Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  But it’s not easy being a one-girl revolution. Not that it got any easier once I became a woman.

  When I moved to Paris and started speaking French, I was struck by the dual meanings of the word aventure, which can mean either “adventure” or “love affair.” The correlation is obvious. Both describe situations requiring a willingness to leap from a safe precipice; both stimulate our adrenal glands, take us places we’ve never been, put us at risk. But what I failed to understand at the time—and what Julian would later have to point out—is that both adventures and love affairs require not just an eagerness and a willingness to experience them, but the instinct and the maturity to judge whether or not they are actually worth the risk. It’s no coincidence that many of the war journalists who are killed in the line of duty are barely into their twenties when they die. They simply had no idea what kind of “adventure” they were getting themselves into.

  And so it was for me with sex. Most of the time it was fun. But a few times it was awful.

  Sean’s room was located just above the lobby on the second floor of a small, slightly shabby hotel in the Marais. When we stepped inside, the room glowed with the amber rays from a streetlamp. We didn’t even bother to turn on the light. We sat on the edge of the bed, kissing. We lay down. We undressed each other slowly, playfully tossing shirts, jeans and undergarments onto the floor. Then we slipped into bed. After half an hour of languorous caressing, Sean quietly suggested we make love. Smiling, I said I’d like that.

  That’s when everything changed. If what had come before was as dulcet as Chopin’s nocturnes, what came after felt like the feedback from an electric guitar held too close to an amplifier. With our legs intertwined, he started to pound and thrust so hard, I thought my pelvic bone would crack. He began to shriek. “You fuck any stranger that asks you? Bad girl!” The bed’s headboard was crashing repeatedly into the wall, Sean’s screaming grew fouler and louder and as I tried to push him off of me, he grabbed me around the neck and yelled, “Behave, slut!” Then he sucked my breast so hard I screamed. His nails drew blood from my arms. Growing ever more excited, he began to slap me. He pulled my hair and licked my face, all the while pounding and pounding to the point where the rickety iron bed was literally bouncing off the floor. After a while, I stopped trying to fight him. I just prayed for the thrashing to stop.

  When at last he finished, rolled off me and—thoroughly exhausted—started to snore, I stood up from the bed, my knees buckling under me. Then I knelt on the hardwood floor in the dark to feel around for my discarded clothes. My underwear was missing. The thought of Mr. Madonna/Whore finding them the next day so repulsed me, I took a minute more to try to locate them, but with no luck. I put my jeans on over my bare skin, my fingers shaking as they tried to maneuver the four metal buttons into the four empty buttonholes. I wandered out in a daze, tasting blood on my lip where Sean must have bit me. When I reached the lobby, the concierge stared at me with what I took to be a sympathetic look in his eyes. The floor of Sean’s room was right above his desk. He had to have heard the banging and the screaming; he must have understood what I’d just endured. He looked me up and down, his lips pursed with concern.

  Thank God, I thought. He’s walking over to help me.

  The concierge paused before speaking. And then in a stern, quiet, measured voice, he proclaimed, “Nous n’avons pas besoin des putes ici.”

  “Excusez-moi?” I said, assuming I’d misunderstood him.

  “Nous n’avons pas besoin des putes ici,” he repeated. “Va-t-en!”—“We have no need for prostitutes here. Be gone!”

  I snapped. In a voice I’d never heard myself use—it could have shattered glass—tears flooding down, I screamed back in English, “How dare you! I am not a prostitute! Do you hear me? I am not a whore!” He pretended not to understand me, or maybe he actually didn’t understand me, but I was so enraged I couldn’t formulate a single thought in French. Our verbal communication thus limited, I lunged at him and began to pound his chest with my fists. I kicked him in the shins. I grabbed his tie, his shirt, anything I could hold on to, and screamed even louder. “Did you hear me, you asshole? I AM NOT A WHORE! You have a demented, violent guest up there,” I pointed to the ceiling, “but you call ME a WHORE?! It’s complete hypocrisy! Why’s it the WOMAN who’s always the whore, huh? Answer my question! Answer me! ANSWER ME!”

  At this point some other guy dressed in a hotel uniform appeared, pulling me off of the concierge. Then the two of them hoisted me like a sack of potatoes and tossed me out the front door, where I landed with a thud on my back. The concierge couldn’t resist yelling “Pute!” one more time before he dutifully locked the door. It was raining. Just like after Aidan, I thought. But that was a rape. This was . . . well . . . I had no idea what this was. Not rape, technically. But bad. Rage—rage directed at me, at my audacity, at any woman who might dare act like a man. I lay there on the sidewalk, stunned, my back feeling every wet cobblestone beneath me. I caught my breath, sat up and looked around to get my bearings. The street was completely deserted.

  I opened my mouth to catch a few drops of rain on my tongue. Then, still sitting, silently sobbing, I let the water soak me through.

  THE PHONE RINGS AT 3:30 A.M. “Good morning, Miss Copaken, this is your wake-up call. Have a lovely day.” Everyone who travels for a living knows that split-second feeling of panic that jolts through the body when you wake up in a strange hotel room: Where am I? I DON’T LIVE HERE! That’s why, if the option’s available, I always choose a sprightly wake-up-call operator over the electroshocking beeps of a hotel alarm clock; it’s like a surrogate mom, a sunny, disembodied voice telling me, Calm down, silly girl, you’re in a Hyatt Regency.

  Years later, when Hal-like computer voices replaced most of the happy operators, I’d wake in hotel rooms feeling like an abandoned child.

  I drag myself out of bed, shower and gather my stuff together. Backpack? Check. Thermos? Check. Camera bag? Check. Box of food? Check. The food is in a large corrugated cardboard box that says “Clorox” on the outside, which the man at the grocery store gave me when I asked. It’s got eggs (I’m an optimist) as well as less-fragile fare, such as canned soups and pastas and bread and vacuum-packed juice and dried fruit and nuts and granola and Snickers bars and those thin, little Kraft cheese and cracker packs, the ones with the small red plastic rectangles for knives—everything in the carton important—but the box is too heavy, and I wish I could leave it behind. I call a bellhop to help me get down to the lobby.

  A taxi drives me to catch the 5 A.M. bus from Harare to Victoria Falls. It’s still pitch black by the time I get there at 4:45, and the dusty open field/parking lot that serves as the bus station is teeming not only with locals but with their huge jerry-rigged packages, wrapped in red-white-and-blue woven plastic with some twine, along with their cages upon cages of chickens. Of the five hundred or so faces in the crowd, mine is the only white one.

  As the sky begins to lighten, turning first gray, then red, then orange and yellow, then blue, the bus has still not arrived. I’m sitting on the ground on my backpack, scanning the photo credits in Time magazine and looking at my watch every five minutes or so, but I’m the only one who seems to notice or care that the bus is now an hour late. The men are laughing, eating and smoking, helping each other move their bulky packages this way and that; the kids are all running around doing giggly, squiggly, hide-and-seeky kid stuff; the chickens and hens are clucking in their cages; and the women, wrapped in their brightly colored batiks, are talking to one another or breast-feeding or peeling oranges for their older children. One of the mothers walks over to me with a big smile and a peeled orange. “Here,” she says, “you look hungry.”

  “Thanks,” I smile back, “I am.”

  “And you better stop looking at your watch. The bus will be here when it gets here.”

  A helpful piece of information, I think,
but just as the woman finishes her sentence, almost on cue, three buses pull up into the dusty parking lot. Suddenly, all of these seemingly laid-back locals start scrambling. It’s pure bedlam, with dust rising everywhere and bodies jumping over one another. Most of the men hoist each other and their packages onto the top of the bus, shouting, laughing and cursing all the while. The women, carrying children, suitcases and chicken cages, maneuver their way past one another to reach the stairs and secure a seat. I look around, calculating the number of people left to board versus the number of seats I believe to still be vacant, and I quickly join in the fray. But when I finally get on the bus, it’s standing room only.

  The bus looks like it’s been around since before the start of the Rhodesian civil war. The plastic upholstery on the seats is either falling apart or nonexistent, many of the windows are either broken or just missing. A fine film of dust and grime covers the floor. Before I even realize what’s happening, the bus driver grabs my box of food and passes it from passenger to passenger until one of them spots an empty space on the shelf above the seats in the back. I hope I’ll see it again. I’m standing in the middle of the aisle, squished between two other unlucky souls. I carry the overburdened backpack on my back, and my camera bag is on my shoulder, but it keeps slipping off because of the backpack. “How long is the trip to Victoria Falls?” I ask the woman standing sardinelike next to me.

  “Sometimes six hours. Sometimes twelve,” she says with a smile.

  “Excellent,” I say, wondering how the hell I’m going to last, but then a seated woman takes my camera bag and puts it under her feet and a man grabs my backpack and puts it under his seat, and then the woman who offered me the peeled orange picks up her toddler and her caged chicken off the seat next to her, yanks me down and places the child and cage on my lap. Okay, that’s better.

  The little girl on my lap is squirmy but friendly. We spend about an hour laughing and making silly faces at each other until she falls asleep hugging me, the weight of her warm, fragrant head pressed snugly against my shoulder. I take the chicken cage and put it on the floor, resting my feet on top of it, and bury my nose in the sleeping girl’s neck. I inhale deeply so as to better take in her perfect smell. That’s when her mother turns to me, an infant suckling at her exposed breast. “Where are your children?” she asks.

  “My children?” I smile. “Oh, I don’t have any.”

  “You have husband?”

  “No, no husband either,” I answer.

  “That’s a pity. An old woman like you with no family.”

  “Oh,” I laugh nervously, “I’m only twenty-three. Plenty of time for all that later.”

  “I’m twenty-two,” she says, placing the baby’s mouth on her other nipple.

  I watch the infant’s cheeks suck in and out, his eyes rolled back into their sockets in ecstasy. Soon, all five of us—the woman, her two kids, the chicken and me—are all snuggled up together, sleeping. Four hours later, halfway to Victoria Falls, I help them off the bus and place the toddler in the arms of her father, who has come to the bus stop to wait for his family. He thanks me and gives his young daughter a playful kiss, eliciting peals of laughter when he tosses her up into the air. As I’m mounting the steps to get back on the bus, the woman grabs my arm and whispers in my ear. “Find yourself a husband, make some children,” she says. “You have too much love to be all alone.”

  I smile and tell her it’s not that simple. She smiles back and says it is that simple. I return to my seat, which now feels spacious but empty, and pull out the book I’ve brought along for the trip: Gabriel García Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  THE PILOT LETS GO OF HIS CONTROLS. “You’re the copilot, so you fly it,” he shouts over the noise of the engines, chuckling to himself. “Nothing to it. Pull out to go up, push in to go down. Simple. Go on, grab the controls.” He puts his hands behind his head, pretending to stretch out and relax.

  Instinctively, I clutch on to what looks like a half-circle steering wheel and pull it out. The nose of the plane tips up. I push it in. The nose of the plane tips down. I turn right. I turn left. “I’m flying!” I yell, like Wendy in Peter Pan. The plane is a small prop plane—just two seats with two sets of controls in front and four empty seats behind us—and I’ve paid the pilot 150 U.S. dollars in cash to fly me east along the Zambezi River from Victoria Falls to the airstrip at Mana Pools. Just as Julian’s friend had promised, chartering the flight had been fairly easy. Below us, a sea of tiny green trees flows by.

  “So, who’s meeting you when we get there?” the pilot asks me, quickly grabbing his set of controls when the plane starts to tilt sideways.

  “No one. Hey, give me another chance. I promise I won’t make it tip again.” The pilot relents, and once more, I’m flying the plane.

  “What do you mean ‘no one’?”

  I explain my predicament—the faxes promising transport and an escort, the Operation Stronghold troops and their lack of telephones, Nduku, the money I’ve already spent to get here.

  The pilot just shakes his head and laughs. “So no one knows you’re coming, then, right?”

  “Well, they don’t know I’m coming today,” I answer, “but they must have received a telex from the consulate saying I’d be coming at some point.”

  “Oh, boy,” he says, taking the controls. “Here, you relax. I’ll fly.”

  Later, when we begin our descent, the pilot points out a grassy clearing in the middle of the trees. “You see that?” he says, grinning slyly. “That’s the airport.”

  “I don’t see any airport.”

  “You’re not using your imagination. Look over there,” he points to the trees on the right, “that’s the arrival hall. Over there,” he points to the trees on the left, “that’s departures. And over there,” he laughs, pointing off into the distance, “those are the taxis!” I follow the path of his finger and spot, trotting along the outskirts of the clearing, a herd of a dozen elephants.

  “Very funny,” I say, but I’m not laughing. When Julian said “airstrip,” I didn’t exactly picture a real airport, but I did picture, well, something. Like a tarmac. Like a tiny building. Maybe a road.

  When we land—on a packed-dirt strip in the middle of the grass—the pilot helps me out of the plane and unloads my backpack, camera bag and cardboard box of food, which he places in a neat pile on the ground. The clearing is no larger than a high school football field, surrounded by trees on all sides. It’s midday, the hot sun burns directly overhead and the birds and the insects sing a cacophonous opera of chirps, squeaks and trills. Then, over the pleasant din, I hear a distinct roar. “What was that?” I ask the pilot. As if to answer my question, another roar emanates from somewhere inside the trees behind me.

  “Probably a lion. Try to avoid them if you can,” he says, with about the same amount of gravity as a morning-commute radio host warning his audience about a traffic jam on the interstate. Then, jumping back into his plane, he shouts over his shoulder, “Well, I’ve got to get back to Vic Falls. Got another flight at two. You take care of yourself.”

  “Thanks. Oh, hey, which way do I go?” I shout, but by now the pilot has shut his door, the propellers are spinning, and the plane is turning around to begin its runway sprint. I stand there, watching it take off and then disappear into the ether. Then I look around, surveying the situation. There’s me. There’s my backpack, my box of food, my camera bag. There’s an open field, grass, trees, sky and sun. There’s a roar.

  I am completely alone. No, that’s an understatement. I’m by myself, somewhere in a jungle in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wild animals, loaded down with stuff, lacking both a compass and a map, devoid of a single frame of reference.

  And no one is expecting me.

  How do I get myself into these situations? It’s easy to blame Nduku, but that’s like blaming Pascal for my solo trip inside Afghanistan. No,
I get myself into these situations because I’m stubborn, because I’m impetuous, because I allow my judgment to be muddled by pride. Just like Julian said, I throw myself into the fray without thinking. And now, here I am once again, flying solo and scared.

  Okay, I think, time to use my head. For a fucking change. Julian’s friend had said that the airstrip is a few miles south of the Operation Stronghold base camp. That means I must walk north. From my photographer’s vest, I dig out the crumpled piece of paper he scribbled on—just moments before I leaned over to try to kiss him, oh, God, how embarrassing—and try to decipher the hieroglyphics. It says: Mana Pools. Airstrip. Road takes you to base camp/Zambezi River. Road? Road? I don’t see any road. But there has to be a road. Why would anyone build an airstrip without a road?

  I leave my bags and boxes in the middle of the field and walk along the tree-lined perimeter, searching for any sign of a thoroughfare. What I find doesn’t so much look like a road as a narrow dirt path through the trees parallel to the airstrip, but it leads toward somewhere and away from here, so I decide to take it. Only problem is which way do I go? With the sun directly overhead, I can’t figure out where north is. Besides, if I’m south of the equator, how does that work? Is the sun in the northern part of the sky? Must be, right? The bathtubs drain in the opposite direction. Winter is summer. So north must be south. Thing is, the road looks like it’s heading east to west. Or west to east. Or neither. If only my Girl Scout troop had spent a little less time sewing and selling cookies and a little more time navigating the woods like the boys, I’d probably know this stuff.

  I head back to my bags, once again slinging my backpack on my back and my camera bag on my shoulder. I pick up the heavy cardboard box of food and try to walk. This is ridiculous, I think. I’ll never make it twenty yards, let alone a mile. And Xavier wanted me to bring a light kit. What an asshole. The image of me trying to drag three cases of lights along with everything else I’m carrying makes me crack up. Here I am, loaded down like a bag lady in the middle of the jungle, laughing hysterically. This must be what insanity feels like.