The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  “What should I tell you, Georg? I didn’t mind. Was it the proverbial effect of a trouble shared is a trouble halved? Maybe. I liked listening to how fantastic our Gerda was. I don’t know about you, but I was jealous as a macaque, even though it complicated living together terribly. But since she’s gone I don’t care who she made eyes at.”

  Capa had offered him another cigarette, as if to encourage him to respond. “I wasn’t jealous, almost never,” he answered.

  “Yes, Gerda said that, too.”

  The last confidence Capa made before they chased him out, before he embraced him on the threshold of the operating room, was that Teddie behaved properly during the day, while at night, when he drank (“There was nothing else to do on the ship!”), the music changed. He jabbered on about how he would have brought Gerda to America and cured her grief for the Polish doctor. There existed no obstacle to his dreams except death, and death, as at the end of a novel, could make everything possible after the fact.

  “They’re like that, the Americans. They dream of a house just like their neighbor’s, with children and hearth, and maybe an enormous red star on the Christmas tree, and in their minds they’ve already as good as bought it.”

  On the ship Teddie boasted that Gerda had found his stories brilliant, had even encouraged him to send them to their friend Hemingway. And he would have proved his talent to her and, sorry to say, my friend, the reputation of a writer easily exceeded the success of a photographer.

  “Those were not very pleasant moments, mein lieber Georg. But what was I supposed to do? Remind him of China and adiós, my friend? Or explain that Gerda wasn’t too fussy in the moments of respite between a battle and a bombardment? She was considerate to offer him that lie, pity that Teddie, in his arrogant naïveté, decided to ignore the warning. She was enchanted by him, perhaps, but she also was by a lot of the youths she saw leave in the morning and not return again in the evening. In the end, the only thing that Gerda loved wholeheartedly wasn’t you or me or anyone else but all those who committed their lives to fighting fascism, it was Spain and her work beside the Spanish people.”

  Georg had nodded.

  There remained the question of whether she had started to get fed up with Capa, too, and he had to believe him on one point: in war the person closest to you is your comrade and the comrade of Gerda had been Capa, the only one she’d had beside her. Georg wasn’t sorry to have to admit it, from the moment he saw him disappear, finally, around the bend in the road, knapsack on his back, collar raised, coarse wool cap pulled down to his neck. The pack of Lucky Strikes, unfortunately, he had forgotten to leave.

  In the grip of his memories, Dr. Kuritzkes stopped on the street off Via Giovenale that should be the right one. He could set off again now, but he’s just realized something odd: the encounter with Capa in Teruel is stamped more deeply in memory than the moment his comrades handed him a daily they’d brought back from a day’s leave. Bad news, they said. The words of condolence, which also must have been offered, have disappeared. “Enterrada en París la camarada Gerda Taro caída en Brunete.” A hole. A hole that had a precise clinical name. There remained only the date on the newspaper clipping, kept in his pocket where a soldier keeps everything that is dearest to him: August 1st, which should have been a birthday.

  Dr. Kuritzkes decides to look at Mario Bernardo’s directions to make sure where he is, but it’s clear that he’s looking for a way out of these memories. I’m almost there, he confirms, as the engine simmers and vents, the soles of his feet still resting on the roadway.

  The front in Cordoba was in a state of lethargy during that whole period, apart from a skirmish in mid-September that he’d taken part in. Letters arrived from Naples and Paris, and, by some tortuous clandestine means, even from his mother: grief-stricken, overflowing with rhetoric and advice. Pointless. Even Morandi came to offer condolences. Great courage requires great courage, he had said, shaking his hand. Thanking him, he returned the clasp. Only months later, when, absorbed in saving the lives of his comrades, he was regaining possession of his own, it occurred to him that maybe he owed his transfer to the old commander. Aldo Morandi was a man capable of saying that he would do without a soldier devoted to getting himself shot, when he could be useful for putting those still able-bodied back on their feet. Who knows if he had also explained that that soldier hadn’t been marked by any collapse of morale, as long as he didn’t know about the death of Gerda Taro. If only they’d learn to celebrate an imprudent person as an example of heroism and forget about the requirements of those who knew how to make war.

  It’s a new thought, the first that reassures Dr. Kuritzkes. Maybe he wouldn’t be there, sheltering under an oak to let the cars pass, if he hadn’t been guided by the cordial antipathy toward Gerda of an old-style officer and the long freeze of the Cordoba front, corresponding to the freeze in himself. Yes, yes he’s reassured. Although he’s still in another realm, he has realized that the cars he sees going by, among them one very shiny black one, can’t belong to these miserable streets. The movie cars are leaving, he says to himself, so as soon as I find Mario we’ll be free to work on our projects.

  Then he sees a group of people gathered around a couple of mopeds and hears, in snatches, a clamor that seems too loud. Is it a fight? Maybe not, since in these areas people shout for no reason. But he doesn’t want to pass through the middle of a fight, especially in a neighborhood where it could turn ugly, and so he turns off the Vespa and starts listening.

  “Get out, there’s nothing to interest you people here. Get it? You gotta go.”

  The response is a “Cool it,” but then the voices are again indistinguishable. The only way to understand what’s happening is to lean out from the tree.

  Even though he sees half of the group from the back and the other keep disappearing and reappearing behind the branches, there is no margin of doubt. The clothes, the bodies, the physiognomy of those youths are middle class. At that point he plunges toward them with a strident screeching of brakes that silences the quarrel.

  “Do you know where I can find Signor Bernardo?” he asks.

  “He should still be at the café around the corner,” they answer, without a hint of surprise.

  In front of the café as well there are people deep in conversation, except for a young woman left alone with a notepad and a bottle of orange soda. At the top of the steps that divide the terrace from the street, Mario Bernardo is talking with the group whose jackets and purses are lying on the chairs of the other tables.

  “Georges, what a pleasure,” he exclaims, seeing him. “I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding us. May I offer you a coffee or a drink, since you’ve crossed the city in this heat?”

  Dr. Kuritzkes pulls up, turns off the engine, follows his friend to the table where he’s left his jacket, and the fact that he leans over to pick it up rather than inviting him to sit down lets him understand that Mario can’t wait to go. But they have a coffee anyway, at the opaque marble bar, wiped off before the saucers are set down.

  “They also do gelato, if you feel like it,” his friend offers, as if to correct the too hurried hospitality. Then, in an undertone, he says movie people think that with money you can solve everything. He scowls, seems vexed.

  “You don’t want anything else?”

  “Just some water. In Naples they would already have given it to you. But Italy is complicated, a continent.”

  His friend agrees, and finds it remarkable that he notices. Being in Rome, he observes, almost everyone starts to believe it’s the navel of the world, beyond which there are only some negligible provinces. And this, he clarifies, when genuine Romans don’t know much more than the few streets they’re used to being on.

  Serving the glass of water, the barman intervenes. “You’re right, doctor, and your friend, too, and if you’ve been to Naples maybe you’ve also passed through my area. I was born here,
but my uncles down in Ciociaria say that the Germans were gentlemen in comparison to what the others got up to! And then—we can say it, can’t we?—there aren’t many real Romans left, not the ones who had great-grandfathers in the time of Julius Caesar!”

  Dr. Kuritzkes, by now used to those comments, answers that he was in Naples for reasons more pleasant than the last war and waits for Mario Bernardo to pocket the change.

  “Lucky you came, Georges,” he says as they leave the bar, “so I don’t have to hear the same story again while they’re taking me home. Who knows when this movie will be made . . . Meanwhile here is where they shot the greatest masterpiece in recent cinema, Rome Open City: the exact part where they kill Magnani and carry off the printer. Rossellini didn’t make any of it up. This was really a subversive hideout, a fortress, if you prefer. One was shot in the Fosse Ardeatine, three deported to Mauthausen and didn’t return. But there were a lot of them, it was the whole neighborhood, it was all the working-class neighborhoods, and this one more than the others. Not like Piazza Barberini, with your Fascist countesses happy to have found the German doctor to treat their nerves . . . ”

  “Just one, Mario. And she,” he reminds him, “stopped seeking my services when I filled in—how do you say gründlich?—there, when I exhaustively filled in her interest in my CV.”

  Mario Bernardo has only recently started hearing about such episodes, that is to say that the doctor no longer considers him a friend “Italian style” but a friend in the way he has always understood the word. Besides, Vittorio Somenzi had told him that he could trust him. He had known him in the war, in moments that bind, tragic but fortunately overcome. It was known that the professor had been an officer in the Air Force, but it was equally evident that he was a sincere progressive, not to mention a great gentleman. And Mario Bernardo himself had told him about their meeting, one evening when they had dined together after working on their experiment, enjoying the shade of the pergola at a good trattoria on the Janiculum hill.

  Vittorio was in the aeronautic engineer corps, but he had never been in an airplane until September 8th, when he managed to make himself available to the Office of Strategic Services, which had parachuted him into the Bellunese Prealps to reach a Garibaldi brigade cut off by an overabundance of snow on the Cadore passes. Bernardo and his group of partisans were up there, on that farthest border of Italy subject to the Gauleiter of the Tyrol, short of munitions and provisions, and the man in the gray tweed suit who appeared on the ridge like the lost traveling salesman for whom they illegally sold false documents had seemed too handsome to be the person they were waiting for at the command.

  “You should know,” Mario explained to him, pouring some cool white, “that while the country was liberated we up there expected some hard times. The rumor was circulating that the Germans were preparing to resist indefinitely, gathering in the redoubt of the Alps plundered treasures, underground missile factories, and all the big shots, with the freshest and most loyal men. The American services believed it, we much less. We knew about the stockpiling of supplies, but we had never seen either deported slaves building fortifications or new forces. Vittorio had told that to his superiors, and yet we couldn’t relax because we couldn’t rule out that the Germans were organizing farther to the north. It’s said that this was precisely the scenario that had driven Eisenhower to occupy Bavaria, leaving Berlin to the Soviets. On the other hand, it worried us that, although the Allies were apparently so convinced of this Alpenfestung, they avoided bombing the area, when they were masters of the sky. We knew that broad Anglo-American sectors wanted to keep the Italian contribution to the liberation at a minimum, especially in the case of us Communist partisans. There was a rumor that the northeastern regions would be joined to Austria, as a mugging of the red Italy that had emerged out of the insurrection, and as a barrier against Titoist Yugoslavia. So there we were, near the enemy, freezing, poorly armed, with the expectation of losing our lives there, and not even knowing if it would end up being useful.

  “Things went smoothly afterward, but that didn’t annul those fears. In fact, the last action that Vittorio and the youths from the Calvi Brigade were involved in confirmed them. Just after the 25th of April the services asked him to locate a group of hostages whom the SS had assembled in Dachau and transported to Val Pusteria, a working zone under our jurisdiction. Vittorio learned that the precious human cargo had reached Villabassa, and included prominent prisoners whom the supreme leaders of the SS intended to exchange, or would liquidate if they had nothing to lose. Vittorio was to some extent acquainted with the negotiations that the commander of the Wehrmacht was conducting in Italy, and even with the commander of the SS, but that I learned years later. Moral of the story: the hostage crisis had a good resolution, because the blond beast, or at least the two leaders of the pack, preferred to go belly up rather than carry out the orders with blind obedience. But it would have taken only a pair of concentration camp guards to act as usual, that is, throw the executed prisoners into the Lago di Braies, to put at risk nothing less than the end of the war in Italy.”

  Dr. Kuritzkes had devoted himself to his lamb and potatoes, but, as he listened to that story, he had an intuition. Was it by any chance the convoy that Léon Blum talks about in his little memoir? He had read it in Paris, and had been moved by the loyalty that the Blums maintained in Buchenwald and during the final transport, when the old socialist was so weak that he might not have reached the end of the journey.

  “Yes, that one,” Mario Bernardo exclaimed, and it was true that Léon Blum was in bad shape. And yet, after thanking the partisan command that had come to liberate him, he had wanted to wait for the Americans with his other companions in misfortune. They had respectfully said goodbye to him and returned to Cadore.

  “The world really is small,” Dr. Kuritzkes commented, and Mario listed the other prisoners. There was the old Austrian chancellor von Schuschnigg, with his wife and daughter; two of Churchill’s grandsons; Badoglio’s son; a grandson of Molotov; the entire Greek general staff; and other eminences of conquered Europe. A large number of Germans, mostly “von” whatevers—the families of von Stauffenberg and other conspirators in the plot against Hitler, a grandson of the last Kaiser, the prince of Hesse, who was the husband of Matilde di Savoia, many Wehrmacht officers who had fallen into disgrace, and a steel baron von Thyssen . . .

  “Ah well, all anti-fascists from the start and committed democrats!” Dr. Kuritzkes interrupted him, reluctant to savor that list.

  Mario laughed, but caught the too cutting thread of his sarcasm.

  “No, you’re wrong,” he objected, mentioning Martin Niemöller, the courageous Lutheran pastor, and then a nephew of Garibaldi who had immediately joined the Calvi Brigade.

  “Of course,” he assented, irritated with himself. But he had little patience with the speeches of survivors, which were all so similar: and he couldn’t stand the fact that even the old partisans’ stories were full of a rigid nostalgia, the nostalgia of losers.

  Maybe it was his fault if Mario gradually cooled as he described the turning point, which occurred thanks to a captain in the Wehrmacht, another of those unpronounceable Junkers, who managed to bring the hostages under his protection: something they were very happy about, especially when the SS obeyed the order to go home, where the Führer was about to kill himself. Thus at the Hotel Lago di Braies an idyll began among soldiers, South Tyrolese, and deportees, “only tea and waltzes were missing.” In any case, before they could lead the Americans there, their visits to the hotel in a requisitioned Fiat Balilla were greeted with dismay: not only because all they had was a few submachine guns but because everything for their lordships was the stuff of small-time thieves. Only Molotov’s grandson, poor Vassily, who had seen Stalin’s son killed in Sachsenhausen, remained deaf to entreaties to stay at the hotel, on pain of some misfortune or other. He had gone with them, had been welcomed in Belluno, delivered to the Soviets i
n Bologna, and finally thanked his liberators via Radio Moscow. Garibaldi’s grandson, on the other hand, they had to deal with as self-proclaimed general of Val Pusteria, and with him a certain Ferrero, Davide, a partisan captain in the Langhe captured and deported by the Germans. In those frenzied days they were focused on free Italy, Italy to be rebuilt, but they learned that Ferrero had sold himself to the SS, lending his own men as guards for the Rice Factory of San Sabba, hardly the second-in-command of a Garibaldi!

  Suddenly the roles were reversed: Mario asking to change the subject, he replying of course, forget it, I understand.

  “Let me add just this, Georges,” Mario concluded. “They accuse us of having carried out summary justice, but was a just justice ever seen, later, in Italy?”

  “Comrade,” Georg answered, “I would skip dessert and coffee. Let’s move on to a grappa or an amaro?”

  “Whatever you have, I’ll have, too.”

  That night, after taking Mario Bernardo home, Dr. Kuritzkes felt like walking a little, and he pushed the bike along the winding curves of the Janiculum. Maybe other times he hadn’t turned onto Via Garibaldi, but the fact is that he had never noticed the spectral white of the ossuary with which the Fascists—ROMA O MORTE (ROME OR DIE)—had appropriated the dead of the Roman Republic. It was only a particularly brazen example of something he encountered everywhere, a continuous absorption of customs, traditions, and historical events into one another, which placed him in a suspension of time and judgment, ruptured as soon as love for the Duce erupted from the breast of a noble Roman caryatid, or, contrarily, Bernardo and Somenzi came out into the open. Suddenly he understood what it meant that Vittorio had never been in an airplane before he was parachuted by the Americans, as Mario had just told him. He wasn’t flying any of the Savoy-Marchettis sent to bomb the Spanish cities or the Fiat BR.20s of the legionnaire squadrons that, firing at low altitude, had caused the collision in which Gerda died. And from the moment the shadow was dissolved (wasn’t it Somenzi’s superiors in the meteorological engineer corps who decided that conditions were favorable for the attack on Brunete?), shouldn’t he have left the mausoleum behind and rushed down to Ponte Sisto, enjoying the splendor of the Eternal City, like everyone else? Wouldn’t Gerda have managed it wonderfully? Wouldn’t she have traded the parades of the Fascist decades for a press pass for the Emilio Schuberth fashion show, ready to shoot away when the bride came out? Chim and Capa had done it, and they understood less about high fashion than about the trajectory of a bullet; and why not, if it was the most desirable work for a photographer, after the war . . .