The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  “That’s enough!” Kuritzkes was exasperated.”If gossiping weren’t the only thing we’re good at, the air wouldn’t reek of his flatulence.”

  Thus, having obtained the fervid expectation on Gerda’s face (but she had also straightened her knees, shifting the hem of her skirt upward), he didn’t know how to continue.

  “My father does business with Italy, and he goes there often. And every time he returns he says to my mother: ‘Dina, doesn’t what Mussolini—who was a socialist—has done there teach you anything? You think you’ll do better with this poisonous Austrian gnome, in a country of reactionary anti-Semites?’ And she yells that he can’t berate her, given that she has brought up her three children by herself . . . ”

  Willy suspected that there was still a hint of bewilderment behind that unusual confidence, but Georg, standing there, had everyone’s eyes on him.

  “My father’s right. We have to stop them soon and do it together,” he continued curtly, a warning immediately picked up by Gerda, who drove her sharp nails into her fingertips, wrinkled her forehead, stiffening her chin and mouth as well, and let the fearsome energy of an obstinate, childish rage rise to the surface of her irises.

  Where in the world did that rage come from? Willy wondered, frightened and fascinated.

  Georg had lighted a cigarette, letting the others speak. And he didn’t realize that his eyes (the famous Kuritzkes eyes!) were wandering over Gerda, with that glitter that made them droop, and the Dachshund couldn’t believe it.

  “This guy thinks that by getting Fräulein Pohorylle on his side we’ll have half the revolution under our belts,” he said to himself, “and he’ll take her hand out of her capitalist boyfriend’s.”

  Unmistakable, shame assailed him. What sort of friend am I if I turn mean for a woman?

  Concentrate again on the speaker, eliminate everything.

  Kuritzkes had again found his usual nonchalance, but Willy had lost the friend he admired and envied. Georg was like the others, an insect drawn by a magnet toward Gerda, the first flame that had managed to outshine him.

  From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.

  Georg would have done anything to have the girl from Stuttgart. He had not only more abilities but also more needs, Willy had intuited. Georg Kuritzkes had so great a need for Gerda Pohorylle because his goals and objectives were so great. And when Gerda was nearby, suddenly anything appeared within reach.

  The man whom drivers see proceeding slowly along Hertel Avenue has the appearance of someone who wasn’t born around there, but he looks respectable. With the white shirt and the jacket over his arm he could be a waiter, but if he’s going to work why did he stop on the sidewalk? Has he forgotten something at home? Can’t find the car keys?

  The hypothesis is not so far from the truth. Dr. Chardack is standing still on the sidewalk because he can’t find a word. Not finding the word happens to him more often than not finding the car keys. Usually it happens when he’s with other people, more rarely when he’s alone. As long as the memory of Leipzig ran as straight as Hertel Avenue, Dr. Chardack proceeded without obstructions in his parallel dimension. Gerda’s unforgettable laughs have induced him to walk quickly, a cool gulp in the exhaust-laden air. But now Dr. Chardack has stumbled on that word that he can’t find in his new language. He concentrates, he persists, but Freiraum doesn’t exist in English. There exist only “free” and “room,” words useful for asking for a room in a fluorescent MOTEL on the dark edge of a highway. Suddenly he sees himself again driving between New York and Buffalo, fighting sleep and the extremely sensible fear that if he lost control of the wheel no one would come to his aid for hours. But this Hertel Avenue, longer and wider than the Champs-Élysées, also reinforces the thought that takes shape in his sweaty head. Where there is space to lose, space going to waste, like food in restaurants, the space can’t be charged with an abstract value. But in the Germany that was about to suppress freedom, Freiraum wasn’t only Georg’s free attic or the great lawn of the Rosental, that untouched tongue of woods whose every path they had all, living in the same neighborhood, known since childhood. It meant something more extensive and more complicated, but natural, because there was a word for it.

  When his history and philosophy teacher caught him distracted, he would shout, “Chardack, are you dreaming?! You’re not going out for recess.” And it was all the same, whether Willy was pondering how to see a certain young lady (did she always take the same street?) or, on the contrary, within reach of the Kantian concept of “the human being’s emergence from his self-incurred minority.” There, that was the point: if you tried to emerge from the state of minority to occupy Freiraum, you risked not getting anywhere. If instead you grabbed it along with the others, that space of freedom took shape: the words thought or written became words uttered aloud. The useless body, bent over the school desk in a deceptive posture, was one with many different bodies (some with a very remarkable appearance). Bodies that met, moved, expanded in a common and greater space, both inner and geographic. And all together they no longer resembled the bolts driven in to keep a static construction standing; rather, they were like parts of a fine mechanism which needed play in order to function. Spielraum: they got us that, a concept even more untranslatable than Freiraum.

  Dr. Chardack has dried off the sweat and resumed walking, mulling over periphrases, while immediately discarding the literal translation of the word, room to play, that has surfaced from a great distance. They were young, agreed, but they weren’t moving in those spaces as if in the expanded precincts of an amusement park.

  “Grow up, Wilhelm, stop playing revolutionary!” The paternal rebuke, somewhat out of place, made him furious. The Dachshund hadn’t hesitated to leave for Paris as soon as the “game” became tremendously serious. Were Gerda’s younger brothers, who had gone into hiding, playing? Was Soma, Georg’s brother, playing, when, at only thirteen or fourteen, he was ferociously beaten up by the SA, the brownshirts? Was Georg playing, who had had to hide for months, or Ruth, active in the student union, or Gerda, on the motorcycle at night, headlights off, distributing leaflets in the periphery of Leipzig?

  No, it wasn’t a game, for any of them. But with Gerda things were, as usual, more complex.

  Gerda never seemed worried. When, in Leipzig, she talked about her visits to Berlin, where the clashes were an everyday occurrence, or when in Paris she announced that she would leave for Spain alone, the others—even Capa—were profuse with warnings. “Calm down!” she sneered, benevolent. And if “Gerda, it’s not a game,” slipped out she got terribly angry. They should stop treating her like a child, she—who knew how to keep the books, calculated the exchange rates in an instant, remembered down to the last Pfennig or centime the shop prices—always got by.

  “I have a head more solidly on my shoulders than the rest of you,” she fumed. A hard head, at that.

  And yet she couldn’t help it: Gerda was and remained light, in all senses, even in the less flattering meanings. The illusion of lightness originated in the charm she emanated, in the paradox of an inflexible grace, in an appearance that was a gift, at times a limitation, and not the result of an effort of will or of constant interior work.

  “Ach, Willy, life is too serious to take seriously.”

  He wasn’t the sole recipient of that sentence whose origin he had discovered in America, finding it on a cross-stitched sampler. Life is far too important ever to talk seriously about. Oscar Wilde. Or was it a cushion placed on a chair?

  That witticism fit her like a magic slipper: Gerda was doing things seriously even when it didn’t seem that way. Maybe she fell into her own trap.

  She had immediately placed the Hungarian with the Leica (“Friedmann? Pleasant blowhard”), jokingly she had started teasing him (“Shave your beard, the maudit type isn’t much appreciated these days”), and soon found herself in the role of the fr
iend with experience of the world and a head on her shoulders. That André Friedmann had been weaned by the only metropolis able to vie with Paris, had been born in a fashion atelier in the chic heart of Budapest, had been brought up in its gambling clubs and streets of ill repute and had then sailed in every water of savoir vivre, clear or muddy, didn’t impress a young lady like Gerda, educated in Switzerland and refined in the revolutionary salons of Leipzig. But to have over him that Pygmalion-like authority (he called her arbitra elegantiae and sometimes mistress of ceremonies) made her proud. In other words, Gerda played, so to speak, at “cleaning up the Balkan gypsy,” André was suited to that game, and the copains and camarades observed the spectacle of a surrealist installation masked by bourgeois customs. The cafés of Saint-Michel and Montparnasse became theaters for the play. Spielraum made concrete.

  There you could have as many dreams of glory as you wanted, not rationed like the sugar cubes, which, when no garçon was keeping an eye on the silver bowl on the table, ended up in Friedmann’s sleeves. Now he did it more for exercise than to stay on his feet, but the waiters at La Coupole, the Capoulade, and the Dôme knew him, and for them it made no difference if the pockets into which the energizing loot was made to disappear belonged to a greasy leather jacket or a beige bourgeois raincoat bought according to the dictates of Gerda Pohorylle. It was a game, it was theater, and they enjoyed it along with the others. Often the money that Gerda and André had in their pockets wasn’t enough even for the movies, and so they invented the show themselves. The friends who functioned as the audience expected to see the play end, some day or other, because sooner or later the fabulous Gerda Pohorylle would get fed up performing with André Friedmann. Instead she fell in love with him.

  In the summer of ’35 they had left, hitchhiking, to go camping on an almost deserted and fragrant little island in the South of France. Certain things happened more easily far from Paris, with its too many constrictions and multiple temptations, but Gerda was so obviously in love with André Friedmann that Willy, felt suddenly liberated.

  One morning he had gone looking for them to propose an outing to Cannes, the ferry left in a little over an hour. He had seen them sitting on a cliff barefoot (the polish on Gerda’s toes chipped, André’s very dark), while they tried to augment the daily ration of canned sardines with some fresh fish. One beside the other, they were silent, watching the hook with the float. It was unusual for Friedmann to be so quiet and still, movement confined to his fingers in Gerda’s thatch of reddish hair, to which she yielded with the minimal undulations of a cat.

  Willy had stopped on the path and stood there, following that abandon with a sense of indiscretion much stronger than when he saw them embracing in the water, or emerging from the tent with shiny skin and veiled eyes.

  “Merde, it stole my bait and got away!”

  Gerda had raised the rod to show the empty hook to André, who had reached out his hands to help her.

  “Was I supposed to pull it up quicker?”

  “No, Schatzi, it happens. Fish are also sly, they prefer to live in the deep blue sea and make babies by the millions. How can you not understand them.”

  “Eggs, stupid.”

  “Eggs or little fish, as my chief prefers.”

  “I’d prefer to catch one. Possibly bigger than an anchovy and edible.”

  “Fishing requires extreme patience or extreme hunger. Pay attention to me, I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes, of course. You were only thirteen and you caught a twenty-kilo pike that almost pulled you into the Danube with its ferocious force.”

  “What do you mean? It couldn’t be a pike, my little goldfish, at most it must have been a carp. Even you know that at that age it’s impossible.”

  “O.K., it was later, and it was a catfish taken out of the Landwehrkanal after you broke the ice with a cobblestone saved in memory of the clashes of December 1932. I went through Berlin in that period, oh, I remember them . . . ”

  “Are you making fun of me? Look out or I’ll tickle you until you drop the fishing rod in the water. And then, pricking up your pretty ears, you’ll hear all the fish of the Côte d’Azure laughing.”

  “Stop it! I’ll give you the rod and this, too. Happy?”

  “I want another. Then I’ll tell you how the real story . . . ”

  Willy had observed Gerda take the rod out of André’s hands (slowly, following the twirls of the line so that the hook wouldn’t get stuck in someone’s skin), carefully lay it down near her lover, and finally, slow and solemn, encircle his neck and kiss him. Friedmann had hugged her tight, freeing his expert hand to move up along her dorsal spine and down the bare back again to the bottom of her striped bathing suit, then he pressed her waist and buttocks, relaxed his grip into a soft embrace, and, finally, detached his mouth from Gerda’s and let his head fall on her shoulder. Maybe André had closed his eyes, but Willy couldn’t see from where he was. He saw instead Gerda run her fingertips over his forehead and, after arranging a lock that had slid over his eyes, caress his hair.

  Riveted to the red earth of Île Sainte-Marguerite, Willy was stunned. Not even out of pity had Gerda ever granted him such a caress. Georg yes, but he couldn’t remember where or when. Maybe it was the fault of the sun on his bare head, even though there was a little wind that, luckily, carried not only the voices but also the comforting fragrance of the Mediterranean brush. He stared at his shoes and socks, but the memory of her affections that had so often appeared to torment him had vanished. Now the kisses and embraces of Gerda and Georg were evidence in an archive, whose key he must possess but had no idea where.

  Meanwhile André had started talking about himself, taking an indirect approach, and Willy again stopped to listen. His fishing initiation in Budapest, where you dreamed of rocks as warm and comfortable as these, and where the fog, when it rose, entered your bones and swallowed up even your hands in front of your nose. But the old fishermen’s stories made up for everything, the boredom and the poor catch, the stink of oily water and rotten fish. Legend said that after sunset, when the fishing was better, gigantic creatures appeared in the Danube, which awakened fantastic fears in the head of a boy in short pants.

  “You know, here’s the best part. While I was starting to wet my pants the carp bites. A kilo and a half, for a kid not bad. I bring it to my mother, and you can imagine! How could I expect that that thing fished under the Elisabeth Bridge should end up on our table in the form of gefilte fish or fish soup with paprika? End of the carp, end of the story.”

  “You mean your mother threw it away right before the eyes of her favorite son? I don’t believe it . . . ”

  “Worse. She gave it to one of her dressmakers who was particularly needy. Right before my eyes, naturally.”

  “And at that moment you decided that if you couldn’t be a great fisherman you’d become a photographer fighting against injustice and inequality. Is that it?”

  “I had no idea what I wanted to be. But I knew that the life of a good bourgeois wasn’t for me. Unfortunately I wasn’t born a princess like you, honey.”

  Those stories had put Willy more at ease. He had never been present at an equally intimate moment between Gerda and Georg, even though he was very familiar with the oscillations of Gerda’s Witz. Of course, she had hurried to meet Georg when he returned from Berlin and stepping off the train in Turin had flown into his arms, while Willy got the bags down and stood guard on the platform. Indifferent to his presence, she had kissed Georg at the top station of the cable car at Sestriere, kissed him on the lawns of the Rosental and the shores of the Saxon lakes, in front of Sas and the whole group, made out with him while they danced at their little parties in the attic. Maybe the Hippocratic principle contraria contrariis curantur was valid. Willy had left the unhealthy realm of desire, ever since Gerda had applied a radical, not always painless, treatment, and after a therapeutic month he said, “E
nough!” “Enough,” the Dachshund had repeated, so relieved, in the end, that he had stayed, waiting to carry her suitcase down to the hotel entrance and have a taxi called.

  Now he could witness a scene like that almost impassively. He had let his gaze wander between the cliff and the dark green profile of the hills, and had felt free, cured.

  In June, Gerda had seen him on the terrace of a university café, the semester was over, and they were talking about departures. It was Raymond, his medical-school companion, who proposed the island famous for The Man in the Iron Mask and The Three Musketeers, so bound up with that novelistic fame that it never occurred to French youths as a vacation spot. The Dachshund wasn’t surprised that Gerda was enthusiastic about it (“I read it as a girl: so the fortress really exists?”) and had proposed that she come with them. He wanted to demonstrate that they were still good friends, but didn’t think that she would join two ordinary medical students. She would leave with her photographer friends or even with Georg, who maybe in a letter had urged her to consider the episode a mistake, an interlude to wash away with a dive into the sea on the Ligurian Riviera.

  For Willy, the moment of surprise had been seeing Gerda with knapsack and beret in front of her hotel, at the agreed-on hour and day. He remained certain that she had joined the two of them faute de mieux, until, on the side of the Nationale No. 7, it emerged that André Friedmann was in Marseille for work and would join them later on the Côte d’Azur. Gerda had let it out while they were nibbling grapes stolen in the vineyards of Bourgogne, and then stood up immediately, arm extended and finger raised toward the drivers. So Willy, who had gone back to squat in the ditch with Raymond, had understood everything: including the fact that receiving the news only in Lyon raised suspicions of a plot that had begun when she was still in her hotel, and I, what a dope, didn’t even realize it.

  In Cannes, where they had to wait for him, Friedmann appeared after walking up the Croisette sweaty and so creased that, were it not for the Leica, he could have been taken for a Spanish dishwasher in the grand hotels. He started to move faster, with his “Hallo, hallo!” that made some passersby en promenade turn their heads, while Gerda, coming out of the shade of a palm, smiled her boldest smile. Willy, keeping to the background, had thought, “Gut, jetzt ist er dran,” and set off for the beach, where Raymond was watching over their things. He had taken off his clothes and jumped into the water. He had stayed a while, floating, amazed by that “Good, now it’s his turn,” serene as the sky over his head.