The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  “Congratulations! It’s magnificent, what you’ve done—one might even say epoch-making.”

  “Thanks,” he replies, almost too automatically. Dr. Chardack isn’t the type for compliments; he prefers witty remarks, but not a single one comes to mind.

  Once, they were champions of laughter. No, that’s an exaggeration, but they were good at animating the dead-seriousness of a debate with stabs of irony, and Willy Chardack had been just as good as his companions. His present colleagues, too, appreciated his dry humor, enhanced by the German accent (the accent of the mad scientist), and he was glad not to be too cantankerous for American standards, a character.

  Dr. Chardack, listening to the distant voice of Georg Kuritzkes, sees him again en plein air with the whole wonderful group, not necessarily outside but in the gay, luminous world of a French film, although they weren’t yet in Paris. But the Rosental didn’t have to fear comparison with the Bois de Boulogne, and the passages of Leipzig were famous. There was industry and commerce, music and publishing, all boasting centuries-old traditions, and such bourgeois solidity attracted new arrivals from the countryside and the East who made the city more and more like a true metropolis, even in its conflicts and clashes. Until the fights and the strikes turned vicious, along with the world economic crisis that was accelerating the German catastrophe. The tense faces that Willy found at home, when his father was exasperated by the line of people looking for a job, any job, while he was already struggling to keep on errand boys and warehouse workers, because the market for leather, which had prospered in Leipzig since the Middle Ages, or thereabouts, was tottering.

  He and his friends, who didn’t have to struggle with insolvent clients, were inclined to fight against everything, even if they came from respectable families. They were free to do it, free to go on outings and sleep in tents under the stars, free to laugh, free to court girls, some of whom were pretty, even spectacular (Ruth Cerf, a beanpole who’d become a majestic blonde, and then Gerda, the most enchanting, lively, and amusing person he had ever encountered in the female universe). The love of joking didn’t fade even when Hitler was about to win and you had to be ready to pack your bags. No one could take away that resource that made them equal, comrades, a way of being that defied the Nazis. But truly equal they were not, and Georg provided the best example of that. Georg was brilliant, but with a kind of excess, to squander, like the supply of shirts (Egyptian cotton shirts!) that had languished in the closets of the Chardack house ever since Willy had adopted the habits of the left. Georg Kuritzkes was intelligent, handsome, athletic. Loyal and trustworthy. Great capacity for assembling, instructing, organizing. Confident dancer. Passionate connoisseur of the latest musical trends from overseas. Courageous. Determined. And also witty. How could a Willy Chardack be a girl’s first choice? They called him “the Dachshund,” long before the nickname—adopted immediately by the slight Stuttgart accent of Gerda Pohorylle—became hateful to him. He couldn’t. But the fact that Georg was also amusing nourished an affection that went beyond those youthful hierarchies, and was evidently enduring, as the thrill of hearing him again demonstrated. The effect of a laugh rediscovered after a time that seemed an eternity.

  Georg has filled him in on his brother in America who’s married, and has moved to a house with a view of the Rocky Mountains. In fact it was Soma who sent him a newspaper clipping: which took forever to arrive, avoiding the dead ends of the Italian postal service—a total surprise, exciting.

  “I bet they’ll give you the Nobel.”

  “Come on. We’re just an engineer who does his experiments in a garage next to a house full of kids and two doctors in a veterans’ hospital. In Buffalo, not at Harvard. The medical industry arrives on a reconnaissance mission, loads us with pats on the back and promises, but so far we haven’t seen any money or requests to license the patent.”

  “I understand. But fitting a heart with a small motor that enables someone to swim, play soccer, run for a bus—it’s a revolution, for heaven’s sake. They’ll realize it.”

  “Let’s hope so. When you called, I thought it was the hospital or a patient we’d discharged. ‘Is there a problem?’—now I say it like the telephone operators—‘I’ll put the call through.’ But I’m pleased, of course.”

  “I’d like to see. In the end you’ll be the only one who made a difference. I told you: you’re the one who made the revolution . . . ”

  This time Dr. Chardack has an answer ready. He’d like to talk about the students who are trying to turn America upside down merely by sitting at a lunch counter where Negroes aren’t allowed, meaning that Woolworth’s and the other commercial chains have opened their lunch counters in the racist South to colored customers. He’d like to compare their solid and pacific faith, guided by a preacher baptized in the name of Martin Luther, with the faith he encountered in the son of an English carpenter who became an electronic engineer thanks to a program that sent veterans to college. “Providence dictated the crucial mistake to me, my dear Chardack—you’ll see, it’ll all turn out fine,” Greatbatch, the engineer, repeated when the doctor hurried to the garage with yet another problem. He’d like to say to Georg that he, the godless person, is really the one who was reborn with every electrical pulse of a sick person’s heart, and that the only god he’s devoted to, Aesculapius, satisfied him.

  “My work is enough for me,” he says.

  The other laughs, a conspiratorial laugh, with that thick strong timbre, but Dr. Chardack catches a crack in Georg’s voice and lets him continue.

  “I’d also like to devote myself to medical research—you don’t get bored and you’re certainly doing something useful. In my field, unfortunately, miraculous inventions are unlikely. If only we could insert a device like yours after a stroke!”

  Again Dr. Chardack catches a polished pebble, a regret. But he can remedy it with a joke: “For me the heart and for you the brain! We divide the vital organs the way the superpowers do the world and now even the cosmos.”

  “The important thing is to have something to divide, isn’t it? And now that you’ll be invited to all the continents, I insist that you get in touch if you come over here.”

  Now that they’ve arrived at the polite remarks, Dr. Chardack is more cheerful. Ultimately it’s no a small thing that of their shared purposes and dreams—medicine, Gerda, antifascism—they both still have the first.

  The conversation concludes with Dr. Chardack and Dr. Kuritzkes exchanging addresses; the latter is thinking of leaving the FAO1 and the UN in general, even though he’s bothered by the thought that he might no longer be welcomed everywhere. “I’ll wait for you then, Willy, I’ll wait for the tired muscle of old Europe to greet you in triumph . . . ”

  Standing for a few seconds in front of the phone, which is back in its cradle, Dr. Chardack still hears his friend’s last laugh, so enveloping despite the implicit sarcasm. But as soon as he realizes its source—that hinting on the telephone without speaking plainly—he stiffens.

  Why had Georg gone to Rome? Did he really believe that there at the FAO they would defeat hunger? He had never been naïve or a fanatic, in fact. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone to Spain if that crazy girl hadn’t arrived to convince him, and to say no to Gerda, just imagine. She was seriously loony, even more so than Capa, who’d practically had a stroke when he discovered that a long Italian vacation with the famous Georg wasn’t enough. No, that reckless girl had brought photos of the Republican militias into the cradle of fascism! Gerda had coolly replied that they were nothing, an excuse to make a scene, and those who were present at that squabble in the welcoming din of a Paris café could only repress an admiring smile.

  Georg Kuritzkes, in any case, had joined the International Brigades and then stayed on in Marseille and joined the Résistance, while Willy sailed for the United States. But before he left for the mountains he had got his degree and, after the Liberation, had done a thesis that won
him a post as a researcher at UNESCO.

  Dr. Chardack stays clear of politics now, but politics sticks its foot in where he is. How could he stomach the fact that the United States doesn’t want scientists with the capacities of Georg Kuritzkes because of a holy terror of anything red? And yet Georg doesn’t necessarily regret it. Maybe he went back to Italy because the UN sent him, but he must like it there if he hasn’t changed too much.

  Dr. Chardack is relieved by that conclusion, and when he goes back to his papers the mass of clouds coming off the Atlantic has already evaporated.

  He’s finished the first draft of the article, and the doors slam downstairs (they’re all going out, luckily), but this is not the moment of the day when he feels how far away the world he’s fallen into is. It’s after lunch, when he decides to make the rounds to check on patients early and then drive to the neighborhoods in the south—Polonia, Kaisertown, Little Italy—where they sell old-fashioned sweets. Maybe he should think of doing this more often, even though no one in the family expects it. But Dr. Chardack has always rejected any effort that is not directed toward a realizable goal. He likes bringing home a cake, not the abstract task of becoming a true American, when what he’s done and is doing is enough and more. He calls himself William, pronounces his surname in the American way, served two years in Korea, the pump for transfusions he fashioned out of a grenade won him two medals. He’s proud of it, of course, because he’s proud of the young men he saved, just as he’s proud of the many American lives that will now be saved thanks to his implantable pacemaker. So don’t ask anything more of him: America is a nation to be part of, not a religion in which to be reborn. Sometimes he misses the good things they have over in Europe. So what?

  And then, having made sure that the patients are stable, he decides to leave the car at the Veterans Hospital and walk to Hertel Avenue, where there are a number of Italian and Jewish cafés and restaurants. Besides, when the weather permits, Dr. Chardack likes to walk, a habit that is not at all American. The fact remains that the streets he walks along—nearly the sole pedestrian, the only one in jacket and tie (but a light jacket, put on over the short-sleeve cotton-polyester shirt), on a Sunday afternoon in late summer—are the streets of North Buffalo: laid out with a ruler, marked by saplings that justify the name Avenue, lined with wooden houses, freshly painted or slightly peeling (a few), red, yellow, greenish, blue, cream, icy white, some adorned with an American flag, smaller houses and larger, houses with a generous patch of lawn (and no fence!) in front, surprisingly able to stand up to snow and hold the heat (coolness less), as he has discovered over the years.

  The only annoyance is that someone might want to give him a lift. “Thanks, no!” was his customary response, since he lacked convincing explanations, until he had the flash of inspiration to explain his eccentric “just walking” as a way of preventing a heart attack. “Oh really, doctor!” the neighbors responded as they clutched the car keys, a little intimidated. But on the street now are only a couple of girls exchanging secrets, and some squirrels looking out at the sidewalk with the impudence that distinguishes them from their poor, fearful relatives in Europe.

  Walking in a space that ignores you while you know it well enough sets thoughts in motion or crushes them at every step. It wasn’t in Leipzig that Dr. Chardack got used to long city walks but following the boulevards of the Fifteenth, Seventh, and Sixth Arrondissements, often crossing over the border into the rich or working-class neighborhoods of the Right Bank. The metro didn’t cost much, but it was the first expense avoided by Ruth and Gerda, who couldn’t count on help from their families. Money thrown away, they claimed, and after all walking helped you keep your figure. The Dachshund sneered that it was the least of their problems. The girls let him buy them a coffee, but metro tickets only in extraordinary situations. What was the fun of traveling underground, packed in as if in a cage, when they were in Paris? At the word “cage” Willy gave up objecting that it was about to rain. Gerda had been in prison, she had gotten out by a miracle, and even her flight from Germany had occurred under a lucky star. “Where do you have to go?” he asked her. “Do you know how to get there?” “Thanks, Dachshund, I can manage, but if you’ve got nothing else to do maybe you’ll come with me a little way.” Maybe he had something else to do (take refuge in the library and come out at closing time), but instead he dragged his medical books well beyond the Pont Saint-Michel and back, the mark of the briefcase handle incised into his fingers.

  She was tireless: after a month she seemed to have been born Parisian. There was the day when she could go and collect the money she’d earned from her small jobs, but she had to trek all the way to the Opéra and, on the way back, buy some croissants and a basket of strawberries for Ruth, who must have gone to the room by now. “She’ll faint if I don’t bring her some sugar, not even twenty-one and so tall.” Or she had to pop over to the post office in Montparnasse to send a letter to Georg—in fact a mailbox and a tobacconist, for the stamps, would be enough, and then, since they were there, couldn’t he buy her some cigarettes? Sometimes when she had already licked the stamps for Italy and he was still waiting for the change, she concluded that if dachshunds with rough coats didn’t exist you’d have to invent them . . .

  Then she had applied herself to getting her baccalauréat by studying privately. Georg had been generous with encouragement to Gerda and exhortations to Willy to help her with the scientific subjects she’d never studied. Almost as a challenge, she preferred to summon him to the École Normale Supérieure, which was more beautiful and tranquil than the Sorbonne, where the Dachshund was enrolled. When they were thrown out, they retreated to a bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, where she pulled out of her bag the periodic table of the elements and the formulary of simple physics, the two of them supporting the dangerously worn pages along the lines of the folds. They remained in that chemical and physical intimacy made of paper until Gerda got impatient or cold. How many minutes of contact would the Dachshund’s flannelled thigh be allowed, how much of a view of silk stockings emerging from under the formulas, of her small feet beating the rhythm of the repetitions?

  In the morning, opening the blinds, Willy examined the clouds above the hotel courtyard. When they were dark enough to indicate that she would skip the lesson in the park, he darkened. A day that was cloudy and not too cold was fine for him, but his meteorology could never manage to guess how long before Gerda got up from the bench. Suddenly she’d stand, walk along the straight green wall of trees, enormous compared to her. She walked with a light but slightly agitated step, or maybe it was the effect of the gravel crunching under her heels, stab after stab. The Dachshund stayed behind to correct her, holding the sheet of paper. Gerda stopped and turned, she wanted to find the formula, the sequence of elements, before he reached her. “Should I slow down?” Willy wondered, unsure whether it was to give her time or to maintain that intent gaze. Doubt itself probably slowed him, since Gerda almost always managed to hurl the answer at him, which rewarded the Dachshund with a fleeting triumphant smile. But sometimes, seeing the classes just coming out of the Lycée Montaigne, Gerda kept going straight, as if their efforts to learn were mocked by the little jackets and smoothed hair that made all those childish faces, revived by the end of the school day, look the same. Her acceleration toward the entrance on Rue Auguste Comte, with the students of the ancient Paris lycée pouring through, communicated, That’s enough, let’s forget it. Willy lengthened his stride, preparing to tell her abruptly that those kids were not a valid reason to get annoyed and leave him there. Strangely, Gerda stopped running, too, as if she’d suddenly realized it, but Willy, following her, heard a soprano voice, getting louder and louder. “Lutetium, Hafnium, Tantalum, Tungsten, Rhenium, Osmium, Iridium, Platinum, Goold . . . ” Gerda declaimed, as if it were a surrealist poem. The students squeezed together to let her pass, barely deigning to make faces at her. But in the eyes of some of the boys shone a light that Willy Chardack kn
ew well.

  Dr. Chardack will forever remember Block D of the periodic table in that imitation, theatrical French, a section that, coincidentally, includes mercury, which is what the battery of his pacemaker is made of. In reality, the mercury battery doesn’t work well, and he and Greatbatch will have to solve the problem—a task the doctor can’t wait to tackle. But Dr. Chardack doesn’t get intimidated by challenges. Greatbatch has never asked him where he got his cold blood and fearless faith in inventions: maybe because he considers it part of the design of Providence that he found right in Buffalo a heart surgeon so capable, and willing to work into the wee hours in his garage. On those nights it was natural to talk about his past in the old world, while Dr. Chardack has had enough of cafeteria lunches and dinner parties where some colleague or complete stranger tends to ask the same eternal questions:

  “So you went to university here or back in Germany?”

  “Well, in Europe, but not in Germany. In Paris.”

  “Oh . . . in Paris!”

  “Not even in Paris does the morgue smell of Chanel No. 5,” he had once frozen a table, before the host laughed as if it were a joke among colleagues, not bad, but inappropriate in front of the ladies, who considered Paris so romantic. Thus, as soon as the ladies retreated to the kitchen, the host returned to the subject. “We had some good times, right, Bill? Nothing more democratic, after death, than the job of the doctor, and I see that they teach us in the same unpleasant way everywhere . . . All right, can I pour you another drop?”