Unaccustomed Earth (40 page)

One day after lunch, feeling energetic, she walked all the way to Piazza del Popolo, and then over to the Villa Giulia for another visit. In the museum she was moved once again by the ancient cups and spoons, still intact, that had once touched people’s lips; the fibulae that had fastened their clothes, the thin wands with which they had applied perfume to their skin. But this time, looking at the giant sarcophagus of the bride and groom enclosed in a box of glass, she found herself in tears. She couldn’t help but think of Navin. Like the young smiling couple sitting affectionately on top of a shared casket, there was something dead about the marriage she was about to enter into. And though she knew it had every chance, over the years, of coming to life, on her way home, in the yellow light of evening, she was conscious only of its deadness. She shopped for her dinner in an
alimentari
on Via dei Giubbonari, and now she carried a bag containing lettuce, a box of spaghetti, and mushrooms and cream to turn into a sauce. She walked through the studded doorway of Giovanna’s building, past a window like a ticket booth where one of two porters greeted her each day as she left and returned. In the courtyard a stone lion continually poured water from his mouth. And then up the stone steps, unlit, unyielding beneath her tired feet, three generous flights that felt like ten.

In the long hallway of Giovanna’s apartment she saw the answering machine blinking. She played back the tape. It was not Navin’s voice but a friend of Giovanna’s. Normally these friends left messages in Italian that Giovanna retrieved from Berlin. But this message, in English, was for Hema. It was a person named Edo, a name she recognized from Giovanna’s list of people to call. For weeks, Edo said in his message, he had been expecting Hema to get in touch. Was everything all right? He sounded kind, and genuinely distressed enough for Hema to return the call. She assured Edo that all was well, and because she had no other excuse, she accepted his invitation to have lunch with him and his wife the following Sunday.

Edo’s wife, Paola, was a photo editor at
L’Espresso,
but Kaushik had met her in Netanya, a resort town on the Israeli coast, where they’d both gone to cover the bombing of a hotel banquet hall, the victims about to begin their Passover meal. It was only rarely that he worked in Italy, the odd photo essay about Senegalese immigrants in Brescia, or shots of the nineteen caskets containing the soldiers in Iraq being carried past the Colosseum. For most of the past five years, Rome had simply been a place from which to get to where he needed to go, and if he looked back at his pocket calendars, each with their three hundred and sixty-five sky-blue pages, and counted the days, he could have confirmed that most of them had been spent taking pictures in Gaza and the West Bank.

His life as a photojournalist had begun nearly twenty years ago. He was wandering through Latin America in 1987, living off the money his father gave him after he graduated from college. He’d gone with his friend Douglas, and they began in Tijuana, hoping to end up in Patagonia. They spent a few months in Mexico, working their way south, through Guatemala and then into El Salvador. And it was there that Douglas decided he’d had enough of Central America, enough of being harassed for looking so obviously American, and bought a ticket to Madrid. Like the Mexicans and Guatemalans, the Salvadorans were never sure what to make of Kaushik, not the soldiers who patrolled the streets with guns nearly as big as their bodies, not the children who posed eagerly for pictures when they saw him with his camera. He began to explore the country alone, a country that was smaller, he’d read in his guidebook, than Massachusetts. He took pictures of the volcano that loomed west of the capital, buildings pocked by bullets and cracked in half by the earthquake earlier that year.

He’d never been in a place so obviously at war with itself. He’d understood, in Guatemala, that the guerrillas were active, gathered from other backpackers that there were parts of the country to avoid. An overnight bus he and Douglas took to Tikal was stopped, and they and the rest of the passengers were ordered to step out and show their passports, flashlights aimed at their faces by a group of drunken checkpoint guards. One of the guards asked to see Douglas’s wallet, took the cash, and tossed the wallet back in Douglas’s face. In Guatemala, that had been the worst of it. But in El Salvador things were more violent, more gruesome, the tourists more scarce. In Santa Ana, Kaushik befriended a Dutch journalist named Espen and began to travel around, absorbing the history of the conflict, the stories Espen told him of the death squads, decapitated bodies strewn on highways, teenagers hanging from trees with fingernails missing and thumbs tied behind their backs. With Espen he watched air force planes dropping bombs at night on FMLN territory, went to visit a refugee camp across the Honduran border. He absorbed the fear of the place and of its people, grew used to the sound of machine-gun fire, accepted as everyone did the fact that he could at any moment, anywhere, crossing a road or asleep at night, be killed. But he’d never felt afraid, back then, for himself.

While sitting with Espen one afternoon, eating lunch in a village outside Morazán, the table began to shake, dark stew spilling from bowls. By then he’d grown used to occasional tremors, the earth’s violence yielding a moment’s pause. They picked up their spoons, continued eating, but then people began exclaiming, running past them through the small square. He and Espen leapt up, following the crowd, thinking perhaps a building had fallen, but the commotion had nothing to do with the tremors. They turned a corner to see a young man lying on the street. He’d been shot in the head, blood pouring like a slowly widening river away from his skull, but not a speck of blood, or even dirt, Kaushik still remembered, staining his tan shirt and trousers. He was curled on the pavement, eyes closed as if napping, the faintest sound escaping from his throat, a cheap gold watch telling the time on his wrist.

A group of people gathered around the body, calling for a doctor, while a young woman, a wife or a girlfriend in a pink sleeveless blouse, sat on the ground weeping with her fist in her mouth. Kaushik’s camera was around his neck as usual, and Espen told him to take a picture. He did not have a long lens with him, had to get in close, expecting at each step for someone in the group to obstruct him, curse at him, shoo him away. But no one paid attention, and so he crept forward and lifted the camera to his face. When he thought back to that afternoon, he remembered that his hands were shaking but that otherwise he felt untouched by the situation, unmoved once he was behind the camera, shooting to the end of the roll. When he was finished, the calls for a doctor had stopped; the man was dead.

Kaushik was the only person to document what had happened. And though he had not saved the man’s life he’d felt useful, aware that he had done something to mitigate the crime. Still, he never believed that the pictures would be published until Espen sent them to the right people. A week later, one ran in a Catholic newspaper published out of Amsterdam. He received a small check, and then, when the photo was picked up by a European newsmagazine, a larger one. And so he began taking pictures for a living. At first he simply woke up and followed the news, sticking close to Espen, staying in El Salvador through the elections, the transportation strike, the killing of the six Jesuit priests and their housekeepers. He photographed bodies with faces smashed and throats slit and penises hacked from between their legs, handing the images over to a human rights agency so that relatives could attempt to identify the disappeared. Thanks to a connection of Espen’s he was hired as a stringer for AP, and so he remained in Latin America, first in Mexico, then Buenos Aires, working for wire services and English-language papers. When he was thirty he was hired by
The New York Times,
and they sent him to Africa and then to the Middle East. He could no longer remember all the corpses he’d photographed, their faces bloated, their mouths stuffed with dirt, their vacant eyes reflecting passing clouds over their heads.

The demands of the job allowed him permanently to avoid the United States. Occasional trips to New York to meet with an editor, to pick up equipment—this was the extent of his time in America, and there were trips when he’d not bothered to tell his father he was in the country, when he’d avoided the miserable day trip to Massachusetts to see his father’s new life, though by now that life had surpassed, in years, the old. His father was in his seventies now, living off a generous pension and devoting most of his time to golf. From sporadic e-mails Kaushik learned that Rupa, the older of the girls, had married an American named Peter and taught art to elementary school students in Colorado. He had received an invitation to the wedding, but thanks to his work, his excuse for so many things, he had not gone. The little one, Piu, was in medical school at Tufts. And yet, also thanks to his work, Kaushik continued to wash up on his father’s doorstep, in the form of his photo credit in one of the newsmagazines his father read, announcing that he was alive, indicating where he’d been and what he’d seen.

He kept a place in Trastevere, a tiny apartment off Piazza di San Cosimato with a generous terrace where, between assignments, he recovered. A woman had brought Kaushik to Italy. Until Franca he had preferred Latin America to Europe, and even now the Spanish he had learned all those years ago got in the way of his serviceable Italian. Franca had convinced him to follow her back to Milan. She came from a family of minor nobility, her heart-shaped face and deep-set gray eyes speaking for a refinement she had not been able to hide when he first met her working for a relief agency in Cameroon. For years he had drifted across the globe without making meaningful ties, and suddenly he was sharing an apartment with Franca, driving out to Bergamo on Sundays to eat polenta and roasted rabbit at her nonna’s home, aware that her grandmother, who had spent years hand-stitching and embroidering a trousseau of nightgowns and bedjackets for Franca, approved of him. It had ended bitterly; though at the time he could never come up with a reason not to, he could not bring himself to propose. She had not taken hold of him; he could see now that that was the problem. And so he left the tears and fury in Milan and took the train down to Rome. At first he thought he’d stay a week, to see a little bit of the city, then move back to Buenos Aires. But the Second Intifada drew him back to the Middle East, and he stayed on in Europe, never telling Franca that he was living in her country, never once running into her.

He remembered Rome, of course, from the only other time he’d gone there, on the way back from Bombay to Massachusetts with his parents. His mother was dying, but at the time, apart from her thinness, there had been no signs. She had just turned forty, Kaushik’s age on his next birthday. He remembered the look of the hotel where they stayed, the marble steps they would ascend to go to the breakfast room. The strong shaft of light that poured through the dome of the Pantheon, and the glances of admiration the waiters could not conceal as his mother perused a menu. He remembered walking along the Janiculum and seeing clusters of swallows like giant thumbprints swiping the sky. And he had returned like a pilgrim to those places, recalled that the hotel was close to the Spanish Steps and managed to find it somehow.

Last year his father and Chitra had visited him in Rome, spending four days on their way to Calcutta. He had obliged, reserving a room for them at the Hotel d’Inghilterra and taking them everywhere. He stood in line with them to see the Colosseum and walked with them through the Forum. He took pictures of their stay, handing his father the rolls of film before they left as if it had been any other job. He ordered Chitra tea with milk in every restaurant, every café, because she did not like the taste of Italian coffee. But they had left no dent on the place, and he never thought of their presence on the streets of Rome as he continued to think, now and again, of his mother’s.

It was in the course of those days with his father and Chitra that a faint gray speck, smaller than the head of a pin, began floating across his left eye. He first noticed it the afternoon they went to Testaccio, his father wanting to visit Keats’s grave. In the lush grounds of the Protestant Cemetery, Kaushik had thought that a gnat was circling his head, and he kept swatting at it, putting out his fingers trying to flick it away. But the speck continued to accompany him wherever he went, quietly tormenting him, and he realized it was within him, that it was not possible to remove it or make it stop. An optometrist explained that it was caused by vitreous gel clumping and pulling away from the wall of his eye, that it was a harmless symptom of getting older. He was told he would grow used to it, and he had, more or less, not bothered these days unless he were in a bright room with white walls, or outside without his sunglasses. It did not affect his driving, or his picture-taking. And yet it felt like an invasion of the part of his body, the physical sense that was most precious: something that betrayed him and also refused to abandon him.

On Sunday he set out in his Fiat for Edo and Paola’s, in a suburb south of the city. The thought of leaving the city, the streets he now navigated with ease, made him melancholy. For he was leaving; in the new year he would be gone. A position as a photo editor for an international newsmagazine had opened up in Hong Kong, and he had accepted. Apart from a few visits to Tokyo, he knew little of East Asia. It would be the first time in his life that a job would mean waking up and going to the same place each day, the first time he would have an office, a desk, an assistant to schedule his appointments and take his calls. The first time he would not wake up unprepared, until he was chasing after it, for what the day would bring. In that sense he would taste a version of the professional life his father had maintained for decades. He imagined he would hate it. Paola told him he was making a mistake, warning him that it was death to the photographer, that since becoming an editor she hadn’t taken a decent picture. The money would be better, but that wasn’t what had attracted Kaushik. It was his need for a different life that was taking him to Asia. The promise, for the next few years at least, that he would be still.