That Savage Water (20 page)


…The female bomber blew herself up as people were dancing and clapping, while the passing wedding party played music…
– Harim is on the telephone, switching between English and Arabic, with a local tip-off about a suicide attack in Karbala, a city seventy miles to the southwest –
…the male bomber attacked soon after as police and ambulances arrived at the scene
.

Deaths? – I ask.


At least thirty-five…sixty-five wounded, including the bride and groom
.

Harim is one of three Iraqi translators the CBC hired for the duration of the war to assist us in covering our stories. He's the only one of them who misses the irony that for him, war is a benefit. Or maybe he's the only one who just hasn't admitted it. He's solid as a tree with thick muscular forearms and a broad black moustache that offsets almost feminine eyes rimmed by enviable lashes. Even on days over forty degrees, he's still in long sleeves and pants, not a sheen of sweat grazing his forehead. Although it's a gross comparison, he's always appeared to me like a well-groomed, tidy Saddam.

Why a woman, do you think? – I ask Carter, my assignment manager.

Explosives are easier to conceal under a woman's clothing – Carter says – You aren't treated with the same suspicion as men.

We should be – I say – We're lethal and devious and stop at nothing to get what we want. You've worked with me before, you should know that. I'm deranged.

You're a sniper, Les. It's why we love you. I need you to go to Karbala today and scan your images to Toronto by this evening. Take Harim. He's got the best sense and knows the area.

I used to think photography was as close to the truth as one could get. It seemed impossible to lie to a camera, even more so when an arm's been blown off and its blood transforms into this perfect refractor of light that ultimately, in cruel and almost unjustifiable ways, renders the photograph a beautiful one. It's a tough paradox to swallow: beautiful blood. But atrocity releases some sort of lunatic aesthetic impulse inside me. It's why so many combat photographers are certifiable because we're confused by our attraction to death. Greta once told me I'd make the worst beauty pageant judge – my criteria are so skewed I'd get the winner entirely wrong.

An hour outside Baghdad, I ask Harim to pull over somewhere I can use the toilet. He turns into an oil truck weigh-station just off the highway on a patch of cleared desert. From behind a dusty pyramid of oranges at her market stand, a woman with deeply etched lines in her face directs me around the back.

When I open the wooden door to the toilet a hunched figure at the window turns: A black trapezoid catches the edges of the dim light source, rustling under the fabric of her burka. The air is thick as an attic's, that musk of nomadic women edged with spice caravan, algae and animal hide. At first, when she brings out her fingertips covered with blood I think she's been shot. A scrap of old fabric crumpled on the windowsill is mottled with red. From beneath her burka I am being scanned, analyzed and ignored.

The four toilets are shallow ruts fenced off by knee-high wooden doors. As I step into the stall, drop my pants and squat over the hole, I watch her continue to clean herself and wonder how they managed to cope with everything I would find so difficult. They hauled massive piles of wood strapped to their backs and sweated it out on foot mile after mile inside those body bags. Pregnant, they curled up in some deserted hut and pushed out their baby in silence like a bitch delivering pups beneath a table. They seem of stronger stock than their men who keep them like mules for their endurance.

Two condoms walk past a gay bar – Paul rallies again – One says to the other, “Hey, fancy dropping in there and getting shit-faced?”

Obscene – I hear Greta mumble. She stands a few feet away studying a photograph of a mass grave, an incomprehensible tetris of joints and limbs askew, piled like discarded chicken bones – I don't know how people get away with it.

What do you call a gay man's scrotum?

Jesus, Paul…

Mud flaps.

Les, is this even real? – Greta's face searches for some sinew of explanation.

I wad a folded napkin from my bag and dab my crotch. The trapezoid is at the rusted rain barrel rinsing her hands when I exit the stall. Water sloshes from her palm and splashes dust onto the hem of her burka and the mint green wall where a colony of spiders have abandoned their webs. Shafting down onto the crumbling paint, the light is a frenzy of molecules, each one a rebel. Through the grid in the woman's eye screen, I just barely catch a fractal of skin: cheek, eyebrow, lip. Some creature is alive beneath that portcullis, some stalwart inhabitant of either a prison or a citadel. She turns and drifts across the floor, disappearing. From the woman outside, I buy four oranges and two bottles of water. She uses one hand to place them into a bag, her other a stump truncated at the elbow.

Nothing is how it should be – I think.

The truck's form shimmers through the heat of the scorched gravel as though from inside a furnace. Inside, the cab is air-conditioned. Harim lifts my camera bag off the seat, placing it between us as I get in. He shifts into drive and pulls back onto the road.

I say – I thought a woman had been shot.

In there? Did it frighten you?

I look at him, at his black whiskers, at his patient hands gripping the wheel, at his glances up to the rear-view mirror like a dog diligently aware of a hundred scents at once. I want to hold my camera to his face and say –
Me? Do you think I take pictures of blown-up weddings because I'm easily frightened? Because the body scares me? Do I look like a woman who can't handle blood?
but instead I say – She had her period. I only thought she'd been shot.

Harim and I drive in silence. Outside is a moonscape of desert whizzing past in clouds of tire dust. We overtake mule carts and bands of women on foot carrying firewood.

The truth is that when I saw the blood, deep down I'd wished she'd been shot. The light had angled onto her surfaces in a way that when she lifted her arm to take the piece of cloth, she'd been illuminated like some otherworldly priestess exalting her pagan divinity, her pose a surreal Pieta. Instinctively, I'd reached down for my camera.

Blood must be our scaffolding, not our bones. Without, it we're empty tubes, limp puppets, so I don't believe it's wrong to want to capture that essence on film. So what if I go looking for it, expecting it, craving it? Is it possible to ask if any war photographer is happy in their work? Are we uniquely forbidden from loving what we do? I believe we have the right to inject with aesthetics any cruel reality we want, to frame the truth of human suffering for the distracted world to flip past in magazines on their way to the perfume ads. It's my belief that if you compose a gruesome image with the same intention as a jewelry campaign, people wil be more likely to stop and take a long hard look at it.

Your guy's a riot – a junior cameraman named Remi leans over to me.

I've got another one – Paul quiets the crowd like a minister – What do lesbians think tampon string is for?

I don't know, man – Remi is in stitches – What?

Flossing after eating.

I don't envy you, Leslie – Greta fails to repress a smirk – Keep your eyes wide open.

You're not married to him yet.

What? Don't you think that was funny?

It was a hoot, Paul. You're a douche.

He squints a grin, all teeth and moustache and brown-tinted sunglasses – An anal douche?

Paul's charm has never been his crudity but his ability to get away with it and for people to become more endeared to him because of it. I want to say to Greta,
now he's funny, now's the act that hooks you and makes you want to cling to him forever
.

But instead I walk over to the photograph of a Cambodian man being shot point-blank in the side of the head, his eyes grimaced, his black hair blown outward by the blast, and feel worse that it oddly comforts me.

The moon has already descended behind the mountains but its aurora still illuminates the sky behind them, giving the appearance of a cautious, stormy dawn. Distant peaks rise in jagged layers behind the concrete edifices, the streets of the city dark except for the front gate of the mosque where a fluorescent bulb buzzes over the figure of a soldier who has momentarily leaned his head back against the khaki wall. In the distance, a dog barks in sharp falsetto and from the balcony of our room I see the soldier lift his head before resting it back against the wall.

Do you always smoke? – Harim says from the bed.

Only after a suicide. I can't think of another occasion it justifies.

Pleasure?

Huh… – I inhale – Tell me about what that is. I'm not sure I've ever felt it.

Harim's body is the texture of felt. It is firm and tanned and covered with hair.

I didn't mean that. I apologize.

You find death more interesting than happiness?

As a rule, yes. Death and hatred. I'm attracted to what's consistent in a person.

Something beautiful has the potential to express more, no? Because it's more rare?

You're rare – I say – Most men can't express themselves unless they're hating something. Spend an afternoon with my ex-fiancé and you'll know everything he's ever been unhappy about.

He is a photographer also?

He's an asshole, but yes, a camera technician. He left me for my best friend. He said he needed someone less grim.

What is grim?

Less bothered by the world, more light-hearted. People don't always tell you the truth when they want something. It's amazing what they will say so they can leave something out.

Harim runs his hand up my back onto my neck, palming my skull and gently tugging my hair. His face is an injury of stubble, eyelashes so dark they look dyed – We're not all born to thrive in the same universe – he says – People are like plants that need different recipes of the same nutrients, the same water. You and him sound like separate species.

We are – I run my fingers through my pubic hair. I should have shaved – Were.

Is it possible you hate me because I'm also good at something? – Paul lights his cigarette on the bedroom's balcony and blows the smoke out at the galaxy of streetlights tracking Bloor Street into the centre of Toronto.

Oh, I don't know. Most likely – I unhook my earrings – Most likely, because I'm that bitch that just can't be happy for her partner. Especially when he's crude and inappropriate at absolutely inconceivable times.

Paul sucks at his smoke and exhales through his teeth – Well, it's funny, Les, because I find it difficult to even look at you lately. It's horrible to say but I guess it's better now than later. You're a skeleton, Les. You're addicted to the smell of blood because you somehow think it's going to one day reveal to you the meaning of your life. And frankly, I hate having to be the villain, which is what you always turn me into. Not everyone's your enemy.

Maybe they are – I say – You are.

As much as jihad has been given a bad rap, I admire them for at least being honest with their hatred. It's always outwardly expressed, is what I want to say. Not left to fester in some stomach vault where it decays into molten clods of resentment that eventually eat through you until they drop out the bottom. Life is cheap to a terrorist, a more-where-that-comes-from attitude of wasteful abundance I can't help but envy.

You're a cunt, Paul.

And deep down you're demented – he furrows the carpet with his toes – That's why you try so hard to fix it in me.

Turn up the sound – Harim instructs – What does this mean,
tainted love?

The song buzzes out through dirty speakers on Harim's shortwave propped in the valley of the bedcovers between us.

It means something is wrong with your love.

What could be wrong?

I don't know – I say – The person who gives it away. Maybe the one being loved. Maybe their heart is a polluted river poisoning colonies of goats. Lyrics don't always make sense. But then again it's difficult to make sense of anything lately.

Tell me what doesn't make sense – Harim is generously patient and it shows in his over-interest. I churn under his attention.

I just could never reconcile Paul's façade with who I knew him to be. Like the cake and the icing were incoherent together. I could see through him and he knew this but pretended anyway. And then that bomber pretending she was pregnant. It made me feel sick and I thought I was past that.

People always pretend – Harim says – We try so hard to be convincing.

People pretend so they don't feel guilty about failing – I shift onto my side – Paul always said,
“I pretend not to be drunk so I don't feel guilty about not being sober
.” Do you know how infuriating it is for someone to still do that? I mean, to continue to act when they know they're not fooling anyone?

Harim lifts his thick arms, crossing them behind his head – Some people are not comfortable without armour. They're scared of appearing fragile, being taken advantage of.

Furrows of black hair suffocate both armpits. The word
fragile
doesn't seem as though it belongs in his mouth. It assumes an awkward, alien shape and I hope to god he's not going to weep or burst into song. The reason I'm in bed with him now is because he seems so impenetrable, relaxed and secure as a fortress with his face edged in the light from the bed-side lamp. Like I could fire a rocket at him and he wouldn't explode. Like it would clang into his chest and drop into the ditch grass, undetonated. I lean over and kiss his mouth and then his neck. I rub my cheek across his chest then bury my nose in his underarm. His coarse hair smells sweet like a field of damp grass; I inhale him as if inhaling earth studded with shrapnel, a roadside crater littered with bush flowers and sunbleached thighbones, barricades of gnarled sandalwood trees that extend out into the endless scrubland.