The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  “Is the bread all right? I don’t think there’re any traces of mold.”

  “It’s very good, in Budapest there was even that . . . ”

  Ruth is about to pick up the magazine when she stops, observing Csiki’s slow chewing, his elbow on the table, his head bent. Maybe she should have been for Gerda what Weisz was for Friedmann: the companion always grateful for having been chosen, the companion-shadow.

  It’s not the first time she’s thought it, going back to the early days, when André would sit at their table at the Dôme, bumming a cigarette or, if he had a pack, offering them one, but to Gerda first. At a certain point, after the usual coffee, he’d start pulling out the adventures of his adolescence, “a gang of hoodlums like Molnar’s Paul Street boys, that’s what we were: but we’d be more than happy to admit girls, too . . . ” Ruth guessed that those stories were tailor-made for her friend, and in fact Gerda, sensitive to the Magyar-epic touches to that serial plotted in her honor, found them entertaining. “What do I care!” she retorted when Ruth, before turning out the light at night, said that those tales were novelistic elaborations, not to say half invented. Now she has to admit that she wronged him.

  It isn’t so much Capa who proved this as his right arm, that thin arm that is now protecting his breakfast bowl. Csiki Weisz, who says nothing about his own childhood, except to narrate it with his gestures of every day, those of the war orphan adopted by an imaginative contemporary.

  Ruth had heard the story of Csiki when Gerda was still around. It would have been too maudlin for André’s tastes if he hadn’t spiked it with a little humor: Weisz-père, who had fallen for Emperor Franz Joseph, but from a horse, in other words he was killed by a Hapsburgian hoof; the firstborn sent to an orphanage, welcomed home again during his Gymnasium years, the mother’s house quickly treated like a hostel, because a certain Bandi Friedmann, hauling Csiki behind him like a trailer, extended the perimeter of their jaunts far beyond the area between the Elisabeth Bridge and the school just outside the Jewish quarter. And then there were the girlfriends, so pretty and smart—Eva, the lawyer’s daughter, and Kati, the banker’s daughter—who had taught the boys how to use the first tools of their trade, “and I won’t tell you what else . . . ” In Berlin, as photographers already well connected in the right circles, they had served as supports and models for Csiki and Bandi. You can always count on people you’ve done certain stupid things with at a certain point in time, no matter what.

  Yes, friends show up in times of trouble. The letter of condolence that Kati Horna had sent arrived in Rue Froidevaux from Spain where she was photographing for the anarchist press. Eva Besnyö’s telegram arrived from Amsterdam (BANDI IS HERE STOP DON’T WORRY STOP) when Capa had disappeared into thin air after the funeral, and reassured Csiki and then Ruth, who had quickly informed all the worried friends.

  In times of trouble true friends recognize one another. Thanks to Csiki Weisz, Ruth had discovered Bandi, when he engaged her in the studio shortly after the funeral.

  It had taken a lot to treat him seriously, at least the bit that he deserved. After all, what had Gerda done at first?

  “He’s twenty!” she said scornfully.

  “And Georg Kuritzkes? Don’t tell me you’re going to be fussy about the difference of a year . . . ”

  “But he still has pimples.”

  Then, toward the end of ’34, Gerda had started going with the Dachshund, confirming that André Friedmann was very low on the scale of her admirers. How could Ruth have understood that behind those late flare-ups of acne there was a youth so attached to his teenage gang? Those kids from Budapest had remained true friends: someone took care of Csiki, Csiki took care of Bandi, and not even now that he was Robert Capa would Bandi have forgotten his childhood friend. And Gerda?

  Gerda had walked out overnight, but enough of digging up the past. How can you still be angry with a dead woman, Ruth, with all you have to do and think about! Look ahead and consider yourself lucky. You’ve put aside some savings (not enough), you have a purpose, two older brothers ready to help you, a husband and a Swiss passport, and only a mother still trapped in Germany. Her mother, whose husband died of the Spanish flu when Ruth was five, would have chosen to perform outside the Neues Theater for a handout of a couple of marks, in a feather boa exhumed along with her theatrical repertoire, rather than send a child to the orphanage, and hadn’t been too much of a lady to work in other people’s houses.

  And, as she’s making her list, there is also the good fortune that she doesn’t have to worry about that fine youth. Csiki can manage on his own, and she can remove him from her thoughts. She could even tell him the thing to say to Capa, just to be safe. Besides, isn’t he the one who runs the show?

  “Take your time looking at the magazine, Ruth, I’ve already seen it. I’ll clean up.”

  And there he is with sponge and rag to clean the table and place the Picture Post on the tidy surface, following their ritual for opening the first copy that arrives in the studio. You just have to handle the envelopes of the magazines addressed to Mr. Capa carefully, while in the case of the dailies his assistant has perfected a precision technique to hide the fact that he’s opened them: this consideration toward Bandi is typical of Csiki, while Capa, on the contrary, tears the wrapping off the mail completely unaware. Over time the eagerness to see the photos laid out on the page has diminished, but the beauty and truth of work destined to touch the eyes of the world survive in the heedless violence of the torn paper.

  For this, too, Ruth would like to make amends, apologize to Capa for the bewilderment with which she listened to Gerda when, increasingly, she extolled the talent of André Friedmann.

  “I can imagine what talent.”

  “No, you can’t. And don’t think that . . . ”

  “I don’t want to know anything.”

  Ruth laughed, but Gerda insisted.

  “If I tell you, that means it’s true. All we do is wander around Paris, talk, go on talking in cafés when we’re tired of taking pictures or freezing cold or something. I don’t want it to be my fault if his Leica ends up in a pawnshop yet again. And also I’ve repeated to him in every language that all I can offer him is pure and simple friendship. Is that enough for you?”

  “Let’s hope so. You know what he has in mind, right?”

  “All right. Just once. Maybe it was imprudent, but . . . ”

  The rest dissolved in the fizz of her trills, Gerda was radiant with each of her small childish faults, happy with every secretly stolen pleasure, and Ruth was swept away and overwhelmed by her. If it happened to her, if she remained seduced by her friend, and if in her case the seductive power wasn’t the streaked irises or the heart-shaped mouth, even less the small breasts, the tawny pubis, the boyish thighs that Gerda scrubbed every morning with cold water and Marseille soap, how could she reproach her for Georg or Willy or André or any other man unable to let her go and forget her?

  It was also Gerda who in every guise (lover, agent, friend) by herself compensated for the audience and the applause that Friedmann was always so in need of, all that anxiety for acclaim would never be limited to those halfhearted little rituals. But even now, when Capa receives so much praise, and so many firm pats on the back from Ernest Hemingway, so many bottles to celebrate their shared ventures, forget the defeats, and send the fascists to hell, the original head of the claque, Csiki Weisz, and she, Ruth Cerf, true child of the dramatic arts, are still there, preparing the little theater to say “Bravo!” Twelve pages in a magazine with a circulation of a million is proof of extraordinary success. And yet for Robert Capa success has become little more than the confirmation of a task performed according to expectations. So Ruth and Csiki exaggerate with adjectives and superlatives, even though he consumes them like water. Only Gerda would have given him a very different substance, she had ambition and conviction for both of them, and for defending free, red, Rep
ublican Spain.

  Ruth has made up her mind to look at the Picture Post, to please Csiki, and then she can talk to him about her plans. She places the magazine in the middle of the table, ready to open it, when the girl on the cover catches her attention. She doesn’t seem like a model: she’s like a real girl, with a real smile (“The Girl with a Smile”) and a nice short haircut, hair as white as a poodle’s fur. Life would never do a cover like that, the Life cover girls are standard beauties. But the Picture Post, founded to tear the British Isles away from Life, though in an almost identical format, intends to be a progressive journal. The editor is one of ours, Csiki explained to her, someone from Budapest who brought the experience of Berlin journalism to London. And that experience, it seems, translates into a girl who rouses curiosity without disturbing the eye of the buyers. Spain is hidden inside, Spain will regain the headlines of the bourgeois press when it falls, that is to say soon. A bitterness rises in Ruth that brings her back to Capa, exhausted by the aftermath of Río Segre, with Csiki, Chim, and the others who take care of him like a sultan. And you, Gerda, would you manage to keep up his morale? Asking herself that she has to tighten her lips, because suddenly she hears her voice, clear and crisp: “Come on, let’s not get demoralized.”

  Ruth had never seen Gerda reproach herself for a mistake, brood over a regret. The only time she had cried in her presence, for more than the blink of an eye, was in the autumn of ’34, during a soirée organized by the Association des Écrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, which Gerda joined some years later as a photographer. But at that time they didn’t have an invitation to sink into the velvet of the Théâtre Adyar, and Ruth had no desire to run down behind the Eiffel Tower. Only because, according to Gerda, seeing the last film of a director fighting with the censors, the producers, and the people who don’t understand the avant-garde was a fitting tribute to Jean Vigo and his revolutionary cinema.

  “It’ll be as lively as a funeral . . . ”

  “We can see the film free, Ruth, what do you care.”

  When the protagonist of L’Atalante went up on the stage to recall the conditions in which cet homme extraordinaire, worn down by tuberculosis, had finished the filming, the room was electric with emotion, the people close to the dead man in tears.

  You wouldn’t have predicted that Gerda, with her serious, sober expression, halfway through the film would cough, which opened the way to a flood of sobs. But Juliette, who escapes from her Jean’s barge toward the lights, attractions, and seductions of Paris, was truly the perfect heroine for Ruth’s friend. Maybe sentimental tears would have flowed in front of another screen, if they hadn’t been forced to count the change in their purses. In that period they had had to give up Garbo in the melodramatic Painted Veil and the grim Dietrich in The Scarlet Empress, but one rainy Sunday they had allowed themselves a second viewing of The Paul Street Boys, escorted by the Dachshund, who expected nothing else. But the few times they didn’t skimp on an evening at the movies, they preferred comedies: as in the old days, when that extremely elegant girl from Stuttgart laughed like a lunatic at Laurel and Hardy, leaving her new companions in Leipzig incredulous. Except at the movies, in Gerda’s eyes only minimal residues of rage appeared, veils of displeasure, and, more than anything, effusions of wounded pride. Tears of worry, suffering, or helplessness meant giving in to the extreme pessimism that, in those times, it was better to be free of.

  Once, however, she had come home tired and sulky, taken off shoes and socks, massaged her ankles, and lain down on the bed with her clothes on, closing her eyes for a few seconds.

  The next day Ruth couldn’t keep herself from asking.

  “Bad news? Work problems?”

  “The usual,” she said, “plus a stupid nausea that won’t go away.”

  “Maybe you should go to the doctor.”

  “Right. I’ll go tomorrow.”

  Ruth returned in the afternoon and found Gerda already home. Makeup removed, pale, eyes alight with a feverish vivacity.

  “It’s official: I’m pregnant. But Friday morning we’ll resolve it. The doctor says a weekend of rest will be enough. She’s a person who understands women’s needs. And she charges so little that it’s almost worth doing it again, almost . . . ”

  Gerda laughed at her joke, as if with that everything were half solved. But it had struck Ruth so wrong that she must have assumed a grim expression.

  “Did I shock you? It’s an accident, these things happen . . . ”

  “I know,” she had retorted, with the graciousness of one whose feet are well over size thirty-nine.

  Gerda was upset, too: by now Ruth knew her. And suddenly Ruth had felt their five-year ages difference and was frightened by it: not only because of what could go wrong, and then what the hell would they do there in Paris without money and without proper papers? Would they ask Willy for a loan? Send a telegram to Stuttgart? She was frightened by the very idea of a pregnancy. Yes, it really was strange to realize that she would make the same decision, claiming the freedom to choose. And it was even stranger to realize that her mother had spoken to her early, and in a clear way, about certain things, about how to avoid them or face them.

  Ruth had been very tall and womanly for about a year. She had had a hopeless crush and some fleeting infatuations, returned by one or two schoolmates of the Kuritzkes brothers. She had rushed into a forgettable kiss and had absolutely not told her mother, while she had hinted at the disappointment about the boy she had the crush on. Sometimes she named names, gave opinions, and, provoked by her extremely handsome brothers, who had fun teasing her, elaborated on her own physical tastes (“blond, maybe light brown, at least a handbreadth taller than me, and in the upper grades of the Gymnasium”).

  Her brothers, however, were also coddled male children who thought of themselves first (and this, Ruth says to herself, is unfortunately still true: her mother lives in a neighborhood where hunting Jews is like shaking an apple tree in autumn. Kurt would like Hans to get the money so that she can leave, but Hans fled from Leipzig to Sweden after Kristallnacht without a cent. Background of her life that she’ll have to tell Csiki and Capa about.)

  In any case, that day Hans was traveling on business, Kurt had already landed in Manhattan—it must have been ’29. Ruth had talked to Mutti about a boy, she doesn’t remember which, let alone how they had ended up talking about him. But she remembers her mother’s face in the circle of light from the kitchen lamp, the character of her charm, which resisted age and wear, her chin raised over the remains of the simple lunch she had prepared, waiting for her return from work: Buttermilch, boiled potatoes, strawberries for dessert.

  “Promise me, Ruth: it’s important. If you’re afraid you have a problem, you must tell me at the first sign. We’ll resolve any stupid mistake, you understand? But we can’t afford others.”

  Was she fourteen at the time? Probably not, since she wanted to be swallowed up. She was about to give vent to the sense of insult that was rising in her throat, when her mother managed to anticipate her. Mein Herz, she had said, better to think than to be ashamed.

  In their house not even that bit of secrecy that made you feel grown-up was allowed, Ruth had thought. But her classmates who had a living, prosperous father and a real lady for a mother, not a former actress, daughter of a street peddler, whose marriage had been talked of for months in the courtyards along the Brühl, would never have had the benefit of such intimacy.

  Wasn’t Gerda basically that type of girl? Ruth wonders, looking at the strange figure on the cover of the Picture Post that her friend would have liked. Yes, maybe at first, because later she’d resolutely gotten rid of that imprint, the same way she went to have the seed removed that would’ve swollen her belly. She was a hard nut, Gerda, regardless of her birth.

  The mere idea of a pregnant daughter would have caused the tiny, meek Frau Pohorylle to die of fear and shame. Gerda had inherited her
height, her white teeth, her alabaster skin in the bad season. But Gerda’s mother looked somehow related, rather (perhaps she was?), to the young maid who had taken Ruth’s raincoat when she arrived for the first time in Springerstrasse—even though the maid wore a mouse-brown sheitel and the mistress of the house was coiffed in the penultimate trend of the moment. But the two women must have had a stronger understanding than what Ruth had picked up in the hasty introductions in the doorway of the Salon, which they had entered with a certain embarrassment.

  “May I offer you a stikele of my plumcake, Fräulein Cerf? I made it today and I think it came out well. Or are you watching your figure the way my daughter does and prefer fruit?”

  “Thank you, Frau Pohorylle, I would love a taste of your plumcake.”

  “Nothing for me, Mutti, just water!”

  Gerda had shouted as her mother left; she had already settled herself on the sofa, legs crossed, the first cigarette lighted, a nod to Ruth to sit in the other corner. Frau Pohorylle, on her return, was an elliptical, egglike form that advanced cautiously, cut in two by a silver rectangle: a plate for the cake, another plate with slices of apple and segments of orange, cake forks, a crystal carafe, two glasses, a gold-rimmed teapot with a matching sugar bowl and cup. Ruth wanted to get up but “Stay seated, bleiben Sie do zitsn!” she had been ordered, while Gerda restricted herself to moving the cigarettes and the ashtray to the side table. When she had performed the task of putting the tray down, Frau Pohorylle begged her to help herself (“Bitteschön”) and then said to her daughter: “I’m in the kitchen with Rivka, if you need me.”

  Ruth took two slices of plumcake and left the fruit for Gerda. Finally, out of good manners and habit, and also because no one was taking care of it, she picked up the tray and went to find the kitchen. She opened the door of a large room, flooded with fresh air and light coming in from the balcony: walls, marble table, and newly painted white cupboards, all filled with a blaze of green and crimson jars. Gerda’s mother and Rivka were “putting up” cucumbers and beets, in chunks and made into red cren, horseradish, and they handed each other jars and lids without noticing her.