A House in the Sky (12 page)

In the morning, stepping out of the dark tent into the white blare of sunlight, I was rewarded for having spent the night. Maryam and her Kuchi sisters-in-law—older women who clucked their approval of my presence—stroked my hair and pinned beaded amulets to my shirt. They showed me their own adornments—chunky stone necklaces from Saudi Arabia, bracelets inlaid with bits of lapis lazuli, silver earrings in the shape of crescent moons.

I waited a while to pull out my camera, and when I did, it was not an event. The first time I lifted the viewfinder to my eye and pointed it at the women, nobody flinched. Nobody turned away or hid her children from me or gave me a single hostile look. Any assessment of me had already been done, perhaps the second I’d stepped out of the tent with Maryam and her kids, all of us intact and no worse for the wear. The men drank tea in the shade of a tent. The women lined up goats for milking. A wizened grandmother type squatting outside one of the tents looked at me squarely and frankly with what felt like centuries living in her eyes, and in that split second, I let the shutter close.

That picture—a close portrait of her spiderwebbed wrinkles and gorgeous clear eyes—became my first published image. An editor at a
local magazine for expats called
Afghan Scene
accepted it a few weeks later to run as a cover photo. She liked the image so much that she asked if she could print a copy to hang in her living room at home. She then commissioned me to go back and report a full feature-length story on the Kuchis. A three-page, eight-photo spread, written and photographed by me.

By the standards of big-time journalists, it was nothing—a couple of sales to a low-budget magazine, a slim English-language monthly containing restaurant reviews and culture stories set between ads for everything from Visa cards to dog adoptions and armored cars—but for me it was a score. It was an actual assignment, a little bit of money—the reward for going and an excuse to stay.

*

Encouraged now, I studied the websites of newsmagazines and newspapers. I paid attention to what people photographed, how the stories read. I forced myself to be extra-outgoing and introduced myself to pretty much everyone passing through the Mustafa, asking questions about where they’d been and what they’d seen. I e-mailed editors in Toronto and New York, attaching photos I’d taken as I made short trips to different provinces, traveling with aid organizations or other freelancers from the Mustafa. Sometimes I got responses and requests to stay in touch, though never a commitment to publish what I’d sent. Most seemed to want only photographs of the war.

One tactic among enterprising freelancers is to get letters of intent from editors or photo editors—a few short lines written on official letterhead, or an e-mail with an official-sounding address, saying that he or she is interested in seeing, for example, your story on opium farmers who’ve taken up growing pistachios or images from your trip to the Tajiki border. The letters are vague, with no guarantee of publication, but when they’re forwarded to press officers or other gatekeepers, they function as gold.

The only letter ever written on my behalf came to me by way of one of the Mustafa’s many strange barflies, a pale Brit with a pronounced
stutter named Anthony Malone, who, like a lot of the buzz-cut men in desert boots hanging around the downstairs lobby area, referred to himself obliquely as a “private security contractor.” He lived in a ritzy Kabul neighborhood, in a mansion with a staff. He knew people. He threw parties. He talked in a low voice into his cell phone.

One night over a beer at the bar, he told me that if I wanted to get an official military embed, he could help me out. Within a few days, he’d procured a letter from a buddy of his, an editor at a magazine called
Combat and Survival,
saying that he’d like to see any photos I could get of the Canadian troops in the field. The letter did the trick. Within a week, I was off to Kandahar.

Combat and Survival
is a publication geared toward soldiers—current soldiers, retired soldiers, and people obsessed, for whatever reason, with war and soldiering. Its pages, when I checked them out, featured reviews of monstrous-looking patrol vehicles and offered manly-sounding frontline reports from places like Serbia and Central Africa, the world’s buzzing hot spots. I had no business working for it, but in truth I was long past worrying about where and how I belonged. After eight weeks in Afghanistan, I’d convinced myself that all I needed to do was to maneuver myself into a place where something newsworthy was going on.

I touched down in Kandahar on a 115-degree afternoon in late June, lugging my photo equipment and a peacock-blue flak jacket, several sizes too big, which Abdullah, the friendly manager at the Mustafa, had dug out of his lost-and-found closet. Showing up at the Canadian press tent at Kandahar Airfield, I felt my nerves flutter. There was a team from Global News Television and CanWest Media and another guy from CTV. Serious reporters, doing serious work, with their Pelican cases full of equipment, their satellite phones and ballistic-proof sunglasses and combat helmets. Shortly after my arrival, a dark-haired woman in a long white shirt breezed into the tent behind me, looking freshly showered and very much at home. I recognized her instantly as Mellissa Fung, a national reporter for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation. I’d seen her on TV plenty of times, but now she was just
ten feet away from me—petite, confident, and not nearly as sweaty as the rest of us, busily conferring with her cameraman over a tripod-mounted video monitor.

I felt like a kid standing alone in the school lunchroom. As I filled out the obligatory military paperwork, including an ominously worded next-of-kin contact sheet, one of the Global News reporters walked over to introduce himself. His name was Francis Silvaggio. I did what I could to sound experienced. I was a photographer based in Kabul, I said. I had flown down to shoot for
Combat and Survival.
As I was speaking, I saw his gaze settle on my Superman-blue XXL flak jacket, which sat propped like a deli sandwich board on the ground next to my pack.

“What is that?” he said.

I sheepishly explained that it was body armor, old and too big and on loan from my hotel in Kabul. He lifted his eyebrows. “I’m a freelancer,” I said, as if this weren’t obvious. I waited for him to say something condescending or find a quick way out of the conversation, but he didn’t. “You know,” Francis said, “I think we’ve probably got an extra vest that’ll fit you better.”

Before long, courtesy of Global News, I’d been outfitted in a snug and comparatively sleek Kevlar vest the color of dry leaves. In it, I felt less loserish. After being issued a helmet by the military public affairs officer, I seemed to fully blend in. A handful of us media people were heading to a forward operating base at a place called Masum Ghar, in one of those areas that got referred to in the news as a “Taliban stronghold.” We would drive an hour and a half in a convoy of light armored vehicles to get there.

We got a procedure briefing from a commander before continuing. He reviewed the threat of roadside bombs, his instructions clipped and shouted. “If we’re hit by an IED and there’s no damage,” he said, “we move on. If we’re hit by an IED and there’s a vehicle down, we will cordon it off and fight our way out if we need to.”

Taking advantage of what could be the last strong cell reception, the other reporters jumped on the phone with their editors, discussing story angles, arranging deadlines. I stepped out of the tent and called Nigel in Australia. I was feeling afraid.

We’d grown distant already. Our rekindled relationship seemed to be waning quickly. One phone call between us would be exuberant and loving—full of
aw babe
exclamations and ideas about the future—while the next would be terse and detached. Nigel’s divorce had become official, but instead of feeling like he had a new life and a fresh start, he seemed mostly depressed. Though I understood it, I didn’t want to understand it.

It was late afternoon in Australia. “I’m going out with the troops,” I said to Nigel, launching into a description of my day thus far, explaining about my helmet and flak jacket, about the Taliban stronghold and the IEDs.

Maybe it sounded like a boast. Maybe I knew that. We’d had a phone fight earlier in the week. He’d been saying he was coming to join me in Kabul, but he’d made no move to book flights. He’d accused me of being pushy. I’d accused him of being docile.

“You won’t hear from me for probably ten days,” I told him now. “But don’t worry, okay?”

There was a pause. I pictured Nigel at work at a desk in a clean shirt, editing his photos of whatever had gone on that day in Bundaberg.

“Okay, then,” he said coolly. “Just don’t get killed.”

We hung up without a single endearment.

*

I spent the next eight days in the field with Canadian soldiers, mostly men my age and from rural parts of Canada. It took only a brief dip in to understand that war was not just dangerous but also a grind. The sun over southern Afghanistan roasted everything—the liquid soap in the latrines, the toilet seats—to almost scalding. Gear was heavy, the dust ubiquitous. I met a classical pianist who was worried about hurting his hands. I met a young father who kept laminated pictures of his children strung on a chain next to his dog tags. I met a couple of guys who passed their patrol time trading fantasies about the singer Nelly Furtado.

On my second day at Masum Ghar, word came down that three Canadian soldiers had been killed by a roadside bomb during a patrol
southwest of Kandahar. The embedded reporters immediately cranked into gear, waiting out the necessary blackout period while the families were contacted before shooting the news out into the universe.

Soldiers lived inside the wire—within the protected confines of the military camp—but roamed, as needed and as ordered, on the outside. Inside the wire, there was a library, satellite television, and eggs cooked to order at breakfast. Outside the wire, the threats multiplied infinitely. The Taliban operated from the nooks and shadows, from the brown folds in the uptilted mountains, and inside the thick walls of little villages, un-uniformed and therefore indistinguishable from innocent civilians. They attacked with rockets and by laying IEDs along the roads.

The threat was almost always invisible. It could be anything. It defined everything, dogged everyone, caused the adrenal glands to pulse and fritz. The threat was hissing camel spiders the size of tea saucers. It was overhead tracer flare in the night, the bad-news e-mail from home, the eerie stillness on a road. It was anything on either side of the wire that could erupt into disaster.

Going outside the wire felt to me like being shot into space. One morning I followed a group of infantrymen as they stalked their way through fields of tangled grape arbors, holding guns and metal detectors, looking to investigate a suspicious wire spotted at a distance by an earlier patrol. I took photos and tried to keep up as the soldiers in their combat gear hopped over low mud walls dividing the fields, maintaining a twitchy silence as they crept closer to the worrisome spot. I felt scared, useless, enthralled. My nerves pulsed. A few Afghan boys watched us closely from a dry wadi as we moved delicately, not wanting to trip any bit of buried ordinance, wondering what the boys knew or didn’t know—were they innocent or not innocent?—until at last we came upon the source of the hubbub, the threat glimpsed earlier, now in focus: a sun-withered scrap of rope lying in a ditch.

I
t is an obvious fact that you can never look ahead with clarity at your own future or anybody else’s. You can’t know what will happen until it happens. Or maybe it dawns on you the split second before, when you get a glimpse of your own fate. I think back to the day when I showed up in Kandahar with my camera and dubious
Combat and Survival
press pass. There were three Canadian soldiers who couldn’t know then that a roadside bomb was waiting for them and they were soon to die. Back home were three sets of parents or spouses who weren’t prepared for the call. Mellissa Fung, the CBC television correspondent who looked so purposeful and confident, couldn’t know that sixteen months later, on a return trip to Afghanistan, she would get kidnapped outside of Kabul and spend twenty-eight days as a hostage, kept half-starved in an underground room in the mountains. Anthony Malone, the British security guy who got me the magazine letter, would be thrown into one of Afghanistan’s most notorious prisons, charged with fraud and failure to pay debts, and held for two years. Jason Howe, the freelancer I met at the Mustafa, would go on to hit the big time, selling photos to all the major newspapers—
Le Figaro,
the
Times
of London, the
New York Times.

I, too, was carrying around my own fate. All the things I couldn’t know sat somewhere inside, embroidered into me—maybe not quite fixed to the point of inevitability but waiting, in any event, for a chance to unspool.

I left Afghanistan when my money ran out. Maybe I should have felt discouraged by my lack of success as a photographer; after about seven months, beyond one article and some photos in
Afghan Scene,
I hadn’t published a thing. But I didn’t. I felt hopeful, excited by the challenge of learning a profession. I went home to Calgary to refill my bank account, work on my photography, and make new plans. My plans no longer included Nigel. He and I had fallen out of touch completely.

I got a job in the lounge of a new restaurant called Seven, a show-offy place that looked better suited to Miami, with white leather couches and white walls. The tips were lavish. The work wasn’t hard. Outfitted once again in four-inch heels and grasping a cocktail tray, I kept my Kabul experiences housed in one corner of my mind. I sublet a room in a condo owned by a girl my age who had an office job downtown, and I filled it with trinkets from the Middle East, hanging photos from Pakistan and India on the walls. For a few hours every week, in service to where I’d been and wanted to go, I took lessons with a local photographer, who was teaching me how to work in black and white and how to use Photoshop.