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The Girl with the Leica

Page 3

by Helena Janeczek


  “Cheers,” Dr. Chardack answered, bringing the reply to his lips as well.

  The problem, in fact, had been the living. There were certain professors with a determination to fail those who stumbled in the exams, not on the facts but on a word or a correct declension. “It’s an invasion!” the placards on the streets declared, and in the classrooms groups of students coalesced who had arrived in Paris from every place where spreading fascism and nationalism had gained the upper hand: here the Italians, up there the Hungarians and Poles, then, in smaller groups, the Romanians and the Portuguese. They were everywhere, the judéo-boches—the last straw—because now there really were a lot of them, feared for that reason, and because they were often among the smartest.

  Learning everything by heart, rattling off, word for word, five-hundred-page textbooks. Straining their eyes until late at night in the faint light of lamps stripped of their pale-flowered shades (well, yes, in intention very romantic), trembling with weariness and the damp cold, the acidity of too many cafés crèmes drunk during the day so as not to collapse on the mattress of the hotel room.

  “Soon a Frenchman won’t be able to be treated by a French doctor,” commented the students generally associated with Catholic groups but more devoted to besieged France than to Jesus Christ. They uttered the phrase like a station announcement, snorted at a classmate, furtively insolent.

  You had to be the best to be sure of passing the exams. You had to respect every deadline. Hurry. Hope that the far-right leagues wouldn’t repeat the terrible events of February 6, 1934, with greater success (“They can make champagne, but they still can’t make a coup” had been the contemptuous, exorcising summary of a fellow-student from Berlin), that the government wouldn’t yield too much to the more reactionary pressures, that the left would win the next elections. Otherwise, you could also expect, among the other restrictions, an entrance quota to restore French universities to the French, and then what else would they come up with to make life impossible for the immigrants?

  Two years of uncertainty. But after the victory of the Front Populaire, celebrated until dawn on that 4th of May, 1936, the nationalist or simply anti-Semitic teachers had become even worse bastards, convinced that only their exemplary efforts could protect France: stop the invaders in the course of their studies, reject them one by one, exam after exam.

  But the advantage of the mother tongue and every privilege of birth were eliminated as soon as they entered la morgue: not the one of defunct Grand Guignol fame but a morgue with stagnant, damp air as cold as death. There they all took on the complexion of the corpses: both the scion destined for Papa’s office and the middle-class kid whose relatives had invested in him their own savings and anxieties for promotion, and including a few from the provinces who prided themselves on having broken the necks of chickens. It was basically a question of numerical probability: the macabre-scientific rite revealed nothing about the future qualities of a doctor, as Willy himself said to his classmates to encourage them.

  And yet it had been a moment of validation and revenge. A moment when no teacher could deny the evidence laid out on the autopsy table. Objectively good at it. Good at it period. For Willy and his friends from Leipzig it was all they had to rely on: so as not to keep waiting for a destiny they rejected to loosen its grip. Recognizing it would have meant surrendering the palace to the fascists who had driven them out, confirming the lies about the “destiny of people and races,” the phony legends of those who believed they were heirs of divinities extinct for millennia. Destiny was a false myth, a trick, a reactionary pretext. But in Paris, too, they had to take that destiny into their own hands, with everything they could display. Willy hadn’t hesitated to grasp the scalpel. And the only one of them who had arrived in Paris with a trade in hand had kept herself afloat with the typewriter. Until her fingers, now slightly callused at the tips (but maybe Gerda exaggerated), embraced the compact body of a camera.

  “Our Gerda plays the Remington the way Horowitz plays a Steinway” was a remark originating in the cafés that served as sitting rooms for those who lived in meager spaces or a dormitory bed. At the same time they were the exchange, the always volatile black market for those who sought work or were offering it. Gerda had the advantage of an excellent knowledge of French, acquired in a finishing school on Lake Lausanne, but this also gave her the allure of an upper-class girl who had never lifted a finger. In other words, she got her first jobs not because the employers expected that she was a good typist but out of sheer charm. So the surprise was that much greater when she delivered, rapidly, impeccable work, and, just as rapidly, her renommée grew. Anyone who had given “our Gerda” a letter to type vite-vite could have been the source of the remark about the Steinway. But no, Dr. Chardack reflects, not noticing a bicycle cutting across his path, the phrase went back to Fred and Lilo Stein, who had welcomed Gerda and the Remington into their apartment and had seen her at work for that whole period.

  Willy wasn’t convinced that staying at the Steins’ was the best arrangement for “our Gerda.” “How’s it going up there in your Montmartre exile?” he would ask her every so often. “Well, very well,” she answered, praising her new room, shared with Lotte, a journalist friend who was the perfect roommate, since she was also constantly chasing after jobs. And she never failed to lavish praise on her magnificent landlords. Which the Steins in reality were not, with that sublet which circumvented the contract signed by a French photographer who had left them in the lurch. But the tenants who had agreed to it delivered the rent with a punctuality unthinkable for Gerda and Lotte. If, however, the place wasn’t silent by a certain hour, they threatened not to pay a cent. Unfortunately, if the girls wanted to honor their delivery deadlines, they had no alternative: when Lotte’s cacophonous hammering was over, her journalistic stop and start, Gerda began her accelerated march, the inexorable ringing and rolling of the new line that reverberated behind the closed door. Thus, having appeased the tenants with a nightcap (“un petit cognac c’est mieux pour dormir d’une tisane . . . ”) and the proper excuses (Fred wanted to offer a discount, but Lilo stopped him immediately), the Steins had placed the Remington as far as possible from the bedrooms, on the dining table, where only they, the land-lords, absorbed the full impact of the background of typing. They said they were used to it, they said that Gerda’s rhythms evoked the unrestrained drumming of Gene Krupa in Benny Goodman’s swing band, and even the vigorous revolutionary art of Shostakovich and Khachaturian. “Our Gerda plays the Remington like a Steinway,” they concluded, and she laughed, perfectly in tune with the praise for her solo.

  Willy had somewhat lost sight of her in that period, even though Gerda always welcomed him warmly when he appeared in Montmartre with a good bottle. The Steins, charming and friendly, invited him more often, but there hadn’t been a chance to deepen the friendship.

  Years later, though, he had seen Fred and Lilo again, on that fateful day, May 6, 1941, printed on the ticket for the ship that, sailing from Marseille, was taking them to the United States. Willy had arrived at the ship as tense as the ropes that tied his life to a wharf in Occupied France. He kept an eye on everything but had basically looked only at the gangplank, the moorings cast off, and, finally, the disappearance of the coastline. Fred had recognized him, as they were about to go below deck. “How nice to see you again,” they greeted each other, with the incredulity, the relief, the lump in the throat contained in that polite remark. During the journey they had become intimate; the Steins wanted to talk and Willy was happy to listen to them. They were planning their new lives in America, but they talked easily about Gerda, about the good times with Gerda, which was natural. It was the medium of their friendship and, all in all, a subject immune to the worries that had to be left behind at least for that month on the open sea. Yes, the knowledge that she was dead and buried in Paris allowed him not to wonder where she was and what could still happen to her . . .

  Dr. Chardac
k looks around and realizes how monstrous that thought seems in the quiet, deep-green frame of a suburb where the biggest worry is the raccoons that root around in the garbage at night. It seems that, more than once, a woman has found herself face to face with the intruder that climbed into the garbage can, looked at her with annoyance, and only then decided to flee. Things that a person born in Europe has trouble believing, things that are still worth a paragraph in the Buffalo News, and Gerda certainly would have been wild about it, despite wondering how one could live in a place where there was no one more exciting to meet than, as they would say, a Waschbär, a raccoon.

  In any case, Gerda had been crucial for enduring the Atlantic crossing. Fred and Lilo’s memories had led him to discover some things he hadn’t known. For example, that Fred was so enchanted by Gerda’s typing skill that he had photographed her at work: fingers soft on the keyboard, face changing from smile to grimace, to resolution, concentration, challenge, puffs of smoke suggesting an established dialogue between the two machines, typewriter and camera.

  At the time of the Montmartre exile, Willy was convinced that Gerda’s interest in photography was only a slight fever, the curiosity that went with a new source of entertainment. She needed amusement as she needed air, that was true, and André Friedmann, who had been hanging around her for a while, made her laugh, undoubtedly. There was no other reason to spend time with him. What ambitions or possibilities could that amiable windbag from Budapest have, with his disheveled hair and ridiculous French, a fellow who was attempting, like hundreds of others, to get some of his photos published in the newspapers? He tried to be bold, to pass off his wretched condition as a choice of style, but Gerda wasn’t receptive to that message, and after a while the young man, who wasn’t stupid, had stopped going after her, satisfied to stay in the friendly and mainly comic role that she assigned him. Photography and the photographer remained a pastime, a hook for widening her circle of acquaintances (for example, Cartier-Bresson, with that elegant manner that betrayed his family’s wealth), until Gerda moved to the Steins’.

  To Dr. Chardack it still seems inconceivable that Friedmann, that is to say Capa, could become a name known even to an Italian-American girl from New Jersey. (“Robert Capa? You never told me!” his wife had exclaimed, seeing him go pale at the wheel when the radio announced that Capa had died in Indochina.) He would have bet, rather, on Fred Stein, who in Paris had become respected and in New York hadn’t done badly, but Capa’s stunning success was something else.

  Stein was from Dresden, had taken his degree in Leipzig, and in Paris was valued for his anti-fascist activity and as a photographer. He had managed to progress on his own, to gain the esteem of colleagues, even to run a studio in Montmartre. And Gerda admired this, admired the transformation of a jurist deprived of the right to practice, first by Hitler and then by France, which the stink of reagents in the bathroom used as a darkroom reasserted every day. On the other hand, if noble France hadn’t provided for a separate toilet even in the apartments of a so-so building, the needs of the tenants and the requirements of the laboratory would have had a hard time living together. Anyway, the tub was full of prints hanging to dry on the clothes rack, something that, according to Willy, his friend couldn’t have been happy about.

  One day when Gerda was still living in the hotel with Ruth Cerf, she had asked him urgently for help. The situation was ridiculous and also a little indelicate, and its subject was bedbugs. After discovering the true origin of a rash taken for an allergic reaction, the girls had done everything possible to disinfect their room, beginning with the parasitic colony’s fortress, the ghastly mattress. The problem seemed to be resolved. But, damn it, now they needed a hot bath, an immersion from which they’d emerge with red faces and the wrinkled fingers of newborns, cleansed of the disgusting film that seemed to remain stuck to their skin, even if they washed twice a day in the rusty sink. They didn’t have money for hot water, and, besides, the bathroom was even more revolting than the entire hotel. Willy barely had time to give them a bewildered glance when Gerda launched into the proposal.

  “You invent something to distract your concierge and we go up. Afterward it will be easy, we’ll be careful, we’ll leave one at a time. You don’t have to do anything else, just the key to the bathroom, now, don’t forget it.”

  It occurred to Willy to send them to the public baths, but the only one nearby, the Bains d’Odessa, had a terrible reputation. So he surrendered to the risk that the concierge or the maids would discover that he brought girls to his room (and two at once!), but everything had gone according to Gerda’s plan. That night, though, his heart was still pounding, he was sweating, and to resolve the excitement he ended up using the most humiliating and mechanical method. The knowledge that they were naked, there across the hall, a few steps away. Then the blow (the blow to his heart) that he wasn’t prepared for: Gerda returned, not to pick up her bag but to get a jar of Nivea out of it. And after telling him “If you want you can turn around” (he had immediately faced the wardrobe) she had taken off her clothes and rubbed in the lotion. “Unfortunately you have to wait until it’s absorbed!” “That’s all right, I’ll wait!” he had replied. “O.K., but I’m sorry to have to punish you for too long . . . ”

  In fact when she communicated that she was ready, Gerda still had to rub the lotion on her legs, wait more minutes, put her stockings back on, pull down her skirt. Turning around, at that point, was comical. All that remained to him was the hope that he hadn’t blushed already before Gerda gave him a little kiss and, with the door closing, whispered, “Danke, Dackel,” and immediately slipped away.

  It was partly that episode that had made him bet against the overregulated life in Montmartre: and the Steins’ bathroom, so often unusable, had appeared to him an emblem of that restricted freedom.

  Yet Gerda, the Steins recalled, had immediately been enthusiastic about the new use. She had asked if her friend Friedmann could develop there sometimes and, most important, she had volunteered to help, so imploring that they couldn’t say no. Yes, our Gerda saw a great possibility emerging along with the strips of negatives and had taken to following Fred at every free moment of the day. “I’ll steal your job, can I?” She learned to do developing, retouching, and enlargements with speed and focused joy; her teacher barely had time to assign her a new task when she was already talking about projects. She assaulted everyone she met with her progress in photography, she spoke of almost nothing else. She didn’t really know how to get practice, because the Steins’ Leica was available only when they were home, while André’s, for goodness’ sake, very often ended up at the pawnbroker’s. That crazy Hungarian had holes in his pockets, plus the courage to tell her that she was overdoing it with that so typically German fixation on saving. “Me, Willy, you know?” Anyway, she was now working on mastering the technical and theoretical part, and then her teachers claimed that the eye could also be trained by shooting without a camera. “Sure, but it’s as if a beginner in surgery, you, for example, always had to be satisfied with cutting the air! Does it seem possible?” “No, you’re right,” Willy had said, but he was no longer certain about many things. Was Gerda giving up the idea of getting her degree in order to attempt a career as a photographer? Didn’t she see how much competition there was, how much easier it was to support oneself with the typewriter? One day he had asked her and she had cut him off: “You think I don’t know it?” She was content that she could get by with her typing work, and she even referred to herself as a Tippmammsel (“chez nous, c’est une mademoiselle qui batte sur la machine,” she explained to the French), but she felt alienated, she was bored. And above all she couldn’t bear having to work off the books, at the mercy of anyone who could present exploitation as a favor and take away the work at any moment.

  And while she continued to prove to him the perfect reasonableness of her dreams (“It’s not something you do overnight”) Willy had remembered a detail of their lessons
at the École Normale, which, though already conspicuous as they sat on the bench in the Jardin du Luxembourg, at the time he had paid little attention to. Occasionally, in the neighborhood of the École Normale, or in the corridors, on the stairs, in the sheltered cloister where they stopped to smoke a last cigarette before entering some classroom, they encountered a man with the cross-eyed gait of professors of a certain age, cap pulled down over his lowered head, well-fed stomach swelling the middle buttons of the raincoat. René Spitz, who as a student of Sigmund Freud had been summoned to occupy the chair of psychoanalysis, needed a personal secretary and that secretary had been Gerda. Thus, every time she caught sight of him, she waited until he was close and squealed “Guten Tag, Herr Professor!” as if seeing him made her the happiest person in the world. The professor didn’t reciprocate, or responded by mumbling in the Viennese style; in any case he kept going straight, the instinct for flight prevailing over the imperative to preserve decorum before the student body. The reaction provoked in Gerda a radiant sneer, like a young tough. “Did you see? You greet him à la boche . . . and pfff!” He was only a petit-bourgeois hypocrite who, unfortunately, could find plenty of little Jewish girls willing to slave under his conditions. But she would not remain what she was now, and you didn’t have to be a disciple of Freud to be sure of it . . .

  Who knows what Gerda would have said seeing him walking through the peaceful emptiness around those small bright-colored houses, his sweaty face no doubt slightly red, his stomach more pronounced, but otherwise so little changed? And she, who was certain she’d see him with a chair at the Sorbonne or in an important American university, how would she have greeted the result of those expectations? After all, she hadn’t been so wrong, after all, he had become something more than an ordinary Herr Professor, but in a place so ordinary, a place they both would have had to look for on the map. But what would Gerda have become if she hadn’t met André Friedmann in a dull period, if he hadn’t introduced her to a photographic agency, and, above all, if in France hiring a foreigner hadn’t been forbidden by law? Wouldn’t she have quickly found a job worthy of her talents and her beautiful presence? And wouldn’t she have continued to use the Dachshund’s lessons to finally enroll in a faculty where girls in general were rare birds and girls like her a subspecies before whom the doors of science opened wide to a suitable mind, an unsuspected persistence, and maybe even some charm? No, not necessarily . . . Maybe she would have been happier if she’d met not necessarily a Rothschild but a facsimile of her old boyfriend in Stuttgart: a man of liberal views and generous hands when it came to his wallet . . .

 

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