He couldn’t reproach Gerda’s capacity to adapt; it had always seemed enviable to him. But Capa’s carefree attitude when they met after the liberation of Paris had disappointed him, and it was the other who had sought him out and embraced him. Capa had promised that he would stop by Springerstrasse if he happened to be in Leipzig, and would bring Georg’s mother food and medicine. Then the May ’45 issue of Life came out, with that small impudent G.I., the American soldier par excellence, making the rude gesture of a “Sieg Heil!” at the Nuremburg trial: an image of such triumphant irreverence that only one photographer could have come up with it. He had been excited to recognize in him the author of the photograph, as if that cover, which showed the entire world the triumph of small men, Capa style, were a tribute to the spirit of Gerda, the right way to dedicate the victory to her. He had opened the magazine on the Champs-Élysées and, as he walked, discovered the last Americans on a balcony in Leipzig, operating a machine gun, and then the photos of one of them killed by a sniper (“maybe the last man to die in WWII”), the blood spreading over the parquet of a bourgeois interior. On receiving his message of congratulations, Capa had called him almost immediately. Too many dead fools until the end, a big mess with a girl, he hadn’t had the time or a mind to stop at his mother’s: c’est dommage, Entschuldigung. But he’d had a mind to photograph a man just killed, and probably also to decide that it wasn’t worth visiting an old Bolshevik, even though Dina would have repaid him with amazing stories about Gerda, even without the offering of some K-rations, which would have really helped her out.
Photography is a job that rewards opportunists, favors skaters on the surface. A doctor, on the contrary, finds himself implicated in the lives of patients, lives that even with the help of X-rays often don’t offer an unambiguous image. Some are born to steer a middle course and some do it anyway, for better or for worse. Gerda would have had the Souveränität not to turn back and at the same time not to deny anything.
Nor had Capa, he had to admit, been an absolute weathercock: that trip to the USSR with Steinbeck hadn’t been a good idea even in 1947. Even less so in the succeeding years, when Paris and Rome were full of his American friends who had ended up on the blacklists, and who, certainly not penniless exiles, as they had been, didn’t move from their comfortable lodgings beyond Montmartre or Trastevere . . .
Georg recalls and ponders all this, while Mario, outside the bar in Pigneto, has been summoned by some very long-winded guy from the production. He waits patiently, smoking a cigarette and fantasizing about this bar, so similar to a village taberna, saying to himself that for Capa it would have stirred a chord more secret than the caffés of Via Veneto did, and for Gerda, too.
He’d better go out to the terrace and liberate his friend, Georg says to himself, and finally they manage to get on the Vespa and leave. At the intersection with Via Prenestina, Mario proposes a quick side trip to where most of the scenes of Rome Open City were filmed, if it would interest him.
“Let’s go.”
Via Montecuccoli is on the other side of the consular road, Via Prenestina. New construction has cleaned up the ruins and the rubble that you see in the famous scenes of the film, and buildings are going up no higher than the prewar structure in front of which Mario signals him to stop. It’s the added floors and, especially, the expansion of the apartment blocks that has drastically changed the face of the neighborhood: it’s still the periphery, since the street ends near the railway tracks, but unmistakably working class.
“On this side of Via Prenestina is the city of workers, on the other the semblance of an ancestral habitat, where the visitor feels a generous frisson in the face of a population of thugs and beggars—you get the same thing right in the center in Naples,” Georg observes to his friend, who nods thoughtfully.
No one pays attention to the two men who, leaning on the Vespa in front of No. 17, discuss abstract things, neorealist poets and directors, while around them people come and go serenely on this day of rest.
“It won’t be the cinema that changes things—whatever they are,” Georg reflects. “It will be the people who live in these apartment blocks, the new worker conscripts, the girls who bring home a salary. For them it’s easier to stand up to the boss than to win at home and between the sheets, but once they’ve started, you can’t stop them. Believe me, I saw it: in Spain, which was no less backward than Italy, not to mention Leipzig and Berlin in the early thirties. You know, sometimes the female students seemed almost envious of their proletarian peers? Because the freedom to wear their hair short or go have a beer—and they even went by themselves, our workers—wasn’t granted by a father or a boyfriend but won with their own hands. These are slow gains, not well suited to épater la bourgeoisie or, still less, to attract it, because they reflect its hypocritical petty-mindedness.”
“I hope you’re right,” Mario replies, and, already back on the Vespa, objects that when they were fighting for freedom even the reactionary Veneto was stirred up, but now it’s returned to the way it was before.
“You never go back completely,” Georg says, before starting up again.
Did the optimism of the moment pull the cliché out of him? And yet those neighborhood streets and, ultimately, the whole of Italy feed a certain faith in progress, while the comparison with Germany is distressing.
Georg sometimes gets letters from the International Brigade members who went up into the mountains with him or enlisted in the Foreign Legion, less frequently from those who were in Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and so on. They returned to their native cities, to replace fathers and brothers killed in battle or destroyed by prison, or following the call of what, in spite of everything, was Heimat. They write that they are distant from politics, “because if you let all those old Nazis get too close you can’t breathe.” A gunner who had returned to the lathe of a steelworks in Mannheim wrote that “everywhere you breathe a Mief and a Spiessigkeit that you can escape only by going into the Kneipe.” The translations suggested by the Sansoni dictionary aren’t really equivalent: “moldy, spoiled, stagnant air,” and “respectability, smugness” isn’t right, either. “We have gone back a hundred years,” a doctor comrade echoes, a baptized Halbjude, retaking possession of his villa in Frankfurt but not the goods accumulated by generations of Kommerzienrat. “The country has been washed with Persil in one of those washing machines that everybody dreams about now: it came out white and very starched.”
They cautiously describe their state of disquiet. They appeal to him as a specialist, “because my doctor says nothing is wrong, but at my insistence he has prescribed these pills.” What advice can he give, by letter, when he doesn’t know the name of a colleague in the entire Bundesrepublik to recommend?
It’s different in the DDR, where the veterans of the Spanish Civil War are celebrated as heroes, covered with medals, given advantages at work. They write seldom and don’t complain, but let a flash of nostalgic impatience surface.
When he thinks of his sister, though, something jars. She’s still a considerable beauty, that is to say that in the monochrome streets of Leipzig her slender figure, the scarves he sends her from Italy, her scaffolding of teased hair stand out.
The receptions that Jenny organizes when he returns to Leipzig reveal how eagerly awaited these visits are. “Let’s toast my brother who works for the United Nations.” She fills the Bohemian glasses with šampanskoe, hands around the tray of tarts (“Taste the caviar, Georg, they give it to us but we don’t have many occasions to eat it”). A perfect hostess, the enchanting wife in whom her companion Professor Doktor should consider himself fortunate. But he has only to look at his mother, already settled comfortably with her glass or intent on conversing in her powerful voice, to notice a divide not reducible to character, the divide of an era. “She’s happy like this. During the war she had the higher education of an American diplomat,” Dina says curtly, and he has no rejoinder.
Dina
would never have agreed to appear beside Prof. Dr. Karl Gelbke the way Jenny does. As far back as he can remember, he’s always seen his mother send her children to get drinks and food, while she sits talking to the others. Dina would never have dreamed of washing the glasses because you were going from a dry wine to a sweet one. She can ignore it now, strong in the license of age and a venerable history, she can fail to remember what her daughter was like as a girl: a good savage, more good but no less savage than her brothers. And so, recalling “our Gerda,” she can superimpose a nonexistent heroine on the girl with bare feet, blouse unbuttoned over the slip, who worked beside her in the garden, pulling up weeds, hoeing, planting roses and salad greens.
Dina had an outfit more suitable for gardening, a faded green smock, a pair of old sandals, a colorful kerchief on her head, knotted in the manner of a peasant woman, from which a few gray-black locks escaped. The two women were so absorbed in the rhythm of the work, marked by a very Russian, very danceable tune, that they didn’t notice his arrival.
They weren’t expecting him, and Georg wasn’t expecting to find Gerda. He had told her that the trains from Berlin were packed, and had advised her to go in the evening with Dr. Gelbke. He wouldn’t leave early, in order not to travel standing up with his heavy suitcases (shoes, sheets and towels, school-books), and had no idea when the bus went to the station. Then a truck driver comrade had given him a ride and, despite stops at Luckenwalde, Wittenberg, and Dessau, where he had helped unload OSRAM bulbs, he had arrived in the late morning. He had been dropped off at the intersection at the bottom of the hill, walked up, dragging his bags (the suitcase with the books weighed a ton), and dropped them in front of the door, a sore on his right palm and breathing so hard he could barely recover.
They were singing loud enough to silence the birds of the Dübener Heide, his mother and Gerda, and they weren’t expecting him. Nor did he, stopping to look at them from the porch of the vacation cottage, expect to see them together, and so in tune with a melody that belonged to his deepest childhood memories. He would have liked to announce his presence by joining in their tumbala tumbala tumbalalaika! But the inner voice that anticipated the refrain sounded invasive, out of place. They repeated the refrain, going faster. And Georg, still mute and unmoving, no longer felt like the uncomfortable third but like the protagonist of a dream scene, where the strange and the familiar are confused, the closest things appear unreachable, and then are suddenly yours, before you’ve even touched them.
“Tumbalaaaika, spiel Balalaika, tumbalaika, fröhlich soll sein!”
Or was it Gerda, proceeding from verse to verse without any hesitation, who wasn’t supposed to be woken from the spell?
Anyway it had all become clear, as in dreams: what Gerda saw in his mother and vice versa, despite appearances and real differences. The two resembled each other. That’s why his pretty young lady was so liked by the eleventh child of a weaver who arrived in the city of Łódź from a Lithuanian shtetl driven by hunger: a daughter who ran away from home to follow the revolution, at sixteen was wanted by the czarist police, fled Russia at eighteen, became a mother at twenty, was divorced at twenty-seven with three children to take care of . . .
And then? Then there was a final repetition of the refrain, so fast that his mother stopped with the hoe in her hand and, straightening up, finally saw him. Not Gerda, who had ended on a drawn-out, wavering high note. She hurled a sharp little cry at him: “Oh Lord, have you been here long? I think I was terribly out of tune!”
“Not at all, you were wonderful! It’s centuries since I’ve heard ‘Tumbalalaika.’”
“Really? Come on, I’ll help you with the suitcases . . . Did you put rocks in them?”
“Books, Gerda. You take the other one, if you really insist.”
After the first swim in the lake with his siblings, they returned to the house. His body only slightly tan (he had never been so pale at that time of year, whereas Gerda went to the pool often), the beating of the other heart still rapid, the smell of lake water and sweaty skin enveloping both. He had stretched out on the bed and fallen asleep. Gerda was snoring beside him, one foot sticking out past the mattress. She pulled it back only after he got up. For a moment she opened her eyes, turning onto her back with a mmmhm that unnerved him, a sigh that was unusual for dozing. She had stayed like that, one hand on her stomach, legs spread.
Leave her alone, it’s not the time.
He had covered her and gone to unpack the suitcases. That day had ended without questions.
Stopping at the signals in Piazza Esedra, Georg hears buzzing in his head the stupid adjective “exceptional” that Gerda evoked in him thinking of those orgasms snatched from the vacation habits of his family. Soma and Jenny who came home late, Dina who read in the shade of a tree waiting for Dr. Gelbke, while Fritzchen, tired out by the games and dives with his older brothers, slept next to her in the stroller.
He had grown up in a milieu that gave him some advantages. He had been spared the anxieties and desires of a double morality, the poisoned apples in paradise, that original lie on which the domination of man over woman and the exploitation of man by man is based, and which he has to atone for with the sweat of his brow. He was given the example of certain monkeys that coupled in a playful way, shared the care of their offspring, formed in practice a communal tribe. “We, however, do not yet live in Communism and are not monkeys,” Dina concluded, “but you should go slowly and be careful, you understand me? That way you satisfy the girl, too.” All that had made him more confident than his high-school classmates; even those at the top of the hierarchies resorted to their wallets to relieve themselves. And every time they boasted about their couplings, they confirmed his contempt for the hypocritical vulgarity of the wealthy classes. Toward his friends, no, he was tolerant: after all it wasn’t anyone’s fault or merit that they had obstacles and difficulties unfamiliar to him.
Gerda could have been his nemesis, but she wasn’t. The first time, Georg was so excited to discover that it was mutual that he hadn’t let himself be diverted by any anxiety. Only afterward he had wondered if the fait accompli had established victory over Pieter. His mind had been on the alert until Gerda returned from Stuttgart, his body trusted in that stupendous body that spoke to him unmistakably. Gerda was Gerda: a worldly woman who in the small hitches of intimacy burst out laughing like a girl, a lover with the grace of a princess and the self-possession of a housemaid, a natural talent that resembled neither bourgeois nor working girls, and certainly not his mother’s Edenic monkeys, who maybe weren’t even real.
It was joie de vivre. Something that existed, was renewed, happened everywhere, first in Leipzig and then in Berlin: in the Pension not far from his dormitory, in the room rented near Alexanderplatz from the war widow Hedwig Fischer, and finally on the cot belonging to Max and Pauline, called Pauli, in the middle of Wedding.
Frau Fischer had no problem with the Frollein, as long as he paid a supplement, calculated on the basis of the elegant young woman’s appearance, and yet less than the cost of the hotel that had weighed on his student finances. He had been afraid of an increase, but the crisis had become so dark that it was best to hold on to the lodgers who paid. Georg was grateful for Gerda’s flexibility: who had learned to get to Berolinastrasse when he couldn’t come to meet her at the station. Who hadn’t commented on the abrupt transition from a street crossing Unter den Linden to an area where there was an abundance of stalls selling cheap goods and the Kneipen were open until late at night. Gerda was curious, not at all put off by the sinister faces and the unequivocal female presences. Did she realize, rather, when she no longer saw that streetwalker, the one so voluptuous, what had become of her? Had she caught the flu, had she had some problems with the vice squad, or some more serious trouble?
And if those observations were due in part to the slightly artificial attraction of the garish, disreputable metropolis, her feline eye was trained to
see the rest as well. The increase in sleepers, men and women, in every building entrance they managed not to be kicked out of. The lines for the distribution of a charity Suppe inversely proportional to the assortment of foods in the store downstairs. The solid façades built in the time of Kaiser Wilhelm that turned black because the chimney sweep cost too much, the sewers that stank more, like the people crowded in the U-Bahn. Gerda noticed everything. She called things by their names, precise and angry. She even noticed—and reported to him with supreme enjoyment—that people stared at her as at an apparition, sometimes they whistled at her, rushed to ask her: “Are you lost, Frollein, can I give you a hand with your suitcase?” Of course she let them give her a hand: “Thank you, truly, very kind.” If Georg urged her to be prudent, “because, listen to me, you don’t know what sort of effect you have around here,” she answered with a smile.
“I can distinguish a poor unfortunate fellow from a creep: why should you worry if a worker or a jobless man follows me—wouldn’t that make you a bit of a classist?”
The Girl with the Leica Page 21