Eight Girls Taking Pictures (37 page)

“You know I’ve run out of visa options,” said Ines. “I don’t have family here. I don’t have a history.”

It was true that her extended family, and the years Charlotte had spent during her childhood in London, not to mention her money and career, had all made for an easy transition to this new country. Since it was growing evident that the casual cruelty of Berlin was becoming policy if you were Jewish, Communist, intellectual, or homosexual—and woe to the person who was all four—Germans who could leave were trying to leave.

But even as Germany demanded the exile of all of the above, it would allow them to take no property (so much of which had been confiscated or looted anyway) and almost no money. Countries like the United States and England were not interested in “penniless immigrants,” falling back
on the “immigration laws already in place that you cannot expect us to disregard.” France was not much better.

Because Charlotte had left early enough to take her belongings and bank account with her, she was able to build something of a life in London. But she could not change the legal fact of Ines not being her family. They could not marry. How could England expect her to send Ines Wolff back to a place that hated her, would deny her a living, and was likely to ship her to a work camp?

As the days counted down, Charlotte had to stop herself from shoving all those safe and self-satisfied Brits off the sidewalks and into the gutters. She told herself that she never wanted to live in this country in the first place, but the truth is that she didn’t want to live anywhere without Ines.

After Charlotte and Ines fell in love, Ines took a photograph of Charlotte applying lipstick, her eyes following her own reflection in the mirror, the fingers of her right hand lightly pressed against the glass; the ordinary moment that reveals the extraordinary. It’s the smallness of life that quickens the heart. It’s grocery shopping. It’s picking up the laundry and repeating an overheard conversation or reporting on someone’s hair, or clothing, who sat next to you in a café, or on a bus, knowing that you both see the hair, the clothing, the overheard conversation with the same lightness of life. So when Ines said of the photograph, “This isn’t how I love you best, but it is how I love you,” Charlotte knew what she meant. This mutual act of Ines taking the snapshot made Charlotte love Ines in much the same way that Ines loved the snapshot itself. Capturing the commonplace, the unremarked upon routine.
My heart; your heart; my heart.
Ines took the picture to Trilby at the Blum GlasWerks and asked him to fashion a glass cube, roughly the size of an ice cube, and place the little portrait inside.

The ship’s captain was more than happy to marry Charlotte Blum and Ignacio Martín as they crossed the Atlantic on their way to Buenos Aires. “Everyone’s a romantic,” said Ignacio.

Ignacio Martín had been traveling though London on his way to his home. Once the Bauhaus closed, he remained in Berlin, waiting to see, hoping to see, if the school would relocate again. When it didn’t, he decided to travel to Zurich, then Paris to see the Maison de Verre, a beautiful industrial house of glass by Chareau, Bijvoet, and Dalbet, a furniture and interior designer, architect, and metal worker, respectively. The tall house, with its glass blocks, moving screens, metal framework, had only been completed in 1932; when he visited it three years later, it was everything that Ignacio believed a house should be.

In London, he arrived at Charlotte’s studio.

“Ignacio!” she cried, hugging him, thrilled at the pure joy of him, especially in the wake of Ines’s departure. They walked and talked and ate lunch and dinner together. Then they talked some more. They went to gardens and parks and strolled along the Thames. They went to museums, studied statues and paintings in the spaces of silence in their ongoing conversation.

“You were right to leave Berlin,” said Ignacio, which didn’t make Charlotte miss it any less (her Berlin, not the existing Berlin). Nor did it make her any less anxious about Trilby, though she would tell herself that, because the Blum house was a short train ride from the city center, no one would notice it, meaning no one would notice him. No one would covet their beautiful glass house, so at odds with Nazi traditionalism, or Blum GlasWerks—how big was the factory really? Her parents were panicked over their boy, yet they comforted themselves by saying, The glassworks would be impossible to sell, and how devastating it would be to walk away from it in any case. No matter that walking away, as a rich man or a poor man (read rich Jew or poor Jew), had become increasingly difficult. It was unthinkable for them to admit that Trilby might not be able to get out at all, so it was better to think of everything in terms of the fate of the Blum GlasWerks, and not the fate of their son.

Charlotte was telling Ignacio that he wasn’t the first old friend to come through the city, and how she and Ines made portraits of immigrants (often writers and architects) when he asked, “How is Ines?”

“Gone,” said Charlotte.

He said nothing. Then, “Will you stay?”

She thought of how British immigration, along with the very slight influence of Bruno Blum, had taken scant pity on Ines, allowing her to emigrate to Palestine. When she secured passage on a ship, there was no suggestion of Charlotte coming along, since Charlotte’s emigration would mean more red tape, more liquidation of assets, and leaving Mr. and Mrs. Blum, who were already struggling with the reality of Trilby being back in Berlin.

“I suppose,” she said.

He talked about his home in Argentina (she too longed for home), extolling all the wonders of the place, ending with “I leave on Thursday.” He kissed her. Then he spent the night, because suddenly the thought of Ignacio leaving was unbearable.

During her last hours in England, Ines had watched Charlotte from the ship’s deck. The girls did not wave, only stood very still, gazing at each other. Charlotte recalled the experience of Ines’s reading the denial of her visa request in England, and the sheer will it took to secure a visa for Palestine; the days leading up to Ines’s departure, which were filled with the studio chores of making ads, cropping images, developing prints, taking photos (grateful for the gray light of London). The joke of calling each other “wife.” Their memories were ordinary—there was no cinematic quality to their love affair of friendship, affection, passion, and an artistic sympathy that allowed them to see the world in ways that each other understood. Who would understand Ines now? Who would know Charlotte?

A last memory of Ines in her navy blue wool coat and tousled curls, a rhinestone pin played against the tailored coat, the men’s-style white shirt and trousers as she smiled that first smile at Charlotte, who stood in the department store window in Berlin.

On the Tuesday before the Thursday when Ignacio Martin was setting sail for Buenos Aires, Charlotte walked out on a girl whose portrait she
was taking. She returned her fee to the surprised parents, then gathered her things and called Ignacio.

He suggested marriage because it would simplify their lives. And because, he said, he was in love with her.

“This isn’t a sailor-at-sea kind of love, is it?” she said.

“Is that a problem?”

She laughed.

“I don’t expect you to be a wife. I expect you to be, well, you.”

Later, she would say that maybe it was the sea air and feeling the disconnection that one feels in the middle of a lengthy ocean passage, with no land in sight, no way to fix your location, that led her to say yes.

Ignacio Martin’s family were
porteño
. They were a lively, intellectually restless bunch, looking, examining, questioning, and telling. There was no shortage of opinions, or tenderness. Ignacio’s father caressed the bearded cheek of the grown-up Ignacio as if he were still a boy. All the men kissed their children, as if time could not alter adult affection. The women held hands, sometimes as they strolled, sometimes when they were sitting near each other. All of this touching was easy and unforced and not too much, but more than Charlotte was accustomed to seeing in Germany.

“My family is mostly Italian,” said Ignacio. “Most of Buenos Aires is of Italian or Spanish descent. We can’t help it,” he said, laughing, “we’re lovers, not fighters.”