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?
He’d looked up at her. All that prayin’ must have worked. God has sent me my own angel.
From then on, they’d been together all over the world. In the Sudan, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Congo, Rwanda, Nepal, Bosnia. They’d both become specialists on Africa, but wherever the big news was happening, they were likely to be there. Both had London apartments that did little more than collect junk mail, messages, and dust. Often their interests took them to separate hot spots—him to civil wars, her to humanitarian tragedies—and they spent months without seeing each other, which was just fine with Nina. It only made the sex better.
“I’m going to be forty next month,” he said quietly.
She loved his accent. The simplest sentence sounded edgy and sexy when he said it. Ah’m goin’ t’ be farhty next moonth.
“Don’t worry, twenty-five-year-olds still swoon when they see you. It’s the I-used-to-be-in-a-rock-band look of you.”
“It was a punk rock band, love.”
She snuggled closer to him, kissed his neck while her hand slid down his bare chest. His body responded as quickly as she expected, and within moments he had her undressed and they were doing what they’d always done best.
Afterward, Danny pulled her close. “How come we can talk about anything but us?”
“Who was talking about us?”
“I said I was almost forty.”
“And I’m supposed to see that as a conversation starter? I’m thirty-seven.”
“What if I miss you when you’re gone?”
“You know who I am, Danny. I told you at the very beginning.”
“That was more than four years ago, for God’s sake. Everything in the world changes except you, I guess.”
“Exactly.” She rolled over, spooning her body against his. She’d always felt safe in his arms, even when gunfire was exploding all around them and the night was full of screaming. Tonight, though, there was only the sound of a fire crackling outside, and of bugs buzzing and chirping in the dark.
She moved the tiniest bit away from him, but his arms closed around her, held her in place.
“I didn’t ask for anything,” he whispered into her ear.
You did, she thought, closing her eyes. An unfamiliar anxiety settled in the pit of her stomach. You just don’t know it yet.
On a ridge high above the makeshift village, Nina squatted on the crumbling edge of a riverbed. Her thighs burned from the effort it took to remain motionless. It was six in the morning, and the sky was a gorgeous blend of aqua and orange; already the sun was gaining strength.
Below her, a Himba woman walked through the village with a heavy pot balanced on her head and a baby positioned in a colorful sling at her breast. Nina raised the camera to her eye and zoomed in the telephoto lens until she could see perfectly. Like all the women of this nomadic African tribe, the young woman was bare-breasted and wore a furry goatskin skirt. A large conch-shell necklace—handed down from mother to daughter through the generations, a valued possession—showed the world that she was married, as did the style of her hair. Covered from head to toe in red ochre dust and butterfat to protect her skin from the terrorizing sun, the young mother’s skin was the color of old bricks. Her ankles, considered her most private part, were hidden beneath a row of thin metal bands that made a tinkling sound when she walked.
Unaware of Nina, the woman paused at the riverbank and looked out over the scar on the land where water should run. Her expression sharpened, turned desperate as she reached down to touch the child in her arms. It was a look Nina had seen in women all over the world, especially in times of war and destruction. A bone-deep fear for her child’s future. There was nowhere to go to find water.
Nina caught it on film and kept shooting until the woman walked on, went back to her rounded mud hut and sat down in a circle of other women. Together, talking, the women began crushing red ochre on flat rocks, collecting the sandy residue in calabash bowls.
Nina covered the lens and stood up, stretching her aching joints. She’d taken hundreds of pictures this morning, but she didn’t need to look through them to know that The One was of the woman at the riverbank.
In her mind, she cropped, framed, printed, and hung the image among the great ones she’d collected. Someday her portraits would show the world how strong and powerful women could be, as well as the personal cost of that strength.
She unloaded the film, labeled the canister, tucked it away and reloaded, then walked through the village, smiling at people, handing out the candies and ribbons and bracelets she always carried. She took another great picture of four Himba women emerging from the smoke-and-herb sauna that was their method of keeping clean in a land devoid of water. In the picture, the women were holding hands and laughing. It was an image that captured a universal feminine connection.
She heard Danny come up beside her. “Hey, you.”
She leaned against him, feeling good about her shots. “I just love how they are with their kids, even when the odds are impossible. The only time I cry is when I see their faces with their babies. Why is that, with all we’ve seen?”
“So it’s mothers you follow. I thought it was warriors.”
Nina frowned. She’d never thought of it that way, and the observation was unsettling. “Not always mothers. Women fighting for something. Triumphing over impossible odds.”
He smiled. “So you are a romantic after all.”
She laughed. “Right.”
“You ready to go?”
“I think I got what I needed, yeah.”
“Does this mean we can go lie by a pool for a week?”