The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  Csiki agrees thoughtfully, then shakes his head. But he’s not doubting her advice.

  “In Spain it’s all falling apart. And we’re getting lost in these stupid things.”

  “No, I understand.”

  “For him it’s a catastrophe.”

  “I know and I’m really sorry, but I have other things to think of now. Melchior found a job in Berne, and we’re going to live there—that way my mother can get out of Leipzig, finally.”

  Csiki nods unemphatically, but then he asks if it was the Reichskristallnacht. His Hungarian singsong skids on those agglomerations of consonants.

  “My brother Hans was supposed to get married two days later,” Ruth answers with a sigh. “Instead he took his bride and escaped. He’s just turned up in Stockholm, an enormous surprise. As long as he was in Germany, my mother wouldn’t move a centimeter. Now the problem is money. The amount my brother left her after selling off the business and things of value in a hurry doesn’t cover the expatriation tax. The Nazis are greedy. Your money or your life. It makes me furious.”

  “And the other brother, the one who came to visit you here?”

  “I’ve written to him, but I don’t expect much from the answer. Kurt was the first to leave and ask our mother to join him in America. Hans was supposed to pay for the journey, he was the businessman of the family, and it was the damn business of the fur market that kept him in Leipzig. But in ’34 the capable Hans ends up detained in Sachsenburg and Kurt, ah Kurt, took it badly. Because our mother was hostage to Hans, and because in the end she went into debt to get him out of the concentration camp. Besides the Nazis, the old jealousies between brothers. Unbelievable.”

  Too much of an outburst, probably, but Csiki’s attentive, melancholy silence doesn’t do anything to restrain her. How many brothers does he have in Budapest? How many years since he saw them?

  “Kurt will insist that Hans should have thought of her before saving his own skin. Couldn’t he take her to Sweden? He’ll repeat that life in New York is too expensive for an actor. Now Hans doesn’t have a job, but, if I know him, he’ll find one soon: I don’t know what we would have done without him when Papa died. But Kurt couldn’t bear Hans taking the attitude of head of the family because he was bringing home money, and Hans couldn’t bear that Kurt did what he wanted just because he was younger. Meanwhile I’m writing the exact amount of my ridiculous savings to both. I’m trying to puncture their pride, which neither one lacks. We’ll resolve it, somehow.”

  “Are you leaving right away?”

  “No, no,” Ruth replies.

  There’s no reason to hurry, since many questions are still far from resolved, but she wants to move forward. And she has to do it as a resident of Switzerland, married to a Swiss, in order to bring her mother to Switzerland, if everything goes as she hopes.

  “I’d like to tell Capa before he rushes off again to Spain,” Ruth continues. “In the next few days I’ll try to come more often, so maybe I’ll be here, too, when you decide to show him the magazine. Even if there’s no need.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  Ruth, relieved, returns to the shelf of negatives, and Csiki, instead of getting sucked into the laboratory, follows her.

  “Capa won’t come today. Kati Horna’s at the hotel. I told her not to move till he wakes up, so she’s sure of finding him.”

  “I didn’t know she was in Paris,” Ruth says, and immediately notices how wrong that banal phrase sounds applied to the scene she is alluding to: the flight from Barcelona, weapons and baggage, the Republican exodus added to the arrival of Austrians and Germans, along with the propaganda about the Jews and the Bolsheviks invading France.

  “She hasn’t been here long. I told her to charge the calls she has to make to Bandi’s room,” Csiki answers.

  They don’t have money, work, lodging. Kati’s husband nearly caught pneumonia in the Pyrenees, where the French confined him to a camp, although, even as an anarchist, he put on the uniform to help the fleeing masses—those poor comrades who no longer have anything, or never did, and are now freezing in the mountains, who’ve never seen snow when they come from the coasts with no warm clothes.

  We should be down there, Ruth says to herself. But it’s a luxury she can no longer afford.

  Csiki is talking about prefectures, procedures, and permissions, and she is distracted by her own business, the fear that the Swiss will revoke her citizenship, if they discover why she and Melchior are going to Berlin.

  “Slowly things will settle down,” Csiki concludes, and Ruth nods, but she doesn’t really know in relation to what.

  “Sorry, I’m lost.”

  “I said that the rest will settle down with Kati and José Horna here. And now I return to my burrow.”

  Ruth gets down the boxes she needs and that to and fro between the table and the shelves corresponds to the swing of her thoughts between Spain and Germany, makes her think of Georg. She’s had no more news of him, but it’s inevitable that he, too, has ended up in an internment camp: exhausted, exposed to illnesses, harassed by gendarmes and guards who hate them, people like them.

  Georg seemed so radiantly handsome in the Paris winter (“As long as there’s a ray of sun you’re more comfortable outside: the houses aren’t heated in Naples”), when she had seen him again in February of ’37. His Italian comrades were thrilled to sit in a famous café on the Left Bank breathing that free and idle air after presenting themselves at the recruitment office of the International Brigades. “Maybe we’ll meet again down there,” Ruth had pointed out, “you as doctors, me as the nurse,” explaining that she had enrolled in a course at the Red Cross. At that point a brilliantined young man had made an observation, causing hilarity in the whole group, and Georg felt obliged to translate: “Forgive them, you can’t understand people who’ve grown up in the Catholic patriarchy and fascism. My friend, who also met Gerda yesterday, wondered if you’re all like that in Leipzig . . . A poor wounded fellow, he said, would faint as soon as he opens his eyes and sees someone like you.”

  The atmosphere was gay and hopeful, Madrid was resisting the atrocious bombings, Gerda had left again for the front in Jarama, where the new offensive on the capital would be repulsed yet again. “I’ll be waiting for you,” Georg had said, saying goodbye, embracing her.

  Months had passed since that meeting, and Gerda hadn’t been seen in Paris. One night Melchior returned from a Party meeting in a black mood. “Terrible signs: Georg Kuritzkes barely escaped execution. They were out to get him, charged him with being a Fascist spy, then an Italian doctor testified in his favor at the trial. Someone certainly informed on him. Here at the recruitment office they didn’t recognize enrollment in the Kommunistischer Jugendverband, the Young Communist League, and accepted his application with reservations . . . ”

  “Are you joking? He was born a Communist!” Ruth exclaimed, almost burning herself with the match as she lighted a cigarette.

  “Yes, everyone from Leipzig says so, convinced that the slander came from someone in the local Party.”

  In the kitchen, where he had gone to look for something to eat, Melchior told her the rest. They hadn’t allowed Kuritzkes to serve as a doctor, giving him the choice of leaving immediately or fighting as a simple soldier, and he had been sent to the front.

  “Maybe politics has nothing to do with it,” Ruth said, sitting opposite Melchior to look at him. “Georg always had the girls at his feet. It was probably envy, or revenge by someone whose girl Georg stole. Consider that the thing goes back to February, when the air wasn’t poisoned yet. Whoever is the author of that lie might have thought he was just getting him out of the way.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Melchior concluded.

  After the terrible events in Barcelona, the SAP had negotiated with the Communists to allow its volunteers to join the Internatio
nal Brigades, since they were in agreement at least on the priority of winning the war. The climate had relaxed again, but Ruth couldn’t free herself of the fear that, if she left for Spain, a rejected lover might inform on or blackmail her, too—that is, behave the opposite of the lover who, having joined the SS, had warned her to leave the country. The idea of being wary not of the Nazis but of her comrades was so intolerable to her that Melchior had taken time to convince her that their anti-fascist front had been their activities in Germany, period.

  Ruth leans over the table to open the Taro and Capa notebooks—wounded young children, refugees sleeping piled up on the streets, straw-haired soldiers on horseback like peasants of distant eras—and goes on thinking about the last time she had news of Georg.

  “El doctor Kuritzkes sends greetings.”

  Almost a year had passed since Capa, returning from Teruel, had surprised her with that opening.

  “Gerda was right: wonderful fellow, wonderful person, a tiny bit rigid but—no offense—you are Germans after all . . . ”

  “Maybe he was startled that you went looking for him.”

  “Startled and therefore rigid: does that seem a valid objection to what I said?”

  Ruth was astonished in turn, but not so much that she failed to ask the important question an instant before seeing him vanish after Csiki.

  “You mean they finally accepted him as a doctor?”

  It was wonderful news, but meanwhile Capa never explained how he had unearthed Georg. After all, he hadn’t gone back to Spain, except in the last period, which had worn him out. Did he know what had happened to el doctor Kuritzkes?

  She could ask him, Ruth says to herself, handling the negatives, in fact ask him to find out as soon as he arrives in Barcelona: it would be a good opening for warning him that he might not find her when he returns to Paris.

  Then she has to get in touch with Soma, who went back to Naples, asking him to send his reply to the Atelier, otherwise the information that can help Georg is in danger of wandering from one country to another.

  Now that he is back in Naples, Soma can share his worries with Jenny, but at the worst moment he was in Paris. They had met at the café and he had pulled out that letter from Georg, written from some remote Andalusian outpost, pointing to a phrase stuck in the middle: “Don’t forget me.” Soma was chilled by that imperative.

  “Simply do what he asks: write to him,” Ruth had said.

  She, however, was so alarmed that she stopped in Rue Vavin to see how Capa was, at least. The concierge directed her to the small deserted lobby, where two men, sunk in armchairs, were in a daze induced by Billie Holiday:

  A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces,

  An airline ticket to romantic places

  And still my heart has wings

  These foolish things remind me of you.

  André kept putting the needle back on the record. Ted Allan, the youth who was with Gerda in Brunete, remained crumpled in the chair, his crutches lying between its arms, his cheeks streaked like those of a child whose favorite toy has been broken. Ruth thought that widowers’ union was a folie à deux and that the crazier of the two was Capa. But then, discovering that he had gone to look for Georg, she had caught a method in the madness—an attempt to medicate himself by taking care of his old rivals, an idea of loyalty to Gerda as bizarre in its way as it was coherent.

  Ruth understands that she can still do something before she packs her bags for Switzerland, something to feel less guilty toward those who fought for Spain. She has to finish cataloguing the images of that lost war. She has to do it just for that reason, and do it properly. Fascism won’t last forever, no matter how many crimes and disasters it might still cause, so let’s go on, she says resolutely to herself. A thought that merits a cigarette. They’ll continue to act as they wish, the enlightened democracies, but they will not be able to come to us and say they couldn’t predict what Hitler and his accomplices were preparing. We have here the evidence of the hors d’oeuvre: the evidence of popular resistance, the evidence of systematic destruction.

  Février 1937: réfugiés de Málaga, après du bombardement fasciste de la ville d’Almería, she writes in one column of a blank page, determined to fill all the others.

  She is so concentrated on the work that the door of the kitchenette makes her jump. Csiki has opened it suddenly and is now heading toward the entrance with leaps reminiscent of a waiter in a tourist café.

  “I have to go make the deliveries. See you tomorrow?”

  “Of course, and also the next days. I’ve finished ’36 and I’m going on, I promise you that before I leave I will have finished. It’s enough just to note the differences, right?”

  “Only substantial ones: dates, places, circumstances.”

  “I was thinking I’d start with the notebooks, mark the printed copies in the adjacent column, then all the films that correspond to the period.”

  “Perfect. Like that, a little at a time, I’ll arrange the negatives, which are the most important thing, and in the worst shape.”

  Csiki, muffled in a beret, scarf, collar raised over his ears, bag over his shoulder and bicycle keys in hand, gives her an affectionate goodbye.

  “À tout à l’heure,” she responds, and goes back to her task.

  When she comes out of the Atelier there’s not a living soul on Rue Froidevaux. The weather is so nasty that Ruth dreams of the metro sign from her first strides on the slippery, sleet-soaked path, while the heavy odor of wet earth invades her nostrils. Soon I won’t be walking through a cemetery to get to work, she repeats to herself, and this, perhaps, comforts her. Now Csiki has been informed of the thing, she has only to talk to Capa about it. She can’t wait to tell Melchior, and she does, in fact, even before she takes off her coat.

  “Good. I’ll warm some water to thaw out your feet?”

  “I was thinking of it . . . ”

  “Take your time, change, we have a fresh baguette and leftover soup.”

  In flannel pajamas with a sweater over them, her feet in the basin stuck under the table, chewing a piece of bread (“I’m famished!”), Ruth listens to the news of the day. In Berne they’ve found him an apartment with two rooms, Melchior informs her, and he intends not to let it get away. Even if, after Berlin and Paris, Berne . . . really a small town. His heart weeps a little, but let it weep, he consoles himself, you have to adapt.

  Ruth already imagines taking a cuckoo clock off the wall and hanging in its place a photo of Paris. But the Berlin accent with which Melchior muddles his concessions to sentimentalism reminds her that repatriation is just as difficult for him as being a foreigner everywhere now is for her.

  “When do you begin at the printer? After the holidays?”

  “Yes, first I’ll make a couple of trips to get things ready. I’ll go to Berlin around Christmas and return after New Year’s. This time it’s better if you stay here, so you can settle my last business. Meanwhile I’ll report to the registry office. In case of arrest, Berne will be able to ask to expel me directly to Berne. How does that sound?”

  She feels dangerously close to giggling, while she brings the spoon to her lips. There wouldn’t be much to laugh at, in substance, and yet it’s comic that a Swiss with ancient paternal roots reassesses his legal country as a waiting room, compared with the lost Heimatstadt Berlin.

  “It sounds good. The reheated soup is, too. I’m glad to leave.”

  “Really?”

  “I’m happy to finish what there is to finish. Not to stay beyond that. Then we’ll see, with my mother, money, and all the rest.”

  Ruth is enjoying the warmth that radiates from two opposite directions to the center of her body, she relaxes. Meanwhile she talks about Capa and Gerda’s pictures from 1936 till the last battles. Of how, listing them, she became aware of the volume as a whole, and its value. “When you look at
those shots in a row,” she says, with an excitement charged with rage that here can be let out, “you see very clearly how the Nazi-Fascist aggression becomes increasingly barbaric . . . the disgusting horror of total war . . . Madrid, Málaga, Almería, Guernica, Bilbao, Valencia . . . ”

  Melchior has taken the glasses to divide the rest of the wine, there’s almost three fingers’ worth for each, and he stops his glass in midair for a toast. He seems really happy.

  “To the most loyal comrade of the loyalists!”

  Happy to have her there before him, red from head to toe, determined and essentially allied, and Ruth feels encouraged. The vin de pays has turned a little acid, it’s not a sin to stretch it with water, and the pause to bring it to her lips dilutes her ardor and accelerates her mental leaps.

  “Will you see Sas in Berlin?” she asks Melchior. “You could bring him something from me, a photo of Gerda. In the studio there are some very beautiful recent ones, I can’t imagine why I didn’t think of it before.”

  “Because you’re a cautious girl.”

  “Are you teasing me? Maybe I just wanted to avoid making him sad. But Sas isn’t one to let himself get depressed, just the opposite, and so . . . ”

  Melchior has interrupted her to say that if she’s thinking of a photo taken by Gerda, not a chance, and anyway it should be chosen prudently.

  “Sas and Gerda were made to understand each other,” Ruth comments, rocking on the chair with the good back and the crooked leg, filled with a tension that’s also good, as she leans forward, unlike the rickety chair she’s sitting on which awaits only a more corpulent occupant to break. Imagining that it might happen soon cheers her.

  Choose carefully, Melchior said, and so Ruth reviews the images she’d like to show the man with whom Gerda went off on a motorcycle to perform the first anti-fascist acts: two shots where she’s sheltered behind a soldier, the one where she sleeps on a milestone with “PC” carved into it. Unfortunately the photo in which she holds a mule by the reins is impossible, because the mono azul would betray both the subject and the possessor, wouldn’t it?