“Not a life of action and glamour. A flood of refugees poured through Vienna—they told their stories to Ian, through me.”
“Was he writing articles, or—”
“No, he says he’s done with writing. Gave it up for practical refugee work and hasn’t penned an article since the Nuremberg Trials.”
“I can see it might wear your soul away,” Jordan said, thoughtful. “Year after year, seeing human suffering and turning it into newspaper fodder. Was it like that for you, translating? Hearing war stories day in and day out, when the rest of the world only wants to leave the war behind?”
“No.” Tony linked his hands between his knees, smile fading to something more pensive. “An interpreter tries to work a step removed. You’re not really there, in a way. You’re like a set of interphones; you make it possible for the two people on either side to hear each other. And that’s everything, when you come down to it. That’s it, in a nutshell: if people would just hear each other—”
Tony stopped. “They’d what?” Jordan asked quietly.
He gave a small, crooked smile. “Likely go right on killing each other in swaths.”
Click. That’s the shot, Jordan thought. Bitter cynicism from a mobile mouth, that same mouth curled in a smile that was still touched with hope even after all it had looked on. “It’s not so different being a photographer,” she found herself saying. “I’m no professional, not yet, but I’ve had a similar feeling to the one you’re describing. The lens removes me from the scene I’m recording, in a sense. I’m a witness to it, but I’m not part of it.”
“People think it makes you heartless. It doesn’t.” A boy walking a beagle on a leash went past; Tony stretched out a hand to the beagle, who lapped his fingers happily before moving on. “It makes you a better set of interphones.”
“Or a better lens.” Jordan tilted her head at Tony. Unexpected depths to her charming clerk—who would have guessed? “You were at war since Pearl Harbor, and then you stayed and did refugee work when everyone else went home. Why?”
“You know what my war was?” Tony smiled thinly. “Nothing. Four years of it. I never fired a shot in anger, never so much as got my boots wet. My entire war was spent in various tents and offices, translating acronyms between high brass of various armies who didn’t speak each other’s lingo.”
“So you stayed on for a chance to do more,” Jordan said. “Why come home this year? It doesn’t sound to me like you’re tired of it.”
He took a long time answering, as if parsing out what to say. “I’m not tired of it,” he said at last. “But I wouldn’t mind doing something—different. Ian’s an avenger, scales of justice in one hand and sword in the other. I want to do more.”
“Like what?” A group of shopping-laden housewives fussed past, but Jordan ignored them.
“I don’t know.” Tony ruffled a hand through his hair. “Make a repository for all those stories, maybe? So they aren’t forgotten and lost. No one likes to talk about their war, after it’s fought. They want to forget. And what happens when they die, and they’ve taken all their memories with them? We’ve lost it all. And we can’t.”
You should talk to my stepmother, Jordan almost said. Another refugee who only wants to forget. But it was Anneliese’s right, surely? Because her story wasn’t just pain and loss, it was shame—the shame of the SS connection, what her father had been. “I’m an American now,” she always said firmly if asked about her past.
“You know why I prefer pictures to words?” Jordan asked Tony instead. “People can’t ignore them. Most find it easier to forget the things they read than the things they see. What’s caught on film is there, it’s what is. That’s what makes pictures so wonderful, and so devastating. Catch someone or something at the right moment, you can learn everything about them. That’s why I want to record everything I see. The beautiful, the ugly. The horrors, the dreams. All of it, as much as I can get a lens in front of.”
“And how long have you known that’s what you wanted?” Tony asked. “I’m guessing when you heard that little Kodak go click for the first time.”
Jordan smiled. “How did you know?”
“Drive—you’ve got it in spades.” His eyes went over her. “I don’t have any, so I notice it when I see it.”