“They take anything?” he asked.
“Nothing essential.” Her voice sounded more gloomy than fragile. Her tennis shoes and clothes hanging in the back wardrobe were the only things that had survived the raid intact. “They boiled Captain Flint alive.”
“You have to leave this house,” Chim tried reasoning. “They can return at any time.”
“And what good would that do?” said Gerta. “If they look, they’ll find you. The only thing we can do is be prepared in case it happens again.”
Ruth knew perfectly what she was referring to but preferred not to argue with her friend this time. “They didn’t have to kill him,” she said. “He was an old and amusing bird; he’d go with anyone.”
Gerta turned her face to the wall so they wouldn’t see her expression and swallowed saliva, but turned back soon after. While Chim tried convincing her, she remained motionless, her hand supporting her head. All his reasoning proved completely useless in making them desist. But they at least welcomed his offer to stay and sleep there that night. He would never think of leaving them alone.
With the frenetic passion of those who, in reality, are trying to change the world, they dedicated the rest of the day to repairing all the damages. They plugged up the holes in the lock with filler. Ruth packed the typewriter in a leather bag to bring to a friend’s office in Le Marais. Chim was in charge of taking Captain Flint with him, wrapped up in a towel. Despite all her character and strength, Gerta did not have the heart to do it. He looked even smaller, like that, with his feathers drenched. Chim looked at him with affection, remembering his bow-legged walk, up to his old tricks all over the living room. He had never learned to talk, but on occasion he had the ability to listen with an intelligence that many humans would envy. Later, Chim climbed up a ladder with a brush in his hand and a hat made of newspaper on his head, absorbed in leaving the walls in the hallway immaculate, like pieces of eternity. His arms were speckled with tiny drops of paint. By the end of the day, everything seemed to be pretty close to being back in its place. You could say that the house had been able to withstand its first attack. Everything was impregnated with the smell of paint and solvent. They opened the windows and delighted in breathing in that uncertain air of summer’s beginnings.
The political climate couldn’t have been more heated. England’s refusal to help France detain Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland caused the French to think they’d been abandoned by their main ally. The constant movement of Mussolini’s troops on the border of Abyssinia didn’t exactly help ease nerves, either. Rarely was there a Sunday in which Paris streets weren’t filled with marching protesters. Hundreds of thousands of people regularly flocked to the streets with flags, banners, and dispatches that the formation of the Popular Front would soon be taking off. Chim, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gerta, Fred Stein, Brassaï, André Kertész … photographers from all over Europe captured the fervor, perched on cornices, from up in the trees or rooftops. Students, neighborhood workers from Saint-Denis, circles of people arguing heatedly in the Marais neighborhood … Something was about to happen. Something serious, important … and they wanted to be there to capture it with their cameras. Leica, Kodak, Linhof, Ermanox, Rolleiflex with the twin-lens reflex … lit up viewfinders, zoom, semiautomatics, filters, tripods … Carrying everything over their shoulders. They were nothing more than photographers, people dedicated to looking. Witnesses. And unaware that they were living between two world wars. A good majority were already used to clandestinely crossing borders. They were no longer German, or Hungarian, or Polish, or Czechoslovakian, or Austrian. They were refugees. They belonged to no one. Not to any nation. Nomads, stateless people who gathered almost every week somewhere to read aloud passages from novels, recite poetry, act out plays written by Bertolt Brecht against Nazism, or give conferences. A certain romanticism united them. Give me a photograph and I’ll build you the world. Give me a camera and I’ll show you the map of Europe, an ailing continent with all its contours under threat, emerging from the acid in the developing tray: the face of an old man at Notre Dame; a woman in mourning before a tombstone at the Jewish cemetery, her eyes closed, whispering a prayer; and just shortly afterward, a boy lifting his hands in the Warsaw ghetto; a soldier with his eyes bandaged, dictating a letter to his fellow soldier; dark silhouettes of buildings against a scene of flashing explosions in black-and-white; Gerta crouching in a trench coat with a camera hanging around her neck, a slightly distorted focus while framing a bridge in flames, the geometry of horror. It wouldn’t be long before that world would go on to become one of the many scenes of war.
On Rue Lobineau, every second and last Saturday of the month, there was a small flea market of exotic merchandise, spices from India, perfumes in bottles of all different colors, indigo-colored fabrics, henna for the hair, tropical birds like Captain Flint. Every time she walked in front of that stand, she thought of him. She’d look at those birds with green-and orange-colored feathers, remembering the illustrations of a book she read as a girl, its turquoise cover featuring a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder.
Her imagination always played tricks on her. She had a narrative mind: Long John Silver, Treasure Island, and all of that. She was far too impressionable. Raised in a world that was on the brink of extinction, and the Captain Flint episode affecting her far more than she was willing to admit. Not only because of how much she cared for it, or the familiarity of seeing it walking around the house every day, but because what happened had been a senseless act. Absurd. Unnecessary savagery. However, the thought of replacing the old parrot from Guiana never occurred to her. She wasn’t one of those. Not feeling the need to fill the holes being left empty in her heart. She walked through all the stalls, sucking in that chaotic tide of sensations. The smell of ginger and cinnamon, the cries of the vendors, the screech of the birds, capturing images as an explorer would in an unfamiliar world.
Chim had arranged for Fred Stein to stay in a free room they had in their flat. He was a quiet man, and timid, with an innate sense of photographic composition. The fact that he was German, and a refugee, helped sway their initial resistance to letting him stay with them. On the other hand, it didn’t hurt to have someone else help them with the rent. After the incident with the Fascists from the Croix de Feu, they felt more secure with a man in the house, though they refused to admit it. Everyone suspected the leading anti-Semitic French groups were directly linked to Germany. And this wasn’t at all comforting, especially considering Gerta’s past.
Fred had a distinct approach to photography, offering a fresh perspective for capturing the pedestrian moment, less intuitive perhaps but more sensorial. When he photographed one of the birds with the bright and colorful plumage, one could immediately understand the sequence; how it had been captured in a tropical jungle, placed into a bamboo cage for countless days so it could enter the river of commerce, until it arrived at a stall on Rue Lobineau.
When it came time to frame her shots, Gerta also absorbed Fred’s distinct point of view, one that was different from the perspective that André had taught her but complementary, to a certain degree. Less exact yet more evocative. The fact that logic didn’t always work at the moment of truth was proven day after day in the news reports. She was trying to discover for herself what exactly she wanted to transmit in her photography. Her innocence hadn’t been completely lost yet. Despite everything, she was still the girl who liked to throw herself down on the rooftop in Galicia, face-up, breathing in the clean air of the stars, floating within the darkness, the coolness of her back inside her pajama top. How strange it was to swim afterward, as a woman, touched by the cold fingers of the lake. She was an excellent swimmer; able to cross from one side of the lake to the other in record time. That’s why they called her “Little Trout” at home.
Every night, just before going to sleep in her Paris bedroom, she crossed the border toward those memories and returned to being that ten-year-old girl in a photograph she kept. Standing on a dock
in a red bathing suit, her back wet, the blond points of her braids, dripping like paint brushes, very skinny legs, birdlike, and always thinking about her star. She imagined it to be lime-green, the color of mint candy. She kept the memory in her mouth until it dissolved, little by little, within the fresh breath of her dream. The following morning, when she went out early to take photos in the neighborhood, her muscles could feel the cold water’s concentrated energy in each stroke, as if she were swimming toward the future. Sometime after that, in the red half-light of her bathroom, while watching the lines and forms appear on the developing tray, she’d discover that the image can be deceiving. Just one false move, the slow configuration of a face, the foreshortening of a falling body, a shirt too clean for a soldier who has spent long hours struggling in combat. But those kinds of details and others, more or less evident, she still couldn’t have known. She lacked the experience and depth of field, that scab of time that can age the gaze of a twentysomething-yearold woman in just a few hours.
Depth of field is something you can’t foresee. It appears when it appears. Some are never able to capture it in a lifetime. Others are born with their days numbered, and they have to hurry to get it, in the short time they have left. Gerta was one of the latter, a long-distance runner. She rushed through her days like cigarettes, waiting for the moment. She stood still, leaning on the windowsill, wearing a black spaghetti-strapped shirt, the sun on the skin of her shoulders. June 24, 1935. Summer solstice. Noon. Not a breath of air. Suddenly she saw a square of light on the far end of the street and felt a tingling in her stomach. She focused with more precision: the white shirt, rolled-up sleeves, the wet hair, the equipment slung over the shoulder, skin tanned from the Spanish sun. The sensation was similar to when a ship jolts and the floor tilts beneath you. Her disorderly heartbeat caught her by surprise, but it was not the moment to stop and analyze her emotions. Nor did she even wait for him to come up. She ran downstairs, two steps at a time, and he lifted her in his arms. In the doorway, as her father always had when he returned home from a trip. Twirling her through the air, half-smiling, sure of himself, fraternal as always. André, and his way of always showing up when you least expect it, with those eyes that granted him forgiveness. So handsome it hurt, she thought. The Hungarian Jew.
Chapter Eight
Night was falling. The ocean dark. And up there, once again, the stars, dense as the calligraphy of an indecipherable manuscript. A soft breeze that smelled of pine and eucalyptus, almost imperceptible, grazed the water with a strange silvery phosphorescence. Gerta and André had been lying down on the sand for a while, face-up and without speaking. As if they were on a boat deck and looking out from the island toward the bright city of Cannes with its red and blue lights shining brightly on the horizon. They both had on the sweaters that Ruth suggested at the last minute they pack in their bags. “They will come in handy at night,” she’d said. Gerta could smell the wool on André’s sleeve as she rested her head on his arm.
It was a small and calm fishermen’s island. Barely 370 acres of Mediterranean pines, with a few docked feluccas, nets placed out to dry, and the smell of old port. The perfect resting place for a warrior. André had returned from Spain tired and with a fresh batch of money from the report he sold to Berliner Illustrierte. The francs were burning holes in his pockets; he wasn’t cut out for being rich. So, when he found out that Willi Chardack and some other people they knew were thinking of taking a trip to the Lérins Islands in the Côte d’Azur, he didn’t think twice. He suggested that Chim and the girls come along. Although Ruth had thought it was a great idea, she couldn’t go. She had just signed a contract with the filmmaker Max Ophüls for a small part in a film called Divine, which had begun shooting in Paris. Chim had a deadline for an assignment he accepted from Vu magazine, about the Left Bank’s artists, and decided to stay. André looked over at Gerta, standing there with her bony chin, a slight frown, as she thought it through.
“All right. Why not?” She smiled in agreement.
They made their way to Cannes hitchhiking. Both in an excellent mood, joking around, stealing fruit from orchards, dining at highway café-bars, leaving behind small villages that smelled of sweet broom. New horizons that whet your appetite and make you want to laugh hard, breathe in the fresh air, and get lost in the world. They were seized by a kind of euphoric vitality. Life’s invisible paths. From Cannes’ port, they took a small fishing boat to Île Sainte-Marguerite while the sun darted across the water. There is a strip between the ocean and the earth. Just as there’s an ambiguous strip, dark but radiant, between the body and the soul, thought Gerta. And the image of white clothing hanging out to dry on the balcony came to mind. Karl’s soul. Oskar’s. And hers.
She believed she had arrived in paradise. An island of warm rocks and cormorants, with waves that launched greenish laps, smacking over the sand. A quiet place, without meetings at the crack of dawn, or the echo of footsteps following you to the foot of your door, or broken glass, or dead animals, or equilateral crosses. An island. A piece of land far from a world on the brink of blowing itself to pieces. Sand and ocean. Pure geography.
They built their tents next to the ruins of Fort Royal’s castle, an ancient Gothic fort that was used as a hospital for the wounded during the Crimean War. At night, they’d light a small campfire to cook dinner. And they’d sit with the fire between them.
“A mysterious prisoner lived in those ruins,” said Gerta, and a silence that precedes all great tales of the night was created around her. So within that circle of embers, she told the story of the man with the iron mask.
No one was ever completely certain who he was or what he did to be isolated that way. He wore a velvet mask with iron fittings that allowed him to eat with his mask on. Two guards, whose orders were to kill him should he ever try to escape, accompanied him always. Some swore he was the Sun King’s twin brother. Others believed he was his bastard brother, son of Anne of Austria and Cardinal Mazarin. The fact was that he was taken to Provence under maximum security. In a locked carriage covered in moleskin. From there, they brought him to this island in a small covered vessel. They say he was taller than most men and with a notable elegance. He dressed in the finest of clothes. They were under strict orders not to deny him anything. And they provided him with the most succulent delicacies. Everything he asked for. And no one could remain seated before him. At night, he would play the guitar with a melancholy that would cause the rocks to shudder. He was buried without his head, so that no one would recognize him even dead.
“He took his secret with him to the grave,” concluded Gerta.
André passed her the canteen, looking at her differently, entranced by her voice. In the light of the flames, her face shined as if it were carved in bronze, her head thrown back while she drank, her elbow lifted, pointing to the sky. A drop of water running down her chin. He believed that woman had a gift for telling stories. She was a river. Her words had tact, power of suggestion. He found himself within a halo that surrounded the campfire of twigs.
Is it possible to fall in love with a voice? Up until that moment, André had never found words to be erotic. Never had he thought that talking could be better than fucking, for example. He wasn’t very good with words. He felt they had the potential to corner him. With fucking, on the other hand, he was certain this couldn’t happen. A good conversationalist can seduce, the words leaving you on the ropes.
“You know a lot of things,” he said.
“Alexander Dumas,” she said, smiling. “I read The Vicomte de Bragelonne, when I was a teenager. It’s the third and last book of The Three Musketeers saga. Do you like to read?”
“Well, yes, but only books about war…”
“Ah…” Lifting her eyebrows in a way that suggested slight irony.
She bent over to revive the flame and André could clearly see the triangle of naked skin leading to her cleavage. Smooth, tan, clean-smelling, like saltwater, and he noticed his erection beginning to press up v
isibly through the fabric of his pants. He wanted to sleep with that woman. He wanted to explore her entire body, open her thighs and enter her, her thoughts, and quiet them with a kiss, and another, and another, until he changed the rhythm of her breathing. Until she could no longer think of anything. He wanted to do all of this once and for all, and stop feeling as he did, cornered by words. That night he learned a metaphor’s power of seduction. Somewhere in his head, a strumming of a guitar, so melancholic that even the rocks shuddered, began to break through.
“Good night,” she said, lifting herself up and brushing the sand from her pants.
André sat and watched her walk away. Her strong swimmer’s back, her flexible movements beneath her cotton shirt, a peculiar sway to her hips when she walked, as if slightly shifting to one side. Arrogance, pride, vanity … ancient wisdom of women who know that they’re being observed. She brought a branch from the bonfire to her mouth to light a cigarette, took a puff, and he saw her disappear below the canvas covering of the tent.
It was a time for disorder, for physical exaltation, swimming until they collapsed from fatigue on the sand, eating sardines from a can for dinner, going to sleep at the last minute, watching the line on the horizon, the sun burning the night until it disappeared over the ocean’s surface. Their heads close together, the smell of the eucalyptus, and the salt on their skin. They fell in love in the South of France—Ruth Cerf would remember later on, trying to reconstruct the fragile thread of their lives for an American journalist—they became inseparable on Île Sainte-Marguerite. A time of one world outside the world, of altered schedules, of days without a date, of gestures followed by shared laughs, complicities between them that didn’t allow room for anyone else. Willi Chardack and Raymond Gorin understood immediately. How could they not? Willi and Raymond would go back to their tents quietly at night, while Gerta and André stayed conversing in hushed voices, creating the perfect depth of field around them. There was a secret space between them. A minimum distance, like two pages in a closed book. The scar on his left brow, a blow from a stone. The vaccination mark on her arm, a half-moon precisely where the syringe shot its serum. Marking her skin years ago, in a Stuttgart school gymnasium, when she was eight years old. The list of wounds. His Achilles’ heel sticking out of the sleeping bag like an island. A prominent scar on the back of André’s hand.
Waiting for Robert Capa Page 6
