It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War (32 page)

I was in a deep sleep when I felt my body being pulled to the left. I assumed I was dreaming. My muscles tensed up; I heard a loud screech and waited for the sound of the crash, as if I were a spectator in my own dream. But then there actually was a crash, the world went blacker than in my dream, and a gentle warmth washed over me.

Since I was a little girl I often had nightmares that I died in strange ways. But I always woke up in time. This time I was unconscious. I don’t remember how much time passed before I started to be cognizant of my surroundings: chaos, frenzy, noise. I couldn’t actually see. I wasn’t coherent enough to react or strong enough to move. It was the first time in my adult life that I couldn’t move without assistance, and it came with an unfamiliar sensation of submission.

For a brief moment I opened my eyes to a minivan and a man with a mustache. The man with the mustache was carrying me. I was still horizontal.

And then I was on a concrete slab in what seemed like one of those rudimentary roadside clinics. I couldn’t figure out what had happened, and I had no idea what country I was in. I looked around to see strangers in the room, many of them heavily bearded men. I couldn’t move; I was injured. My back burned, and my bones sent intense waves of pain through my shoulder.

A nurse with a head scarf stood over me, to my left, holding a giant needle full of fluid. I asked her if the needle was clean. She looked at me as if I was insane. Where was I? An image of a refugee camp flashed before my eyes. More bearded men. I wondered why I wasn’t wearing a head scarf. I raised my right arm, the one I could still move, and felt the top of my head for my usual
hijab
. My hair was exposed, but I knew that I should have had my head covered.

To my right I heard a man let out a series of rhythmic, gut-wrenching groans. I looked over, and it was Raza.
Oh, Raza,
I thought.
My Pakistani driver. Next to me. Moaning. To my right. Raza. Making noise.
It seemed like the most natural thing: Raza and I on adjacent concrete slabs, in a Pakistani clinic similar to ones I had spent years photographing around the world. Now Raza and I were the patients.

Oh, Raza is moaning,
I thought.
That’s good. He is alive.
I still had no idea what had happened, but for some reason I understood that it was a good sign that Raza was making noise. Everything hurt as the head-scarfed nurse stood over me with the needle that still hadn’t been injected in me. What had I been doing that morning? Was I dreaming?

Teru appeared before me, at the foot of my slab. His faced looked as if he had just finished a boxing match, but he was standing on his own two feet. I wondered what Teru, from New York, was doing at the foot of my bed. The nurse stuck the needle in me. She never answered my question about whether it was clean. Who cared if I got HIV? I was in excruciating pain. The refugees. Mardan. We had been in Mardan all morning. It was starting to come back. There were so many people in the room, standing around, looking at Raza and me, splayed out on the tables. Refugees, I recalled. The
New York Times
. I had been photographing. The skid, the crash. It was real. Teru explained: “We are in Pakistan. We were photographing at the refugee camps with Raza, and we have been in a bad car accident.” A doctor started immobilizing my arm by bandaging it close to my body. My bones were broken. My back burned. My Pakistani dress,
a salwar kameez
, was melted onto the raw patch of flesh on my back where my skin had rubbed off in the friction of the accident. My hands were a raw mix of pus and blood. My ankles were sprained and swollen, and my ribs hurt. Where was my head scarf?

Teru and I were transferred to an ambulance, and Raza wasn’t with us anymore. The paramedic, Khalid, sat at my feet and leaned over me, saying his name over and over again, pleading with me to repeat his name so I wouldn’t pass out. “Khalid. My name is Khalid. Say my name.” He was relentless, and I was grateful, vaguely aware that he was trying to keep me alive. “Khalid. Say my name: Khalid.” I was horizontal, arm taped to my side, drugged up on morphine, when I realized that my camera bag wasn’t with us.

“Khalid, where is our car?” I said. “Where is my camera bag? Is the car far from here? We were on our way to Islamabad.”

“No,” Khalid said. “The car is close to here.”

I could see only within the confines of the ambulance but assumed we were traveling along the highway toward Islamabad.

“Khalid,” I repeated his name as instructed, “can we stop at the car to get my camera bag? I need my cameras, my phone.” I only half-expected him to agree.

He turned back toward the driver and said something in Urdu, then turned back to me: “OK. We can stop at the car.”

I felt the ambulance make a detour and eventually come to a stop. I was so curious what the remains of our demolished car looked like, but my arms were taped alongside my body to hold my broken bones in place, and I couldn’t muster the energy to raise myself up to look outside. The back doors to the ambulance flung open behind me, and a Pakistani policeman stepped in and announced that he had been tasked with guarding our car so that no one could steal our belongings. In an effort to prove that he hadn’t pilfered anything from our bags, the policeman then stood over me, lying flat on my back and wrapped with flimsy gauze, and held out my little change purse.

“Look,” the policeman declared triumphantly as I struggled to keep my eyes open. “All your money is here!” And he riffled through my little travel wallet, showing me that he had meticulously separated out all the different currencies, arranging them in order by country.

“Thank you. You can have the money,” I said. “Where are my cameras? Where is my camera bag? I wanted my cameras and my telephone.”

He immediately produced my black Domke camera bag, in perfect shape. And at that point someone—either Khalid or the ambulance driver—obviously felt some sort of urgency to return us to the original mission of rushing us to the hospital, and the doors behind me closed, the police officer who had safely guarded our things disappeared, and we continued on our way toward Islamabad.

I asked Khalid to fish my orange cell phone out of my bag. He handed it to me, and as I held the phone I wasn’t sure whom to call. One side of my brain told me to call Paul; the other side of my brain wondered who Paul was. My mind was cloudy.
Paul. Fiancé. Call. Paul.
I scrolled through the names in my contact list and found “Paul Baby” and wrote a text: “Baby I have been in a bad car accident. But I am ok. Please call my parents and let them know I am ok.” I then dialed my friend Ivan, who had started working with CNN and was in Pakistan at the time. Ivan answered the phone, and I vaguely remember asking him to call my friend Kathy Gannon, who was still living in Pakistan from the days when she helped me secure my first Taliban visa, to find out what hospital we should go to as we made our way back to Islamabad. Somewhere in the reserves of my memory, I was able to recall that Kathy knew the country well. My eyes started closing again when my phone rang. It was Paul. “Baby, I am OK. Please call Kathy Gannon and find out what the best hospital is in Islamabad. And can you call my sister Lauren and tell her I am alive?” Lauren was my oldest sister, to whom I often turned during a crisis. In childhood she had been my protector, and she was solid and nurturing during any crisis—truly maternal. I must have sensed that Lauren would be the right person, rather than my mother, to handle the news and to disseminate it to the rest of the family without drama. I then called Dex, explaining that we had been in a car accident and asking him to meet me at the hospital. And then I passed out again.

The next time I woke up I was being wheeled down a hospital corridor on a stretcher, watching the lights on the ceiling and the upper halves of bodies scurry past me. The medics were rambling on in Urdu when I heard “ . . . driver expire . . . ,” and I knew they were talking about Raza. My heart broke.

“Where is Raza?” I pleaded—to no response. “Where is my driver, Raza?”

Silence.

They wheeled me to the emergency room at the Shifa International Hospital, where a sea of familiar faces met our arrival: Ivan, Dex, Pamela Constable from the
Washington Post
, Kathy Gannon. I couldn’t move and was flying on morphine. Ivan had brought along a CNN security adviser who doubled as a medic to look me over with a series of quick tests to ensure that I didn’t have brain damage. He put a flashlight to my eyes and asked me to follow it. He was already one step ahead of the doctors at Shifa.

I noticed Dex, in crisis mode, scurrying around the emergency room with a clipboard of papers to register me and Teru at the hospital.

“Dex, where is Raza?” I asked, knowing he would be honest with me.

“He is dead, man. Raza is dead.”

The words sank in—
driver expire
—and I started to cry.

I felt that Raza’s death was my fault. We weren’t in a dangerous place or driving at some ungodly hour of the night. We weren’t being chased by Taliban or insurgents or running on no sleep. It was one of the few times in my career when my driver and I were actually operating in a safe environment, on a full night’s sleep, caffeine and food in our stomachs, driving along a perfectly paved road. But I still felt guilty.

When, a few hours later, his sons came to collect Raza’s belongings, and visited the hospital room where Teru and I were being treated temporarily, I started crying uncontrollably. “I am sorry. I am so sorry.” Raza had been the breadwinner for his wife and eight children.

Kathy came to my room before leaving that night. She stood at the foot of my bed and offered some advice to Dexter: “Do not leave her alone for one minute in this hospital. Monitor everything they give her. They will come at all hours of the night to administer tests, and someone must be with her.” And then she explained that she had asked her private doctor in Islamabad—a trusted doctor who treated the foreign diplomatic, aid, and journalist communities—to pass by and check on me daily.

For three days Paul struggled to get a visa to Pakistan. Under normal circumstances, that could take weeks for a journalist. To make matters worse, the accident happened on a Friday afternoon. He somehow persuaded the ambassador to open the consulate over the weekend to issue him a visa. In the interim Dexter and Ivan rotated shifts in my room. The Pakistani staff was thoroughly confused by their presence—women in Pakistan didn’t usually have men who weren’t husbands or family members in their room—so I told everyone that Dexter and Ivan were my brothers.

There were other problems. The first night, a handful of male nurses arrived at my bedside at about one in the morning, ready to take me for an MRI or a CT scan. In lieu of a rolling stretcher they grabbed the edges of the sheet from my hospital bed and picked me up in the sheet, jamming together the shattered bones of my collarbone and chafing the open wounds on my back where I had lost layers of skin. I screamed bloody murder while Dex yelled at them to be careful, as they shifted me from the sheet to a rolling stretcher. They ushered me down the hall onto an elevator and down to a basement room, where I was placed on a table at the entrance to a monstrous, tunnel-like machine. I drifted in and out of consciousness as I waited for the mysterious scan to begin. Nothing. What seemed like hours passed, with no progress, when I turned to Dex to ask what was happening. He turned to the male nurses and said, “Dudes, what is taking so long?”

The men stood over me awkwardly, and one cocked his head as he offered up: “Madam has metal.”

Dex was confused. He turned to me: “Dude, do you have metal on you?”

I still had my underwire bra on. No one had dared to remove my clothes since I had arrived at the hospital. My rust-colored
salwar kameez
was still stuck to the open wounds on my back, and my bra was still fastened around my chest.

“Dex, I have a bra on.”

“Well, take it off.”

“I can’t take it off. I can’t move my arms. You take it off.”

The Pakistani nurses were completely riveted.

“I can’t take your bra off. Paul will kill me.”

“Dex. You are fifty years old. You have seen tits before. Take my bra off!”

The poor nurses were confused again.

“It’s a simple bra with a front clasp,” I explained to Dex.

He nodded, and I passed out again.

 • • • 

T
HE SCANS FROM
S
HIFA
Hospital revealed no internal bleeding and no damage to my head. I had a smashed collarbone; loss of skin on my back, arms, and hands; two sprained ankles and possibly sprained ribs. I felt as if I had been thrown into a washing machine on the spin cycle. Every three hours a nurse would come into my room and administer morphine directly into my veins. With each injection my body felt as if it were sinking into a warm bath and then rising up to float through the room, weightless and painless.

In a rare window of lucidity, I started looking through my e-mails and asked Dex to bring in my computer so I could download and look through my pictures from the refugee camps. I wanted to file a selection of images from my hospital bed and get them published in the paper, as if somehow this horrific day would have been justified by our work. Or maybe I was so accustomed to filing at the end of a long, exhausting day on a breaking-news story; I had once filed under fire in Fallujah from beneath the protection of a Humvee. The instinct to file the images from the camps before they got outdated was automatic.

Paul arrived in my hospital room on a Monday morning, clipboard in hand, in the midst of one of my doped-up hazes. I remember seeing him and his concerned but reassuring face and knowing everything would be OK. And I knew the nurses would be relieved to finally see my fiancé by my bedside to replace my questionable “brothers.”