Free Waiting for Robert Capa by Susana Fortes Page B

more precision: the white shirt, rolled-up sleeves, the wet hair, the equipment slung over the shoulder, skin tanned from the Spanish sun. The sensation was similar to when a ship jolts and the floor tilts beneath you. Her disorderly heartbeat caught her by surprise, but it was not the moment to stop and analyze her emotions. Nor did she even wait for him to come up. She ran downstairs, two steps at a time, and he lifted her in his arms. In the doorway, as her father always had when he returned home from a trip. Twirling her through the air, half-smiling, sure of himself, fraternal as always. André, and his way of always showing up when you least expect it, with those eyes that granted him forgiveness. So handsome it hurt, she thought. The Hungarian Jew.

Chapter Eight
    N ight was falling. The ocean dark. And up there, once again, the stars, dense as the calligraphy of an indecipherable manuscript. A soft breeze that smelled of pine and eucalyptus, almost imperceptible, grazed the water with a strange silvery phosphorescence. Gerta and André had been lying down on the sand for a while, face-up and without speaking. As if they were on a boat deck and looking out from the island toward the bright city of Cannes with its red and blue lights shining brightly on the horizon. They both had on the sweaters that Ruth suggested at the last minute they pack in their bags. “They will come in handy at night,” she’d said. Gerta could smell the wool on André’s sleeve as she rested her head on his arm.
    It was a small and calm fishermen’s island. Barely 370 acres of Mediterranean pines, with a few docked feluccas , nets placed out to dry, and the smell of old port. The perfect resting place for a warrior. André had returned from Spain tired and with a fresh batch of money from the report he sold to Berliner Illustrierte . The francs were burning holes in his pockets; he wasn’t cut out for being rich. So, when he found out that Willi Chardack and some other people they knew were thinking of taking a trip to the Lérins Islands in the Côte d’Azur, he didn’t think twice. He suggested that Chim and the girls come along. Although Ruth had thought it was a great idea, she couldn’t go. She had just signed a contract with the filmmaker Max Ophüls for a small part in a film called Divine , which had begun shooting in Paris. Chim had a deadline for an assignment he accepted from Vu magazine, about the Left Bank’s artists, and decided to stay. André looked over at Gerta, standing there with her bony chin, a slight frown, as she thought it through.
    â€œAll right. Why not?” She smiled in agreement.
    They made their way to Cannes hitchhiking. Both in an excellent mood, joking around, stealing fruit from orchards, dining at highway café-bars, leaving behind small villages that smelled of sweet broom. New horizons that whet your appetite and make you want to laugh hard, breathe in the fresh air, and get lost in the world. They were seized by a kind of euphoric vitality. Life’s invisible paths. From Cannes’ port, they took a small fishing boat to Île Sainte-Marguerite while the sun darted across the water. There is a strip between the ocean and the earth. Just as there’s an ambiguous strip, dark but radiant, between the body and the soul, thought Gerta. And the image of white clothing hanging out to dry on the balcony came to mind. Karl’s soul. Oskar’s. And hers.
    She believed she had arrived in paradise. An island of warm rocks and cormorants, with waves that launched greenish laps, smacking over the sand. A quiet place, without meetings at the crack of dawn, or the echo of footsteps following you to the foot of your door, or broken glass, or dead animals, or equilateral crosses. An island. A piece of land far from a world on the brink of blowing itself to pieces. Sand and ocean. Pure geography.
    They built their tents next to the ruins of Fort