Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri [133]
In the long hallway of Giovanna’s apartment she saw the answering machine blinking. She played back the tape. It was not Navin’s voice but a friend of Giovanna’s. Normally these friends left messages in Italian that Giovanna retrieved from Berlin. But this message, in English, was for Hema. It was a person named Edo, a name she recognized from Giovanna’s list of people to call. For weeks, Edo said in his message, he had been expecting Hema to get in touch. Was everything all right? He sounded kind, and genuinely distressed enough for Hema to return the call. She assured Edo that all was well, and because she had no other excuse, she accepted his invitation to have lunch with him and his wife the following Sunday.
Edo’s wife, Paola, was a photo editor at L’Espresso, but Kaushik had met her in Netanya, a resort town on the Israeli coast, where they’d both gone to cover the bombing of a hotel banquet hall, the victims about to begin their Passover meal. It was only rarely that he worked in Italy, the odd photo essay about Senegalese immigrants in Brescia, or shots of the nineteen caskets containing the soldiers in Iraq being carried past the Colosseum. For most of the past five years, Rome had simply been a place from which to get to where he needed to go, and if he looked back at his pocket calendars, each with their three hundred and sixty-five sky-blue pages, and counted the days, he could have confirmed that most of them had been spent taking pictures in Gaza and the West Bank.
His life as a photojournalist had begun nearly twenty years ago. He was wandering through Latin America in 1987, living off the money his father gave him after he graduated from college. He’d gone with his friend Douglas, and they began in Tijuana, hoping to end up in Patagonia. They spent a few months in Mexico, working their way south, through Guatemala and then into El Salvador. And it was there that Douglas decided he’d had enough of Central America, enough of being harassed for looking so obviously American, and bought a ticket to Madrid. Like the Mexicans and Guatemalans, the Salvadorans were never sure what to make of Kaushik, not the soldiers who patrolled the streets with guns nearly as big as their bodies, not the children who posed eagerly for pictures when they saw him with his camera. He began to explore the country alone, a country that was smaller, he’d read in his guidebook, than Massachusetts. He took pictures of the volcano that loomed west of the capital, buildings pocked by bullets and cracked in half by the earthquake earlier that year.
He’d never been in a place so obviously at war with itself. He’d understood, in Guatemala, that the guerrillas were active, gathered from other backpackers that there were parts of the country to avoid. An overnight bus he and Douglas took to Tikal was stopped, and they and the rest of the passengers were ordered to step out and show their passports, flashlights aimed at their faces by a group of drunken checkpoint guards. One of the guards asked to see Douglas’s wallet, took the cash, and tossed the wallet back in Douglas’s face. In Guatemala, that had been the worst of it. But in El Salvador things were more violent, more gruesome, the tourists more scarce. In Santa Ana, Kaushik befriended a Dutch journalist named Espen and began to travel around, absorbing the history of the conflict, the stories Espen told him of the death squads, decapitated bodies strewn on highways, teenagers hanging from trees with fingernails missing and thumbs tied behind their backs. With Espen he watched