Between Here and April

by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  “To life?” I held my palms out in front of my breathing, conscious self. “Uh, in case you haven’t noticed, Renzo, I’m not dead.”

  “I know that. I mean this life. Real life.” He gestured toward the photographers hustling in and around the store, the two in front of us discussing the relative merits of the various Mac computers for transmitting pictures, the two behind us trading stories of auto-focus lenses clogged with sand. The atmosphere felt almost festive, the air humming with invisible balloons. “Bernie tell me you go with me to Baghdad, no? This is good. This is what I am talking about.”

  I nearly laughed. “Renzo, first of all, I told Bernie I’d think about it. Not that I’d definitely come. Second of all, you may be surprised to hear this . . .”—I dropped to a sotto voce—“. . . but not everyone would define ‘real life’ as choosing to work in constant proximity to death.”

  “Yes, but they would be wrong,” he whispered, loudly, back. “Just one ticket is fine,” said Renzo, grabbing my backpack off my shoulder and handing it to the Hasid along with his own. As if we hadn’t just spent the past decade apart, living our separate lives. Carrying separate backpacks.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But most people are just happier, I guess, not thinking about it all the time. Or seeing it up close. All the time.” Now I addressed the security guard. “Actually, make that two tickets, please.”

  “But what else is there?” said Renzo.

  The man handed us two claim tags. “Thank you,” said Renzo, but before he could stick both of the laminated numbers into his back pocket, I grabbed mine.

  “Besides death?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, come on, Renzo. Life, for one.”

  “Semantics.” He waved his hand dismissively and made his way past the flat screen TVs and iPod displays toward the back of the store, in the direction of the camera equipment.

  “Look,” I said, nearly running to keep up with him, “can we switch topics? You’re pissing me off already, and I just got here.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, his face breaking into another mischievous grin. He loved to provoke, both in pictures and in life. I’d forgotten how simultaneously frustrating—and exhilarating—that could be.

  Once, when we were in Rome, I’d invited him out for drinks with an old roommate of mine from college, passing through Italy on her way to Namibia to work for the Peace Corps. By the end of the evening, he had Maggie in tears, after he rolled his eyes at her claims of being motivated purely by selflessness. “Any halfway intelligent fifteen-year-old can tell you there are no selfless acts in life,” he finally snapped.

  “You’re just so totally wrong,” Maggie replied.

  To which Renzo replied, after lighting a cigarette, and taking a seemingly endless puff on it, “Think what you want. Tell everyone you know you’re doing this job to save people. But I tell you that in fact you have as much if not more to gain from digging all those sewers than the people who will be shitting in them. You think Mother Teresa’s selfless? I meet her. I take many pictures of her. Two minutes before the shoot, she is yelling at one of her staff, calling her stupid, and shooing away the children around her, like little fleas. Then the camera comes out of my bag and, poof, she make her face of pity and put her hands on the head of a young, how you say, leper. I sell this picture many times. Everybody want this picture for their magazine and their journal and their film documentaire. But it is a lie. Just a convenient lie.”

  “But every picture’s a lie,” I’d said, trying to steer the conversation in a different direction. “As Susan Sontag wrote—”

  “I know what she write,” Renzo said, cutting me off. He stared at Maggie—who wound up parlaying her experience building primitive latrines in Namibia into a job in emerging markets at Bear Stearns—accusatorily. “I read that book. And many others. But some lies are more truthful than others.”

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” he now said, leading us into another line to wait for one of the many green-vested equipment salesmen behind the counter. “Let’s start again. Hello, Elizabeth. How are you?” He pronounced the words exaggeratedly, like a student of English learning the first dialogue in the textbook.

  “I. Am. Fine. Thank you. Very. Much. And. You?”

  “I am very well, thank you.” He smiled. Then he leaned over to kiss me, gently, on the cheek. “It is good to see you.”

  My skin tingled at the point of contact. “It’s good to see you, too,” I said. “I’m glad you called.” Then, noticing the sign at the front of the line, I said, “I think we’re in the wrong line. That says medium and large format cameras. You want digital, don’t you?”

  “No. I want to buy a Linhof.”

  “A Linhof?” I knew the kind of vivid panoramas such large format cameras were capable of producing. Thomas Struth had taken his into museums, forests, parking lots, and urban streetscapes and had produced some of the more arresting images of the mundane I’d ever seen. But why Renzo would want one to cover Iraq, especially if Newsworld, as I’d heard, had gone completely digital, was a mystery. “What for?”

  “My Deardorf is too heavy.”

  “Too heavy for what?”

  “I am tired of journalism,” he said.

  “I want to make art. So, for this I need a lighter camera.”

  Now I was totally confused. “So wait, you’re not going back to Iraq? But Bernie said—”

  “No, of course I’m going back to Iraq. Where else would I go?” He shook his head at the absurdity of the thought. Of his missing a war. “It is just that I refuse to shoot the sentimental bullshit anymore. No more close-ups of the crying widows and the bleeding soldiers and the little child with the shrapnel stuck into the skin on his face in the hospital bed. We have seen these pictures too many times, in too many places. They have become meaningless. I am much more interested in the translation of this experience into something else, in the, how do you say in English this word, recul?”

  “Stepping back.”

  “Yes. Stepping back.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Like Matthew Brady, only color and further back. You know Matthew Brady?” Of course I did—Matthew Brady was the first real combat photographer, lugging his heavy glass plates and camera equipment through the bog of the American Civil War. “Anyway, I will show you. During lunch. I have some pictures I take with the Deardorf back in the apartment I borrow. It is just around the corner. I cook you lunch, yes? I make fish soup last night when I get in from Rome. We heat it up. You like fish soup still, no?” One night when we were in Tel Aviv, while I was busy filing a story, Renzo had gone out to the local fishmonger’s to gather the ingredients to make his mother’s famous zuppa dipesce. At the time he’d claimed it was the only dish he knew how to cook, but over the years we’d traveled together, I’d seen him create unbelievable concoctions out of the barest bones. He once took a packet of dried pea soup, mixed it with water, powdered milk, and half an onion he’d rescued from the trash, and made us two bowlfuls of green penne that rivaled anything I’d eaten in a three-star restaurant.

  “Of course,” I said, “I love your fish soup,” recalling, with shocking clarity, the slow way he’d undressed me after we’d eaten it.

  A man in his mid-twenties, lithe and leathered, strode up next to us. His sun-bleached hair brushed the top of his jacket, which was covered with a dozen pockets, one of which held an iPod whose earphones he was now removing, revealing the tinny bass of a rap song. On his shoulder hung a large digital Canon, along with a well-worn Domke camera bag. “What the . . . ?” He slapped Renzo’s back and nodded his head up and down in recognition. “Renzo fucking D’Aubigny! How the hell are you? I didn’t know you were in town! Dude, you should have called! I was out drinking with Anton last night. We closed the place down.”

  “I just got here,” said Renzo, politely. “So I do not call anyone yet but my old friend here, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, this is Phipps. I share once with him a house in Tikrit.”
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br />   Phipps nodded perfunctorily at me before turning his attention back to Renzo. “Dude, we fucking owned that story.” He held up his hand as if to slap Renzo a high five, but Renzo looked at him blankly. “So when are you heading back, in time for the anniversary?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Renzo.

  “You’ll stay at the al Hamra again?”

  “I do not know yet.” Both lies: Bernie had told me that Renzo had booked two rooms at the al Hamra beginning one week before the anniversary of the war.

  “Well, if you do stay there, I call first dibs on your extra bed. Anton, that little fuck, he got an assignment from Time while he was here, can you believe it? God knows which editor he had to ball to get one, but he got one. He leaves the day after tomorrow.”

  “This is fortunate for him.” Renzo was trying to smile but visibly cringing. He kept looking over his shoulder to see how close we were getting to the front of the line.

  “I might have an assignment from Der Spiegel,” said Phipps, “but I won’t know until next week.” He was reminding me more and more of a young Labrador retriever: panting, salivating, wagging his big, hairy tail in a too-tight space and knocking everything down. “Hey, you want to join us for dinner tonight? We’re all meeting up—Anton, me, Jonesie, Blake—at that place I took you last year, remember it was—”

  “Next,” the man at the camera counter shouted.

  “Sorry,” said Renzo, “but it is our turn. I see you soon in Baghdad, yes, inshallah.”

  “In-fucking-shallah,” said Phipps, “Be cool, my man, be cool.”

  “You be cool, too,” said Renzo, speaking the words robotically. He leaned over to me as we walked to the counter and whispered, “You see? This is why I need you to come with me. All of the young ones these days, they think they are Rambo. Ça m’ennui.”

  “Can I help you?” The man in the yarmulke said as he put away a Hasselblad.

  “Yes, please,” said Renzo. “I would like to purchase a Linhof.”

  WE LEFT B&H a little less than an hour later, carting the new camera and two hundred rolls of film and an ultralight tripod. “Where are you staying?” I asked Renzo, as we made our way down Ninth Avenue, and he explained that his friend Simon, a Reuters photographer who’d been holed up in Baghdad since the start of the war, had told him he could stay in his apartment on West Twenty-ninth Street whenever he pleased. The owner of the deli downstairs kept an extra set of keys for any of Simon’s colleagues passing through. All Renzo had to do was to say the secret password—“f-stop”—and ask for them.

  I could already picture the apartment: A single room, facing a brick wall. A futon on a bare floor. A halogen lamp. Photography books stacked in one corner, a battered file cabinet in another. A stack of framed sixteen-by-twenty-inch exhibition photos pushed up against one wall, to be dealt with at some nebulous but never-to-be-reached point in the future. A makeshift kitchen area, furnished with a hot plate, a waist-high refrigerator covered in fake wood-grain, a toaster oven, a set of mismatched plates. A bathroom taken over by an enlarger and several half-used bottles of chemicals, an empty toilet-paper holder. A table with a lightbox. A sagging couch either rescued from the sidewalk or pushed home on a dolly from the Salvation Army. A metal desk stacked with unopened mail, a giant iMac, a half dozen LaCie hard drives, an aerosol can of Dust-Off. And somewhere on the floor an Afghan rug, carted home like a bison over Simon’s shoulder after his last trip to Kabul.

  “So, here we are,” said Renzo, jiggling his keys into the various ancient-looking locks to get them to unlatch, and I saw that I was right about nearly everything except the color of the squat refrigerator (it was olive green.) “It is not the Chez Raton,” Renzo continued, invoking the French argot for Sheraton—“Chez Raton”: at the rat’s house, literally—a double whammy of an insult, both to Americans, for building such hotels, and to North African immigrants, for being the rats infesting them. “But it is confortable.”

  No, I thought. It is not comfortable. It is dust-covered and lonely, and it is exactly how I would have wound up living, minus the photo equipment, had I stayed on this path. My apartment wasn’t much larger—and with four of us occupying it, it could feel much smaller—but it was filled with color and light, with children’s drawings and soft places to sleep. On the other hand, what it had recently lacked in warmth could have filled a room—was now filling, in fact, this cavernous space—from the moment Renzo had shut the door behind us: a molecular charge, ricocheting off our skin, of tension and possibility.

  While Renzo heated up the soup, I found a sponge under the sink and got to work wiping down what I could. Then I ran the bowls and spoons under some hot water with soap, scrubbed the grit out of two mugs, filled them with tap water and ice, and unearthed a couple of dish towels for napkins. The kitchen area, if one could even call it that, was an afterthought of a nook, which meant Renzo and I kept bumping into one another, and each time this happened, a dull ache of need, of which I’d been previously oblivious, grew more acute.

  We sat down to eat. The card table which served as the dining area was set back into the darkest corner of the room, so Renzo brought over one of the clamp-on lamps, clipping it to the back of his metal chair and bouncing it off the wall behind him so we could see our food. “I forgot the wine,” he said, returning with a bottle of Chianti he’d bought duty free at the airport. He uncorked it with his Swiss Army knife, took a nice, big swig, and handed it off to me to do the same. And thus the bottle passed back and forth between us, along with the various narratives of our lives, while the briny broth warmed my tongue and filled my stomach. I stared at the dusty cone of light behind my ex-lover’s head, then at the angles of Renzo’s face, made more linear by the bounced shafts, then at his long, delicate fingers curled around a fifty-cent spoon. The whole scene felt at once both familiar and foreign. Familiar, because we’d spent many long nights thus, eating in borrowed rooms, often with just a flashlight wedged between us for illumination; foreign because it had been almost a decade since our last real discussion, on the floor of an abandoned house near Djakovica, on the darkest night of my life.

  CHAPTER 16

  IT WAS EARLY 1999, my last trip to the Balkans, my last story with Renzo. Mark and I were already married by then, and I was already carrying a small cellular entity that would become, a few months later, our daughter Daisy. “Don’t go,” Mark had said, the morning of my flight, but I’d wanted to prove to him—to myself—that having a child would change nothing about our lives. “Don’t be silly,” I’d replied. “I’ll be fine.”

  Renzo and I were driving along the outskirts of Djakovica, a Kosovar Albanian enclave where, according to British and American intelligence, the Serbians had set up a rape camp. This was after the NATO air strikes, and I was trying to ascertain the veracity of these reports, which some were claiming to have been politically timed to deflect attention away from civilian casualties.

  A light rain was falling, Renzo was at the wheel, and I was navigating with various maps of the region, whose borders, though drawn less than a year earlier, were already out of date. “I think we have to turn left up here,” I said, sending us up a steep, wooded hill. But it seemed to veer away from the town, rather than toward it.

  “Are you sure?” said Renzo. He pulled the car over next to a patch of evergreens and flipped on his hazard lights.

  “I thought this was the right way . . .” I said, trying to talk and think quickly over the metronomic slap of the wipers. Though I was uncertain about the existence of the particular rape camp in question, both Renzo and I were well aware of what the Serbs were capable of doing to the contents of an idling car. Back in Bosnia a few years earlier, an Italian journalist we knew had been murdered, along with two of his colleagues, by a band of thugs known as the Fish-Head Gang, who terrorized motorists along the route between Gornji Vakuf and Vitez. Others had had their cars, their equipment, even their shoes stolen off their feet.

  Renzo was still studying the m
ap, his hand resting on the clutch, when they suddenly appeared: eight heavily armed Serbs, in ragged uniforms with three-day-old stubble and Kalashnikovs slung over their shoulders.

  “Oh fuck,” I said, my heart shooting up into my larynx.

  “Calmati,” said Renzo.

  Three of them, reeking of alcohol and stale sweat, held guns to our heads, forced us into the backseat, and drove us, rifles now dug into our ribs, a couple of miles north to an abandoned house in the woods, where we were joined by the others, who’d followed behind in a sputtering Yugo. Shouting wildly, arguing, it seemed, over what to do with us, they wound up pushing us into the house and tying Renzo, with the scraps of an old sheet, to a chair. Me they shoved into a corner, guarded by the short one, his gut hanging out over his pants. Their apparent leader, a redwood of a man with matted blond hair, took the butt of his rifle and banged it into Renzo’s forehead, slashing a bloody gash between his eyes that would leave a permanent scar and deprive him, over the course of the next hour, of liters and liters of blood, which poured in stripes down his nose and cheeks. “Stop it!” I screamed, which made the men laugh.

  Seeing the butt of the rifle poised for a second strike and judging my overweight warden to be slow and weak, I slipped out from behind him and ran over to try to protect Renzo, only to be tackled halfway by two of the larger men, who threw me on the floor and dug their knees into my spine. I breathed in the dust, tasted the particles of mica on my tongue.

  “You!” the redwood shouted to Renzo. “American scum! Spy!” He struck him again, this time in the ribs, then kicked him, repeatedly, in the gut.

  “He’s not American,” I kept repeating. “Or a spy. Please let us go.”

  The leader shouted something to the men, which I only understood in context, once I felt myself being flipped over onto my back, my arms pinned behind me by one man, my belt unbuckled, roughly, by another.