Eight Girls Taking Pictures (38 page)

She liked the easy manner of his family, their easy acceptance of her; she liked the intellectual clamor. It made her miss her own warmhearted, smart family.

On a piece of land not too far from the city center, Ignacio designed a glass box house for them. Twenty-foot ceilings, matching studios, a sky bridge and rooftop terrace. He constructed a center courtyard—a mixing of traditional with the new—that had a spectacular garden and bathing
fountain. The newspapers wrote about this “prodigal son architect” who “spent his time in Germany mastering the art of the office building” and has now “moved into one.” It was hard not to notice that sharp contrast between slow, sunny, romantically traditional Buenos Aires (as Catholic as Berlin was Christian and Jewish, and not too devout on any front) and the cosmopolitan, morally fluid, glittering Berlin, its glitter diamond-hard.

These differences expanded to a dismissal of Charlotte’s photographic style as well: Her portraits were thought to be too direct, too unsparing, her critics missing the obvious (she thought) beauty in the unadorned, unable to see how realism can be so precise as to seem almost surreal. For Charlotte, Ines, and Ignacio, the tension in their art was often located in that place between the actual and the dream.

The paradox of Charlotte’s life was having the time and support to make the pictures she wanted to make but no place to show them. Nor did she have a clientele receptive to them. It seemed the
porteño
(and the Argentine in general), as she had been told more than once, preferred work that was a bit less demanding. Couldn’t they agree on what was beautiful? Surely that was a universal; a sentiment that wasn’t entirely encouraging.

Ignacio found a job with an architecture firm that made municipal buildings, hoping for eventual commissions for public housing. He said, “Change must begin somewhere,” and one of the partners did seem to like him.

Charlotte found herself making little photomontages, or walking the city, studying the handbills, billboards, and other advertising, which she found provincial and uninspiring. In the midst of a mild spring day, while inhaling the scent of flowers from window boxes, she would dream of snow. The sound of traffic would suddenly intensify in her memory as she saw herself immersed in the surging crowds of Potsdamer Platz, the smell of car exhaust, the grind of trolley wheels, the bus and car horns, the deep buzz of motor scooters. At night, she would see the starlight of an Argentine sky melt into the reflections of city lights on wet, Berliner streets.

Sometimes her waking dreams of Berlin gave way to nighttime rendezvous
with friends and family and Ines, Ines often enough to prevent her heart from healing but not so frequently that Charlotte couldn’t find a kind of contentment and pleasure in her new life. Ignacio was a good man. He liked her as much as he loved her and lived without the expectation that she would be an Argentine wife. It was common enough, Charlotte thought, the middle-class wife with her maid and her children, willful ignorance of the mistress, her bridge and her secret boredom. And the ones who weren’t bored were a brittle bunch who cared too much and pushed too hard to hang on to the life they had. The difference between Buenos Aires and Berlin was the Church, which dictated to these wives, seeming to pick up where their husbands’ demands of feminine behavior left off.

On the other hand, Charlotte was mesmerized by the icons and art of the Church; whether opulent or plain, it was all tears and blood and gold and silver. Stars and stained glass and saints whose various tortured deaths bordered on the pornographic. The processions, with their carried statues, and penitents on their bare knees, sometimes dragging chains, were like grand street theater. “You are not supposed to enjoy it in that way,” Ignacio said.

“Oh,” said Charlotte, nudging him. “But I am supposed to enjoy it?”

And confession seemed to her the best invention of all. Sin on Saturday, repent on Sunday. Debauch then fast; demand then beg. It was a faith of extremes.

All in all the days ran apace until Charlotte got a letter from Ines.
My exile has ended! Will be arriving in London three weeks. Wish you were there. Ines.

Ignacio wasn’t entirely happy about Charlotte’s plan to sail to London to visit Ines, but he wouldn’t think to tell her that she couldn’t go because he loved her. “But I’ll be back,” said Charlotte, to which he replied, “Yes, but it’s the part before you get back that I’m not looking forward to.” “Then it will make the part where I return so much better,” she said.

She touched his cheek. “Is that your brave smile?” she said. And he said, “I know that Ines is your friend.”

He gave her a gruff, affectionate kiss at the dock, then waved good-bye.

 • • • 

If someone asked Charlotte if 1937 London was different from 1936 London, she would say, “Not really, except that it was alive and beautiful again because Ines was there.”

“You look different,” said Ines.

“Perhaps it’s the Argentine effect. Do I seem languorous?”

“Maybe. Whatever it is, it’s working for you.”

“The crossing didn’t exactly agree with me—I was either sleeping or throwing up. I couldn’t quite get my sea legs, I guess.”

And when Ines asked, as they embraced, “Would Argentina make you feel different too? Charlotte?”

Because all color had drained from Charlotte’s face just before she raced over to vomit into the bathroom sink.

Charlotte’s daughter, Barrie, was born in London, five months after Charlotte arrived. At first Charlotte had ascribed her nausea to a rough passage, then the loss of her period to upheavals personal and political in nature, as well as to the rigors of travel. But in the end, a doctor said that it wasn’t flu, or travel, or the seismic shifts of her worlds (interior and exterior): it was simply pregnancy.

The first letter she received after she wired Ignacio was joyful:
I can’t believe our good luck!
The second, arriving two weeks later, was confused:
When did you say you’re returning?
And the third was an example of lost patience:
You are my wife. That is our child. We all belong together.

Charlotte deflected Ignacio’s requests for her return by saying that the pregnancy had progressed to the point where she couldn’t stand the thought of being tossed around at sea, since she was now “seasick” all the time. She also was “pregnancy clumsy,” as she called it. These statements were true.

What her letters left out was her happiness with Ines. She neglected to mention that she had reopened her old studio—her equipment exactly as she had left it the day she walked out, almost two years prior. And she said nothing about her and Ines contacting old clients and pursuing new ones.

They had fewer émigrés than before, having heard that the Nazis were making it impossible to stay but also impossible to go. A Jew was permitted to deal only with other Jews—except there were no Jewish-owned businesses anymore. On the fashionable Kurfurstendamm, signs everywhere blocked Jews from entering. One émigré told them that all you saw, on every door, every window was “JewJewJewJew. Like it’s one long refrain, this ‘Jew’ that appears everywhere. I can live without the luxuries,” said the émigré, “but not without bread and meat and coal.”

They were told that in Berlin all Jews had to add “Israel” or “Sarah” to their names. Stars lost all their meaning of dreams and aspirations when affixed to clothing.

Jews were being told not to bother looking for apartments. Possessions were sold for nothing, and even those who could get permission to leave were not allowed to depart with any money, guaranteeing their impoverishment and being turned back by various countries. It was a desperate, confusing state of affairs to be so unwanted and so unable to go.

Ignacio was getting impatient. Barrie was three months old, and he wanted his daughter and his wife home, with him. Charlotte and Ines had fallen back into their easy “wife” routine, now expanded as a small family. Charlotte’s life was doubled as a legal, conventional wife and an emotional, unrecognized “wife.”

Bruno and Marcelle Blum were in Toronto, having left London just as Charlotte arrived. Though her parents said nothing about Charlotte returning to her husband, she knew them well enough to know that this omission was their way of saying Ignacio was her husband; he was Barrie’s father. Their empathy for Ignacio ran high in light of their separation from their son, daughter, and now granddaughter. So many families they knew were being involuntarily torn apart.

The tension of living day to day without making any sorts of long-range plans wore on the young women. Charlotte and Ines pulled a little away from each other in anticipation of Charlotte’s inevitable, they thought, but did not voice aloud, departure. They really weren’t each other’s wives; they would never be seen as a family. Words like
wife, family,
and
mommy
would always be in quotes for them, and they knew it.

Charlotte thought about the meaning of
wife
; she thought about the brokenness of her life without Ines. She thought about Ignacio, and she thought about Barrie’s little smile, which looked nothing like Ines’s or Charlotte’s.

On an otherwise unremarkable day in November 1938, Charlotte and Ines received word of
Kristallnacht
, the Night of Broken Glass. Synagogues looted and burned; homes looted and burned; women and children brutalized. Countless Jewish men sent to camps, tortured and killed. The entire city smashed to shards of jagged and crushed glass. Someone neglected to tell the thugs who demolished the Blum GlasWerks that it was no longer a Jewish-owned business; it had been owned by Aryans for over a year. They were idiots destroying their own property.

Charlotte remembered her brother’s office, previously her uncle’s office, and the fragile glass models of houses and windows and sculptures. She thought of the little glass ice cube with her portrait, taken by Ines, one of the only things she had brought to her Buenos Aires studio.

Charlotte thought about her father and his passion for glass, his belief that glass was the way to utopia, the best possible world for all men, the spiritual possibilities of glass. The Glass Chain. Bruno Blum and the other architects would never think of the glass chain again without hearing it shatter. The smashing of the Blum GlasWerks. The smashing of the family’s glass house. Charlotte covered her face with her hands as she stood in her London studio, whispering, “Trilby.”