by Whitney Otto
When the first girl returns to the beach, having decided on invisibility, the boyfriend of the girl played by Maria comes back from swimming to an early dinner of potato salad and schnitzel and wine. He asks her why she seems so sad. She says, “Because it was such a perfect day and now it’s over.”
• • •
Not all the neighbors were menacing, but it took only one. It took only a single neighbor, someone the girls had had no problems with during their time there, to begin to take an interest in kitten + kohl. The neighbor asked about the square footage of the studio, and how many bedrooms did it have, and it appeared the back of the building received a good amount of sun, or were there trees or other buildings obstructing it? Was it quiet? How was the hot water? The heat? A fireplace perhaps? And a garden, was there a garden? Overgrown or kept?
There was the day they returned to a kicked-in front door. Alarmed, though it was only late afternoon, the girls cautiously went inside. Nothing was missing. They pushed furniture up against the door until the locksmith came by, paying him double and agreeing that he could come after dark, so no one would see him doing anything for a Jew.
Their neighbor came by the day after the door incident. “Someone’s temper getting the better of them?” he joked.
And then they knew. They knew that even the most neutral neighbors would be tempted to take what they had not even thought to covet until recent events had made them understand that possession was nine-tenths of a law that favored them. It was not uncommon for someone to show interest in your jewelry, your home, your job, your painting, maybe even your wife—it was as if the temptation was too much, the possibilities of possession too great to pass up. If you were Jewish, you began to spend all your time trying to go unnoticed. Or making your winter coat go unnoticed. Or your car, your garden. It was nearly impossible to have things and hide them at the same time. How could anyone fight what a Jew now represented to many Germans? It was as if they were walking catalogs of splendid goods and real estate and business and career openings. The trick was to disappear without disappearing.
And when Charlotte said to Ines, “I have relatives in London. We can pack it all up and move our studio. Just until everything gets sorted out,” Ines agreed.
“They can’t make you go back there [“there” being Germany]. Who are you hurting by staying here? What space are you taking? What difference can one person make to them [“them” being the English]?” cried Charlotte.
Ines laughed a rueful little laugh. “It seems the entire equilibrium of the Empire rests on my residency.”
It was 1934, almost 1935, and Charlotte and Ines had been living and working in London, making portraits of literary figures, film stars, and people with money who were fairly open-minded in their ideas about photography. Advertising jobs were few and far between and often consisted of working with hospitals or other public service professionals, none of whom were very interested in anything visually groundbreaking. Though their style and the client seldom made for a sympathetic matchup, they could make ends meet by cobbling together work in addition to the small monthly stipend from Charlotte’s trust fund, the same one that had paid for Rainier Ermler’s equipment in what now seemed ages ago.
“You know I’ve run out of visa options,” said Ines. “I don’t have family here. I don’t have a history.”
It was true that her extended family, and the years Charlotte had spent during her childhood in London, not to mention her money and career, had all made for an easy transition to this new country. Since it was growing evident that the casual cruelty of Berlin was becoming policy if you were Jewish, Communist, intellectual, or homosexual—and woe to the person who was all four—Germans who could leave were trying to leave.
But even as Germany demanded the exile of all of the above, it would allow them to take no property (so much of which had been confiscated or looted anyway) and almost no money. Countries like the United States and England were not interested in “penniless immigrants,” falling back on the “immigration laws already in place that you cannot expect us to disregard.” France was not much better.
Because Charlotte had left early enough to take her belongings and bank account with her, she was able to build something of a life in London. But she could not change the legal fact of Ines not being her family. They could not marry. How could England expect her to send Ines Wolff back to a place that hated her, would deny her a living, and was likely to ship her to a work camp?
As the days counted down, Charlotte had to stop herself from shoving all those safe and self-satisfied Brits off the sidewalks and into the gutters. She told herself that she never wanted to live in this country in the first place, but the truth is that she didn’t want to live anywhere without Ines.
After Charlotte and Ines fell in love, Ines took a photograph of Charlotte applying lipstick, her eyes following her own reflection in the mirror, the fingers of her right hand lightly pressed against the glass; the ordinary moment that reveals the extraordinary. It’s the smallness of life that quickens the heart. It’s grocery shopping. It’s picking up the laundry and repeating an overheard conversation or reporting on someone’s hair, or clothing, who sat next to you in a café, or on a bus, knowing that you both see the hair, the clothing, the overheard conversation with the same lightness of life. So when Ines said of the photograph, “This isn’t how I love you best, but it is how I love you,” Charlotte knew what she meant. This mutual act of Ines taking the snapshot made Charlotte love Ines in much the same way that Ines loved the snapshot itself. Capturing the commonplace, the unremarked upon routine. My heart; your heart; my heart. Ines took the picture to Trilby at the Blum GlasWerks and asked him to fashion a glass cube, roughly the size of an ice cube, and place the little portrait inside.
The ship’s captain was more than happy to marry Charlotte Blum and Ignacio Martín as they crossed the Atlantic on their way to Buenos Aires. “Everyone’s a romantic,” said Ignacio.
Ignacio Martín had been traveling though London on his way to his home. Once the Bauhaus closed, he remained in Berlin, waiting to see, hoping to see, if the school would relocate again. When it didn’t, he decided to travel to Zurich, then Paris to see the Maison de Verre, a beautiful industrial house of glass by Chareau, Bijvoet, and Dalbet, a furniture and interior designer, architect, and metal worker, respectively. The tall house, with its glass blocks, moving screens, metal framework, had only been completed in 1932; when he visited it three years later, it was everything that Ignacio believed a house should be.
In London, he arrived at Charlotte’s studio.
“Ignacio!” she cried, hugging him, thrilled at the pure joy of him, especially in the wake of Ines’s departure. They walked and talked and ate lunch and dinner together. Then they talked some more. They went to gardens and parks and strolled along the Thames. They went to museums, studied statues and paintings in the spaces of silence in their ongoing conversation.
“You were right to leave Berlin,” said Ignacio, which didn’t make Charlotte miss it any less (her Berlin, not the existing Berlin). Nor did it make her any less anxious about Trilby, though she would tell herself that, because the Blum house was a short train ride from the city center, no one would notice it, meaning no one would notice him. No one would covet their beautiful glass house, so at odds with Nazi traditionalism, or Blum GlasWerks—how big was the factory really? Her parents were panicked over their boy, yet they comforted themselves by saying, The glassworks would be impossible to sell, and how devastating it would be to walk away from it in any case. No matter that walking away, as a rich man or a poor man (read rich Jew or poor Jew), had become increasingly difficult. It was unthinkable for them to admit that Trilby might not be able to get out at all, so it was better to think of everything in terms of the fate of the Blum GlasWerks, and not the fate of their son.
Charlotte was telling Ignacio that he wasn’t the first old friend to come through the city, and how she and Ines made portraits of immigrants (oft
en writers and architects) when he asked, “How is Ines?”
“Gone,” said Charlotte.
He said nothing. Then, “Will you stay?”
She thought of how British immigration, along with the very slight influence of Bruno Blum, had taken scant pity on Ines, allowing her to emigrate to Palestine. When she secured passage on a ship, there was no suggestion of Charlotte coming along, since Charlotte’s emigration would mean more red tape, more liquidation of assets, and leaving Mr. and Mrs. Blum, who were already struggling with the reality of Trilby being back in Berlin.
“I suppose,” she said.
He talked about his home in Argentina (she too longed for home), extolling all the wonders of the place, ending with “I leave on Thursday.” He kissed her. Then he spent the night, because suddenly the thought of Ignacio leaving was unbearable.
During her last hours in England, Ines had watched Charlotte from the ship’s deck. The girls did not wave, only stood very still, gazing at each other. Charlotte recalled the experience of Ines’s reading the denial of her visa request in England, and the sheer will it took to secure a visa for Palestine; the days leading up to Ines’s departure, which were filled with the studio chores of making ads, cropping images, developing prints, taking photos (grateful for the gray light of London). The joke of calling each other “wife.” Their memories were ordinary—there was no cinematic quality to their love affair of friendship, affection, passion, and an artistic sympathy that allowed them to see the world in ways that each other understood. Who would understand Ines now? Who would know Charlotte?
A last memory of Ines in her navy blue wool coat and tousled curls, a rhinestone pin played against the tailored coat, the men’s-style white shirt and trousers as she smiled that first smile at Charlotte, who stood in the department store window in Berlin.
On the Tuesday before the Thursday when Ignacio Martin was setting sail for Buenos Aires, Charlotte walked out on a girl whose portrait she was taking. She returned her fee to the surprised parents, then gathered her things and called Ignacio.
He suggested marriage because it would simplify their lives. And because, he said, he was in love with her.
“This isn’t a sailor-at-sea kind of love, is it?” she said.
“Is that a problem?”
She laughed.
“I don’t expect you to be a wife. I expect you to be, well, you.”
Later, she would say that maybe it was the sea air and feeling the disconnection that one feels in the middle of a lengthy ocean passage, with no land in sight, no way to fix your location, that led her to say yes.
Ignacio Martin’s family were porteño. They were a lively, intellectually restless bunch, looking, examining, questioning, and telling. There was no shortage of opinions, or tenderness. Ignacio’s father caressed the bearded cheek of the grown-up Ignacio as if he were still a boy. All the men kissed their children, as if time could not alter adult affection. The women held hands, sometimes as they strolled, sometimes when they were sitting near each other. All of this touching was easy and unforced and not too much, but more than Charlotte was accustomed to seeing in Germany.
“My family is mostly Italian,” said Ignacio. “Most of Buenos Aires is of Italian or Spanish descent. We can’t help it,” he said, laughing, “we’re lovers, not fighters.”
She liked the easy manner of his family, their easy acceptance of her; she liked the intellectual clamor. It made her miss her own warmhearted, smart family.
On a piece of land not too far from the city center, Ignacio designed a glass box house for them. Twenty-foot ceilings, matching studios, a sky bridge and rooftop terrace. He constructed a center courtyard—a mixing of traditional with the new—that had a spectacular garden and bathing fountain. The newspapers wrote about this “prodigal son architect” who “spent his time in Germany mastering the art of the office building” and has now “moved into one.” It was hard not to notice that sharp contrast between slow, sunny, romantically traditional Buenos Aires (as Catholic as Berlin was Christian and Jewish, and not too devout on any front) and the cosmopolitan, morally fluid, glittering Berlin, its glitter diamond-hard.
These differences expanded to a dismissal of Charlotte’s photographic style as well: Her portraits were thought to be too direct, too unsparing, her critics missing the obvious (she thought) beauty in the unadorned, unable to see how realism can be so precise as to seem almost surreal. For Charlotte, Ines, and Ignacio, the tension in their art was often located in that place between the actual and the dream.
The paradox of Charlotte’s life was having the time and support to make the pictures she wanted to make but no place to show them. Nor did she have a clientele receptive to them. It seemed the porteño (and the Argentine in general), as she had been told more than once, preferred work that was a bit less demanding. Couldn’t they agree on what was beautiful? Surely that was a universal; a sentiment that wasn’t entirely encouraging.
Ignacio found a job with an architecture firm that made municipal buildings, hoping for eventual commissions for public housing. He said, “Change must begin somewhere,” and one of the partners did seem to like him.
Charlotte found herself making little photomontages, or walking the city, studying the handbills, billboards, and other advertising, which she found provincial and uninspiring. In the midst of a mild spring day, while inhaling the scent of flowers from window boxes, she would dream of snow. The sound of traffic would suddenly intensify in her memory as she saw herself immersed in the surging crowds of Potsdamer Platz, the smell of car exhaust, the grind of trolley wheels, the bus and car horns, the deep buzz of motor scooters. At night, she would see the starlight of an Argentine sky melt into the reflections of city lights on wet, Berliner streets.
Sometimes her waking dreams of Berlin gave way to nighttime rendezvous with friends and family and Ines, Ines often enough to prevent her heart from healing but not so frequently that Charlotte couldn’t find a kind of contentment and pleasure in her new life. Ignacio was a good man. He liked her as much as he loved her and lived without the expectation that she would be an Argentine wife. It was common enough, Charlotte thought, the middle-class wife with her maid and her children, willful ignorance of the mistress, her bridge and her secret boredom. And the ones who weren’t bored were a brittle bunch who cared too much and pushed too hard to hang on to the life they had. The difference between Buenos Aires and Berlin was the Church, which dictated to these wives, seeming to pick up where their husbands’ demands of feminine behavior left off.
On the other hand, Charlotte was mesmerized by the icons and art of the Church; whether opulent or plain, it was all tears and blood and gold and silver. Stars and stained glass and saints whose various tortured deaths bordered on the pornographic. The processions, with their carried statues, and penitents on their bare knees, sometimes dragging chains, were like grand street theater. “You are not supposed to enjoy it in that way,” Ignacio said.
“Oh,” said Charlotte, nudging him. “But I am supposed to enjoy it?”
And confession seemed to her the best invention of all. Sin on Saturday, repent on Sunday. Debauch then fast; demand then beg. It was a faith of extremes.
All in all the days ran apace until Charlotte got a letter from Ines. My exile has ended! Will be arriving in London three weeks. Wish you were there. Ines.
Ignacio wasn’t entirely happy about Charlotte’s plan to sail to London to visit Ines, but he wouldn’t think to tell her that she couldn’t go because he loved her. “But I’ll be back,” said Charlotte, to which he replied, “Yes, but it’s the part before you get back that I’m not looking forward to.” “Then it will make the part where I return so much better,” she said.
She touched his cheek. “Is that your brave smile?” she said. And he said, “I know that Ines is your friend.”
He gave her a gruff, affectionate kiss at the dock, then waved good-bye.
• • •
If someone asked Charlotte
if 1937 London was different from 1936 London, she would say, “Not really, except that it was alive and beautiful again because Ines was there.”
“You look different,” said Ines.
“Perhaps it’s the Argentine effect. Do I seem languorous?”
“Maybe. Whatever it is, it’s working for you.”
“The crossing didn’t exactly agree with me—I was either sleeping or throwing up. I couldn’t quite get my sea legs, I guess.”
And when Ines asked, as they embraced, “Would Argentina make you feel different too? Charlotte?”
Because all color had drained from Charlotte’s face just before she raced over to vomit into the bathroom sink.
Charlotte’s daughter, Barrie, was born in London, five months after Charlotte arrived. At first Charlotte had ascribed her nausea to a rough passage, then the loss of her period to upheavals personal and political in nature, as well as to the rigors of travel. But in the end, a doctor said that it wasn’t flu, or travel, or the seismic shifts of her worlds (interior and exterior): it was simply pregnancy.
The first letter she received after she wired Ignacio was joyful: I can’t believe our good luck! The second, arriving two weeks later, was confused: When did you say you’re returning? And the third was an example of lost patience: You are my wife. That is our child. We all belong together.
Charlotte deflected Ignacio’s requests for her return by saying that the pregnancy had progressed to the point where she couldn’t stand the thought of being tossed around at sea, since she was now “seasick” all the time. She also was “pregnancy clumsy,” as she called it. These statements were true.