Waiting for Robert Capa

by Susana Fortes

  She shut the notebook and placed it in the drawer of her nightstand. She needed to rid herself of her thoughts.

  Chapter Ten

  Ready, one, two, three. Gerta and Ruth each grabbed an end of the board and placed it onto the two easels. A string of colorful lanterns hung from the ceiling of their Rue Lobineau flat. They were getting ready for a surprise party for André’s birthday. October 22. The same day as John Reed’s.

  Ten Days That Shook the World left a strong impression on Gerta. She could still remember the book’s red cover on top of the table at the lake house, next to a vase of tulips, the white tablecloth, and everything else.

  She considered it a first-class testimony and could recite entire paragraphs by heart. That was the kind of journalism she and André yearned to do. To be right in the center of the events, seeing them firsthand, feeling the heart of the world pump through its veins.

  They covered the entire length of the table with white sheets. Ruth cooked a traditional lekaj in the oven. Honey, raisins, almonds, and cloves, just like it’s served on the Jewish New Year. She spent hours preparing it. Henri brought two bottles of Calvados from his native Normandy.

  Twenty-two. The two little ducks. An unforgettable birthday. All kinds of drinks, laughter until dawn, champagne, candles, cigarettes, paper lanterns, photographs out of focus. Henri Cartier-Bresson and Chim covered in streamers, drinking straight out of the bottle of Calvados. Hiroshi Kawazoe and Seiichi Inoue, two Japanese artists they had met on Île Sainte-Marguerite, who performed a traditional samurai dance. Willi Chardack dressed up as the man with the iron mask. Fred Stein, completely drunk, clowning around, his arms around a broomstick. Csiki Weiss and Geza Korvin, with their fists in the air. Comrades of André’s, two old friends from his years in Budapest, of the heroic times of stealing croissants from the bars of shops recently opened in Paris. Chim, frowning again, concentrated, trying to build an Eiffel Tower with toothpicks. The journalist Lotte Rapaport swearing never again to accept another job as a seamstress. Paris was full of lunatics. Gerta, cut out against the light of the window, wearing a tight pair of pants and a black turtleneck, laughing with her head thrown back. André’s profile in the gangster hat he’d been given. That cigarette appended to the corner of his mouth. The laughter in his eyes, that air of mischief. “Happy Birthday,” she said into his ear, softly. Their faces close, dancing to a new cabaret tune that was becoming fashionable on the radio. It was sung by a young girl who was as slight as a sparrow, named Edith Piaf. They were bidding farewell to their childhood. And they did not know it.

  That’s how they passed the time. On other occasions, they’d stroll through the quais of the Seine. Gerta loved looking at the boats all lit up along the waterfront. A boat is always a promising possibility. When they received an assignment’s paycheck, they’d treat themselves to coffee and croissants at the cafés near Place Renée Vivien. Sometimes she’d accompany André on one of his photo shoots. That’s how she began her training. Setting the focus, calculating the exposure time, adjusting the diaphragm to the light. She liked to watch André lean up against the wall and mentally prepare the photo he planned to take. And though she had randomly arrived at photography, she grew increasingly fascinated with everything about it. The smell of the developing fluid. The tension of waiting and watching your own face appear, bit by bit, at the bottom of the tray. Those small and bony fingers holding her chin, the arch of a raised clavicle over the delicate skin on her neckline. The darkest shadows below her eyes. The mystery.

  Sometime later, Georg sent her a postcard from Italy. A scene from Florence’s Piazza della Signoria, taken from the Loggia dei Lanzi. André didn’t want to read it but spent the entire day squinting his eyes like a bull in heat, responding to her questions with monosyllables. If she offered him a cigarette, he preferred not to smoke; if she pointed out a red carnation in one of the stalls along the Left Bank, he looked the other way. Just another damn ordinary flower.

  Gerta could sense the storm coming and tried to tiptoe around the thunder to avoid it. It would pass. Thankfully, she had enough work to do so as not to agonize over it so much.

  She had been able to negotiate several contracts for Alliance Photo at a good price. Maria Eisner was thrilled with her. She worked hard, having slept less than five hours a night over the last few weeks. Yes, she would have preferred if the 1,200 francs she was being paid a month were for her photographs and not for her bookkeeping. But it was all there was, and she couldn’t complain. Besides, she never backed away from an opportunity to push André’s work. She fought for each and every one of his photographs as if her life depended on it. That same morning, she had negotiated a 1,100 franc advance for three assignments per week for him. It wasn’t a lot, given the high price of the materials he needed, but it was enough for him to pay his rent, eat a decent meal three times a day, or treat himself to something extra once in a while. That’s what passed through her mind as she walked the frozen streets back home with her hands shoved deep into her coat pockets, sporting a wool hat and a red nose from the cold, like an Arctic explorer. I may not be perfect, she thought with a hint of condescension aimed at herself, but as a manager I’m not bad at all. Deep down, she was proud and wanted to get home and deliver the news to André. She wanted to feel his arms around her waist, his body pressed up against hers, transmitting heat, taking her to high and faraway places, slowly, waiting for her as no one else ever had.

  It was late. She found him facedown on the bed, hair disheveled, one side of his face against the pillow, and fresh stubble darkening his jawline. In order not to wake him, she quietly removed her clothes and placed them on a hook behind the door. Then she put on an old gray undershirt that she always wore to bed and, looking for the warmth of his body, curled up against André’s back.

  It was like hugging a jackal. He let out a terrible growl. The animal inside him had been awakened and it almost caused her to fly off the bed and onto the floor.

  “Can you tell me what in hell is the matter with you?” she asked.

  Nothing. A deathly silence, nocturnal, withdrawn in thought. Mute as God’s shadow. Gerta flipped herself over to face the wall. She didn’t feel like fighting.

  “You Hungarians are strange,” she said.

  “True,” he said, “but never as idiotic as the Russians.”

  At last the jackal had come out of his cave. A feeling of terrible disgust and immense exhaustion came over her, and she thought to herself that neither of them deserved what was about to happen. Because she suddenly knew that when he lifted his head, he’d look at her exactly the way he was looking at her now: his face severe, distant, his naked arm spread across the sheet. She wasn’t certain by way of her mind but through her body and the goose bumps on her skin that foretold what he would say, word for word, in a harsh tone, his voice unrecognizable. And while she listened to his string of stupidities, the kind men have repeated hundreds of times to women—in every kind of room, in every part of the world—that’s when she felt the boiling blood flowing within her face. It’s him or me. It’s here or there. It’s black or white. She thought he’d be different, but no. As absurd as any of them. Ridiculously simple. Capable of throwing it all away for nothing, for stupid male pride that can’t appreciate what it has and wants more. To be the only one. Only him. Nobody else, not now, not before, not never. Sure, then go ahead, walk out that door and go back in time ten years. When I was still a sweet girl, and there still was no trace of a vase with white tulips, or a small house on the lake, or a damn pistol on top of the table, or salesclerks who throw anyone out of their stores by pushing them, or going out at the crack of dawn to distribute pamphlets through the streets of Leipzig, or Georg, or Wächterstrasse, or anything, not one thing, nothing. I mean who did that Gypsy think he was? Did the world begin when he was born? For the love of God.

  She stormed out of their bed, unable to believe what she was hearing. Because now he didn’t have her cornered, nor was he forcing her to m
ake odious and uncouth comparisons. Who’s better? Who was worse? How did he do it to you? Like I do it? What he wanted was to hurt, offend, and humiliate. That’s why he brought out that photograph that appeared in Vogue of Regina Langquarz, tall, with short hair and legs like a heron. In fact, had she ever asked him about her? Didn’t matter. There he was, telling it all in great detail, offering explanations that no one had asked for. Or about the Spaniard he met while he was in Tossa del Mar while he was on assignment with Berliner Illustrierte. You damn Hungarian bastard. Damn the very sight of you. I never want to see you again in my life. Stupid vain bastard. Bastard. Bastard. Bastard … This was what was running through Gerta’s mind as she rushed to put her pants and her shirt back on. Her lips trembling, she was overcome with a nausea that forced her to lean up against the wall and place her hands over her mouth.

  He looked at her from the bed as someone would at a film that was being projected. But one where the reel, at some moment, had come undone, and it was now impossible to rewind or to find a way back that wasn’t rigged with mines of pride. He would have given anything to be able to stop her, to grab her by the arm and look her straight in the eye, without resorting to the words that always cornered him but, rather, to their bodies. That was the language he felt safe in. He wanted to kiss her mouth and her nose and her eyelids and afterward push her onto the bed and enter her, firm and steady, dominating her at his own rhythm, until reaching that place that was exclusively his, where there wasn’t room for other men or other women, the past or the future, where you couldn’t find Georg Kuritzkes or Regina Langquarz to stand in the way. But he was left paralyzed, scratching his chin, wrinkling his forehead, with his head against the wall and a weightlessness in his stomach. He had a strong sensation that every second that passed was being played out against him. That he should say or do something soon. Anything. Regardless, he still waited until the last moment for her to be the one to do it. In some things women are infinitely stronger than men. He realized he had ruined everything when it was already too late; when he saw her grab her coat from the rack and slam the door before bolting down the stairs, two at a time.

  Snow. All of Paris was covered in snow. The rooftops, the streets, the fences, the barges protected by pneumatic wheels that traversed the Seine, beneath a sky so gray that from a distance it could be mistaken for the cloudy surface of the river, the color of lead, with dark green veins, and as desolate as the Danube on a winter evening. He searched everywhere for days. Ruth’s house, Chim’s. Going up and down the café route a million times without any luck. La Coupole, Le Cyrano, Les Deux Magots, Le Palmier, the Café de Flore … nothing. The earth had swallowed her whole. André walked the snowy streets like a phantom. Overcoat buttoned to the top, his collar up, listening to the ubiquitous murmur of Christmas carols and the small bells that children shook in doorways asking for pastries and sweets. With an infinite melancholy, his eyes gravitated toward steamed-up windows with lace curtains, behind which he imagined warm and cozy homes. He was discovering the oldest reasons why people choose to uproot themselves. Remembering how the streets of Pest looked to him when he was six or seven years old and he lived on 10 Városház Utca, in the back part of a block with apartments that had hallways and staircases with banisters. Back then, he liked dreaming with his eyes open and his nose glued to the toy shop windows located in stately neighborhoods where the grand palaces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire still stood strong on the other side of the river. Although he sensed Saint Nicholas wasn’t going to leave any of those magnificent locomotives beside his stocking under the chimney. Because Christian saints didn’t have any jurisdiction in the Jewish district. And besides, the postal service didn’t deliver mail to working-class neighborhoods. There were certain things worth knowing as soon as possible. Who you are. Where you come from. Where you’re headed. That’s why, at fifteen, he chose to side with the world’s disinherited. Of course he thought about her. All the time. Morning and night. Picturing her dressed and undressed. With shoes or barefoot. Lying on the sofa wearing a shirt that just reached her thighs, and a bunch of photographs on her lap, without any makeup on, with that sexy, indolent air she had just waking up that drove him wild. This is what he thought about as he walked under the star of Bethlehem that hung over the Boulevard des Capucines, and saw himself reflected in the storefront windows of pastry shops full of adorned marzipans with tricolored cockades and candied chestnuts. He saw shops decked in mistletoe, the stalls covered in poinsettias, and he wanted to die. His shoulders hunched, his hands shoved down deep in his pockets. Wearing two layers of socks and a coat lined with lamb fur didn’t make a difference: he was dying from the cold. To him it seemed worse than the glacial winters in Hungary. He walked on. An iciness in his soul. Mad at himself, adrift, his gait erratic, moving clumsily and getting pushed by the crowds of people carrying packages and walking in the opposite direction. He felt a blind rage against the world. A few times, he shoved back without excusing himself and when he had to face one indignant passerby, he limited himself to kicking the edge of the sidewalk.

  “Fucking Christmas.”

  Chapter Eleven

  It wasn’t clear how he died, but all indications pointed to suicide. Gerta found out from Ruth. She knew André adored his father. Deep down, he and his father were one and the same. Dreamy, imaginative, capable of believing their own lies to the point of converting them into truths. In fact, many of the tales that André liked to entertain his friends with were simply new versions of the stories that, as a child, he had heard his father tell at the Café Moderno in Pest, when he was sent by his mother to go and bring him home before he spent all of the family’s savings in one game of pinnacle.

  Dezső Friedmann, like André, was an incurable romantic, who had grown up in the depths of rural Transylvania sheltered by folk tales and medieval legends. When he was barely an adolescent, without a duro to his name, he abandoned that place to see the world, surviving in his travels from city to city thanks to his picaresque ingenuity. Until one day he met Júlia, André’s mother, and he decided to become a tailor.

  André would listen to his worldly adventures with eyes as wide as saucers, feeling proud and amused, like when Dezső told him that he used a Budapest restaurant bill as his visa to cross the border. He tried to imagine him there, looking very serious, taking out the documents from the inside pocket of his jacket with an air of authority, and this would throw André into a fit of laughter. Many years later, André himself would use the same ruse to leave Berlin and it had also worked for him. One’s luck is also inherited.

  His father would always say that to be a good gambler, you had to always act as if you had an ace up your sleeve. If you play the part of the winner well, you end up winning the game. The bad part is that sometimes life calls your bluff ahead of schedule. Leaving no choice but to bet what’s left on your last hand. Dezső lost it all.

  Like hair color or belief in omens, gambling is a secret illness that’s carried in one’s genes. André had that gene in his veins. When things weren’t going well for him, he’d spend his time drinking and placing bets. Henri Cartier-Bresson, with his infallible Norman eye, would often say: André was never the most intelligent of men. His talent was never pondering the intellectual root of a concept, but he was an incredibly intuitive player. He had an eye for details that the rest of us could not see. I suppose that experience also helped sharpen his sense of smell. Since the age of seventeen, he’d been on his own, moving from one hotel to the next, and later from one war to the next. He was born a gambler.

  The man did not lack reason, as he would show many years later, on the morning of June 6, 1944, while the fog tore to shreds the sky over the English Channel.

  Ocean. The sound of the ocean. It was impossible to focus with all that movement. Above, the rattle of the machines, the fear on deck. Below, the foaming abyss of the waves. André didn’t think twice. He jumped into the landing craft with his two Contax cameras around his neck. Then he looked towa
rd the beach and tried to calculate the depth and distance that they were planning. Up ahead, three miles of sand planted with mines. Omaha Beach. Nobody had explained to those boys what the hell they were supposed to do there. Only that they should save Europe from the clutches of the Nazis. As they approached the shore, he winked at a young American soldier from Company E of 116th Infantry Regiment. “See you there, kid,” he said, trying to lift his spirits.

  Minutes later, the world blew to pieces. The majority of the boys hadn’t reached their twenties yet. Shot down before setting one foot on the sand. In the focus, flashes of orange amid thousands of particles of water spray. An anti-tank trap. A mortar blast. A roaring sea. Orders given that were almost drowned out by the wind and the motorboats. He just kept shooting; there was no time to stop and adjust the focus. Snapshots, fast and fleeting. Images of War. Afterward, the Atlantic’s whipped foam was dyed red in the worst bloodbath of D-Day. Two thousand dead in under two hours.

  André was the only photographer to disembark during the first wave. Voluntarily, he enlisted with the 116th. In Easy Red. “The war correspondent has his stake—his life—in his own hands,” he wrote in his book Slightly Out of Focus. “And he can put it on this horse or that horse, or he can put it back in his pocket at the very last minute. I am a gambler. I decided to go in with Company E in the first wave.” It’s a miracle he survived while trying to advance in water up to his neck and, later, while dragging himself through 125 miles of sand that had mines. A game of cat and mouse. Of course, by then his name was no longer André Friedmann and she was no longer at his side. She’d been dead for seven years. Seven long years in which there was never a single day or a damn night that he didn’t long for her. Perhaps the only thing he wanted was for someone to take pity on him and shoot him already.