“I was able to get to Cours-la-Reine in Hug’s car and afterward continued on foot to the Place de la Concorde, trying to cross the bridge to the Assemblée Nationale.” André had begun to speak German, in which he was much more fluent. He was leaning on the edge of the table, his arms crossed. “There were more than two hundred policemen on horseback, six vans and police cordons in columns of five. It was impossible to cross. The people began surrounding a bus filled with passengers and that’s where it all began: the fire, the stone-throwing, the broken glass, a head-to-head between Fascists from the Action Française and the Jeunesses Patriotes, against us. It only worsened throughout the night. None of the streetlamps worked. The only visible light came from torches and the bonfires people began creating.” He brought his cigarette to his lips and looked straight at Gerta. He spoke with passion but with something else as well: vanity, habit, male pride. It’s something that gets into men’s heads and makes them behave like boys, right out of a scene from a western.
“It was raining and there was smoke everywhere. We knew that the Bonapartists had been able to get close to the Palais Bourbon, so we regrouped in an attempt to try and block them. But the police opened fire from the bridge. Several snipers had taken post up in the horse-chestnuts of Cours-la-Reine. It was a bloodbath: seventeen dead and more than a thousand wounded,” he said, blowing out a fast stream of cigarette smoke. “And the worst part of it all,” he added, “was not being able to take one damn photograph. There wasn’t enough light.”
Gerta continued looking at him closely, elbow at the edge of the table, chin resting in hand. Werner Thalheim had been detained that day and they ended up sending him back to Berlin, like many other comrades. The Socialists and the Communists kept brawling it out in their war of allegiances. André’s friend Willi Chardack wound up with a broken collarbone and his head cut open. All the Left Bank cafés were converted into makeshift infirmaries … but this presumptuous Hungarian considered the fact that he couldn’t take his goddamn photograph the biggest tragedy of all. Right.
Chim watched her with eyes that appeared smaller due to the thickness of his lenses, and she knew that in that very moment he was watching her think, and that perhaps he didn’t agree with her, as if behind his pupils there lived the conviction that no one has the right to judge another. What did she really know about André? Had she ever been inside his head? Had they gone to school together? Did she ever sit beside him on the back steps of his house, petting the cat until sunrise, in order not to hear his family fight because his father had thrown away an entire month’s salary in a card game? No, Gerta evidently did not know anything about his life or about Pest’s working-class neighborhoods. How was she to know? When André was seventeen years old, two corpulent individuals in derby hats went and fetched him from his home after a series of disturbances by the Lánc Bridge. At police headquarters, the commissioner, Peter Heim, broke the boy’s four ribs, never pausing to interrupt his whistling of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony throughout. His first swing went straight for the jaw, and André gave it to him with his cynical smile. The commissioner retaliated with a kick to the balls. This time, the boy didn’t smile but gave him the dirtiest look he could muster. The beating continued until he lost consciousness. He remained in a coma for several days. After two weeks, he was let go. His mother, Júlia, bought him two shirts, a jacket, a pair of mountain boots with double soles, and two pairs of baggy pants, his refugee uniform. And put him on a train when he was just seventeen. He never had a home again. What did she know about all that had happened? Chim’s eyes appeared to be asking this, as he scrutinized her reactions from behind his rounded glasses.
It was hard to imagine two teenagers less likely to wind up being friends than Chim and André. But despite the fact, they orbited one another like two celestial bodies floating through the air. They’re so different, thought Gerta. Chim spoke perfect French. He seemed serious. Like a philosopher or a chess player. From the few comments he had made, Gerta was able to deduce that he was a staunch atheist, though he still carried his Jewish karma inside like a strand of sadness, as did she. André, in contrast, did not seem interested in complicating his life with such things. It appeared he complicated his in a different way, just as men always have. It all started because of a tall man with a mustache, who began speaking to Ruth in a tone that wasn’t rude but suave. It had a certain gallantry to it, but with a good dose of alcohol. Nothing that a woman couldn’t handle on her own, without making a scene but with a simple answer that would put the Frenchy in his place. But before Ruth had time to respond, André was already getting up and throwing his chair behind him with such force that everyone in the place stopped to look. His hands slightly separated from his body, his muscles tensed.
“Easy,” said Chim, getting up and removing his glasses just in case they had to break open someone’s face.
Luckily, it wasn’t necessary. The guy, somewhat elusive and resigned, simply put up his left hand as a form of apology. An educated Frenchman, after all. Or not looking for trouble that night.
It became apparent to Gerta, however, that this was not the first time something like this had happened to them. Just from having watched him, she was certain that on more than one occasion the situation had been resolved differently. There are men who are born with an innate need to fight. It’s not likely something that they choose, but an instinct that causes them to jump 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,