Lucky

By Kathryn Para

Lucky is an unflinching novel set in the Middle East and Canada. It tells the story of Anika Lund, a freelance war photographer with an ambition to photograph an infamous terrorist, and her best friend and translator, Viva, who seeks answers to the mystery of her husband’s disappearance in Syria. In the fall of 2004, they gain access to Iraqi resistance fighters, and entrance to the broken city of Fallujah, igniting a series of terrifying events that exact a price that becomes too much to bear. Lucky explores essential questions about war photography, the price paid by journalists and the moral dilemmas of love and war.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mother Tongue Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781896949451

Kathryn Para

Kathryn Para is an award-winning, multi-genre writer with a MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry have been published in Grain, Room of One's Own, Geist, Sunstream, and Vancouver Review. She is the 2013 winner of Mother Tongue Publishing's Search for the Great BC Novel Contest. Her stage play, Honey, debuted in 2004. She has also written, directed and produced short films. She lives in Gibsons, BC. Lucky is her first novel. It was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize.

Book preview

Acknowledgements

November, 2004

Fallujah

Ani rips away the scarf that blinds her. Sprawled full length on the road, she still feels the heat of the hand that shoved her from the moving car, the sudden surprise of being airborne, the ugly thud that knocked the air from her lungs. Something is broken—with each gasping breath she feels a stab between her ribs. Her elbow spurts pain down her arm. The abrasions on the right side of her body seep and burn, little skin left on her thigh, palm and forearm.

She squints in the bright light. Her bag is several feet away, a canvas sack with a Canadian flag sewn on by hand, and she scrabbles towards it. The camera on the road, the metal casing partly broken from the frame, lens miraculously intact, rolls of plastic film canisters trailing after the bag.

Blots of greasy smoke and dry brown dust drift across a horizon of broken buildings. The street is deserted. Heat radiates from the ground in undulating sheets that suck moisture from her eyes and mouth, sears her skin. The only shelter is in the shade of a wall made of grey stucco topped with layers of brick, a wall that holds the road away from an orchard of date palms with fronds that skim the cobalt sky. Her fingers follow brick and stucco pockmarked by bullets, reading it like Braille. Opposite the wall, a neighbourhood perforated with smoking craters.

Rearranging her hijaab with one hand, she wraps the fabric as best she can over her ragged hair and around her neck, smelling the dirt and sweat and acrid residue of fear that permeates her quick-dry expedition shirt. Her cotton cargo pants are stiff with blood and spatters of bone and flesh, her feet bare on the street, numb. Shrapnel winks from cracks and fissures, the road so littered with metal shell casings that they tink and ting against each other as she shuffles along. A wild dog skulks across her path, its prize a bloated hand.

So thin and light, she borders on invisibility, Ani hikes up her pants and feels almost invincible until something moves in the burned-out storefront. The fine hairs on her neck rise as she scans for faces as dirty as hers, as haggard and suspicious. Mujahideen maybe. Or displaced squatters with nowhere left to go. As ragged as she, they hide behind the rusty shell of a burned Volkswagen Passat with a single bullet hole in the middle of the driver’s window. Snipers. A sound squeaks past her lips; her throat cracks with an absence of saliva.

Telephone cable droops across the road, white and red wires skinned of their protective outer sheath. Beyond the date palms lies the edge of the desert, hardpan, where grey sand blows white—this is Fallujah, she hopes, wanting to recognize the minaret that hovers ahead on the horizon, mirage-like. Then a mortar explosion rumbles through the ground, thrumming like adrenaline. The pressure of it pops her ears.

Gunshots down the street. Sharp cracks in the air. Bullets find homes in the concrete rubble and shattered buildings, the thip thip of their passage, the sound stretching out like fishing lines, segmenting space. She turns towards the noise because where there is violence she will find American soldiers, and they will help her.

She scuttles along the wall, the ancient roadway scattered with smashed concrete laced with metal, follows the thip thip through the remnants of two-story concrete buildings. The hand that shoved her from the car haunts her arm, but the thunder of an F-16 rolls from the sky, jars the feel of it, and she inhales, feeling soot and dust sifting through her lungs. Gravel studs her palms and thigh. She holds her elbow, and blood pools in her hand.

The dust on the road vibrates and lifts in orderly columns as the whir and clank of an Abrams tank floods her bones, makes her teeth chitter and clack, as if someone else uses her mouth to speak. In a maelstrom of dust and groans, a metal ghost emerges from a wobbly mirage of the street. Another bullet slices the air not far from her cheek. A sniper. A bullet smacks her just below the collarbone, spins her into the dirt. New pain and a new understanding of the concept, but no matter. She lurches to her feet and keeps walking towards the tank. Soon she will be free.

June, 2006

Vancouver

It’s a myth that life flashes before your eyes just before you bite it. It’s more like you’re in a dark room, and in that darkness, you see a silver light that arcs through the indigo, plunges into your eyes and exits your fingertips. All you hear is your pulse, ticking like a timepiece in cold, empty space.

I float through Claire’s West Vancouver mansion and run aground in her kitchen. I anchor to the granite countertop with my elbows, and mesmerize myself with a martini glass as it slides across the stone on a thin layer of alcohol. The liquid sloshes, a pink ebb tide in the v-shaped glass. Claire is still playing therapist. I’m here to meet another one of her friends, Levi, a journalist with ties to the Middle East, as if he were a mechanic and I a broken engine.

When the kitchen door swings open, party voices flood the room and deposit the waiter as he backs in with a tray of dirty glasses and greasy serviettes. The floor lurches and snaps back into place.

Ahoy, matey, I say, plastered at three in the afternoon. He throws me a quizzical look, and I wave my glass at him.

All afternoon I’ve been getting this look, but I don’t give a shit what they think, those women with diamond bracelets and Charles David shoes—two children in private school, all the time in the world for Pilates, nail appointments, trips to wine country in California. The men smoke cigars and wear wool pants, brush crumbled filo from their ties. They talk about stock options, uranium and nickel and the price of oil. About their boats and the salmon they catch and bash on the head, and then leave to flop in the hold to suffocate for an hour, the big ones, sucking a thin soup of air through their gills.

Those people don’t know what to think about me, and I’m not giving many clues. I’m not a black hole. I’m not a disease. I’m not a best friend. I’m definitely not this dress. Claire’s dress clings to my hips, her diamond earrings pinch. I lean into the granite island and lap the pink martini with my tongue.

It’s Claire’s birthday, Claire my unlikeliest friend. Everyone turns to look when she enters a room. She walks as if she owns everything. Her hands punctuate every word and movement, and intermittently strip wild strands of dyed black hair out of her eyes. Claire insisted on my platform pumps, too, with straps around the ankle. They go with the dress, she said. No matter that they don’t fit, that they make me stumble and wobble. Claire says that’s the martinis, says it often.

I like that she’s direct. It makes being friends with her easy. Clear. She doesn’t grace me with her secrets, but she does all the right things: contributes to charity, buys organic food and recycles religiously. Does that confer depth, that she can afford to be good?

Now she sails through the kitchen door in a purple dress too short for someone her age, but her legs are great.

Claire bounces an air kiss off my cheek. Water, please, she calls to the waiter. And one of those marvelous sashimi plates. Her energy descends on me like a tsunami. Enjoying the party?

Good. Yes.

Is the book ready?

What if it isn’t?

Oh my God. You haven’t got it ready. You’re killing me.

I’m not trying to kill you.

You of all people understand a deadline. Wait, do you hear that?

What?

That’s the editorial team winning a bet. I can hear them scream from across the city.

The waiter places a plate of artfully tumbled tuna sashimi between us. Claire picks up chopsticks and dunks a piece of raw tuna in soy sauce. Look how thin you are. Eat.

I’m eating, I lie. Food is obscene, and it’s everywhere. Out there, shops selling boxes of overripe fruit, milk curdled and curded, blocks of dyed cheese, slabs of meat hanging in windows, broiled ducks with heads quacking and in here, hors d’oeuvres glistening with grease, buttery crumbs on lips, spinach caught in teeth, waistlines larded, chins doubling and tripling. Disgusting. Someday I’ll be so thin I’ll slip through that silver slice in the sky, and all this obscenity will end.

What about going back? It might kick-start the process.

Not yet. The room expands when I say this. Windows enlarge, light rushes in. The truth makes things luminous. This I know from my work. The glow is where I point my camera.

Claire lowers her voice. What does the shrink say?

She uses a lot of multi-syllable words like clomipramine, paroxetine and prazosin.

Do the drugs work?

No. Yes, if you like fog. I’m supposed to meditate. It’s all bullshit.

A beautiful distance stretches between us, like a burden lifting. She understands so little.

What about your family? Connect with your roots.

Home. Gears and grease and grime of a logging town in the middle of southern BC. Frozen white in the winter, soot black in spring, bleached in the summer. Cattle, alfalfa fields and the sawmill are highlights. My brother, also. The possibility of a road trip settles in me.

Claire touches my arm, her hand cool, her fingernails immaculately polished. Ani, honey. We want the Fallujah piece. I know it’s a tough go and we want to ease you back into the work, but you need to fulfill the contract.

Fallujah. I shake my head. Other things are so much more important, but what are they, these important things that have me so distracted that I can’t go back to work?

You’ve sorted the pictures at least? She looks slightly panicked.

The pictures bite me when I touch them. I’m thirty-five, but they make me feel a hundred and thirty-five. Time isn’t measured by years. The markers I use now are before digital cameras and after, before my capture in Fallujah and after. Before Cairo, after. After my parents died. Before. After.

Claire makes a tsking noise and rubs my arm. Working on it will help you move on.

It’s like she can’t hear, the suggestion the same one the psychiatrist harps on: get back on the horse, put one foot in front of the other. Build your tolerance gradually, Dorothy Chin says. Fuck tolerance. I know how to cope. I use the V-drug, vodka, to fantastic effect.

Claire kisses my cheek and steers me out of the kitchen, propelled by the swinging door. That’s Levi, she says, and waves my hand at the only interesting-looking man in the room. And for god’s sake look like you’re having some fun.

Levi waves back, but I turn away. I need to find a bathroom first, so I float past a group of women exclaiming over the fig tree in the yard. In Beirut the figs are like heroin. The sticky sweetness, the juice that runs to my elbows, the ruby belly of the fruit in my mouth. Viva, handing me another and another, handing me figs like an offering of family, an offering of love. I miss the curls of her hair, the shape of her face. If I gouged out my eyes, I would still see her, and so I don’t. Then how would I find her?

Claire’s parties are as bland as the house—cream and taupe on the walls, chocolate leather, cappuccino and cream silk drapes, wool carpet, mahogany, marble, thread counts and empty calories. Everything is beautifully immoral.

The maze of furniture gives way to a hallway lined with slate, the ridges of the natural stone wonky under my toes. I admired this house once, envied it even, its glass and cedar shakes, its West Coast design, its view of Lighthouse Park from its perch on the Outer Harbour of Burrard Inlet. Now I just need to pee.

I locate what the ladies outside would call a powder room and close the door, set my martini on the marble surround beside the sink, a translucent onion glinting in the bottom of the glass. The ornate mirror frames me like a cameo pin, a pale tragic face, cornered and bony, imminently forgettable. I like it that way. I sit on the toilet, the choppy sea of the floor threatening to swamp the room. I put my head on my knees and stay there until the floor steadies. When I wash my hands, my elbow knocks the glass and sends it sailing to the slate tiles where it smashes into pieces that gleam like the onion that skitters to the heat register and sticks. Like snowflakes, every piece different. I cradle the bits carefully, but the floor tilts. I automatically put out my hand and glass digs into my palm. Blood bubbles, breaks to drip to the floor. Pain clarifies the lines in the room, and the fuzziness of alcohol fades. Fucking shoes, I say.

Later, the tide lifts me to where Levi holds court in the living room. Leanly muscled, he wears jeans and a black t-shirt. He has on a party face, relaxed, the skin around his mouth crinkling as he talks, his teeth leaning slightly to the left in his mouth, fighting an asymmetrical grin. Black hair, short in the back, flips over his eyes. He’s not tall, but he speaks well and makes the men in suits around him look overdressed and undereducated.

Levi Rooke, he says, extending his hand. We should already know each other, don’t you think? His palm, warm and generous, meets mine. He makes me smile.

You work mainly in Palestine, don’t you? We’re both nomads in the Middle East, and as we talk, we know many of the same people.

Then he asks, like everyone does.

It’s a collection of photos from Fallujah, I say. We’re putting them into a book.

I hear it’s stunning work, he says to the group. She took them from inside the compound. The insurgents, the hostages, got both stories. Intense.

He passes me the conversational torch, but I’m not much for the dog-and-pony show. No one has seen these photos except me. They want the gory details, the slice-and-dice sections. Expectation creeps towards me. Hell, I say, Claire would be disappointed if I spoiled it for you. Another pink martini appears in my orbit, and I snatch it from a tray attached to a disembodied arm. I deposit the bloody tissue clotting the cut in my palm on the tray and grab a fresh serviette.

Levi fills in with the Amnesty International award, the spread in Harpers Magazine, the invitation to tour my work in Germany. I wonder how he knows all this about me. He looks to me again to take over the show. I half expect carnival music to wind up. I’m expected to trot myself out, spin around, do my tricks and bark on command. I drink instead.

There’s no point trying to make friends and influence people. The heat and sand and wind of the Middle East have dried me into a husk that no amount of alcohol or humidity can swell. Before Fallujah, I had been in Askar with Viva. We had vacationed in Egypt. Before that, in and out of Baghdad, Beirut, the trips circuitous and jagged, like memory. Along with Fallujah, I have an arsenal of other photos. Originally I thought I’d show them, display the Palestinian children shot to pieces, the Israeli civilian carbonized corpses, the soldiers on both sides, their black blood on the caramel coloured stones. Then the debacle in Fallujah, and now I can barely look at any of the work from the Middle East. The whole project has been stalled for more than a year.

My stomach sends a rumble of acid towards my esophagus, and I look for an exit. Nice to meet you, Levi. I need to find some food.

Levi grips my hand and squeezes for a second. It’s a hard squeeze that ripples through my body, reminds me of the back of the car in Fallujah, the hand on my arm, my body flying. I jerk away and weave through the crowd with a portside tilt.

Another group has gathered outside the kitchen where a waiter on his knees scrapes up skewers of teriyaki chicken that have landed in wet lumps on a Persian carpet. I’ve seen the nimble-fingered women who wove these carpets, working in small rooms with thick clay walls, in front of looms with strings like harps, blue veins showing through the skin on the backs of their hands. And the men who sold them, with round, persuasive voices yammering in the street, bargaining at full speed, carpets layered on the ground. People crowded into the souq, shoulders and elbows, sandaled feet, the buzz of flies, the cobblestones that could crack an ankle, canopies for shade, baskets of fruit, the smell of cinnamon and sweat as folk music wailed through tinny speakers.

Jesus, I say, and kneel to help scoop the skewers into a pile. Have you got something? I ask the dazed waiter, this one only a boy, sixteen at most, his mouth soft, dark eyes wide. A rag or something?

The boy shakes his head, his brown face flushed.

It’s a kilim, I say. Get a rag.

What?

The carpet. Look at it, no knots. Alex would have had a fit. Alex my ex. Alex my friend. My favourite. In another world, we sit under a canopy at a tin table on a busy street in Damascus, sipping bitter Arabic coffee from a delicate ceramic cup. Heat and dust swirl around us, the buildings stuccoed with history. The sine wave of Arabic mixed with French mixed with motorcycles and the buttery smell of Parisian croissants. When I think about him, his embrace gets distilled into a moment in time, bottled and kept on the back shelf of my heart. The kind of love that has no alternative. We sit at the table all afternoon, and it’s not until dark that we touch, his rough fingers against the skin of my waist.

I wonder what he’s doing now. He’d love this one. His fingers would taste the quality of the wool, the density, the dyes, each rug like a prayer to him. Specific and universal at the same time. I grab paper napkins that have scattered from the tray and blot the sauce while the waiter stacks hors d’oeuvres back on the tray.

Fucking priceless, I say, words slurring, and I compensate by getting louder. Feel it. I grab the waiter’s hand and draw it along the carpet. It should be on the wall. The bloodied serviette that’s

Reviews for Lucky

[rodraglin · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lucky – a harsh look at a hopeless situation Ani is a photojournalist, back from an assignment in Iraq and suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome. She’s got a book deal for photos she took while in Fallujah if she can ever sober up and sort out all the images she shot.Ani is also haunted by the disappearance of Viva, her guide, interpreter and friend during her time in the Middle East.Ani’s publisher introduces her to Levi in hopes he can encourage her to face her demons by getting to work on the book. Levi is a journalist who has covered the same beat as Ani and could perhaps provide empathy for her and text for the photos.Author Kathryn Para skillfully weaves the past – Ani’s last assignment that took her to Fallujah, with the present – her deteriorating mental condition as a result of what happened there. When Para recounts the past she uses the third person, for the present she uses the first person, a technique that works very well. As the story unfolds it becomes apparent the key to Ani’s past and the salvation for her future are in the box of images she took in Fallujah, the ones she can’t bear to look at.Lucky is a harsh story. Nothing good apparently has ever happened to Ani – her mother was bi-polar and was killed along with her father when their vehicle was hit by a fully loaded logging truck on an icy road. Her older brother is also dead. She can’t seem to have fulfilling relationships. Even her cat runs away.The events she witnesses in Iraq and Syria are horrific. The people she meets duplicitous.This reader had some difficulty understanding Ani’s motivation to become an imbedded photojournalist with the mujahidin defending Fallujah against the American assault. It seemed like a suicide mission – if she isn’t killed by American bombs and artillery, she’d likely be killed be the mujahidin as a spy or simply because she’s an infidel. And for what, more photos of innocents suffering in the Middle East? There also were a few significant instances of what I would consider author intrusion in the story. One where a folk tale is told by an old woman in great detail and at great length for no apparent reason, and another of a trip to Egypt where the same is repeated about Temple of Amun at Karak. Both these instances did not develop character or advance the plot and seemed to serve no purpose other than for the author to expound her knowledge of Syrian mythology and Egyptian antiquity.There also were times when the author appeared to try too hard with her imagery and diction rejecting an appropriate word or phrase and reaching for something more original. Rather than enhance the narrative these too clever odd word pairings gave me pause and pulled me out of the reading experience.When I finished this novel I was reminded of a quote by Anne Lamott in her book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life:“There’s no point writing hopeless novels. We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.” Though well conceived and constructed, and for the most part very well written, Lucky by Kathryn Para is just that, a hopeless novel.