Waiting for Robert Capa

She couldn’t say then what it was that didn’t convince her about the Hungarian that eyed her so probingly, one hand holding his elbow, with a cigarette between two fingers. Without a doubt, there was something.

André Friedmann seemed to always land on his feet, like a cat. Only he could sink so deep and still maintain his boss’s confidence; or travel on a German train with a passport and no visa, casually show the inspector an ornate bill from a restaurant instead of proper documentation, and actually get away with it. One of the two: either he was very clever or he had a gift for tipping the balance in his favor. As she studied them closer, neither of the two was especially reassuring, in Gerta’s eyes.

“You know what being lucky is?” he asked, looking her straight in the face. “It’s being at a bar in Berlin just as a Nazi SS officer begins to smash a Jewish cobbler’s face, and not being the cobbler but the photographer who was able to take out his camera in time. Luck is something stuck to the bottoms of your shoes. You either have it or you don’t.”

Gerta thought about her star. I have it, she thought. But she kept it to herself.

André brushed the hair off his forehead and looked toward the back of the place again, at nothing in particular, momentarily in a daze. Sometimes he stared off into the distance, as if he were somewhere else. We all miss something, a house, the street that we played on as kids, an old pair of skis, the boots we wore to school, the book we learned to read with, the voice yelling at us from the kitchen to finish our milk, the sewing room at the back of the house, the clatter of the pedals. Homelands don’t exist. It’s an invention. What does exist is that place where we were once happy. Gerta realized that André liked to return there sometimes. He’d be talking to everyone, boasting about something, smiling, smoking, when suddenly, out of nowhere, he’d get that look in his eye, and he was far away. Very far.

“Watch, you’ll wind up sleeping with him,” Ruth predicted when they finally arrived at their doorstep at dawn.

“Not for all the money in the world,” she said.

Chapter Four

Any life, as brief as it may appear, contains plenty of misconceptions, situations that are difficult to explain, arrows that get lost in the clouds like phantom planes, and if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. It isn’t easy piecing together all that information. Even if it’s only for your own ears to hear. That’s what the psychoanalysts were doing with their dream studies. Quicksand, winding staircases, melting pocket watches, and things like that. But Gerta’s dreams were difficult to grasp or to try and frame. They were hers. What had her childhood been like up until then? A betrayal of those around her or else dreaming of another life?

She had found a modest paying job as a part-time secretary in the office of the émigré doctor René Spitz, a disciple of Freud. The majority of the pages in the early editions of his journals were filled with articles on dream interpretation. It was a world that wasn’t completely foreign to Gerta. When work was slow, she would avidly read all the case studies, as if wanting to uncover a secret about her own life.

Everyone tries to manage their dreams in their own way. Sometimes, when she returned home, she would sit on her bed with an old box of quince candy that she used to store her treasures in: a pair of Egyptian amber earrings, photographs, a silver medallion with the silhouette of a ship, a pen drawing of the port in Ephesus that Georg had given her their last summer together. She suddenly felt the need to grasp at those memories like straws, as if they could protect her from something. From someone. She returned to the world of Georg as one shields oneself with armor. Constantly repeating his name. She forced herself to write to him as much as she could. Made plans to go see him in Italy. Something had stirred itself up inside, irritated her, left her disconcerted, and she sought refuge in an old lover. This was her limbo, trapped somewhere between reality and fiction. Why? Ruth studied her behavior while keeping her thoughts to herself. Recognizing the same defense mechanisms she’d seen her use as a girl.

One morning, when Gerta was nine and a student at the Queen Charlotte School, her teacher punished her by not allowing her to go and play outside. She pretended that she didn’t care, as if she had always disliked having to go outdoors anyway. When Frau Hellen announced that her punishment was over, she stood her ground. For an entire year she remained indoors, reading alone at her desk, not wanting to grant the teacher the satisfaction of believing she had wounded Gerta. It wasn’t that she was proud, just different. She never dealt well with being Jewish. Inventing stories about where she came from, like Moses saved from the water, or that she was the daughter of Norwegian whalers or pirates or, based on the novel she was reading, that her brothers formed part of King Arthur’s Round Table, or that she had a star…

But there were other sorts of dreams, of course there were. There was the lake, the table covered in linen, a vase with tulips, John Reed’s book, and a pistol. That was a whole other story.

Once, as she was leaving the doctor’s office, she sensed someone walking behind her, but when she turned around to look, there was no one there, just a bunch of trees and streets. She kept walking from the Porte d’Orleans, through that area of vacant lands, and past Boulevard Jourdan, with a feeling of uneasiness at her back, as if she could hear a light squeaking of rubber soles. Every now and again a gust of wind would come, rustling up the papers and leaves, almost taking her and her scant 110 pounds with it as well. Bundled up in her coat and gray beret, she walked, eyeing the windows of the closed storefronts, seeing no one’s reflection but her own. October and its shadows of longing.

She was thin, mostly due to fatigue. She slept poorly, burdened by a flood of blurry memories. It seemed centuries had passed since she abandoned Leipzig, yet she still hadn’t found her place in this city.

“I know that one day I arrived in Paris,” she would tell René Spitz in his office one afternoon when she decided to change her medical coat for the couch. “I know that for a while I lived at other people’s expense, doing what others did, thinking what others thought.” It was true. The reoccurring feeling that bothered her most was living a life that wasn’t hers. But which was hers? She’d look at herself apprehensively in the bathroom mirror, staring at each of her features, as if at any given moment she could undergo a transformation with the fear that she’d no longer recognize herself. Until one day the change happened. She grabbed onto the sink with both hands, stuck her head beneath the faucet for a few minutes, and then shook her head to the sides like a dog in the rain. Afterward, she returned to studying herself in the mirror. Then, with the utmost care, she covered her hair, strand by strand, with red henna clay, using her fingers to comb it all back. She liked the color of dried blood.

“You look like a raccoon,” Ruth said when she came home and found Gerta underneath a pile of blankets. Her red hair made her face appear harder and thinner.

Inside her house, she never hesitated to display who she really was. But outside, at the café gatherings, she became someone else. Dividing yourself in two, that was the first rule of survival: knowing how to differentiate exterior life from interior suffering. It was something she learned to do from an early age, in the same manner she learned how to express herself well in German at school and go home afterward and speak in Yiddish. By the end of the day, all curled up in her pajamas with a book, Gerta was nothing more than a pilgrim before the walls of a foreign city. On the outside, no less, she continued being the smiling princess with green eyes and flared pants, who had managed to dazzle the entire Left Bank.

Paris was one big party. With a simple bike wheel, wine rack, and a urinal, the Dadaists were capable of converting any night into an improvised spectacle. There was smoking, an ever-increasing amount of drinking, vodka, absinthe, champagne … Every day a manifesto was signed. In favor of popular art, by the Araucanian Indians, from the cabinet of Dr. Caligari, of Japanese trees … That’s how they passed the time. The texts written one day were compared to ones written on others. The Paris carousel and Gerta giving it a whirl, turning on herself. She signed manifestos, assisted political meetings, read Man’s Fate by Malraux, bought a ticket for a trip to Italy she never took, drank far too much some nights, and, above all, saw him again. Him. André. She even dreamed of him. Though it was more of a nightmare. He pressed down on her chest, completely aroused, making it impossible for her to breathe. She woke up screaming, with a frightened look in her eyes, staring straight at the pillow. Not wanting to move or rest her head on the same part of the bed. Perhaps that dream happened later on, who knows … It’s also not that important. The fact was, she saw him again.

Of course, there’s always chance. As well as destiny. There are parties, mutual friends who are photographers, electricians, or awful poets. Besides, everyone knows how small the world is, and that in one of its corners you can fit a terrace-balcony, from which you can see the Seine, hear the voice of Josephine Baker, like a long, dark street, and on which, just as she was heading back inside, the Hungarian grabbed her by the arm to ask her:

“Is it you?”

“Well,” she responded in a dubious fashion, “not always.”

The two share a laugh as if they’ve known each other for ages.

“I didn’t recognize you,” said André. Looking both shocked and amused, with a slight wink of the left eye, as if at any moment he would lunge like a hunter over its captive. “This bright red looks good on you.”

“Perhaps,” she said, readjusting her elbows on the balcony railing. She was going to say something about the Seine, about how beautiful the river looked with the moon looming over it, when she heard him say:

“It’s not surprising that on nights like these people leap from bridges.”

“What?”

“Oh nothing, it’s just some verse,” he said.

“No, really, I didn’t hear you because of the music.”

“That sometimes I want to kill myself, Red. Get it?” He said it loud and clear this time. Taking her chin in his hand and looking her straight in the eyes, never erasing that slightly sarcastic smile from his face.

“Yes, this time I heard you, and you don’t have to yell,” she said, taking the glass from his hand without his noticing. She hadn’t realized until then that he was completely drunk.

A short time after, they were alone, walking along the riverbank, she letting him do the talking, half of her paying attention, the other half pitying him, as if he had come down with a fever or some harmless sickness that would soon pass.

What he had, which might very well pass or not, could be called deception, wounded pride, a desire to be fussed over, exhaustion … He had just returned from an assignment for Vu magazine in Saarland.

“Sarre…” he said its name in French as if he were dreaming.

But Gerta understood what he was trying to say. In other words, the League of Nations, carbon, bonjour, guten Tag … and all of that. André had told her that he had been in Saarbrücken during the last week of September, where there were posters and banners with swastikas everywhere. They walked along the river’s edge, staggering slightly, him more than her, gazing at the moon, her coat collar up, shielding her from the night fog. He had gone with a journalist friend named Gorta, who—he went on to say—with his hair long and straight like a Sioux, was more like a Dostoevsky character than a John Reed. Carbonfilled clouds in the shape of whirlwinds had snuck into all parts of the city. There are steady winds and variable winds. Ones that change direction with a force that can knock down both jockey and horse. Winds that suddenly reorient themselves, turning the hands of time counterclockwise. Winds that can blow for years. Winds of the past that live in the present.

André’s speech wasn’t very well put together. He jumped from one thing to another, without transitions, using awkward wording. But nonetheless, Gerta, for some reason, at least that night, could see through his words as if they were images: at the forefront, an image of a cyclist reading the lists the Nazis had posted on the streetlamps, workers drinking beer below an equilateral cross or passed out in the shade beside the trash containers, the filthy gray of the sky, Saarbrücken’s main street filled with banners hanging from its balconies, crowds of people leaving factories, cafés, greeting one another with a “Heil Hitler,” their arm raised, their smile casual, innocent, as if saying “Merry Christmas.”

There were still a few months left until the plebiscite’s outcome would decide if the territory would join with France or become a part of Germany. But, judging from the photos, there wasn’t a doubt. The entire carbon basin had been won over by Fascism. SARRE—WARNING—HIGH ALERT was how the report’s headline read. The images and text credited to a special correspondent by the name of Gorta. André’s name did not appear anywhere in the report. As if the photographs were not his.

“I don’t exist,” he said with hands in his coat pockets, shoulders slumped, though she spotted the vertical lines at the corners of his mouth hardening. “I’m nobody.” Now he smiled bitterly. “Just a ghost with a camera. A ghost photographing other ghosts.”

Perhaps it was right then and there that she decided to adopt that man abandoned at the edge of the Seine, with those cocker spaniel eyes. Soon after, they found themselves sitting on a wooden bench. Listening to the trees, the river. Gerta with her knees to her chest, hugging her legs. For certain women, there’s great danger in having someone place a fairy godmother’s wand in their hands. I’ll save you, she thought. I can do it. It may cost me and you might not deserve it, but I’m going to save you. There isn’t a more powerful sensation than this. Not love, piety, or desire. Though Gerta still hadn’t learned this, she was too young. That’s why, somewhere along the way, she rubbed his head with a gesture that was a cross between messing up his hair and taking his temperature.

“Don’t worry,” she said in a good fairy’s voice, poking her chin over her sweater. “The only thing you need is a manager.”

She smiled. Her teeth were small and bright, with a tiny gap separating the two front ones. It wasn’t the smile of a full-fledged woman but of a young girl—better yet, a fearless boy. An adventurous smile, the kind you put on in front of your opponent during a game. Tilting her head slightly to one side, inquisitive, teasing, as the idea ran through her head like a mouse in the floorboards above.

“I’m going to be your manager.”

Chapter Five

It was all a game at first. That shirt I like, that one I don’t. While he went into a changing room at La Samaritaine department store, she would wait for him at the entrance of the dressing area outside. Lounging with blasé entitlement on some sort of a red velvet sofa with her legs crossed, swinging one foot back and forth, until she saw him step out transformed into a fashion figure. Then, with arched eyebrows, she’d mockingly look him up and down, make him take the bullfighter’s lap of honor, scrunching her nose a bit before giving him her approval. In reality, he looked like a film star: clean-shaven, a white collared shirt and tie, polished shoes, an all-American hairdo. His eyes, on the other hand, were still that of a Gypsy. This could not be fixed.

She enjoyed the distance that he maintained around himself, a space that was necessary in order for each to occupy their place. He was never bothered by her reprimands or when she told him what to do. He began calling her “the boss.” This pact filled them both with a curious energy, as if there were a signal floating between them in the air, meeting at Le Dôme Café without having planned it, or when he passed below her window whistling without a care in the world, or, by coincidence, they both happened to be trying out a new restaurant on the very same night. Although by then, they both knew that their casual meetings were not the least bit casual.

Operation Image Makeover had its immediate results. Gerta was right. Her mother’s teachings had proven themselves once more. Being elegant will not only improve your living, it can also help you earn one. Part two of the Sarre report became André’s rite of passage. An air of success begets success.

Ruth rushed up the stairs with the breakfast baguette in one hand and the new edition of Vu magazine in the other. SARRE, PART TWO, stated the headline. ITS RESIDENTS’ OPINIONS AND WHO THEY WILL VOTE FOR. Gerta, still in pajamas, desperately waited for her in the stairwell, wearing thick socks, her eyes swollen from having just woken up. And though it was still very early, she could hardly contain herself. Pushing aside the teapot and cups, she cleared a space on the kitchen table in order to spread open the magazine as if it were a map of the world. A flashy headline, its words moving across the page in a diagonal, and the photos she had originally seen stuck to the bathroom tiles as contact sheets were now enlarged and well emphasized on the page. She inhaled the smell of fresh ink from the page, as she had with her Magic Markers when she was young. In black lettering, the photo credit read: ANDRÉ FRIEDMANN. Gerta smiled over her gray pajama top and instinctively raised her fist to the air as a sign of victory. Exactly like Joe Jacobs did when he raised Max Schmeling’s winning glove before the flashing cameras. When it comes down to it, not all boxing matches are fought inside the ring.

She liked to think of it as just a temporary alliance, nothing more. A mutual aid society for Jewish refugees. Today for you. Tomorrow for me. Besides, thought Gerta, it was not as if she had nothing to gain from it. She also received something in return. It was comforting to think like this, as if not getting too involved made her feel better. They got into the habit of waking up early to walk through the neighborhood and catch the first cart deliveries of fruit and fish to the markets. Together they’d wander through the streets with all the spices, behind the church of Saint-Séverin. The ringing of the bells passing through them both as they strolled in the fresh morning air, already charged with the smell of carbon and hemp. Foreigners in a dream city. The sky changing from indigo to gold with a soft gleam of light in the east. They were a strangelooking pair: a dark-haired guy dressed in a sweater and a blazer, and a redhead in tennis shoes and a Leica hanging from her shoulder like the bow of Diana the Huntress. She didn’t always carry an extra roll of film with her, because she didn’t want to waste a single franc, but she learned fast. Each kept to their own part of the sidewalk, without brushing up against the other, maintaining their distance. A day with beautiful light, a cigarette … That’s all it was. In just a few weeks, she learned how to use the Leica and develop film in the bathroom using a piece of red cellophane to cover the lamp. André taught her how to get close to the object in question.

“You have to be there,” he’d say, “glued to your prey, lying in wait, in order to be able to shoot at the exact moment, not a second before, not a second after.” Click.

As a result of the lessons, she became more cautious and aggressive. Though when it came time to finding the perfect composition for an image, she lacked determination. She would just stand there on some corner near Notre Dame, focusing in on an old man with a thick beard and astrakhan hat, seeing a fragment of his thin cheek in relation to the Gothic portal of the Last Judgment, and lower her camera. She could capture it all with her eyes, except when it came to the temporal. The gray cobblestoned streets and silvery skies were not of interest to her anymore. It was something else. Perhaps she started to realize that what she was holding in her hands was a weapon. The reason why those long walks began to increasingly become a place to escape oneself, her special way of peeking out into the world—still easily surprised, maybe a tad too contradictory. The way you look at things is also how you think about and confront life. More than anything, she wanted to learn and to change. It was the perfect opportunity to do so, the moment when everything was about to happen, in which life’s course could still alter itself. Many months later, just before daybreak in another country, beneath the rattling of machine guns in minusfive-degree weather, she would remember that initial moment when happiness was going out to hunt and not killing the bird.

“Photography helps my mind wander,” she wrote in her diary. “It’s like when I lie down on the roof at night and look at the stars.” It was one of her favorite things to do during their vacations in Galicia. She’d climb out of her bedroom window and up to the rooftop, position herself face-up, and carve a hole in the night sky with her eyes. Taking in the summer breeze, not thinking about anything, in the middle of complete darkness. “In Paris, there are no stars, but there are the cafés’ red lanterns. They look like new constellations created by the universe. Yesterday, while sitting at an outside table at Le Dôme, I sat in on a passionate debate about the visual power of the image between Chim, André, and that skinny Norm who joins us occasionally. He’s an interesting character, that Henri, well-educated, from a good family, but at times you sense that guilt that people from the upper class have, their conscience conflicted because of their family’s origins, and who then try to excuse themselves by being the most Leftist person at the table. André always teases him, saying that Cartier-Bresson never answers the telephone before reading the editorial in L’Humanité. But it isn’t true. Other than being quick-witted and déclassé, Henri likes to consider himself free. They argue whether a photograph should be a useful documentation or the product of an artistic quest. It seems to me that the three of them think alike, but with different wording. But I don’t fully understand.

“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?