Wherever There Is Light (35 page)

Kendall became the Angel of Climbach in December. Climbach was a French town close to the German border, and as the Americans approached, the Nazis attacked. Kendall wasn't afraid. Not of the cough of mortars or the thump of the cannons or the trees bursting or the bullets whizzing overhead or the screams of the wounded or the silence of the dead. She wasn't afraid, not as long as she witnessed the fighting through a viewfinder and pressed the shutter-release button of her Leica—either the one Julian had given her or the newer model, the IIIc, she'd bought herself before going to London. Most of her photographs had their usual concision and, over the years, one of them earned a measure of fame by appearing in photography and history books: a Negro soldier lying on his back, dead and alone in a field, his helmet rolled away, his face as innocent as a sleeping Renaissance cherub, his dark skin and the pure white of the freshly fallen snow its own message, a cri de coeur—
Pay attention
,
America
,
I died for you
.

The Germans retreated from Climbach. In town, a medic asked her, “Will ya talk to these boys till we get they asses on the meat wagons?”

Kendall shared cigarettes with the wounded and listened to their morphine-induced rambling. It was a pleasant distraction. After they had been loaded into ambulances, the medic led Kendall over to a soldier lying under an olive-drab blanket on a stretcher. “This here's Pete,” he said, and went to treat another batch of wounded.

Kendall knelt beside the stretcher. Pete said, “My wife, Mary, she a beauty like you.”

“Where you from, Pete?”

“Omaha. Mary and me, we got a daughter, Sarah. Her third birthday was yesterday.”

“You must miss them.”

“I'm gon' see 'em soon.”

A bare foot was sticking out from under the blanket. Kendall covered it.

“My foot freezin',” Pete said.

Kendall rubbed it between her hands. The skin was ashy and cold.

Pete sighed with pleasure. “Let's don't go tellin' Mary. She jealous as a house cat.”

“We won't tell.”

Pete's breathing was shallow. “You the girl they call Angel?”

Kendall's throat closed up. She swallowed. “That's me.”

Pete propped himself up on his elbows. His breathing was faster, and he was gazing across the street at the church. The bell tower had been sheared off by the shelling to prevent a German sniper or spotter from hiding there.

“You—you the Angel of Climbach,” Pete said, lying down.

Soon, his chest stopped rising and falling. Kendall drew the blanket up over his head. Numb, she went behind the stretcher, kneeling and taking pictures of Pete with the church in the background.

The Angel of Climbach never sold those photographs. When the contact sheets came back from the lab, she couldn't bring herself to look at them.

In late January 1945, Kendall took a break from the war. For a woman who had dreamt of visiting Paris since high school, Kendall's first sight of the city failed to excite her. She lived at the Hôtel Saint-Germain-des-Prés but frequented the hangout for journalists in the basement of the Hôtel Scribe, where she drank wine by the bottle and slept with men who evaporated from her memory as quickly as they filled her bed. She did meet Arnaud Francoeur, who lasted longer than the others, because he was a Parisian and took her on a tour of the Left Bank. The high point of her month was eating dinner with the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson—in her opinion, the greatest flâneur of the century. Léo Sapir had mailed him Kendall's book
Double Lives
, and Cartier-Bresson flattered her silly by saying how grand it was. He also had some advice for her:

“To crop a photograph is a rejection of reality. You must see everything as it is. You must see the picture whole. In your art
and
your life.”

Kendall kept his advice in mind on her next assignment, following the 761st Tank Battalion. Otis was with the Black Panthers—the nickname of the 761st. It was wonderful meeting up with him, but she didn't stay long. With so many GIs dead and wounded, combat units were undermanned, and the ability to fight trumped race. Thousands of Negroes volunteered to be replacements, and Kendall tagged along with a replacement platoon that entered Germany behind the Fourth Armored Division. That was how she got to the Ohrdruf concentration camp.

Kendall attempted to see things as they were, yet the emaciated dead lying outside the barracks in their striped prisoner garb, the naked corpses stacked in a shed, the mass graves with hands and feet poking up through the dirt like withered plants, and the bones resembling blackened twigs in a fire pit with the stench of death, burned flesh, and hair in her nostrils defied comprehension and made Kendall think that, through some malevolent alchemy, she'd been brushstroked into the gruesome Bruegel painting
The Triumph of Death
. Steeling herself against her disgust and a desire to throw away her Leica and weep, Kendall shot fourteen rolls of film from a variety of distances and angles of view with 35 mm, 50 mm, and 135 mm lenses. The soldiers carrying jaundiced, skeletal survivors like brides across a threshold momentarily revived her faith in humanity, but by her second afternoon Kendall couldn't shake her sense that the camp was the figment of a ghoulish imagination.

She was anxious to photograph any totem of normalcy, so when a chaplain said that he'd heard some families lived a mile through the forest, Kendall went for a walk, and she was delighted by what she saw at the end of a hard-packed trail—a gingerbread cottage nestled among beech trees with a vegetable garden on one side and a stream behind it. No one was in the garden or on the porch. Kendall shot half a roll of film, then headed for the stream. A high-pitched voice cried out in German as Kendall stepped past the cottage. An American soldier, a white soldier in muddy fatigues, had a girl on the ground and was lifting her dirndl.

“Stop it!” Kendall shouted, but not until she glimpsed two haversacks, two helmets, a carbine, and a Garand in the grass by the cottage, and an arm encircled her neck, did it occur to her that the soldier might have a buddy with him, and by then she was pinned on her back.

Her fear and her fury debated whether she should lie still and hope to survive or risk being killed to free herself. Her fury won, and Kendall clawed at the man's face, an unshaven white man with fierce eyes and hot breath stale with cigarettes and fatigues reeking of sweat and a faint stink of death. He held her wrists above her head with one hand while undoing her belt with the other, then ripped the buttons off her fly as he stripped down her khakis. Kendall squirmed and bucked, but she couldn't throw him off, and as he parted her legs with his knees and tore off her panties, the words erupting from her were as incomprehensible as the terrified burbling of the German girl.

Kendall wished that Julian's pistol weren't in a trunk at her mother's in Lovewood or that Julian would magically appear and kill this son of a bitch. Julian. She remembered the day of her gallery opening when she was waiting for Julian and Brig came over squiffy on gin and tried to fuck her. What did she do? She used her head. And got the Beretta. There was that carbine by the cottage. Garands were too heavy. Tankers were issued carbines. Kendall had photographed them, and Otis had let her fire his. She was reminding herself that the safety was a button by the trigger guard when the solider jabbed at her with his hard-on, and the girl screamed like a speared animal. Kendall pictured the other soldier and wanted to vomit hearing him say, “Nice, ain't it, baby?” He had a scabbard strapped to his right calf. Not an uncommon way for soldiers to carry knives. Kendall had noticed the scabbard when she'd shouted at him.

The man rammed his cock inside her. Her skin tore and burned as the soldier began to thrust. Gritting her teeth, Kendall murmured, “Not that fast,” and smiled up at him, moving her hips sweet and slow. “Let go of my hands; we both might as well enjoy it.”

He released her, and Kendall was astounded he'd think she was aroused. Of course, you didn't have to ace the Army intelligence test to be a rapist. Locking her legs behind his, Kendall strained upward. He interpreted this as her approval of his technique and stuck his tongue in her ear. She thanked God for her long arms and the soldier's short legs, and drew him to her, stroking his back, his buttocks. “Good, good,” he grunted as her left hand slid to his hip, then lower, her fingers unsnapping the loop securing the grooved hilt of a knife. As he slobbered on her neck, Kendall plunged the blade into a cheek of his ass. He yowled, and she stabbed him in the side of his leg and shoved at him with her forearm. He rolled off, screaming, “Fuckin' swamp whore!” and Kendall scrambled to her feet. Her hand clutching the knife was slick with blood and, hobbling toward the cottage, she tugged up her pants and clipped her belt closed while the soldier shouted, “Ronald, help! I'm bleedin' to death.”

Ronald was too distracted to help. His head was raised, his eyes were shut, and his body was jerking with his grand finale inside the girl, who was whimpering, “
Nein nein nein nein
 . . .”

Kendall dropped the knife and grabbed a carbine, pressing in the safety and remembering how Otis had retracted the operating slide. The soldier was standing in his boxers, but his pants were around his ankles, and his leg was bleeding.

In a voice full of scorn and incredulity, he said, “You're gonna shoot me, are ya?”

Her desire to kill him scared her. A colored girl, even a photographer, would get tossed in prison or executed for killing a soldier. Rape would be no defense. Who would believe her and who would care about the German girl? Yet with the stinging between her legs, and her thighs sticky with her own blood, Kendall didn't give a shit, and the carbine jolted against her shoulder. The shot went over his head. Her lousy marksmanship annoyed her, but firing the carbine paid off. Her target spun around, yanked up his pants, and fled, limping toward the woods; Ronald was now paying attention, sitting beside the girl, shimmying into his boxers, and warily eyeing Kendall. The girl was on her back, one arm over her eyes, moaning.

“I ain't done nothing to you,” he said. “And that guy ain't no pal of mine. We was takin' a walk.”

“Leave your gear and go.”

“I'll get reamed out by my lieutenant if I leave my gear.”

Kendall urged him to reconsider by firing a shot into the grass a foot in front of him. She was thrilled, not only because it sent him on his way, but because she'd been aiming at that spot. The girl sat up. Her hair was braided into a gold crown. Kendall slung the Garand over her shoulder in case the soldiers returned, and rummaged through their haversacks and found a bar of soap in a paper wrapper and two undershirts she could use as washcloths. Up close, the girl looked no more than thirteen or fourteen. Her face was grimy with tears, and blood had soaked through the skirt of her dirndl. Kendall held out her hand. The girl stared at it.

“
Es ist
okay,” Kendall said, using up most of her German.

The girl clasped her fingers. Kendall helped her up and, holding hands, they walked to the stream.

When Kendall finished telling Julian her story, she was standing at the open window in her suite at the Trianon. Julian got off the couch and came up behind her. He wanted to hold her, but she heard him approaching, her body stiffened, and he didn't touch her.

Kendall said, “I should've killed them both.”

“And give yourself something else to regret forever?”

She looked across the tin rooftops with the terra-cotta chimney pots to the domes of the Sorbonne and Panthéon, both of them glorious against the wash of red and violet twilight.

“I didn't see them at Ohrdruf. The camp was a mob scene. Everyone wanted a peek. To prove we were fighting the right war. Soldiers and reporters were in and out. Eisenhower stopped by with Patton and Bradley . . .”

Kendall turned. “You would've shot them. I wished you were there to shoot them.”