The Canal House Read online

  The Canal House

  Mark Lee

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

  2003

  F O R M Y M O T H E R

  With thanks to: Wendy Belcher, Robert Cook, Jenny Darling, Liam Kelly, Therese Kosterman, Pat Lau, Joan Marble, Don Miller, Kathy Pories, and especially Joe Regal.

  Contents

  Nicky

  1 Lovers’ Walk

  2 The Italian Suit

  3 The Day and Night Bar

  Julia

  4 Kosana Refugee Camp

  Nicky

  5 The Mother Tree

  6 The Convent

  7 Boma Mission

  8 At Bracciano

  9 Westgate Castle

  10 The Hunt

  11 The Party

  12 The London Train

  Julia

  13 The Canal House

  Nicky

  14 The Lamb

  15 Darwin

  16 Into Timor

  Julia

  17 Dili

  Nicky

  18 Into Liquica

  19 Santa Cruz

  20 Light

  Nicky

  1 LOVERS’ WALK

  I once read the diary of an Englishman who was trapped at the South Pole in 1914. After their ship was frozen into the ice, he and his companions survived for two years on seal blubber and boiled penguins. On several occasions they almost starved to death. The men became obsessed with food and considered themselves experts on its preparation and consumption. Huddled in their canvas tents, they spent hours describing favorite meals and imaginary banquets. They debated the right way to cook trout, and two men had a fistfight over the proper use of clotted cream.

  I offer these facts as an oblique defense for my own obsession. Like those lost explorers, I’m a starving man. For most of my life I’ve never been in love, but I think about it often and consider myself an expert on its various complexities. I watch for lovers on the street and in restaurants. I’ve become a collector of jealous glances and lingering kisses, capturing the moments of others and storing them in my memory.

  I was watching one afternoon at a dusty refugee camp in northern Uganda when Daniel McFarland and Julia Cadell first spoke to each other. I saw nothing in that encounter, but they met in England a few months later and fell in love. This time the collector was collected. Even now I’m trying to understand the faith and desire, the large ambitions and small compromises, that brought the three of us to our final moment together.

  A FEW YEARS AGO, a powerful earthquake hit southern Turkey. I was a photographer on contract to Newsweek, so the magazine flew me to Istanbul and I hired a taxi driver to take me south to the city of Adana. When we finally got there, I discovered that only a few hundred people were dead. The earthquake was a disaster for the people who lived there, but as far as Newsweek was concerned it wasn’t a major story.

  Normally I would have taken a few hundred shots and returned to London, but this time I was forced to stay. My photo editor, Carter Howard, said that a canine search-and-rescue team from Missouri was being flown to Adana by the U.S. Air Force. He wanted pictures of a golden retriever named Cliff finding people lost in the wreckage.

  While waiting for the dog, I wandered around the collapsed buildings and took photographs. I prefer 35mm film to digital, but there was no easy way to develop negatives or send them out. The digital camera made it easy. I’d shoot a disc, download everything onto my laptop, then hook up to my satellite phone and send the images to London.

  I was sleeping at the home of an Armenian tea trader. Every morning I would roll up my sleeping bag, eat a few candy bars, and go look for rescue crews. Almost everyone in Adana was wearing surgical masks to filter out the dust and germs. Street vendors sold perfume to block the smell of uncollected garbage and I sprinkled a French product called Illusion on my mask. Sniffing the scent of roses, I wandered past piles of shattered concrete and twisted rebar, the collapsed remains of factories, apartment buildings, and mosques. The streets of Adana were clogged with bulldozers and trucks. Bodies were stuffed into plastic bags and laid out in rows in the middle of the soccer stadium. By noon my clothes and skin were covered with white dust and there was a salty, foul taste in my mouth.

  Cynicism is an occupational necessity in my profession; it’s like the chloroquine you swallow in a malaria zone. You can still get the disease, of course, but the bitter little pills hide your symptoms. The trick is to take your photographs and get out before the medicine loses its effectiveness.

  Unfortunately, I stayed too long in Adana and the cynicism wasn’t working. The destruction of the city and the grief of its survivors clung to me like the dust from the shattered buildings. The grief became a physical sensation, a hollowness in my stomach and a weakness in my bones. I woke up wondering why this disaster had happened and what purpose it served in some divine scheme. My weakness, my confusion, stayed with me as I wandered around and met the earthquake victims. Most of them carried objects saved from the wreckage: a photo album, a vacuum cleaner, two green parakeets in a little brass cage. The sky above us was clear and blue, but the air was dusty and it distorted the light.

  I began to worry about Cliff, the golden retriever. Covering the floods in southern China I learned that rescue dogs got depressed when they found nothing but dead bodies. Their handlers would have to bury a few living people under a pile of leaves and branches so that the dogs would feel encouraged enough to keep working. That’s what I needed—a fake rescue to help my morale—but it wasn’t going to happen.

  The soldiers stopped finding survivors after the third day, but they kept on searching. Late in the afternoon on the fifth day I found a rescue crew pulling away chunks of concrete at a partially destroyed medical clinic near the river. A soldier screamed at me in Turkish, then English: “Go back! Go back! Many dangerous here!” And I could see that part of the second floor was about to collapse.

  I turned away from the wreckage, and N. Barbieri, the Italian photographer who works for Reuters, slipped past me and scrabbled over the chunks of concrete. Nina started out using only her first initial so that the Italian newspaper editors would think she was a man. Other photographers called her the Rat, because she was small, fearless, and had close-cropped black hair. Since there aren’t a lot of photographers covering international news, we all know each other. We drink together and travel together, but that doesn’t mean we’re friends.

  The Rat stopped for a moment, then glanced back and asked, “You going in there, Nicky?”

  “Forget it.” The danger of the situation didn’t bother me; I had simply had enough of Adana. I took a quick shot of the building’s shattered facade, then trudged back home to my bag of chocolate bars.

  Five minutes after I left, N. Barbieri took a great photograph, a finalist for Picture of the Year. The Rat was standing on the edge of the second floor, shooting downward, when they discovered a dead mother, embraced by her unconscious but still living, four-year-old son. Both are covered with a white dust. The Turkish soldiers stand back, amazed, like the shepherds who have just found the babe in the manger.

  I had made a mistake, but I didn’t know it yet. A day later I gave up on the dog and bribed my way onto an army truck going north to Istanbul. I checked into the Sheraton and spent two days taking baths and ordering room service. By the time I returned to London, the latest edition of Newsweek was being sold at Heathrow. The earthquake mother and child were on the cover and the photo credit was N. BARBIERI/REUTERS.

  Standing in front of the airport magazine rack, I felt tired and ashamed. I hadn’t missed the shot because of equipment problems or bad luck. That afternoon in Adana I had lost my photographer’s faith: the certainty that if you go forward, always go forward, the picture will come to y
ou.

  I rode the underground into the city and checked into the Ruskin, a two-star hotel across from the British Museum. Alex, the Greek night clerk, smiled when he saw me and we had the usual exchange.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Bettencourt. Where have you been?”

  “Up, down, and all around.”

  “Take lots of pictures?”

  “Truckloads of them.”

  “Newsweek wants to talk to you.” Alex handed me a piece of fax paper and I unfolded it inside the tiny elevator that groaned to the second floor. Carter Howard had sent me a short but ominous message: Spiked you. Ran Reuters. Call for appointment.

  I don’t normally go to expensive restaurants unless someone else is paying, but I had gotten into the habit of treating myself to one good dinner when I returned from an assignment. That night I took the underground to Touraine, a French restaurant in Chelsea. Touraine is at the end of a dark street and has a small sign over the entrance. When you reach the door, you think that no one could possibly be there; then you step inside and find that the place is filled with customers. After David, the owner, led me to my table, I ordered a bottle of Vosne-Romanée wine and some grilled mushrooms. I worked my way through a bowl of fish soup, sautéed chicken with braised leeks, veal à l’ardennaise, an herb salad, and pears poached in red wine. A meal like that can overwhelm your doubts and make you feel satisfied with the world, but images from Adana still lingered in my mind. I drank three glasses of cognac, paid the outrageous bill, and took a taxi back to my hotel.

  I GREW UP IN MODESTO, an agricultural city in California’s San Joaquin Valley. A huge sign arches over the main street downtown and it proclaims four words: WATER, WEALTH, CONTENTMENT, HEALTH. Even when I was a child, I knew that I was different from my parents and their friends. I wanted to live in a place where people didn’t talk about property taxes and gas mileage.

  I won a Nikon camera playing poker during my sophomore year at college, began to take photographs of the football games, and quickly discovered one of the key pleasures of being a photographer: It gives you an easy excuse to slide into other people’s lives. You’re there, part of the action, and yet the camera gives you a busy shield to insulate yourself from what you’re seeing in your viewfinder.

  When I first started out, I didn’t know how to take a good picture, but I lacked three qualities that can inhibit a young photographer: dignity, shame, and fear. After graduating from college I moved down to Los Angeles, bought a police scanner from Radio Shack, and drove around the city looking for car accidents and other disasters. I would shoot two or three rolls of film, then drop them off at Associated Press and the local newspapers.

  Eventually the Los Angeles Times printed my photo of a Latina mother weeping as her son was zipped into a body bag. At the edge of the photo they printed my name: NICKY BETTENCOURT—FOR THE TIMES. I didn’t feel proud at that moment, but more real, more substantial. I suddenly realized why fifteen-year-old kids climbed over barbed-wired fences and shimmied up concrete supports to spray paint their tags on freeway overpasses.

  I began working for the major wire services and had a weekly feature called “Out of the Frame” in a local alternative newspaper. I would search out the bloodiest possible car accident, then photograph what was happening a few feet away from the paramedics—a little boy eating a snow cone or a cop picking his nose. The managing editor said it was “postmodern ironic” and my name was put on the masthead.

  When the Bosnian civil war broke out, I sold my car, got some press credentials from the San Francisco Examiner, and flew to Sarajevo. I had never traveled in a foreign country, didn’t know any language other than English, and had never covered a war. Three days after my arrival in Bosnia, I found myself huddled in a foxhole near the Serbian lines, sharing a bottle of wine with Dieter Getz, the Austrian photographer. Aside from his photos, Getz was famous for his long blond ponytail and the pull-on-a-condom T-shirts he bought in Thailand.

  “This job is very simple,” Dieter told me. “When there’s gunfire, the journalists, the soldiers, and the aid workers all fall to the ground.”

  “Okay.”

  “Yes. Okay. Okay.” He mocked my American accent. “But when there’s gunfire, we shooters stand up to take the picture. That’s the difference, Nicky. That’s who we are.”

  • • •

  I WAITED UNTIL the next morning, made an appointment to see Carter at three o’clock, then took the elevator down to the dining room in the basement. The Ruskin is a dump, but it’s one of the few hotels in Bloomsbury that doesn’t have American college students staying there during the summer. There’s something depressing about eating an English breakfast with a group of nineteen-year-olds from some Midwestern university.

  It was a warm August day so I walked over to the Newsweek offices on Park Street, a few blocks east of the American embassy. I went upstairs to the third floor where Ann Weinstein, the young assistant photo editor, was scanning negatives into her computer.

  Ann glanced at Carter’s private office. The door was closed. “We used Reuters for the quake.”

  “Yeah. I know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Don’t lie and say you weren’t at that building.”

  “Maybe I wasn’t.”

  “Carter adjusted your color levels on his computer when I was in Cornwall for the weekend. You took a photo of a Turkish soldier wearing a red emergency vest. The same man is in Barbieri’s picture.”

  “I wouldn’t have lied,” I told her. But maybe I lied when I said that.

  “Carter!” she shouted. “Nicky’s here!”

  Carter Howard was in his fifties, an elegant man with thinning hair who’d lived in London for the last eight years. He used to be a photographer, but he made the transition to editor when he fell in love with a young British artist named Jonathan Campbell. I’d never been invited to their row house in Kensington, but I’d heard about their herb garden and the immense studio with a skylight.

  Whenever I dropped by the office, Carter liked to plug in his kettle and make tea. That afternoon he just stood there wearing his custom-made shirt and pleated trousers. Carter had picked up a slight British accent from living in London and he called me Nick-o-loss, dragging out the last syllable.

  “Welcome back, Nicholas. I haven’t been out of my office the entire day. What do you say we take a walk through the park?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Carter pulled on his suit coat and I followed him downstairs. As we wandered up Alford Street, Carter described his attempt to grow antique English roses in a shady part of his garden. We took the pedestrian passageway under Park Lane to Hyde Park and stopped in front of a fountain. At the center of the fountain was an elaborate sculpture of a naked couple either dancing or falling through space while a bunch of cherubs surrounded them. Carter turned west and led me down a gravel pathway beneath some oak trees. The fountain was dedicated to lovers and the pathway was called Lovers’ Walk.

  A little boy and girl were running across the park grass, trying to get a dragon kite up into the air. It could have been a good photograph, but I turned away from the shot and looked down at Carter’s polished wing tips. “Nice shoes,” I told him. “You always wear nice shoes.”

  “New York isn’t happy with you, Nicholas.”

  “New York can go to hell. They weren’t walking around Typhoid City, waiting for a goddamn golden retriever.”

  “That’s your job.”

  “I sent out over four hundred shots—with captions. Some things didn’t go right and Barbieri got a better picture. You’re a photographer. You know how it is.”

  “It’s not just the earthquake photos. They’ve been complaining about your stuff since you came back from Nigeria. These days every photographer with a sat phone and a digital camera can send us pictures five minutes after they press the button. You’re competing with every other shooter in the world.”

  “I know that, Carter. I’ve met them. They’re all twenty-six years
old with tattoos.”

  “News organizations don’t want full-time employees or even contract photographers. If you expect a paycheck from Newsweek, then you’re going to have to provide images that are consistently unique.”

  “I’ve risked my life for this goddamn magazine. You know that’s true.”

  “I’m on your side, Nicholas. There’s no reason to get angry. Maybe you’re just tired, burned out from the traveling. If you want, I can transfer your contract to the Washington Bureau. Life is a lot easier there, just one long photo op.”

  I imagined myself standing in a pack of photographers, taking shot after shot of the president in the Rose Garden. What every photographer wants is that unguarded moment when a person’s defenses are down and you can capture an image so intimate that it connects with anyone who sees it. But successful politicians have learned to conceal their emotions in public. Working in that world would be like photographing wax dummies.

  “No. I don’t want a job like that.”

  “All right. It’s your choice.” Carter stopped in the middle of Lovers’ Walk and looked around at the green fields of Hyde Park and the rush-hour traffic grumbling up Park Lane. “Do you know an American journalist named Daniel McFarland?”

  “Sure. He was the one covering the fighting in northern Iraq after the Gulf War, and then he worked in the Balkans. We were in Bosnia at the same time, but we never actually met. I used to see him drinking with a bunch of Polish photographers at the Café Metropole. Wasn’t Victor Zikowski killed working with McFarland?”

  Carter shrugged and resumed walking. “McFarland has a five-year contract with the Daily Telegraph, but he also does features for the Washington Post. John Scofield deals with him quite frequently.”

  The Post was owned by the same parent company as Newsweek and they shared offices on Park Street. Scofield played squash every Wednesday with Carter, and I could tell they had discussed my awkward career.