Eight Girls Taking Pictures

by Whitney Otto

  Francis Walker was away more and more working with the military. Lenny had no patience for Natasha and her needs and her fears; Natasha said that Lenny’s coldness was due to jealousy, and Lenny allowed her to believe that because it was easier.

  Mauritz had emigrated to America after begging Georges to come with him. But no amount of pleading or declarations of love could dissuade Georges from traveling to Paris to be with his family, despite the Vichy government, which surely sealed all their fates. It was always a mistake to think that, no matter how well you had done in the world, you would be seen as the exception.

  Lenny went to A.W., the female editor in chief of British BelleFille, asking to be given war assignments. “I’ll take pictures and I’ll write,” she said. As if anyone, let alone a high-fashion magazine, would send a woman to report the war. When she was told no, she continued photographing at home.

  Then, after D-day, women in numbers so small everyone knew their names began reporting from France. This was how Lenny found herself on a transport plane, bumping and rolling through choppy air, to land on the French coast where the Americans believed the Germans had surrendered, only to find themselves fighting for territory. Lenny, excited and scared and brave, began shooting rolls of film, recording the battle from the vantage point of the soldiers, stopping only once to feel the love and elation of being back in France.

  This was in 1944, when Francis Walker was in Italy and the Allies were ending the war and Lenny, in her custom-made soldier’s uniform, boots, and bags of film; her camera, her typewriter, her cigarettes and gin, traveled with the American military, taking pictures of the surrender, with the exception of that first battle. She never would’ve been sent if the magazine had known it was a war zone; women weren’t sent to photograph war. She was meant only to write and photograph the war’s end.

  Paris was not Paris. All her old friends, the ones who had somehow escaped the camps, or had been in the camps and survived, now seemed unhealthy and hollow and barely present. She was moved to fury and sadness as she held them in her arms. Prewar memories of masquerade balls, dinners that went deep into the night; art exhibitions, paintings traded for meals at La Coupole and Le Dôme and the occasional, awful American breakfast at Deux Magots because an American begged for it. All the love affairs and broken hearts and marriages. The manifestos. The feeling of promise. No one could think of it now. So seeing one another was a double-edged blade that couldn’t help but cut when handled.

  No one expected that a high-fashion magazine like BelleFille, with American, French, Italian, British editions, would pay Lenny to travel with the American troops as they moved through Europe in the waning days of the war that was all but formally over. But when Lenny happened into battle, the extraordinary A.W. saw the possibilities of her dispatches. It was an almost unimaginable pairing: Fortuny gowns and Cartier jewels and Hermès handbags with the wreckage of war. To that end, who better to photograph and write the dispatches than a former fashion model with Surrealist sensibilities and an attraction to risk?

  “Here,” said the young American soldier, a photographer for a U.S. paper, who had been assigned to drive Lenny, that is, when Lenny would allow him to drive. It was an ongoing argument between them.

  She took the telegram and read it before lighting it with the same match she used to light her cigarette. She noticed Jack Fisher watching her. “Francis’s wife. She’s very needy.”

  Francis knew that Jack’s involvement with Lenny wasn’t limited to driving, and that they shared a bed on the road and a room at the Hôtel Scribe when in Paris—though the room reflected her more than it did Jack. All her belongings—typewriter, camera, film, prints, negatives, underwear, cigarettes, tins from her parents, along with the chocolates she loved so much, canteens, gin bottles—were scattered everywhere. The perpetually unmade bed, the crowded desktop, the filled ashtrays, and wastebaskets with tossed paper both inside and outside. Her uniforms, her leggings, her filthy boots.

  Jack’s gear, on the other hand, was limited to what could fit into a camera bag and a footlocker that he slipped under the bed.

  Their nine-year age difference excited him. In college he’d studied art with the idea that he would one day make movies. He knew of Lenny before their introduction: She was the subject of work by Tin Type, Picasso, Cornell, and Cocteau, whose film, in which she starred as Venus, was said to be a “visual poem, made in a state of grace.”

  She said the reason she and Francis Walker got along so well was that he was crazy about her (Francis had his own aspirations to make art) and he didn’t care about sexual exclusivity. “Thank God.”

  When thinking of Lenny as a lover, a companion, and a comrade, Jack found himself questioning the line that divides reckless from adventurous, until she languidly came over to where he was working across the room and unbuttoned his shirt, changing the direction of his inner debate completely.

  • • •

  So began their crisscrossing of Europe, a journey marked by drinking, smoking, sex, photography, reporting, the surprise of each day. It was an unpredictable vagabond life punctuated by the danger of a dwindling war. Lenny and Jack would venture out for weeks, then head back to the Scribe, then out again. They lived in suspended time that rendered everything weightless. They asked each other “What day is it?” so often that it became a running joke. Whether she was drunk or sober, Jack had never seen anyone more content or calm than Lenny.

  As Lenny, Jack, and the American soldiers rolled through villages that reminded her of fairy tales, she found herself thinking of the lines of an e. e. cummings poem that she barely knew:

  anyone lived in a pretty how town

  (with up so floating many bells down)

  spring summer autumn winter.

  These towns had her imagining the travelers and dogs and window boxes of roses that were there before the Nazi graffiti, pushing love for the Fatherland. She imagined the aroma of roasted chicken and cinnamon-scented apples in pastry, and the peal of bells. Lenny repeated those lines like a mantra to keep her focused when she saw the pretty, ruined towns in Alsace and France.

  She went into a city where the inhabitants were nothing but refugees from the local zoo; a Western European town that resembled a jungle, with its zebras, chimpanzees, and birds with feathers of red, blue, yellow, and green.

  Then there were the vacant German homes filled with little luxuries—a set of sheets, a silver gravy boat, a platinum-and-diamond locket—embroidered or engraved, and not matching the addressed mail on the hall table. And the other part of the poem she remembered,

  women and men (both little and small)

  cared for anyone not at all.

  Lenny and Jack went to Eva Braun’s house, with its phone lines marked Berlin and Berchtesgaden, and a gold bracelet of all the countries of Europe, studded with ruby swastikas, and engraved on the reverse was a single word, Mine, in each country’s language.

  In France, Lenny translated for French collaborators, with their shorn heads and shame. In Luxembourg, she took pictures of shapeless statues bound in rope and net to protect them from bombs. She saw villages smoldering, reduced to rubble with people sleeping and cooking in the open. Old castles and city walls were crumbled.

  And then she entered Dachau.

  • • •

  Lenny’s pictures of wartime celebrities (Chevalier, Dietrich, Crosby, Colette, Picasso) ran alongside her pictures of the lifeless twenty-year-old daughter of an SS officer, a suicide that looked made of ivory, lying beside her dead father and mother. There were camp guards hung, or floating in streams, beaten by their former prisoners; these deaths nothing next to the stacks of concentration camp bodies spilling out of abandoned boxcars. And more bodies, more carnage, among them the living so skeletal and still, almost impossible to distinguish from the dead.

  No one could get a tight shot without getting close to the boxcars and the open graves and the barracks. Jack watched the men, soldiers and medics, who watched Lenny workin
g precisely and methodically, as if she was indifferent to the images in her viewfinder, or the stench, and he knew that they knew their hands would not be so steady, or their stomachs so strong. A reminder that photography can be an intimate art.

  Sometimes he thought he heard her murmuring the same four words, spring summer autumn winter, under her breath as she worked. Spring summer autumn winter. Spring summer autumn winter. He couldn’t have known that sometimes these four words, repeated as she worked, were the reason she appeared so collected, when inside she was terrified of coming apart permanently. Spring summer autumn winter.

  Once, while she was standing on a hill of dirt to get her shot, Lenny’s foot broke the surface, which sent her sliding down the mound, taking the topsoil with her, revealing the mass grave beneath. She continued, unflinching.

  The only thing she said to Jack as they drove away, past the lovely villas situated in the sumptuous, verdant landscape, was “They knew.” She thought of Georges St. Georges joining his family in Paris, and of Mauritz’s family, trapped in Berlin. “All of them knew.”

  And later, when in a German village that greeted the Americans as “liberators,” an elderly German woman tripped, dropping her few possessions in the road near Lenny, Jack could see Lenny reflexively move to help, only to stop herself and step over the mess, her eyes straight ahead.

  • • •

  When Lenny and Jack entered Berlin, that damaged, cosmopolitan city, she said that, having seen the beautiful countryside and their modern buildings, she couldn’t understand the Germans, why they wanted anything more. Lenny parked the jeep to allow them to walk and take pictures. On a corner near Potsdamer Platz was an enormous building, partially bombed and open to the sky. A broken name was still affixed to the facade: Piccadilly. They picked their way through the mess at the open door, discovering a massive, multilevel interior with torn velvets, upended and broken chairs and tables, smashed mirrors, and a half-filled man-made lake with one untouched swan boat, aimlessly floating along, the rest broken and half-capsized.

  It was unsafe to try to climb the grand staircases, with their missing steps and lost handrails. So they left.

  Lenny and Jack entered Hitler’s apartment, where Jack took a picture of Lenny bathing in Hitler’s tub, the dirt of Dachau darkening the water. Afterward, she took stock of the fairly modest flat that she thought looked like the charmless, middlebrow home of a bureaucrat. If anyone asked her to describe the place she would say that it lacked personality—from the kitsch sentimentality of the art to the fact that you could probably clear the place out for a new tenant in less than an hour. It didn’t surprise her that someone who lived so practically, so prosaically could be so cruel.

  When word of the final surrender reached Lenny, she was sitting under a tree in the middle of a field in Alsace with Jack Fisher. They were smoking cigarettes, her Rolleiflex on the grass nearby. Both of them were so dirty from being too long without access to a shower that every time they moved they seem to release a fine puff of dust. Lenny didn’t care; she could remain unwashed forever.

  It was the noise of celebration coming from a passing Allied convoy of four vehicles, the whooping and honking and the knowledge that the German army had been collapsing and giving up for days, that allowed them to sit quietly for a bit longer, having figured out what the commotion signified.

  “I’m going to miss this,“ she said. “It’s the first time something’s been done with me before I was done with it.”

  “It’ll be strange, our lives,” he said.

  “I will miss you too, but that isn’t what I meant.”

  “Then what?”

  She was quiet. “I’m not Cinderella. I can’t force my foot into a glass slipper.”

  “Not with those boots on you can’t.” He smiled. He nudged her booted foot with his booted foot.

  “It’s like I’ve had this great adventure, as if I’ve found my truest self,” she said. “I’m not really fit for a woman’s life.”

  Jack straightened up. “Look. I don’t know if you’ve never heard of you, but you weren’t exactly living like a middle-class American wife and mother, with the kids and the husband commuting to the city. My old life in Brooklyn was a helluva lot less colorful than your old life in Paris, not to mention London.”

  She was weighing her words and choking back the tears she most definitely did not want to fall. How could she tell this young American soldier that she couldn’t bear feeling estranged from herself again?

  “You can’t know how restless I would get. Everything would work for a few years and then—”

  “Then what?”

  “Then it would all go quiet. It was like, like the world would click into high gear when I changed lives or locations—you know, I was a wild one when I was younger, but then there was New York, then Paris, then London—the novelty accelerated everything—lovers, photography, art class, modeling, and all those New York parties, even the Blitz—until the routine set in, and with it life would adjust down to normal speed. Then this war, where every day was without precedent. Where uncertainty was normal—or, I guess, normal for me. You know what I mean because you’ve lived it too.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have signed up for any of this, especially some of what we saw that I fucking wish I’d never seen—”

  Buchenwald. Dachau. The pretty how towns. Spring summer autumn winter.

  “It’s over now anyway,” he said.

  The tears she fought so hard, fell. He scooted over beside her, put his arm around her. “The world can’t stay at war for you, Lenny.”

  “I’ve always been the one who had to keep moving, until the war, since it was now the one moving. I could stop without stopping.”

  He tenderly combed her hair with his fingers, smoothing it, though it was sticky with dried sweat and longer than its former, cropped cut.

  “It was as if all my life was moving toward this experience, you know?”

  Jack dropped his hand. “I’m ready to be done with it.”

  “Well, I’m thirty-eight years old. And a woman, and I’m broke. What am I going to do? Photograph shoes for BelleFille? If I’m lucky? Women and fashion and weight gain and marriage. What am I going to do?”

  “You’ll have a life, Lenny. And, if we’re lucky, we’ll forget. What we’ve been living isn’t a life, Lenny, it’s an interruption.” He took a deep breath. “You’ll go back to Francis, who loves you. You’ll move into that big house of his, with that clinging wife who wants to be your best friend”—this got a smile from Lenny—“and Francis’ll paint and you’ll take pictures, and you’ll have dinner parties with all your artist friends. It’s not right that a war, any war, but especially one this shocking, should feel like home to you.”

  “You know, I only saw combat as a photographer by accident. Women reporters weren’t exactly allowed. But then there were those Germans, holed up in that fortress like nothing was ending. . . . It was all an accident,” she said. “I had no idea that I would love it so much.”

  “Listen, I don’t know your deal, but I do know that, if you don’t figure it out, sooner or later you’re going to break all to pieces.”

  They said nothing, for a while, listening to distant sounds of celebration. They heard voices and horns and military vehicles speeding on dirt roads. The nearby trees rustled in the breeze.

  “When I was seven,” said Lenny, “my mother was sick. Some virus. She wanted my father to send me away while she recovered. She worried about contagion. And he didn’t want to, but they both wanted to keep me safe. They had some friends who lived in the city—good friends whom we saw a lot, childless, and they loved me especially. They loved my brother too, but me most of all. So, I went to stay in their apartment at the same time that a nephew was there. He was young and had been in the war, in France, and he would start drinking first thing in the morning even though I don’t think anyone ever saw him drunk. I liked him. We got along. And one day, when the couple had to be gone and had no
one to watch me, they asked the nephew to keep an eye on me, just for an hour or so.

  “We were alone and something happened, something so . . . terrible, and the couple were beside themselves, blaming themselves, and my parents blamed them too. And also blamed themselves. All those adults deep in their own misery. It was confusing, and I felt like I wasn’t even a person to them anymore but a situation where everyone could feel bad. They did feel bad because they loved me.

  “I went to a doctor—besides the medical doctor, though I had been to see him too, you know, afterward—a psychiatrist. My parents were always very modern, very forward-thinking, and the doctor they took me to explained what I needed was to be taught that love and sex are absolutely separate. And so I was, and I do.”

  “My God, you were just a little kid.”

  “My father took the first nude picture of me. I was almost eight years old and freezing in the snow . . .” Her voice trailed off. Her eyes looked into Jack’s. “He was trying to fix things, telling me that doing this would help me ‘reclaim my body,’ but I was so young, I didn’t understand that anyone thought my body wasn’t my own anymore. Maybe he was just trying to understand how to love me.

  “Anyway, it’s not like I ever cried about it—oh, poor me or anything—and so when the war happened, it became the only time in my life where the unstable outside world matched the unmanageable inside me.”

  Then they gathered up their things, put them in the back of the jeep, and went to join the others in celebrating the end of the conflict.

  SUCH ARE THE DREAMS OF THE EVERYDAY HOUSEWIFE OR ARTÍCULOS ELÉCTRICOS PARA EL HOGAR (ELECTRICAL APPLIANCES FOR THE HOME)

  On a gray day in March 1927, Charlotte Blum stood back from the mannequins that she had been wrestling with all afternoon in the spotless display windows of Wertheim, one of the city’s premier department stores, to take in the effect of her arrangement. The point was to sell sunglasses, items one usually saw on movie stars, so casually glamorous in the casually glamorous sunshine of California. The citizens of Berlin seldom found themselves wishing for a pair of dark glasses in their often overcast city, but if Charlotte had learned nothing else in her twenty-four years it was never to underestimate the lure of dreams.