The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  Getting lost in these conjectures while he walks in the sun is turning out to be a very useful pastime. Dr. Chardack is accustomed to summing up conclusions of an experiment, even one that’s mental and involuntary. On the other hand, he had already thought at the time that, with a variable in the initial configuration, a small intervention of chance, Gerda Pohorylle could have been anything, in a city like Paris.

  In the letters that Gerda always shared with Willy—maybe because she felt a little lost in the early days, maybe to keep their affections joined, and in the order she had established in Leipzig—Georg wrote that in Italy life wasn’t such an obstacle course. He had repeated it on a mound of snow when they met him in Turin to go skiing in a well-equipped resort in the Alps. They had stopped at the top of the piste: below they could see neither the start of the cable cars nor the two giant silos, the new hotels that the owner of Fiat had had built with the solemn support of the Father of the Country. Georg had proposed a break and had taken advantage of it to speak. “Let it be clear,” he had said, “there are no excuses for those who have imprisoned, beaten, sent into confinement or exile our Italian comrades, setting an example for even more criminally minded pupils.” And yet in Italy you could be born a Jew and become a minister, member of the hierarchy, big shot, court artist esteemed by the gang leaders, even—looking at Gerda—chief concubine of the chief whoremaster: not an enviable role, given that male lust was acclaimed there as an important endowment of leadership. She hadn’t commented, but had shaken out her short hair crushed under the beret, without pushing back the locks that had escaped onto her forehead. Maybe that instinctive gesture had nothing to do with it. Anyway Gerda, her face turned to the sun, her cheeks red, the foulard that peeked out under her scarf matching her green eyes half-closed in feline bliss, had still less to do with it. And so Georg had turned to the Dachshund: “You know that a large number of our fathers’ clients are Fascists, even people with the surname Cohen, and not just so as to maintain good relations with the blackshirts. The furriers are Fascists but so are the small shopkeepers. Dazed by the military pomp, intoxicated by the Roman trinkets that make them feel Italian to the marrow.” Then there were those whom Georg met on the wards: the ones who’d grown up in houses full of books dusted by the maidservant (“That’s what they say around here,” he clarified, disgusted) were thrilled to become clowns dressed as warriors. “Their fervor is at its peak now that the imperialist war is approaching!”

  Willy would have liked just to enjoy the day on skis and not enter into those subjects. “In France they say that Mussolini’s exaggerated warmongering is meant to intimidate the other nations,” he had tried to get by, eyeing the fresh slalom tracks on the descent, “and solidify his popularity at home.”

  Georg had shaken his head, curt.

  “We know perfectly well what our Führer is, but we shouldn’t delude ourselves that this one is all bark and no bite. On the other hand the Fascists don’t have much liking for Hitler, and for now we can take advantage of it. Stay in Paris, wear ourselves out in the war of the poor among all the émigrés, what’s the point? We shouldn’t give up fighting, but we don’t need to cultivate moral scruples, either, because we choose to live where, for now, almost everything is simple and within reach of our pockets.”

  “Who are you making these speeches to, the mountains?” Gerda had retorted with a little laugh.

  Georg had taken the square of chocolate that she held out to him, conciliatory, leaning forward on the skis planted slantwise in the fresh snow, and had bitten into his portion as if making a show of savoring the bittersweet.

  Willy had hesitated to do likewise, embarrassed. There was no doubt that that bite signified a rejection that he could only be glad of, but it was equally clear that his friend, yet again, had unfolded his dialectic weapons to attract Gerda: bring her close, know that she was at his side. Political meetings as love meetings. It had been happening since she joined their group. Willy wasn’t cut out for either one; even if later life had demonstrated that he could handle some basic compliments (“That blue shirt suits you, that hairstyle, that relaxed look”), and even articulate an “I’m glad to see you,” a token and, more often, surrogate for an “I love you.” But they were other women, the ones he had courted, women looking for serious intentions. Using that language with Gerda, you risked a flash of sarcasm or getting your hair mussed, physically or figuratively.

  “Ach, Willy.”

  Georg Kuritzkes had a whole other repertoire: conspiratorial remarks, compliments disguised as teasing, grand discourses in which he cited Lenin, Marx, and Rosa Luxemburg, and inserted lines of Heine from memory. The moment Gerda arrived in Leipzig, he had launched into the competition with the boyfriend from Stuttgart without revealing himself by a single word, and yet courting her with all of them. Was that why, in the end, she had decided in favor of the medical student who couldn’t offer her the chic things she’d become accustomed to, thanks to her dear Pieter, an importer of colonial goods and descendant of a Hanseatic mercantile dynasty? Probably not. Georg, however, lived nearby. His passionate courting mixed with his political passion—that, yes, Gerda succeeded in taking seriously. She wanted to adjust quickly to Leipzig and the new times. She had only to embrace the good fortune of having found her instructor: to ring the bell in Friedrich-Karl-Strasse when she wanted, because she’d forgotten a book or a pair of gloves, scattering hairpins in Georg’s attic, where no one batted an eye if the last to remain was a girl.

  Then Georg Kuritzkes had enrolled in Berlin and Gerda went to see him often. She would return to Leipzig on Monday glowing—eyes, skin on her face, her movements softened, while to the Dachshund she sang the praises of her exciting days in Berlin. A woman gets like that when she can stay freely with a man, Willy concluded, stunned. Like a queen in her capital, everything belongs to her, and she passes through it, regal and benevolent. The walks in the Tiergarten when Georg was at the university, the American jazz orchestras, the monumental rationality of the new filmmakers, and the moving rigor of the bricks with which the great architect Mies van der Rohe, already admired for the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, had erected a jagged wall in memory of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. “Were you supposed to take me to the cemetery?” she had asked him, but she bought a rose from a poor fellow, placing it on the ones that had already withered, which was the right thing to do. Then, in the physical absence of Georg, that intense luminosity faded, the electricity ran out. But Leipzig still suited Gerda very well, here and now.

  The air of North Buffalo, on that sunny Sunday, has a wonderful smell of cut grass, with streaks of gasoline, which Dr. Chardack inhales with the second or third cigarette after lunch. The taste like proof of the luxury of not having anything else to do. Around the houses now there’s a lot of activity, people busy painting, hammering, repairing the gutter. They seem to be having fun (the children certainly), and he can only admire this simple way of renewing the frontier spirit, extracting it from the toolbox. In his case, it was years before he made up his mind to settle permanently, odysseys by car with the airport closed for bad weather (up there winter could fall suddenly), long searches to find the right house. And yet he’s comfortable there, he’s stopped missing New York.

  How long since he’s heard from the Steins? The last time, Fred mentioned health problems, worse, but not enough to keep him from important appointments: a session with Dietrich, charismatic despite her age; a snapshot of Khrushchev, fantastic; of Willy Brandt, who was still a friend and still had the same expression; of Senator Kennedy, who didn’t excite him, neither the man nor the portrait he’d made, but he hoped he’d be elected. There was even a trip to Germany coming up, quick and painless, the plane ticket already booked . . .

  “I’m glad for you that you have a desire to return,” Dr. Chardack had muttered.

  Inevitably, during the Atlantic crossing the Steins wanted to satisfy some of their curiosity about Gerda
. Lilo asked when he had met her, and Willy answered that it was late summer of ’29, when Herr Pohorylle had received an offer to start a business in Leipzig and had moved the family from Stuttgart.

  He was on the tram, on the way home, and at a stop he had noticed a woman in front of a milliner’s window. She was wearing lace stockings and shoes of a slightly darker color, an ivory-colored dress that ended in soft pleats above the knee; between the line of the ears and the shoulders, her brown hair left exposed an area of almost amber skin. Willy had hoped that the tram wouldn’t start up before he could see the face of that woman, who had an unreal, cinematic elegance. But she had set off at a pace that seemed to mock him. She escaped him, turning her straight back, the hollow of her half-naked knees. When the tram resumed its course that had become pursuit, Willy believed he could see the profile of Elisabeth Bergner, she so much resembled his favorite actress. But on a parallel track he had realized that the diva-like woman was young, much younger than he had imagined. A girl, whom he might meet, in fact he would want to meet at all costs.

  He met her a few weeks later. She was already quite intimate with many in their circle, with Ruth Cerf and, especially, Georg Kuritzkes. The Dachshund thought that none of them would have any chance with her, because they were too young, and Georg, in particular, too devoted to the dispossession of the bourgeoisie for the tastes and demands of the elegant Miss Pohorylle. But, as on many other occasions, he was wrong.

  Dr. Chardack wouldn’t have remembered that woman seen from the tram for the rest of his life if that woman hadn’t been Gerda. And if he hadn’t perceived, maybe not at sixteen but at eighteen, that her allure and the frustrating capacity to escape him, and not only him, were related. No longer. The memory of Gerda now is only a time-wasting indulgence, a memory like the others. As he continues to walk straight down Hertel Avenue, with his jacket over his arm, because there’s not the shade that even the slenderest trees manage to cast on the asphalt, he turns, at the same time, onto a lateral thought: for example, who gave Georg his telephone number. Not the brother in Colorado, whom he was no longer in touch with. His mother, maybe, but who could have given it to her? Ruth? Had Kuritzkes’s mother and her second husband, Dr. Gelbke, helped the widow Cerf during the years of Nazism? It could be, and Ruth would be the type to remember it. But now she led a bourgeois life (married with children: how many?) in Switzerland. Did she, in any case, make phone calls to Dina Gelbke out of politeness? To talk about what? Health, old times in Leipzig and Zurich, children and grandchildren and former habitués of Friedrich-Karl-Strasse, but proceeding cautiously, and preferring the dead, starting with the adored Gerda, as opposed to all those who had scattered, not just by chance, to the four corners of the Western hemisphere . . . Who knows. Has the name of the street changed, are the Gelbkes still at the same address, Dr. Chardack wonders, his head beaded with sweat amid the thinning hair. Anyway, he’s convinced that Georg got his number from Ruth Cerf. It was much easier to preserve old friendships in Europe.

  Why had he never considered Ruth? Only because she was too tall and had a beauty that inspired awe? She had gotten along in Paris as a model until her type was considered unfashionable and too Germanic, a joke of the times. In Leipzig, though, they were still high-school students, and a girl like Ruth certainly didn’t go unnoticed. But a twenty-year-old like Gerda was a sensational novelty, and then she was so sophisticated, so glamorous: inevitable that the boys had started buzzing around her, a little less so that he had remained more enmeshed than the others. Didn’t they call him the Dachshund partly because, height apart, he always aimed at achievable goals?

  But Gerda didn’t dispense her favors only on the basis of appearance, and she had never been simply a girl to long for through a window. She was a thing much too serious for those who loved her, to judge from the reactions to the wild epics of André Friedmann when her companion was in Paris and Gerda in the middle of the Republican Army with her Leica. The by now slightly famous Robert Capa appeared on the boulevards of the Rive Gauche, all exuberance, all sexual ease, arm around the waist of the girl he had picked up for the evening. How long would Gerda have lasted with someone like that, a man who went to collect their fee and spent it on drinking and bimbos? Willy wondered in dismay. But then he’d run into him in the late morning, the aftereffects of carousing summed up in an exhausted smile. With a pleading expression, Capa invited the Dachshund to the café to talk about departures and plans. He swallowed cup after cup and continued to use the first person plural. He referred to Gerda as a poor melamed to the Only and Supreme, even if he kept naming her, Willy reflected ironically, with a thought to the Galician teacher who had prepared him for his bar mitzvah. It wasn’t a valid excuse for his consolations of the preceding night, but one point needed to be recognized: Capa wasn’t the only one to get overpowered by every kind of intoxication when Gerda came into it. Detoxifying one’s system of a spring so fresh was almost impossible.

  Willy had tried it with apparently good results, but at times he discovered he had lapsed. The most humiliating occasions were those further back in time, when Georg Kuritzkes had officially been chosen. The old boyfriend from Stuttgart had withdrawn with the class of those who are used to losing in the grand style, as after the crash of ’29. Remaining “good friends,” as she claimed, didn’t seem natural to Willy, in fact had the odor of a tactical retreat: the boyfriend was waiting for the rival’s resources to be slowly consumed, but that didn’t happen.

  Besides, it was clear that Gerda was very much in love with Georg and his world. And it was precisely the irrefutable reality that exposed the realistic Dachshund to the repercussions.

  For example, he happened to observe her in the smoky living room of Friedrich-Karl-Strasse one night when Dina Gelbke, Georg’s mother, brought up some episodes of her past, a Bolshevik adventure story. Gerda didn’t miss a detail. Dina recounted how, very young and very ignorant, she had been roused by the furious winds of 1905, which kindled even proletarian Łodź, and had run away from home to escape the repression and join the comrades in Moscow. She told of prisons, false identities, final flight from the tsarist police, and then of the most memorable undertaking since she had lived in Leipzig: the escape from a clinic in Merano, where her first pregnancy was being monitored, to pay a visit to the man to whom she owed the direction of her life, Lenin. “I was well and no one could keep me from setting off: not my husband and certainly not the doctors.”

  Who had provided the opportunity to repeat the story on that occasion that had left such an impression? No, it hadn’t been Bertold Brecht or Kurt Tucholsky but some minor celebrity who, passing through the city, came to the house. But while Dina told the story she looked at the young people, and with a certain satisfaction emphasized that, very soon after her arrival in Zurich, Georg, too, had displayed a revolutionary impatience and then an uncontainable rage—not toward the Swiss banks but toward the obstetrician and the doctor, or rather the entire surrounding world.

  “You’d be better off knowing how to produce that rage again, since you’re a little too fond of getting lost in speeches,” she concluded, resting her gaze on the youths sitting on the carpet at her feet. Gerda hadn’t turned to Georg with a tender or even a radiant smile. She had laughed in his face, openmouthed, her head thrown back and moving side to side to resume eye contact with Dina and her fleshy lips, and Georg had withdrawn the hand resting on Gerda’s knee, which vibrated with the fullness of that laugh.

  Willy suffered. He was jealous of the proprietary carelessness with which Georg touched her, and even more of the casual way in which he let go. He was envious of such innate assurance (what could you expect from someone who had had Lenin as a godfather?), and it incensed him that the other took Gerda not as a gift but as a merit. He was jealous also of Dina’s attention to Gerda from the day her son introduced her to the household. So again he summoned up the woman seen from the tram, the still frame that came down off the screen. “
Watch out, all of you,” he said to himself. “If things go better here or she gets fed up with hanging around your revolutionary crème, Gerda will go back to what she was before in a heartbeat.”

  He didn’t have much faith that things could go better in the Germany of ’31 or ’32. So he concentrated on the candid figure that admired berets and small hats in the window of the milliner’s shop at that tram stop. A cheap trick. Anyway he was certain that Gerda hadn’t forgotten Pieter. Her former boyfriend had gone back to the coffee-importing business, which she had helped to get going in a big way. And maybe, who knows, in memory of old times, she might agree to go with him on a business trip and open an office in South America.

  Who knows what she might do if Pieter offered it to her? Would she prefer Georg, who was leaving again for Berlin, or seize the opportunity to get away from every looming misery and threat?

  Willy was afraid to find out. Cocooned in his jealousy and in attempts to free himself of it, he had fought—clumsily, uselessly—against an accusation that, years later, many had spit in Gerda’s face. Opportunist! She lighted a cigarette with Parisian nonchalance and, lifting her chin, exhaled: “If that’s what you think . . . ” The sulky expression was reflected in the mirrors, the smoke enveloped the person sitting opposite at the little table. Usually he apologized right away, as if taking care of a formality: better quickly and efficiently, or rather already smiling. To insist, to explain would have been counterproductive.