Waiting for Robert Capa (7 page)

André's fascination with Spain was instantaneous. There were days when he returned to his
pensión
, and as big as he was, he'd throw himself on the bed listening to La Niña de Marchena or to Pepita Ramos, and it reminded him of home. The country reminded him a great deal of Hungary, those rowdy streets, the tavern scene with its strings of garlic hanging from the ceilings, wineskins filled with red wine, stages for flamenco … The Gypsy within him did not hold back. He joined right in, taking portraits of those around him with such a penetrating intensity it was as if he were trying to rob them of their souls. When he was finished with his sports assignment in San Sebastián, he continued onto Madrid to cover the huge protest on April 14, the fourth anniversary of the Republic's proclamation. There was a charge in the air, and André could feel the tension in the streets. How they hated the Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas (CEDA), the right-wing coalition that, less than a year ago, government-led, had launched an attack on the miners rebellion in Asturias. The wounds were still fresh, but the political issue did not stop the Spaniards from celebrating their holidays and religious festivals as they wished. Sevilla's Holy Week, for instance, where André had arrived by train, along with a thousand other visitors, to soak up the imagery: women with mantillas and pinned carnations cheering on the passage of Jesús del Gran Poder, singing songs of devotion to all the passing brotherhoods, the Nazarenos dressed as Ku Klux Klan, zigzagging through the narrow streets and the firecracker smoke until dawn. He had never imagined a festival where the sacred and the profane were so intertwined. Observing it all objectively, with a look that still hadn't been fully adjusted, still a bit raw and superficial but forming a new layer of skin to it all: dancers in frilly dresses stomping furiously in the April wind, young men on horseback, Premier Alejandro Lerroux touring the city in a carriage whose horses were adorned
à la Andalucia
, fun-loving drunks, tourists, cats perched on undulating tin-plated rooftops. An old man in his doorway sharpening a knife, next to him a small bundle covered in cloth with an opening on one side revealing the dark-skinned little face of a sleeping Gypsy girl. The war was about to begin.

“You have to experience this country,” he wrote Gerta in a letter, not knowing that in a short while she'd be traveling through it, under fire from antiaircraft weaponry, still alive within the dead lights of the cities. How strange life can be. But André couldn't have known this as he described his impressions of the trip in an awkward German, from the American Bar at the Hotel Cristina, with a three-day-old beard, shirtless, and moneyless, after having spent the entire night drinking. “Sometimes I wish you were here” was how he finished the letter.

That he tempted everyone around him was part of his charm, as was his lack of discipline, his way of appearing self-centered and slightly conceited. A touch of womanizer in him. This, Gerta could not ignore.

Sometimes
… she repeated to herself, rereading the letter. What an imbecile.

S
he remained standing in front of her door for a while, house key in hand. The door's strike plate had been forced and little bits of wood were scattered on the floor. Before she had time to think, she noticed how the blood throbbed in her left temple, a vague, discomforting feeling similar to sensing footsteps behind her while walking home. Her entire body tensed up like an arc, the instinctive precaution of the hare who can smell its hunter. She had imagined this scenario so many times in her head that she no longer recognized it. It was seared into her memory the moment she first stepped foot into that jail cell in Wächterstrasse. There was a muffled pounding in her eardrums, consistent, like waves. She had experienced something similar at the lake, several meters below the water. When you swim under water, you can even hear the blood run through your veins, though not a single sound from the outside world can reach you. If someone were to have called her name in that moment, she would not have been able to hear them. Nor the sound of a gunshot, perhaps.

Instinctively, she held on to the camera bag resting over her stomach and opened the door slowly with her foot.

“Ruth?” she called out. “Are you there?”

As she entered the hallway, her imagination began registering the chain of events bit by bit: the broken lock, torn-up pieces of paper, a load of gutted books all over the hallway, the photographs torn from the wall, the little glass vase in smithereens, overturned drawers, a bead from her amber necklace rolling across the floor, those equilateral crosses painted on the wall. “Filthy Jews.” The same old story … She detected a strange odor in the house. The sound of boiling water coming from the kitchen. A second before she uncovered the pot, she already knew what she'd find. Captain Flint floating on the surface with a broken neck and his tongue sticking out. She didn't scream. All she did was turn off the flame and close her eyes. A pang of shame and humiliation galloped up her throat, causing her to retch. She needed a cigarette and sat down on the floor to smoke it, her back against the wall under the swastika. Knees bent, her forehead in her hand. Suddenly it became clear that this was never going to end, that it would always be like this. Either black or white. Or this or that. Who you're with, in what you believe, who you hate. Who will kill you. In her head, she could hear the faint echo of a handsaw: “
Je te connais
,
je sais qui tu es.”

All the metaphysical anguish she experienced during those gatherings at Chez Capoulade were now transformed into pure hate. Specific. Clear. It had nothing to do with ideology but rather with instinct, along with the need to break open somebody's head. To fight knowing precisely why you're fighting, to revive the reflexes, the basic elements of defense and self-preservation, tense the muscles, learn how to load and unload a weapon, improve your aim…

“It's either you or them, Little Trout.” She recalled Karl's voice on the rooftop, trying to instruct her in case the moment should ever come.

The memory stirred up something inside. She missed her brothers. She noted a soft tickling on her side before the tears began clouding her vision.

Damn it, she said. Stupid damn Jew. Are you going to give those sons of bitches the satisfaction of bringing you to tears? She slammed the floor with her fist, brusquely, with a desperate rage aimed more at herself than anybody else, and on the same impulse she stood up, took the camera out of its bag—placing her eye on the viewfinder, adjusting the focus, then the diaphragm, first framing the parrot's limp head, closing in on its tongue—and began to shoot. Hardened look, her nostrils dilated, her hands steady, white knuckles each time she pressed the shutter. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click…

When Ruth and Chim arrived, they didn't need to ask what had happened. They found her leaning on the kitchen table, her shirtsleeves rolled up above her elbows, frowning, concentrated on gluing back together the books that could still be salvaged. She was pale and wore a tense expression, obstinate, disciplined, as if that manual task was the only thing that could help her control her emotions. She didn't move when they arrived or say a word. Chim weaved through the debris so he could hug her, but she put the brakes on him with her hand. She didn't need comforting from anyone.

“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.