Melchior confirms, sighing.
“I know: I’ll bring you a great portrait, and if necessary you’ll say it’s your fiancée.”
“Wife,” Melchior corrects her.
“Yes, wife, it’s written on your passport.”
Ruth feels a sudden embarrassment, and immediately tries to get out of it. In the photograph she’s thought of bringing Melchior, Gerda is buying lilies of the valley, which is the custom in France on the First of May. She was almost certainly going to Place de la Bastille with Capa. But to the Germans one can serve up a different story. You can say that she was choosing her wedding bouquet with her mother, who, in reality, is the florist. In that portrait Gerda is dressed informally, like a girl of the people, the way she usually dressed in Spain. But she always has style, with the matching scarf and hat, the luminous smile . . .
“Sas would be proud to see her like that,” she concludes vehemently.
“All right,” says Melchior, “unless a compromising detail has escaped you.”
“No, it’s perfect,” Ruth replies, bursting into laughter. “Capa passes it off as their wedding photo!”
Yes, he had left for China with a supply of prints and handed them out the way missionaries do sacred images.
And then at the Atelier the apologetic and slightly morbid journalists would ask: “What about the beautiful wife he lost in Spain?” Indeed the story that they were husband and wife originated in Spain, a rumor fed to help Gerda, who went around with the soldiers by herself. And in the end Capa, the man most inclined to confuse reality and fiction, found in his hands the evidence: the white flowers, the smiling flower seller, Gerda wearing her suede jacket. “We were a single person, a single body,” he’d mutter in the grip of a sad drinking binge. Oh, Gerda would have laughed in his face. But did this deny that she had gone out with him, that morning of May 1st, in her stained, beloved jacket?
“You know, seen from a distance, almost the same height, that is, short, they slightly resemble Charlot and Paulette Goddard on that country road?”
“You think?”
“You know them too well.”
In fact, Ruth objects, the appearance is deceptive. He couldn’t help capturing her in an infinite number of shots, in the crowd at a meeting, in a trench in Madrid: she devoted barely two portraits to him.
“Did he not like to have his picture taken or was it that she wasn’t in love?” Melchior sneers.
“No, no, wait,” Ruth replies, fired up, even though it’s only as she goes on speaking that her thoughts take shape—thoughts that are not very reassuring, but that she feels she has to follow in the face of the immediate future and the man with whom she’s preparing to begin it. So she tells Melchior about the portrait of Capa in the Picture Post and the Eyemo buried in Brunete. How much time (hours? minutes?) passed between the instant Gerda shot the photo of a burning vehicle and the instant in which the vehicle she was traveling in was hit? Were the soldiers burned alive in the tank in flames? Did Gerda hear them screaming? How many people did she see die before dying? A much greater number than those she photographed. The wounded soldiers in Sierra de Guadarrama, some in such bad shape that they had no hope . . . And the ones in the hospital in Valencia were already dead . . . Gerda made her way between tortured bodies, leaned over to shoot, she had photographed a body thrown onto the tiles with not even a rag for a shroud, a child, boy or girl, five or six, the face disfigured.
“I would have run away, or cried and vomited even my soul. Whereas she took pictures, three shots, then a different corpse, a dead man less obscene to the eyes, a dead man published in some newspapers. I ask you, since you’re less involved: what did my friend become in Spain?”
“A very courageous woman,” Melchior says hesitantly, uneasy.
Ruth, a horrible lump in her throat, shakes her head: “I’ve never denied it. Courageous, capable of self-control, of focusing the lens.”
“What upsets you, then?”
Ruth doesn’t know how to answer, more confused than her husband, whose gaze reflects his bewilderment.
“She was carrying the camera, the movie camera, the tripod, for kilometers and kilometers. Ted Allan said that with her last words she asked if her rolls of film were safe. She blasted away in the midst of delirium, the little Leica above her head, as if it were protecting her from the bombers. The good soldier Gerda: I don’t doubt it. But I don’t understand it, no.”
“What, Ruth?”
“I don’t understand what she felt. Hardly any fear, O.K. And then?”
Her toes are wrinkled, the water in the basin is starting to get cold, and Melchior seems to have surrendered to her thinking out loud.
She returned to Madrid, Valencia, Barcelona, Ruth continues. She put on her heels again, lipstick, the smile. She returned to Paris and seemed the usual gay and enthusiastic Gerda, and she talked about Spain, yes, with some mention of the terrible things she had seen, in the heat of those adventurous reports: the bestialities committed by los moros, the weariness of the people, the surreal landscape created by the bombs. But they were all words expended for the cause, just like her photographs. International solidarity was supposed to make you feel, loud and clear, that nonintervention was a crime. That Gerda Taro said, and I understand it.
“I myself, how did I behave, all in all? The party at the Steins’, in May of ’35, do you remember it, Melchior? The colored bulbs created an atmosphere like a cave, the midnight soup served by the ladleful above the pot to gather the drunks. And did I tell anyone that Hans was in Sachsenburg again? Not Gerda, who was flirting with André Friedmann and other guests. I said it to no one, because it wasn’t appropriate, right? Better to pretend that nothing was wrong. Months later, meeting on the street, we exchanged a few words. ‘You look well, Ruth, what are you up to?’ ‘I’m getting married, and we’ve moved.’ ‘Congratulations! Seems things couldn’t be better.’ ‘There’s my brother in the concentration camp.’ ‘Kurt?’ ‘No, the older one, Hans, the one who stayed in Leipzig.’ ‘Ach so, I confuse them. Terrible, but with Kurt in America certainly something will be done. Keep your head up.’”
“A normal exchange between friends who aren’t as friendly as they used to be,” Melchior comments, perhaps beginning to lose patience.
“Normal, yes. But you understand what I mean by ‘pretend that nothing was wrong’? Talk about certain things as if they were normal, because they are, because there’s no other way to treat them . . . ”
“Because they’ve become normal.”
“Right. Pass me the towel, that’s enough.”
In the time she takes to dry her feet, empty the basin, and put on a pair of socks fresh from the laundry, her husband has cleared the table and begun to wash the dishes.
“Don’t stand there like a soul in pain,” he says, seeing her poised in front of the door. “Sit down, finish your argument.”
“Calling it that’s maybe too much . . . ” Ruth smiles, sitting down but not on the rickety chair. “On the other hand, what should we do if not pretend it’s nothing? In the case of real danger, for example going to Berlin, or even here, where everything is peaceful in appearance. And the people arriving from Spain? Should they never stop recalling the horrors?”
Melchior listens in silence, bent over the sink.
“And yet Capa broke down the last time,” Ruth continues. “He was always more fragile than Gerda. It’s not a matter of courage, because he was always working under the bombs. It’s a question of willpower and control. It was she who wore the pants . . . but no, what am I saying, the pants have nothing at all to do with it . . . ”
Melchior interrupts his washing up and turns to look at his wife, tenderly.
“You know what the paradox is?” Ruth lights up. “The paradox is that for a woman it’s easier. Certainly for a young woman like Gerda who excelled at preserving good manners, the façad
e. Smiles and jokes, you know your part, you’ve been practicing it for a lifetime. What man would be suspicious in the presence of a carefree girl? You just show up and pretend it’s nothing. To resist is to pretend it’s nothing, to resist is to play a part. Men think that they alone are capable of discipline: we women weren’t admitted even as auxiliaries after the dissolution of the Republican militias. But Gerda was trained long before venturing onto a battlefield as a soldier. And in any case, under the worker’s overalls, the tapered skirt, or the military uniform, isn’t it always the human being who remains—ein Mensch?”
“Gerda was also daring by nature, at the time you would have said unconventional,” Melchior replies, and the dirty water that he’s dumped into the sink emits a gurgle of approval.
“Of course she was. Capa won’t forgive himself for not being with her in Brunete. Even if you can’t count the girls he’s taken to bed in the meantime . . . For you it’s simple.”
“The man is a simple animal, everybody knows it.”
“Maybe.”
“Hasn’t he been punished enough?” Melchior objects, and as he turns to look at her the cloth he’s drying the dishes with sketches a swirl. “He even got a slap from Gerda’s brother, a slap right in the face at the Gare d’Austerlitz, in front of the congregation of red journalists. Should he have let his beard grow and abstained me from the pleasures of the flesh like a Hasid?”
“You’re unlucky, sweetheart. I’ll leave the exhortations of Martin Buber for your bar mitzvah and all those arcane religious activities to you . . . ”
They laugh with the complicity of a couple who watch over their own skirmishes as a rite: she who has never felt completely part of something, he brought up in Zionism and libertarian utopias.
Melchior didn’t talk about it much, which to Ruth had seemed typical of a man who thought about doing, a man who had chosen a trade he liked, and then a political party, and even an emancipated woman like her. Above all he was a reliable companion. “You thought you found a proper Swiss man,” he repeated to her, “instead you got a stateless and apostate Jew.”
“The problem,” Ruth resumes, less ironic than she would like, “is that I am also a simple woman: I trust what I see. It’s true with you, true with Capa.”
“Right,” Melchior agrees, “but you just said Capa’s an incurable blowhard. You’re a little naïve, yes, not gullible.”
“You know, a few months after we buried Gerda, I saw him at the Select with his dancer, the Arab panther, and I said to myself that that was life, real life, while the memories he entertained me with were ghosts fated to fade away. ‘People believe what they want to believe,’ Gerda used to say. Gullible in that sense.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Why don’t you have a cigarette and I’ll take care of the rest?”
“Go on, I’m almost finished.”
A little hoodlum like Bandi Friedmann had been weaned on danger, it was impressed in his five senses. Not a girl like Gerda: she was a beginner. She wasn’t capable of protecting herself, courage went to her head, like a schnapps tossed back as a challenge. “Does it seem absurd to you?”
“Not at all.” Melchior has sat down beside her and stares at her with exasperated tenderness.
“But now this story is reaching its end. It was a good idea to think of the photo to give Sas. Our comrades who are supporting the Widerstand have more guts than your war photographers put together.”
There’s one last cigarette in the pack. After a couple of drags Ruth hands it to Melchior and nods: “I don’t doubt it. But I also don’t doubt that Gerda would still be alive if he had been there that day. There: here at home I can say it.”
A long puff of smoke reaches her. “On Rue Froidevaux not even between the lines, I hope.”
Ruth gestures no, discouraged. She gave Capa every means of absolution: bad luck, tragedy, the impossibility of keeping Gerda from acting without consulting anyone. But whenever she looks for him at the Select, she finds herself facing the tables of the Coupole, where one day in September of ’34 she was accosted by a fellow in such bad shape she paid for his coffee out of the kindness of her heart. “Mein wunderschönes Fräulein, I really need someone like you, tall, natural blond. You will be the model, I the photographer, the client a Swiss insurance company, and with a Swiss insurance company, you can be sure, I will offer you more than a petit café in addition to the pay.”
“That, however, is a Capa-style version,” Melchior insinuates.
“Not at all: haven’t I ever told you?”
“Not with this abundance of detail . . . ”
“The fact is that Friedmann boasted with the flair that Capa continues to fuel. When I got home, I assailed Gerda with suspicions and the few reassuring excuses dissolved. ‘Will you come with me,’ I asked her, ‘even if it’s nine in the morning?’ ‘Will I come with you! In fact, let’s go out early and get some fresh air: so you’ll look even healthier at the moment he immortalizes you . . . ’ ‘If he immortalizes me . . . Maybe the only tool he has is between his legs.’ ‘Do you need money? Then start with the assumption that that photo spread exists and maybe the guy also wants to try it on with you, which is obvious. Worst case, Ruth, we blow raspberries at him all along the Left Bank.’”
Laughter at the expense of the presumed seducer of blond beauties and the certainty that Gerda would go with her had made her see the photographer in a more serene light. She couldn’t understand, she had told her friend, where he got such arrogance, but he was amusing, and if you believed him he had photographed Trotsky in ’32 in Copenhagen.
“Seriously? Trotsky never lets the press get close because he’s afraid they’ll infiltrate an assassin. I’d really like to know how he did it . . . ”
Between Gerda and André Friedmann an understanding was established immediately, and the two inflicted overlapping commands: no, crossed is too much, bring them closer again, a little askew, we should show off my friend’s kilometric legs, but with discretion and elegance, natürlich, meine Liebe, but yours aren’t bad, either, if I may.
Ruth had been pleased with all that followed: Gerda, who thanks to Friedmann learned to take photographs, Friedmann, who thanks to Gerda gained a presentable look. And she hadn’t been surprised when Gerda told her that she had gone to live with Friedmann, because there was no longer anything to be surprised by after the liaison with the Dachshund.
Now the time that André and Gerda spent together seems to her an enormity: two years exactly, one in Paris, the other in Spain, in large part under the same roof, even in the same sleeping bag.
Melchior, tired, says that every pot has its cover, or tries to find one that fits.
And if the pot can’t stand the cover?
“Let’s go to bed, Ruth.”
“I’m the one who introduced them.”
3Originally published in English as Manhattan Transfer (Harper & Brothers, 1925).
PART III
GEORG KURITZKEs
Rome, 1960
War is no longer declared,
but rather continued. The outrageous
has become the everyday. The hero
is absent from the battle. The weak
are moved into the firing zone.
The uniform of the day is patience;
the order of merit is the wretched star
of hope over the heart.
It is awarded
when nothing more happens,
when the bombardment is silenced,
when the enemy has become invisible
and the shadow of eternal armament
covers the sky.
It is awarded
for deserting the flag,
for bravery before a friend,
for the betrayal of shameful secrets
and the disregard of every command.
Every Day
—INGEBO
RG BACHMANN
(translated by Peter Filkins)
Rome, September 18, 1960
My dear Ruth,
Willy Chardack remains a rough-coated dachshund, but he appreciated my congratulations. As you predicted: so thank you for your help and advice.
Here finally we can breathe. My Italian friends have returned, the ones with whom I, too, have launched an experiment—though its results won’t be crucial for the health of humanity, it would simplify the job of showing our world in color. We’re an improvised team, but we’ve got excellent skills; I cover the neuroscientific aspect, the technical is assigned to a much sought-after directeur photo, and it’s being supervised by a professor at the University of Rome.
It’s good for me to get out of the panem et circenses routine (the FAO looks out on the Circus Maximus, where in the time of Julius Caesar the chariot races were held). To open a medical office you have to deal with byzantine bureaucracies or go around them through acquaintances, bribes, etc., and I find it so odious that I procrastinate.
Meanwhile I’ve bought myself a Vespa. A deal, according to my mechanic.
I’m sorry that school has already begun for you (here they start in October!), because it would be the ideal moment to visit Rome. Come when you want, with your children, with your husband if he can allow himself a vacation. I would be happy to be your guide and offer you the most up-to-date means for exploring the monuments and the famous contemporary dolce vita!
Warmly
yours,
The racket of the typewriter, the only one disturbing the quiet of the FAO building, is still echoing in the ears of Dr. Kuritzkes when he adds his signature to the page pulled out of the Olivetti: an energetic G, as disproportionate as the head of a tadpole with its illegible tail, the familiar scribble that makes him hesitate before typing his full name on the envelope. Giorgio Kuritzkes, c/o PUTTI, Via della Purificazione 47, Roma, ITALIA. For Ruth “Georg” would be more usual but not for the neighbor who might respond if the letter was returned, and for him it’s the same: he’s been changing his name for a lifetime.
The Girl with the Leica Page 16