at the first sign. The Hungarian was one of them, righteous, accustomed to displaying the classic weaponry of a knight errant with women. And with a dangerous inclination to engage in duels just before the last drink of the night.
Despite this, when it came to both his life and work, he was, or tried to appear, versatile and frivolous when he was lucid. He had a peculiar sense of humor. Finding it relatively easy to laugh at himself and his blunders, like when he spent in one afternoon the entire advance that the Agence Centrale had given him and had to pawn a Plaubel camera to pay the hotel. Or when he destroyed a Leica trying to use it beneath the clear waters of the Mediterranean while on assignment in Saint-Tropez for the Steinitz Brothers. The agency went bankrupt a few months later, and André joked that it was because they had hired him with his long list of disasters. His carefree way of making fun of his own stupidities made him easygoing and likable on a first impression. Typical Hungarian humor. His lazy smile expressed all that was needed, and he could even be cynical without trying too hard. Above all, the way he would shrug his shoulders, as if it made no difference whether he was photographing a war hero from the Bolshevik revolution or shooting a spread about chic vacation spots in the Riviera. Curiously, Gerta did not completely dislike such a duality. In some ways, she also enjoyed expensive perfumes and moonlit nights with champagne.
She couldn’t say then what it was that didn’t convince her about the Hungarian that eyed her so probingly, one hand holding his elbow, with a cigarette between two fingers. Without a doubt, there was something.
André Friedmann seemed to always land on his feet, like a cat. Only he could sink so deep and still maintain his boss’s confidence; or travel on a German train with a passport and no visa, casually show the inspector an ornate bill from a restaurant instead of proper documentation, and actually get away with it. One of the two: either he was very clever or he had a gift for tipping the balance in his favor. As she studied them closer, neither of the two was especially reassuring, in Gerta’s eyes.
“You know what being lucky is?” he asked, looking her straight in the face. “It’s being at a bar in Berlin just as a Nazi SS officer begins to smash a Jewish cobbler’s face, and not being the cobbler but the photographer who was able to take out his camera in time. Luck is something stuck to the bottoms of your shoes. You either have it or you don’t.”
Gerta thought about her star. I have it, she thought. But she kept it to herself.
André brushed the hair off his forehead and looked toward the back of the place again, at nothing in particular, momentarily in a daze. Sometimes he stared off into the distance, as if he were somewhere else. We all miss something, a house, the street that we played on as kids, an old pair of skis, the boots we wore to school, the book we learned to read with, the voice yelling at us from the kitchen to finish our milk, the sewing room at the back of the house, the clatter of the pedals. Homelands don’t exist. It’s an invention. What does exist is that place where we were once happy. Gerta realized that André liked to return there sometimes. He’d be talking to everyone, boasting about something, smiling, smoking, when suddenly, out of nowhere, he’d get that look in his eye, and he was far away. Very far.
“Watch, you’ll wind up sleeping with him,” Ruth predicted when they finally arrived at their doorstep at dawn.
“Not for all the money in the world,” she said.
Any life, as brief as it may appear, contains plenty of misconceptions, situations that are difficult to explain, arrows that get lost in the clouds like phantom planes, and if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. It isn’t easy piecing together all that information. Even if it’s only for your own ears to hear. That’s what the psychoanalysts were doing with their dream studies. Quicksand, winding staircases, melting pocket watches, and things like that. But Gerta’s dreams were difficult to grasp or to try and frame. They were hers. What had her childhood been like up until then? A betrayal of those around her or else dreaming of another life?
She had found a modest paying job as a part-time secretary in the office of the émigré doctor René Spitz, a disciple of Freud. The majority of the pages in the early editions of his journals were filled with articles on dream interpretation. It was a world that wasn’t completely foreign to Gerta. When work was slow, she would avidly read all the case studies, as if wanting to uncover a secret about her own life.
Everyone tries to manage their dreams in their own way. Sometimes, when she returned home, she would sit on her bed with an old box of quince candy that she used to store her treasures in: a pair of Egyptian amber earrings, photographs, a silver medallion with the silhouette of a ship, a pen drawing of the port in Ephesus that Georg had given her their last summer together. She suddenly felt the need to grasp at those memories like straws, as if they could protect her from something. From someone. She returned to the world of Georg as one shields oneself with armor. Constantly repeating his name. She forced herself to write to him as much as she could. Made plans to go see him in Italy. Something had stirred itself up inside, irritated her, left her disconcerted, and she sought refuge in an old lover. This was her limbo, trapped somewhere between reality and fiction. Why? Ruth studied her behavior while keeping her thoughts to herself. Recognizing the same defense mechanisms she’d seen her use as a girl.
One morning, when Gerta was nine and a student at the Queen Charlotte School, her teacher punished her by not allowing her to go and play outside. She pretended that she didn’t care, as if she had always disliked having to go outdoors anyway. When Frau Hellen announced that her punishment was over, she stood her ground. For an entire year she remained indoors, reading alone at her desk, not wanting to grant the teacher the satisfaction of believing she had wounded Gerta. It wasn’t that she was proud, just different. She never dealt well with being Jewish. Inventing stories about where she came from, like Moses saved from the water, or that she was the daughter of Norwegian whalers or pirates or, based on the novel she was reading, that her brothers formed part of King Arthur’s Round Table, or that she had a star…
But there were other sorts of dreams, of course there were. There was the lake, the table covered in linen, a vase with tulips, John Reed’s book, and a pistol. That was a whole other story.
Once, as she was leaving the doctor’s office, she sensed someone walking behind her, but when she turned around to look, there was no one there, just a bunch of trees and streets. She kept walking from the Porte d’Orleans, through that area of vacant lands, and past Boulevard Jourdan, with a feeling of uneasiness at her back, as if she could hear a light squeaking of rubber soles. Every now and again a gust of wind would come, rustling up the papers and leaves, almost taking her and her scant 110 pounds with it as well. Bundled up in her coat and gray beret, she walked, eyeing the windows of the closed storefronts, seeing no one’s reflection but her own. October and its shadows of longing.
She was thin, mostly due to fatigue. She slept poorly, burdened by a flood of blurry memories. It seemed centuries had passed since she abandoned Leipzig, yet she still hadn’t found her place in this city.
“I know that one day I arrived in Paris,” she would tell René Spitz in his office one afternoon when she decided to change her medical coat for the couch. “I know that for a while I lived at other people’s expense, doing what others did, thinking what others thought.” It was true. The reoccurring feeling that bothered her most was living a life that wasn’t hers. But which was hers? She’d look at herself apprehensively in the bathroom mirror, staring at each of her features, as if at any given moment she could undergo a transformation with the fear that she’d no longer recognize herself. Until one day the change happened. She grabbed onto the sink with both hands, stuck her head beneath the faucet for a few minutes, and then shook her head to the sides like a dog in the
