Waiting for Robert Capa

by Susana Fortes

  Sometimes you can find yourself hundreds of miles from home, in an attic in the Latin Quarter, with water stains on the ceiling and pipes that sound like the foghorn of a ship, not knowing what will become of your life. Without residency papers, and with little money except for when your friends in Stuttgart can find a way of shipping some over to you. You discover the oldest reasons for uprooting, feel the same desolation in your soul as all those who have been obliged to travel the longest thousand miles of their lives and look at themselves afterward in the mirror and discover that, despite it all, a desire to be happy is written on their faces. An enthusiastic resolution, irreducible, void of cracks. Perhaps, she thought, this smile will be my only safe-conduct. In those days, the reddest lips in all of Paris.

  In a hurry, she grabbed her trench coat from the coat rack and went out into the morning of the streets.

  For months now, the city of the Seine was a hotbed of thoughts and opinions, a place conducive to the bravest and brightest ideas. Montparnasse cafés, open at all hours, became the center of the world for the newly arrived. Addresses were exchanged, job opportunities sought, the latest news from Germany discussed, and every now and again one could get hold of a Berlin newspaper to read. In order to get a summary of the day’s news, it was customary to go from table to table along all the stops on the route. Gerta and Ruth would often make a date to meet at Le Dôme Café’s outside patio, and it was precisely where Gerta was headed. Walking in her peculiar way, hands in the pockets of her trench coat, shoulders hunched from the cold chill as she crossed the Seine. She enjoyed that ashen light, the generous schedules, the lead gutters on the roofs, the open windows, and the world’s ideas.

  But Paris was not only that. Many considered the flood of refugees a burden. “The Parisians will embrace you and then leave you shivering in the street,” Ruth liked to say, and she was right. As it was done before in Berlin, Budapest, and Vienna, the fate of European Jews was now being written on the city’s walls. While passing in front of the Austerlitz station, where she was supposed to pick up a package, Gerta saw a group of young men from the Croix-de-Feu putting up anti-Semitic posters in the station, and before she knew it, night had fallen. Again, a bitter smell of gunpowder rose to her throat. It was unexpected and different from the fear that she had experienced at home when the doorbell rang. It was more like an uncontrollable eruption. A reckless sensation that caused her to scream, coarse and loud, with a voice that did not resemble her own in the least.

  “Fascistes! Fils de pute!”

  The rebuke was heard loud and clear, in perfect French. That’s exactly what she said. There were five of them. All were wearing leather jackets and high boots, like cocks with their spurs. But where the hell was her self-assurance and sangfroid? She had her regrets when it was already too late. An older man exiting the door from the post office looked her up and down with disapproval. The French, always so restrained.

  The tallest one of the group became defiant and began walking toward her, taking big strides. She could have found safe haven in a store, café, or in the very post office, but she didn’t. It did not occur to her. She simply changed direction, cutting the corner onto a narrow street with balconies looming above. She walked, trying not to accelerate the pace, instinctively protecting herself by holding her handbag tightly over her abdomen. Aware of the footsteps behind her. Cautious. Without turning around to look. When she had barely made it around the entire block, she was able to perfectly hear, word for word, what the individual on her trail had directed at her. A voice as cutting as a handsaw. And that’s when she started running. As fast as she could. Without caring about where she was going, as if her running had nothing to do with the threat she’d just heard but with another reason. Something inside, blocking her, as if she were being held captive in a labyrinth. And she was. Her mouth was dry, and she felt a pang of shame and humiliation heading up her esophagus, like the time when she was a child at school and her classmates poked fun at her customs. She went back to being that little girl in a white blouse and plaid skirt, forbidden to touch coins during the Sabbath. Someone who, deep down in her soul and with all her might, hated being Jewish, because it made her vulnerable. Being Jewish was a blue scarf speckled with snow in a doorway of a spice shop, her mother crouched over and keeping her head low. Now she was dodging the passersby she was brusquely meeting head-on, making them do a double-take: a young woman in such a rush could only be trying to escape herself. She took a quick left onto a passageway with gray mansard roofs and a smell of cauliflower soup that turned her stomach. And there she had no choice but to stop. At a corner, she grabbed onto a lead gutter and vomited all the tea from breakfast.

  It was after twelve when she finally arrived at Le Dôme Café. Her skin moist with sweat, her hair wet and pushed back.

  “What on earth happened to you?” asked Ruth.

  With shoulders hunched, Gerta sank her hands into her pockets and made herself comfortable in one of the wicker chairs without responding. Or if she had, it was done in an elusive manner.

  “I want to go to Chez Capoulade tonight” was all she offered. “If you want to join me, fine. If not, I’ll go alone.”

  Her friend’s expression grew serious. Her eyes appeared to be busy forming opinions, jumping to their own conclusions. She knew Gerta all too well.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  That could mean a number of things, thought Ruth. And one of them meant going back to the beginning. Winding up in the same place they thought they had escaped. But she kept quiet. She understood Gerta. How could she not? If she herself wanted to curl up and die each time she was at the Center for Refugees’ section 4, where she worked, and was obliged to turn the newly arrived away, to other neighborhoods, where it was known that they’d also be rejected because there was no longer a way to offer shelter and food to everyone? The largest flood of refugees had arrived at the worst moment, just as unemployment was at its highest. The majority of the French believed they’d take the bread right out of their mouths; that’s why there were more anti-Semitic protests in the streets. It was a bandwagon that had started in Germany and that was dangerously spreading everywhere.

  Most of the refugees had to pass around the same 1,000-franc bill to present to the French customs authorities to prove their income and be granted entrance permission. But Gerta and Ruth were never as defenseless. Both were young and attractive, they had friends, spoke languages, and they knew what to do in order to get by.

  “What you need is a real easygoing guy,” said Ruth, lighting a cigarette and making it clear she wanted to change the subject. “Maybe that way you’ll be less likely to complicate your life. Face it, Gerta, you don’t know how to be alone. You come up with the most absurd ideas.”

  “I’m not alone. I have Georg.”

  “Georg is too far away.”

  Ruth directed her gaze at Gerta again, and this time with a look of disapproval. She always wound up playing the nurse, not because she was a few years older but because that’s how things had always been between them. It worried Ruth that Gerta would get into trouble again, and she tried her best to help Gerta avoid it, unaware that sometimes destiny switches the cards on you so that while you’re busy escaping the dog, you find yourself facing the wolf. The unexpected always arrives without any signs announcing it, in a casual manner, the same way it could simply choose to never arrive. Like a first date or a letter. They all eventually arrive. Even death arrives, but with this, you have to know how to wait.

  “Today, I met a semi-crazy Hungarian,” Ruth added with a complicit wink. “He wants to photograph me. He said he needs a blonde for an advertisement series he’s working on. Imagine, some Swiss life insurance company…” she said, and then her face lit up with a smile that was part mocking, part mild vanity.

  The reality was, anyone could have imagined her in one of those ads. Her face was the picture of health, rosy and framed by a blond bob parted to the left, with a patch
of waves over her forehead that gave her the air of a film actress. Next to her, Gerta was undeniably a strange beauty with her gamin haircut, her severe cheekbones and slightly malicious eyes with flecks of green and yellow.

  Now the two were laughing out loud, slouching in their wicker chairs. That’s what Gerta liked most about her friend: the ability to always find the funny side to things, take her out of the darkest corners of her mind.

  “How much is he going to pay you?” she asked in all pragmatism, never forgetting that however appealing the idea was to them, they were still trying to survive. And it wasn’t the first time that modeling had paid a few days’ rent or at least a meal out, for them.

  Ruth shook her head, as if she truly felt bad dashing her friend’s hopes like that.

  “He’s one of us,” she said. “A Jew from Budapest. He doesn’t have a franc.”

  “Too bad!” Gerta said, deliberately smacking her lips in a theatrical manner. “Is he at least handsome then?” she mused.

  She had gone back to being the happy and frivolous girl from the tennis club in Waldau. But it was only a distant reflex. Or maybe not. Perhaps there were two women trapped inside her. The Jewish adolescent who wanted to be Greta Garbo, who adored etiquette, expensive dresses, and the classic poems she knew by heart. And the activist, tough, who dreamed of changing the world. Greta or Gerta. That very night, the latter was going to gain territory.

  Chez Capoulade was located in a windowless basement on 63 Boulevard Saint-Michel. For months, leftist militants from all over Europe had started gathering there. Many of them were German and a few were from the Leipzig group, like Willi Chardack. The place was dimly lit, no brighter than a cave, and at the last minute everyone would show up: the impatient ones, the hard-core ones, the severe ones, those in favor of direct action, the ones that could be trusted. Impassioned looks, irritated gestures, lowering their voices to say that André Breton had joined the Communist Party, or to quote an editorial in Pravda, smoking cigarette after cigarette, like young privateers, quoting Marx, others Trotsky, in a strange dialect of concepts and retractions, theories and controversies. Gerta didn’t participate in the ideological discussion. She kept herself at a distance, focused within herself. Not able to grasp it all. She was there because she was Jewish and anti-Fascist, and perhaps because of a sense of pride that didn’t fit well within that language of axioms, quotes, anathemas, and dialectical and historical materialism. Her head was busy with other words, ones she heard that very morning near the Austerlitz station. Words that she was able to erase from her head for a while but that would return, with the grating sound of a handsaw, when she least expected.

  “Je te connais, je sais qui tu es.”

  Chapter Three

  Deep in thought, she walked behind them without a single misstep. Ruth had insisted she join them, leaving her with no other choice. The filtered light beneath the trees in the Luxembourg Garden made it feel as though they were passing through a huge crystal dome; it was one of literature’s most frequented walks. Out of nowhere, Ruth ran beneath a horse-chestnut. Wearing a maroon-colored coat, she rested her back up against its trunk and smiled. Click. She had a talent for posing. From an angle, her face resembled one you would see in classic art. The sky cropped above her head like the jaw of an antelope. Click. With her coat collar lifted, she took three steps forward and then back, making a funny face to the camera, her head tilted to one side. Click. Without batting an eye, she passed right by the statues of the great masters: Flaubert, Baudelaire, Verlaine … bowing her head slightly when she came upon the bust of Chopin. Click. The sunlight scattered itself, like in a painting, over the tallest branches. Along the central path, her footsteps crunched over the gravel. The French were always so concerned with rationalizing spaces, putting up iron gates on the countryside. She ran her fingers over the surface of the pond and playfully splashed the photographer. Click.

  Gerta observed and remained silent, as if this had nothing to do with her. Ultimately, she had gone only because her friend didn’t fully trust the Hungarian. Although there was something about the spectacle that fascinated her. She had never been interested in photography, but to predict the invisible selection process of the mind when framing a shot seemed to her an exercise in absolute precision. Just like hunting.

  The camera was light and compact, a high-speed 35-mm Leica with a focal-plane shutter.

  “I just rescued her from a pawnshop.”

  The Hungarian excused himself, smiling, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. His name, André Friedmann. Black eyes, very black, like a cocker spaniel’s, a small, moon-shaped scar over his left brow, a turtleneck, a film actor’s good looks, upper lip slightly curled in an expression of disdain.

  “She’s my girlfriend,” he joked, caressing the camera. “I can’t live without her.”

  He had come with a Polish friend of his, David Seymour, who was also a photographer and Jewish. They called him Chim. He was thin and wore the glasses of an intellectual. It appeared as if they’d been friends a long time; both the kind who come off as uncouth, who place their glass on the table and never turn away anything that comes their way. Theirs was a friendship like Gerta and Ruth’s, to some degree, although different. It’s always different with men.

  As they strolled around the Latin Quarter, they all took turns telling their stories, where they came from, how they ended up there, their refugee adventures … There was also the decorative part: Paris, September, the tall trees, the time that passes quickly when you are young or far away, or, better yet, when you’re next to the Rue du Cherche-Midi, the sound of an accordion rising like a red fish over the pavement … By then Gerta had enough time to study the situation up close. Walking alongside André as if this was the natural order of things. They kept each other’s pace, without tripping or getting in the way, though keeping their distance. Gerta took her time smoking and talking, without looking at him directly, focused solely on her analysis. She found him to be a bit conceited, handsome, ambitious, and like anyone, overly predictable at times. Seductive, without a doubt; also a tad vulgar, rough around the edges, and lacking in manners. That’s when, while crossing Canal Saint-Martin, his hand reached under her blouse to touch her waist in an invasive manner. It didn’t last more than a tenth of a second, but it was enough. Pure phosphorus. Gerta was immediately put on guard. But who the hell did this Hungarian think he was? She was brusque in her approach, looking as if she were about to say something unpleasant, her pupils radiant with green embers of rage. André just smiled a little, in a way that was simultaneously sincere and helpless. Almost shy. Like a child who has been wrongly accused. There was something in his eyes, a look of uncertainty, and it imbued him with charm. His desire to please became so evident that Gerta felt a vulnerability inside of her, like when she had been scolded as a child for something she hadn’t done and sat on the porch steps fighting back the tears. Careful, she thought. Careful. Careful.

  At least the photo session was informative. André and Chim discussed photography like members of a secret sect. A new esoteric sect of Judaism, whose course of action could extend from a meeting with Trotsky in Copenhagen to a European tour with the North American comedians Laurel and Hardy, whom André had recently photographed. To Gerta, it seemed an interesting way to earn a living.

  “Not really,” he said, disillusioning her. “There’s a lot of competition. Half of the refugees in Paris are photographers or aspiring to be.”

  He spoke about inks for printing, movies in 35 mm, diaphragm apertures, manual dryers and tumble dryers, as if they were the keys to a whole new universe. Gerta listened, taking it all in. She was happy learning something new.

  The day extended itself through plazas and into cafés. It was the perfect moment, when the words have yet to mean so much and everything transpires with levity; like André’s mannerism of cupping his fingers to protect the flame for his cigarette. Hands that were tanned and confident. Gerta’s way of walking, looking
at the ground and veering a little to the left as if she was giving him the opportunity to occupy that space, smiling. Ruth was also smiling, though her smile was different, tinged with fatalism and resignation due to her friend’s leading role, as if she were thinking, Go with Little Miss Innocent. But she wasn’t serious. Just a little game of female rivalry. She walked behind them, offering the Pole some of her conversation because that was the part she’d been given to play that evening and she gave it her best. Today for you. Tomorrow for me. Chim just let her talk, somewhere between fascination and condescension. Watching her from a distance, the way certain men will look at women they consider out of reach. Each of them in their own way felt the effects of the moon that had peeked out into a corner of the sky that night. Bright, luminous, like a life full of possibilities still waiting to be revealed. Of mathematical probabilities and uncertain beginnings. Somewhere out there, in some roundabout of the night, colorful Chinese lanterns, music from a phonograph … The four of them dined in a restaurant André had recommended that had small tables with red-and-white checkered tablecloths. They ordered the most economical menu option, which consisted of rye bread, cheeses, and white wine. Chim pointed to a busy table in the back of the place, where the conversation revolved around a tall man wearing a wool hat with some kind of miner’s light attached to it.

  “It’s Man Ray,” he said. “He’s always surrounded by writers. The man beside him with the tie and hatchet face is named James Joyce. A strange character. Irish. But he’s worth listening to when he’s very drunk.”

  Afterward, Chim pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger and fell into silence again. He didn’t speak much, but when he did, whether induced by alcohol or not, he spoke about personal things, in a low voice, as if directed at his shirt collar. Gerta felt an immediate sympathy for him. He was shy and cultured, like an erudite Talmudist.