Waiting for Robert Capa. Susana Fortes

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СКАЧАТЬ either, although he feels at liberty to move around the house bow-legged like an old pirate. They wrote his name for us, but we decided to call him Captain Flint. What else?

      “Chim gave me a photo that his friend Stein took of me and André at the Café de Flore. I hardly recognize myself. I’m wearing my beret to the side and I’m smiling, looking down as if someone were telling me a secret. André is wearing a sporty jacket and a tie and appears to have just said something funny. Things have started going better for him, and he can afford fancier clothes, although he doesn’t manage to put them together so well, you might say. He’ll look right at me, trying to detect my reaction, smiling, or barely. We look as if we were lovers. That Stein will go far with his photography. He’s good at waiting for the moment. He knows exactly when to press the shutter. Only we aren’t lovers or anything close to the sort. I have a past. There’s Georg. He writes me every week from San Gimignano. We’re born with a mapped-out route. This one, not that one. Who you dream with. Who you love. It’s one or the other. You choose without choosing. That’s how it is. Each of us travels on their own path. Besides, how do you love someone without truly knowing who they are? How do you travel that distance when there’s all that you don’t know about the other?

      “Sometimes I am tempted to tell André what happened in Leipzig. He also doesn’t speak much about what he’s left behind, though he’s capable of talking for hours on end about anything else. I know that his mother’s name is Júlia and that he has a little brother whom he adores tremendously, Cornell. There have only been a few occasions in which he opens a window onto his life for me to look through. He’s extremely guarded. I, too, grow silent sometimes when I look back in time and see my father standing in the gymnasium’s doorway in Stuttgart, waiting for me to tie my shoelaces, growing a bit impatient, glancing at his watch. Then I can hear Oskar and Karl in the stands, cheering me on: ‘Go, Little Trout…’ It’s been ages since someone has called me that. It’s been ages since we went down to the river to throw stones. Cleaned the mud off our shoes with blades of grass. On nights like these, I wonder if it’s as painful for them to be remembered as it is for me to remember them. They have had to escape several times from the Führer and his decrees. Now they’re in Petrograd, with our grandparents, near the Romanian border. It’s a small Serbian village that’s never had an anti-Semitic tradition, and because of this, I worry less. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to feel proud of being Jewish; I’d like to be more like André, who isn’t affected by this in the least. To him, it’s like being Canadian or Finnish. Never could I comprehend the Hebrew tradition of identifying with your ancestors: ‘When we were expelled from Egypt…’ Listen, I was never expelled from Egypt. For better or for worse, I can’t carry that load with me. I don’t believe in that kind of we. Organized groups are just a bunch of excuses. Only the action of an individual holds a moral meaning, at least in this life. Frankly, the other kind doesn’t convince me. It’s true that the beautiful parts we were taught as children exist. The story of Sarah, for example, or the angel who held on to Abraham’s arm, the music, the Psalms…

      “I remember that on Yom Kippur, the day where it’s written that each man should forgive his neighbor, they dressed us in our best clothes. There was a photo on top of the bureau, of Karl and Oskar wearing baggy pants and new shirts. I was wearing a short dress with cherries all over it. Skinny legs. My hair was in a bun on top of my head, like a little gray cloud. Images are never forgotten. Photography’s mystery.”

      Knock-knock … someone tapped lightly on the door. It had been a while since she last heard the pounding of the typewriter keys in the room next to hers. It must have been around one in the morning. When Ruth peeked in, she saw Gerta sitting with a notebook on her knees, all wrapped up in a blanket, with her third cigarette of insomnia hanging from the edge of her mouth.

      “You’re still awake?”

      “I was about to go to sleep.” Gerta apologized like a little girl caught doing something wrong.

      “You shouldn’t keep a diary,” said Ruth, pointing to the redcovered notebook that Gerta had placed on top of her nightstand. “You never know into whose hands it may fall.” She was right: this went completely against the basic norms of keeping a low profile.

      “Right…”

      “Then why do you do it?”

      “Don’t know,” Gerta said, shrugging. Then she put out her cigarette in a small, chipped plate. “I’m afraid of forgetting who I am.”

      It was true. We all have a secret fear. A terror that’s intimate, that’s ours, differentiating us from the rest. A unique fear, precise.

      Fear of not recognizing your own face in the mirror, of getting lost on a sleepless night in a foreign city after drinking several glasses of vodka. Fear of others, of being devastated by love or, worse, by loneliness. Fear as extreme consciousness of a reality that you only discover at a given moment, although it’s always been there. Fear of remembering what you did or what you were capable of doing. Fear as an end to innocence, rupturing a state of grace. Fear of the lake house with the tulips, fear of swimming too far from the edge, fear of dark and viscous waters on your skin when there’s no longer a trace of firm earth beneath your feet. Fear with a capital F. F as in Fatal or to Finish Off. Fear of the constant fog of autumn over those remote neighborhoods through which she has to pass on Thursdays, with its deserted plazas and scant faces, a beggar here, a woman pushing a cart full of wood over on the other corner. And the sounds of her own footsteps, their tone soft, quick, and moist … as if they weren’t hers but those of someone following her from a distance, one, two, one, two … that relentless, threatening feeling you carry with you in your neck all the way home, beret tightly in place, hands in pockets, that pressing need to run. Like when she was a little girl and had to cross the alleyway from the bakery to Jakob’s house, holding her breath as she climbed the stairs, two by two, until she rang the doorbell and the light went on, and she was in safe haven. Easy, she’d say to herself while trying to slow down her pace. Take it easy. If she stood still for a moment, the echo would stop, if she started up again, the rhythm would pick up again, repeating itself: one, two, one, two, one, two, one two … Once in a while she turned her head to look and there was nothing. Nothing. Maybe it was all in her head.

       Chapter Six

      She sat for a while, contemplating the page she finished typing. Engrossed in it, unaware of its content but conscious of the porosity of the paper, the impression each character had left. Black ink. Alongside the typewriter, there was a stack of handwritten pages with green blotting paper between them. Gerta twisted the roller, removed the sheet, and began reading it closely: “In the face of Nazism spreading itself throughout Europe, we are left with only one solution: uniting Communists, Socialists, Republicans, and other Leftist parties, into one anti-Fascist coalition that will facilitate the formation of wide-ranging political groupings (…). The alliance of all democratic forces into one Popular Front.”

      “What do you think, Captain Flint?” she said, looking up at the shelf where they set up the trapeze for the bird to do its stunts. Since André had left for Spain, she found herself talking more to the parrot. Another of her tactics for combating loneliness. Just like her return to being her old militant self. She felt the urgent need to help, be useful, serve a purpose. But in what? Not a clue. She tried to find out by going back to the gatherings at Chez Capoulade, which had only grown more popular with time. Woman-echo, Woman-reflection, Woman-mirror. Inside, there was always too much cigarette smoke. Too much noise. Gerta grabbed her glass of vodka, still half-full, and went outside to sit on the edge of the sidewalk and smoke a cigarette. She sat there, hugging her knees, looking up at the patchy sky, a star here, another there, between eave and eave, with a faint orange glow toward the west. She felt good like this, СКАЧАТЬ