Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes Read Free Book Online Page B

every now and again I’m able to get an ad assignment for Alliance Photo. It’s not much, but it allows me to practice and get to know the inside world of journalism. The scene is not encouraging. It’s not easy to break through; you have to elbow your way in. At least André has good contacts. Ruth and I got a new job typing up handwritten screenplays for Max Ophüls. I’m also still working at René’s office on Thursday afternoons. With all of this we have enough to pay the rent, though it barely lasts us until the end of the month. But at least I don’t owe anyone money. Oh, and we have a new roommate, a parrot from Guiana, a present from André, with an orange-colored beak and a black tongue—poor thing arrived a bit beaten up. Ruth has resigned herself to teaching it French, but it still hasn’t said a single word, prefers to whistle the “Turkish March.” It can’t fly, 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?
    â€œChim 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?
    â€œSometimes 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