by Whitney Otto
The only thing the camera didn’t pick up was their dislike of each other, fueled by distrust and their desire to win Georges, since neither was the least inclined to share, each wanting his attention as his or hers alone. They buried their mutual aversion beneath a veneer of professionalism and the need to please Georges. All this tension—their physical similarity to each other as well as to Georges, their artistic ambitions, their relationship to love, with one prone to jealousy and the other to indifference—translated into a period of superior work for Georges.
It wasn’t romantic love that fueled Lenny; she wanted to take pictures. Mauritz desired Georges, and he wanted to take pictures. Georges also loved Mauritz but not only Mauritz, thus keeping Mauritz in a perpetual state of jealousy, a jealousy that almost eclipsed Mauritz’s own photographic aspirations. Lenny was troubling for him because Mauritz didn’t want to share Georges, either personally or professionally; it didn’t help that she appeared somehow sexually mutable (her beautiful boy self, her siren self) and that Georges had an appetite for novelty and pretty things, compounded by his own sexuality that refused to stay fixed. The result was a difficult triangle where no one ever relaxed.
The studio was drafty and freezing, though it was only November. Mauritz and Lenny sat near each other, as close as they could to one of two fairly inadequate electric heaters, waiting for Georges, Mauritz seeming a little worn.
Lenny was wearing a cream-colored, heavy shirt made from a nubby fabric and cut almost like the shirt of an American sailor, with its V-neck and loose sleeves. It was nearly as long as her chocolate-colored short skirt with matching chocolate stockings. When she lifted her left arm, the sleeve fell back to reveal a pair of fourteen-karat gold handcuffs, both cuffs on the same arm and connected with a chain, that slid up and down.
“You must think I’m pathetic,” said Mauritz.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t think anything of the sort,” said Lenny.
He sat there fighting back something: the tears, anger, despair that resulted from possessing the person you want without ever feeling as if you actually have him.
Mauritz reached over, traced a finger along the edge of one of the gold cuffs. “Georges wasn’t with me last night,” he said.
Lenny leaned back in her chair, extending her legs. “I just wish he’d get here.”
“Those were a gift, weren’t they?”
She shook her wrist, lightly knocking the cuffs against each other.
“And, I’m guessing, fully functional?”
“What would be the point otherwise?” She now leaned toward him. “Don’t do this, Mauritz. Tell yourself that what he has with you is only with you. And here’s something you know is true: Sex and love as a single thing doesn’t really exist; it’s more like a wish, a story that we tell ourselves when we’re scared that someone will walk away with something that belongs to us.”
“Where were you last night, Lenny?”
She sighed. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Then why not tell me?”
“Because it doesn’t matter.”
When Mauritz began to cry, Lenny stood and, using the long tail of her cream-colored shirt, gently wiped his face. “Mauritz. He wasn’t with me.” She knelt in front of his chair. “But it wouldn’t matter anyway. Do you understand? Now, what shall we do?”
“Why not let me take your portrait?”
In her chair by the heater, she leaned back as she had during their conversation while he arranged the lights and set up the shot.
“Put your left arm—no—up—yes—behind your head—yes.”
The sleeve fell back, the gold handcuffs exposed. When Mauritz looked through the lens, tightening the frame, he noticed what he hadn’t seen when her arm was down: The inside of one cuff was engraved, in rather large script, GSG.
“Like this?” asked Lenny, gazing into the lens.
“No, tilt your head and glance to the side, as if you really can’t figure out what it means to love someone.”
The resulting picture was unusual in that it caught Lenny in an unguarded moment, with a wistfulness and a sweetness, as if she perpetually prowled the perimeters of love without ever stepping inside. When Georges saw it, he was moved by it. And when Lenny saw Georges’s response, and Mauritz’s pride, she laughed it off, mocking the sentimentality of the girl in the picture, saying, “Nice try.”
All color had been leached from Georges’s face when he finally arrived at the studio, interrupting Mauritz and Lenny after a single exposure.
“Where have you been?” asked Mauritz when Georges was scarcely in the door. “We’ve been waiting hours and—”
Georges dropped into one of the chairs.
“What?” asked Lenny. When Georges remained silent, she said, “You’re scaring us.”
“They’ve done it,” he said.
“Who?” asked Mauritz.
“Two hundred synagogues destroyed. Every Jewish business looted. Vandals. Monsters. Thousands of people, thousands beaten, killed—I’m told that half the men have disappeared overnight.” Georges held his head in his hands. “Where did they go? How do you make half the men of Berlin vanish in one night?”
Everyone knew about Germany’s chancellor and the Nazis and their treatment of the Jews. Georges had family in Berlin, furriers to all the best people, and professors. One cousin was a civil servant, one of the few who had kept his position after 1933; Georges’s family tried to tell themselves that, yes, things were bad if you were Jewish, but look, Georges’s cousin’s job was spared; yet they couldn’t quite believe it. They knew about the labor camps, the random violence and theft that German Jews faced every day. Once, Georges’s fourteen-year-old niece was walking home from school when a German woman saw her from the window, came outside, and pulled her into her house to make the girl clean her kitchen.
There were laws affecting their professional lives, their education, their basic rights as citizens. But they still had the press, including one of the highest-circulating newspapers. And they were still German. Someone would see what was happening and stop it. This was Berlin, one of the largest, most worldly metropolises in the world. This was the middle of the twentieth century, for God’s sake, how amok could everything run before someone stepped in and reminded the Germans that German was German? Hadn’t they all suffered in the last war? Hadn’t they all been punished since?
That Georges and Mauritz had felt reasonably safe as Jews living in London never altered the fact of what was happening in Germany and Austria. Berlin. Vienna. These daily events were shocking, but, against the sophistication of Berlin (and the recent tolerance of Weimar) and the grace of Vienna, they seemed an ugly hoax, an epic madness. It was huge. And it was Georges’s cousin. It was his niece doing dishes for a stranger who forced her as she walked home from school. It was Mauritz’s three sisters and his brother and their parents and grandparents.
And now it was this new thing, this unimaginable thing.
“They took apart the cemeteries. People watched people being beaten.”
Lenny knew that Mauritz and Georges had been trying to convince their relatives to leave Germany but they had met a kind of hopeful resistance (“How can we have nothing when we’ve worked so hard?”) or the excuse of someone’s health (“She’s too ill to travel”) or the bureaucracy itself (Germany’s emigration; England’s immigration), and now it was dawning on everyone that (1) no one would save them—
“—people watched people being killed. In front of everyone”—
and (2) it just might be too late.
The Girl in London, 1939
In the same manner that Lenny in Elysium longed for Paris, with Paris setting off a longing for London, so was London creating the predictable (for Lenny) desire to be “anywhere but here.” Then, on September 3, three things happened that changed everything: War was declared, a false-alarm air-raid siren sounded, and Lenny took up with Francis Walker.
It was impossible for Lenny to say which
of the three things made London vital for her again, just when it had begun to feel tired and claustrophobic, but all three together renewed her in the most terrible, beautiful way. She ignored the advisory for all Americans to return home, keeping her studio in Knightsbridge while living almost full-time with Francis Walker at his Hampstead house.
That September, the month of the first air-raid siren, scattered many into basements, Anderson shelters in gardens, and Tube stations, though most people just slowed down, unsure where they wanted to be, and ending up nowhere special. It was also the month children were moved from London to the countryside. This seemed a continuation of children in transit that began with the kindertransport from Germany and Austria, those ten thousand Jewish children who were to be reunited with their parents after the war.
Then nothing more happened.
Lenny continued to work with Georges St. Georges; his distraction over his family, most of whom had emigrated to Paris, meant that she was doing more and more of the photographic work. No one knew the whereabouts of the civil servant cousin, but everyone hoped that he had reached safety after using every connection he had to get Georges’s immediate and extended family to France.
Mauritz had called home one day to find a stranger answering his family’s phone, demanding to know Mauritz’s identity. The stranger said that Mauritz’s family was “busy” and they would ring him. Would he be so kind as to leave a number?” Mauritz hung up, then rang the Italian neighbors he had known his entire life. What they told him made him despair, though they said not to, let them see what they could find out and they would call. They also said that they had a number of possessions in safekeeping for the family, who had wisely been passing things to them during the previous weeks.
Not long after Mauritz talked to them, the Italians, too, disappeared.
“As an American, maybe I can find something out? Maybe it’s possible for me to travel to Berlin?” What Lenny didn’t say was that she wasn’t scared by the prospect of going to Germany because she was fueled by a sense of anger, and of risk. The hatred she felt for the Nazis was pure, and the idea of hating them in person was, she knew, foolhardy; everyone she knew hated them, partly because most of the people she knew and loved were Jewish, meaning that the news of what was happening traveled at a different velocity in her world than it did in the press. Yet it didn’t fully illuminate her desire to be in a dangerous place.
Mauritz was so quiet that Lenny thought he was considering her offer. The longer he said nothing, the more she committed to her plan, until he said, “You aren’t powerful enough to do any good,” before turning and walking away.
Not being powerful enough touched something tender inside of her, so raw and willfully ignored that her hands began to shake.
No one spoke anymore that day, except to say what needed to be said to finish the pictures for BelleFille’s “The New Fashion” section (“A gas mask that folds into a camera bag!” “Is khaki your color?” “This little dickey doubles as a smoke blocker”), but when Mauritz went to leave for the evening, he paused near Lenny and said, “What you said? It didn’t go unnoticed,” before continuing out the door.
Lenny was in her Knightsbridge apartment, which was more of a spacious, airy bed-sitter than a true flat. Along one wall was a tiny kitchen, which Lenny used more often as a jury-rigged darkroom by hanging heavy curtains, and a bathroom. Tall windows looked onto the street two stories below. The plan was for her to spend more time in Hampstead with Francis Walker, and his estranged wife, Natasha, who had made a reappearance since the night of the false alarm. His ex had raced up to his house when the sirens sounded, then never went home. That was a year ago. Natasha was a high-strung woman in the best of times; Lenny didn’t care that she lived with Francis, and often with Lenny. The unexpected result of their threesome was that Natasha seemed more attached to Lenny than she was to Francis, her devotion a shade oppressive and difficult for Lenny, driving her back to her bed-sit more often than not. Francis, too, spent more time at Lenny’s place. Crazy for two people to remain in a single room while Natasha had all that luxury of space back at the house.
Lenny was alone in the apartment, the windows opened wide to the warm day, when she heard the planes. At first, she didn’t think much of it because the sound of the engines was sluggish and grinding, the opposite of flight, nor was this the first instance of planes over London, often on their way to somewhere else. What forced her to the window was that the sound indicated so many planes, not just a few but a swarm (over 300 bombers. Over 600 fighters, she read later).
Then it began.
Lenny moved back from the windows, closing them softly. She sat on the edge of her bed.
For two hours bombs and artillery shells fell from the sky.
• • •
It was the quiet that stirred her from her spot. Checking the clock, she saw that it was nearly six, and she and Francis were having friends for dinner at eight thirty at his house. Why it didn’t occur to her that the dinner might not come off said much about what Lenny did and did not consider an emergency. She was hurriedly packing some clothes and wine for Hampstead when her phone rang once, then was cut off by the most tremendous explosion, which shook the plaster off the ceiling and walls. It was only a moment later when she realized that the same droning planes had sounded just before the explosion.
Everything came unglued in this second air run. The clear skies of the day gave way to a clear night, with the fires of the bombs creating a tracery of flame that aided in the aim of the new planes. Lenny (dinner now definitely canceled) raced up to the roof, standing there as London shook and broke and burned in the night. The sky went darkly pink; she heard the crackle and felt the heat of the fires below. Or maybe she imagined feeling the heat. Billows of smoke rose, illuminated by the fires, before dissipating and leaving the blackness of a bombed building or the miracle of an intact building. There were bursts of light and sound, fountains of sparks, and still the ever-present wave of planes. There was something terrible and gorgeous in all of this.
She should’ve been terrified—watching an air attack? From a roof? Why was novelty stronger than fear? The bombing didn’t end until the small hours of the morning (that deafening noise). She should’ve run, or cowered, or tried to be less alone.
Instead, she felt exhilarated, calm, and not unhappy—all the emotions that she would never, ever, for the rest of her life, admit to anyone.
After that first, big attack, Lenny’s father sent her a telegram, demanding that she come home. She sent him a telegram with her London address, a reply both definitive and unmistakable.
The attacks of the Luftwaffe went on for fifty-seven days and nights, with the worst fires, the most damage, the most casualties occurring in the following May. In between the fifty-seven consecutive raids and that unthinkable day in May, Lenny went on as did everyone else: working, falling in and out of love, arguing, making up, raising children, having children, going to school, going to the market, seeing friends, falling out with friends, being with family. People did not flock to the Tube stations. People did not rush to their Anderson shelters. People were so calm that a kind of weird boredom settled in. It was almost as if the planes overhead, the antiaircraft fire, and the enormous barrage balloons—which were just thin silver-tone material around gas, so insubstantial, yet effectively protecting the city and its inhabitants by forcing the planes to fly higher to avoid them—created an atmosphere that both provoked and negated fear. Though she understood them as a defensive measure, the barrage balloons only reminded Lenny of the lighting lessons of Tin Type, who’d explained that a silver object doesn’t generate its own light.
An artist friend of Lenny’s who’d fought in the Great War told her of the time he came upon dead farm animals suspended from the branches of a very old, very large tree, which struck him as an ideal Surrealist sculpture: the horse, the goat, the pony, all blown up into, then tangled among the branches, the very things that should not have been ther
e yet seemed ordinary in the panic of the war.
She reflected on her Surrealist photographic tendencies as she donned a tin hat to go out amid the wreckage of the city, day after day, making pictures of the nightmare that now surrounded her: a tall old building, its entire center blown out, leaving the sides and the top floor, approximating Venice’s Bridge of Sighs; the smashed typewriter; the waterfall of books that rushed from the windows of the library onto the street.
There were doors completely blocked with rubble; a classical statue of a woman lying on the ground in the embrace of another fallen statue. Still another statue, of a sixteenth-century king, wearing a gas mask and a flak jacket, with a sign around his neck saying, “All dressed up and nowhere to go.”
The bombings democratically hit every borough of the city, bringing its citizens together in a way that hadn’t happened before.
Lenny viewed the cityscape, with its vast holes where houses and businesses once stood, marveling at the random pattern of destruction, picking her way through little mountains of bricks, stones, mortar. She wanted to weep when she came upon a structure, centuries old, damaged beyond repair (often leveled altogether), thinking of all the men and the hundreds of years it took to construct this city, only to see it come to this in a historically scant fifty-seven days. Mostly, Surrealism kept away despair, except when she wondered as she walked in the wake of the bombs and fires, Is this Breton’s convulsive beauty? Or, when she though of all those vacant Jewish houses, Is this de Chirico’s empty city?