Waiting for Robert Capa

“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, breathing in the aroma of lime trees during spring’s recent debut. The silence of that city appealed to her, with its labyrinth of stoned promenades creeping down to the river. That calm brought her peace. It allowed her to organize her thoughts. She remained like this awhile, until someone placed their hand on her shoulder. It was Erwin Ackerknecht, her old friend from Leipzig.

“We need someone to type the text to the manifesto in French, English, and German,” he said, taking a seat next to her on the pavement. “The more intellectuals we can gather the better. We have to make this congress a success.” He was referring to the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, which was to be held in Paris in the early fall. Erwin took his time rolling a cigarette between his fingers, then wetting the paper with his lips to seal it. “Aldous Huxley and Forster have already confirmed their attendance,” he added, “as well as Isaac Babel and Boris Pasternak from the USSR. Representing us will be Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, and Robert Musil, from Austria. The Americans still haven’t confirmed … It’s important that this document reaches everyone, Gerta, each one of them, in their own language. Can we count on you for this?”

“Of course,” she said. She took a sip of her vodka drink, allowing the alcohol to find its way into her veins, passing through her heart and up to her brain. She found it tasted harsh, mixed with the tobacco. Brushing a patch of hair off her forehead, she looked out into the sky. Like just another sentry in the night, Saint-Germaindes-Prés’ thousand-year-old abbey and its Romanesque bell tower stood tall, framed in black.

In recent weeks, the surrealists’ controversies had shifted away from poetic boundaries to concentrate instead on the reality that was being reported in the media. Their desires grew dim, and the small group from the Left Bank temporarily abandoned the astral heights of Mount Olympus and muses with green-colored eyes, so they could take part in the world’s grand whirlwind. While they awaited further news, a latent conflict persisted between those who accepted the revolutionary party’s plans and those who still aspired to unite the revolution with poetry. It was not a trifling matter. Walking down the boulevard one afternoon, André Breton, on his way to buy tobacco at the shop next to Dôme, bumped into the Russian Stalinist Ilya Ehrenburg, just as the latter was leaving. Neither chose their words carefully. The poet took a deep breath and, on the same impulse, punched Ehrenburg in the nose with a crack that sounded as if a chair had broken. It wasn’t a premeditated act. It simply happened. Caught by surprise, the Russian didn’t have time to react. Weakened by the blow, he fell to his knees, dripping a scandalously red-colored blood over the gray pavement. Afterward, as if they were all possessed, it turned into a messy battle with everyone against everyone. There were insults; some people got up to help the wounded man, while others tried to calm the poet’s fury. They tried to lift the Russian, get him out of there, until someone shouted something about calling the police, and in that moment they all decided to walk away from the boxing match between mastiffs until the next time. A few days later, René Crevel, the poet in charge of trying to make peace between the surrealists and the Communists, committed suicide in his kitchen by opening the gas valve.

“It’s always necessary to say good-bye,” he wrote, having lost hope. “Tomorrow, you will return to the fog of your origins. To a city, red and gray, your colorless room, its silver walls, and with windows that open directly onto the clouds to which you are sister. To search for the shadow of your face throughout the sky, the gestures of your fingers…”

That was the state of things when Gerta found herself obliged to choose between two options she didn’t like. It was no secret how dissidents in the Soviet Union were repressed, but in that small Montparnasse community, the sacred dwelling of the gods, many were unsure whether to denounce Stalin’s abuses or keep them quiet in order to preserve the unified band of anti-Fascists.