Dmitri was scowling at the antenna of his world-band radio. His face betrayed a deep irritation. “There’s nothing I hate more than a bent aerial,” he said, sighting along its length and swearing to himself in lightly accented English.
It seemed an oddly trivial complaint from a man who spends nine months of every year traveling to uncomfortable, out-of-the-way places; who only just arrived in Kashgar after several weeks of hitching along the southern Silk Road; and who spent one of those weeks locked in quarantine at the behest of paranoid local health officials. All this trouble in the hope that at least one of his recent photographs is among the dozen or so each year he considers worth keeping.
“Do you at least feel bad?” he said, briefly focusing his scowl on me. “Do you feel bad because it was you who made me open the door?” I had knocked on Dmitri’s door a minute earlier. When he opened it, a draft from the window had knocked the radio to the floor.
“Not really,” I said. I didn’t want to indulge his mood. Also, it was the third time the wind had knocked the radio over; he should have learned by now. Also, I didn’t feel bad.
“Of course you don’t. You’re a Jew.”
I ignored this last comment. Dmitri made comments like this about twice a minute, tracing my every least action back to my religion. He was Jewish too, an Ashkenazi from Greece, a breed I hadn’t known existed. I didn’t particularly like these comments, not because of the bigotry, but because I can’t stand being pigeonholed.
As we headed downstairs, I mentioned that I hadn’t gotten to sleep until 3:30 that morning. Seeing his surprise, I quickly added, “Beijing time.” Kashgar is 4,000 kilometers west of Beijing. The absurdity of China’s single time zone is such that most residents here hold to an unofficial local time, two hours behind Beijing. Buying a train ticket in Kashgar is hell.
“Can you do me a favor and fuck off the with Beijing time?” Dmitri said. If his mood didn’t abate soon, this trip to Tashmilekh was going to be a disaster.
Suddenly he broke into a smile. Eyeing me, he said, “You know you walk like a Jew?”
Dmitri is a self-described misanthrope, but clearly he is just flattering himself. A true misanthrope wouldn’t have offered to take me, a near stranger and member of the despised tourist class, to this little-visited market in Tashmilekh. In truth, Dmitri is merely tightly wound, impatient, and temperamental. He is also funny, almost frighteningly effusive, and oddly mothering. He possesses an affection for small children that borders on maudlin, an affection that compels him to terrorize parents on the streets by snatching babies from their arms.
He has the type of open manner and demonstrative body language that people naturally respond to, even when they have no idea what he is actually saying. If they knew what he were saying, he would probably be dead by now. Half the time, he’s threatening to kill someone. “I’ll kill you! I’ll strangle you!” he says to our floor attendant in mock exasperation. She giggles and dodges his feint. To the young waiter: “I’d really like to hump your sister. Do you think you could arrange something like that?” The waiter smiles shyly and refills our tea. To a man on the street, while gripping his protruding belly: “Do you have a doctor? Has he told you to cut back on the kebabs?” The man laughs heartily, without an inkling of understanding.
Dmitri has a habit of correcting the behavior of locals whom he deems inappropriate. Years of travel seem to have given him no equanimity in the face of minor nuisances. He shouts at truck drivers who honk unnecessarily. He scolds bus passengers who light cigarettes without opening their windows. He barks at vendors who cough without covering their mouths. So that his meaning isn’t lost, he follows these harangues with condescending pantomimes: a monkey banging on a steering wheel; an asthmatic coughing spastically in a cloud of cigarette fumes; a spray of germy mucus flying through the air.
Every tourist secretly yearns to correct the behavior of locals. Be more like us, we want to say. Be less noisy, less dirty, less rude. Work harder, stop littering, brush your teeth, hate your government. We rarely admit this impulse, except maybe in shrill, eye-rolling conversations in tourist bars.
Dmitri corrects them constantly, and they love him for it.
We arrived at the market in Tashmilekh while it was still setting up. We were the only Westerners present, and we wended our way through the densely packed donkey carts toward the main square. Dmitri had three cameras in his shoulder bag and six rolls of Tri-X film. He left me to go take his photos undisturbed.
Dmitri draws an analogy between himself and Henri Cartier-Bresson. A bit pretentious perhaps, but fundamentally apt. Like the French photographer, Dmitri travels the world taking snap photos with a 35mm Leica using only the light available to him, documenting what he sees.
He doesn’t fund himself with grants or exhibitions. He claims to have no interest in fame, although he states this claim with a frequency that betrays a deep sense of conflict. His two ambitions are to be inducted into Magnum and to show someday at the Met. His poetic ideal is an exhibition he once attended displaying the works of a man in the twilight years of his life. The man had been snapping photos in anonymity for decades, sharing his work with no one, with no other purpose than to document his own existence. Finally this old man presented his life’s work in its totality. His first exhibition would be his last.
Dmitri likewise conceives of his photographs as a sort of pictorial diary, a record of his own life. This is one of his many half-truths. It is almost definitionally true that the life of a photographer is represented in his photographs. My own father is a commercial photographer, and certainly a sizable part of his existence is captured, albeit obliquely, in the fine jewelry, children’s games, antique cars, safety razors, sporting equipment, donut boxes, and thousands of other images he has created for his clients.
On the other hand, Dmitri’s travels are so deliberate, his subject matter so narrow, and the lengths he goes to capture that subject matter so arduous, that to call his work a photographical journal implies an unforced, quotidian aspect that simply doesn’t fit.
For Dmitri is only interested in capturing “the old,” the ways of life that are dying out or being supplanted. I push him for a definition of The Old, because I am suspicious of easy nostalgia and because Dmitri’s offhand characterization — which encompasses everything from Russian peasants to Chinese mining towns to decaying Cuban art deco — doesn’t seem to fully cohere. I can intuitively grasp what he is talking about — if he were ideological he might refer to communities untouched by globalization — but I am hoping he can more clearly articulate for me the rationale of his life’s work.
“I’m not a philosopher,” he growls. “I just don’t want any goddamned Nike baseball caps in my photos.”
Tied up with Dmitri’s concept of The Old is his concept of The Beautiful. He aches to visit North Korea, for example, so that he can photograph the Socialist Realist architecture, the elderly women sweeping endlessly in massive empty squares. “Can you imagine how beautiful?” he asks me. I suggest that the scene sounds more striking than beautiful, but I can see that for him the distinction is moot.
There is perhaps only one statement Dmitri makes that I can accept without reservation. “I love this,” he tells me repeatedly. “I couldn’t do anything other than this.”
I went to get breakfast in one of the numerous dumpling shops ringing the market. Each shop had a few beehive-shaped kilns out front, and at this early hour many of the shop keepers were still getting their fires going. While the fires were being built, orange flames roared out of the kiln tops. Once the fires had burned down to coals, boys plunged their arms up to the shoulders into the furnace heat to slap packets of dough-wrapped mutton on the kiln walls. The boys sweated fiercely with the effort. When one of them dragged a hand across his brow, I saw that his arm was mottled with burn scars.
My fellow diners were a mix of Uighurs, Uzbeks, Tajiks. They mostly ate in silence, breaking bits of oven-baked bread into gruel with roughened hands. Afterward, they offered silent prayers to Allah. A large square hole in the ceiling let out the smoke and let in a solid flame-edged shaft of smoky desert sunlight. I couldn’t help thinking what a beautiful picture it would make.
Dmitri has traveled all over Central Asia and the Middle East with his cameras, including to trouble spots like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. I ask him if he ever feels he is in danger in these countries. No, he tells me, he has a simple trick to win the good graces of the locals. He pretends to be Muslim.
Pretending to be Muslim is easy. The difficult part is having the nerve to carry it off. Dmitri has read the Koran (mostly irrelevant to his act), knows the important Arabic prayers (not so important, but useful inside mosques), and is familiar with common Muslim greetings, gestures, and expressions (the heart of the ruse).
He is, in fact, the hammiest Muslim I have ever seen, but the locals nevertheless eat up his decidedly un-Halal performance. He welcomes them with a forceful “Assalamu Alaikum,” his hand over his heart in traditional greeting, or maybe running over his chin in the symbolic stroking of Mohammed’s beard. He peppers his speech liberally — too liberally — with Hamdullahs and Allah Akbars, rolling his eyes heavenward and turning his palms to the sky.
“Mussulman?” his Muslim brother invariably asks. Dmitri responds with another round of enthusiastic Hamdullahs and Allah Akbars. His other stock phrase is “George Bush is a donkey” in the local language. The friendship is cemented.
Dmitri claims the performance is sincere, that we’re all talking to the same god anyway. I don’t really care either way. It’s a good trick, and no one is getting hurt. But he pretty quickly stops trying to pass me off as Muslim, because I refuse to play along.
After breakfast, I spent some time watching a snake oil salesman peddle his cure-all potion to a group of elderly men. From a battered metal canister, the salesman scooped a mulch of wood bark, mushroom stems, and other herbal oddities. The plant liquor left over in the canister was the supposed medicine. While the man barked into a megaphone, a young boy portioned out the liquid into stoppered glass bottles.
The old men watched raptly, making silent O’s of their eyes and mouths under the huge brims of their fur hats. When it came time for volunteers, one old man eagerly rolled up his sleeve to reveal a hairless forearm. Into the canister it went.
I moved on, past the melon stands, blacksmiths, the thick crowd clustered around the softserve ice cream machine, the knife sharpeners, the dried fruit stands, the vendors hawking bolts of cloth.
I walked through the animal market, giving wide berth to the rear hooves of the cows and donkeys, carefully sidestepping the messes left by the herds of sheep and goats.
“Hey, no photographs!” someone yelled as I snapped a picture of the outdoor barbershop where the old men submitted their heads to the razor. All Muslim men in this region shave their heads at least once a year, and many do it far more frequently. I’d even seen some little girls with shaved heads.
It was Dmitri who had yelled. He was grinning. “Wanna get your head shaved?” he asked. “Sure,” I said.
The old men were wonderful to watch. Armless in their barbershop cloaks, they looked like newly hatched birds, naked without their fur hats and — despite their creased necks, skin softened with age, and full beards — strangely babylike as they squinched up their faces in anticipation of the razor’s scrape.
When my turn came, I was astonished by the sharpness of the blade, the way my hair seemed to melt away from its edge. The barber was deft; he exposed my white scalp as easily as he might peel an orange. Then he shaved my face. I felt a slight unease when he grabbed my upper lip and twisted, the tip of his thumb against my gum, and ran that slicing blade along the pink edge of my mouth. He did the same with my bottom lip, and then released me. My fingers played gingerly along the contours of my skull as I wandered back toward the main square.
A few minutes later, as I was poking around some donkey carts behind the market, I was picked up by the police.
