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Heavy smoke from the artillery fire and burning buildings has left only little windows of clear space to aim my camera through and snap pictures. My ears have long ago given up any attempt to hear anything over the pounding thud of the battle. I move through the streets half blind from the smoke and mostly deaf from the explosive guns looking for pictures to take. I want to bring Chechnya back to the world. I have fourteen roles of film already. Three more to go and then I can leave this dangerous place forever.
*****
I watch the fog swirl around obscuring everything but my curiosity. Where is she now? Maybe huddling in a door stoop somewhere damp from the fog or hiding in the bowels of the B.A.R.T. station down on Embarcadero Street.
From the balcony of my apartment over looking the bay, I have a clear view of the entire street as it slopes down towards the wharf. Once the fog has burned off in the afternoon heat everything below me is visible. Little shops, art galleries, and expensive restaurants line the street below attracting tourists and day shoppers from the airport and suburbs. All day long cars move slowly up the hill from the waterfront perusing. I look down on it all through a camera lens, an old German model nearly thirty years old. I don’t know what I hope to see.
The apartment is simple; nearly bare except for a small bathroom and a walk in closet I’ve converted into a darkroom. My things are scattered on the floor: rolls of film, some books, empty pizza boxes, half a bottle of Jack Daniels, clean and dirty clothes in overlapping piles, a worn suitcase, an ashtray filled with half smoked cigarettes. Materially I have very little, but Chechnya has given my mind many things to sift through, though I’d prefer to hide from much of what I remember. Ash and faces in the ash with dead blank eyes looking into nothing appear at random. I sleep very little, two or three hours a night if I’m lucky.
When I do sleep I often dream of the pictures I have taken of the Russian death squads moving through the cities with their guns and tanks burning down every thing in their path. Sometimes Yuri will come and sit by me on the shattered cement wall overlooking the still burning apartment buildings where he was killed trying to photograph a woman and her two children jumping from the eighth floor to escape the flames.
In the morning from my balcony I watch the homeless women walk along the street. The sidewalk is empty except for her and the rusty shopping cart she pushes along. I can hear the wheels squeaking as she makes her way up the street. Often the fog obscures her for a moment. Then she re-emerges somehow cleansed for a moment of the brutal grime accumulated from the streets. As the fog swirls off her, illusions of purity imbed themselves in my mind’s eye, an angel following the morning light, but reality returns quickly as she comes into full view.
I’ve been watching her for two weeks now make her way up the hill cautiously each morning. She always stops at the little gift shop with the beautiful porcelain dolls in the window. Through my camera I watch her face in profile noting what must have been at one time the calm slope of her cheek and the pleasant angle of her jaw line.
*****
I help a field surgeon remove the jawbone of a Chechnyan suicide bomber from the chest of a Russian Lieutenant who lays dying on the edge of Groznyy during the withdrawal. Yuri is beside me yelling something in Russian I cannot understand. My brain will not make the conversion from Russian to French. He is gesturing towards a building, apartments I think. All I see is the red geyser erupting from the man’s chest. Yellow and orange light like that of a campfire dance across the surgeon’s face.
*****
She wears layers of clothes of mixed colors and styles. A black shawl covers her head hiding all but a few long tufts of dirty blond hair that peek out from the corners like gnarled rat tails. Her eyes are hidden behind a cheap pair of children’s sunglasses, maybe to block out the glare when the sun begins to cut through the fog. I enjoy speculating, trying to learn what she is thinking and feeling. In this, I do not have to know the answer. I can watch and guess, making up her history and future as it suits me.
For her I give a wondrous existence, a spirit of the fog appearing in human form to help the suffering, a Florence Nightingale of the street people. I try to keep her in this role as long as I can. My imagination so much more comforting than memory.
At night, I bathe in the blood of the pictures I have taken. The small closet seems too cramped to hold all of the moments of time I have captured on film; a small dingy walk in closet that smells like Pinesol and acetone. Most nights I get very little from the photos, a few cars passing, a pigeon perched, domesticated people living blandly, but some nights I think I almost capture it. Those days when she comes up the hill and I shoot the picture right at the moment when I think the fog is releasing her how I imagined. But the pictures never reveal what I hope for. Somehow, I still see the day’s destruction wearing down on her.
******
Yuri voice is gone now; I think it has left with him to fight the fire or to take pictures; I’m not sure which. There are other voices that sometimes filter through the ringing in my ears. The surgeons and—more distant, a woman— a mother, I think, screaming that her children are on fire.
The blood has stopped spraying from the Russian’s chest. The surgeon has stopped yelling also. We sit in front of the body exhausted. The surgeon is holding the bloody jawbone of the suicide bomber. He keeps muttering in Russian, “We were ten meters away. How could this have happened?” There is a wall missing in the apartment building where the suicide bomber had been standing moments ago. Flames have overtaken the thin plaster walls and the cries of the burning people are growing stronger.
I decide to watch for Yuri. When he doesn’t return I go looking for him. I climb through the rubble. Dirt and soot fight with snowflakes in the air. My lungs inflate and deflate like flowers blooming during a false spring. I follow the screams of a woman, thinking maybe he headed that direction to help.
I reach the backside of the apartment complex and see Yuri aiming his camera towards the eighth floor. I’m shocked to see that he is photographing a woman and her children preparing to jump from the eighth floor to escape the flames. He turns towards me and points in their direction, as if I should be taking pictures too. I turn and walk away. Away from Yuri and away from Chechnya, sick to death by what I have seen. Then, the wall buckles under the stress from the heat generated by the fire and Yuri is gone, crushed flatter than the film in his camera. The next day I’m gone, also. I leave Chechnya and all the other war zones behind.
*****
When she turns away from the gift shop and continues up the street her tattered clothes and shopping cart break down the illusion. The sunlight does not reach into her shadows. Suffering is stagnant upon her face, the flat resignation of her place in this city lost in the back alleys between the reeking garbage and fermenting winos huddled around their bottles of cheap alcohol. I watch her until she reaches the intersection and turns right towards the poorer districts of the city.