Shutterbabe

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  I carry everything to the small clearing that leads to the road. Okay, right or left? Which way is it going to be? “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood . . .” And what, Mr. Frost? What’s the next line? I know it ends with “And I, I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference,” but what comes in between? I used to know that poem by heart back in seventh grade. We had to recite it in front of the class. I loved that poem. A twelve-year-old girl can decide to model her life on a poem like that.

  I choose right, but not because it looks any less traveled than left. At this point, I just have to make a choice. Any choice.

  I briefly toy with the idea of leaving the food box here and coming back for it, but I’m sure there are animals who are far bigger and far hungrier than I am who’d just love to devour a few of my oatmeal-raisin-granola bars. There’s little to no chance the box will be here when I get back, and I’m in no mood to add starvation to my list of woes. So I put it on the ground and try kicking it. But every time I kick the box, my camera bag is jolted off my shoulder. So then I get the bright idea of putting the camera bag on top of the box, and now I’m in business. For the next hour, I push and pull that box and my cameras along the dirt path, traveling probably no more than a mile and with no idea if I’m even heading in the right direction. Though it’s still hot, the path is shaded by tall trees. Once I’ve committed myself to the rhythm of this futile exercise—push, scrape, stop, pull, scrape, stop, push, scrape, stop, sigh, rest—sweating and exhausted, I start to relax, to listen to the life whistling all around me.

  Noise vaults through these lush, quiet trees like a Mozart symphony. The monkeys are the string section, their high-pitched squeals forming the underlying melody. The birds are the flutes, the insects the rhythm section, the distant trumpeting of elephants the brass. Then there’s that strange, low-pitched snorting, which reminds me of a bass (and which, I would later find out, was actually the sound of a hippo; this should have tipped me off, had I been more jungle savvy, to my proximity to water).

  But beneath the clamor of the animal orchestra is a silence so profound it’s immobilizing. I’m too tired to go any farther anyway, so I drag my stuff to the side of the path, sit down on a rock, close my eyes and listen to it. It’s one of those cinematic, self-conscious Zen moments, the kind where you’re aware of the absurdity of the act—I’m sitting here all alone on a rock in the middle of the jungle with my eyes closed, listening to silence and thinking Big Thoughts—but you’re doing it anyway and actually enjoying it.

  Unfortunately, the biggest thoughts that pop into my mind involve my flesh being ripped by a lion. Do lions hunt humans in a game reserve park? Or are they so used to seeing tourists staring out at them from Land Rovers, they could care less? Am I in danger? I’m not sure what is worse—knowing what hazards lurk just beyond the trees or being completely oblivious.

  I stand up from the rock and start all over again. Push, scrape, stop. Pull, scrape, stop. Sigh, rest. And then, just as I’ve started to give up any hope, I hear the rumble of an engine. And then laughter. And then a jeep appears from the direction I’ve just come, carrying three shirtless men. How auspicious—three muscular deus in a rugged machina.

  “Hey, there, mate!” the driver calls out. “You look like you could use a lift.” Must be an Aussie: the h is “hey” is silent, and “mate” comes out sounding like “mite.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I say. “How could you tell?” I brush the strand of hair that’s come loose from my braid behind my ear and wipe the sweat off my forehead as an afterthought.

  “The name’s Darien. These are my mates Will and Connor. We’re on holiday.” In the back of the jeep is a case of blue and gold Foster’s Ale. Why is it that wherever you go on this immense planet, you can always find Australians on holiday? It must have something to do with growing up in a former penal colony. They’re probably culturally programmed to seek freedom, roam.

  I introduce myself. A round of hi’s and handshakes ensues.

  “Where are you heading, then?” asks Connor. Or is that Will? All three of them look alike—blond, brawny and bare-chested. I feel like an unwitting, overdressed extra in a beer commercial.

  “Where am I heading?” I look at the Aussies, at the dappled light hitting the dirt path, at the seemingly endless forest of densely packed trees. “You know,” I say with a smile, “I have no idea.”

  The men help me load my stuff into their jeep. I sit on top of the Foster’s, and Darien drives off in the direction I’d been walking. They’re on safari, they tell me, driving around in search of wild animals by day, eating, drinking and being merry around a campfire on the banks of the Zambezi by night. I should join them, they say. I tell them it sounds fun, but that I’m here to cover a rhino war. I explain about the poachers, the shoot-to-kill policy, Operation Stronghold. “A rhino war?” says Darien, shifting into third gear. “So that’s what those guys are doing with those guns.” His blond ringlets fly back off his forehead in the wind.

  “You’ve seen them?” I ask.

  “Yeah. They’ve got a bunch of machine guns and an old helicopter. Every day it takes off with a couple of them, and every night it comes back. I figured it was some sort of military training.”

  “You’re a photojournalist, then?” says Will, consciously trying to make conversation. I’m practically sitting on his lap, squeezed between the Foster’s and his naked chest. “Must be fascinating.” He raises his eyebrows when he says this. Darien, watching us in the rearview mirror, tells Will to cut out the flirting. He found me first, he says.

  “You know what?” I reply with a yawn. “Sometimes it really sucks.”

  We drive a bit farther, then the trees give way to an open field on the banks of the Zambezi. There must be at least forty hippos happily bobbing and snorting away in the calm pool of water. An elephant family drinks. Hundreds of birds flitter about. A couple of monkeys frolic in the trees. I can’t help thinking it looks fake, like a movie set.

  We drive still farther, until we come upon a couple of ramshackle wooden cabins, the kind that are painted olive green with mesh screens instead of windows, like the ones in my summer camp.

  “Here we are, then,” says Darien, stopping the jeep to let me off. “This is where the men with the guns live.” He unloads my gear and, making the dramatic gesture of kissing my hand, urges me to hike the half mile down the river to help him and his “mites” polish off the Foster’s later that evening. “You could pitch your tent with ours. We’ll protect you from the lions,” he says with a wink.

  “I’m sure you will,” I wink back, “but I don’t even have a tent to pitch. Thanks for the lift and everything, but I think I’ll just sleep alone tonight, if that’s okay with you boys.”

  I say this with enough sarcasm that Darien looks offended. Then I feel bad. He’s just saved me from at least another hour or two of dragging my stuff through the jungle on foot, and I repay him by insinuating that he and his drunk friends would try to have their way with me (like Bebe! I think), when they’re probably just harmless jack-a-roos, trying to be nice to a stranger.

  But I’m tired of paying the consequences when my instincts are wrong. I’ve now been around long enough to know that such a scenario isn’t out of the realm of possibility. It’s just like earlier, back at the airstrip. Maybe the lions roaring beyond the trees were harmless, already sated by an enormous antelope carcass or two. Maybe they were not. But why on earth would I ever stick around and give them the benefit of the doubt?

  IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK in the afternoon at the end of my sophomore year of college when Jack, Greg and I finished editing our section of the Boston Ballet documentary we’d been working on for film class, and the warm spring air beckoned. The three of us had become close friends while collaborating on it, and for the past thirty-six hours, we’d been holed up together in a small editing room in the basement of Harvard’s
Sever Hall, meticulously snipping and taping small pieces of film and plastic brown sound stock together and trying to keep synch on a Steenbeck. Jack suggested we buy a six-pack of beer and drink them on the roof of my dormitory, Adams House, to celebrate. Giddy from both the lack of sleep and a sense of accomplishment, we bought the beer and climbed the staircase to the roof.

  With the sun falling lower in the sky, we sat and laughed and smoked and drank toast after toast to our success at finishing on time. Our team had worked well together, rarely bickering like some of the other groups still trying to complete their sections. We had made all decisions through mutual consensus, respected one another’s opinions.

  Which is why I was confused when Jack whispered something into Greg’s ear. “Hey, no secrets!” I laughed, taking another drag from my cigarette. Then Greg, looking at me, whispered something back to Jack. And then, before I could even grasp what was happening, the two of them were pushing me down on my back. I could see the purple sky, a sliver of a moon, the first few stars waking up. I could smell the tar on the roof. Jack’s hands were on my breasts, his tongue trying to find entry into my mouth. Greg was at my waist, unzipping my jeans.

  I was dumbfounded. In the entire time we worked on our film together, I could not recall ever flirting with them. I never made any sexual references, innuendos or ambiguous comments. I felt no attraction toward either of them. We were partners, I thought, working together, a creative team. How long had they been planning this little scenario? Was I so oblivious as to not have seen it coming? Or is it impossible to predict what men will do?

  Screaming obscenities at the two men, I pushed them off of me and stood up, zipping my jeans with my mouth clenched in hatred. They didn’t try to hold me back, but I ran away anyway. I ran down the stairs of the dormitory, fumbled with my keys, opened the door to my room and, once safely inside, slammed it shut and bolted the lock. I undressed as if my clothes were on fire, wrapped myself in a towel and started the shower. Within minutes I heard a loud knocking at my door.

  “Deb, Deb, we’re sorry. We didn’t mean to freak you out. Please, just let us in.” It was Jack’s voice.

  “Fuck you!” I shouted. Then I slipped into the shower to drown out all the noise.

  Unfortunately, this small violation was only the dawn of the grim and bizarre pattern to come. The next year, my junior year, the muggings began. In the late fall, a drunk homeless man with bloodshot eyes broke into my dorm room, where I was alone working on a Shakespeare term paper. He shut my bedroom door behind him with a thud and threatened to rape me if I didn’t give him money. I had no money on me, so I lied and told him I’d seen him in my window and had already called the police; being drunk or high or stupid or whatever, he believed me and bolted. The police found him the next day, shoplifting a sweater at an Urban Outfitters, but when I went to court to testify against him, he’d been let out on personal recognizance and never showed up. I switched bedrooms after that. That same winter, I was taking an early evening walk through a crowded Harvard Square when I felt a combat boot kick me in the face. I remember feeling the impact and seeing a man run off, but since I passed out, the rest is hazy. A fellow student I barely knew—I think his name was Bob—saw me lying there on the sidewalk surrounded by gawking bystanders and picked me up like a baby. He then carried me to the Lampoon castle, where he called the police and made me a cup of hot chocolate, the kind with the tiny floating marshmallows.

  That June, a man mugged me and my roommate at gunpoint when we were heading home from dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Cambridge. Two weeks later in New York City, where I was working for Magnum, a man posing as a taxi driver stopped his cab for me in front of Penn Station. When I got inside, his accomplice, who’d been crouched down in the backseat, pointed his gun at me and stole the new wallet I’d just bought to replace the one pilfered by the first mugger. That same summer of my discontent, a luggage salesman who was trying to sell me a Samsonite on wheels led me to the back of the store, where he said the suitcase would be and where he promptly mauled me. A few months later, already well into working on my “Shooting Back” thesis photographs my senior year, three drunk guys wearing Boston College hats confronted me on a darkened street and tried to push me to the ground. “Wanna fuck?” one of them said. I was so infuriated by my lack of control over the world at this point that I actually beat him over the head with the only weapon I had at my disposal, the plastic case covering the video I’d just rented for my tutorial on men and violence, A Clockwork Orange. When I was finished with him, blood was squirting from the corner of his eye and running out of his left nostril.

  The next day, during my one-on-one tutorial at his quaint little house on Athens Street, my professor William Alfred fixed me a martini. Then, in place of a lesson, he allowed me to just sit in his well-worn armchair and cry for the entire hour.

  Then came the flasher, then Aidan, then the ultra-Orthodox rabbi, then Pascal, then the stabbing in Zurich, then Sean, then Nduku, and, in between, lots of boyfriends and lovers ranging from extremely kind and generous to just this side of evil.

  There was a pattern. There was no pattern. It didn’t matter if I invited them into my life or if they barged in uninvited. Men were predictable. They were completely unpredictable. They gave me intense pleasure. They caused me profound pain.

  It was complicated.

  It would be easy to say I invited these attacks, and believe me, I’ve often berated myself for doing so. I have no doubt that my eighteen-year sojourn inside the padded walls of suburbia stunted my instincts, turned me into a poodle with a “kick me” sign amidst wolves. Plus I’m short, female, slight of build and friendly. The perfect lethal combination, if you want to blame the victim. But for every time I may have, for lack of a better term, “invited” an assault—Jack and Greg, Aidan, the flasher, Pascal, Sean and, okay, maybe even the stabbing in Zurich, if you want to take it that far—there were just too many other random events and violations. To wit: two attempted rapes (in my dorm room, outside the video store), two sexual assaults (the luggage store, the rabbi), two armed robberies (on the street after dinner, in the back of the taxi), one regular assault (combat boot in the face), and one demand for sexual favors in exchange for safe passage into the jungle (Nduku), which is pretty funny, because when you actually think about it, there’s no such thing as safe passage into a jungle.

  MARK, THE WARDEN OF MANA POOLS and thus the pro forma commander of Operation Stronghold, looks at me as if I’m an alien. “A photographer? From Paris, you say? That’s funny. No one told me you were coming.” He says this with the quiet civility of a man who has never been in a rush. We’re standing in one of the cabins, and Mark walks over to the wall calendar above his clutterless desk to look for some scribble that might prove him wrong, but not even a birthday mars its crisp white boxes of empty days. He’s white, dressed in a short-sleeve olive uniform shirt, olive shorts and hiking boots. On his right sunburned knee is some mud; in his beard, some crumbs. He politely explains how he can’t let me accompany his soldiers on patrol unless I have written permission from Nduku. “But you’re more than welcome to camp out by the river. It’s beautiful this time of year.”

  “But I have written permission from Nduku,” I say. I show him my fax, never mentioning the whole sexual-favor-as-bribery mess. I figure now that I’m here, what’s the point?

  “That’s odd,” he says. He flips over the fax in his hand as if searching the blank backside for enlightenment. “Usually the press office informs us when someone’s coming. Did you meet with Nduku in Harare?”

  “No,” I lie.

  “Oh, well, that’s probably it. You should have, you know. He could have arranged your transport. How’d you get here anyway?”

  I tell him I chartered a plane from Victoria Falls.

  “Well, then, never mind,” Mark says, reaching out to shake my hand. “Welcome to our little war.”

 
“Thanks.” We chat for a bit about schedules. He tells me the soldiers go out on patrol at 8 A.M. every morning, searching for any signs of poachers—vultures circling above, debris from a campfire, dead rhinos with bloody stumps where their horns should be. “And if you find a poacher?” I ask.

  “We shoot him,” he says, distracted by my pile of stuff. “Did you bring a tent?”

  “No.”

  “That’s okay, I think I probably have an old one around here somewhere.” He scratches his beard to help him think.

  Though the soldiers sleep in dormitory-like cabins, Mark advises against my joining them. “It’s not a good idea,” he says in a tone that makes it clear that his statement requires no further explanation. Which it doesn’t.

  I don’t know why I simply assumed I’d have a place to sleep. Oh, well, I think. Camping will be fun.

  Mark searches around the crevices of his cabin, but he can’t find the extra tent. I briefly contemplate joining the Australians in their tent, but since no rain is forecast for this evening, I figure I’ll wing it in the open air with my sleeping bag. I borrow a pot from Mark, carry my stuff no more than a quarter of a mile down to the campgrounds by the river, find a rock to sit on, gather some wood, make a fire and boil three eggs for dinner. It’s dusk, and the Zambezi stretches before me, wide, calm and alive. The hippos are still there, bobbing around, snorting, doing their hippo thing, fat and innocent-looking. But I’ve been told about hippos. They’re vegetarians, Mark said, but if you get in their way, they’ll rip your head off.

  A lone elephant ambles by less than ten yards in front of me. He stops to take a drink, sees me and moves on. In the fading light, he looks two-dimensional and dark, like a big, black, cutout elephant paper doll. Two crocodile eyes and only the hint of a snout swim like a whisper on the surface of the river, a ghostly V-shaped wake trailing behind them. Even the monkeys know to be quiet now, allowing the crickets to have the final word of the day.