Asimov's Science Fiction: February 2014 (20 page)

IMAGE 4: A Ugandan journalist sent Yona a clipping about Oliver's death. A photo accompanies the article. It shows a body, Oliver's body, lying in the street. Yona doesn't know why anyone would think she would want to see that photograph. She does; she doesn't. She could include it, make people face his death head on.

Instead she opts for

IMAGE 5: in which Oliver plays football with some children in Kampala, his dreadlocks flying, his smile unguarded (photographer unknown), and IMAGE 6.

IMAGE 6: The only photo in this collection which was actually taken by Oliver Haifetz-Perec, photojournalist. It is a portrait of Lutalo, the Ugandan gay activist he was there to meet. The camera's gaze is unflinching, as is Lutalo's. His pseudonym means "warrior." The scar across his cheek and nose is the first thing that catches the viewer's attention, traveling from upper left to lower right of his face, the natural path of any English reader's eye. The lighting of the shot highlights the scar rather than diminishing it. Oliver was killed when he intervened in an attack on Lutalo, who managed to escape into hiding. This is a small comfort to Yona, the idea that Oliver's murder was not meaningless. She holds it to her chest when she tries to sleep at night. She wonders why Oliver stepped in, when he had always sworn by his journalistic objectivity, and if she would have done the same. She has always thought of herself as a witness, though she knows that her presence is in itself an imposition on the scene. The photograph of Lutalo is the last one on Oliver's memory card.

All that Yona saw of Johannesburg, she saw from the descending airplane. She didn't bother to take photographs, hadn't taken any in months, though she knew she'd have to get over that soon enough. In any case, the plastic window would ruin any shot she composed.

Between questions about whether she was sure she was ready to return to work, her editor had warned her to expect secrecy, to accept a blindfold and an undisclosed location. She had assured Mel that she would be fine. In truth, she knew she would welcome the chance to get out of the apartment and away from the constant reminders of Oliver. A recently rediscovered village sounded interesting enough.

Her contact met her at baggage claim. He was tall, six feet at least. His polo shirt and khakis made him look like the drivers from the game parks. They all had com puter-printed signs, though, whereas he had handwritten her name on a piece of cardboard and drawn a camera next to it.

"Welcome," he said. "My name is Odwa Mabuya. Chief Project Manager. I know you must be nervous to go with a stranger. I hope you understand our precautions." His English was accented but fluent. She wondered why he had come to pick her up himself, instead of sending someone.

She shook his hand. "In my line of work I've gotten in a lot of cars with strangers, but you're definitely the first to blindfold me."

"We hope you understand the need once you see what we are protecting."

"Some sort of lost tribe?" she asked.

He smiled. "Ja. Exactly."

He took her duffel—Oliver's duffel—but let her carry her own camera bag to the parking lot. They arrived at a small white pickup truck. He put her bag on the seat and proceeded to go through it without apology. She offered her camera bag, and he did the same cursory examination. He searched her pockets as well, in a manner that was both awkward and professional. No hands strayed where they shouldn't have, but he seemed uncomfortable with the process. Her phone, her earplugs, her passport, her sleeping pills, her anti-malarial pills: all went into a pouch that he wore around his neck. Everything else he stowed in the small space behind the seat of his truck. He motioned for her to climb in.

"Sorry," he said. He handed her an airline-issue sleep mask patterned with snoring sheep. Yona wondered what anyone else in the parking lot thought of this, if they were watching. She put the mask on. These were the terms to which she had agreed.

"Would you like one of your pills to sleep?" he asked. "The journey is long, and you may feel ill from the bouncing of the
bakkie
—the truck—without your eyes to warn you. My bakkie has terrible shock absorbers."

She wanted to say no, wanted at least some sense of where they were going, but as she opened her mouth to do so, the energy to argue drained from her. She was tired, and she would only be frustrated by her inability to see her surroundings. All the pictures untaken.

"Yes, please. Just a half." She held out her hand.

She dreamed of the night before Oliver had left for Uganda. Clothing and cameras and documents were strewn across every surface as he tried to choose what would come with him this time. At some point he had given up on packing and pressed her to him.

"It's only three weeks," she said. "We've been apart three weeks before, dozens of times."

"Not since the wedding. It feels different somehow."

"It's no different, Ollie. I'll do my assignment, you do yours, and we'll be back here in no time, with three months all to ourselves."

He kissed the top of her head and drew back to look into her eyes. "You promise?"

She opened her mouth to agree, but in the moment she blinked, his face was not his face anymore. Or rather, it was his face, but bloodied and bruised, his eyes gone, the sockets smashed.

"I promise," she said, hoping he believed her.

"Are you okay?"

It took a moment for her to orient herself. The air whipped by the open windows of the vehicle and the evening sun warmed her face. Her head felt stuffed with cotton.

"Just a bad dream," she said, still drifting.

She woke again as the vehicle slowed. She heard the hum of a powerful electric fence. The hairs on her arms stood up.

"Are you awake?" Odwa asked once they had passed the fence. "You can remove the blindfold now. We are here."

After the drug and the darkness, Yona could barely keep her eyes open. Still, she wanted to see everything; she had already missed so much. She glanced at the tall fence receding in the truck's mirrors. In front, the pavement had given way to two well-worn furrows through the grass. Where was here? She wasn't supposed to know, yet she couldn't help but wonder. She had landed at midday and it was almost dusk now. She judged by the placement of the sun that they were driving north and east.

"Do I get to know anything about where we are?"

"Mpumalanga."

That narrowed it down to a province, at least. She felt a familiar pull, for the first time in months. "May I start taking photographs?"

"Ja."

She twisted to reach her camera bag and pulled out the Nikon D4.

SHOT 1: The guide in profile. His Bafana Bafana cap obscures his eyes. His right hand is on the wheel, his left on the gearshift. The setting sun is directly behind the photographer, putting Odwa's face into sharp relief. He smiles for the camera, an easy smile.

SHOT 2: The hills they traverse are verdant, rushing headlong into their southern hemisphere summer. They roll with fractal curves. The composition of the photo mimics the topography of a hand: vein and muscle and sinew and bone.

SHOT 3: Three identical vehicles, white pickup trucks wearing similar coats of dust. The building behind them is long and low, its roof thatched and its walls mud. It looks newly built. A satellite dish nests in the thatching, an incongruous note.

"When do I get to meet them?" Yona asked.

Odwa lifted his cap and scratched his head. "Tomorrow. You should rest first."

She debated arguing, but exhaustion was creeping over her again. They were still in the same time zone she had left uncountable hours before, but the recycled air in the plane and the sleeping pill had taken their toll. She was relieved to discover that her hut had running water and a cleanish bathtub. She had bathed under much worse conditions. The deep tub was luxury as far as she was concerned, even if the water was only lukewarm.

SHOT 4: The photographer's blurred legs resting on the rim of the tub, the bed in sharp focus beyond them.
Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman.

She only soaked for a few minutes, afraid she was tired enough to drown in the tub. She fell asleep with the lights on, a camera beside her, always watchful.

In the morning, she wandered out of the hut with her little Panasonic in hand. The staff of the facility, the anthropologists and whichever scientists were on this project, greeted each other as they stepped out of their own huts, all ignoring her.

SHOT 5: A tiny dead chameleon on the porch, desiccated but still holding onto a twig with its tail.

SHOT 6: Breakfast in the staff hut, on a small table in the kitchen nook. Rooibos tea in a china cup, buttermilk rusks on a saucer. Grenadilla juice, syrupy and sweet even in a photograph.

Odwa joined her after she had assembled and photographed her breakfast, handing her one of her own Malarone pills and a glass of water by way of greeting. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yes, thank you." She swallowed the pill and drank the water. "Best I've slept in weeks, actually."

She stirred some milk into her tea, then warmed her hands on the chipped teacup. "Will we go this morning?"

"You can meet me at the bakkie in one hour." He grabbed a rusk from the tin where she had found hers and disappeared out the door again.

She had nothing to do for the intervening hour other than nurse her tea and biscuits. She repacked, stuffed a few granola bars into her pockets, filled her water bottle and clipped it to her camera bag. There was a wooden bench outside the main building and she situated herself there to wait. She waved at the people who walked around, but none gave her more than a curt nod.

SHOTS 7–35: Photos of the staff going about their business. They laugh and joke with each other, fill the trucks with petrol from cans.

Yona was surprised Odwa didn't blindfold her again, but she thought it better not to ask the question. She guessed that once inside the compound, it didn't matter any-more. She wouldn't be able to find her way back here again if she tried. Even now, clutching the door as the truck careened down the rutted path, knowing the time and the position of the sun, she could no more say where she was in relation to the previous hill than to the huts they had stayed in the night before.

SHOT 36: The path is clogged with goats. The goats are in no hurry.

"Why did everyone back there ignore me?" she asked Odwa. "Your colleagues?"

"Not everyone thinks you should be here."

"Me personally? Or a photojournalist in general?"

"A photographer. They say we take our own photos for our own work. Why do we need someone from outside?"

She played with the focus on her lens. "And why am I necessary?"

He grinned at her. "You know the phrase 'seeing is believing,' ja? Here, that is not true. Believing is believing, a separate thing entirely. Your eyes will lie to you."

"I don't understand."

"Does your camera ever lie?"

"I try not to let it."

"But you can foreshorten a distance, so a man looks as if he is standing on the edge of a cliff when he is in fact in no danger?" He took his hands off the wheel to demonstrate foreshortening. The truck lurched to the right and he grabbed the wheel again. Yona searched for the seatbelt, drawing it across her lap. "Well, yes."

"And you can choose a frame such that a small group of people can look like a crowd? Imply that there are more behind them?"

"Yes."

"Your eyes will lie to you here, in that same way. I will tell you the truth, and hopefully you will choose to believe it, but it will not be the same thing that your eyes tell you. Belief is the opposite of seeing; it is trusting something you cannot see at all."

She tried to make sense of what Odwa was saying. "But if that's the case, I really don't understand at all why you need me here."

"We bring you here, and you tell the rest of the world what you saw. What your pictures show. And they leave us alone here to do our work, and they send us money to continue our work, and they say their prayers of thanks that such mysteries exist."

"That's a gamble, if you're suggesting there's something I shouldn't be photographing. I won't compromise myself."

"It will not be a compromise. You'll see."

His self-assurance was starting to bother Yona. He didn't know her. "And you?" she asked. "If so many of your colleagues are opposed to my visit, why am I here?"

"I am the project manager. I win. Unless I'm wrong about this, as they think. Then I will be angry with myself, and my project will not get a chance to get over it."

Yona wasn't sure how to respond to that statement. She lifted her camera to her eye to disguise her silence.

SHOTS 37–51: Yona's fastest shutter captures the caprice of springbok on the adjacent hills.

Odwa snorted. "Why would you waste film on springbok? If you want nature photos, I can find you animals worth photographing."

She shook her head. "It's digital. No film wasted. I can delete them later if I don't like them. But I do. I like them because they're here, and they're part of the story of my journey, even if you're indifferent to them."

He shrugged, but a moment later pointed to a waterfall in the distance. "For your nature album."

SHOT 52: A waterfall cuts through a steep rockface. Typical of those found in other areas of the Transvaal escarpment.

It took them twenty minutes more to reach their destination. Yona would not have imagined that such a large area might be fenced and closed off. They had not been traveling at highway speeds by any means, but the size still violated her sense of scale.

And then they were there.

SHOTS 1–8: This exhibit opens with the photographer's descent into the tribe's land. A soft-bellied curve, then a steep switchbacked trail ending in a grassy valley. Small horses graze behind a rough stone wall. Their necks are thin, their bodies wiry, their joints large. Their coats glow with good health. A narrow stream bisects their grassy pasture. They raise their heads as a unit: wary, curious.