The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  “Have you had breakfast?”

  She repeats the question until Csiki replies: “Merci, pas de problem,” so she begins to work fiercely on the crust of bread until she digs out some acceptable mouthfuls.

  Csiki forgets to eat, he never has time to shop (“The shops close early”; “But the boulangerie behind here is open even Sunday morning!” “Oh, is it? I didn’t know . . .), and Madame Garai, the Atelier’s secretary, doesn’t consider the matter part of her duties. So ever since Ruth stopped coming daily to Rue Froidevaux, the basis of Csiki Weisz’s nutrition is dinners with his friend “Bandi” Capa (“Eating once a day is enough for me, look, I have horse teeth”), which are coming to an end. These dinners will be over as soon as the sick man gets back on his feet enough to make the leap from the bistros in the neighborhood of the hotel to the rations of the Republican units in Spain, where he has every intention of returning. And afterward? Ruth wonders, worried. Afterward Csiki will manage, or the émigrés from Budapest will take care of him—there’s quite a group in Paris. It’s absurd that she’s still the one who worries about Csiki. Ridiculous that she goes in search of plates to wash or crumbs under the table, as if in the preceding months she hadn’t realized that the floor was always clean, the dishes in order, even the bed in the loft always made with military perfection.

  “The woman who gets you is lucky,” she used to joke, which provoked a slight reddening of Csiki’s long nose, even if the remark was as old as the remains of a baguette. She, too, is lucky, since as soon as she’s poured his cup of coffee and lighted a cigarette Csiki opens the door a crack, “Sorry, I’ll be there in two minutes.” Otherwise, between one drag and the next, the nervousness about that thing to say to Capa would mount again: not too urgent a thing, but a thought to get rid of.

  What should she do? Look for him in the cafés of Montparnasse? Lie in wait at the hotel? Better to speak to him right away, ignoring his convalescence and the friends crowding into his hotel room. When he’s completely recovered, he’ll be increasingly focused on impressing the new copains who call him Bob (“Bàab”), as if he were one of them, an American in Paris, as Gerda conceived him, who, to listen to her . . .

  “C’est l’Atelier Robert Capa,” she had repeated into the receiver the first time she’d heard that diminutive.

  “Oui,” the slurred accent insisted. “J’ais un message pour Bob . . . Bob Capa.”

  “Ah, sorry, Monsieur, dites-moi, j’annote . . . ”

  From then on she got used to it, but she couldn’t get rid of the sensation of unfamiliarity and annoyance. If André is the name of a coiffeur or a waiter, what’s Bob? A witty uncle, the lanky deskmate, an ordinary decent fellow who does an ordinary job? She can’t understand how a pseudonym can have its own life. “Robert Capa” entered her ears, like everyone else’s, with a French accent. And that pronunciation made it easier to adopt: a name of uncertain origin, a stage name. The creators, Gerda and André, hadn’t foreseen that some real Americans would swallow it as if it were real, even if they were so thrilled by their brainchild that they would announce it to anyone at the drop of a hat.

  On the First of May in glorious 1936 a photographer was zigzagging his way against the current of the almost motionless parade, and Ruth, impatient with that epic slowness, stood on tiptoe and waved to summon him. They had taken Paris, they were a mass so vast that the result, proclaimed two days later—the victory of the Front Populaire—seemed only the final tally of a reality already measured in peaceful, festive bodies, smelling of lilies of the valley and carnations. Harmonious flowers for the harmonious demonstration, the red parade assembled in Place de la Bastille with the slogan “Pour le pain, la paix et la liberté” and the concrete, revolutionary union demand for a forty-hour work week.

  “Come on, let’s look for Gerda,” André said, “we have some news!”

  Ruth let herself be drawn by curiosity and by the hand that was pulling her by the coat.

  “I’ll be back soon,” she cried to Melchior.

  Along the section that they retraced laboriously, slipping sideways between the demonstrators, she imagined various hypotheses. The first, that they had got married, she immediately discarded: Gerda getting married and, on top of that, to Friedmann—no, it wasn’t believable. “They’re going to America” crossed her mind, and she was convinced that it must be that. The air was permeated by the socialist spring, but in the gridlock of marchers it was inevitable to think that a couple of provocateurs would be enough for it to end as it had in February of ’34, with ten dead. If some fight should break out, Ruth had to be ready to escape, strictly speaking she shouldn’t even have set foot in that crowd.

  The first one they saw was the Japanese, standing still on the sidelines with Gerda.

  “Here she is,” André said, and then to Gerda: “You explain it to her, now let me smoke a cigarette.”

  Seiichi had lighted cigarettes for them all and Gerda held the lighter, as if striking the wheel could awaken a genius that would suggest a good place to start.

  “No. You have to introduce yourself.”

  André had taken a drag on the filter held tight between his lips, and he stared at Ruth with a theatrical expression, even straightening his forelock.

  “As the cursed poet said: Je est un autre. You must call me Robert Capa.”

  That’s it?

  Seiichi signaled applause. Friedmann was radiant. Gerda repeated “Robert Capa” in French, English, and German accents, insistently pointing out that it didn’t get mangled in any language and was very catchy. No one noticed Ruth and her embarrassed smile. Half a step at a time, the metalworkers’ contingent paraded by.

  That was it, André had chosen a pseudonym. Gerda thought she had extracted the tricks of the trade from Maria Eisner, but if she seriously believed that a name was enough to start making a name for yourself, she remained an apprentice.

  “You’re basically petit-bourgeois,” Ruth had concluded, but dreams were free.

  “It sounds Marseillaise or something like that,” she commented. “Anyway it sounds good.”

  “Capa means ‘shark’ in Hungarian,” André replied, deaf to Ruth’s irony.

  “No, it’s American, like Frank Capra,” Gerda said, “American of Italian origin or whatever you want, but goes with that face . . . It’s enough if the French fall for it.”

  Ruth was confused. The name was more attractive than the ordinary André Friedmann. But what other advantages could it have? The French preferred a fake Marseillais, or, say, American, to a petit juif from Budapest? Certainly. But given that they already knew the photographer, how would they fall for it?

  Gerda, André, and Seiichi looked at her with the shining eyes of children in collusion.

  “It’s better than Frank Capra,” Ruth admitted. “It has a sort of hint of nobility, like Don Diego de la Vega in the famous performance . . . ”

  “How does that come to mind!” André replied. “We thought of Robert Taylor, and for her Greta Garbo. No more Pohorylle. Voilà, starting today she’ll be Gerda Taro.”

  “She’s American, too, I suppose.”

  “Doesn’t matter, international,” Gerda replied. “Only Robert Capa has to be American.”

  A protest banner had appeared—“AGAINST THE EXPENSIVE LIFE,” another “AGAINST GERMAN REARMAMENT”—and meanwhile Gerda was saying things no less absurd than the comment with which Ruth tried to flush them out. Robert Capa lived at the Ritz, had a limousine and a race car, was a handsome guy, athletic, lover of the good life.

  “Bachelor?” Ruth asked. “Then look out, because they’ll rob you . . . ”

  “Bachelor of course!” André flared up, having apparently lost his sense of humor. “Otherwise how would he be in Monte Carlo one day, the next in Deauville, then at the bank in Geneva checking his investments. Not to mention those boring returns to America, when it’s imposs
ible to reach him, because he’s traveling on a private plane. A guy who’s always had everything, you know? His grandfather arrived in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, defended his nuggets against the worst scoundrels, but was killed by a drunk creditor. The widow retreated to cultivate flowers and read novels. Three daughters passionate about literature, a son passionate about botany. The boy, who became a great agronomist, married the daughter of the biggest canned-fruit producer in California.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to write novels,” Gerda stops him. “Come to the point!”

  “Stories, Schatzi, have to be invented properly, otherwise they don’t hold water.”

  “The heir to the canned fruit—that is, Robert Capa,” Friedmann resumed, “is tired of California and canned peaches. He sells everything, comes to Paris, spends and squanders, but it’s not enough for him. Photojournalism satisfies the adventurous vein that runs in the family, the need to defeat boredom. He doesn’t work for money, of course, but like a good capitalist he wouldn’t dream of giving anything to anyone. So he takes Gerda as personal agent. And she, with her charm, hires me as a factotum. And here we are.”

  “The work of Robert Capa,” Gerda was precise, “I naturally have to offer at an exorbitant price . . . ”

  Ruth burst into laughter so loud that it attracted glances of dismay from their worker comrades to the right and the left. “The two of you are completely mad!”

  No, not too mad. It seemed that Gerda and André intended to cast the bait with discretion.

  “Ah, the Parisians who think they’re so savvy! Newspaper editors, even those on our side, whom it would kill to raise your fee by two cents, you poor anti-fascist refugee. But when you talk about an American who travels in the beau monde of all Europe, they can’t wait to meet him. Très désolés, he’s gone to Venice with his latest conquest, we have no idea when he’ll be back. And who’s the girl, someone famous? That we certainly can’t say.”

  Suddenly Gerda coaxed a little flame from the lighter, held it at its peak, then abruptly closed the lid and gave the silver parallelepiped back to Seiichi. The loudspeakers were scratching, the speeches were about to begin. “Bread, peace, and freedom!” some demonstrators proclaimed.

  “What brand is it: American?” Gerda inquired.

  “I bought it at Cartier on Place Vendôme.”

  “Stupendous. I know our bluff seems like a childish joke. But people believe what they want to believe. At least for a while. And a while is enough for us. Because afterward, I’m sure of it, we’ll never go back to where we started.”

  Csiki Weisz shrugged whenever Ruth had an outburst about the new diminutive of Robert Capa (“Bob, a three-letter word, and they manage to mangle it!”) after hearing it pronounced by some Americans. Thus, one day when Chim was arranging his photographic materials right on the table where now the café au lait is ready for Csiki, she asked him the question. On the basis of what criteria does one choose a pseudonym? And didn’t it bother him that he wasn’t called by his real name anymore?

  “No. Chim is nice, don’t you think? For someone with the face of an owl . . . ”

  Ruth had nodded and waited for the explanation that Chim was quick to provide, with that stolidity that belied the cliché of the photojournalist in mad pursuit of events. He told her that he had simply adapted the first syllable of his surname, Szymin, preposterous. Besides, even in Warsaw he had always had a nickname, a diminutive, just as Capa was Bandi and for some would remain that all his life.

  “And that ‘Bob’ that won’t come out of my mouth, can you stand it?”

  Chim had smiled vaguely, looking up from his negatives.

  “The Americans, of course, but not only them. Llegó Roberto Capa, el fotógrafo, mira, tenemos suerte! they say in the units. The photographer Roberto Capa came, we’re so lucky! That’s what they call him from Andalusia to the Basque territories.”

  That in Spain they saw Capa as a good-luck charm bewildered her. But, determined to oppose the gently ironic light that had appeared through the lenses of the person she was talking to, she launched into a replay of the birth of our hero. By the way, what happened in the end to the American millionaire?

  “It was mainly Gerda who liked that,” Chim said, in a timbre of voice that went below his usual placidity. “He was unmasked almost immediately.”

  Again absorbed in rearranging contact prints and negatives, he had talked about the scoop at the League of Nations a couple of months after the May 1st parade. The other reporters were photographing Haile Selassie, who was calling for sanctions, but only Capa’s Leica had captured the unfortunate Spaniard arrested with the Italian journalists who were yelling like fascist thugs. Everyone wanted that photograph, at whatever price, even if they knew perfectly well that it was André Friedmann who’d shot it. So he had been convinced that working as Robert Capa suited him.

  “But then why isn’t he always called Robert, instead of that inane Bob?”

  The sentence had come out of her stubbornly, but Chim didn’t bother to look up.

  “A name is a name,” he said, “in the end it belongs to others.”

  Ruth didn’t agree: in French didn’t you say donner un nom—give a name? And didn’t a gift become the possession of the one who received it, and so he could choose another one?

  Chim had agreed, continuing to rearrange.

  “O.K., sorry: I’ll let you work.”

  Chim had detained her, pointing a finger at his contact sheets.

  “If we took a photo . . . not these, one that you’re in. How would you identify yourself?”

  After reflecting, bewildered, she had told him that Gerda, always ready to get the best out of every experience, had once summarized an article by René Spitz: when a child begins to smile, then recognizes himself in the mirror, then stamps his feet yelling no!, it’s a crucial phase, like the later one in which he acquires the capacity to say “I.” In practice, however, the professor couldn’t tolerate that his secretary was an independent girl. “A failing that is, unfortunately, very common.”

  Chim possessed a quality that you wouldn’t have guessed: a gallant version of his courtesy, a shy politeness that put any woman at ease.

  So Ruth had confessed that in her modeling photographs she barely recognized herself, and it wasn’t false modesty or, worse, hypocrisy.

  “I see that I’m beautiful, yes, but it’s advertising, I’m a commodity . . . In my family there are too many actors, maybe that’s why I prefer to do without makeup and posing.”

  “In your case there’s no need.”

  As if to accompany the compliment Chim offered her a cigarette.

  “Anyway,” Ruth resumed, “Capa even believed a little in that story of the great American bon vivant, didn’t he? And if now he accepts that silly three-letter nickname, maybe it’s partly because it confirms that he’s succeeded in making himself believable in that role.”

  “Because they succeeded,” Chim corrected her, and Ruth was silenced immediately.

  And while Chim consoled her with time that smooths out everything (but he touched his eyeglasses), she told herself that that Bob would never have existed without Gerda. At the beginning of the fairy tale she was playing with André as if changing the clothes on a paper doll, and he didn’t stamp his feet, in fact he let her do it—ein braves Kind. In the end, with Gerda, he had brought into the world nothing but himself: Robert Capa.

  It’s very light now in the Atelier on Rue Froidevaux, a milky, flat light, thanks to that gray sky: perfect light for an artist, not for a photography studio. Csiki doesn’t complain about being confined to the kitchenette, or even about having to “hang out the laundry” in the toilet, going up and down the spiral staircase with the basin of prints, which he clears out before morning. It’s not right to make Madame Garai pee under the eyes of Spanish or Chinese armies, and if a client asks for the bathr
oom, you can’t offer him all that intimacy with still fresh photographs, Csiki maintains.

  He’s not all wrong, nor was it fanciful to think that Capa had chosen that Atelier because it reminded him of the golden years of the Pilvax Passage in Budapest, which was obviously something different: just two steps from Váci Utca, where the fine ladies went to shop, plus it was home to a café famous as the haunt of the revolutionary patriots of ’48. The Pilvax had hosted the historic Kaffeehaus in the busy elegance of the twenties, but it didn’t have the big windows onto Rue Froidevaux, made even more prominent by the furniture Gerda had obtained: no bric-a-brac, just a few pieces but good ones. The linear, lightweight black armchair, the two comfortable boxy chairs surround the narrow table on upholstery sawhorses in rationalist harmony.

  Ruth should sit there leafing through the Picture Post, but, waiting for Csiki, she gets lost looking out the windows, anxious about the thing she has to tell Capa, tired of waiting for both of them, until the door of the kitchenette opens.

  “So, did you see the magazine story?” Csiki says to her, and starts dipping the bread in his café au lait.

  Ruth looks at him, leaning on the edge of the table, sipping coffee and smoking, more relaxed.