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Review
Excerpt:
More than ten years ago, Daldossi had been at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, an eighteen-story juggernaut that was housing another 1800 reporters and photojournalists. Daldossi had always hated places like that. Back then, in the early days of the Iraq War, there were probably more press people than military people, which is why it wasn’t long before Daldossi returned to Vienna, soon after the accident in which an American tank had shot at the Palestine Hotel, killing a Reuters cameraman and a Spanish reporter, because a few dimwitted soldiers had mistaken camera lenses on the hotel balconies for artillery.
Daldossi had been surprised when an old woman in Ghazaliya ran away from his camera with arms raised.
In 2003, he’d wanted out of Baghdad. Out of that photographic combat zone. Out of that ugly country, that insipid subtropical band of arid terrain that had so little to offer, even in the way of landscapes. No mountains like Afghanistan, only heat and dust storms over the desolate, desertified plains.
Supposedly it was better in the northeast, which at least had a few oaks, beeches, and plane trees to call its own.
At the time, Daldossi had been annoyed to share the same subjects with so many other people, but a year later, when events had shifted and almost everyone had disappeared, he struck out for Iraq once again.
In between, he’d spent time in Hammelburg with Schultheiss training for the next war. The UN/German Bundeswehr training camp had given him a recurrent case of déjà vu. Schultheiss was the only one who, for most of it, hadn’t been there, done that.
His relationship problems with Marlis had come to a head. Daldossi couldn’t stand her stories about bears and her family anymore. He couldn’t kick the feeling he was missing out. Sitting next to Marlis on the leather couch, he felt positive that real life was happening elsewhere.
Of course, real life also included trained circus and dancing bears abandoned in Austria by their tamers and brown bears with behavioral problems that had been kept in far-too-small cages by nutcases whose parents had denied them stuffed animals as kids.
But Daldossi couldn’t give a rat’s ass about that reality. That’s how he’d put it then.
And that reality didn’t interest him the slightest bit more now.
At any rate, he’d done his share for animal protection. For Marlis’s sake, he’d driven to the Zwettlburg Animal Sanctuary a million times to photograph the bears. From Sector A to Sector D, he’d documented every inch of the place including the playground and the visitor’s center. All pro bono. And he’d gone out there in every season to take portraits of Zotti, Burli, Dora, or Charly (the crowd favorite) playing, sleeping, or climbing in the snow, rain, or sun.
He wasn’t an animal photographer, Daldossi had protested from the start, but Marlis was stubborn. She’d demanded his help as proof of his love. Besides, working with long telephoto lenses was his specialty, she’d said.
His actual specialty was protecting humans, Daldossi had retorted, but he went with her to Zwettlburg anyway. The two of them had bent apart the chain-link fence in multiple places so that Daldossi could stick his lens through. And Burli, the old circus bear from Gänserndorf Safari Park, had even posed a bit and come right up to the fence when Marli lured him with a can of tuna in oil.
At least it was bears Daldossi had to photograph. He couldn’t have possibly mustered the patience for spiders or beetles, let alone the lighting techniques and macro lenses that would have necessitated.
Leonardo Zambrotta had once been an animal photographer before he took an interest in humans. He had embarked on adventurous expeditions to India and Africa, reported on the endangered Bengal tiger, spent time in Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda. Daldossi remembered a conversation with Zambrotta about a mountain gorilla photo shoot in a national park in northern Rwanda. He had been in the country at the very moment the Rwandan president’s plane was shot down over Kigali – allegedly by Tutsi rebels. That same volley had also unleashed the Hutu’s genocide of the Tutsi minority.
Zambrotti had personally witnessed the local Hutus organizing into paramilitary groups in the village where he was staying. A seething mob had set its sights on the last remaining Tutsi family and stormed the house with clubs, spears, and machetes.
Their bodies’ heads had been thrown into the river.
After that, someone could have conjured forth the rarest, most beautiful animals from the depths of the jungle, Zambrotta had said, and he would no longer twitch.
(S. 99ff)
© C. H. Beck, Munich 2016.
Translation by Jake Schneider
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