Helena Janeczek - The Girl with the Leica

She was clearly... the pretty girl you couldnt help following, like destiny.
G EORG K URITZKES
Radio interview, 1987
Despite your death and scant remains,
the hair that lay golden on your head,
your smile, soft flower in the wind
and the skip in your walk,
dodging the bullets to capture
scenes of battle,
all still give us breath, Gerda.
L UIS P REZ I NFANTE
From To Gerda Taro, Killed on the Brunete Front

E ver since you saw that photograph, youve been gazing at them, spellbound. They seem happy, very happy, and theyre young, which is fitting for heroes. You couldnt say good-looking, but you couldnt deny it, whereas they dont appear at all heroic. Thats because theyre laughing, a laugh that closes their eyes and exposes their teeth, a laugh thats not photogenic but so frank it makes them glorious.

He has horse teeth, bared to the gums. She doesnt, but her canine protrudes into the cavity where the next tooth should be, with the charm of a small, attractive imperfection. The light spreads over the white of his striped shirt, flows onto the womans neck. Her clear skin, the diagonal of the tendons molded by her profile against the chair back, and even the curved line of the armrests amplify the joyous energy released by that unison laugh.

They could be in a square, but, sitting in those comfortable armchairs, they give the impression of being in a park, where the background blends into a thick curtain of leafy trees. You wonder, then, if the frame they have all to themselves might be the garden of a grand bourgeois villa, whose residents fled over the border when Barcelona became a hotbed of revolution. Now that cool spot under the trees belongs to the people: to those two laughing with their eyes closed.

The revolution is an ordinary day on which you go out to stop the coup that intends to suppress it, but you pause anyway to celebrate. Wearing the mono azul like a summer suit, putting a tie on under the overalls, wishing to appear handsome in the eyes of the other. Of no use here the mastodon of a gun, which has passed through the hands of countless soldiers before getting to the anarchist militiaman, who now cant touch the luminous neck of his woman.

Apart from that obstacle, theyre free of everything at this moment. Theyve already won. If they keep laughing like that, if they go on being so happy, knowing how to get a shot out of that old firearm doesnt seem too urgent. Those who are in the right will win. Now they can enjoy the sun tempered by the broadleaf trees, the presence of the beloved.

The world should know. It must see in the blink of an eye that on one side is the centuries-old war, the generals disembarking from Morocco with fierce mercenary troops, on the other people who want to defend the lives they have, who want one another.

In that early August of 1936, a lot of people are arriving in Barcelona to join the first population in Europe to take up arms against fascism. They describe the city in chaos in the universal language of images, which leap from the pages displayed on the newsstands of half the world, hung up in party and union headquarters, waved by newsboys, reused to wrap eggs and produceimages that leap in the faces even of those who dont buy or read newspapers.

The people of Barcelona welcome as brothers the foreigners whove come to fight by their side, and are getting used to that Babel of volunteers wandering all over the place, savoring the greeting compaero, compaera, then getting help from gestures, onomatopoetic sounds, pocket dictionaries. The photographers, who arent waiting for weapons and training, are part of that continual flow to the volunteer militias. Theyre here for us, theyre like us, comrades: those who see them on the job understand and let them work.

But the two militiamen in the photograph, enthralled by their own laughter, dont notice anything. Whoever is taking the picture moves, shoots again, risks giving himself away to take a closer shot of the couple united by the broad, intimate smile.

This photograph is almost identical to the first, except that here the man and woman are obviously so enraptured that they dont care about the life around them. The scissor-like steps that cut the pavement behind them, revealing that theyre not in a park but maybe even on the Ramblas, where the city, mobilizing, gathers. The neighboring chair, where another woman is sitting.

Of her head you see only a tuft of curly hair, of her body only a covered arm. Youd need her gaze, the gaze of someone who has seen up close what you can deduce from the images but cant see with your eyes.

The photographer who has captured the two comrades isnt alone. Theres a man and a woman, positioned on the right side of the street, one beside the other.

Then you discover the photograph of a woman sitting in the same armchairs, and you find it hard to believe that such brazen good luck can exist. Until, in the upper right, you notice a sliver of the profile of the young militiaman who in the other photographs is smiling ecstatically at his blond girl.

This worker, holding a fashion magazine in her discordant hands and a gun between her legs, doesnt really seem the type to be seized by gossipy curiosity about a couple of photographers who, after competing to capture the noisy laughter of the comrades in love, immortalize her as well. No, you say to yourself, someone like that sees and doesnt see the things that dont concern her. She remains slightly alert, because shes been given a weapon, but mostly she wants to savor that moment of peace.

But a few days laterso you imaginethat militiawoman arrives at the beach where the training takes place and finds the two photographers. He looks almost like a Gypsy, or rough and ready anyway, she could be a model out of the magazine the woman was reading on the Ramblas, but with a cumbersome camera around her neck that hangs to her hips.

Now the woman is curious: Who are those two? Where do they come from? Are they having an affair, like the many that flourish in this climate of mobilization and high summer and freedom, or are they husband and wife?

Something like that, since, allies and colleagues, they speak to each other in a harsh language. She is smiling and quick as a cat, but more poised when she instructs the comrades on how to position their weapons. Theyre both working hard, theyre euphoric and lighthearted, and share their Gauloises as a gesture of brotherhood and thanks.

Ive seen them before, the militiawoman intervenes, when the photographers go off and an excited exchange of comments begins, but no one listens to her. The interesting news comes from the journalist comrade who brought them here. Theyve just arrived from Paris and nearly got killed already when the twin-engine plane made an emergency landing on the Sierra. A big shot from the French press broke his arm, but the two of them not even a scratch, thank heavens. Hehis name is Robert Capasays that Barcelona is magnificent and reminds him of his native city, Budapest, except that he cant go back as long as its in the hands of Admiral Horthy and his reactionary regime. Gerda Taro, his companion, must be an alemana, a German, one of those emancipated young women who didnt submit even to Hitler.

Can you tell us when the photos will be published? the militiawomen press him.

The journalist promises to find out, but not from the photographers, who are about to leave for the areas where the fighting is: first theyre going to the front in Aragon and then south to Andalusia.

A year after those photographs came the first eighteen deaths in Barcelona, in the buildings gutted by artillery fire from the cruiser Eugenio di Savoia. The militias were disbanded, the militiawoman returned to the factory. Maybe she sews uniforms for the Ejrcito Popular, where the anarchists have to obey without protest, and women are no longer welcome. But in the factories they still listen to the radio, comment on the news, keep up their courage.