It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (25 page)

By February 2006 Mehdi and I and Paul and his girlfriend had broken up. It was four months after Paul and I had dinner for the first time. Because of my string of failed relationships, along with the ever-increasing demands of my work, I was sure I would spend the rest of my life single. It was the one subject that filled me with a sense of failure.

“You were dating an Iranian, you’ve been dumped, and you can’t get a visa back to Iran to try to win him over,” Paul said with conviction. “I think it’s time you move on.”

By May, Paul and I spoke on the phone almost every night, catching up on the day’s events, the news, our respective personal lives. Paul had started dating a Turkish woman. I was dating everyone from New York to Istanbul. I must have logged 100,000 miles in a few months: From May through June 2006, I went from Istanbul to Beijing to Chicago to Florida to Mexico City to Istanbul to Damascus, photographing everything from investment bankers in Hong Kong to the former Yankee catcher Joe Girardi in Chicago to the presidential elections in Mexico. And almost every evening my phone would ring, no matter where I was, and it was Paul on the other end.

I started anticipating his calls. I felt a little flutter when the phone would ring in the early evening, knowing he had carefully calculated my time zone and when it would be convenient to call within my work and sleep schedule. I had never dated anyone who understood how my work and personal life were intricately bound.

Then the words “beautiful” and “kiss” started appearing on my once-platonic BlackBerry, and I was confused. I wasn’t sure I was even attracted to him.

“Marry your best friend,” my mother used to say. “You don’t want to marry for passion, because the passion fades. Marry someone who makes you laugh, who you can spend time with. Looks fade. Passion fades.”

Not that my mother, or I, had ever had much luck in love, but she did, on occasion, offer sage advice. And clearly the passionate route that my grandmother Nina had advised had not proved successful for me yet.

One day Paul came to Istanbul for work, and we went for dinner as usual. But something had changed between us. Jason didn’t tag along, I got dressed up, and Paul booked a table at an expensive sushi restaurant. When he walked me to my door that evening to say good night, we stood under the street lamp longer than usual, as if we might actually kiss.

Just then Ivan walked by. He looked at us, stopped, folded his arms across his chest, and stood on the corner across the street from us.

“You two cannot kiss!” he yelled. “Because if you get together, Lynsey is inevitably going to break up with you, and then we can’t be friends with Paul anymore. Lynsey only dates assholes, and you are too nice and normal for her. And we like you, Paul. So I am not leaving this corner until Paul walks away and gets into a cab.”

That’s how much faith my friends had in me when it came to men. My years of putting work first or having dalliances with manifestly unreliable people—all of it had affected them. Ivan stood there for ten minutes until Paul finally went home.

 • • • 

A
FEW WEEKS LATER
Karl had a weekend-long slumber party in his house along the Bosporus. We gathered there on Saturday to swim and barbecue, and every few hours Paul texted me from a friend’s wedding in Rome. I didn’t reply to all of them. On Sunday he called from the airport in Istanbul and came directly to Karl’s house.

We were all in the kitchen cooking dinner. I was washing lettuce when he slipped up behind me, pressed his front side against my back, put his hands on my waist, and leaned into my ear: “I am taking you home tonight.”

An electric jolt passed through my body. In all the months we had been friends—all those up-all-night boozy conversations—Paul had never touched me. The simple act of his hands on my hips, with his body pressing against me, changed the dynamic.

“No, you are not.”

“Yes, I am. And you are not arguing with me.”

His confidence that we would be right for each other removed the question marks in my head.

And at the end of the evening—it was the night the French soccer player Zidane had head-butted the Italian player Materazzi, leading Italy to the 2006 World Cup—Paul and I got in a taxi together and went back to my apartment. The next morning, as we sat drinking coffee on my little balcony overlooking the green mosque in Cihangir, I knew we would probably spend the rest of our lives together.

 • • • 

I
HAD NEVER DATED
someone I could envision marrying before. Paul, like me, was completely driven by his career. He was constantly dealing with deadlines and understood my own long hours. He worked as a foreign correspondent in places like Algeria and understood the challenges and allure of covering big, often dangerous stories. I never had to explain to him why I was away for several weeks out of every month or why I had to stay up on my computer, editing and filing, late into the night. With every assignment that took me off to Darfur or Congo or Afghanistan, he simply said, “I love you. I am here. Do your work, and come back when you finish. I will be here waiting for you.”

It wasn’t just that Paul was accepting of my work—he was energetically supportive, excited to help me plan my reporting, fascinated by the next possible story, and visibly proud of my accomplishments. Few men were this engaged in their girlfriends’ careers. I couldn’t help but be suspicious.

A few months before I was taking him home to my crazy family for Christmas, I wanted to make sure he would be fine with hanging out with gay men as well as loud Italian Americans. Socially Paul was an affable, relaxed guy, but he was also somewhat refined, in that European, proper, polite sort of way. I explained to Paul that everyone was bound to ask him a million questions. I joked that if he had any secrets, he needed to tell me, because my family was capable of prying anything out of anyone. He got a bit fidgety.

“Well, I have something I should probably tell you,” he said, in his forest-green V-neck sweater. “I have a title. I’m a count.”

Me and Paul on the Turkish coast, July 2007.

“You’re what?”

“I am a count.”

He explained that his great-grandfather was the adopted son of a Jewish Austro-Hungarian baron, Maurice von Hirsch, a wealthy banker who lent money to King Edward VII and made a fortune building the first railways connecting Turkey to Europe. Hirsch was also a philanthropist who donated his money to programs for the settlement of the persecuted and impoverished Jewish people living in Russia and Eastern Europe. As Baron de Forest, Paul’s great-grandfather became a British MP, was a close friend of Winston Churchill’s, and later became a citizen of the Principality of Liechtenstein, where he was given the title of count by the prince. In 1944 he set up a charitable foundation for the protection of the natural environment, which Paul’s father runs to this day. Paul spent his childhood living in a castle in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, on the French Riviera, next to Zairean president Mobutu Sese Seko’s villa. Paul’s father airlifted one hundred endangered lemurs out of Madagascar to their home and set up a private zoo that stretched all the way to the sea, full of mini monkeys that terrified Paul as a child.

I stared at him. What would I tell Nina, my Italian grandmother who rode the boat from Bari, Italy, to Ellis Island and struggled her entire life to provide for her family? Nina frowned upon people who had their success handed to them on a silver platter. And would Paul frown upon my middle-class family? I was unsure what the count title meant in present-day translation—were people supposed to curtsy in front of him? Did he wear a kilt? Did his family live in actual castles? Before I could formulate a reaction, words flew out of my mouth.

“Don’t tell my family,” I said.

 • • • 

I
SHOULDN’T HAVE WORRIED;
Paul fit into my world just fine. At first it was I who had a problem fitting into his. A few months into our relationship I was planning a trip back to the Darfur refugee camps in eastern Chad and flying through Paris. Paul, coincidentally, had to be in Paris for his best friend Oscar’s thirtieth-birthday party. I had a backpack with camera gear and a satellite dish and another, carry-on-sized bag in case we had to catch a UN flight to the border—they always restricted luggage weight. I packed a few linen tunics, a pair of jeans, cargo pants, head scarves, a bug net, a headlamp, wet wipes, antibiotics, running shoes, and one set of workout clothes in case there happened to be a gym in the hotel in Ndjamena, the capital of Chad. Paul told me the weekend would be casual, so I stuffed a few dressy tops into my bag. In New York, a birthday party often called for fitted jeans, a stylish top, a pair of high heels, and some silver jewelry. But I had never hung out with Swedes before.

When I arrived at the restaurant to meet Paul, Oscar, and about forty of their friends, I knew I was in trouble. Everyone was a statue of blond, elegant perfection. The women were wearing semiformal gowns made of fine fabrics that somehow gathered gracefully on their curveless bodies. Their hair had been styled professionally into rolling, blond curls. They all carried Chanel, Prada, Gucci, or Louis Vuitton bags. Glistening diamonds hung from their earlobes. The men sported Gucci loafers, Prada suits, Audemars Piguet watches, labels I didn’t know.

And there I was in my Zara top, my Levi’s jeans, and my Nine West heels, on my way to Darfur.

As Paul introduced me to the men and women, they looked me up and down, and then turned their backs and walked away. No one cared who I was, what I did for a living, or that I was going to Darfur to document a war so people like them could have a clue what was going on in the world outside Stockholm or Paris. I started sinking into insecurities I didn’t even know existed. The next day I raced to Zara, scrambling to find something fancy enough to wear.

“But you are a tough, successful woman—a war photographer who has traveled around the world,” Paul said. “You really care about these women?”

There was a second dinner scheduled for the following night, and I was dreading the disapproving glances by these women who had never worked a day in their lives. I was still a woman, and I still cared what I looked like; no matter what I accomplished with my career, nothing eliminates those stinging insecurities you develop as a child or teen. And for better or worse, these people would occasionally pop up in Paul’s life. I would have to deal with them again, which made me question Paul’s judgment, too: How could he like these people? Did I want to be a part of this world?

Maybe I was so upset because I actually wanted this relationship to last. Something about Paul’s eccentric background mirrored my own. It made him flexible about my time-consuming profession, and capable of embracing this crazy, weird life of mine. We had found familiar ground in the wilderness of our familial abnormalcy: our love of our work. He respected my industriousness and drive. The love between us was organically unconditional, allowing us to be ourselves, without any limitations. It reminded me of the love my family gave me. Suddenly, standing at that stupid Swedish party, I realized that Paul was different from any other man I had ever known.

That evening, I sat alone at a table while everyone cavorted around me, when one of the Swedes approached me for the first time and asked if he could sit down.

“Sure,” I said, surprised.

“My name is Carl. I think you are the only other person here with a job.”

I laughed. The next morning I sprinted off to Darfur, where I felt completely comfortable.

CHAPTER 9

The Most Dangerous Place in the World

In 2007 the war in Afghanistan dragged on, the prospects for peace diminishing every year. The Taliban insurgency spread throughout the countryside, and America, distracted by Iraq, was paying the price for neglecting a country all too familiar with an occupation. Car bombs and suicide attacks occurred weekly; NATO troops retaliated, killing a large number of civilians in the process. My relationship with the country had already spanned seven years, and as more and more lives were lost on both sides, I felt I needed to document what had gone wrong.