Lime's Photograph

by Leif Davidsen

  And then the first photograph of Amelia, wearing a white blouse and a blue skirt, squinting in the sunlight in front of the fountain on Plaza Cibeles in Madrid. The sight of her beautiful, dainty feet in gold sandals made me weep. Her twisted face as she gives birth to Maria Luisa, whose curly-black head can just be seen on its way out. The two of them together, naked in the sunshine at a cove near San Sebastián. And the last photograph I ever took of them. They’re sitting side by side on a bench, feeding the pigeons. I hate those rats with wings, but Maria Luisa loved them, and I’ve captured the moment, the birds like a halo round their heads, the eye drawn towards the child’s laughing face and the woman’s joyful eyes. I studied them for a couple of hours, my grief like physical pain.

  Box after box. Envelope after envelope. Photographs that meant something only to me, and photographs which had made me famous and rich. There was one image that I studied for a long time. It was taken in 1971. It showed a group of paparazzi outside a restaurant in Kensington. I’m in the photograph too, I must have lent my camera to a colleague. We’re young and the way we’re posing makes us look as if we’re a football team. There’s rain in the air. I could recall the smell of damp clothes and Virginia tobacco and hear their jovial voices. We’re laughing, most of us have got a fag in our mouth or hand, and our hair is long, cut in a pudding basin style. We’re wearing jeans and leather jackets. Our cameras, with their telephoto lenses, hang round our necks, like ancient talismans worn by a mystical tribe. We’re waiting for John Lennon and Yoko Ono to leave the fashionable restaurant after their lunch. When they appeared our noisy bravado and camaraderie would vanish, and we would charge forward and point our lenses at them, each of us hoping that we would be the one to get the shot that would put food on the table that evening.

  We stood there in cold and wind, sun and rain. Waiting for our prey like a pack of wolves. We hunted in packs, but only the strongest got the big pickings. We knew where the famous ate, exercised, walked their dogs, visited lovers. We knew the habits of the royals better than we knew what our own families were up to. We were predators, pursuing our quarry on familiar terrain. They tried to dodge us, but we tracked them down and bagged them if we were lucky. They also sought us out when they thought they could use us in a power struggle, or because they feared being forgotten more than they feared the lens. I was part of the regular pack but, like so many others my age, I left the group when I thought there were photographs to shoot and money to be earned elsewhere. In Moscow, Beirut, Tehran, East Berlin, New York, Madrid. News coverage or sports coverage. The world was my playground and my workplace. I spoke the international language of the photograph, and it could be understood by everyone, everywhere. The 20th century is the century of the photograph, moments captured in a split second that recorded history, usually to be forgotten two days after the photograph had appeared in the newspaper. But not Jacqueline Kennedy’s picture. My lucky break. My ticket to the big money.

  I sat looking at the photographs, sentimental and drunk and despondent because I could see how the years had vanished, time blown away like the pages of a calendar in an old American movie. Childhood, adolescence, manhood. Captured on perishable photo paper or brittle, crackling negatives and yet inescapably over. I never gave my age a thought when I had Amelia and Maria Luisa. Didn’t fear growing old. Now, holding my photographs in my hands, I could almost feel the physical decline in my body, the laboured beating of my heart. I began calculating the number of times my heart had beat over nearly 50 years, and grew dizzy at the thought of the huge task it had accomplished. I pictured the grit forming in my kidneys, the black coating on my lungs, the fragile brittleness of my bones and suddenly I was afraid of dying, furious with time and with God who let it pass without our noticing. Without our understanding that every second has gone once it’s been.

  Eventually I returned to the photograph lying on the top of the pile. I don’t know what drew me to it exactly, probably a sense that it harboured a secret, that the photograph was somehow closely linked to the incident. I studied that photograph of Lola Nielsen, the woman with Marianne Faithfull’s hair, and the man behind her.

  Clara Hoffmann of the Danish security service had put the photograph in front of me in the Cerveceria Alemana and life had not been quite the same ever since. So now I put it on the floor in the Hotel Inglés, looked at it and remembered.

  There was one more print from the same period. A colour photograph, taken in a living room. Lola Nielsen was pictured with another woman whose name I couldn’t remember, and three men, all sitting round a low table. There were two large, brown pottery ashtrays on the table and a chillum left carelessly alongside an old-fashioned pipe. That famous poster of the era was hanging on the wall – Che Guevara with his stubbly beard and gentle eyes below his beret, contemplating the evil capitalist world. There was also a poster denouncing the imperialist war in Vietnam that galvanised my generation. Like so many other things, it’s forgotten now, a distant conflict in a faraway country. The chairs and sofa looked like they had come from a flea market. Lola is playing her guitar, and the men are looking at her. Her fair hair half-conceals her face. One of the men is Ernst Strauss who had arrived that summer from Berlin with two other Germans. They look alike, young men with beards and long hair.

  I remembered that they had stayed in the commune for a couple of months early in the summer. I could picture them: intense and committed, discussing the revolution. They were dogmatic, insisting that a peaceful, social revolution was no longer an option.

  “Through the work of small, disciplined groups organised as independent cells, bourgeois society will be forced to reveal its true fascist face. The bourgeois state must be forced out of its repressive tolerance through violence and terror. The Palestinians have proved that the international community won’t listen until words are accompanied by force, until hijackings or the taking of hostages put the cause on the front page of newspapers all over the world. We must strike at the very heart of bourgeois society via the armed actions of the people.”

  It was then that I realised that Ernst wasn’t West German, but East German. At least he had been born in Halle. “Did you escape over the Wall?” I’d asked him, but his answer was evasive.

  Quite a few of the Danes in the commune agreed with the young Germans, while others opposed the use of violence. The discussions were heated, but mostly Lola and I kept out of them. Lola thought only of her career as a songwriter, while my thoughts revolved mainly round my photographs – how I was going to be the Robert Capa of my generation, getting Lola or some other girl into bed and smoking hash. I knew the right phrases, but I didn’t really believe in their Marxist and revolutionary talk. West Germans and Danes had it too good.

  I studied the photographs, remembering more. We had all earned some money picking strawberries on the flat fields that encircled the town. We got up at 4 a.m. and cycled out to the place where a tractor towing a trailer was waiting to take us to the day’s picking area. The money was good if you worked hard, and no one asked for your tax code or your social security number. I suddenly recalled the feel of the heavy wet plants and the taste of the big, sweet berries, the cool morning breeze and the smell of salt and mist from the sea nearby, and I could see the bent backs and the raised bottoms in the grey, morning light and feel the biting stiffness in the small of my back.

  And then suddenly I remembered something else.

  I had left Lola’s room early one morning. She didn’t feel like picking strawberries that day. Usually she didn’t feel like it. She counted on men providing for her. She spouted all the feminist theories but, as so often with her, they were mostly empty words. She would rather be waited on hand and foot, preferably by men.

  As I came out of her room at the very top of the building and went downstairs, I saw a shadow sort of pull itself back, and then half-run down the stairs ahead of me to the kitchen. The commune occupied the large, old, main house of a disused farm and people were always coming and going,
so you often encountered someone you didn’t know. Many had believed that a commune really did mean communal living, and that if there was a spare bed you could just move in. I went down to the kitchen to have a cup of coffee and some breakfast with the others but I was too late. They had already left. A woman was standing by the sink with Ernst. She was holding a mug of tea and talking energetically but quietly in German, while Ernst listened intently. I said good morning and the woman turned her face away and Ernst asked me to make myself scarce in a strange, harsh tone of voice. I didn’t reply, just got a cup of coffee and some bread and cheese. It was as much my kitchen as theirs. The woman stood with her back to me. She had a rather slender, attractive back under a baggy sweater that hung outside her faded jeans. Her hair was short, in a simple cut, and I got a glimpse of a pale, severe face and peculiarly fervent, intense eyes when she glanced at me. The two of them stayed where they were and I went out into the yard and sat in the early dawn and ate my breakfast, drank my coffee and smoked a cigarette.

  That evening I asked Ernst about the girl. He was standing in the old garden behind the farmhouse, his ardent gaze following Lola as she wandered around in the evening sun, her fair hair loose down her back, her body naked under a flimsy, striped cotton dress. She was holding a three-year-old by the hand, the daughter of one of the people who lived in the commune. I knew Lola had slept with Ernst, but it didn’t bother me. I liked Lola’s indolent nature and sensual, leisurely lovemaking, but I wasn’t in love with her. Not so it hurt. Not so I got jealous. We aimed to drop words like jealousy and infidelity from our vocabulary. No one could own someone else’s desire, or their right to satisfy that desire with other people. I knew what she was like from the outset. After all, she had left someone else’s bed to get into mine. But Ernst wasn’t coping too well with the new, revolutionary openness.

  Ernst had looked at me, even though it was hard for him to take his gaze from Lola moving sensually in the lovely, Danish summer evening. Insecurity was written all over his young face, and he blushed slightly. Half in fun and half in earnest, I said to him that the mysterious woman who had been in the kitchen wasn’t as pretty as Lola, was she? He turned on me in a rage, snarling that I should mind my own business, that I would be wise to forget I had ever seen her. He left the garden, furious. And I never saw him again. He vanished, along with the woman. They might have come back later in the summer, but a week later I packed my rucksack and hitched to Copenhagen to seek my fortune.

  It wasn’t until a few years later that I learned the name of the woman when I saw her face on wanted posters in West Germany. Her intense eyes, alongside Ulrike Meinhof’s intense eyes, stared out from the poster that stated that they were wanted for murder, kidnapping, robbery and other terrorist activities. But I didn’t think much about it. I can remember only that when I saw her photograph, I realised that my suspicions had been right. The commune near Bogense had sown the seeds of terrorism, but they were being sown in many places back then. Most of us didn’t overstep the mark. Just look at Oscar and me, and some of the others who lived there at the time. One is a successful advertising executive. Another is a Secretary of State, known for his robust, effective handling of his ministry in the right-wing government of the 1980s.

  I studied the photograph again, looking carefully at one of the three young men. Suddenly I remembered his name – Karsten Svogerslev. He had a lot of curly hair and a big beard and sat farthest to the left, looking across at Lola. I didn’t really keep up with Danish politics, but now I realised that he was a member of parliament, part of a far-left alliance of old communists, anarchists, Trotskyists and Maoists, All the political parties from the 1970s that called themselves something containing those words: Worker, Communist and Party. Otherwise most of the people from those days had left their pasts behind. When the Berlin Wall fell, their convictions crumbled with it.

  I had left both the commune and Denmark behind long ago, and Lola was just one woman among many, a pleasant memory, but nothing more than that. It wasn’t until I was sitting in that hotel room nearly 30 years later, seeking to retrieve the fragments of the past from the recesses of my mind that it all came back to me.

  I spent the night before I left the commune with Lola. Her room was small, with sloping walls. The only piece of furniture was a wide bed which she had found in what had once been a bedroom in the farmhouse and painted deep blue, and some old wooden beer crates painted dark red and covered with velvet. The walls were bare and white, decorated only by her guitar, which she had hung up on the wall. It was very hot, and the warm summer evening air drifted in and out through the curtainless window, carrying away the smoke from our joints. We were naked and had made love and she was lying on her side tracing patterns on my chest. Her breast brushed my arm and I felt warm and light-headed from sex and marijuana and I was both sad and happy at the thought of leaving. Feet were made to roam and I would pursue my restless instincts. I thought of the nomad as a romantic figure and I saw myself as a modern nomad with the whole world as my domain. I was never going to own more than I could put in my rucksack. Others could sing. I would take photographs, since photographs could be sold anywhere. I was 20 years old and hopelessly romantic. I had my secondary school leaving exam. I had worked for six months spray-painting cars and put money aside. I had done my compulsory military service, giving a year to the nation. Considering the circles I moved in and the spirit of the times, I should really have refused and done the 16 months of civilian work that was the alternative, but I really couldn’t be bothered. Next I had worked as a labourer. I had earned enough to do a bit of travelling, and I hadn’t told the others at the commune about my savings in the bank in Odense. I called it my freedom fund.

  Now I remembered that I had taken a photograph of Lola that night or rather early morning, as it had begun to get light outside. I searched for it in the suitcase, as memories rolled like a film in my intoxicated mind. I could see it quite clearly. She’s sitting up in bed, naked, and is pulling her long hair up above her head, raising her breasts. Her long legs are bent slightly to one side in a Little Mermaid pose. It must have been a lovely photograph, but I hadn’t kept it. It wasn’t in the suitcase. For a moment I felt huge disappointment, but then I sat back down cross-legged on the floor and studied the photograph of Lola and Ernst by the harbour in Bogense, remembering our last night together.

  “Where do you come from, Lola?” I had asked.

  “From nowhere,” she had answered.

  “We all come from somewhere and we’re all on the way somewhere.”

  “I grew up in Vordingborg in a military family, but I’m from England originally. I’m adopted. I think I’m a member of the aristocracy. Something tells me there was a big scandal,” she had said.

  She reinvented herself constantly, giving herself new roles, new identities and backgrounds, she wrote her own history and didn’t worry about tangling herself up in lies and inconsistencies. Each time she created a new myth, she became convinced that it was true. Once she had told the commune that she was the daughter of an unmarried mother who had taken to drink in Copenhagen. I knew that she had told Ernst that she was the eldest of a family of six children and had grown up on an impoverished farm on the west coast of Jutland. Her Danish didn’t give her away. You could tell that I was from Fyn by the way I spoke, even though I was already trying to make it sound like standard Danish or even working-class Copenhagen. Her voice was elegant and mellow, rather like an actress in an old black and white film from the 1940s, with a delicate, nasal tone that flattened the “a” sound as members of the upper classes from north of Copenhagen did.

  I didn’t contradict her. She kissed my chest and caressed me with her tongue and further down with her fingers and I could feel my desire swelling again between her hands.