The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  “I was twenty. I won’t let anyone say those are the best years of your life,” he had written in a book of which Ruth knew only that famous beginning. A perfect phrase, given the circumstances, for those who were twenty-one, like her. Not to mention Capa, who was two years older. Ruth couldn’t imagine the author of Aden, Arabia, with that Paris-intellectual look, at twenty, much less dictating an article in the Telefónica skyscraper in Madrid, which swayed and shook and rumbled (as did Gerda, imitating the dark rumble) when the bombs fell, that is, every single day. Nizan had also been overwhelmed by the news, and was visibly uneasy, having known Capa in other moments, with his insolent good-time guy’s face.

  Anyway, she and Nizan tried to pretend to have something to say to each other, and even ventured in Capa’s direction. The longest of their attempts took place near Limoges.

  “We’re almost halfway,” announcement from Nizan.

  “Ah bien,” reply from Capa, who immediately huddled again between the armrests.

  “Limoges,” Ruth had said, “the city of the porcelain?”

  Of course, the valuable porcelain, but since the times of the Grande Révolution those who produced it had given the owners a run for their money. Nizan, although he continued to discourse on the Limousin, and its praiseworthy working class, its kaolin resources, and so on, stared at her with the gravity of a plea for help.

  “The people I worked for, when I’d just arrived in Paris, had a set of Haviland china. I nearly ended up on the street because of a broken plate, but they paid me on the black market, as with all us émigrés . . . ”

  Why, just to say something, had she told a story that had the vulgarity of a farce for the petit bourgeoisie in the mood for a stimulating evening? The Fräulein who, after taking the children to school, found the head of the family naked under the robe de chambre, cried, “C’est dégoûtant!,” fled from the bedroom and the house, didn’t know where to go, wept on a bench, looked for a telephone to call her mother, went back, packed her suitcases. And finally she discovered that they had informed on her at the police station as an illegal étrangère, which created endless problems for her. But then Gerda arrived and they had gone to live together . . .

  The shock that passed through Capa’s body was so violent that it made even Nizan jump. But the name of Gerda couldn’t be taken back, and at that point she had to break the silence that had descended on the compartment at all costs.

  “Are the owners of Haviland from the same family as Olivia de Havilland, do you know?” she asked Nizan.

  Movie stars were not his field, he answered, staring at her through his round glasses, but he had read that the actress was related to the proprietors of an aircraft manufacturer: “In the realm quand même of the great capitalist dynasties, n’est-ce pas, Madame?”

  In other circumstances, in spite of the ceremoniousness that France taught its children of every background and ideology, they would have let it go, out of a sense of the ridiculous and of decency. But the silence was too painful, and Paul Nizan unexpectedly went on talking about movies. When Captain Blood came out, he had immediately realized that Olivia de Havilland was destined for success; not to mention Errol Flynn, who, after his exploits as a noble rebel pirate, had gone to Spain to show solidarity with the right side . . .

  “A total jerk, ce Flynn-là!” Capa burst out with a sepulchral disdain. A clown who used the Spanish cause and especially the Spanish women to do what he liked as a star, and he was really a disgusting chicken shit.

  No one uttered another word.

  Maybe Nizan was ignorant of the backstories that had made him stumble into that faux pas. Or maybe he knew that Errol Flynn had flirted with Gerda, too, but had given no importance to those rumors. The Capa of two days earlier would have buried his adversary in a flood of grotesque anecdotes, not with that spiteful phrase.

  In the compartment an icy silence fell. Mountains, flocks, three travelers cocooned in their seats. They arrived like that at the station in Toulouse.

  In Toulouse, Capa put on a veneer of restraint, until he found out that they didn’t have a permit to repatriate the remains via airplane (but could this, Ruth thought, be called repatriation?). Gerda remained in Valencia, waiting to be put on a train car that was to stop at every checkpoint and tiny Catalan station. After some phone calls between Paul Nizan and Louis Aragon it was decided that the employee of Ce Soir would go to Port Bou to take care of the bureaucratic matters (did you need a carte de séjour even for a corpse?) and then travel on the special French railroad convoy along with the coffin. Capa, who had again become a dead weight, should be sent back without delay: both to avoid the incalculable wait at the border and because Madame Cerf was there, fortunately, who when she returned to Paris could provide support to Gerda’s family arriving from Belgrade.

  “Il y arrive que des civils survécus à un bombardement plombent dans un état catatonique,” Ruth had written down during a first-aid lesson devoted to detecting internal lesions. Civilians who survive a bombing may fall into a catatonic state. But she didn’t know what to do with that état catatonique, except feel relieved that the Toulouse-Paris line didn’t have many intermediate stops. “Let him sleep, he needs it,” she said to herself, closing her eyes in turn. But at Cahors she had already reopened them. “At least rest,” she repeated to herself, closing her eyes again in the useless attempt to silence the torture. “Why me?” she repeated to herself. Why not Chim, or Cartier-Bresson, or even the Steins, who were always close to the two of them? Yes, why not Lilo Stein, if Capa really had to hold on to a woman? We’re not even friends, real friends, she said to herself, something that had recently, perhaps, also been true of Gerda. Don’t you see what a wreck he is! she rebelled, squeezing her eyelids even tighter, speaking to Gerda, who could no longer hear her recriminations. And your family? You never mentioned that your mother was sick and now I have to take care of your father, with whom I’ve barely exchanged a hello in my whole life. What did you think, Gerda, that you were invulnerable?

  Ruth had longed for a moment all to herself, but now that that moment extended from station to station, she continued to toss and turn in the hum of her thoughts, with waves of exhaustion roaring in her eardrums, as if underwater. Invulnerable, yes of course. Easy to feel invulnerable when you don’t care much about others. Whereas we are here doing what we can, and I can’t even collapse, because I have him across from me. You can’t see him, you can’t understand what a mess he is. He could jump off the train—no, now he wouldn’t be able to, but better not to depend on it. Did you ever think of it? Did you ever think of those who remain?

  There was no relief in those thoughts, in fact they made her feel even more miserable, trapped in the anguish that resentment stirred up: until a lump jammed in her throat emerged in a lament. Ruth felt it rising from her diaphragm, felt that it resembled the cry of a cat down in the courtyard, but having to push it down amplified the inner resonance, clear and tremendous. Her lips contracted, her jaw trembling, she began to cry with her eyes closed. Swallowing, erasing the threads of tears with her hands, she struggled to breathe normally, and that slowly led her to a brief sleep.

  When the train stopped, André was looking at her.

  “Where are we?”

  “Orléans, a man with a lot of bags said.”

  “Then it’s just over an hour. Someone from Ce Soir will be there to take you to the hotel. Unfortunately, as they explained, I can’t.”

  André, indifferent to that news as to all the rest, kept looking at her. Did he realize that she had been crying? Her eyes remained reddened, a small companion to those swollen eyes that now sought contact. Instinctively she sniffed.

  “Entschuldige, Ruth, I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “You must have had things to do, work . . . the cinema.”

  “No, they’re all busy reassuring the director about the première of Yoshiw
ara. Ophüls had to resort to a Japanese garden in Porte de Saint-Cloud rather than film in Tokyo.”

  “What’s the film like?”

  “A consommé of Madame Butterfly, La Bohème, and La Traviata. I may be unfair, but, in view of the versions I’ve typed, I’d be more excited about a Soviet film about a Ukrainian collective of beekeepers.”

  Was it a smile, that grimace that appeared on André’s face? Barely a reflex, but it denied the état catatonique. Ruth had learned that a physical response to external stimuli, if it lasted, dispelled the suspicion of permanent damage. They would resume living: even Capa, in some way.

  She had to keep talking, tell him anything. What about that exotic garden outside Paris? An enchanting place, with a little bridge, lanterns, a pagoda, a pavillon de thé, other small houses with rice-paper walls, while the Seine ran nearby and bicycles jangled their bells on their way through the Bois de Boulogne . . .

  “Seichi told me about it, maybe . . . ”

  “They only recently opened it to the public, almost no one knows about it.”

  And so, rather than the melodrama of the geisha and the Russian officer of Yoshiwara, Ruth told André the story of Albert Kahn, the son of a cattle dealer, who founded a bank in the Paris of the Belle Époque. With his enormous earnings he acquired a villa and land to create a park that would contain all the places he had loved. Forests, as in his native Vosges or distant Colorado, a French garden, an English garden, and a Japanese garden, which was the largest, because the stocks issued by the emperor had made him one of the richest men of the time. But those Jardins du Monde weren’t enough for him. He felt he was a traveler, a philanthropist, a pacifist. He began to spend his fortune on encouraging direct knowledge of other peoples and cultures, and thus promoting universal understanding and brotherhood. When the summer of 1914 arrived, the idea turned out to have a cruel naïveté, but Albert Kahn didn’t lose heart. He immediately created a rescue committee to provide food and shelter for refugees, as he himself had been as a child. And as soon as people could travel again on the continents, he relaunched his projects. The world had experienced the opposite of the civilizing progress that Monsieur Kahn believed in—irreparable ruin, hastened death—but he could still preserve its fragile variety and wonder in effigies. The idea dated back to a trip to Japan before the war, when he had taught his Paris driver how to use a camera and a movie camera.

  “The driver? A photographer was too much for his pockets?”

  “Wait. Kahn was used to going beyond the goals he’d reached successfully. So he hired photographers and filmmakers, a dozen, and sent them to some fifty countries.”

  “Expenses, salary, and everything?”

  “Salary I don’t know, but provided with an unlimited amount of film and Lumière autochromes. He wanted to create an archive of human life, a planetary archive. They brought back around a hundred hours of film and more than seventy thousand color plates . . . ”

  “Color? Madness.”

  “If they hadn’t gotten public funds the Archives of the Planet would have been lost. It’s not a set of porcelain whose value everybody understands . . . ”

  “Including a pretty Fräulein who breaks it out of revenge . . . You should have thought about that.”

  Absolutely she had, she replied with a sharp laugh, surprised that he had been listening to her. But hearing her yelp, Capa began to cry again: not much, but as if startled out of the temporary suspension of pain.

  The stories of life don’t sort themselves out because you find a good one to tell. The story of the banker had a bad ending, too, and Ruth could only tell it the way it happened. Albert Kahn had feared wars, hatred, and prejudice, but not the network of interests he was part of, the network of global exchange that sees no substantial difference between war and peace. The French banks believed that they were safe from the tempest of Wall Street. Thus when, in 1931, they began to totter, the Banque Albert Kahn was too exposed to the markets and at the same time too small to merit an intervention by the Bank of France. Kahn mortgaged the properties along the Seine and the villa on the Côte d’Azur, but in the end he went under. The bank failed, all his goods were seized, he was granted the use under bailment of the Bois de Boulogne dwelling.

  “And the plates, the films?”

  “In a municipal warehouse, as I mentioned . . . ”

  Ruth realized that chance had inspired a story miraculously made to touch the residual curiosity of a photographer, but she could add only that when Ophüls learned that the banker knew the Tokyo of the time of Yoshiwara and possessed some images of it, he wanted to visit the villa at all costs. Kahn, a small man, still fit except that he used a cane, was happy to exchange a few words with Michiko, the young female protagonist, but he greeted the rest of the company with a slight bow and shut himself up in his home.

  It was the truth, the truth had offered her an effective pause. And now Capa waited for the story to unfold.

  “One day when I was there, Ophüls takes me aside and introduces me to Kahn. ‘Madame Cerf, as you can easily understand, is of ancient rabbinical stock from Alsace—unlike me, who would be an Oppenheimer from Saarbrücken, like so many, if I hadn’t taken a stage name.’ ‘I know very well,’ Kahn answers, ‘I went to the market with my father.’ The intuition, Ophüls explained later, had come to him when his gaze met the tops of the firs, that linear perspective between the Rising Sun and the woods of his childhood. Anyway, from that day on, for Monsieur Kahn we were all compatriots, Landsleut, with whom to dust off even the curious Jeddisschdaitsch, the Yiddish German of his childhood. His preferred interlocutor was the cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan, who gets by with Yiddish because he’s from Breslau. It was funny to hear them talk about technical aspects of cinema that fascinated Kahn, and in which Eugen Schüfftan is a real genius. He invented the special effects in Metropolis, and ever since Fritz Lang went to America, Ophüls has fought over him with all the German directors in Paris, and even the French.”

  Ruth was about to describe how Ophüls and Schüfftan had finally been invited to a projection of the amazing Autochromes, when Capa interrupted her vehemently. The disappointment of the first film Fritz Lang made in Hollywood! Spencer Tracy was very good, but certainly not at the level of Peter Lorre. Fury had nothing to do with M. The girl he had gone to see the film with had come out so frightened that he had to spend his last cents to take her home in a taxi. So he’d had to consume kilometers of dark Berlin neighborhoods, amid imaginary shadows of maniacal murderers, and the very real danger of being arrested for vagrancy.

  He’s calming down, Ruth thought. But it was as if he were speaking in the place of someone else.

  “Months ago we were stuck in Paris,” André continued, his voice flat. “I was supposed to cover a civil-defense exercise that seemed like a gas-mask costume ball, compared to Spain, where the fronts were at a standstill. Gerda wasn’t working much and was getting impatient . . . ”

  “I can imagine.”

  “We were at the back of the hall, I was holding her tight, as always, until the lights go on and the audience gets up to leave. ‘M was something else,’ I say to her, and I tell her about the Berlin experience, making her laugh. Gerda had seen it, right, with Kuritzkes?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, “it’s likely . . . ”

  Was Capa listening to her?

  “The credits were still playing,” he resumed, “and Gerda announces to me that she’s going to visit Georg. I felt like Spencer Tracy, furious, I felt like hitting her. When the first bombs fell on Madrid, she was still there, in Capri.”

  Capa burst into tears. After that, he shut himself up again in a protective silence, sending her back to her reflections.

  That visit to Naples had lasted longer than expected: and Ruth knew Gerda, and knew Georg. The rudeness with Willy Chardack was water under the bridge, they were both focused now on the war in Spain. W
hat did they have to lose except grabbing some glorious moments?

  And on her return from Italy, Gerda had charged off to Spain, without hesitation. Poor friend, what did you get yourself into, Ruth thought with sudden, resigned lightness.

  The train had slowed down and stopped outside Paris. Now that the lights, the buildings, the advertising billboards signaled that they had almost arrived, André looked at her anxiously.

  “I’ll call you at the hotel,” she promised, “as soon as I can.”

  “Macht nichts!” André answered. “Forget it,” with a gesture he had brought with him from Budapest, a gesture that was too vehement.

  Because the opposite was true. It was clear to both that he would continue to seek her out, and Ruth would make herself available whenever she could, she would listen to him and see him weep, weep less and less, talk more and more. Talk about Gerda. The journey to Toulouse had bound them more closely than they had been when Gerda was there.

  Weisz is still on the telephone with Capa, but Ruth can’t stay in the chair forever, overwhelmed by thoughts that aren’t helping her move on.

  She gets up impulsively, moves the journal aside to make room on the table for paper and pen. She’s looking for the negatives on the top shelves of the bookcase, when Csiki hangs up. Now she knows how to answer him: better not to show Capa anything until we’re sure he’s completely recovered, matter of a few days.