When I saw the photo, I was so shocked that for a few seconds I didn’t even realize it was me there; that I was the woman. I didn’t remember pulling back my hair. I certainly wasn’t unhappy in the café that day. Maris and the baby were coming to visit. The only memory I had was of being glad to sit down after shopping and then my annoyance at realizing the guy was still taking pictures. That’s all.
I flipped to the next one. Lainzer Tiergarten the day of the picnic with the Easterlings. I’m offering bread to Mickey Mouse, the boar. We seem to be smiling at each other. Love at first sight. Maris is standing nearby with the baby in her arms. Nicholas has his hands in the air and is laughing. If that first picture was Hell, this one was Heaven. Everyone, including the boar, is happy. I’d been shaken by the first picture, but this one exuded such happiness that, despite myself, I grinned.
As I said, there were five other shots: two on the Johann Strauss the night of the prom, one in front of the Opera, one walking my dog down by the river. The last was of me from behind as I crossed the street back to the café. An old man in a silly hat is watching me and pointing. He’s telling his wife something and they’re both laughing. That son of a bitch photographer took another picture of me five seconds after saying he’d stop! But it was such a funny picture that I giggled; if you didn’t know what was going on, you’d think the old man’s pointing out my ass to his wife. After I’d looked at them over and over, I dropped them into my lap and pulled the dog over to hug. Who was this guy? How long had he been following me around taking pictures? And what pictures! Each one was startling, special. I was suspicious, but intrigued as hell. It was perverse and impressive.
Maris came over later that day. After she put down the baby for his nap, I got out the pictures and showed them to her without saying where they came from. I wanted her first impression. You know how famous Maris is becoming for her model cities. I wanted to hear what an artist had to say before I took any further step.
They were in the original order. She spent the most time on the first, but stopped almost as long on the one of me walking the dog. When she asked if they were done by the same person and I said yes, she said it was hard to believe. One looked like part of the series of me in Vanity Fair by Herb Ritts, but the Opera one reminded her of a 1920s Bauhaus photograph, something by Moholy or Herbert Bayer. The corker, though, was the café shot; it was as good as any picture she’d ever seen. Who was the photographer? She wanted to know if he had a book out because she’d get hold of it.
I told her how I’d met the guy. She shook her head but didn’t stop looking at the pictures. I asked if she didn’t think the whole thing was bizarre and she said yes, but they were brilliant nevertheless. Maybe it was her own strange sensibilities, but she didn’t think the man who took them was strange. I rolled my eyes and said, hey, he followed me around for days, obviously, without my ever knowing it. He was James Bond and Peeping Tom rolled into one! Not to mention a good photographer. How long had he been there before I knew it?
She said if he ever came around again and bothered me, I should just tell him to go away. But she didn’t think he was going to do that. Then she said something that got me. “We’re afraid of everything these days, you know? Terror dominates pity.” I had no idea what she meant by that and asked her to be clearer. Shuffling through the batch, she held up the picture of me in the café. “This man doesn’t want to scare you. He doesn’t want anything from you. If anything, he wants to tell you something. He’s saying that you’re in trouble.”
My stomach clenched and I asked whether it was so obvious. She said, “Well, kind of.”
I have that small television in the kitchen which I usually turn on to CNN when I’m in there for any length of time. Once in a while I look up if something sounds interesting, but usually it’s only background noise in English.
Yugoslavia’s only a few hundred miles away from here, and since it exploded, Austrians have kept a close eye on what’s going on down there, for obvious reasons. Dubrovnik is the favorite target these days, and it’s obscene the way they’re destroying that beautiful town for no reason other than spite.
Two days after Maris’s visit, I was making lunch while listening to the latest report from the battle zone. Bombs exploded and people ran for shelter. There was the sound of machine gun fire and an ambulance raced by. An old woman loomed up in front of the camera, hands to her face.
A reporter’s voice came on, describing what was happening. I was chopping onions and trying to remember if I’d bought chives. The voice on TV said, “Blah blah blah Leland Zivic.” I knew in the back rooms of my brain that the name meant something, but I was too concerned about chopping and chives.
Another voice came on, this one smoother and sweeter than the other. I looked up only because someone laughed, which sounded strange in the middle of all that gunfire.
There he was! His name was written across the bottom of the screen with PHOTO JOURNALIST below it. I grabbed a marker and wrote it with indelible ink on the wood chopping block. I’d worry about scrubbing it away later.
The reporter said Zivic was famous for his photographs of trouble spots around the world. He’d been in Rumania when Ceausescu fell, Liberia when Doe was executed, Somalia at its raging worst. When asked what he thought about the Yugoslavian conflict, he said something like “Forty years of peace in this country. Then from one day to the next they’re going into maternity wards and shooting newborn children. Does anyone besides the politicians understand how that happened? The trouble with wars is that they all look alike to the people who aren’t involved. Only the skin color of the dead is different.”
The reporter said, “If that’s so, why do you keep risking your life to take these pictures?”
Zivic nodded as if the reporter had made a good point. “Because if I do my job well, people will see wars aren’t the same; they aren’t just body counts and anonymous casualties. Death should be shown in such a way that it will be remembered.”
I know one of the film correspondents for CNN. After a long time on the phone, I got through to her in Hollywood. Explaining what was up and where I’d just seen him, I asked her to trace down Leland Zivic for me. Good woman that she is, she didn’t ask why I was interested.
It turned out he had an apartment in London and was represented by an agency there. She gave me both of the addresses and phone numbers. I assumed if he was on television in Yugoslavia, it wasn’t likely he’d be answering his phone in London, so I called and left a message on his machine: “This is Arlen Ford. Please call me when you get a chance.”
I expected to hear from him soon but didn’t. At first I thought he hadn’t answered because he was still on assignment. In grisly moments it struck me that he might be dead. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, but his photographs sat on the table in the living room and naturally I looked at them a lot. His London numbers were stuck on a yellow slip above the telephone, and “Leland Zivic” was big and black in my handwriting on the chopping block. I’d give it a week or two before trying to wipe it off.