I do hear him say that he works for The New York Times. The younger one—his name is Julian, he says—reminds me of a shy British schoolboy. He can look me in the eye only for a second or two before staring back at his beer. He tells me he’s based in Harare as a stringer for the BBC and for The Financial Times, and that he’s been posted here for just under a year. “Did you just get here, then?” he asks me, rotating his glass in his hands to help the words come out.
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