It wasn’t unlikely that Seiichi Inoue was dead.
But if this is a day for memories, Dr. Chardack says to himself as he lengthens his stride toward home, the bottle in one hand and the tray of cannoli in the other, then better to direct them toward something exhilarating to the point of absurd, to the point of feeling a detached wonder toward what remained forever on the other side of the ocean. As absurd as the night in Cannes when Willy met Seiichi, and they were wined and dined at the expense of the Rising Sun with a plateau de coquillages and expensive champagne, and then, parading along the Croisette to the brightly lit Palm Beach Casino, they had started shouting out an aria from a Hungarian-German operetta, with Seiichi suspended demonstratively between André and Gerda.
My mama was from Yokohama
Papa from gay Paree.
My mama wore only pajamas
Because he liked to see.2
The only thing to do at this moment is find a way to avoid having to get the house keys out of his pants pocket. The kitchen window is open, he can get to it by trampling the flowerbed, he moves as close as possible to the windowsill and shouts the name of his wife. After a few seconds the noise of dishes stops. Dr. Chardack heads for the door and waits for her to arrive and open it.
He had been right, but it shouldn’t have happened like that.
1The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
2“Meine Mama war aus Yokohama / Aus Paris war der Papa / Meine Mama ging nur im Pyjama / Weil Papa das gerne sah,” from the operetta Viktoria und ihr Husar by Georg (Pál) Abraham (music) and Arthur Grünwald and Willy Löhner-Beda (libretto), first performance: Budapest, February 21, 1920 (author’s note).
PART II
RUTH CERF
Paris, 1938
When the best girlfriend
And the best girlfriend
Traipse through the streets,
To go shopping,
To go shopping,
To shoot the breeze,
Wander through the streets . . .
“Wenn die beste Freundin” (1928)
—MISCHA SPOLIANSKY and MARCELLUS SCHIFFER
(translated by Shelley Frisch) sung by Marlene Dietrich
I am the Dark One,—the Widower,—the Unconsoled
The Prince of Aquitaine whose Tower is destroyed:
My only star is dead, and my constellated lute
Bears the black Sun of Melancholia.
—GÉRARD DE NERVAL, El Desdichado
The sky is locked in an immutable gray, and Ruth, rain-soaked, sick of running, is carrying around Paris something she doesn’t know how to tell Capa.
He returned at the end of November, exhausted, ill from the exertions and the cold he’d endured in Spain, and even though the fever has gone down, finally, he still isn’t leaving his hotel room, his den. But his friends, old and new, flock to see him: Seiichi, with the clouds of macarons in expensive boxes from Place de la Madeleine (one open, two untouched on the night table when Ruth passed by the other day); Chim, every day, if he’s not away on a photography job.
Ruth often meets him on the street where the Atelier Robert Capa is: Chim has also been going there since the start. The words (“How’s Capa?” “Better.” “Have a good day.”) come out in the confidential tone of a whisper on the path that crosses the Montparnasse cemetery, where visitors are few, apart from groups that come to pay homage to some famous tomb.
Cartier-Bresson she saw only once, sitting on the sick man’s bed, legs crossed, with those outsize childish fingers holding up the paper to read him an interesting article.
Just now it’s Ruth who doesn’t have time for visits, and she also goes much less frequently to the Atelier, on Rue Froidevaux: Capa’s immobility means less work in the studio.
But Csiki Weisz stops by the hotel morning and evening, generally around dinnertime, “so I can make him eat and drink, otherwise when’s he going to get better,” and brings him the news. Primarily copies of the newspapers that give an increasing amount of space (and well paid) to Capa’s most recent reporting on the Spanish Civil War: the series on the farewell to the International Brigades and the one on the battle of Río Segre were bought by all the important press outlets, including Life. But Csiki repeats to Ruth that not even that has the power to revive his friend’s energy, in fact it makes him feel like an undertaker, someone making money off other people’s troubles. “It’ll pass,” says Ruth. “Let’s hope soon,” says Csiki.
Ruth isn’t in the studio when Capa shows up for a hello, playing the clown as usual: kissing the secretary, talking on the phone, messing about with his friend and assistant in the dark-room, spreading good cheer though his eyes are still ringed by dark shadows.
Csiki doesn’t need to explain to Ruth that he has no faith in appearances, even if appearances should be respected. He responds to her “Bonjour, c’est moi” with a “J’arrive tout de suite,” like a good shop boy who can’t leave a job already begun, and says nothing else.
Today, however, when he appears, his hands aren’t wet, as usual. As soon as he sees her he hands her an illustrated magazine.
“Regards-ici.”
“Let me take off this wet coat, hang on.”
“Twelve pages in the London Picture Post.”
“Fantastic.”
They had begun that euphoric dialogue, made up of superlatives, when Capa decided to go to China. Ruth and Csiki spent a lot of time together, working on the material he sent. The images spoke clearly of the indiscriminate violence with which the Japanese devastated populous cities and massacred the inhabitants. But they felt reassured that Capa was so far away: with Joris Ivens, the director he’d met in Spain, and John Fernhout, the husband of Eva Besnyö, who had grown up in the same building in Budapest, that is to say almost a sister. The Pilvax was a very new passage, with the Friedmanns’ dressmaking salon off the courtyard and the Besnyös’ apartment on an upper floor; they were wealthy enough to give the sixteen-year-old Eva her first camera. For Csiki those ancient hierarchies were a guarantee that the troupe would take care of their friend. Maybe it wasn’t right that they should worry about almost nothing but Capa’s safety, in the face of those events, but they couldn’t help it, after what had happened to Gerda. They couldn’t even avoid the superstitious thought that if Gerda had returned from Madrid she would have been safe out in the East. But it was pointless to brood. The studio on Rue Froidevaux was “my Paris HQ”—Capa had written from the Asian front—and they clung gratefully to their own roles and tasks, which included commenting “Fantastic” on every important publication.
Then everything had changed again. Capa returned from Hankou (“Sorry, the diarrhea wouldn’t go away”), and in the space of a newsreel the shigella bacteria could have been transmitted to his assistants. France and Germany had delivered the Sudetens to Hitler, after Vienna fell because the people had decided by a majority to hand themselves over to the Nazis. “Scheissaustriaker!” Ruth blurted out. Csiki talked less and less, aside from some laconic crack (“Anschluss-Schluss”) or a word of universal comprehension (“katasztrófa”) that suddenly came out of his mouth. Budapest, the second capital of the now dismembered Austro-Hungarian Empire, was being choked by the new Reich, and Weisz’s and Friedmann’s relatives were trapped inside it.
“You’ll see, you won’t be next on the menu,” said Ruth to comfort him. “Too Magyar, too much paprika. And anyway you already have fascism!”
Csiki giggled, grateful.
It turned out to be easy for Ruth to work with Csiki Weisz, and even to understand him. They had been asked to take on the jobs that André and Gerda had done before—Capa’s friend the laboratory, Taro’s friend the captions—as if they were counter-figures, auxiliary troops behind the front lines.
Besides, Ruth had always been Gerda’s ally, only the affair with Willy had upset things. It wasn’t that she couldn’t pay
for the hotel (for practical matters there was always a solution); it was a question of trust. “With men you do as you like,” she had said to her,“I’ve never asked you anything, I’ve always covered for you and helped you—ever since you liked Georg, and a lot, and didn’t know what to do about your Stuttgart boyfriend. You move to the Dachshund’s without saying anything, then come here to get your things and leave me some money for the hotel. You don’t act like that with a friend!”
When they started seeing each other again from time to time, and the ashtray at the café of the moment was overflowing with their cigarettes, Ruth surrendered to the evidence that Gerda really couldn’t understand what had wounded her so much. Basically, she concluded, it was only the small rites of living together, with the inevitable rifts, the same that were now being repeated between Melchior and her. And that thought made it easy for her to enjoy an hour in her presence, which was always so pleasant. She had only to take in Gerda’s sincere enthusiasm for her new movie jobs (“Max Ophüls? Magnificent! Be sure to get yourself a bit part!”) and listen to her talk about the guests at the Steins’, or the ideas of Willy Brandt and the other important comrades she hung around with, or the great progress she was making with the camera. “Cross your fingers, Ruth, I found a job—in fact, you won’t believe it, but Friedmann found it for me.”
“Really? Congratulations.”
“Alliance Photo represents the best German photographers and I’m making myself liked, I’m learning. I don’t give a damn if I don’t get along too well with my boss, Maria Eisner, who’s crazy about André, naturally. She was looking for an assistant who knows languages and also bookkeeping? Well, she found her. It’s not my fault if I’m smarter than she thought.”
Ruth didn’t have to do anything but relax, scrape up with the spoon the sugar remaining at the bottom of the cup, observe the passersby with one eye and Gerda with the other. The smoke rings exhaled with gracious emphasis, her mouth that sipped the coffee without dribbling. And that story, punctuated by laughter, that was like the chatter of a girl in love. Maybe it was: even if the love object at the moment was a photographic agency. She had immediately told Eisner that she had experience and a talent for business. In Leipzig she managed her father’s accounts, and in Stuttgart she had helped her boyfriend launch himself in the coffee trade after the collapse of American cotton. Selling photographs was certainly more inspiring than selling eggs wholesale or the four blends of which customers usually ordered the cheapest.
“I understand how the market works.”
“Oh yes?” Ruth answered, distracted, because the theatrical pause required it.
“It’s not enough to be prompt and so on. You have to have the right names, or else invent them. You think an editor in chief can distinguish the quality of an image? Rarely. The photograph is made of nothing, inflated, merchandise that’s out of date in a day. It’s knowing how to sell it,” Gerda concluded, and raised triumphant, mischievous eyes toward the street.
Observing her, Ruth had an intuition: look at her, she thought, that small woman who attracts every gaze, that incarnation of elegance, femininity, coquetterie, and no one would ever suspect that she reasons, feels, and acts like a man. It was too convenient an excuse to forgive her, but perhaps a good way of understanding how anger never carried off all the affection. And when Gerda got up, kissing her with the side of her cheeks so as not to smudge her lipstick, Ruth no longer noticed the wake of displeasure scented with a drop of Mitsouko that she could have recognized with her eyes closed.
Gerda was unsettling. She wasn’t like any of the girls Ruth knew in Leipzig: not the ones like her, who when they fell in love stopped noticing other men, or the girls whose sole purpose was to make the heads in the male universe spin. There was no doubt that Gerda was aware of having that effect; she reveled in it like an ornamental fish in an aquarium, but in an unusual way. Openly, without malice, almost candid. She liked being attractive and courted in principle, she liked certain boys in particular: but she didn’t make any mystery or fuss about it. (“Don’t you find Georg remarkable? I’ve never been fascinated before by someone so young. Did you think about him like that, too?” “He wouldn’t even consider me . . . ” “You can tell me, come on, I won’t be offended.” “What? That there’s no comparison between Kuritzkes and the others?” “So you like him! But I’ll be happy to give you Willy Chardack.” “The Dachshund? Ah, thank you so much!”)
They wouldn’t have become friends if they hadn’t very quickly begun speaking freely to each other, making Ruth’s first impressions vacillate. The little doll from Stuttgart wasn’t only more entertaining than a gussied-up featherbrain, like some of her high-school classmates, interested only in fashion and in famous figures or suitors (to boast of if handsome or from a good family, to mock otherwise). It was something different. What, precisely, Ruth didn’t understand (did “without prejudices” coincide with “unprejudiced”? Not completely), but Gerda’s persistence in hanging around with her had been enough to prove that she wasn’t an arrogant stuck-up person. And so she had let herself be invaded by that refreshing geniality and brilliance.
They had met through Georg Kuritzkes in the pool at the Bar Kochba Sportverein and then had seen each other in the same group after the swimming season. They had already exchanged the first bland confidences, when they discovered that they went to the same school. Ruth was a student at the Gymnasium while Gerda was taking stenography and home-economics classes: not because she cared about the diploma but because she’d also gone to a commercial school in Stuttgart.
“You know, I’m someone who really can’t stand having nothing to do,” she had said one day outside a classroom, book in hand, waiting for the lesson to begin.
“I always arrive early,” she had laughed, swaying on her heels. “It’s obvious that I like coming to school.”
“The Gaudig-Schule is famous for an avant-garde approach to teaching,” Ruth had said, a flat observation that contrasted with Gerda’s enthusiasm. “They’d like to educate us to develop our independent personality, cultivating spiritual growth that transcends the subjects, as they must have explained to you when . . . ”
“All I notice is that the teachers are better than in Stuttgart,” Gerda had interrupted, “and more approachable than in the Swiss boarding school I went to. On the other hand there’s not much to develop in the courses I take, stuff for girls looking for a good match or a job as a business secretary.”
So Ruth had said that she had several professors who were really smart, thoughtful, very open and aware. Some even allowed the students to organize political meetings, making the great hall available. A few years earlier an imposing youth had come from Berlin (“a Viking, you’d never have called him a student”) who had talked about the class struggle in the scholastic world. Soon afterward, a group of girls had established a section of the socialist student union, which she was still involved in.
“In a girls’ school! At ours it was something if they organized the Christmas market with our little crafts. Or the classical music concert, terrible. But naturally we all wanted to be the best.”
“As for that, my classmates and I at the Gymnasium aren’t all great friends, either.”
Maybe their understanding had been sealed at that moment, when Gerda burst into a laugh so loud that it would have clashed with even the most advanced pedagogic concept, if the bell hadn’t rung to muffle it.
But Ruth would never have imagined that, starting that day, whenever a class in cooking or Gabelsberger shorthand coincided with the high-school schedule, Gerda was waiting for her in front of the gate that opened onto Döllnitzer Strasse. She’d be leaning against the wrought-iron bars, sometimes with her umbrella open, more often hanging by an arm, almost always smoking: like a big sister or a woman who has a date with a man she knows will show up. The building cast on her its dark asymmetrical shadow, lengthened by the outline of the stepped tympana, ne
o-Gothic ornaments that decorated the gray mass of the institute at a pointless height. She was restless in her natural way, alone and tiny compared to the flow of high-school students: she was independence incarnate.
Ruth joined Gerda, they chatted a little in front of the gate, and then set off for their respective classrooms or, still chatting, toward home. In her most daring shoes (the ones she wore to school) her friend came up to about her shoulders. But they were two pretty and carefree girls together, illuminated by one another.
Ruth had never seen herself like that in her life as a student. The first thing she noticed as she walked toward Döllnitzer Strasse now was her own steps, or rather the large feet in the laced shoes resoled twice a year, polished with Erdal, in the original box with the red frog. And then the clothes that her mother altered for her or, when she handed down her better items, had made over by the dressmaker. Her father’s trench coat (also his ties, since they were fashionable) resurrected from a box that stank of naphthalene. “It doesn’t fit my brothers and anyway it’s what people are wearing these days,” she had rejected her mother’s protests and, readjusting the belt at her waist, tightening it as much as possible, had concluded, “See, it’s perfect,” before going out the door, head down. Muffled up inside it, she had begun to feel more protected and special. To a benevolent or interested imagination, she and Gerda resembled a provincial Garbo and Dietrich. But basically the only thing that counted was that they had found each other.
Csiki Weisz repeats that it’s a relief to see Capa in the Atelier again, at least every so often, and after handing her the Picture Post he disappears into the little kitchen that has been sacrificed to the laboratory. “Ein Moment!” Ruth knows very well how long that moment can last so she yells at him: “I’m making coffee, what do you say?” and immediately starts fussing with the pot and the Eltron immersion heater, a Berlin investment of Weisz and Friedmann, protected by their shabby old clothes when they left for Paris. Now it was encrusted like a marine fossil, and you had to be careful, for example pushing the magazine lying on the desk out of range of the spray. As soon as the water starts to drip through the filter, Ruth inspects the provisions in the cupboard. There’s milk because they bring it every morning, but all that’s left of the Heudebert biscottes is the tin box. She finds two apples, a bruised pear, the hardened end of a baguette, the sugar bowl.
The Girl with the Leica Page 9