Table of Contents
A picture versus 203 words.
Khaled
Carla
The General
The Brain
Dorian Gray
Ammar is sick
Self-loathing
A picture versus 203 words.
I'm in Baghdad, waiting at a checkpoint manned by US marines. Suddenly a car comes rushing towards the checkpoint. The driver is shouting something in Arabic from his window. The marines raise their weapons, like the spikes on a hedgehog. I lift my camera, in much the same way as the Americans are pointing their rifles. The car comes closer. I can see a man on the back seat, holding a woman. He is caressing her hair with one hand, and his arm is wrapped around her waist. She is bleeding. I can see him speaking to her intently, passionately, staring right into her eyes.
All the elements in this scene appear to be converging towards an unspeakable disaster. Then, at the last moment, the marines' translator is able to shout "hospital!", and the Americans lower their weapons.
There is something about the look in the man's eyes, the way he holds his woman to him. They are the fulcrum around which everything turns, tenses, and then relaxes again. You never really love something until you realize that you are about to lose it. I shoot a few pics, but they don't show what really happened. The camera only registered the fear.
Khaled
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Khaled's right index finger can't bend, so he seems to be constantly pointing with it. What his exact medical condition is I don't know. I have never asked him. It's not that I'm not curious, but I've noticed that whenever anyone else asks Khaled about his finger he changes the subject, and then shuts himself off from the questioner, usually for good. His finger is an index for sorting his new acquaintances, pointing at those who ask questions without considering whether those questions might be too personal, whether they might remind Khaled of things he would rather forget.
Khaled doesn't ask personal questions. I know that he doesn't know that I don't have a sister, and I don't know if he has one. I do know he has a family member who is in the Baath party - we met him once, and he was mocking Khaled's choices in life; not being married, and all that – but that's all I know about his family. Instead of talking about ourselves when we are together, we prefer to talk bollocks. Khaled in particular – he likes to quote French philosophers.
I think the initial binding force of our friendship is poverty. Syria is proving a bad choice for me. There is very little work here for a news photographer. Not much happens, and if something does happen the secret police prevent you taking pictures of it. Money is scarce, and time plentiful. Much of this time spent is spent with Khaled, who doesn't work.
I don't think the thought of work ever occurs to him. Not that he wouldn't be capable of work, judging from the number of books he has devoured, and the fact that he speaks four languages. But it's difficult to imagine him at work. It's hard to explain... Picturing Khaled at work is like imagining Sean Connery, in a supermarket, with a caddy.
It's not that he's some kind of slob. Khaled looks terrific for his 49 years - no early signs of aging, no wrinkles or receding hairline. He dresses casual chic, with clothes either given to him by friends or girlfriends, or which he finds in the second hand Souq - clothes which are donated to charity shops in the west, who sell them on to small entrepreneurs in poorer countries, who retail them from stalls. The only affordable alternative to these second-hand clothes would be new Chinese garments - mostly rash-giving polyester clothes, printed with misspelled English slogans, and best avoided.
I've never seen Khaled cook. He eats and drinks in restaurants, with whatever money he or I can find. Shifting from cheap drink-holes to posh places with no prices on the menu, depending on the level of cash that is available. No regrets there.
The Syrian government, like most regimes in the region, depends for its survival on its secret police. Here, as in several other Arab states, the security police service is known as the mukhabarat, and consists of a shadowy but very real network of agents, officers and - most importantly - informers. Anyone could be an informer, but taxi drivers, concierges and corner shop owners are particularly useful. Many of these corner shops are really just small rooms, booths even, where the owner spends all day and most – perhaps all – of the night. So if you want a packet of smokes at four in the morning you just wake up your local informer, who is asleep behind the counter of your friendly local corner shop.
There is a corner shop just across from Khaled's house, so it is impossible to visit Khaled at home without the “mubies” knowing about it. Khaled hates the owner, and doesn't like it when I buy smokes from him, but I still go there from time to time just to chat with the shopkeeper and to tell him again and again how wonderful I think Syria is. This is the game: you have to solemnly agree with people about how great The Father (the president) is, for making it possible for people of all religions and none to live peacefully together while Syria's neighbours are torn by sectarian strife.
After a while you start to become very suspicious of your friends, just like a real Syrian. But Khaled himself never shows any fear. He even tries to sneak me into a Baath party conference one day, but we are stopped at the entrance by a suit-clad muscle man. He is polite at first, welcoming us in and then holding us up, checking back and forth on the phone with an authority which never reveals itself to us. Yes of course, he says, welcome, let me check, wait here one minute. One minute soon becomes half an hour, and Khaled begins to take his restlessness out on Mr Muscle, until Mr Muscle in turn loses his patience and tells us to go away and come back later, when there will be a session about Jewish history and politics. Khaled shoots back that he isn't interested in listening to such bullshit, and the guard asks why? Is he Jewish himself? Khaled says “maybe I am. Maybe my mother had an affair with a Jewish tourist”. So then we have to leave in a hurry. A mukhabarat car tails our taxi all the way home, and as we hide in my apartment we can hear the agents angrily questioning the neighbors.
Afterwards, I am proud to have such a daring friend. The incident will be used against Khaled later, when he is arrested.
Khaled is friendly with most of his country's dissidents. There are not many, and all of them have done jail-time. Some have done more then twelve years. The more time they did, the more important they are. When introducing someone to you they say, this is our dear friend Dr Ahmad, he did sixteen. He is more important than me. I did only twelve.
Dr Ahmad seems youthful, for a man in his late sixties, with sharp eyes and a Clark Gable moustache. He is pleased with the distinction of having done his sixteen years. It seems almost as if time has stood still for him, as if prison has made him younger. Maybe this is their way of getting back at the government, by being thankful for the years it has given them in prison, to bond with their fellow dissidents. It is a club that you can't join unless you have two digits to add to your name when you are being introduced to outsiders. Having had those two digits excised from your life makes it seem much less likely that you work for the secret police. You have to give up those digits up to join the dissident club, just as some Yakuza gangsters cut off a finger to prove their loyalty to their boss.
When I first meet him Khaled is not a full member of the dissident club. He still has to serve his time. He has tried hard to fulfill the entry requirements, always clashing with the authorities. Finally, one December, they get around to arresting him. His lawyer, who is supposed to defend him, is also arrested, which makes it impossible for me to reach him. The last thing his lawyer tells me before he is arrested himself is not to try and contact Khaled, for fear of making things worse for him.
When Khaled gets out of prison, six months later, we go to an expensive restaurant to eat, and drink, and there he tells me everything.
Khaled had been confined in a cell which was barely two meters square, infested with large rats. The staple food was a disgusting bulgur stew, which he was often unable to keep down. During his interrogations he was beaten. Once, his blood got on to the sleeve of an interrogator, who shouted at him: “I don't want your Jew blood on my uniform”.
I feel guilty, for some reason, so I make sure the alcohol keeps flowing. Khaled doesn't seem angry at me but he is very bitter about a mutual friend, Mahmoud. During his interrogations, he says, the police came out with details that only Mahmoud knew. He is now certain that Mahmoud is involved with the secret police. So we both cut off contact with Mahmoud.
Not long after this I move to Lebanon, but I still visit Khaled whenever I come back to Syria, which is fairly often. Khaled changes his phone numbers regularly, not because of security, he says, but simply because he runs out of money all the time, and can't keep his phone chips from expiring.
So whenever I want to find him, I go to one of his hang-outs and then ask for his new number. The last time I look for him I go to an ice-cream parlor we both used to visit, where I find one of the sons of the owner. He must remember me. “Do you know where Khaled is?” I ask. “Which Khaled? Khaled from the army?”
I decide he must be thinking of the wrong Khaled. “No, not army Khaled!” I insist. “My friend Khaled, who I used to come here with. He's a civilian.” “The only Khaled who hangs out here is an army officer,” the guy insists. “I have his number in my phone here. Do you want me to call him?”
I think about what he is telling me. A terrible suspicion is creeping over me. “Okay,” I say reluctantly. “Why not? Let's try.” He speed dials the number and hands me his mobile phone.
“Hallo?” says a voice. It is Khaled. My Khaled. Khaled from the army...
“It's Jeroen here.”
“Hi Jeroen!” He is, as always, pleased to hear from me.
“I'm at the ice cream shop,” I tell him.
“Hold on. I'll be right over.”
Carla
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Sometimes I work for a local newspaper in Beirut. I work for free, for Carla's sake. She is at the bottom of the food chain at the newspaper, because she never writes about politics, which is the only thing that counts in Lebanon. But when you work with Carla she takes you to places you'd never have suspected existed, to do stories you'd never have heard about, and all within the few square kilometres of central Beirut.
I estimate Carla to be about 40 years old. She has the mysterious smile of a teenager, and when I pick her up to hug her she weighs nothing, which makes it difficult to guess her age.
One of the stories Carla is working on is about The Ice Cream Man, a mean old guy who makes ice cream. He makes it entirely himself, from fresh ingredients, and he gets really angry when people come into his shop and ask for strawberry ice cream when strawberries are not in season. This anger is not a pretence - he is not at all affected. Several attempts by Carla to thaw him have failed, and his shop is slowly dying for lack of customers, because people will no longer put up with his temper. Carla and I have often plotted stratagems to persuade him to let us photograph him, but in the end we've always had to give up.
So we put The Ice Cream Man to one side and move on to “Lili” (real name Aziza Semaan), who was one of the female actresses in “Caramel”, a hit Lebanese film from 2007.
In the movie, Tante Rose (Sihame Haddad) falls in love, despite her old age, with an even older gentleman who comes to her sewing shop to have his pants shortened. He keeps returning to have an extra centimeter taken off, and just before the pants turn into shorts he succeeds in getting a date with Rose. Lili, the older sister whom Rose takes care of, is not happy, and tries to frustrate the date in every way possible. Finally, Rose has to lock Lili into her room while she slips off for her assignation.
“Lili' is like royalty in Beirut, and I am thrilled to be going to meet her. Carla and I have to search Gemayze, one of Beirut's oldest neighbourhoods, for her apartment, with Carla bouncing around in her sneakers and jeans, asking around for “Lili's place”.
Sometimes I wonder what people here make of Carla. She is, in a way, very un-Lebanese. Here women spend so much time, money and effort on looking sexy, in the most girly, bling, man-pleasing sort of way. I don't mean that Carla is not attractive - she is, but in a very jeans/sneakers/never-mind-the makeup, independent-smart-kind-of-woman style. In a Lebanese hurricane of silicone tits and collagen lips she is an eye of calm, quiet female charm.
'Lili', when we find her, turns out to be single. She tells us about her fiancé, who is far away. Her apartment is like a museum to how Gemayze used to be back in the 1950's, before the first Civil War. She is just like her character in the movie. She bursts into sparkling laughter, and then when the laughter has passed she goes quiet, and stares emptily in front of her.
After a while, she changes her mind about having a fiancé, and asks Carla if I am still single. She tells Carla to leave me with her when she goes. Changing the subject, Carla asks about “Rose”, her sister and rival in the movie. Lili lowers her voice and leans towards us. “She has a mean streak,” she confides to us. “She locked me up in my room, just so she could sneak off and meet her fiancé.”
The General
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One May there is a three-day mini-civil war in Beirut. The rest of the world isn't really interested, because the troubles coincide with an earthquake in China which causes many more deaths, and which is much easier to explain.
Two days after our little war finishes I decide to go and get some fresh flowers at Andre's flower shop, just around the corner from my house. In the shop the TV is turned on to the classic music channel, playing Bruch's violin concert.
Nice! Our little war is over. Music, flowers...
Andre, as I assume the owner is called, although I've never checked – he could be Antoine, someone else – is an older gentleman, in neatly pressed shirt and pants. We exchange the usual politesse, talking about the weather, about Bruch, about the recent events.
“Let me tell you,” he says, “these Sunnis are worthless. The general is right.” He means General Aoun. All his supporters refer to him as “the general”.
“Hariri and his goons are selling Lebanon bit by bit to the Saudis,” he explains. “There are no churches in Saudi, but even in Iran there are churches. We as Christians should make an alliance with Hezbollah: the Shia will respect our religious freedoms. Never will we let the Sunni dogs take over our mountain. We will crush them, just like we did with the Ottomans. We destroyed the Ottoman soldiers by rolling burning rocks down the mountains.”
While he is talking he wraps the flowers. “How much do I owe you?” I ask.
“That will be 20 thousand livres.”
“Here you go, thank you, and have a nice day.”
“Likewise a very nice day to you too, and thank you.”
The Brain
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Later, it seemed to me that I had known The Brain before I ever set eyes on him. It seemed to me that we had become acquainted the night before our first and only direct encounter. I understood, somehow, that he had been through a fight with his wife, an ugly fight, in which he had insulted her badly. He would rather have forgotten that fight. The morning after, she made him coffee. The hours went by without words. The Brain smoked, and let his coffee go cold without drinking it. His wife walked around the house in her slippers, making a constant swishing noise on the bare floor. The street was unusually quiet, and the sound of her slippers seemed loud. She picked up clothes, and put them in the washing machine. She picked up a broom to sweep the floor, and The Brain looked at her, raising his head, as if to say, stop sweeping. She put the broom back. She swished on, and picked up another piece of clothing in the kitchen. She made another cup of coffee, and put it in front of The Brain, and took away the old cup which had now turned cold. The Brain put sugar in the cup and, without speaking, put on his shoes and went up to the roof. It had been raining that night and there were puddles of water on the flat concrete roof. Old cigarette butts were floating in the water, left over from the other times he had come up here to look at the horizon. He could see past the next buildings into the fields and, beyond them, to the sea. Beyond the next building there was a construction site. It was empty. No one was working, today. People were staying at home, watching television.
Beyond the construction site the fields were also empty. No one looked up to see The Brain as he tossed his cigarette away and returned to his apartment on the second floor. He left his shoes outside. While he was gone, his wife had mopped the floor. She was still moving around the apartment, picking up stuff, making new coffee. The Brain lit a cigarette. His wife preferred that he not smoke in the house, but today she didn't complain. The electric heater clicked off. The Brain looked at the clock. It was nine in the morning. The power had cut off, and it wouldn't come back until six hours later. He walked to the hall and turned on the emergency supply. This consisted of two truck-batteries, hooked up with thick wires to a power converter. When there was power the grid charged the two batteries, and when the power cut out they could run a few compact fluorescent bulbs off them.
One hour and thirty minutes later The Brain died. The building he lived in was overrun in a fire fight. He died in the garage, forced to sit against the wall with four others and then executed.
His lifeless body was dragged from the scene, leaving a trace of deep red blood. The Brain fell out of his skull and onto the pavement. The garage wall, crumbled by bullets, showed five smears of blood. The shadow on the wall divided the wall diagonally. It was twelve o'clock.
Now The Brain lay on the pavement. I lit a cigarette. The Brain consisted of about one and a half kilos of meat, a blue and bloody substance, looking like a hedgehog, or a crouching cat, something alive and conscious. It was, to me, alive, an entity in itself. I let the smoke slowly leave my nostrils as if to form a disinfecting barrier between me and The Brain. All his thoughts, everything he was, had been chemically stored in this thing. All of him was there, in front of me, on the pavement: his first moments, his mother, his childhood, his dreams, his failures and his triumphs, his truth and his lies. And I was staring back at him.
I had to get out of there. I still often think of him.
Dorian Gray
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Bagdad, 18 May 2005
Today I am working in some street in Baghdad. Not much is going on. Some American soldiers are on the street. They're just talking to people who are going about their normal business, with no idea really of what is going on around them.
All of a sudden a fire fight breaks out, just around the corner. The American soldiers react by kneeling down and squinting down their rifle barrels in the direction of the disturbance. I do much the same. I ought to go to the action. I ought to go where the fighting is. But, to be honest, I feel perfectly happy, kneeling down in good company, with these armed Americans. It is painful running towards danger. It is, I suppose, a bit like jumping out of a window without looking first, hoping to fall on something soft.
I think the movies and the books misled me about this line of work. It's not exciting in the same way as it is in books and movies, in which the adrenaline jag is tamed, softened, by the knowledge that the hero will almost certainly survive that chapter. In reality, there is no such guarantee. The fear is literally sickening. And there is no romance to it, not at the time. The smells are often unbearable, and the stories or pictures you end up with are usually not worth all the bother and the fear.
The gun battle continues. I decide to make a break for the action. Clumsily I run, while keeping close to the wall, bending low. It is a nauseating, painful, unnatural feeling, this running the wrong way, like bending your knee too far in the wrong direction.
Around the corner I find an Iraqi, shot through the windshield of his car. I count six bullet holes. He is tipped over onto the passenger seat. He is still gurgling, and moaning softly. He is far-gone.
At the end of the day I put his jpegs into a folder on my computer's desktop, and mark it “do not send”. I have no clue who he is or why someone shot him, and therefore the picture is useless. I have nothing for the caption.
In the years since then, I have come to understand that the dying man is a sort of Iraqi Dorian Gray, that he will never become any older for me, and that nor for me will he ever die. But the photos I took of him, and many other photos like them, have sucked the life from me.
Ammar is sick.
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Ammar lies on his stomach on his bed. His face is turned away from us. He is sick. It may be the remains of a hangover. We are eight, standing by his bed. Muhaned suggests we all give him a hug and a kiss so that he will get better soon.
I met Ammar and Muhaned in Baghdad, at an art gallery of a friend. We became friends. The group of friends wanted to travel to Jordan, and I decided to join them for the journey; I was heading that way anyhow. When we arrived in Amman we stayed at a cheap business hotel on the outskirts of the city. In those days, being away from Baghdad meant drinking sessions - it had become more difficult to drink alcohol in the Iraqi capital, what with the advent of freedom and democracy and all that.
The drinking sessions always end in tears. First there is the singing. One starts, usually Fadi, as he has the most beautiful voice. The others join in for the chorus, tapping rhythmically on anything available. Then melancholy sets in, and everyone starts sobbing and blaspheming.
Those who aren't crying yet hug and console those who are, and then break down themselves.
Muhaned is the first to kiss Ammar on the cheek. He caresses his back for a few seconds and leaves his place to the next one. It is almost like Ammar has died, and they are filing past to pay their last loving respects. When it's my turn I notice that he's warm. He doesn't move an inch. He seems to soak up the attention. A few hours later he recovers miraculously, and is singing with us again.
Self-loathing
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When people ask me why I photograph wars I suspect that most of them expect me to say something along the lines of, “because I care”.
My editor instructed me to be very honest in this book. He said, “only something that is real will work”. These words had been lingering in my mind for a while before I decided to take him up on them.
I got incredibly drunk one night, and sent him an e-mail about the meaning of life. Or more precisely, of my life, as far as I can make it out.
In the e-mail, without commas or any other punctuation, I stressed over and over again how much I hated myself. How much I didn't care. I pointed out, remorselessly, how bored I was of hearing about suffering.
“When I hear people going on about how so and so got killed or maimed I just want to get the shot and go to lunch,” I told my editor.
I also included some suggestions about what my punishment should be, concluding that I was a charlatan who should be hung from the highest tree. I reeled all of this off without rereading it, hammered drunk, and then I pressed the send button. I took another sip, murmuring “let's get real” to myself, and then I heard a ping sound, indicating that the e-mail had been sent.
The tragic thing is that much of what I wrote - drunk, maudlin, angry - is true. I realized this later, while I was sobering up. I realized that, at least in part, it has been self-loathing that has pushed me into covering conflicts. It has made me more cynical and desensitized towards others, yet it has also given me the need for an occasional pat on the back from a reader or editor who thinks that I do what I do because somehow “I care”.
I have been like this for a long time. The wars just make it worse. They also throw a little extra self-pity into the mix, letting me add another notch on my stick every time I get shot at.
Deep down I must always have known this. No matter how great the reward from the work, I always end up feeling I am taking advantage of the suffering of others, which leads to more self-loathing. I end up hating everything about myself, including my pictures and my name. After I wrote that e-mail to my editor it suddenly occurred to me that I never give my photos a second look after I send them, never print them from the jpegs. In Baghdad, during the war, I was more than happy to go by the name of “103”. This is what the hotel staff used to call me because they couldn't get used to my real name. In Syria people usually call me Robert; this is the second name in my passport, and much easier for them to pronounce than Jeroen. I like the sound of it. Robert Kramer. Maybe I can make a new start.
Copyright © 2010 Jeroen Kramer, All Rights Reserved.