The Girl with the Leica

by Helena Janeczek

  “And now?”

  “Now, too, but it doesn’t matter . . . ”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That I don’t really know what I’ve chosen . . . you, for example.”

  “Ah, magnificent! Come on, get ready, we have to get off.”

  How luminous it all seems now, with that broad view over the Tiber at the point where it embraces the Tiber Island, flowing past the unharmed synagogue (if only they had destroyed it, like the German ones, and spared the congregation), the sun in front reflected by the water for a more dazzling effect. Even memories that aren’t altogether good become so at a distance. They are restored the way the frescoes of saints and Madonnas and angels in heaven are for the Olympic Games: and if in Berlin little remained to restore, it’s not a problem that has anything to do with him.

  He stopped meeting Gerda in Berlin. He saw her in Leipzig, but he can’t remember if it was before the catastrophic Reichstag fire, when he had hidden in various Schrebergärten in the Rosental, waiting for the customs stamps for white fox with which business friends of his father would smuggle him to Italy.

  Now he returns to Leipzig to see his family, but, walking along Gohlis or, worse, happening onto the Brühl, he has to keep both feet in the present. He almost never sees a known face. Most of those who didn’t die in a concentration camp stayed in the city where they spent the years of exile. Some comrades who fled to the USSR were swallowed up by the great white Arctic from which the skinned foxes came, the most valuable of the goods his father dealt in. His father, suicide. The families in Łódź and Odessa, discovered through searches set in motion by some surviving relative to whom the Jewish organizations announced their death at the same time. What’s worse is to have to admit that in the city where he was brought up, along with the barbarism, life and death had also been a matter of class. Where did you go, a Jew with a small egg warehouse, a small fur business, or an unemployed worker and small militant Communist? The thieves took your life when you had nothing else to steal: with calculation, however, a calculation without precedents in the history of exterminating invaders and bloodsucking tyrants. Licensed thieves, exploiters, and opportunists, under the cover of the fanatical obscurity that glorified the need for murder. No, he has nothing to reproach himself for, since he could have stayed in Naples rather than leave for Spain, and then it was the extremely taut thread of fortune that enabled him to arrive in one piece at the moment of Nazi Fascism’s surrender. But sometimes it weighs on him, the simple injustice of being alive.

  That’s how it is, but he can’t do anything about it, except enjoy the injustice, which isn’t too difficult on a September day like this. Wasn’t it in fact Gerda, the last time in Madrid, who said that it was almost a sin to be entertained again by Charlie Chaplin, when so many boys she had met the day before no longer could? And hadn’t she laughed just the same at the most memorable scenes in Modern Times, although the film, which had been shown so often, crackled in a scary way? Even Ted Allan had discarded his artificial cocky expression and relaxed into high-pitched trills. And he? He had appreciated everything: there was really nothing else you could do in wartime.

  He wouldn’t mind telling Mario about the projectionist who thundered from above like Zeus, “Quiet down there,” and rightly, because it took a superhuman calm to put on shows in a city that had been under siege for years. But meanwhile he’s stopped to wait for him, just beyond Piazza Belli, where a cigarette vender has appeared; Mario has concluded negotiations, and is about to return with a carton of Murattis. Once they were something else, a luxury item. Gerda’s preferred brand, as long as she could afford them, which later coincided more or less with the discovery that they weren’t as Smoked by Royalty and the Nobility but, rather, produced in a factory in Kreuzberg, where Pauli worked. Oh really? They could keep them: basically, except for the stupendous box, their aroma wasn’t much different from the others.

  The problem with Gerda, Georg thinks as his friend gets back on the Vespa, was that her readiness for change made her seem always the same to herself. Of course it produced astonishing things, but they passed over the surface and, deep down, fed the conviction that she was undamageable. The war, yes, changed Gerda, just as it changed everyone, civilians and, much more, the men at the front. And why shouldn’t a woman who went to the front almost every day resemble a soldier?

  Georg, to tell the truth, had seen her at work when she was based near his brigade, then a few other times in Madrid. He had been fascinated by the casual way she could choose her subjects, had admired the rapid, instinctive shots, but had never seen her photographing during a battle or a bombing. That is to say that, then, he knew that part of Gerda only through reflected images: the photos that she herself showed him, spreading open her notebooks at every one of their meetings; and then the figure evoked by the comrade-like tone with which men of every rank greeted her, the reputation for outstanding courage, the familiarity with which they called her pequeña rubia, little blonde. There was an echo of extraordinary respect around her, a flattering echo in which talents and characteristics that Georg knew well reverberated but were amplified into a fabulous aura. Was it true that she appeared on the barricades in silk stockings and high heels? That she was welcomed as a sort of talisman, a pilgrim Madonna who gave protection to the fighters?

  “Come on! Where’d you hear that garbage?” Gerda shied away, amused, and maybe not too much. The idea that someone venerated her seemed incredible, nonsense intended to diminish her work and her commitment. Yes, it was true that a couple of times she’d gone to the university neighborhood in nice clothes, seeing that one arrived directly by tram at the first defensive lines. But it was only a cheerful way of saying to those youths that, thanks to them, Madrid was managing to live, a way of encouraging them, and “you can be sure they appreciated it.”

  In those reactions Georg found the confirmation that Gerda, even in war, had remained essentially the same. She loved to be admired, of course she did, but there was no fire, smoke, or flaming skies that could go to her head—her head was attached to her shoulders, especially at critical moments. Not even the photographs of the fronts in Segovia, Jarama, and Guadalajara, and she said much less about the circumstances in which they had been shot (Why should she have to? They both knew the outcome of the battles and what it meant to be in the midst of them) and much more about the newspapers that had published them—not even those photos had roused in him the suspicion that she’d gotten reckless.

  Georg feels a retroactive pang as that word surfaces, and he nearly skids on the curves of Via Dandolo, and then recalls the only time he had the sensation that Spain was modifying Gerda: not under the blackout in Madrid or in the Sierra Morena but as early as November of ’36, when she came to see him in Naples.

  It had all been familiar, deliciously familiar, after more than a year apart that coincided with the time needed to absorb the affair with Willy and then the inevitable separation: the wait at the station, Gerda’s appearance on the platform, recognizing her at a distance by the astrakhan jacket, the sporty cap, the quick pace. Hearing her cry out his name, seeing her wave her free hand. The euphoric embrace as she handed him the suitcase, then they walked side by side, enveloped in Gerda’s chatter. The only variation was that he led her to the bus stop on the Rettifilo without asking if she would prefer, as usual, to walk.

  “Is it so far, where you live?” she in fact asked. “I’ve been sitting for days, I need to walk a little.”

  “No, in fact it’s close. But it’s not a nice walk.”

  “Only not nice? Or not nice where they’ll cut your throat?”

  Georg laughed. But waiting for the tram that was late in arriving, he began to push away the circle of kids who emerged rapidly from the alleys. They talked one on top of the other, in collusion or elbowing one another. They asked for change, cigarettes, candy, they offered tours and bell’otelle, ancient finds, corals, miraculou
s prayers, “Pretty lady, won’t you give us an offering for your health . . . ”

  “As you see, this is the main problem. And if it goes badly, stealing or pickpocketing.”

  Gerda brightened, uttering an answer incomprehensible to a little Schnorrer and, perhaps, thief who would never guess that Strumpfband and Büstenhalter, those nasty, martial words, indicated respectively girdle and bra. To be safe she had thought of the money before getting off the train, and “Sorry, Georg, can’t we skip the tram, which will be very full, and get one of these kids to carry the suitcase? If we give him a tip, he won’t steal it, I suppose, and he could also keep his friends away . . . ”

  Amazement that she had had this idea after ten minutes in Naples made him hesitate just enough so that Gerda, misunderstanding it as assent, spoke to one of the bigger ones, who had a more pleasing appearance.

  “You, what’s your name?”

  Leaving Georg the job of making a deal with the chosen one, she wonderfully disguised the fact that she hadn’t grasped anything but Mimì (“Isn’t that a girl’s name?” she asked him later). In order to be recognized as a resident and not a tourist, Georg had taken care not simply to give the address but to indicate the route that seemed shortest to him, since the lady had traveled for many hours and was tired: cut through Forcella, cross Via Duomo, and turn onto Via dei Tribunali until he reached the little square with the seventeenth-century church and the noble palazzo where he had found lodgings with two other students. He warned Gerda that her little ganef with the big eyes might still disappear with the suitcase, “but don’t worry, they’ve explained to me how to get it back.”

  “Good,” she replied, already distracted.

  On the way, Georg had realized that Naples was not only the cheapest city to live in and the most protected, because the Duce was in control there, up to a certain point: it was also the best suited for slipping out of the coordinates you belonged to. The writings BELIEVE OBEY FIGHT were concentrated in the larger squares, along the avenues hollowed out by earlier rulers. They stopped at the façades, where they crumbled along with the stucco corroded by the dampness of the soil and the stagnation of rains going back to who knows when. The first fifteen years of the new era in Naples had been reabsorbed by baroque fatalism. HE WHO STOPS IS LOST. Not him. As they proceeded, he offered the boy a cigarette, and he sucked it with a childish greed, happy, walking slightly lopsided. He had come to live there among the lost people, he was the comrade of that barefoot criaturo more than their antithetical prospects might lead them to imagine. Gerda also had to do with it, the fact that she had remained in Paris, the fact that he had lost her following a choice that he couldn’t object to. And yet seeing her walk through those alleys frozen in a millennial poverty, with the drawn-out cries that bonded men and strays in the stench of pee and remains of fish thrown from the peddlers’ carts; seeing her notice everything with impassive curiosity, the votive altars, the filth, the new growth of Mimì’s hair compared with the other boys, shaved and deloused, the children hanging onto the balconies to pull themselves up, bottoms sticking out and noses snotty (“Not as many as you see in summer.” “Ach so!”). Seeing her like that had made him perceive something unusual that he didn’t know how to define. What was different in that fluid way of moving and looking? And then what should he have expected, outrage, frightened disgust, squeamish pity? From Gerda?

  That night they had gone to dinner with a group of friends, both foreigners and Neapolitans, and she had satisfied her curiosities in an adventurous Italian in which she mocked both the fear that the scugnizzo (“That’s how it’s pronounced?”) might steal her suitcase and her own recklessness, which she justified as a blinding effect of the photographic gaze. When she arrived in Barcelona for the first time, she recounted, the whole world had told her about a German woman who had settled in Barrio Chino, a very bad neighborhood, and who fit in so well that thieves and gypsies not only didn’t try to touch her anymore but came running to her lens. That example hadn’t made for an agréable welcome: she had been sent as a war photographer and left to others the task of capturing the intolerable conditions of the poor.

  The sentence roused an admiring dismay, which Gerda picked up immediately, returning to her first confrontation with Naples and calling herself stupid because she had left the Leica to her companion. But after all she was on vacation, and would take advantage of it to learn again to see beautiful things above all. Which of them would offer to help her?

  Spurred by that request, they had taken her to the terrace of the Grand Hotel Excelsior for coffee (spending little less than in the trattoria of Borgo Marinai frequented by tourists and the middle class) and then to walk along the sea, where the low season and the western wind had swept away other presences. Enough that Gerda, attached to his arm, could describe without hesitation the grand Republican struggle and, in the pauses, sigh: “Look at the stars, feel the air and how peaceful it is!”

  Georg was relieved. They had spent the first week in visits to Gambrinus, panoramic walks on the Posillipo, returns to Via Toledo on a wave of second thoughts about a pair of suede shoes (“They’re very pretty, but in Spain what use would they be?”), increasingly extended forays into the working-class neighborhoods. A day of bad weather, when he had suggested a brief itinerary of churches, museums, and catacombs, had been enough to understand that Gerda’s patience for beautiful things, or at least beautiful and old, was rather limited. She had never been particularly attracted by them, but now her gaze seemed oriented by a journalistic instinct even when she was admiring the scenes of life on the frescoes and mosaics of Pompeii.

  She had become a photojournalist. But that was only the end point of an evolution that Georg had encouraged in his letters, and Gerda had never hidden anything from him. Maybe, after the liaison with Willy and all that talk about the laboratory at the Steins’, the didactic flâneries with the Leica belonging to her Hungarian friend, and then—hurray!—the first photograph sold to a newspaper, a fashion photo, Gerda wanted to regain her faith in what seemed to her more necessary: to photograph the things that needed to be shown.

  But even Georg was tired of being a guide. His life in Naples was a promised land, but a promised land for the wretched. He wanted to go home, look again at the photographs pulled out of a voluminous Baedekers Italien, find out how to enlist in the International Brigades.

  Had Gerda written to him about that photo she sold before they saw each other in Turin in April of ’35? There they had talked about the preparations for war, which weren’t being taken seriously enough abroad; about Italy, which, pursuing its vocation as a warmonger, could only pull Germany along behind. The conversation resumed under the porticoes had the pleasure of a conspiratorial tone. There was little time for talking alone, which was also by his choice. How should he introduce the schoolmate he was seeing? As a sweetheart, the word that was used there (but he wouldn’t have said it like that)? Friend was sufficient, partly so as not to seem subtly vindictive, hence inadequate and a little ridiculous.

  “Don’t dig up anything” had been the advice of Sas, the man who had watched him grow up, and whose liking for Gerda was unquestioned. Sas had come to Turin to spend some time with him and his brother, and also—as he later discovered—to get information from Gerda to bring to Berlin. He’d been engaged for some piano performances by a Prussian widow who wintered in Portofino and had arrived after that comfortable but exhausting interlude. Gerda was happy to see him again, happy with everything. Perfect in the frame of elegant Savoyard aristocracy, which she savored with splashes of irony along with the Punt e Mes, friendly with his girl, unsuspicious as a clandestine courier. The courage of his musician friend and all those who were resisting in the brown sewer provided a subject of sincere empathy until, after accompanying Sas to the station of Porta Nuova, Gerda had left, too.

  Georg had continued to see the Turinese girl but had also answered the letters in which Gerda told him
of her prohibitive desire for a Reflex-Korelle. Then there had been the gap of the vacations, the stab of pain on hearing that she would go to the Côte d’Azur with the Dachshund (but with Willy it had been terrible, Gerda confessed to him, and that was easy to believe). Finally the predictable news, relegated to the back of his mind for so long that, at that moment, he had managed to take it lightly. Have fun with your photographer until you get your camera, he would have liked to write. Instead he hadn’t answered her. So Gerda had tracked him down on the telephone. “I’m calling you from the agency where André found me a job, it’s important for me,” she had said, “but I don’t want to lose you.” He answered “I’m here” and “cordial good wishes,” sarcastic, distant, and yet emotional. Afterward he started writing a redundant letter of concepts like “respect,” “truth,” “need for clarity,” but hadn’t sent it. Meanwhile, Mussolini had declared war and in three days conquered Adwa, in the repugnant revanchist jubilation of the Stampa and the Corriere della Sera. The League of Nations had met and announced punitive measures. The postal services, overwhelmed by patriotic communications, threatened to swallow up the correspondence between Turin and Paris. A letter that arrived while Italy was denouncing the sanctions with authentic populist fury (he could count on his fingers the acquaintances who remained cool, or rather anti-fascist) had been buried somewhere or other for around a month. Gerda urged him to stay calm: “Listen to me, our paths at the moment are proceeding separately but they always run parallel . . . ” He had sent a short answer. He never knew if that letter reached the Paris address where she had gone to live with Friedmann or, with the help of the post office, had continued to travel on those parallel paths. Anyway, he had had his moment of clarity. At the university as well, where the Fascist students had begun to target foreigners, that is to say refugees, managing to expel those who were already working in research institutes. So he had moved to Naples, unhappy to lose a barely established circle of friends and the girl he realized he was fond of just as he said he had no idea about the future. But he felt in some way refreshed by a disillusionment that embraced everything, forcing him to turn the page.