Waiting for Robert Capa (6 page)

“When I walk around the neighborhood with André, I'll look up at a balcony and suddenly, there's the photo: a woman hanging out her clothes to dry. It's something that has life, the antithesis of smiling and posing. Enough with having to know where one should be looking. I'm learning. I like the Leica; it's small and doesn't weigh a thing. You can take up to thirty-six shots in a row without having to carry around a light stand with you everywhere. In the bathroom, we've set up a darkroom. I help André, writing the photo captions, typing in three languages, and every now and again I'm able to get an ad assignment for Alliance Photo. It's not much, but it allows me to practice and get to know the inside world of journalism. The scene is not encouraging. It's not easy to break through; you have to elbow your way in. At least André has good contacts. Ruth and I got a new job typing up handwritten screenplays for Max Ophüls. I'm also still working at René's office on Thursday afternoons. With all of this we have enough to pay the rent, though it barely lasts us until the end of the month. But at least I don't owe anyone money. Oh, and we have a new roommate, a parrot from Guiana, a present from André, with an orange-colored beak and a black tongue—poor thing arrived a bit beaten up. Ruth has resigned herself to teaching it French, but it still hasn't said a single word, prefers to whistle the “Turkish March.” It can't fly, either, although he feels at liberty to move around the house bow-legged like an old pirate. They wrote his name for us, but we decided to call him Captain Flint. What else?

“Chim gave me a photo that his friend Stein took of me and André at the Café de Flore. I hardly recognize myself. I'm wearing my beret to the side and I'm smiling, looking down as if someone were telling me a secret. André is wearing a sporty jacket and a tie and appears to have just said something funny. Things have started going better for him, and he can afford fancier clothes, although he doesn't manage to put them together so well, you might say. He'll look right at me, trying to detect my reaction, smiling, or barely. We look as if we were lovers. That Stein will go far with his photography. He's good at waiting for the moment. He knows exactly when to press the shutter. Only we aren't lovers or anything close to the sort. I have a past. There's Georg. He writes me every week from San Gimignano. We're born with a mapped-out route. This one, not that one. Who you dream with. Who you love. It's one or the other. You choose without choosing. That's how it is. Each of us travels on their own path. Besides, how do you love someone without truly knowing who they are? How do you travel that distance when there's all that you don't know about the other?

“Sometimes I am tempted to tell André what happened in Leipzig. He also doesn't speak much about what he's left behind, though he's capable of talking for hours on end about anything else. I know that his mother's name is Júlia and that he has a little brother whom he adores tremendously, Cornell. There have only been a few occasions in which he opens a window onto his life for me to look through. He's extremely guarded. I, too, grow silent sometimes when I look back in time and see my father standing in the gymnasium's doorway in Stuttgart, waiting for me to tie my shoelaces, growing a bit impatient, glancing at his watch. Then I can hear Oskar and Karl in the stands, cheering me on:
‘Go
,
Little Trout
…' It's been ages since someone has called me that. It's been ages since we went down to the river to throw stones. Cleaned the mud off our shoes with blades of grass. On nights like these, I wonder if it's as painful for them to be remembered as it is for me to remember them. They have had to escape several times from the Führer and his decrees. Now they're in Petrograd, with our grandparents, near the Romanian border. It's a small Serbian village that's never had an anti-Semitic tradition, and because of this, I worry less. I don't know if I'll ever be able to feel proud of being Jewish; I'd like to be more like André, who isn't affected by this in the least. To him, it's like being Canadian or Finnish. Never could I comprehend the Hebrew tradition of identifying with your ancestors: ‘When we were expelled from Egypt…' Listen, I was never expelled from Egypt. For better or for worse, I can't carry that load with me. I don't believe in that kind of
we
. Organized groups are just a bunch of excuses. Only the action of an individual holds a moral meaning, at least in this life. Frankly, the other kind doesn't convince me. It's true that the beautiful parts we were taught as children exist. The story of Sarah, for example, or the angel who held on to Abraham's arm, the music, the Psalms…

“I remember that on Yom Kippur, the day where it's written that each man should forgive his neighbor, they dressed us in our best clothes. There was a photo on top of the bureau, of Karl and Oskar wearing baggy pants and new shirts. I was wearing a short dress with cherries all over it. Skinny legs. My hair was in a bun on top of my head, like a little gray cloud. Images are never forgotten. Photography's mystery.”

Knock-knock … someone tapped lightly on the door. It had been a while since she last heard the pounding of the typewriter keys in the room next to hers. It must have been around one in the morning. When Ruth peeked in, she saw Gerta sitting with a notebook on her knees, all wrapped up in a blanket, with her third cigarette of insomnia hanging from the edge of her mouth.

“You're still awake?”

“I was about to go to sleep.” Gerta apologized like a little girl caught doing something wrong.

“You shouldn't keep a diary,” said Ruth, pointing to the redcovered notebook that Gerta had placed on top of her nightstand. “You never know into whose hands it may fall.” She was right: this went completely against the basic norms of keeping a low profile.

“Right…”

“Then why do you do it?”

“Don't know,” Gerta said, shrugging. Then she put out her cigarette in a small, chipped plate. “I'm afraid of forgetting who I am.”

It was true. We all have a secret fear. A terror that's intimate, that's ours, differentiating us from the rest. A unique fear, precise.

Fear of not recognizing your own face in the mirror, of getting lost on a sleepless night in a foreign city after drinking several glasses of vodka. Fear of others, of being devastated by love or, worse, by loneliness. Fear as extreme consciousness of a reality that you only discover at a given moment, although it's always been there. Fear of remembering what you did or what you were capable of doing. Fear as an end to innocence, rupturing a state of grace. Fear of the lake house with the tulips, fear of swimming too far from the edge, fear of dark and viscous waters on your skin when there's no longer a trace of firm earth beneath your feet. Fear with a capital
F. F
as in
Fatal
or to
Finish Off
. Fear of the constant fog of autumn over those remote neighborhoods through which she has to pass on Thursdays, with its deserted plazas and scant faces, a beggar here, a woman pushing a cart full of wood over on the other corner. And the sounds of her own footsteps, their tone soft, quick, and moist … as if they weren't hers but those of someone following her from a distance, one, two, one, two … that relentless, threatening feeling you carry with you in your neck all the way home, beret tightly in place, hands in pockets, that pressing need to run. Like when she was a little girl and had to cross the alleyway from the bakery to Jakob's house, holding her breath as she climbed the stairs, two by two, until she rang the doorbell and the light went on, and she was in safe haven. Easy, she'd say to herself while trying to slow down her pace. Take it easy. If she stood still for a moment, the echo would stop, if she started up again, the rhythm would pick up again, repeating itself: one, two, one, two, one, two, one two … Once in a while she turned her head to look and there was nothing. Nothing. Maybe it was all in her head.

S
he sat for a while, contemplating the page she finished typing. Engrossed in it, unaware of its content but conscious of the porosity of the paper, the impression each character had left. Black ink. Alongside the typewriter, there was a stack of handwritten pages with green blotting paper between them. Gerta twisted the roller, removed the sheet, and began reading it closely: “In the face of Nazism spreading itself throughout Europe, we are left with only one solution: uniting Communists, Socialists, Republicans, and other Leftist parties, into one anti-Fascist coalition that will facilitate the formation of wide-ranging political groupings (…). The alliance of all democratic forces into one Popular Front.”

“What do you think, Captain Flint?” she said, looking up at the shelf where they set up the trapeze for the bird to do its stunts. Since André had left for Spain, she found herself talking more to the parrot. Another of her tactics for combating loneliness. Just like her return to being her old militant self. She felt the urgent need to help, be useful, serve a purpose. But in what? Not a clue. She tried to find out by going back to the gatherings at Chez Capoulade, which had only grown more popular with time. Woman-echo, Woman-reflection, Woman-mirror. Inside, there was always too much cigarette smoke. Too much noise. Gerta grabbed her glass of vodka, still half-full, and went outside to sit on the edge of the sidewalk and smoke a cigarette. She sat there, hugging her knees, looking up at the patchy sky, a star here, another there, between eave and eave, with a faint orange glow toward the west. She felt good like this, breathing in the aroma of lime trees during spring's recent debut. The silence of that city appealed to her, with its labyrinth of stoned promenades creeping down to the river. That calm brought her peace. It allowed her to organize her thoughts. She remained like this awhile, until someone placed their hand on her shoulder. It was Erwin Ackerknecht, her old friend from Leipzig.

“We need someone to type the text to the manifesto in French, English, and German,” he said, taking a seat next to her on the pavement. “The more intellectuals we can gather the better. We have to make this congress a success.” He was referring to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which was to be held in Paris in the early fall. Erwin took his time rolling a cigarette between his fingers, then wetting the paper with his lips to seal it. “Aldous Huxley and Forster have already confirmed their attendance,” he added, “as well as Isaac Babel and Boris Pasternak from the USSR. Representing us will be Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, and Robert Musil, from Austria. The Americans still haven't confirmed … It's important that this document reaches everyone, Gerta, each one of them, in their own language. Can we count on you for this?”

“Of course,” she said. She took a sip of her vodka drink, allowing the alcohol to find its way into her veins, passing through her heart and up to her brain. She found it tasted harsh, mixed with the tobacco. Brushing a patch of hair off her forehead, she looked out into the sky. Like just another sentry in the night, Saint-Germaindes-Prés' thousand-year-old abbey and its Romanesque bell tower stood tall, framed in black.

In recent weeks, the surrealists' controversies had shifted away from poetic boundaries to concentrate instead on the reality that was being reported in the media. Their desires grew dim, and the small group from the Left Bank temporarily abandoned the astral heights of Mount Olympus and muses with green-colored eyes, so they could take part in the world's grand whirlwind. While they awaited further news, a latent conflict persisted between those who accepted the revolutionary party's plans and those who still aspired to unite the revolution with poetry. It was not a trifling matter. Walking down the boulevard one afternoon, André Breton, on his way to buy tobacco at the shop next to Dôme, bumped into the Russian Stalinist Ilya Ehrenburg, just as the latter was leaving. Neither chose their words carefully. The poet took a deep breath and, on the same impulse, punched Ehrenburg in the nose with a crack that sounded as if a chair had broken. It wasn't a premeditated act. It simply happened. Caught by surprise, the Russian didn't have time to react. Weakened by the blow, he fell to his knees, dripping a scandalously red-colored blood over the gray pavement. Afterward, as if they were all possessed, it turned into a messy battle with everyone against everyone. There were insults; some people got up to help the wounded man, while others tried to calm the poet's fury. They tried to lift the Russian, get him out of there, until someone shouted something about calling the police, and in that moment they all decided to walk away from the boxing match between mastiffs until the next time. A few days later, René Crevel, the poet in charge of trying to make peace between the surrealists and the Communists, committed suicide in his kitchen by opening the gas valve.

“It's always necessary to say good-bye,” he wrote, having lost hope. “Tomorrow, you will return to the fog of your origins. To a city, red and gray, your colorless room, its silver walls, and with windows that open directly onto the clouds to which you are sister. To search for the shadow of your face throughout the sky, the gestures of your fingers…”

That was the state of things when Gerta found herself obliged to choose between two options she didn't like. It was no secret how dissidents in the Soviet Union were repressed, but in that small Montparnasse community, the sacred dwelling of the gods, many were unsure whether to denounce Stalin's abuses or keep them quiet in order to preserve the unified band of anti-Fascists.

She thought for a while, as if floating over an abyss, with the manifesto in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She wasn't reading the words, just smoking and looking at the white fabric covering the sofa, and the shelf with the clay figurines that Ruth bought from a peddler. Despite all their efforts to convert that place into a home, it never stopped being a temporary camp: the taped-up glass on the kitchen doors, a map of Europe in the living room, the hallways lined with stacks of books on the floor, a small bottle with lilacs in the window, random photographs tacked onto the wall … André, with the sleeves of his blazer rolled up, waving good-bye from the Gare de l'Est. She missed him, of course she did. But it wasn't something irreparable; more like a gentle sensation untangling itself imperceptibly. Without a loud roar, but with a kind of familiarity. Nothing serious. She had opened up the window and propped her elbows on the windowsill when a breeze came her way, refreshing her skin and memory: mornings spent running around the neighborhood with the Leica; André's teachings, his way of installing himself in time without ever looking at a watch, as if it was up to everyone else to adapt to his rhythm; the day he arrived with Captain Flint on his shoulder; the false negligence with which he kept his developing liquids on the top shelf of the bathroom; his way of always showing up at the last minute with a bottle of wine under his coat and a basket of trout, fresh off the boat; the way he laughed while turning on the kitchen stove, while Chim spread out the tablecloth and Ruth removed the plates and glasses from the cupboard and arranged the silverware on the table in pure gala style. The quick carelessness in all his gestures. His arrogance at times, fused with a peculiar aptitude to be what he didn't seem to be and to appear as he wasn't. Behind which mask was he hiding? Which was he? The happy bohemian and seducer or the lonely man who could sometimes fall into silence on the other side of a collapsing bridge? “I'm nothing, nothing.” Gerta remembered how he told her this near the edge of the Seine. He used his fragility to hide his pride. Perhaps all his charm was rooted in his ability to pretend: in the shyness he instinctively hid his courage within, his way of smiling, or shrugging his shoulders, as if nothing was wrong, when in reality he was furious. So many contradictions: his blazer hanging open, those strong hands, his worldly air, and that rare ingenuity of an obedient child when he allowed someone to counsel him on his wardrobe. But that costume game brought results. If it wasn't for that respectable new image that wearing a jacket and tie gave him,
Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung
magazine would never have given him that assignment he was now on in Spain. At first he was hesitant about accepting the offer, because the magazine, like all German publications, found itself part of Goebbels's iron-fisted propaganda machine. But he wasn't exactly in a position to be able to choose or reject his projects. All he was asked to do was interview the Basque boxer Paulino Uzcudun, scheduled to fight the German heavyweight champion Max Schmeling in an upcoming match in Berlin.