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“Watch, you’ll wind up sleeping with him,” Ruth predicted when they finally arrived at their doorstep at dawn.
“Not for all the money in the world,” she said.
Any life, as brief as it may appear, contains plenty of misconceptions, situations that are difficult to explain, arrows that get lost in the clouds like phantom planes, and if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind. It isn’t easy piecing together all that information. Even if it’s only for your own ears to hear. That’s what the psychoanalysts were doing with their dream studies. Quicksand, winding staircases, melting pocket watches, and things like that. But Gerta’s dreams were difficult to grasp or to try and frame. They were hers. What had her childhood been like up until then? A betrayal of those around her or else dreaming of another life?
She had found a modest paying job as a part-time secretary in the office of the émigré doctor René Spitz, a disciple of Freud. The majority of the pages in the early editions of his journals were filled with articles on dream interpretation. It was a world that wasn’t completely foreign to Gerta. When work was slow, she would avidly read all the case studies, as if wanting to uncover a secret about her own life.
Everyone tries to manage their dreams in their own way. Sometimes, when she returned home, she would sit on her bed with an old box of quince candy that she used to store her treasures in: a pair of Egyptian amber earrings, photographs, a silver medallion with the silhouette of a ship, a pen drawing of the port in Ephesus that Georg had given her their last summer together. She suddenly felt the need to grasp at those memories like straws, as if they could protect her from something. From someone. She returned to the world of Georg as one shields oneself with armor. Constantly repeating his name. She forced herself to write to him as much as she could. Made plans to go see him in Italy. Something had stirred itself up inside, irritated her, left her disconcerted, and she sought refuge in an old lover. This was her limbo, trapped somewhere between reality and fiction. Why? Ruth studied her behavior while keeping her thoughts to herself. Recognizing the same defense mechanisms she’d seen her use as a girl.
One morning, when Gerta was nine and a student at the Queen Charlotte School, her teacher punished her by not allowing her to go and play outside. She pretended that she didn’t care, as if she had always disliked having to go outdoors anyway. When Frau Hellen announced that her punishment was over, she stood her ground. For an entire year she remained indoors, reading alone at her desk, not wanting to grant the teacher the satisfaction of believing she had wounded Gerta. It wasn’t that she was proud, just different. She never dealt well with being Jewish. Inventing stories about where she came from, like Moses saved from the water, or that she was the daughter of Norwegian whalers or pirates or, based on the novel she was reading, that her brothers formed part of King Arthur’s Round Table, or that she had a star…
But there were other sorts of dreams, of course there were. There was the lake, the table covered in linen, a vase with tulips, John Reed’s book, and a pistol. That was a whole other story.
Once, as she was leaving the doctor’s office, she sensed someone walking behind her, but when she turned around to look, there was no one there, just a bunch of trees and streets. She kept walking from the Porte d’Orleans, through that area of vacant lands, and past Boulevard Jourdan, with a feeling of uneasiness at her back, as if she could hear a light squeaking of rubber soles. Every now and again a gust of wind would come, rustling up the papers and leaves, almost taking her and her scant 110 pounds with it as well. Bundled up in her coat and gray beret, she walked, eyeing the windows of the closed storefronts, seeing no one’s reflection but her own. October and its shadows of longing.
She was thin, mostly due to fatigue. She slept poorly, burdened by a flood of blurry memories. It seemed centuries had passed since she abandoned Leipzig, yet she still hadn’t found her place in this city.
“I know that one day I arrived in Paris,” she would tell René Spitz in his office one afternoon when she decided to change her medical coat for the couch. “I know that for a while I lived at other people’s expense, doing what others did, thinking what others thought.” It was true. The reoccurring feeling that bothered her most was living a life that wasn’t hers. But which was hers? She’d look at herself apprehensively in the bathroom mirror, staring at each of her features, as if at any given moment she could undergo a transformation with the fear that she’d no longer recognize herself. Until one day the change happened. She grabbed onto the sink with both hands, stuck her head beneath the faucet for a few minutes, and then shook her head to the sides like a dog in the rain. Afterward, she returned to studying herself in the mirror. Then, with the utmost care, she covered her hair, strand by strand, with red henna clay, using her fingers to comb it all back. She liked the color of dried blood.
“You look like a raccoon,” Ruth said when she came home and found Gerta underneath a pile of blankets. Her red hair made her face appear harder and thinner.
Inside her house, she never hesitated to display who she really was. But outside, at the café gatherings, she became someone else. Dividing yourself in two, that was the first rule of survival: knowing how to differentiate exterior life from interior suffering. It was something she learned to do from an early age, in the same manner she learned how to express herself well in German at school and go home afterward and speak in Yiddish. By the end of the day, all curled up in her pajamas with a book, Gerta was nothing more than a pilgrim before the walls of a foreign city. On the outside, no less, she continued being the smiling princess with green eyes and flared pants, who had managed to dazzle the entire Left Bank.
Paris was one big party. With a simple bike wheel, wine rack, and a urinal, the Dadaists were capable of converting any night into an improvised spectacle. There was smoking, an ever-increasing amount of drinking, vodka, absinthe, champagne … Every day a manifesto was signed. In favor of popular art, by the Araucanian Indians, from the cabinet of Dr. Caligari, of Japanese trees … That’s how they passed the time. The texts written one day were compared to ones written on others. The Paris carousel and Gerta giving it a whirl, turning on herself. She signed manifestos, assisted political meetings, read Man’s Fate by Malraux, bought a ticket for a trip to Italy she never took, drank far too much some nights, and, above all, saw him again. Him. André. She even dreamed of him. Though it was more of a nightmare. He pressed down on her chest, completely aroused, making it impossible for her to breathe. She woke up screaming, with a frightened look in her eyes, staring straight at the pillow. Not wanting to move or rest her head on the same part of the bed. Perhaps that dream happened later on, who knows … It’s also not that important. The fact was, she saw him again.
Of course, there’s always chance. As well as destiny. There are parties, mutual friends who are photographers, electricians, or awful poets. Besides, everyone knows how small the world is, and that in one of its corners you can fit a terrace-balcony, from which you can see the Seine, hear the voice of Josephine Baker, like a long, dark street, and on which, just as she was heading back inside, the Hungarian grabbed her by the arm to ask her:
“Is it you?”
“Well,” she responded in a dubious fashion, “not always.”
The two share a laugh as if they’ve known each other for ages.
“I didn’t recognize you,” said André. Looking both shocked and amused, with a slight wink of the left eye, as if at any moment he would lunge like a hunter over its captive. “This bright red looks good on you.”
“Perhaps,”