The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  It’s taken a while to write the letter, and now he has to hurry to put it in the folder to show the guard whom he asked as a favor (“an exception”) to let him into the office on a Sunday. It’s a ceremonial performance (“Dotto’, please, hurry”), and the role-playing is preserved. And it doesn’t matter that the idea of telephoning came to him after he decided to stop at the office to get some papers, and that he’s never before used the phone for personal communications, much less on a weekend.

  It was a good idea to telephone Willy on a Sunday morning in America, and a pleasure to find him at the first ring, to talk to an old friend on another continent in the silence that reverberates with the rhythmic vibrations of the cicadas, so loud, in this late summer, that they muffle the noise of cars passing on Viale delle Terme di Caracalla. Spellbound by the compact crowns of the pines, as if he’d never seen them, by the ruins, by the paradisiacal gardens of the Aventine that he can’t stop gazing at. Hovering, privileged, extraterritorial. Enveloped by the eight-story marble building, which has a geometrical purity, and the marvelous quality of certain Fascist structures that seem designed to make you forget their origins. It was supposed to be the Ministry for Italian Africa and in 1952 opened its doors to the United Nations. An agreed-on retribution for the symbolic rent of a dollar a year.

  Yes, he wasted too much time writing the letter, and the cigarettes left on the counter won’t be enough for the guard, it will also take a present at Christmas. Carton, cigars, bottle? He’ll have to inquire. Some of his colleagues will enjoy the fact that he’s been corrupted by such customs, but never mind.

  He comes out of the elevator satisfied. CONFERENCE EUROPE 10-15 OCTOBER, ROME says the folder under his arm that, in case of questions from the guard, is to be immediately delivered to the embassy of one of the countries invited at the last minute to balance the presence of the United States, which has asked to attend as an observer.

  But Oreste is distracted by a boy who can’t sit still yet doesn’t dare move away from the bench. He must be about ten, still at an age that respects prohibitions, something that, in his way, he applies to the guard, who is peeling a peach, careful not to let it drip beyond the cloth on which his lunch is set out.

  “The game starts at three, and, damn them, they won’t wait for me. They’ll let somebody else play if I don’t get there!”

  Oreste looks up. “Another bad word and you’ll catch it,” he mutters to the boy, and the patriarchal face and the uniform that pinches mid-chest suddenly stiffen.

  There, he’s seen me, thinks the doctor. The rhythm of his heels, the only sound that echoes in the long corridor, confirms how out of place his appearance is. Oreste’s son wouldn’t be able to hang around there; indeed, the guard gathers up the dishes in an instant, glancing in his direction, and now awaits him at the desk with an expression so serious that it reminds him of a story he heard recently. The town he left as a kid, years of labor on construction sites, the accident, the application for disability—feeling he’d been miraculously saved by the Madonna, since it could have been much worse—and, finally (“without connections!”), this job, which supports the whole family. But the doctor wouldn’t dream of reporting that the sovereign space of the Food and Agriculture Organization was violated by the rite of pasta.

  He and the guard know each other by name, and that’s already something: a sign that Dr. Giorgio, as Oreste calls him, isn’t among the bureaucrats who come and go and when they’re transferred elsewhere haven’t even learned Italian. No, when he arrived from Paris his Italian was already so fluent that almost no one settled for simply complimenting him, forcing him to explain that he had lived in Italy as a student. “Here in Rome?” even Oreste asked. The doctor, to cut it short, replied: “No, in Florence.”

  The guard doesn’t know that Dr. Giorgio, having studied also in Milan and Turin and, finally, Naples, even learned to distinguish dialects. And if in Italy, at the time, learning was limited to the life of the neighborhoods, while the pomposity of the regime’s Italian hovered in the universities, it wasn’t like that in Spain, where the Italian volunteers, who came from all over, had brought their local speech.

  Those volunteers knew how to read and write, and many—the majority as adults—had gathered secretly around a country hearth to learn. Having become militants partly out of pride in that Promethean undertaking, they listened to the political commissar with a seriousness that revealed that for them knowledge and Communism were synonyms. One day, when the radio was broadcasting a speech by Comrade Nicoletti, someone cried, “Peppino Di Vittorio!” and the diminutive of a man who had left as a laborer to incite the southern lands spread among the Italians a hopeful desire for redemption. Anyone, with a little training, could learn to shoot and follow orders, and that a Lombard mechanic could become a sapper, a Ligurian dock worker a tank man, and Sardinian miners gunners was only the first step on the way to the classless society of the International Brigades. The words, however, were distorted by accents, limited by dialects incomprehensible outside the radius of the fellow villagers with whom they arrived at the camp in Albacete. Georg Kuritzkes was well aware of having an advantage over those comrades. He had come with papers presumed false, he was stateless, but he had no difficulty understanding and being understood in various languages.

  In the end he was assigned to the 86th Mixed Brigade under the command of Aldo Morandi, a Sicilian comrade whose military gifts had been rewarded by a rapid career rise, and then he had been transferred to the front in the Andalusian mining region. He had written to Gerda—just two lines on the bare beauty of Sierra Morena and a very affectionate greeting—but didn’t consider how soon that letter, sent to the office of the censor in Madrid, would be delivered to her.

  One day, returning from a reconnaissance, his head emptied by the mountain sun beating on his helmet, he made out a crowd from a distance and thought that the campesino who was surrounded was offering some rare goods, maybe even jamón Serrano. He calculated that it was pointless to hurry and went straight on at his pace until, light as a lynx in the typical Spanish cloth shoes, Gerda appeared before him. Tearing off her Basque beret and shaking her short sun-lightened hair, she exclaimed, “Do you recognize me?” and remained looking at him, exhilarated by the expression that must have appeared on his face.

  She had arrived the day before, late. They had welcomed her in the casita that served as general headquarters and settled her on one of the two cots in the room reserved for the command. She had slept well, but was a little sorry that sharing her den, along with the officers and the ticks (the only defect of the hayloft), was the Spanish second in command, an authentic hidalgo. Morandi would have preferred to see her leave immediately, despite the credentials she had shown him and having decided himself that they would take turns giving her the cot.

  The comrades in his group moved away, partly out of discipline, partly out of discretion, and very much, obviously, in order to comment on the sensational appearance of that rubia equipped with a camera in their marginal outpost. He and Gerda were alone on the path. It would have been the ideal moment to talk, since no one would have caught a syllable. He’d just have to tell her about the arrest and trial—“like Kafka”—with irony, naturally. But he had felt like a perfect K. and was still tremendously embarrassed about it. Gerda would have been dumbfounded thinking back to the last embrace in Paris (“I knew I could count on you”) and was not to blame for what had happened. And also walking beside her in that dusty air, on that track of hard grass and crushed stone, had the unfathomable quality of a dream. He wished above all not to spoil the joy of that unexpected meeting (they were alive: wasn’t that enough?), the pleasure of seeing her at ease in the harsh emptiness of those mountains mangled by war.

  Slowly they had approached the comrades at the camp, while Gerda continued to vent against Morandi. Poor Georg, who had fallen in with that obtuse soldier for whom a woman at the front was more pernicious than
the runs (“I sleep in this dirty overall, you know? and I don’t even notice the stink anymore”), that severe father in uniform who concealed the instinct of a mother hen.

  Georg, bursting into laughter (there was truth in what Gerda was saying, and all her energy), let slip an imprudent retort: “If we had more commanders like him, we’d be closer to victory.”

  He tried to mitigate it by saying: “Morandi’s seen a lot, since the Great War . . . ”

  “Did he take you out of the lines? Does he use you as a doctor?” Gerda asked, suddenly softening.

  Did she already know something and was she dawdling to avoid the subject? he wondered, with a relief that shifted the stone under his sternum.

  “He can’t. But he uses me as an interpreter, a messenger between divisions, help as a radio operator.”

  Gerda had found this very funny (“You’ll get Berlitz as your nom de guerre”), probably so as not to have to show her gratitude toward the target of her derision.

  “You can’t imagine how much the lack of understanding among French, English, and Germans has cost us, as well as in coordinating with the Spanish. So many losses, even some defeats, I fear!”

  Gerda, incredulous and irritated, retorted that none of the great generals with whom she had very friendly relations (“Unlike your hostile Morandi”) had ever mentioned it, nor any of the soldiers whose trust and respect she’d earned.

  “Ein schlechter Witz,” she commented, spiteful, continuing to observe him with a questioning expression.

  “It’s true,” Georg said, “even if it seems a joke.”

  “Scheissdreck merde shit . . . mierda!”

  The spontaneous impulse to adapt to their spirit as an international barracks was irresistible. If there hadn’t been comrades keeping an eye on what he was still doing there with the blonde (“a dear friend of mine,” he was at pains to explain—an outrageous error), he would have kissed her immediately, not right on the mouth, to avoid making a mistake. Walking faster, he had longed for and feared a next occasion. But it was the only time he saw Gerda alone, for many days in a row.

  In the FAO building, Dr. Kuritzkes never talked about Spain or about the comrades he’d joined in the Haute Savoie, while in Paris everyone knew he had been maquisard.

  The aftermath of the war was protracted everywhere and in a particular way on Avenue Kléber, site of the provisional headquarters of UNESCO. Parisians passing by the giant Hotel Majestic, moving with their old nonchalance, had trouble perceiving that the swastikas and the guns shouldered for protection of the Wehrmacht High Command had been replaced by the flags of the winning nations. But those who entered the lobby and headed for a suite stuffed with desks or the personnel department dug out of a salle de bains (with the folders in the tub and the toilet lid like a side table) couldn’t help feeling that they were still an occupier. And an occupier at a disadvantage, because a grand hotel was better suited to the brutal requirements of a command than to housing the multiplicity of projects devoted to education, science, and culture in the repacified world.

  Dr. Kuritzkes had gone to Rome before his colleagues could move to the building on Place de Fontenoy, whose division into three wings, conceived by three architects of different nationalities and approved by a committee of great masters (Le Corbusier, Gropius, Saarinen, Rogers, Markelius, Costa), was the perfect realization of the universal mission for which the Maison de l’UNESCO had been planned.

  In Rome they knew his CV, but it was no longer the thing to talk about the period that had given life to the new world order, of which the United Nations was the precursor, like the dove after the flood. The only one who did was a Yugoslav colleague, Dr. Modrić, a biologist with a degree from Trieste who had specialized in ichthyology at the Lomonosova in Moscow. He was a thin scholar whom Dr. Kuritzkes often worked with on research aimed at improving fishing techniques. The strange thing was that, face to face, Modrić never mentioned the war. He preferred to expound on the aquatic ecosystems that presented science with the continuous challenge of the unknown, and digress a little on private life when they’d finished the day’s task. The complicated relationship with a Signora Carla who worked in a bank in Piazza Fiume. The worry about his children, who remained with his ex-wife in Zagreb and were enrolled full-time in school, as in the capitalist world they dreamed of, but just for that reason unreachable during working hours. It had been Dr. Modrić who suggested that for a modest baksheesh (“Here, dear Kuritzkes, we are not in Central Europe: you must have noticed”) one could telephone from the office on the weekend, avoiding that annoyance of shutting oneself in a phone booth, with the smoke outside, the noise, the kids whose invented gestures became bolder the longer you stayed on.

  Good person, Modrić. Basically a very discreet man. “Doctor, I know you’re one of ours, but please allow me a question: wouldn’t you, like so many, now prefer to cross the atlantico?” he had asked, while he was summarizing what neurophysiology had learned from the sophisticated intelligence of cephalopods.

  “No,” he answered, secure. “I, too, prefer to occupy myself with what is in the Atlantic. I find it more profitable and satisfying.”

  “Ça va sans dire,” Dr. Modrić agreed.

  That reply was so representative of his behavior that it was bizarre, in the cafeteria, to hear him assaulting his colleagues with stories of his partisan activities. He did it as a way to vent and out of spite, that was clear: the Yugoslavs should be treated with caution—irredentism and so on—much more than certain Germans with imaginable pasts (“Cordial with everyone, eh? Fascists inside!”).

  “You don’t see all the rest, it doesn’t concern you?” someone at the table tried to stop him.

  The rest began with the cyclopic stake in the eye they ran up against every day. The UN had obtained an agreement for the restitution of Ethiopian plunder, but the stele of Axum remained in front of the FAO building, twenty-four meters of theft planted in the clear Roman sky.

  “Ils s’en fichent, les italiens!” a colleague concluded. “They don’t give a damn,” another nodded; in fact, they were rubbing their hands at the fact that decolonization had fallen to the victors. Thus they landed on the subject that, outside their specialties, they knew better than any other.

  In the cafeteria of the FAO, around the tables flooded with bright light, they’d been following the crisis in Congo for days, tense and passionate; in comparison, the Olympics just concluded had been a fleeting thrill. The dark news from Africa had swept away the triumph of Abebe Bikila, the Ethiopian marathoner who, rounding the stolen stele for the second time, had put wings on his bare feet and won the gold.

  During the Suez crisis, the UN had helped avert a new world war, but now it was suffering a setback: two chiefs were sitting on the natural wealth of Congo, whetting the appetite of the superpowers and the Belgians. The UN, far from resembling a global government, wasn’t able even to play the role of a referee who could suspend the match. A bitter observation, but, worst of all, the dispute had taken root in Rome as well. There were experts in forests and pastures, in cultivar and stockpiling goods, but the coup d’état in Congo had divided them. The crevasse that had opened in Viale delle Terme di Caracalla didn’t even mirror the division into blocs, since the Soviet Union and its allies had left the FAO. The majority of the whites defended the impartial role that the UN had set for itself, a line that for their African colleagues, and also Turks, Indians, and so on, was turning out to be a farce of evading responsibility. In Congo Mobutu’s soldiers had put under house arrest Lumumba, the prime minister who wanted the unity of his people, full democratic freedom, and fair allocation of resources, and the UN had done nothing but provide the ring of prison guards around the house.

  “To protect him,” some Swede or Canadian tried to say, causing an uproar.

  Dr. Kuritzkes and Dr. Modrić found themselves among the white flies of the colored ranks. But those who knew the
Titoist biologist better suspected that he felt closer to his beloved polyps than to the inhabitants of those unknown lands. Dr. Kuritzkes, however, unsheathed his old weapons of persuasion and rhetoric, although he would have preferred not to use them anymore, at least not there. He didn’t want to feel doubts again about a choice, because political games now were poison to him. The emblem of the FAO was a stalk of grain, Fiat panis, Let there be bread, its motto. Was it asking so much to trust that he was doing an honest job under that motto?

  In the past week Georg had started dreaming about Gerda again. He needed her optimism, her shameless pragmatism. Her brilliance at hiding uncertainties and disappointments, her ease in appearing realistic to the point of seeming cynical, so as not to give in. Even the derision that no other woman had shown him with such frequency.

  What would you do, Gerda? It’s not hard to imagine.

  “Are you finished?” she’d say when, in Leipzig, she witnessed arguments so similar to the ones he carries on now in the cafeteria. “You promised we’d go dancing, or do I have to find somebody else?” she’d sing with a little smile.

  “I’m not done, we’re talking about important things,” he retorted, hating her, and getting angry with the friends who, tapping their feet, indicated they understood that the discussion had been put off. Ubi maior . . .

  But he was good then at not losing face. “All right,” he said, “but let me finish this cigarette.” And right away he offered one to Gerda, too, and while the match he’d lighted for her went out (how many fires had been extinguished by those gallant gestures?) returned to assessing the situation.