The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  Joyeux Noël! Joyeuses Fêtes! Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année 1939!

  Ever since things in Germany have gone from bad to worse, for Ruth to pass from the silence of Rue Froidevaux and the winter darkness of the Montparnasse cemetery to the lighted boulevards, the decorated windows, the people loaded with bags or hugging Christmas packages is sometimes similar to being a city mouse who for a moment can’t breathe and then darts away.

  The reality that matters is elsewhere. The reality is worse than the crudest of Capa’s pictures in the newspapers. And then Ruth allows herself a break, looks at the piece with the white-haired girl, and doesn’t notice Csiki, standing behind her, who asks: “Seen it?”

  “Magnificent!” she exclaims reflexively.

  Csiki doesn’t react. Not even when Ruth turns and looks him in the face, a Pierrot mask, drawn and pale.

  “No,” Csiki whispers, “look more carefully.”

  “What is it, what should I have seen? The photomontage, the photo of the dying soldier?”

  “Another one.”

  Ruth, agitated, returns to the twelve pages of “THIS IS WAR!,” scans them up to the page that escaped her, which contains only a portrait of the photographer. The Greatest War-Photographer in the World: Robert Capa.

  And finally she understands. She understands his urgency to show her the Picture Post. She suspects that Csiki hasn’t dared to deliver it to Capa, the reason he’s now looking for advice from her.

  The page with the portrait anointing The Greatest War-Photographer in the World is a peak never reached by a photographer, but if Capa should lose his balance, he could fall into the void from which he’s just raised himself. The precipice is right before their eyes, right there on the table.

  Gerda took that picture. On the front in Segovia, near the Navacerrada pass, when she was working with the Leica, he with the Eyemo provided by Time-Life for a feature that would inaugurate the great turning point. “The March of Time is a newsreel projected in more than a thousand theaters. We’re entering Hollywood, comrade!” Robert Capa must have said something like that to her, because that was how Gerda Taro had portrayed him: focused, bold, his profile one with that of the movie camera that pokes out from the arch of his eyebrow like a metallic horn with the wings of a moth.

  The greatest war-photographer without a still camera.

  It’s all so absurd that a perhaps incautious comment escapes Ruth: wouldn’t Gerda, maybe so as not to appear too pleased with her success, have laughed at the incongruity?

  “Maybe,” Csiki sighs, “but at the time she wasn’t at all amused.” And, as usual, he was the one who’d had to report the bad news to Capa. “Explain, when you talk to him, that a film isn’t a sequence of photographs,” the guy from Life had told him, already about to hang up the phone.

  “D’accord, d’accord,” Csiki had mumbled on the telephone, “mais écoutez, my boss is back in Spain avec the camera, he will do better, il est en train d’apprendre . . . ”

  “Well, keep on trying!”

  The last to use the Eyemo, Csiki murmurs, was Gerda. The Leica, tossed away by the impact with the tank, had been recovered, the film still intact, but of the movie camera not a trace remained. Time-Life had called the studio to offer condolences, Capa was in Amsterdam, untraceable. Csiki feared that if Capa told them that the Eyemo had also disappeared in Brunete, the bill for the movie camera would not be long in arriving, and maybe even a warning, because only the person hired on the contract was supposed to handle it.

  Ruth observes Csiki’s Adam’s apple, swallowing repeatedly, he looks like he’s eaten a lightbulb, and she adds, icily, that Gerda loved to feel she was the better part of Robert Capa. She told everyone that she was better than he was at filming. But that detail about the Eyemo, no, that she didn’t know . . .

  The lightbulb in Csiki’s throat is stopping. In the end, he says wearily, Capa called the editorial office.

  “I’m very sorry, but your camera c’est kaputt . . . perdue avec ma femme.”

  Ruth left the magazine on the table and grabbed Csiki again, who was ready to disappear into the lab (does he want to hide the fact that he’s weeping?), to tell him that she’ll go ahead with the jobs he’s given her.

  “Thanks. You know where to find the negatives. If there’s no white paper, use the letterhead.”

  Outside it’s started to rain again, the water descends in rivulets along the windows, exasperating. Maybe another coffee would help the cold feet, it won’t hurt, anyway.

  “I’m making another coffee, you want one?” she calls to her friend.

  Csiki insists that he wants to make it, he invites her to sit comfortably and hurries to his Wunderkammer to get the water. Ruth relaxes into the rationalist armchair, undecided whether to take off her shoes.

  Csiki brings her the coffee, impatient to turn into something positive the weight that’s been removed with that confidence. Gerda would have been proud to see her photograph in the Picture Post. “Capa should be, too, don’t you think?”

  Ruth nods and tastes a boiling-hot sip, while Csiki lets himself be carried away by memories, with the loquacity of taciturn men when, for once, they start talking.

  “You can’t imagine how thrilled Bandi was when Time gave him the Eyemo. He must have told you about the Navacerrada pass, how happy they were down there, camped in the middle of the woods and always working side by side.”

  Ruth doesn’t have to do anything but give an affirmative nod and let him continue.

  Two types of flashbulbs, an abundant supply of film, a store of coffee and chocolate: everything that Gerda had ordered via telegram from Valencia (Weisz had hunted down the photographic material, Capa had taken care of the refreshments) had had to make room in the knapsack for that precious compact object that was worth the sacrifice of the sugar cubes and the search for a space for every single pack of American cigarettes taken out of the carton.

  But wasn’t it a fabulous device? Bandi had exclaimed before wrapping the Eyemo in the sweater that was to protect it during the journey. Taken apart like that, didn’t it resemble a little robot that looks at you sideways, yes, and it’s female (“See, Csiki, it has tits!”), or a children’s puppet invented by Picasso?

  Bandi couldn’t contain himself. He couldn’t wait to arrive in Madrid and unwrap the surprise in front of Gerda. He couldn’t bear to stay far from her and from Spain, so he had gone straight to Louis Aragon to say he was quitting. Ce Soir, with the exclusive contract for France, had given him an undeniable privilege, but now that the pathway to America was clear he didn’t need it anymore. He wanted to tell Gerda and right away pull out the proof that he hadn’t invented anything, placing the Eyemo in her beautiful, incredulous hands: all while embracing her, kissing her on the neck, until, entwined, they started staggering around the room like drunken polka dancers.

  Yes, Ruth imagines all this. The rest she already knows, because Capa told her, more than once.

  The next day they left Madrid, making a stop before reaching the Navacerrada pass. Gerda, seeing him filming in the dirt barnyard of a farmhouse, the camera around his neck and the movie camera on his shoulder, satisfied, happy, bursting up to the edges of that heavy turtleneck, had cried, “Look at me!” and in response got his most thuggish expression.

  But she wasn’t satisfied with the shot.

  “Stupid, you’re not supposed to be impressing girls, you’re supposed to be showing the world you’re a director: take the Eyemo, here, a little straighter, concentrate, you’re Robert Capa, you’re not afraid of anything, not even of that big German shepherd standing guard two steps from your backside,” she provoked him.

  “Ça va, now yes, you came out well, you can put it down.”

  Capa had approached Gerda quite slowly, turning only after he reached her. The German shepherd was there, free, in fact, but well trained, as if he knew exactly whe
n and against whom he was supposed to move from defense to attack.

  “He’s one of ours! Szép kutya, jó kutyus, true that you’re ein braves Hundchen? Un perro alemán pero también un camarada valeroso. Te mandan a buscar minas fascistas, perrito guapo? A German dog but still a brave comrade. Do they send you to look for fascist mines, you good dog? What language do you think you should talk to this dog in?”

  It seems that at that very moment, when Capa moved toward the dog to give him a pat, a Belgian soldier from the Marseillaise battalion appeared, with an order from General Walter: they were to wait until he reached that finca, where he would host them and, the next day, take care of escorting them to the battlefields.

  “Ah, et ce chien maintenant c’est le chien personnel du commandant—he’s the general’s dog,” the Belgian comrade had said. “Mais si le commandant lui parle en sa langue maternelle, le polonais, je ne sais pas—But if the general talks to him in Polish, his mother tongue, I don’t know . . . ”

  But Gerda knew, she knew how to talk to the German shepherd in Polish, and the dog was happy to trot behind her or stop at her commands. Gerda could talk to almost all the members of the International Brigades in their own language, and with a few phrases she won over battalions and generals, enchanted politicians and censors. Gerda was beloved by the correspondents of the foreign press and by poets and writers; Rafael Alberti and his wife welcomed her warmly whenever she stayed in Madrid at the Alianza. “And then, Ruth, I don’t know how to describe to you the look on John Dos Passos’s face when one night at the Hotel Florida she recited some passages from a novel of his. Hemingway hated her from then on, but he would have changed his mind if only he’d had another chance to meet her . . . ”

  When Capa began to inundate her with these rhapsodies, Ruth listened and nodded like someone drinking in every mouthful of a story, tasting the flowers and ripe fruits released by the perlage of pure gold, without knowing if that sharp note of acidity, that overdone fermentation, was a sign that he had passed off a cheap spumante as a Grande Cuvée Riserva.

  The true from the false, how could you distinguish it with Capa? she wonders, while Csiki now speaks on the telephone with him, in Hungarian as usual.

  And yet, Ruth recalls, there really was that book by Dos Passos that Gerda took to the pool at the Bar Kochba club one summer, a birthday present, and she pondered it between dives. At times she lost the thread, went back, muttering that, except for Berlin Alexanderplatz, she had never read such an impenetrable modern novel. But she caught the beauty that had been promised in the dedication:

  For the greatest dancer on the planet

  This great American novel

  In which the orchestra of the revolution

  Swings to the rhythms of the wildest hot jazz.

  Your happy partner (in every dance)

  Georg

  Leipzig, August 1, 1932

  To avoid getting the cover wet, Gerda had taken it off, and the book looked like an edition of the works of Lenin designed by a constructivist: a red bible with three close black stripes, at the center the severe title, Auf den Trümmern, (On the Ruins).3 Those ruins of the Great War proclaimed nothing hot or jazzy or wild, but Gerda was fascinated by that tome and got sunburned to finish it. She burned for everything that arrived from Georg, before he left again for Berlin. She was at the peak of being in love. Did she enjoy those moments aware that they were coming to an end, or did the enjoyment intensify precisely in view of the end? No, Gerda didn’t like things that ended. She had never let any of her men leave her radius. Not even in the case of her damaged friendship with Ruth had she had the tact to recalibrate the distances, something so shattering to Ruth that she switched sidewalks; the only one who so much as glanced at her sadly was the Dachshund. No, Gerda couldn’t conceive that something might break forever: only transitions, phases, chapters, where the final period, which she herself inscribed, anticipated the urgency of turning the page. Because Gerda liked things that changed.

  The Spanish turning point had been the most serious and the most thrilling. So it was believable that Gerda, hurled into the beau monde of Madrid under blackout, had had a ball with the world-famous writer who had accompanied her last summer in Leipzig. “The orchestra of the revolution swings to the rhythms of the wildest hot jazz: that’s the effect of your novels!” Dos Passos was impressed, Capa by the impression that Gerda had made on Dos Passos, not knowing that her regard for Dos Passos had blossomed out of the German edition received from her beloved Georg Kuritzkes.

  Maybe it hadn’t happened exactly like that, but in this case Capa wasn’t bragging randomly. When he ran into some scratch that blemished his splendid memories, he rustled up d’emblée the wizard of retouching. But he couldn’t tolerate having others correct him, and as for souvenir photos forget it.

  The one with the German shepherd, for example.

  Csiki Weisz, knowing Bandi’s attachment to the two photos that Gerda had taken of him, one day thought about cropping and retouching the one that showed his whole body. You saw who Robert Capa was, you saw the camera, and the photo ended there: a black half-length image on a white background, without the dirt stains on the trousers, without the squat heavy boots, the unpaved barnyard, the poor farmhouse guarded by an untrained German shepherd. But Bandi, rather annoyed, had said: “No, you don’t touch a photo of Gerda’s. The editors will do it, if they really want to.”

  Csiki was hurt. He muttered that it was foolish to send the newspapers one portrait with the movie camera and the other with a four-legged intruder. But he continued to reprint the photographs, as he’d been asked, and Ruth added the stamp “PHOTO TARO” on the envelopes she sent. What a well-fed German shepherd was doing in that sliver of rural Spain Ruth had never asked, until Capa suggested it to her.

  The story didn’t hold up. That the dog had been trained for military purposes might be true. But it certainly wasn’t General Walter’s dog. The story of Gerda giving orders in Polish, a language she barely spoke, had crossed Capa’s mind, and he couldn’t let go of it. The commander admired her, adored her, according to Capa, to the point where he ordered her in person to withdraw from the battlefield immediately. And Gerda, paying no attention to General Walter, had continued to take photographs until it was too late.

  For a second Ruth feels herself sinking into the rationalist armchair, her feet drop down in search of the support of her shoes.

  Csiki is still on the telephone and Ruth doesn’t understand anything, except hotel, Bandi, Rue Froidevaux, and other words that would be comprehensible even if they were spoken in Arabic.

  She takes a sip of coffee and tries to reflect, annoyed by the rain.

  Capa had at his disposal skills and strategies practiced on the streets of Budapest, which included telling tall tales, and it was an apprenticeship that had also taught him not to get too burned. On the other hand, Capa circled the fire with those Capa-style stories, exaggerated tales to laugh at like children at the Kasperltheater, laughing heartily when the impertinent puppet got hit on the head, and when the fabulous Gretel vanished through the trapdoor, astonishment protecting them from grief.

  Ruth knows the picaresque resources of Bandi Friedmann very well, but she no longer has confidence in them. She’s seen what happens if they fail, unfortunately, and she saw it up close the day she went with him to Toulouse to get Gerda, or what remained of Gerda.

  For eight or nine hours, on the train to Toulouse, Capa had done nothing but weep and sigh, stopping every so often to repeat, “I shouldn’t have, I shouldn’t have, Ruth,” swaying slightly forward and back on the second-class seat. Before going to the Gare d’Austerlitz, he had collapsed on a chair in her kitchen, hadn’t taken even a sip of water while he waited for her to get ready, her trembling hands in a struggle not to ravel her stocking. “Tell the concierge something came up!” she had said to Melchior at the door, already less stunned by the peal of
the bell at an improbable hour that, because of their contacts with the Widerstand, the resistance, had made her immediately think of Hans—that he’d been arrested, if not worse. It was worse, but didn’t concern her brother.

  As the hours and the kilometers passed, the sobs diminished, or got deeper, until they became subdued rattles. At times, turning toward the landscape outside the window, Capa murmured some violent phrase in Hungarian, but his eyes remained opaque, like the bituminous surface of the road that skirted the tracks. Ruth didn’t know how to console him. She tried to take one of his hands, squeeze it hard. She tried holding both hands, resting them on her knees, but he pulled them away with a childish shake of his head, as if to say, “I don’t deserve it.” She had tried to tell him that it wasn’t his fault. But the truth was that she couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t do anything but witness that suffering for eight or nine hours, hoping that Gerda, even in death, would have the power to calm him, to allow him to hold onto her coffin as if to a raft, as the only real support in the deep, swallowing sea. Maybe it would loosen some of that rock he had inside. Maybe he would weep for another eight or nine hours, but in a different way.

  She hoped but didn’t much count on it. She herself felt the same anxiety, or fear, of meeting Gerda, who in Madrid had been given a farewell with great ceremony (but in a city that had been under siege for almost a year how had they found the means to properly recompose a birdlike person dragged under a tank?) and honored by a great crowd in Valencia, too. The only way not to think about it was to pick up the thread of the conversation addressed to her, occasionally, by the man who at the Gare d’Austerlitz had introduced himself as comrade Paul Nizan, with tickets for the compartment reserved by Ce Soir and the task of bringing back to Paris nôtre jolie camerade et chère amie. A fragile thread. Ruth felt that suddenly every word in French emerged false, laborious. And then Paul Nizan withdrew again behind the ream of newspapers placed on the free seat between him and Capa, showing only the edge of big round eyeglasses.