“Lucky girl. Have sex for me. But be ready to be back to work next Friday. The violence in Sierra Leone is escalating again. The peace talks are going to fall apart. I want you there before Christmas. ”
“You know me,” Nina said. “Ready to fly at a moment’s notice. ”
“I won’t call unless a new war breaks out. I promise,” Sylvie said. “Now go get laid while I try to remember what it’s like. ”
A few days later, Nina was in Namibia, in a rented Land Rover, with Danny at the wheel.
It was only seven in the morning and already the December sun was bright and warm. By one o’clock, the temperature would be somewhere around 115 degrees, and it could well be hotter. The road—if you could call it that—was really a river of thick reddish gray sand that sucked at the car’s tires and sent them careening one way and then the other. Nina held on to the door handle and sat up straight, trying to make her body work like a shock absorber, rolling with the motion.
She used her other hand to steady the camera that hung around her neck so that the strap didn’t bite into her flesh. A T-shirt was wrapped around the camera and lens—not a very professional way to battle dust, but in all her years in Africa, it had proven to be the best compromise between protection and use. Here, sometimes you had only an instant to grab your camera and take the shot. No time to fumble with straps and cases.
She stared out at the desolate, blistering landscape. As the hours passed, taking them farther and farther from any semblance of civilization and deeper into one of the last true wildernesses of southern Africa, she noticed more herds of starving animals standing by dry riverbeds. In this summer heat, they were dropping to their knees, dying where they stood as they waited for the rains to come. Bleaching bones lay everywhere.
“You sure you want to find the Himba?” Danny asked, flashing her a grin as they slammed sideways and almost found themselves stuck in the sand. The dirt on his face made his white teeth and blue eyes look startlingly bright. Dust powdered his collar-length black hair and shirt. “We haven’t had a week to ourselves in months. ”
The so-called road became passable again, and she brought up her camera, studying him through the viewfinder. Focusing on him, widening the shot just a little, she saw him as clearly as if he’d been a stranger: a handsome thirty-nine-year-old Irishman with pronounced cheekbones and a nose that had been broken more than once. Pub fights as a lad, he always said, and just now, when he was looking ahead, concentrating on the road, she could see the tiny frown lines around his mouth. He was worried that he’d followed bad advice on the wrong road, though he’d never say such a thing. He was a war correspondent and used to being “in the shit,” as he liked to say, used to following a story to hell and back. Even if it wasn’t his story.
She took the shot.
He flashed her a smile and she took another. “Next time you want to photograph women, I suggest waitresses at a poolside bar. ”
She laughed and put the camera in her lap again, covering the lens with its cap. “I owe you one. ”
“Indeed you do, love, and I’ll be collecting, you c’n be sure. ”
Nina leaned back into the torn, uncomfortable seat and tried not to close her eyes, but she was exhausted. After two weeks tracking poachers through the jungle and four weeks before that in Angola watching people kill each other, she was tired to the bone.
And still, she loved it. There was nowhere in the world she’d rather be and nothing she’d rather be doing. Finding “the shot” was an adrenaline-fueled fun ride, and one she never tired of, no matter what sacrifices she had to make along the way. She’d known that sixteen years ago, when at twenty-one, with a journalism degree under her belt and a used camera in her backpack, she’d gone in search of her destiny.
For a while she’d taken any job that required a photographer, but in 1985 she’d gotten her big break. At Live Aid, the concert for famine relief, she’d met Sylvie Porter, then a newbie editor at Time, and Sylvie introduced Nina to a different world. The next thing Nina knew, she was on her way to Ethiopia. What she saw there changed everything.
Almost immediately her pictures stopped being only images and began to tell stories. In 1989, when Typhoon Gay smashed into Thailand, leaving more than one hundred thousand people homeless, it was Nina’s photograph of a single woman, up to her chest in dirty water, carrying her crying baby above her head, that graced the cover of Time magazine. Two years ago, she’d won the Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of the famine in Sudan.
Not that it came easily, this career of hers.
Like the Himba tribe of this region, she’d had to become a nomad. Soft mattresses and clean sheets and running water were luxuries she’d learned to live without.
“Look. There,” Danny said, pointing.
At first all she saw was an orange and red sky, full of dust. The world felt scorched and smelled of smoke. Gradually, the silhouettes on the ridge materialized into thin people, standing tall, gazing down at the dirty Land Rover and its even dirtier occupants.
“That them?” he asked. “Must be. ”
Nodding, he closed the last distance between them and the ridge, and at the bend in a dry riverbed he parked the vehicle and got out.
The Himba tribe stood back, watching.
Danny walked slowly forward, knowing the chief would present himself. Nina followed his lead.
At the elder’s hut, they paused. The sacred fire burned in front of it, sending a stream of smoke into the now-purple sky. They both bent down, moved carefully, making sure not to pass in front of the fire. That would be seen as disrespectful.
The chief approached them and, in halting Swahili, Nina sought permission to take pictures, while Danny showed the tribe the fifteen gallons of water he had brought as a gift. For a people that walked miles for a handful of water, it was an overwhelming gift, and suddenly Nina and Danny were welcomed like old friends. Children surged at them, surrounded Nina in a giggling, jumping pack. The Himbas swept her and Danny into the village, where they were fed a traditional meal of maize porridge and sour milk and were entertained by the tribe. Later, when the night was blue with moonlight, they were led to a rounded mud hut, called a rondoval, where they lay together on a mat of woven grass and leaves. The air smelled sweet, of roasted corn and dry earth.
Nina rolled onto her side to face Danny. In the shadowy blue light, his face looked young, although, like her, he had old eyes. It was a hazard of the trade. They’d seen too many terrible things. But it was what had brought them together. What they had in common. The yearning to see everything, no matter how terrible, to know everything.
They’d met in an abandoned hut in the Congo, during the first war, both of them taking cover from the worst of the fighting; she to reload her camera, him to bandage a wound in his shoulder.
That looks bad, she’d said. Can I wrap it for you?