They’re taking it easy up there, relaxed, too lazy even to get a drink from the refrigerator. They’re still talking about old acquaintances and the double life, between battlefields and returns to five-star hotels. A life that seemed increasingly odd as the reconstruction advanced and others found a job, a wife, a two-room apartment with hot water. In Paris Capa stayed at the Lancaster, which had provided the suite for Dietrich’s gilded exile before she went to Hollywood, and those ancient splendors had been resurrected after the war. The bill for the room burned up even the future earnings of the Magnum agency, but he insisted that otherwise he couldn’t get jobs worthy of his photographs. You met him at lunchtime on the Champs-Élysées, you with the baguette under your arm to nibble on in the street: sometimes he barely exchanged a greeting, others there was no way to avoid being taken to Le Fouquet’s, where he’d refresh you with everything you could wish for, while he, barely awake, ordered for himself and the ethereal mannequin or whore, not always of the highest quality, first a coffee, then an omelette, and finally a second bottle of champagne, after the one that had been uncorked to toast a friend of the glorious old days.
Chim was a character of a very different type, they agree. Mario recalled that, according to the gossip of the circle, he was among the many international homosexuals for whom Rome was turning out to be a party. And if they looked for clues in his cared-for clothes, his reputation as a gourmet, and the exquisite politeness toward changing female presences, the aura of secrecy seemed the most crushing proof. It was easy to observe that he kept his acquaintances carefully separate—the fashionable world, for example, from the circle around Carlo Levi, with whom he made those trips to southern villages that were to be dragged out of illiteracy. Maybe his motives were political and not private, and anyway it was his business.
Georg began to laugh, a dry laugh, commenting that people here think they’ve been clever for centuries, caput mundi, but they have the mentality of a provincial bigot, only more arrogant and vulgar.
“You’re telling me. But it’s comfortable in Rome.”
“Up here at your house certainly.”
In the courtyard a boy has stumbled and been grabbed by the pursuer—who is smaller, besides—amid loud complaints, because to have that kind of bad luck isn’t fair, and he limps willfully in the direction of home base.
“Did you ever see the series Chim did for UNICEF?” Georg asks. “It was the first time we’d commissioned that type of project—Children of Europe. Scarcely more than a brochure with a limited circulation, but the photos were published everywhere. If I bring you the book, perhaps you’ll remember some of them.”
“What year?”
“Around the end of ’48, the book came out in ’49.”
“It could be. I was writing for the newspapers at the time, I was still struggling to support myself in the cinema. I did a lot of jobs, I even worked in a blast furnace in Marghera—a little of everything. I came to Rome in 1950, the year after.”
Georg describes the material that was delivered to UNESCO when Chim returned from his trips, anxious to submit it to him, because they had in common Capa and many other things: Leipzig, where the photographer had studied at the Academy of Graphic and Editorial Arts, Spain, obviously, and even Polish origins. Discovering that Russian was the language Georg had heard as a child, Chim occasionally threw out a phrase, but mostly they spoke in German. It was the natural choice and guaranteed a certain reserve. They worked at four desks, one behind the other, like school desks. UNESCO was established in a provisional way in what had been one of the most sumptuous of the Belle Époque hotels, the Majestic. And since it was a quarter of an hour from the Lancaster, Chim suggested that he go with him when he went to see Bob, as he was calling him by that point. Capa, on the other hand, hadn’t gotten used to calling him David, even though it was the only genuine name between the two of them.
“He was from Warsaw, right? A Jew from Warsaw?”
“Yes, a Jew from Warsaw.”
The countries Chim visited for UNICEF were the ones where the condition of children was most desperate: Italy, Greece, Hungary, which was very important to Capa, Austria, which was overflowing with refugee camps, and inevitably Poland. A series of images showed a line of students crossing the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto—low damp mounds of earth, scattered with the last smashed bricks—to reach the area that had been rebuilt with the first socialist apartment blocks. Chim noted that his father’s publishing house, which brought out books in Yiddish and Hebrew, had been behind the big church that represented the only building not razed to the ground by the Germans. The most direct testimony that his parents were no longer alive, he had murmured as he turned the contact sheet, he had received not in Warsaw but in a city where, as luck would have it, he had shot many rolls of film. In that vacation town spared from the destruction, schools, orphanages, homes for disturbed children had been set up. Thanks to a Jewish organization, the pensione run by an aunt had also been turned into a sanatorium, where his father and mother had moved when war broke out. “It was this,” he said, showing him a couple of photographs. In one you saw a tubercular patient who, propped against her companions’ mattresses, displayed a rigid corset. Chim didn’t remember what he had done to get that smile and that comical expression in the dark eyes. Timid and radiant, a little in love maybe, Georg had observed. Chim made a sign of denial, and he had ventured a prognosis for how long it would take the spinal column to heal, something he knew about, having fought against TB when he was a partisan in Haute Savoie.
“Really?” Mario asks.
“The people in the villages were almost as afraid of TB infection as of the Germans, especially for their children. Dealing with it meant earning their gratitude and sincere collaboration.”
“I understand. So up there you didn’t fight?”
Georg gives an absentminded yes of confirmation, distracted by the cry “I’m coming!” down in the courtyard, which turns out to be the unlucky boy, or maybe not too unlucky, given his speed.
Mario is probably more curious about the Résistance in the mountains than about the genesis of a publication by means of which UNICEF, newly hatched and in search of support, wanted to publicize the state of need of millions of minors forced to do anything just to survive—steal, beg, prostitute themselves, pick up cigarette butts and resell them—and at the same time highlight the efforts to help them grow, study, and heal, so that Europe, too, might grow and heal. But the commitment to defeating the evil of ignorance is something they share, otherwise they wouldn’t have come up with that didactic film that explains how we perceive colors.
Then Georg takes as a starting point the children in the courtyard, emerging here and there from their hiding places, sometimes in time to touch home, sometimes grabbed in the last stretch, where, crushed behind the corner, “it” has found a system for capturing them.
“In theory the youngest children playing down there could be the offspring of the oldest kids photographed by Chim back then. Let’s say the most fortunate or obstinate or endowed with talent, and let’s say also a talent for life—I don’t know how that can be taught, and maybe it’s better not to know.”
Mario laughs, comments that he appears to be optimistic, and all in all he’s not wrong: yes, what they lived through seems truly far from these children of the miracle, even if stating that means supporting a certain kind of propaganda, and peace will never be a certainty.
“Anyway, they can run, catch each other, play . . . ”
Georg recalls some images taken in the park of a Roman villa to explain more clearly—not an ordinary villa but the one where Mussolini was arrested in ’43. Ironically, right on the burned grass of Villa Ada, Chim photographed some barefoot children, stripped down to the comical bloomers provided by the pious institution that had brought them to the outdoors and had them playing volleyball. Some without a leg, some without an arm, one, with prosthes
es on his lower limbs, even had a crutch to compensate for the rigidity of his movements: the child in the foreground, the only one wearing a shirt and long pants. Chim pointed out to him that the only two players whose faces were looking toward the camera, though at a distance, were blind, blinded by the impact of a bomb. Maybe not completely, but enough so that the effort of taking part in the game was enormous.
“He was able to capture the energy along with the incurable injuries. His art owed a lot to that refined consonance, a quality that caused his partner to say that, of the two, Chim was the better photographer. I think he was also alluding to the human material, because certainly Capa would never have made the pilgrimages to refugee camps and orphanages, the dive into the void of his own childhood: not for six months and a laughable fee, maybe not even for all the gold in the world.”
Mario wants to know what year Seymour and Capa died, and it’s a question so easy that Georg continues to follow the echo of the squabbles in the courtyard that accuse the tall boy of cheating. In the meantime he thinks of the invisible damage, the alterations of the nervous system spilling onto the perceptual-sensorial apparatus caused by certain experiences, not as a combatant but as a photographer. Not shell shock, as the Americans called it, only a vague imbalance that amplifies the attraction of danger, as if it were a sporting challenge, a game in appearance more like the one down in the courtyard than like the volleyball match at Villa Ada.
Chim was aware of it. At the time, Georg was confident that UNESCO would take on a task more significant than the works of reparation, as Chim had defined them. He was sorry that that sensitive man, evidently afflicted by melancholy, intensified by his experiences, had said he was content with the children portrayed on his journeys (he had even noted their names: Tadzio, Tereska, Elefteria, Angela . . . ), since he was unable to bring any of his own into the world. Chim’s speech seemed unacceptable, since most of those who had lost their families were trying to create one of their own. So one day, while they were looking at the photographs, he had allowed himself to object that the war was over. Chim, embarrassed, had changed the subject to Capa and said that in other circumstances their friend would have wanted ten kids, like a rabbi with a long beard.
“Too bad that other circumstances had a different idea,” Georg replied delicately.
“Maybe I shouldn’t say it to you, doctor, but I saw those two more happy than not . . . But things, natürlich, can always change, as long as there’s time.”
There’s no more time now, there hasn’t been for a while. But there’s always something left to repair, for example with a phone call to the Dachshund and, when he’s about to confide it, Mario asks him the question he was expecting from the start.
No, he answers, he didn’t know Robert Capa well. They were friends, it’s true, even if he had to be taken in moderate doses. But he was infinitely grateful to him. The free world would have preferred not to see the dirty life that la Grande République reserved for the Republican refugees: and the great photographer, who came to Argelès-sur-Mer to capture all the prophetic shame of it, had discovered that he was in one of those camps. If Capa hadn’t been able to obtain his release, he probably could have expected the fate of his companions who went from democratic-French barbed wire to Nazi German barbed wire.
“How is it that Capa came to mind today?” Mario asks.
The silence that follows delivers them to the last cries of the children excited by the game that has ended happily, radios broadcasting the news, horns and engines noisy down in the street. Then Georg, washed by those sounds, answers, lighting up.
“We had a friend in common who died in Spain. Today no one knows who Gerda Taro was. Even the traces of her photographs are lost, because Gerda was a comrade, a woman, a brave and free woman, very beautiful and very free, let’s say free in every respect.”
Mario must have understood: he asks no more questions. The children in the courtyard have decided to stop playing hide and seek. Sometimes, to follow an example, it’s enough to say a name.
EPILOGUE
COUPLES, PHOTOGRAPHS, COINCIDENCES #2
Look at them, finally, sitting outside at the Café du Dôme, with those smiles that speak to each other, gaiety unleashed by some sweetness or stupidity, the merest trifle is enough. You see it at a glance, looking at this photograph, the light uniform over André’s profile, the sun that lets him keep his jacket open, a spring day so mild that Gerda has taken off hers, or maybe she went out in short sleeves, since Rue Vavin is nearby.
They don’t realize they’re being photographed. The photographer has placed himself on the sidewalk opposite, focused with the wide-angle lens and shot in a second. Someone, however, has noticed that shot: the man at the table behind has interrupted his reading of the paper and, having lowered the page, now peers at the couple’s moves, as the direction of his gaze and the little smile emerging on his lips indicate. On the other side of the scene, and of the time that the photograph straddles, there’s a man of the past century who, like you, observes. If you look at him more closely, you note that his friendly smile seems almost a comment on the radiant smile of the protagonist: ah ils sont beaux, les jeunes, when they can make the girl they’re in love with laugh . . .
But how does he know? After all he has before him only the photographer, who has left the third glass half full of a milky drink. Maybe he happened to observe that lively liaison and it amuses him that someone has taken the trouble to capture it. Behind them, the busy garçon avoids the concert of smiles, and shines instead in the whiteness of his jacket, enlivened by the play of folds around the elbow, perfect center of the frame.
The waiter, well, he knows the habitués, you can be sure of it. Starting with that Friedmann, who has given himself a decorous look, thanks to Mademoiselle Gerda, always très chic and friendly to everyone. But the waiter wouldn’t measure up to that well-known haunt if he didn’t also know the clientele that doesn’t sit out on the sidewalk every damn day. Like the man who arrived from Montmartre and sometimes exchanges his photos at the tables: portraits of people more important than that couple, who are famous mainly at the Dôme, and some pictures that make those who work amid artists think that Monsieur Stein has a talent for capturing the flair of Paris.
In 1934, Fred Stein, who had arrived less than a year earlier, had caught a nocturnal winter love, a secret covered by the hair and coats of the two lovers, bodies fused in the shadow imprinted on the snow by the light of the streetlamp.
That snapshot perhaps carries within it the living memory of a flight disguised as a honeymoon, the quickest and most unsuspicious way of getting passports, when Fred’s arrest had become just a matter of time. The Steins were married in Dresden in the town hall—outside people applauded, shouting Heil Hitler!—and then gave themselves a present, because Fred loved taking photographs and according to Lilo was talented: a Leica.
You imagine that Fred rose quietly, going out to capture images of Paris, and that he left without making any noise, so as not to wake Lilo, exhausted from the off-the-books jobs—cook, dishwasher—that allowed him to become a photographer. Later, after the move to the address that on the visiting cards appeared as “Studio Stein,” she, too, learned to photograph weddings and baptisms, replacing her husband when he had other engagements. And it was Lilo who kept the accounts and the ménage of sublet rooms in the house that was always open to any friend or Party comrade who rang at the door. The daughter of a great doctor, she managed a life that was the polar opposite of her childhood, with servants and garden, but that life was also far from the solitude à deux captured by Fred in his nighttime wanderings: noisy and—even though the apartment looked out on the cemetery of Montmartre—rich in luminous moments. In ’35, when they celebrated the arrival of Gerda and Lotte with bulbs hooded by red and green shades, Lilo was immediately won over by the exaggerated bow with which André Friedmann introduced himself. She liked the disheveled look, the comical
way of showing off, the boyish bluster. Fred and Lilo were a few years older, they were twenty-five, but had become a support for those who were less disciplined with money, lodging, and feelings.
That day in April of ’36, Fred Stein arrives at the Dôme and stops to have a drink with friends. Paris is no longer the nighttime theater of disorientation, love no longer needs to bundle up in the anonymity of figures that draw a dual self-portrait of exile. Now it requires the close-up, belongs to those who manifest it: to Gerda Pohorylle and André Friedmann, on the sidewalk of the café where everyone knows them.
André has just begun to call himself Robert Capa, Gerda has just got her first press pass, the Steins live in a more comfortable apartment near Porte de Saint-Cloud, where Lilo manages the lab without having to take on countless other duties. Fred has developed a good clientele, and a name as a portraitist. The next year, included for the second time in a group show at the Galerie de la Pléiade, he will show some of his portraits of writers beside Man Ray and Philippe Halsman (who in those years chooses Ruth Cerf as a model). He’s not the only one who embarked on that career out of necessity, but in Dresden he didn’t do any apprenticeship, unlike Chim at the academy in Leipzig or Capa through Eva Besnyö and Kati Horna, who during high school were taught by a master of the Hungarian avant-garde. Fred Stein learned by himself, thanks to the wedding gift of a Leica and to Lilo, who helps him. It’s the Leica, he says, that taught him to photograph, he always carries it around his neck, treats it as an extension of his body. He can’t help it if that symbiosis clashes with the distrust of clients who, used to grandiose hocus-pocus, doubt that an acceptable portrait can emerge from a device scarcely bigger than a wallet. Things were so hard at the start that he had to insert “Promotion gratuite photo portrait” among the small ads in the newspaper.
The Girl with the Leica Page 25