He held a negative up to the window light for her to see: a woman crossing a bridge, away from the camera, an opera cape blown open behind her so that it seemed she might lift off the pavement and take flight.
“So you’re going to print something you’ve already taken?” she asked.
“André’s comment about me not touching my camera has unsettled you.”
“No,” she said, only then aware of the disappointment he must have heard in her voice. “No of course not. Your art is your art. You have to come to it when you can.”
“A photograph is art made in two parts,” he said. “In the taking of it, and in the manipulation and development. The same negative can be so many things. The same sky can be light and joyous or dark and menacing, all in the wave of my hand between enlarger and paper.” He took the negative to the burning candle on the dresser. “Ansel Adams says the negative is the score and the print the performance.”
He held the negative over the candle flame.
“Wait! Don’t destroy it!” she said. “I’ll never forgive myself for having been in the bath when you meant to print it.”
Still he held the negative there. She could see it getting hot, not melting or becoming misshapen, but the chemicals on the top side pooling so that even she could see the woman in the cape had lost her shape.
“I’m making her more haunting,” he said.
Nanée said, “You’re not destroying the negative?”
“Sometimes it is only in destroying a thing that we find what we create.”
Friday, November 15, 1940
VILLA AIR-BEL
Edouard set his enlarger up in a makeshift bathroom darkroom. He lined up in the tub a roasting pan for the developer, sheet pans for the stop bath and fixer, and a deeper pan for the rinsing water. The zinc was still damp from Nanée’s bath, the smell of the soap she used, citrus and verbena, bringing with it the glimpsed image: Nanée submerged in bathwater, the intoxicating stretch of her long, shadowed neck, her up-tilted chin. Always, what can be seen suggests what is hidden, the surface interesting not in what it is but in what it isn’t. It was true in photographs and in life.
“Here I am.” Nanée’s voice disconcerting.
He might have been thinking it himself, Here I am, finally, after all those months of being lost in that camp.
She stood in the doorway, her hair still wet, her face clean and fresh. He wished he’d shown her the other negatives in this sequence so she could understand the long days he spent watching from their Vienna window while Elza tutored her math pupils, the full life they had and this, one of the last moments. That was, he supposed, why he’d needed to br?lage the negative, to mix the chemicals into something like loss, and grief, and guilt.
He poured his chemicals into the pans and put the Kindermann globe over the bathroom’s single bulb, less daunted at the dim ruby glow now that he wouldn’t be alone with his demons. If Nanée weren’t there, he might explore dozens of crops and manipulations and exposures, but she’d never been in a darkroom, and what excitement was there in seeing a test strip emerge in the tray? He felt good about the br?lage too. In melting the emulsion, in leaving that to chance, perhaps he had created something. He would leave this printing of the caped woman too to chance.
He put the negative in the carrier, emulsion facedown lest the photograph print with what was right as left and what was left as right, the way it seemed his life had been for so long now, everything the opposite of what it should be. He adjusted the enlarger until the image came into focus on the easel, the clear lines of the operagoer’s billowing cape now melted and reformed into ethereal waves, her face more goddess than woman.
“Who is she?” Nanée asked, her own face goddesslike in the red light. “This woman in the dramatic cape, who you’ve inexplicably melted.”
The smallest bit of a laugh bubbled up from somewhere deep inside him as he inserted paper into the easel and set the timer. He had laughed at Camp des Milles, but that laughter had come from a place behind his eyes that wanted to be tears.
When the timer’s metal bell tinged, he moved the paper from the easel into the developer and rocked the roasting pan back and forth.
“Look, there she is,” Nanée said, her voice full of awe as the woman began to take shape, the wavy edges of her cape as haunting as he’d imagined when, seeing just the hint of Nanée’s body wavy in the bathwater, he’d remembered this image.