His friends didn’t realize that he was agitated, nor did Gerda, maybe because she didn’t care. It was enough for him to take her by the arm, shelter her with his jacket if it was starting to snow at the tram stop on Gohliser Strasse. And then they chatted until they arrived at the usual Tanzlokal, where the tension relaxed, and thoughts were silenced by the dance-hall music.
He liked the low lights, the smoky, sweaty warmth, the swing that made you do crazy things with your shoulder blades, and he liked Gerda.
“I like you, too. I mean it.”
She had assured him of it the first time he managed to embrace and then kiss her properly, finding himself stunned. How had she managed to free herself without a tug, only a phrase breathed a few inches from his mouth? No, probably she wouldn’t be the right girl, she had then said to him, and besides in her life there’s Pieter, whom she’s very fond of.
Georg had immediately cooled off, but the foxtrot allowed him to hold her tight where the hooks stuck out under the silk dress, the route of the last tram to take her hand, the crowded platform to extinguish a laugh on her lips. His mind was obscured, the unconscious guided him.
Except that later, on those slow, overheated trams, steamed up by bad weather and the remains of agitation, he always got tangled up in analyses and questions of principle. It’s not suitable to fix on such a bourgeois woman, he said to himself, the girlfriend of a capitalist whom she always defends (“Is it Pieter’s fault if they’re slave owners in America?”). And then Gerda Pohorylle never tired of appearing frivolous and superficial, maybe not exactly frivolous but impatient to return to her untouchable thoughtlessness. Don’t let yourself be deceived by that lively and unpredictable little head, he warned himself, and continued to act the nice guy. Don’t be flattered by her interest in your book recommendations, your critical opinions. Don’t seriously believe that she cares anything about historical materialism or the emancipation of the oppressed. She’s interested in not being bored, in your handsome face and entertainment, nothing else. So control yourself: have fun, yes, but don’t delude yourself about the rest.
The rest had won. Attraction had followed its own course, chemistry flooded the synapses, prevailing over reason, which was natural, and just. Georg Kuritzkes was hopelessly in love with Gerda Pohorylle. The only question he ever posed to himself was how he had managed to win her, until what he feared was illusory turned out to be real.
Gerda had changed. She was transformed. Not like the girls who adapted to him with such obvious zeal that, in his mind, they ended up confused with one another: Hanni, Paula, Trudel, Marie-Luise . . . But the skirmishes with his mother hadn’t changed, the times when he criticized her because she was crazy about Gerda and was always ready to take her side. “What is it?” he attacked her. “The horrible missionary instinct that’s so much more interested in the sheep to convert? Or do you, too, aspire to the dolce vita . . . ”
“Don’t provoke me, Georg, you don’t understand a thing.”
“All right. I humbly ask you to enlighten me!”
His mother adjusted her reading glasses or picked up the dust cloth, while Georg pointed out that Hanni Paula Trudel and Marie-Luise had become comrades within a month, if they weren’t already enrolled in the Young Communist League.
“Tell me, do I have time to waste with some little girls who won’t last next to you?”
“And this one will last?”
“I hope so for your sake, durak. I do what I can, but you should make a bigger effort than usual.”
Georg protested that he refused to play the lovesick suitor, that that was ruled out by the education he’d had, the ideas about equality between the sexes, and he pretended to misunderstand his mother, who had already turned to see what had become of his little brother, whom she’d had with Dr. Gelbke. In reality he just wanted to stay close enough to hear her repeat that Gerda was a woman of unusual insight, very likable, and, “pointless for me to tell you,” attractive. Once he had extorted these confirmations, his mind was at rest.
The comfort that Georg got from his own dialectic was much more volatile than the tranquil routine that was being established between him and Gerda, his comrade-mother, and the other habitués of Friedrich-Karl-Strasse. The girl was the last to leave his attic, and sometimes she didn’t go home. One morning his mother met Gerda in the kitchen, all neat and tidy, near the icebox, and heard herself asked: “May I take the milk bottle?”
“Go ahead, there’s another for the baby,” she answered. “Don’t even ask.”
Nights and breakfasts at the Gelbke house were repeated. Gerda approached the icebox, “May I?” she asked, and again his mother invited her to help herself, while Georg cut the bread, grinning, with his head down (it was ridiculous, yes, but he was happy). Then Dina read aloud the articles from the Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung, Gerda picked up the baby’s pacifier and washed it under the faucet, while he pulled Fritzchen down from the chair he was trying to climb up . . .
In the morning they parted in the doorway, at night Georg stopped by Springerstrasse and waited for Gerda to come down. She was extremely punctual and that cheered him every time. One day he rang early, since he’d been loitering for a few minutes in front of No. 32. Gerda answered “I’ll be right there,” but then asked him to come in.
“Georg Kuritzkes, medical student,” she introduced him to her parents. “We have to run, though, the movie starts in half an hour.”
“Very pleased, do us the honor of a visit when you have more time.”
“Thank you, Herr Pohorylle, and excuse the drop-in . . . ”
“Aber bitte: you young people should have fun!”
The circumscribed episode in the hallway, where Gerda adjusted her hat in front of a mirror hanging above a rounded monstrosity of a secretary desk, helped to reassure him. Spiessbürger, he had said to himself, prosperous petit bourgeois. Courteous, the way tradesmen should be, but not excessively unctuous. Would they surrender to the idea that Gerda had given the goodbye to the great importer of coffee to go with someone like him? Still jobless, and an enemy of the class they boasted of belonging to?
The evening was cool but pleasant, and there was enough time to go on foot to the Capitol cinema. They walked in the shadow of the streetlamps that striped the surface of the residential streets with dirty yellow. Was it the rhythm of their pace, the darkness accentuated on the side of the street where the Rosental began, the clasp of their hands that relaxed and gripped with small syncopated impulses? The fact is that a question had arisen that, step by step, was trailing another behind it. Had Gerda told her parents what she had gone to Stuttgart to do? What had she told them instead? That she was going to visit her best friend from old times? And what did she say when she didn’t come home? That she was staying at Ruth Cerf’s? Or nothing?
“Let’s walk a little faster, there’s nothing here, it’s boring.”
Georg would have set aside those thoughts if Gerda hadn’t started to hurry. He felt he was being tugged in a forward flight that speeded up his heartbeat, speeded up doubts, and suddenly linked them to the Pohorylles, whom he saw again in frozen images and details. Her father’s swelling vest with the old-fashioned watch chain. The glasses askew in front of faded eyes that matched a faint beard. The mother very small, her pallor emphasized by the modesty of a mouse-colored dress. She hadn’t opened her mouth except to agree in monosyllables with whatever her husband said.
Had Gerda kept him hidden from her parents? Did she want to hide from those tiny authorities not only him but all those whom, after a quarter of an hour along the Chaussée di Gohlis, she showered with admiration?
Georg hadn’t even noticed if there was a mezuzah on the Pohorylles’ door frame. But he was the son of a divorced woman remarried to a goy. And in the echo of the disgusting rotundity of that word, which seemed reckless to him, he stopped.
“Are you ashamed of me?”
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“What?!”
“Are you ashamed of me and my family?”
The repetition had made him blush, embarrassed and furious that it was he who was ashamed of them. It couldn’t be seen, luckily, under the jagged mass of shadows cast by the Rosental.
“Are you hiding from your parents the change in how we spend our time together lately?”
In response he had received a crystalline laugh: long and terrible, Gerda’s hand detached from his and raised in a theatrical swirl.
“I don’t give a damn about my parents: I’ve always done what I like.”
With no other commentary in that regard, his hand had been clasped again: “We’ll be late for the movie.” But at a red light Gerda had declared that that nonsense was annoying, and her house a bore.
“I assumed you saw it the same way, but I’ll invite you to dinner at our house, you can come to Shabbat, if you want . . . ”
“Whatever you say.”
The matter was closed, set aside before they rapidly reached the ticket window of the movie theater, which was always crowded on weekends. Why had he gotten involved in things that didn’t concern him? Why had he given in to that petty moralism (only because he had seen the Pohorylles in person?), when Gerda was a grown woman, a liberated woman, and had all the right to manage her affairs as she believed best? He would get his degree, if necessary play the role of the well-brought-up youth, without hiding the fact that he didn’t know how to say half a prayer in Hebrew, or softening his opinions, even regarding Gerda’s parents. It wasn’t right for him to do otherwise.
Then there had been exams, vacations, days spent all together in Dr. Gelbke’s house on the Dübener Heide, and, finally, his departure for Berlin. No invitation to the Pohorylle house, no moment removed from the pleasure of their being together.
They had extended their happy routines to new territories. And if, unavoidably, these included Gerda’s little sulks and the grand questions that assailed him, repetition dulled the analyses and blunted the questions of principle. There was a condition that decreed the suspension of time passing, and, without that, doubts didn’t mature. Georg Kuritzkes had never been so happy, and would never be again.
The nostalgia he’s allowed himself in the past days, thinking back to his years with Gerda, has had a comforting effect, and so he’s reinforced it just outside the gates of the FAO. Feeling the breeze blowing against him as he rode home on his Vespa, he told himself that it was as natural as that warm air to have a language and city of origin, a great task, and a great love. If he hadn’t had the capacity to live at the height of his dreams then, either, he would have become a survivor filled with bitter regrets or a traitor in a bubble of oblivion like one of those plastic globes where fake snow falls on the Coliseum and every other monument on the planet contained in that two-cent idyll.
All was not yet lost, at that point. They hadn’t yet moved on to the need for the Widerstand, the resistance that was too weak for the winter of barbarism. If the pressure not to submit could have been multiplied, if that desire, as life-giving as his girl, could have gone farther, become insurrection, the lethal order would have tottered before its defeat amounted to a world of ashes and rubble.
In Leipzig and then in Berlin, the conflicts were extremely bitter, the divisions lacerating. The big cities were caught in the stranglehold of the petit-bourgeois substrate and in the mass resignations of the working class, which kindled a bipolar feeling even in those who didn’t believe that revolution had to rise, like the Arab phoenix, from the ruins of the Weimar Republic. But the struggle was different as long as there was a possibility of winning it. And he organized, discussed, avoided the ambushes of the brownshirts and was always ready to fight—and beside him he had Gerda Pohorylle.
Gerda summarized the beauty and the difficulty of that period, rediscovered and renewed every day. At that moment the two of them were perfect: she took him out to have fun, and he put the tools for fighting in her hand. No one was to blame if that stupendous complementarity had fractured. It would have ended, probably, even if Hitler hadn’t arrived to separate them.
Recognizing it doesn’t sadden him, on the contrary it settles him in the proper place of a man of nearly fifty who accepts the limits, some limits, in order not to suffer them all.
Recently his mother launched a mission based on the conviction that “our Gerda” became a revolutionary saint thanks to the éducation sentimentale of Leipzig. Georg doesn’t try to contradict her, even though he now prefers structures of thought that are examined through the cold, rigorous lens of the neurosciences. But if comrade Dina Gelbke manages to get a small street for comrade Gerda Taro, a concrete cube for the pigeons, who already foul every bronze head of our revered friend Lenin, she can only be rewarded for it. Mind and memory are a single thing, the integrity of memory establishes the integrity of every human being, even among the nomads (and wasn’t he perhaps a nomad?); the preservation of memories is not a prerogative of the bourgeois inner life. Each remembers what serves, what helps him to get by. And Dr. Kuritzkes wants only to hold on to “his Gerda,” even though he knows she doesn’t exist.
Gerda the daring, the unpredictable, the rubia fox, who wouldn’t give up a single bite of happiness that could be stolen from the present.
In Rome the temperature is still summery, and the first center-left government is working on reforms and attempts at détente abroad, but the thaw is distant, perhaps impossible. The fate of Congo angers him, but he wouldn’t feel so cornered, and impatient with his odious clerical impatience, if he didn’t spend every morning in the presence of the United Nations flag. Modrić isn’t wrong when he complains that, on the outside, the UN is confused with NATO—it’s all American stuff, from that point of view, and then “what does someone from the other side have to do with it—you know what I mean, doctor—a Communist?” A foreign Communist, and a non-aligned Communist at that, is considered a freak in this city that invented the circus.
Except that Dr. Modrić still has his socialist country and his familiarity with everything that lives in seas, lakes, rivers, and lagoons. Whereas Dr. Kuritzkes is an authentic fish out of water. He applies sarcasm to himself like a medical treatment. In the morning in the bath he sings “lasciaaate ogni speraaanza . . . voi ch’entrate!” imitating the heavy accent of Helmut Krebs, whose splendid interpretation of Monteverdi’s Orfeo he came upon rummaging in the stalls of Porta Portese. Had it been left by a German? Or something much worse? On his dusty fingers he felt the irritation of those conjectures suggested purely by the Deutsche Grammophon label, before putting the record under his arm.
In the past week, however, it hasn’t been enough for him to reproach himself, sing, discuss in the office, and then at home listen to Orfeo or J.S. Bach—the severe Thomaskantor who hovered over his youth—in a face to face between the wing chair and the record player. Now he has to sum up, and he does it best when he comes home sweaty and invigorated from a run in Villa Borghese, where in the morning he meets only other expatriate athletes and a few Roman dogs out walking with the maid.
He’s never been under the illusion that the UN can remove itself from the great conflicts, and he is well aware that the neutrality of science doesn’t exist. More than once, with his intellectual colleagues at UNESCO, he has eviscerated the interpretations of the famous phrase from Adorno’s Minima Moralia: “There is no true life—or just life—within a false life.” UNESCO offered him the best of compromises, a compromise that has, ultimately, remained acceptable. But he no longer accepts it. Driven by a need for truth, he could still reach a just choice, even if it resembles a false step. “I’m leaving, I’m quitting.”
He was pondering those conclusions the other day after visiting his barber in Via Sicilia, when, coming down along Via Veneto, he saw the German writers and academics who customarily make the sidewalk tables of the Doney their Stammtisch. Even though their voices were muffled b
y youths on mopeds honking at friends sitting down for an aperitivo, and the din of the Americans—who gravitate around the movies or the embassy and hold court at the Café Doney—they were utterly recognizable from the expressions and measured gestures that lent a provincial aspect even to clothing bought in the recommended tailor shops. Even the blond woman poet, who was very famous in Germany, seemed a timid Carinthian peasant in the bustle of that self-satisfied urbanity. But maybe her Swiss companion intimidated her: no less famous as a novelist, and attractive the way a rumpled frog speaking with a pipe in his mouth might be. “You should also hold forth on Adorno’s maxim,” he thought, putting out the cigarette butt under his heel.
Suddenly a girl who was flying to a rendezvous made Gerda flash into his mind. She would have been in tune with the setting, perfectly at ease with waiters and clientele of every sort: she was at home in the bars of Montparnasse, while in Berlin she always wanted to drag him to the Romanisches Café (“I’ll pay! I’ve spent almost nothing yet . . . ”), where you met anyone who was anyone in the avant-garde. The young Italian woman went by in the peasant shoes that Gerda wore in Spain—espadrilles they’re called, now that they’re fashionable. And, in a flash, he saw Gerda not as she was at the time but as she would have been in those sinuous Capri pants, the sweater over her shoulder, her hair weightless. The apparition cut off his digressions, or, rather, intervened. That old story about the true life and the false life, please, Georg, forget it . . .
Dr. Kuritzkes, however, admires Adorno, who returned from exile to reclaim the chair in Frankfurt, while German critical culture volunteers as an extra in La Dolce Vita.
Do you have a reason to reproach yourself for not going back to remake Germany, beside those who have an iron cross in the closet? he said to himself, as he had before, but that day the thought is tinged with the clear and mocking intonation of Gerda Pohorylle. So he has descended the curves of Via Veneto in a state of amused wonder to the point where Piazza Barberini comes into view. He hurls himself into the traffic, as he learned to do in Naples, and, shortly after turning into the narrow street that intersects Via della Purificazione, he is persuaded that this time, too, it will turn out well. If the bristly Dachshund has managed to revolutionize medicine, he’ll find space, too, modest perhaps, but free, to devote himself to his research—if not in Rome, then somewhere else. He just has to wait for the right moment, keep his eyes open.
The Girl with the Leica Page 18