Free Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes

by their main ally. The constant movement of Mussolini’s troops on the border of Abyssinia didn’t exactly help ease nerves, either. Rarely was there a Sunday in which Paris streets weren’t filled with marching protesters. Hundreds of thousands of people regularly flocked to the streets with flags, banners, and dispatches that the formation of the Popular Front would soon be taking off. Chim, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Gerta, Fred Stein, Brassaï, André Kertész … photographers from all over Europe captured the fervor, perched on cornices, from up in the trees or rooftops. Students, neighborhood workers from Saint-Denis, circles of people arguing heatedly in the Marais neighborhood … Something was about to happen. Something serious, important … and they wanted to be there to capture it with their cameras. Leica, Kodak, Linhof, Ermanox, Rolleiflex with the twin-lens reflex … lit up viewfinders, zoom, semiautomatics, filters, tripods … Carrying everything over their shoulders. They were nothing more than photographers, people dedicated to looking. Witnesses. And unaware that they were living between two world wars. A good majority were already used to clandestinely crossing borders. They were no longer German, or Hungarian, or Polish, or Czechoslovakian, or Austrian. They were refugees. They belonged to no one. Not to any nation. Nomads, stateless people who gathered almost every week somewhere to read aloud passages from novels, recite poetry, act out plays written by Bertolt Brecht against Nazism, or give conferences. A certain romanticism united them. Give me a photograph and I’ll build you the world. Give me a camera and I’ll show you the map of Europe, an ailing continent with all its contours under threat, emerging from the acid in the developing tray: the face of an old man at Notre Dame; a woman in mourning before a tombstone at the Jewish cemetery, her eyes closed, whispering a prayer; and just shortly afterward, a boy lifting his hands in the Warsaw ghetto; a soldier with his eyes bandaged, dictating a letter to his fellow soldier; dark silhouettes of buildings against a scene of flashing explosions in black-and-white; Gerta crouching in a trench coat with a camera hanging around her neck, a slightly distorted focus while framing a bridge in flames, the geometry of horror. It wouldn’t be long before that world would go on to become one of the many scenes of war.
    On Rue Lobineau, every second and last Saturday of the month, there was a small flea market of exotic merchandise, spices from India, perfumes in bottles of all different colors, indigo-colored fabrics, henna for the hair, tropical birds like Captain Flint. Every time she walked in front of that stand, she thought of him. She’d look at those birds with green-and orange-colored feathers, remembering the illustrations of a book she read as a girl, its turquoise cover featuring a pirate with a parrot on his shoulder.
    Her imagination always played tricks on her. She had a narrative mind: Long John Silver, Treasure Island , and all of that. She was far too impressionable. Raised in a world that was on the brink of extinction, and the Captain Flint episode affecting her far more than she was willing to admit. Not only because of how much she cared for it, or the familiarity of seeing it walking around the house every day, but because what happened had been a senseless act. Absurd. Unnecessary savagery. However, the thought of replacing the old parrot from Guiana never occurred to her. She wasn’t one of those. Not feeling the need to fill the holes being left empty in her heart. She walked through all the stalls, sucking in that chaotic tide of sensations. The smell of ginger and cinnamon, the cries of the vendors, the screech of the birds, capturing images as an explorer would in an unfamiliar world.
    Chim had arranged for Fred Stein to stay in a free room they had in their flat. He was a quiet man,