Waiting for Robert Capa (3 page)

“I'm not alone. I have Georg.”

“Georg is too far away.”

Ruth directed her gaze at Gerta again, and this time with a look of disapproval. She always wound up playing the nurse, not because she was a few years older but because that's how things had always been between them. It worried Ruth that Gerta would get into trouble again, and she tried her best to help Gerta avoid it, unaware that sometimes destiny switches the cards on you so that while you're busy escaping the dog, you find yourself facing the wolf. The unexpected always arrives without any signs announcing it, in a casual manner, the same way it could simply choose to never arrive. Like a first date or a letter. They all eventually arrive. Even death arrives, but with this, you have to know how to wait.

“Today, I met a semi-crazy Hungarian,” Ruth added with a complicit wink. “He wants to photograph me. He said he needs a blonde for an advertisement series he's working on. Imagine, some Swiss life insurance company…” she said, and then her face lit up with a smile that was part mocking, part mild vanity.

The reality was, anyone could have imagined her in one of those ads. Her face was the picture of health, rosy and framed by a blond bob parted to the left, with a patch of waves over her forehead that gave her the air of a film actress. Next to her, Gerta was undeniably a strange beauty with her gamin haircut, her severe cheekbones and slightly malicious eyes with flecks of green and yellow.

Now the two were laughing out loud, slouching in their wicker chairs. That's what Gerta liked most about her friend: the ability to always find the funny side to things, take her out of the darkest corners of her mind.

“How much is he going to pay you?” she asked in all pragmatism, never forgetting that however appealing the idea was to them, they were still trying to survive. And it wasn't the first time that modeling had paid a few days' rent or at least a meal out, for them.

Ruth shook her head, as if she truly felt bad dashing her friend's hopes like that.

“He's one of us,” she said. “A Jew from Budapest. He doesn't have a franc.”

“Too bad!” Gerta said, deliberately smacking her lips in a theatrical manner. “Is he at least handsome then?” she mused.

She had gone back to being the happy and frivolous girl from the tennis club in Waldau. But it was only a distant reflex. Or maybe not. Perhaps there were two women trapped inside her. The Jewish adolescent who wanted to be Greta Garbo, who adored etiquette, expensive dresses, and the classic poems she knew by heart. And the activist, tough, who dreamed of changing the world. Greta or Gerta. That very night, the latter was going to gain territory.

Chez Capoulade was located in a windowless basement on 63 Boulevard Saint-Michel. For months, leftist militants from all over Europe had started gathering there. Many of them were German and a few were from the Leipzig group, like Willi Chardack. The place was dimly lit, no brighter than a cave, and at the last minute everyone would show up: the impatient ones, the hard-core ones, the severe ones, those in favor of direct action, the ones that could be trusted. Impassioned looks, irritated gestures, lowering their voices to say that André Breton had joined the Communist Party, or to quote an editorial in
Pravda
, smoking cigarette after cigarette, like young privateers, quoting Marx, others Trotsky, in a strange dialect of concepts and retractions, theories and controversies. Gerta didn't participate in the ideological discussion. She kept herself at a distance, focused within herself. Not able to grasp it all. She was there because she was Jewish and anti-Fascist, and perhaps because of a sense of pride that didn't fit well within that language of axioms, quotes, anathemas, and dialectical and historical materialism. Her head was busy with other words, ones she heard that very morning near the Austerlitz station. Words that she was able to erase from her head for a while but that would return, with the grating sound of a handsaw, when she least expected.

“Je te connais
,
je sais qui tu es.”

D
eep in thought, she walked behind them without a single misstep. Ruth had insisted she join them, leaving her with no other choice. The filtered light beneath the trees in the Luxembourg Garden made it feel as though they were passing through a huge crystal dome; it was one of literature's most frequented walks. Out of nowhere, Ruth ran beneath a horse-chestnut. Wearing a maroon-colored coat, she rested her back up against its trunk and smiled. Click. She had a talent for posing. From an angle, her face resembled one you would see in classic art. The sky cropped above her head like the jaw of an antelope. Click. With her coat collar lifted, she took three steps forward and then back, making a funny face to the camera, her head tilted to one side. Click. Without batting an eye, she passed right by the statues of the great masters: Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine … bowing her head slightly when she came upon the bust of Chopin. Click. The sunlight scattered itself, like in a painting, over the tallest branches. Along the central path, her footsteps crunched over the gravel. The French were always so concerned with rationalizing spaces, putting up iron gates on the countryside. She ran her fingers over the surface of the pond and playfully splashed the photographer. Click.

Gerta observed and remained silent, as if this had nothing to do with her. Ultimately, she had gone only because her friend didn't fully trust the Hungarian. Although there was something about the spectacle that fascinated her. She had never been interested in photography, but to predict the invisible selection process of the mind when framing a shot seemed to her an exercise in absolute precision. Just like hunting.

The camera was light and compact, a high-speed 35-mm Leica with a focal-plane shutter.

“I just rescued her from a pawnshop.”

The Hungarian excused himself, smiling, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. His name, André Friedmann. Black eyes, very black, like a cocker spaniel's, a small, moon-shaped scar over his left brow, a turtleneck, a film actor's good looks, upper lip slightly curled in an expression of disdain.

“She's my girlfriend,” he joked, caressing the camera. “I can't live without her.”

He had come with a Polish friend of his, David Seymour, who was also a photographer and Jewish. They called him Chim. He was thin and wore the glasses of an intellectual. It appeared as if they'd been friends a long time; both the kind who come off as uncouth, who place their glass on the table and never turn away anything that comes their way. Theirs was a friendship like Gerta and Ruth's, to some degree, although different. It's always different with men.

As they strolled around the Latin Quarter, they all took turns telling their stories, where they came from, how they ended up there, their refugee adventures … There was also the decorative part: Paris, September, the tall trees, the time that passes quickly when you are young or far away, or, better yet, when you're next to the Rue du Cherche-Midi, the sound of an accordion rising like a red fish over the pavement … By then Gerta had enough time to study the situation up close. Walking alongside André as if this was the natural order of things. They kept each other's pace, without tripping or getting in the way, though keeping their distance. Gerta took her time smoking and talking, without looking at him directly, focused solely on her analysis. She found him to be a bit conceited, handsome, ambitious, and like anyone, overly predictable at times. Seductive, without a doubt; also a tad vulgar, rough around the edges, and lacking in manners. That's when, while crossing Canal Saint-Martin, his hand reached under her blouse to touch her waist in an invasive manner. It didn't last more than a tenth of a second, but it was enough. Pure phosphorus. Gerta was immediately put on guard. But who the hell did this Hungarian think he was? She was brusque in her approach, looking as if she were about to say something unpleasant, her pupils radiant with green embers of rage. André just smiled a little, in a way that was simultaneously sincere and helpless. Almost shy. Like a child who has been wrongly accused. There was something in his eyes, a look of uncertainty, and it imbued him with charm. His desire to please became so evident that Gerta felt a vulnerability inside of her, like when she had been scolded as a child for something she hadn't done and sat on the porch steps fighting back the tears. Careful, she thought. Careful. Careful.

At least the photo session was informative. André and Chim discussed photography like members of a secret sect. A new esoteric sect of Judaism, whose course of action could extend from a meeting with Trotsky in Copenhagen to a European tour with the North American comedians Laurel and Hardy, whom André had recently photographed. To Gerta, it seemed an interesting way to earn a living.

“Not really,” he said, disillusioning her. “There's a lot of competition. Half of the refugees in Paris are photographers or aspiring to be.”

He spoke about inks for printing, movies in 35 mm, diaphragm apertures, manual dryers and tumble dryers, as if they were the keys to a whole new universe. Gerta listened, taking it all in. She was happy learning something new.

The day extended itself through plazas and into cafés. It was the perfect moment, when the words have yet to mean so much and everything transpires with levity; like André's mannerism of cupping his fingers to protect the flame for his cigarette. Hands that were tanned and confident. Gerta's way of walking, looking at the ground and veering a little to the left as if she was giving him the opportunity to occupy that space, smiling. Ruth was also smiling, though her smile was different, tinged with fatalism and resignation due to her friend's leading role, as if she were thinking,
Go with Little Miss Innocent
. But she wasn't serious. Just a little game of female rivalry. She walked behind them, offering the Pole some of her conversation because that was the part she'd been given to play that evening and she gave it her best. Today for you. Tomorrow for me. Chim just let her talk, somewhere between fascination and condescension. Watching her from a distance, the way certain men will look at women they consider out of reach. Each of them in their own way felt the effects of the moon that had peeked out into a corner of the sky that night. Bright, luminous, like a life full of possibilities still waiting to be revealed. Of mathematical probabilities and uncertain beginnings. Somewhere out there, in some roundabout of the night, colorful Chinese lanterns, music from a phonograph … The four of them dined in a restaurant André had recommended that had small tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths. They ordered the most economical menu option, which consisted of rye bread, cheeses, and white wine. Chim pointed to a busy table in the back of the place, where the conversation revolved around a tall man wearing a wool hat with some kind of miner's light attached to it.

“It's Man Ray,” he said. “He's always surrounded by writers. The man beside him with the tie and hatchet face is named James Joyce. A strange character. Irish. But he's worth listening to when he's very drunk.”

Afterward, Chim pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger and fell into silence again. He didn't speak much, but when he did, whether induced by alcohol or not, he spoke about personal things, in a low voice, as if directed at his shirt collar. Gerta felt an immediate sympathy for him. He was shy and cultured, like an erudite Talmudist.

On the phonograph, Josephine Baker sang
“J'ai deux amours,”
which made Gerta think of avenues, narrow and black, like eels. Murmurs of conversation undulated all around, clouds of cigarette smoke, the perfect ambiance for sharing intimate feelings.

André carried the weight of the conversation. He'd let his words fall like someone who was out to narrow the gap. He spoke with vehemence, sure of himself, pausing every now and then to take a drag of his cigarette before starting up again. They'd been in Paris for more than a year, he said, trying to make their way, surviving on advertising assignments and sporadic work. Chim worked for
Regard
, the Communist Party's magazine, and lived on the specific assignments he was given by different agencies. It was important to have friends. And André had them. He knew people in the Agence Centrale and at the Anglo-Continental—the Hungarian diaspora, like Hug Block, who was a real handful, but he could rely on the Hungarians. He told jokes, smiled, said whatever popped into his head. Sometimes he'd look to see what was going on in the back of the place. Then turn back and fix his eyes on Gerta again. It was as if, with all of this, he was trying to say, these are my credentials. Keeping her chin down and eyes looking up, she listened with reflective thoughts of her own as he spoke. The expression on her face wasn't offering any easy promises, either. There was something punishing in it, with a fixed penetration, as if she were comparing or trying to distinguish what she had heard from what she was now hearing, perhaps venturing into judgments that weren't the kindest. To André, they were surprisingly light eyes, the color of olive oil, streaked with green and violet, like those flowers in the Budapest gardens of his childhood. He continued talking with confidence. Sometimes someone from l'Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires would send him a wire. Refugee solidarity. One of those gatherings hosted by the association was precisely how he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, a tall and aristocratic Norman, slightly surrealist, with whom he began developing photographs in his apartment's bidet.

“If they label you as a surrealist photographer, it's over,” said André. His French was terrible, but he made an effort. “Nobody will offer you work. You become a real hothouse flower. But if you say you're a press photographer, the world is yours.”

He didn't need to be asked direct questions to tell you his life. He was extroverted, a chatterbox, effusive. To Gerta he appeared too young. She estimated he was twenty-four or twenty-five years old. In reality, he had just turned twenty and still displayed a certain naïveté that boys can have when they pretend to be heroes. He exaggerated and embellished his own exploits. But he had charisma; when he spoke, all there was room for was to listen. Like when he told the story about the rebellion against Daladier's government. February 6, a rainy day. The Fascists had announced a colossal demonstration in front of the Palais Bourbon, and, in response, the Left organized several counterprotests of their own. It resulted in a pitched battle.