On the phonograph, Josephine Baker sang “J’ai deux amours,” which made Gerta think of avenues, narrow and black, like eels. Murmurs of conversation undulated all around, clouds of cigarette smoke, the perfect ambiance for sharing intimate feelings.
André carried the weight of the conversation. He’d let his words fall like someone who was out to narrow the gap. He spoke with vehemence, sure of himself, pausing every now and then to take a drag of his cigarette before starting up again. They’d been in Paris for more than a year, he said, trying to make their way, surviving on advertising assignments and sporadic work. Chim worked for Regard, the Communist Party’s magazine, and lived on the specific assignments he was given by different agencies. It was important to have friends. And André had them. He knew people in the Agence Centrale and at the Anglo-Continental—the Hungarian diaspora, like Hug Block, who was a real handful, but he could rely on the Hungarians. He told jokes, smiled, said whatever popped into his head. Sometimes he’d look to see what was going on in the back of the place. Then turn back and fix his eyes on Gerta again. It was as if, with all of this, he was trying to say, these are my credentials. Keeping her chin down and eyes looking up, she listened with reflective thoughts of her own as he spoke. The expression on her face wasn’t offering any easy promises, either. There was something punishing in it, with a fixed penetration, as if she were comparing or trying to distinguish what she had heard from what she was now hearing, perhaps venturing into judgments that weren’t the kindest. To André, they were surprisingly light eyes, the color of olive oil, streaked with green and violet, like those flowers in the Budapest gardens of his childhood. He continued talking with confidence. Sometimes someone from l’Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires would send him a wire. Refugee solidarity. One of those gatherings hosted by the association was precisely how he met Henri Cartier-Bresson, a tall and aristocratic Norman, slightly surrealist, with whom he began developing photographs in his apartment’s bidet.
“If they label you as a surrealist photographer, it’s over,” said André. His French was terrible, but he made an effort. “Nobody will offer you work. You become a real hothouse flower. But if you say you’re a press photographer, the world is yours.”
He didn’t need to be asked direct questions to tell you his life. He was extroverted, a chatterbox, effusive. To Gerta he appeared too young. She estimated he was twenty-four or twenty-five years old. In reality, he had just turned twenty and still displayed a certain naïveté that boys can have when they pretend to be heroes. He exaggerated and embellished his own exploits. But he had charisma; when he spoke, all there was room for was to listen. Like when he told the story about the rebellion against Daladier’s government. February 6, a rainy day. The Fascists had announced a colossal demonstration in front of the Palais Bourbon, and, in response, the Left organized several counterprotests of their own. It resulted in a pitched battle.
“I was able to get to Cours-la-Reine in Hug’s car and afterward continued on foot to the Place de la Concorde, trying to cross the bridge to the Assemblée Nationale.” André had begun to speak German, in which he was much more fluent. He was leaning on the edge of the table, his arms crossed. “There were more than two hundred policemen on horseback, six vans and police cordons in columns of five. It was impossible to cross. The people began surrounding a bus filled with passengers and that’s where it all began: the fire, the stone-throwing, the broken glass, a head-to-head between Fascists from the Action Française and the Jeunesses Patriotes, against us. It only worsened throughout the night. None of the streetlamps worked. The only visible light came from torches and the bonfires people began creating.” He brought his cigarette to his lips and looked straight at Gerta. He spoke with passion but with something else as well: vanity, habit, male pride. It’s something that gets into men’s heads and makes them behave like boys, right out of a scene from a western.
“It was raining and there was smoke everywhere. We knew that the Bonapartists had been able to get close to the Palais Bourbon, so we regrouped in an attempt to try and block them. But the police opened fire from the bridge. Several snipers had taken post up in the horse-chestnuts of Cours-la-Reine. It was a bloodbath: seventeen dead and more than a thousand wounded,” he said, blowing out a fast stream of cigarette smoke. “And the worst part of it all,” he added, “was not being able to take one damn photograph. There wasn’t enough light.”
Gerta continued looking at him closely, elbow at the edge of the table, chin resting in hand. Werner Thalheim had been detained that day and they ended up sending him back to Berlin, like many other comrades. The Socialists and the Communists kept brawling it out in their war of allegiances. André’s friend Willi Chardack wound up with a broken collarbone and his head cut open. All the Left Bank cafés were converted into makeshift infirmaries … but this presumptuous Hungarian considered the fact that he couldn’t take his goddamn photograph the biggest tragedy of all. Right.
Chim watched her with eyes that appeared smaller due to the thickness of his lenses, and she knew that in that very moment he was watching her think, and that perhaps he didn’t agree with her, as if behind his pupils there lived the conviction that no one has the right to judge another. What did she really know about André? Had she ever been inside his head? Had they gone to school together? Did she ever sit beside him on the back steps of his house, petting the cat until sunrise, in order not to hear his family fight because his father had thrown away an entire month’s salary in a card game? No, Gerta evidently did not know anything about his life or about Pest’s working-class neighborhoods. How was she to know? When André was seventeen years old, two corpulent individuals in derby hats went and fetched him from his home after a series of disturbances by the Lánc Bridge. At police headquarters, the commissioner, Peter Heim, broke the boy’s four ribs, never pausing to interrupt his whistling of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony throughout. His first swing went straight for the jaw, and André gave it to him with his cynical smile. The commissioner retaliated with a kick to the balls. This time, the boy didn’t smile but gave him the dirtiest look he could muster. The beating continued until he lost consciousness. He remained in a coma for several days. After two weeks, he was let go. His mother, Júlia, bought him two shirts, a jacket, a pair of mountain boots with double soles, and two pairs of baggy pants, his refugee uniform. And put him on a train when he was just seventeen. He never had a home again. What did she know about all that had happened? Chim’s eyes appeared to be asking this, as he scrutinized her reactions from behind his rounded glasses.
It was hard to imagine two teenagers less likely to wind up being friends than Chim and André. But despite the fact, they orbited one another like two celestial bodies floating through the air. They’re so different, thought Gerta. Chim spoke perfect French. He seemed serious. Like a philosopher or a chess player. From the few comments he had made, Gerta was able to deduce that he was a staunch atheist, though he still carried his Jewish karma inside like a strand of sadness, as did she. André, in contrast, did not seem interested in complicating his life with such things. It appeared he complicated his in a different way, just as men always have. It all started because of a tall man with a mustache, who began speaking to Ruth in a tone that wasn’t rude but suave. It had a certain gallantry to it, but with a good dose of alcohol. Nothing that a woman couldn’t handle on her own, without making a scene but with a simple answer that would put the Frenchy in his place. But before Ruth had time to respond, André was already getting up and throwing his chair behind him with such force that everyone in the place stopped to look. His hands slightly separated from his body, his muscles tensed.
“Easy,” said Chim, getting up and removing his glasses just in case they had to break open someone’s face.
Luckily, it wasn’t necessary. The guy, somewhat elusive and resigned, simply put up his left hand as a form of apology. An educated Frenchman, after all. Or not looking for trouble that night.
&nb
sp; It became apparent to Gerta, however, that this was not the first time something like this had happened to them. Just from having watched him, she was certain that on more than one occasion the situation had been resolved differently. There are men who are born with an innate need to fight. It’s not likely something that they choose, but an instinct that causes them to jump at the first sign. The Hungarian was one of them, righteous, accustomed to displaying the classic weaponry of a knight errant with women. And with a dangerous inclination to engage in duels just before the last drink of the night.
Despite this, when it came to both his life and work, he was, or tried to appear, versatile and frivolous when he was lucid. He had a peculiar sense of humor. Finding it relatively easy to laugh at himself and his blunders, like when he spent in one afternoon the entire advance that the Agence Centrale had given him and had to pawn a Plaubel camera to pay the hotel. Or when he destroyed a Leica trying to use it beneath the clear waters of the Mediterranean while on assignment in Saint-Tropez for the Steinitz Brothers. The agency went bankrupt a few months later, and André joked that it was because they had hired him with his long list of disasters. His carefree way of making fun of his own stupidities made him easygoing and likable on a first impression. Typical Hungarian humor. His lazy smile expressed all that was needed, and he could even be cynical without trying too hard. Above all, the way he would shrug his shoulders, as if it made no difference whether he was photographing a war hero from the Bolshevik revolution or shooting a spread about chic vacation spots in the Riviera. Curiously, Gerta did not completely dislike such a duality. In some ways, she also enjoyed expensive perfumes and moonlit nights with champagne.
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 re
cognize 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.
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