The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  “What do you mean classist: only brute physical force counts here, if you get in trouble.”

  “I can get in trouble even when I’m sunbathing in the Tiergarten.”

  She must have been right, to continue, as always, to do things her own way.

  One day he had watched her arrive in the company of a youth with the build of a dockworker. He was walking bent over, muttering under his mustache words that you could imagine were in a coarse Berliner Schnauze, while Gerda amazed him with conversation, along with some questions, in her impeccable salon German. Georg, moving away from the window, had shaken his head and, from that moment, stopped worrying. Gerda wasn’t an intruder in those places, but a celestial creature whose lack of bad faith meant that you wouldn’t dare to graze her with a finger. He felt proud of his girlfriend, but also inadequate: the two things together kept him from scenting that, deep down, the matter was a little more complicated.

  It was a question of scent, literally, an event that started with a package containing a bottle of Aqua Velva that Gerda had given him months earlier. That beribboned acquisition, he understood, was similar to other gifts he had learned to appreciate, he who in the big department stores would have been unable to choose the perfect wallet to replace a worn-out one, the scarf of a particular blue. Sometimes they were birthday presents, sometimes she dragged him to the famous sales, when the temples of commerce filled up with all those who otherwise wouldn’t venture in, and the salespeople displayed the impassive endurance of notables forced to receive homage from the plebeian rabble. But he had to admit that watching her try on a dozen hats or parade in evening gowns, which she then abandoned, saying she was looking for something simpler, entertained him, even excited him a little, like a forbidden game.

  One afternoon, leaving Tietz, they came upon a picket line turning its grim gaze toward the Polizeipräsidium. No Berlin square had been as caught up in protest movements as Alexanderplatz, none had seen so many dead, wounded, barricades, mass arrests: since the Spartacist insurrection of May 1, 1929, the last bloody proof of the treatment that the Social Democrats reserved for the opposition on the left. Holding him under the arm as couples out shopping do, Gerda had immediately pulled him toward those accusatory faces, raising her fist. In the gesture, the half-empty Ka-de-We bag, used for the role of the client accustomed to the best, had slid to her elbow, and he had whispered in her ear: “Ka-de-We for all, comrades: we won’t be satisfied with Tietz or Wertheim!”

  “Stop it, stupid.”

  That weak answer had confirmed that, for Gerda, a world cured of inequality would also have to accept the universal right to excess. Watching her raise her fist with the bag on her elbow, he desired her very much, the promise of an earthly paradise that he had the privilege of tasting in advance.

  But he couldn’t learn to like the aftershave she’d brought him from the Kaufhaus des Westens. He thought he had weighed the words in which he’d told her that for him it was an unjustified waste, but she could exchange it for some nice little thing for herself. All hell broke loose. Gerda really insisted on the antiseptic properties of her gift, as if that were the reason that she was mortally offended. The fact is that in the blink of an eye they had arrived at accusations that skirted insult: you want me to be something else, forget it, I’ll never be what your schemes require. You know what I say? Go back to your Pieter. And get yourself someone who marches like a dragoon, preferably with a mustache, since that’s what you deserve. Gerda turned fierce to the point of trying out all the amateur endowments of the virago, only then the exaggeration made her laugh, change her tone, repeat in the most persuasive way how happy she would be if he kept that fresh-smelling American lotion. Keep it? He had kept it, used it almost never. The perfume on his face disturbed him—not bad, in fact, but useless and alien. To preserve the peace, he sprinkled it on when she came to Berlin, waiting for the parvenu-like odor to evaporate. For that reason it disconcerted him how in the world it could bother him again at the end of the day, when it was the last thing he wanted to be invaded by: sinking his hands in Gerda’s hair, directing his tongue to her small nipples, sniffing the secret stuck to his fingers in a perfumed secretion so rich that the trail of Aqua Velva arrived like sabotage, an olfactory hallucination. So he had suspended the morning applications: if Gerda had to rebuke him, he would say that he preferred her in her natural state to the chemical.

  But there were no explanations that time or the next. Having spent a glorious weekend, Georg resumed his classes and the training at the Charité, but those commitments weren’t the reason that Gerda didn’t prolong her visits to Berlin. She no longer went around like a tourist, even if she still loved to sit in the fashionable cafés, go to the movies when the weather was bad, walk on the sumptuous boulevards of officialdom. But walking in the morning past Alexanderplatz she often stopped at the tobacco shop in the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, and went on to the Communist stronghold where Georg occasionally sent her: to make a contribution to Rote Hilfe, to leave leaflets in the right places, to meet someone in a shop-office-print shop or a union headquarters. She luxuriated in the welcome she found everywhere, ignoring the initials and symbols that changed from one red sign to the next. Following Georg’s directions, Gerda, heedless by nature, hopeful by principle, traced a possible route for a united front on the left. She never described a moment of fear, except once, when she ran into a Nazi scumbag who, complete with paramilitary equipment, was advancing on Grenadierstrasse, the most distinctly Jewish street in the Scheunenviertel. She didn’t seem too worried by the clashes between reds and browns that were the order of the day. She was confident that he wouldn’t send her near the hot spots, and, in any case, they followed the news of expected outbreaks of violence like a weather bulletin. It was an illusion to think you could foresee all the disturbances, anyway: another young lady from the provinces would never have ventured into the capital, perhaps not even to visit. Gerda instead had an expression of satisfaction when she repeated to him that she had learned to skirt the dangers like a genuine Berlin girl.

  Georg, finding her on the bed reading as if nothing had happened, hugged her hard. And one day he smelled the unmistakable scent of Aqua Velva.

  “I’m using your aftershave, since you don’t. Do you mind?”

  “No, no, go ahead,” he had replied, incredulous, “but I was wondering . . . ”

  “You know, I find it really good, otherwise I wouldn’t have got it for you. Who cares if it’s not very feminine . . . ”

  “Well, that scent . . . what do you need it for? You don’t seem to have a beard growing.”

  “I should use up my eau de toilette when I go out in that foul air?”

  The question had evaporated: Gerda didn’t fail to find her solutions, and she would never go along with anyone’s schemes.

  Then things changed, suddenly came to a head. Dr. Kuritzkes would prefer not to think about it, but the long circuit around Piazza Venezia, the incubator and stage of Fascism, makes it impossible to avoid those memories. He wasn’t in time to tell Gerda he’d been arrested. No evidence had been found, but after his room in Berlin was searched, which happened while he was still in prison under investigation, the widow Fischer had barely let him in. “Take your stuff and go: here everything is all right, but I will not tolerate the enemy in my house. Fine young man, sent to the university to learn how to stab Germany in the back!”

  All this he had told her later, when he went to pick her up at the station, as they had agreed earlier. To force her to listen to him he had put down her suitcase. It was better for her to return to Leipzig on the last train. The witch didn’t want traitors to the country, but she wanted her money on the nail. So he had moved to Max and Pauli’s, in Wedding, where he shared the kitchen with a tram worker. That is to say he was sleeping there, and would stay and live there.

  “Let’s go to the old Pension, I’ll pay” had been Gerda’s immediate and generous off
er.

  “I don’t know if they’d take us. I’ll go to trial, there could be reports.”

  “Now don’t exaggerate, having a girl isn’t a crime yet. Or you want to have every movement dictated?”

  During the week when he had adapted to the stagnation of reboiled coffee and the Maggi bouillon, to the springs of the cot and the sleep of his tram-worker companion, Georg had prepared himself. Just as he had reckoned with arrest, he had thought about Gerda’s reactions, calculating which would come next. Not a shadow of fear crossed her face, a hint of bewilderment, a spasm of vexation.

  “No. It’s not a good idea to go to that hotel. Believe me,” he replied.

  “O.K., but there are others, much worse, where they won’t make such a fuss. Maybe you killed someone? It happens, these days, but I’d like to know . . . ”

  Was she provoking him out of persistence or had she become annoyed? Right there, in the middle of the Anhalter Bahnhof, teeming with uniforms regular and irregular, maybe even more abundant than the pickpockets, the beggars, and the homeless? And he, rather than saying come on, I’ll explain everything, but let’s get out of here, had in a choked voice yelled how out of place her sarcasm was. Didn’t she know that murder was never at the top of the list of crimes in a state crippled in war, or blinded in the right eye? Hadn’t he dragged her to the cemetery of Friedrichsfelde, where she had been so moved before that wall of oxidized brick, the enormous star that reminded her of a Christmas Zimstern, the pile of roses offered to their Rosa? What punishment had the murderers of Luxemburg and Liebknecht received, and then what about Leo Jogiches, killed in custody in Moabit by a cop whose first name, last name, and even rank were known? Or the killers of the minister who signed the surrender, that Erzberger, further guilty of having taxed the landowners, how many years had they served? And the students who had murdered with a shot to the head fifteen workers detained for who knows what seditious act near Marburg? Zero. Not to mention the little Austrian corporal who for a beer-hall putsch had gotten away with eight months and not even expulsion, for love of country! No, such a sincere lover of Germany could aspire to the chancellorship. Ludendorff: absolved. Hindenburg, the murderer of millions of soldiers: president of the Republic! Whereas the Rote Hilfe lawyers had told him that, if any evidence emerged that he was close to the revolutionary left, a charge of High Treason couldn’t be ruled out. Why? Because he hadn’t run away in the face of yet another fascist terrorist assault. Because the entire papier-mâché republic built in the Ufa film studios in Babelsberg was coming down . . .

  “Yes, better,” Gerda had whispered to him, and then, taking him under the arm, aloud: “Don’t be angry, dear: if you already bought the tickets for the operetta we’ll go to the movies another time!”

  The operetta?

  Of course, people were looking at them. As they quickly crossed the waiting room with Gerda’s suitcase, which seemed a serious hindrance, and his anguish, which, however, was easing, he let out: “How will it end?”

  “They lost more than four percent compared to July . . . ”

  “But they have Hindenburg and his cabal on a tight rein.”

  Outside, a Siberian wind was blowing, and the rain came down obliquely; Gerda was freezing in her short jacket. They had gone into the first cinema, one of those which showed old silent films without interruption and served as a shelter for people like them. Gerda huddled up as close as possible, her feet on the suitcase. He kissed her for a long time in the wavery darkness that was like an underwater background, a shiver of two merged temperatures that melted in the mouth. Nervous, aroused, stuck on the hard narrow seat, he suggested that they go to Wedding, since at that hour there was no one home.

  Walking from the bus stop they passed by the most notorious apartment building in Berlin. There was still no visible sign of the rent strike that the tenants had just joined, only the aspect of a wretched fortress, of a musty prison. “Meyers Hof, right?” Gerda commented, and he, nodding, pulled her past, when before he would have taken her from one courtyard to another, to show her how the proletariat was reduced to living.

  Georg recalls the cot pulled down, the damp cold (lighting the stove was ruled out), the neutral gaze with which Gerda observed the room, hesitating over which garments to take off. Dress, shoes and stockings no, leather jacket put on again over the slip. The underpants ended up on a clothespin attached to the line where the baby’s diapers were hanging. He recalls the constant noise on the stairs. The framing of the bucket of potatoes, the bucket of coal, the child’s beloved ball (what was it doing there, or had that always been its place?), the ironing board that leaped to the edges of the view in his plunger-like movements. He recalls that Gerda came suddenly, prodigiously, came with her hand over her mouth, biting it, and, with just time to pull out, he, too.

  And then? Then who knows. They had composed themselves, probably, tidied up, exchanged some words, some kisses. Held hands returning to the bus stop? Feeling good? Yes, that yes.

  There were two seats at the back on the upper deck of the bus. There was a rolling motion, a stable-like warmth that made them sleepy. Gerda’s bare head on his shoulder, her rain-soaked hat on her lap. Was she dreaming? Not necessarily. There was a lot of traffic, because of the bad weather, or because it was near Christmas, but that jerky progress met the euphoric daze in which every tension melted.

  Without changing position, Gerda opened her eyes again, whispering something in his ear: a proposal to be better organized whose details he no longer remembers. He recalls that she asked him to find out about hotels by the hour and to buy Fromms again: a pack cost nothing. A certain desire must have been revived in him, an animal hope that had been gradually fading as she concentrated on the economic aspects of their next Berlin meetings. Money wasn’t a new theme, so Gerda’s talk was reduced to an enveloping hum.

  The Pohorylles had let go the maid, and then an errand or shop boy. With her brothers settled at the big Ury department stores, Gerda had to apply herself to balancing the accounts of her father’s business. Herr Heinrich seemed among the most hopeless of Galician Jews at running a business, having asked for loans not only from relatives but even, through his daughter, from the former boyfriend in Stuttgart. And yet what Gerda claimed was undeniable, that is, that the times were difficult, much more difficult for those who sold eggs than for those in the fur business, no matter whether they did a modest trade, like Georg’s father compared to the Chardacks, for example.

  “The rich are always rich, as you teach me, while those who aren’t start saving even on eggs. The egg is a perishable good, the supreme fragile merchandise. Now they want to let them rot; using the ideology of race, the competition takes advantage of it until it’s up to us to lower the prices again. But then we become the incarnation of the disloyal Jew, and in the end the Aryan earns twice as much with the same eggs that come out of the same filthy asses. What to do? Let’s hope for salmonella, in any case let’s not get discouraged. Anyway that’s enough: I didn’t come to Berlin to complain.”

  Gerda’s outbursts were like that, as evanescent as they were energetic. Often they weren’t even outbursts, but the summary of what had happened to her since they parted, poured out on some mode of transport or an unattractive stretch of street. But there, at the rear of that bus that was taking them back to the center, the usual outburst had broken off: with a sigh, no, an uncontrollable inhalation of air, a disconsolate sob.

  “What’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  “Nothing. Leave me alone, it’ll pass.”

  “No, tell me, please: maybe we shouldn’t have, I don’t understand . . . ”

  She didn’t answer, looked for a handkerchief, and when she opened the purse the hat fell off her lap. Georg made an awkward move to pick it up from under the seat, while Gerda sat with the handkerchief balled up in her fist, tears coming down again, a frightening look he’d never seen before.

 
She was unable to speak. He embraced her again, caressed her, putting a lock of hair in place.

  “I can’t do it anymore.”

  She seemed of parchment, suddenly old. And her voice, when she managed to find it, was a squeak that became hoarse as soon as she calmed down a little.

  Righting herself after every blow, she whimpered, always finding a remedy. Since she was a girl, thanks to her aunt, who had means but no children, she’d always dressed fashionably. And so she had sworn never again to bring home the classmates who’d sneer at their strange German, the strange candelabra, the house in the courtyard, the untidiness, her mother. Never mind, they didn’t deserve it. And then, moving from elementary to Realschule, running off at the first bell, running to get the piece of paper showing the exact quantity of eggs transmitted to the uncle’s business, Vereinigte Eierimporte, where Papa was a traveling salesman with a commission on the sales: half in currency (and in that half lay their salvation), half in wastepaper. The number of cartons sold diminished, the zeroes of the exchange rate exploded, the calculations had to be made before New York woke up, eggs and commission estimated, each egg was worth a hundred and more billion, up to three hundred and twenty billion Reichsmark, which after the reform became thirty-two Pfennig, nothing. And her brothers hurried off on bicycles with suitcases full of bills to get in line at the baker and the butcher, she at the dry goods store because it was the most important shopping. At the age of thirteen she established priorities and strategies, running to Karl and Oskar to know what they could buy and how much they had to pay, if they were still in line. If her father couldn’t call in time, if the line was long, if the American stock exchange had reopened before their turn came, all the plans had to be remade. Not even the cash was enough. To possess nothing but the provisions bought up on the good days or traded for with the eggs to be discarded, and she was always the one who had to deal with it. Not being able to count on anyone. Hearing the math teacher say that she didn’t deserve a better grade “because you already have calculation in your blood, but you lack the geometric spirit of the ancient Greeks.” Hearing her mother, frightened by the volatility of the numbers that forced Papa to move around between illegal Switzerland and anti-Semitic Poland, repeat that, thank God, people there couldn’t do without eggs: for breakfast, for cakes, and for the Spätzle that were a meal in themselves. Hearing the same old story again today, without the Spätzle and with much more fear. Hearing again that her parents were talking about leaving, returning to Lviv for a while, moving to Yugoslavia, looking for contacts in Argentina, as in ’23 and ’29, when there had been the bankruptcy and the move to Leipzig. A life sitting not on suitcases, Gerda said, pointing to the one in front of the seat, but on cartons of eggs. “That’s why I wanted to be much better off, or, to tell the truth, really rich.”