The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  Yes, only he, the Dachshund, had become deaf to the call of Gerda. It was proved by the detachment with which, now, he listened to André’s garrulous voice recounting how not even in the hardest times in Berlin had it occurred to him to remedy things with the fishing rod (“And if a guard asked for my license? Get yourself expelled from Germany for a fish that may not even bite! Among you people everything is verboten . . . ”), in Paris, on the other hand, he and his friend Csiki Weisz were desperate to try it.

  “Better than stealing, we said to ourselves. Now the cops in half the city knew us, not to mention the shopkeepers. We go beyond Place de la République and, once we’ve trekked up there, hunger makes our heads spin. At that point, we notice the people fishing in the Canal Saint-Martin or the Seine. The Danube, by comparison, seemed like clear water. ‘Let’s forget it,’ Csiki goes, and rolls out a series of objections, starting from our lack of equipment. Well, having borrowed a rod, we sit on the Quai de Tournelle and, numb to the bone, catch two small stocky fish. Small, but not so small they give us the strength to continue. If they’d been a more decent size we’d have had one each for dinner. So we go back to the strategy tested in the shops. I get the best-equipped fisherman talking and, while he’s absorbed in his advice, Csiki exchanges our fish. We go back to the hotel satisfied, but discover we don’t have a drop of oil left. Finally, there’s this guy who looks like a dandy, so you can imagine what he came to do in a nasty hotel in the Sixth Arrondissement. He hands us his jar of brilliantine, generous. We fried the fish and ate them. They tasted of perfume and mud: impossible to distinguish which of the two was more nauseating. Moral of the story? Never again!”

  “Here you are again, though, repeat offender . . . only here we can’t make an exchange.”

  “But whatever little fish has the kindness to bite, it will be a delicacy.”

  Gerda responds with a smack on the lips that André maintains as long as he can, at his peril. The rod is back in his hands, tremulous, bending toward the drop. But when he separates from Gerda’s mouth to take control of it again, he’s still looking at her, not the sea.

  “You believe me? You believe that I ate that fish in brilliantine, and not ‘Ja, ja, the mad Hungarian talks big’?”

  Gerda, laughing, ruffles his hair: “What do you want from my life, André?”

  “I don’t know. Swear you believe it.”

  There’s a moment of fluid silence: pounding and backflow of waves against the rocks, small squeaks, maybe lizards and insects shifting the brittle vegetation, maybe only the wind, although it’s no stronger than a breeze.

  “I swear,” whispers Gerda and closes her eyes.

  The Dachshund is astonished. Friedmann frozen, as if in a still, his gaze too wide-eyed to turn liquid in emotion.

  You’ll see, now she’ll reopen them and burst out laughing, Willy thinks, swallowing. But no.

  Little Gerda in the sailor-style bathing suit, the small breasts that vanish between the stripes, her eyelids closed tight, her lips pursed, seems like a child who can’t be touched.

  André mumbles something in Hungarian, very softly.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You know, not fair.”

  “Èletem. It’s used like mein Schatz . . . more or less.”

  Gerda scrutinizes him while she repeats the word with a transparent serenity.

  “Was that right?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Easy to be Magyar. What did I say?”

  “My life,” Friedmann answers, and takes a breath.

  A few minutes later, hearing them laughing again like lunatics, Willy stepped forward. With the outing to Cannes put off, he returned to the camp, stretching out in the shade of a twisted sapling, while the tourists left with the last ferry. There was only the sound of the boats in the distance and a strong scent of lavender. André and Gerda arrived with enough fish to reduce the ration of their canned companions to an antipasto. “I’m going to wash off,” Gerda said, pulling Friedmann behind her, and while they set off on the path to the sea Raymond started picking up the leftovers, muttering that ils s’enfichent de tout, the lovers.

  Dr. Chardack is unsure whether to be surprised by that memory, so intact. It doesn’t seem to him that he’s ever recalled it, much less shared it with anyone. Twenty-five years have passed since then, but it’s not the number that’s important. What’s important is that the past should be left alone, with the dead in their place, but now that memory has appeared, so complete that he recalls even the scent of lavender. The things that you don’t use, that you don’t damage, that you put away for good, turn up unexpectedly, unaltered.

  Robert Capa, he had revealed to his wife when, stopped in traffic on Broadway they heard the bad news on the radio, wasn’t Italian but, rather, the Parisian creation of a girl he knew back in Germany. His name was Friedmann, in fact, André, which must have been an adaptation—the Hungarians have strange names. From the terse explanations he had added, after abruptly turning off the radio, his wife must have understood that the Jews and Hitler had something to do with it, and a childhood friend he’d lost touch with who really had lived in Italy. But confronted by his unhappy gaze fixed on the windshield, she hadn’t pursued it.

  That night on the island had been like all the others. When Raymond stopped snoring, the usual mosquitoes began, and when the mosquitoes’ hour ended, the commotion in the neighboring tent ceased as well. All this had disturbed Willy’s sleep only in the first days, when he had gotten a serious sunburn. Gerda and André weren’t the main reason that he hadn’t closed an eye. I hope it’s Gerda’s turn, this time! He had said it to himself over and over again with an almost euphoric excitement. But with whom could he share it? With Ruth, who overnight had found herself alone in the hotel, because Gerda had gone to stay with him, and crossed the street when she saw her? Or with Georg, who had been granted the rights and attentions of one who had been left? Because it seemed insignificant to everyone that Gerda Pohorylle’s first relationship after Georg Kuritzkes was with him, the Dachshund.

  But on that island something incredible had occurred and he was its witness: the only witness and at the same time the least worthy.

  Under the tent pitched in the shadow of a fortress where a man had been imprisoned who, according to legend, was innocent, Willy felt alone with Raymond’s whistling breath, with the mosquitoes and Gerda’s extraordinary sharp cries (followed by smothered laughter), with the guilt of having given in to his best friend’s girl. “It’s her turn, this time!” he couldn’t say to anyone.

  But suddenly Dr. Kuritzkes has emerged from that past he thought he had buried.

  And now he’s almost running along Hertel Avenue, determined not to waste more time: not to finally buy a pastry, or to repeat to himself, as if before a jury that he didn’t summon, that Gerda had ended things with Georg before giving him a real kiss. And this Georg must have known, otherwise he wouldn’t have indulged the impulse to telephone him with the spontaneity that drew on an unaltered affection, the affection that binds old friends, even across years and continents.

  The guilt lies there, also unaltered. Out of ideological consistency or out of pride, Georg hadn’t asked for an account of anything, and he had never been able to tell him that he had been a coward, as well as a fool. So the friendship had died and today’s phone call wasn’t enough to revive it.

  Now Dr. Chardack heads with mechanical haste toward the Italian restaurant that is just ahead, a recently opened place where he’s never been. He comes out with a tray of cannoli and a rough paper bag that, according to American law, covers a bottle from he no longer remembers what vineyard. It doesn’t matter, he’ll find out at home. Clutching the brown paper at the base of the neck while the other hand is occupied is uncomfortable, another reason to hurry.

  Twenty-five years to accept a guilt that doesn’t hold up and
forgive himself.

  But he had been right, that night on Île Sainte-Marguerite, when he stared at the imperfect darkness of the tent with that euphoria colored by Schadenfreude (no, he wouldn’t dream of paraphrasing the meaning of that word), until the first cries of the seagulls arrived and a slightly sad calm. This time, he would have liked to say to Georg, it was pointless to hope, wait, torment oneself without letting it show, as he had done.

  He had also been right when, two years later (it was summer again but they wouldn’t go on vacation), in the delirium and mounting unease about the funeral that the Communist Party was organizing for the daughter of Paris fallen in the struggle against fascism, he had grasped something that flung them all beyond the shock wave of that inconceivable loss.

  They’d known for days that Gerda was dead, for three days they had waited in Paris and for three more days had remained beside her, before taking the bier to the cemetery.

  Exhausted, scattered in tiny groups compared with the blocs from the factories or Party sections, they kept a slight distance from the head of the cortege—he with Raymond, friends from the SAP in two compact rows, Csiki Weisz with the circle of Hungarians, Cartier-Bresson, who towered over Chim making him disappear (or Chim wasn’t there, hadn’t come back from Spain?). They sought one another with their eyes, but not too intently, they looked for the back of Capa’s neck, at the head of the procession, or Ruth, who was dragging Gerda’s father through the streets that kept getting steeper, with the brother beside her (Karl or Oskar? He had forgotten . . . ) who had brought him from the Serbian town where Gerda’s family had taken refuge after leaving Germany.

  They proceeded at the inexorably slow pace of giant parades, crushed by the brass that kept repeating the funeral march, crossing Place de l’Opéra, turning onto the Grands Boulevards for short stretches, passing over the canal where André Friedmann had often envied the retired fishermen, struggling toward Ménilmontant, coming to a standstill at the entrance to Père Lachaise and on the paths inside that led to the Communard’s Wall.

  A crowd encumbered by banners and red flags spread out around the tomb, making the speakers invisible. The masses of workers stank of sweat, but the wreaths and bouquets, already withered by hours of walking in the sun, stank even more. Solemn and bellicose orations, telegrams, verses (or were they poetic phrases?) dedicated to a lark who died in Brunete yet will never cease to make her song heard. Someone recalled that on that day, August 1, 1937, she would have been twenty-seven, “our Gerda,” the courageous comrade who had given her young life for a struggle that she knew marked the future of them all. Listening was equivalent to waiting for the speeches to end, the audience dazed to the point where the flowers or handfuls of earth would fall into the grave from hands by now numb, like the rest of the people in line to say farewell. At least the funeral was over.

  But two days earlier, in the morning, when they met at the Gare d’Austerlitz, there were only a hundred of the hundred thousand who would parade through Paris on the Sunday: half prominent personalities, half friendly faces, nearly the same people who had converged at the editorial offices of Ce Soir after seeing the paper with the black-bordered picture of Mademoiselle Taro.

  It had occurred to Willy to go by the newspaper office only after hurrying to the hotel on Rue Vavin looking for Capa, finding instead Soma Kuritzkes, just arrived from Naples, so distraught that he was disoriented. Willy had brought him to Ruth, hoping she could help him come to himself. But the concierge had told him that Madame had left with that photographer who had showed up in a stupor when the whole building, and one might say the whole city, was still asleep. Gone where, Madame? To get your poor friend, according to Monsieur Melchior . . .

  Seeing the time, Willy had taken Soma to lunch. He had thought carefully of avoiding Boulevard de Montparnasse, choosing a small, uncrowded place. “On me,” he had said, seeing Georg’s brother looking for his wallet. But Soma had pulled out a note for Gerda. “Monsieur Capa a rappelé a 9 heures.” At the hotel they must have taken him for a relative and given him that note. Could Willy let him return alone to the hotel? So they had taken the metro to Rue du Quatre-Septembre and had headed together to the office of Ce Soir.

  The first person they saw was one of Capa’s great copains. He was smoking, squatting on his heels, his head resting against the wall, the friend who in that happy summer had invited them often to Cannes (on the ferry Gerda would put on her shoes and apply some lipstick) to pretend they were wealthy tourists, as he was.

  Motionless, he recounted that Capa just the day before had been jubilant (“He ordered champagne brought to the room”) because Life would send him to China with Gerda. Then he had started weeping, he wept with an agonizing Asian inertia, while the ash of the cigarette kept getting closer to his fingers, without falling. Suddenly he stood up. “Inoue Seiichi, Mainichi Press, Tokyo,” he had said to Soma with a bow. And he started up Rue du Quatre-Septembre, to reappear two mornings later at the Gare d’Austerlitz, his suit and face impeccable, as always extremely punctual.

  Gare d’Austerlitz at an hour that was strange for the bohème of refugees and for the Parisian intelligentsia used to carrying on into the night. But they were all there early that morning. And when the railway worker comrades had unloaded the coffin, covered by the flag of the Spanish Republic, they had had only to clench their left fists and their lips.

  Then Gerda’s father had advanced toward the bier and had begun to recite the kaddish. Someone followed him, yitgadal v’yit-kadash sh’mei rabba’, a sequence of words recovered in a whisper. But the back that shook before those hundred people, that liturgical rocking toward the coffin aligned beside the tracks, recalled the movements of one possessed. Herr Pohorylle had stopped suddenly, swayed forward, crumpled. He had ended the kaddish lying on the soft red silk flag that enveloped the remains of his daughter.

  Capa, too, would have collapsed at that moment, if the friend next to him hadn’t realized it. Willy had seen them holding onto one another, and had seemed to see again André when he quarreled with Gerda: she sent him to the door and Seiichi had to drag him home dead drunk. In addition there were the cameras, the journalists from Ce Soir. The final picture had been this: Capa, disheveled, unshaved (oh, how she would have detested seeing him like that!), his complexion ashen, suspended between a Moscow muse and an extremely elegant Japanese gentleman.

  Capa had been led away, the ceremony had gone forward. “It’s over,” Willy had thought, “c’est fini.” That phrase whirled continuously in his head, it whirled in a void and from the void picked up other phrases, “c’est fini, fini, rien ne va plus, les jeux sont faits.” Soma had asked him if they shouldn’t join the Pohorylles, afterward, at the hotel. “Schluss,” Willy had said to himself. Starting tomorrow he would go back to doing his things: go to the university, help Soma with enrollment and a residency permit. And then really nothing was over: Madrid remained under siege, Hitler was preparing for war, China had been invaded by Japan, the Front Populaire was crumbling, the Communist Party was gaining a heroine and martyr out of a terrible loss.

  But André Friedmann, he, yes, he was finished, Robert Capa from that moment on, whatever he did. The spaces that André and Gerda had stolen in the cafés and newspapers with their theatrical talent were finished, finished under the reality of a tank track that weighed more than a boulder.

  Save yourself if you can.

  Willy was no longer upset, but infinitely empty, lucid, and calm. Whatever the choices we make, he had said to himself, whatever reason for fighting we pursue or end up abandoning, from now on they will be only means for saving ourselves, each according to his possibilities and each according to his needs.

  “I think they’ve almost finished,” he said to Soma.

  This youth who wants to study chemistry at the Sorbonne will save himself, and maybe also his brother down in Spain. And anyway neither he nor Georg was in the room waiting with a bottle
of champagne for Gerda to return.

  Dr. Chardack is walking along the tree-lined streets that lead home, and the shadow of his short figure has spread over the whole sidewalk. He stops to put on his jacket, an awkward operation with his hands full. He finds the concentration he needs to perform these gestures ridiculous, sees himself as the typical clumsy “Herr Professor.” But he’s not sorry about what he’s become.

  He was right. Georg, too, saved himself and landed in a life similar to his, a life devoted to scientific research. The past should be kept carefully outside the door. But if it knocks or rings, as it did this morning, you have to let it enter. So he did. As soon as he gets home he wants only to dedicate himself to the New York Times.

  Grief fills him, now, almost overflowing, like the stuffing of the cannoli, and maybe it has an equally pasty, soft consistency.

  That stupid death clashed so fiercely with Gerda’s talent for life. Apart from the shock and the profound mourning, that disaster had been for all of them a very violent alarm. And they had saved themselves. Georg was in Rome, Soma in Colorado, Ruth in Switzerland . . . Even the Steins and Csiki Weisz and the others, except Capa and Chim, killed by a sniper in Egypt, were alive, were safe.

  And Seiichi?

  He who throughout the whole monstrous duration of the funeral had stood fast like a shadow behind Capa, and for an unforgettable moment had shared his joy at being able to photograph the Japanese war in China with Gerda—Seiichi had probably been the only one of the Paris friends who had had to wear the uniform of his country, the most feared and hated in the Pacific.