In Istanbul my mornings were languid. I slept as long as I could. I didn’t stress about morning light, shadows, alarm clocks, car bombs, or whether my driver would turn up on time. I made my own coffee. I listened to Billie Holiday and Nina Simone without worrying whether whoever I was sharing a room or a house with would mind the music.
Uxval and I made love in the afternoon but to a different rhythm. Uxval was the same, but I was more complicated. He was frolicking around in the Istanbul sunshine, and I was a caged animal, incredulous that life was proceeding as usual outside Iraq. I marveled at the women around me, Turkish and foreign, decked out in colorful clothes that revealed their bare arms, their legs, their cleavage.
Only a few days passed before I found pictures in a drawer of a blond woman with gold-rimmed sunglasses staring flirtatiously at the camera, bathed in soft sunlight. She was sitting on the red tram that rode up and down the street outside our apartment window. It was an intimate look I knew all too well.
“Who is this?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s Claudia,” he said dismissively. “She was in my Turkish class . . .” (I had assumed she was Turkish, but she was Mexican. Only Uxval could manage to find and conquer a Mexican woman in Turkey in three months.)
Turkish class that I paid for, I thought. And probably in my apartment, and in my bed, and rolling around in my sheets. All on my dime. Uxval had moved to Istanbul for us to be together, and we both knew that his options for earning a real living there would be limited at best. I had wanted to make sure things were taken care of while I was away, so I paid the rent, the bills, and left spending money for him each time I left for Iraq. In return, he was there when I came home. That was our deal, and apparently it had consequences.
I put the photo down and looked at him. I didn’t have the energy to go through it again. “She’s attractive,” I said. He knew that I knew. And he and I both knew I no longer cared. The arrangement worked for us. As I began to understand the new rhythm of my life in Baghdad and on the road as one of permanence, I accepted my relationship with Uxval for what it was. I loved him, and I didn’t want to come home from long stretches away to an empty apartment. Though I knew he was dating other women while I was off for months at a time, I accepted his philandering as one of the compromises of the work and lifestyle I had chosen. We left for a romantic weekend on the Turkish coast the next morning, and three weeks later I was back in Iraq on assignment with Elizabeth, happy to be back to the world I understood. In Iraq I didn’t have to worry about finding pictures of strange women in my drawers or wonder why no one cared that a war was going on.
? ? ?
I RETURNED TO FIND that the war had changed. As the Americans became more aggressive, the Iraqis retaliated with more improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The first time I witnessed an IED attack against Americans, I was in the car with my Iraqi driver “cruising,” a term coined by my colleague the photographer Jo?o Silva. Cruising meant driving around aimlessly in search of street photos when news was slow. That day I saw a Humvee in flames under a bridge and asked my driver to pull over.
“New York Times . . . photographer . . . I am American . . . journalist . . . ,” I yelled to the Americans from across the street. I didn’t attempt to take any photographs until they knew who I was. We had learned from the killing of a Reuters photographer on the balcony of the Palestine Hotel that a long lens could be mistaken for a rocket-propelled grenade.
I ran across the street toward the soldiers and said, “I am so sorry for your loss. Can I speak with the commanding officer? Who are you guys with?” I looked at the patch sewn onto his uniform and recognized the soldiers as part of the 82nd Airborne. I knew no one could authorize anything but the commanding officer, and I didn’t want to waste time. I flashed my press credential. I had finally acquired the proper U.S. military?issued press pass they required for access to any scene that involved the military. It was a simple press card with a photograph, issued by the Coalition Press Information Center, and ensured that the journalist had been screened by the Americans’ provisional government in Iraq.
The young man repeated the name of my organization with a sneer: “Oh, the New York Times.” They thought we were all lefties opposed to the war. The commanding officer arrived and authorized me to shoot. Three soldiers accompanied me as I ran back across the highway in order to photograph from a distance.