“No.”
“Have you ever taken a picture?”
“No.”
“And you want to be a photographer?”
“You find that strange?”
“A little.”
“So if I said I wanted to be a policeman, you’d think that was strange too? Because I’ve never slapped handcuffs on anyone?”
I could tell from the softening in her eyes that, if she could, she would be smiling. “So you’re a clever ass,” she said. “Word of advice: Don’t mention the camera in my mother’s presence or she’ll buy it for you. She’s very eager to please.” The handkerchief went to the cheek and back. “But I doubt that Odelia would approve. I guess you already know that.”
I was both impressed and a little unsettled by how much she seemed to have grasped in so little time. Maybe it was the mask, I thought, the advantage of cover, the freedom to be watchful, to observe and scrutinize.
“She’d probably make you give it back.”
I sighed. It was true. Mamá would not allow such easy amends, and most certainly not if it involved money.
Thalia rose to her feet and beat the dust from her behind. “Let me ask you, do you have a box at home?”
Madaline was sipping wine with Mamá in the kitchen, and Thalia and I were upstairs, using black markers on a shoe box. The shoe box belonged to Madaline and contained a new pair of lime green leather pumps with high heels, still wrapped in tissue paper.
“Where was she planning on wearing those?” I asked.
I could hear Madaline downstairs, talking about an acting class she had once taken where the instructor had asked her, as an exercise, to pretend she was a lizard sitting motionless on a rock. A swell of laughter—hers—followed.
We finished the second coat, and Thalia said we should put on a third, to make sure we hadn’t missed any spots. The black had to be uniform and flawless.
“That’s all a camera is,” she said, “a black box with a hole to let in the light and something to absorb the light. Give me the needle.”
I passed her a sewing needle of Mamá’s. I was skeptical, to say the least, about the prospects of this homemade camera, of it doing anything at all—a shoe box and a needle? But Thalia had attacked the project with such faith and self-assured confidence that I had to leave room for the unlikely possibility that it just might work. She made me think she knew things I did not.
“I’ve made some calculations,” she said, carefully piercing the box with the needle. “Without a lens, we can’t set the pinhole on the small face, the box is too long. But the width is just about right. The key is to make the correct-sized pinhole. I figure point-six millimeter, roughly. There. Now we need a shutter.”
Downstairs, Madaline’s voice had dropped to a low, urgent murmur. I couldn’t hear what she was saying but I could tell that she was speaking more slowly than before, enunciating well, and I pictured her leaning forward, elbows on knees, making eye contact, not blinking. Over the years, I have come to know this tone of voice intimately. When people speak this way, they’re likely disclosing, revealing, confessing some catastrophe, beseeching the listener. It’s a staple of the military’s casualty notification teams knocking on doors, lawyers touting the merits of plea deals to clients, policemen stopping cars at 3 A.M., cheating husbands. How many times have I used it myself at hospitals here in Kabul? How many times have I guided entire families into a quiet room, asked them to sit, pulled a chair up for myself, gathering the will to give them news, dreading the coming conversation?
“She’s talking about Andreas,” Thalia said evenly. “I bet she is. They had a big fight. Pass me the tape and those scissors.”
“What is he like? Besides being rich, I mean?”
“Who, Andreas? He’s all right. He travels a lot. When he’s home, he always has people over. Important people—ministers, generals, that kind. They have drinks by the fireplace and they talk all night, mostly business and politics. I can hear them from my room. I’m supposed to stay upstairs when Andreas has company. I’m not supposed to come down. But he buys me things. He pays for a tutor to come to the house. And he speaks to me nicely enough.”
She taped a rectangular piece of cardboard, which we’d also colored black, over the pinhole.
Things were quiet downstairs. I choreographed the scene in my head. Madaline weeping without a sound, absently fiddling with a handkerchief like it was a clump of Play-Doh, Mamá not much help, looking on stiffly with a pinch-faced little smile like she’s got something sour melting under her tongue. Mamá can’t stand it when people cry in her presence. She can barely look at their puffy eyes, their open, pleading faces. She sees crying as a sign of weakness, a garish appeal for attention, and she won’t indulge it. She can’t bring herself to console. Growing up, I learned that it was not one of her strong suits. Sorrow ought to be private, she thinks, not flaunted. Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.
At the funeral? I mean, the burial?
No, I did not.
Because you weren’t sad?
Because it was nobody’s business if I was.
Would you cry if I died, Mamá?
Let’s hope we never have to find out, she said.
Thalia picked up the box of photographic paper and said, “Get the flashlight.”
We moved into Mamá’s closet, taking care to shut the door and snuff out daylight with towels we stuffed under it. Once we were in pitch-darkness, Thalia asked me to turn on the flashlight, which we had covered with several layers of red cellophane. All I could see of Thalia in the dim glow was her slender fingers as she cut a sheet of photographic paper and taped it to the inside of the shoe box opposite the pinhole. We had bought the paper from Mr. Roussos’s shop the day before. When we walked up to the counter, Mr. Roussos peered at Thalia over his spectacles and said, Is this a robbery? Thalia pointed an index finger at him and cocked her thumb like pulling back the hammer.
Thalia closed the lid on the shoe box, covered the pinhole with the shutter. In the dark she said, “Tomorrow, you shoot the first photo of your career.” I couldn’t tell if she was making fun or not.
We chose the beach. We set the shoe box on a flat rock and secured it firmly with rope—Thalia said we couldn’t have any movement at all when we opened the shutter. She moved in next to me and took a peek over the box as if through a viewfinder.