“The Goddess of the Chateau, despairing for a visa to America, like the rest of us,” Edouard said.
He ran the print through the stop bath and fixer, then set her in the water to rinse. He carried her in the water tray out into the light of the kitchen and set her on the counter for Nanée to better see. The print was dark, but that only added to her haunting quality.
“It’s like she’s us,” Nanée said. “Not us how we look but . . . but how I feel.”
She is you. The thought so sudden and true that Edouard was afraid he’d given it voice.
“Would you like to see who she was before?” he asked, thinking again of the full sequence of photos he’d taken: an elegant Viennese woman emerging from a matinee at the Opera to find the street blocked by a Nazi pop-up protest. Her face startled. Disgusted. Turning. Walking away. These were the kind of photographs he took, or used to. A watcher. A woman who never imagined she was involved. He’d followed her—stalked her, really—all the way to the little bridge crossing the canal in the Stadtpark where he’d taken this shot, her strides no less angry for the distance she put between herself and the Nazis by then being dispersed by the Vienna police. He couldn’t say even now why he’d followed her.
Nanée said, “I think if I saw her in other photos, it would spoil this quality, this light on myself.”
This light on myself. He wondered what it was of herself that she saw in the caped woman. Her proud anger, he thought. Her pride at her anger. He too saw himself in this photo, his fingers focusing the lens as Elza would have been writing that note back in the apartment, explaining that she had to go to Germany to get her sister. He’d believed his own proud anger set him above others. It was something he realized only after Elza was murdered, an unconscious assumption on which his work was based.
He said to Nanée, “This is what makes a photograph compelling, or shocking, or moving. We all imagine ourselves innocent. Aghast at cruelty. Empathetic. Human. We don’t imagine that in simply watching we provide an audience.”
We cheered or jeered, or perhaps we only stared. He wasn’t sure it mattered. In being there to watch, we encouraged. This was what he photographed: the genteel society from which violence seeped up.
He said, “We don’t imagine our own slovenly posture, our lurking eyes, our glee as we witness shame. The camera records that which we would never recognize in our own hearts, and yet when we see it in the faces and postures of others, we see it too in ourselves.”
“But there’s nothing slovenly or lurking in her.”
“We don’t see that our own proud anger allows us to feel superior.”
“Do you feel yourself superior, Edouard?”
His name warm in her voice.
“Do you not, Nanée?”
“Think you superior?” The slightest teasing smile on her lips. “Might we not learn even more from looking at photographs of ourselves?”
“We never believe the camera has truly captured us unless we appear beautiful. We think photographs showing our ugliness are distortions, bad angles, bad moments. Not who we are.”
He looked to the kitchen sink and the copper pans, the jug they used to collect milk from Madam LaVache. “Beauty, it isn’t interesting to me,” he said. “It’s the face we present to the world. I wish to capture what we hide. That which brings us shame.”
“And now?” Nanée asked gently. “There is so much violence and shame, slouching and lurking. So much hiding, saying we’re one thing while doing another. Why can you not photograph now?”
Edouard studied her face in the bright daylight streaming through the windows. “And now? Why do you stay in France?”
She crossed her arms.
He hadn’t meant to offend her. He never meant to offend her. But she could leave France any time she wanted.
“I suppose I prefer being in the thick of it,” she said.
It was some kind of truth, if not the whole of it; he could see that in her direct gaze.
“I find,” he said, “that if I’m to turn the camera to the watchers now, I must turn it to myself. I don’t know how I ever imagined I was anything else.”
“But in photographing—”
“No. This is what I told myself for so many years, that I’m different because I have a camera, I turn it to show the watchers that, in giving evil an audience, they encourage violence. But in doing so I too give evil the audience it craves. I . . . I now think this is what people fear more than anything: not that they will be revealed as horrible, but that they won’t be revealed at all, that they will be nothing.”