Who’s he?

A famous war photographer. He was one of the greats. He was in Spain. He was at the Normandy invasion. He went everywhere and saw everything. He was in Vietnam too, but it was still French Indochina then and it was the French they were fighting. He got killed there, sometime in the ’50s.

Richard wasn’t interested in anything he had to say about Capa.

I think you went because of Dad.

I don’t know. Maybe in some way I did.

But you didn’t see Dad’s war. You saw another war.

You’re right. There are lots of wars.

It was the closest moment they’d had since he had got home. Too close, in that room, on a day like that one, with the trees bare and the leaves on the ground, when the past pressed them closer. Richard took down his hands and looked at Jonny for a moment. They were men now, not boys, two men looking into each other across a room. He did not know if his brother had done that before, seen him as a man, as much a man as their father or himself. And then Richard walked out of the room and there were only the photos on the table, the pretty ones, the Japanese ones, the ones of the pretty girl, and beside all that maumau they seemed like nothing.

It was true, what he had said. It had been surprisingly easy to get in, whoever you were, that first mad modern war where photographers got to go everywhere. The trip to Vietnam had been an accident, as far as he was concerned, an aberration, as it seemed now, though at the time it had seemed intentional, fated even, the turning of a circle. Even if to others it seemed an achievement. How could he explain that to his brother? That those photos, which so impressed people that they remembered him for them, which had made a magazine cover, and which might even have been the start of a career, seemed all a mistake and even a shame. That there was no courage in them but only chance, and rush, and fear. The weight of the camera in his hands, the cold consciousness of the camera, as if only the lens saw what he himself could not bear to see and the hands were helpless to help.

Surprising how doors opened to you sometimes. Offered you a chance to be Capa, running into battle with a camera around your neck. To be a hero like Capa. Like your own father even. To see war. Shouldn’t a young man see war? Wasn’t the greatest photographer the photographer of war, of life and death?

Hey, Richard, see this. This is more than anything you’re ever likely to see. See what your father might have seen. Get in closer. That was what Capa said made a photographer great, getting in close.