Love at First Sight
In the late sixties, a photographer showed up at our family home to photograph my parents’ art collection. From the balcony of our living room, I saw a slim, graceful man dancing around an art piece, his thick hair winged out from his head in chaotic waves. I hadn’t yet seen the man’s face, but already I was in love.
Our four-story townhome
In the late sixties, I was a senior at Barnard College, a serious student of literature and art history, a “grind” who always had to have A’s. My grade point was 4.0 and I meant to keep it that way. In order to do so, I had a system. Mostly I stayed in an apartment I shared with two other girls up near Columbia, but if I had exams or had to write a paper, I’d go home to my parents’ house in Gramercy Park where there were no distractions and I could count on my mother to feed me. On this particular occasion, I had finals to prepare for, but I’d been out with a friend and gotten extremely drunk the night before, so I was dealing with a major hangover. We lived in a townhouse, with a kitchen on the ground floor opening to the street, and that’s where I was, gulping down copious amounts of orange juice, when there was a loud tap tap tap on the door.
I must’ve startled. It was about noon, my father was out of town and I had no idea where my mother was. Also, I looked a sight in a frowsy old bathrobe with my hair curled in rollers and scotch-taped to my cheeks to keep the frizz out of it. My breath probably still stank of liquor. Nervously, I went and opened the door. On the step were two middle-aged men in wide-shouldered trench coats and black turtleneck shirts, and my first thought was, these must be friends of my mother’s from the old country. They looked like they were straight out of a Viennese murder mystery set in the late 1940’s. At their feet stood two or three suitcases and they spoke with heavy European accents, “Hello,” with a harsh, guttural ‘H’ that made me think perhaps they truly were refugees from another time and place.
But then I heard my mother call out from someplace in the house, “Oh, it’s the photographers,” so I gave the two men a weak smile, let them in, and ran upstairs.
The balcony overlooking our living room
About an hour later, my mother buzzed me on the intercom. “You’ve got to meet these men,” she said.
“No way,” I said. Art history exams were a bitch to study for. All those slides of angels’ wing tips one had to identify.
“You must,” she insisted, her own voice harsh and Germanic.
We argued over this, but in the end she won. I removed my curlers, applied some lipstick, slid into a pair of jeans. I’d go downstairs for five minutes, no longer.
On the way down, I paused at the balcony on the second floor. Our living room had a twenty foot ceiling and was as big as a barn; peering down into it, I saw a slim, graceful man dancing around an art piece.
He had a flash gun in one hand and his thick hair winged out from his head in chaotic waves, reminding me of an orchestra conductor passionately wielding his baton. I hurried down the rest of the way. I hadn’t yet seen the man’s face, but already I was in love.
Werner Forman
My mother, Franyo
The man’s name was Werner Forman. He was a Czech photographer and his face, from the front, was every bit as handsome as I’d anticipated. For the next two hours I sat at his feet, staring at him. Neither he, nor the man accompanying him, his brother, Bedrich, spoke any English.
My mother gave them Bloody Marys and spoke to them in German. I just sat there like an idiot, pretending I could follow the conversation. At the time, we had a large, well-known collection of African and Oceanic art and the brothers had come to photograph several of the pieces for a book they were writing. People often visited our house to look at the collection, but these two were different, professional and tender in the way they handled the pieces, passionate about their work, and after they left all the oxygen seemed to have been sucked out of the air, and the huge living room where they’d been felt drab and empty. My mother, never a woman to mince words, said a little forlornly, “I’d put my slippers under his bed anytime.” It was a phrase I’d never heard her use before, mushy and sentimental, a phrase that diminished my mother’s characteristic steely poise, and that had a portent I couldn’t possibly understand at the moment.
After that, it was a while before I saw Werner Forman again. I traveled to London that summer where I had a boyfriend (I had a thing for British men and always seemed to have boyfriends in London), and where I kicked around, working for a friend of my parents who ran an art gallery, and waiting for… I didn’t really know what. And then, sometime in the middle of the summer, Werner Forman walked into the gallery and my world shifted.
He was forty-six years old. I was twenty-one. He was skinny as a corpse, with a gaunt, Slavic face, crazy hair, canny, slightly up-tilted eyes, and a body as graceful and nimble as a cat. I was a college girl who wanted to be a writer and who lived her life for romantic interludes and wild escapades that she thought would eventually be the grist for novels.
He was a middle-aged man with a whole life of experience behind him, much of it bitter and difficult. I was just starting out. But here’s the deal: while I was free and could go wherever I wanted, Werner was stuck behind the Iron Curtain.
That’s right. For every trip he wanted to make out of Czechoslovakia, he had to go to god knows how many government ministries to acquire the necessary exit visas -- and even then he might be turned back at the last moment.
But I didn’t know anything about that. I thought this man who could barely speak English was one of the most fascinating people I’d ever met, and when he asked me out for a drink that evening, I said yes without thinking of the consequences.
Nicole & Werner
Werner Forman (right)
My affair with Czech photographer, Werner Forman, was precarious and had to be kept very secret. Which was probably the draw for me -- all that drama. Certainly I couldn’t tell my parents what was going on. A romance with a man twice my age living behind the Iron Curtain, uh uh, not something to advertise. But I was in love, and so I made a few life-altering decisions. The first was that I would skip the next (my last) semester of school and remain in London. I rationalized this by telling myself I’d been going to school full time, summer, spring, winter, fall for almost four years and needed a break.
I had a little money of my own and rented a flat together with a friend from the States, Celia, who’d lived across the street from me growing up. Together we would set up a life for ourselves, art school, a new boyfriend for Celia, a dog, a car, a slew of new friendships. As for Werner, I was never sure when I would see or hear from him. Phone calls were dicey. He would let me know he’d be in touch at such and such a time, but then we had to be very circumspect because people (officials) listened in. I learned quickly that I couldn’t just open my mouth and say what I wanted. Instead we spoke in code: mention of an assignment at the Louvre at the end of the month meant I was to meet him in Paris. Mention of the British Museum meant Werner was coming to London. We couldn’t say anything affectionate or personal. Often I had trouble deciphering his words.
And then there was the problem of my parents who still thought I would be returning to school that fall. Celia was older than I, and had already graduated college. Since we had grown up together, she knew my parents well and was as scared of them as I was. But she agreed to go with me to Italy, where they would be vacationing, and talk to them about my decision, which kind of terrified both of us.
From left: Franyo (mother), Nicole & Gustavo (father)
My parents were refugees from Hitler Germany, very cultured and educated, but also very opinionated. Their word was the law. One did not talk trivialities with them. And one had better be neatly dressed, nails groomed and every hair in place.
Celia and I arrived, armed with the marijuana we’d hidden in our luggage. We were staying at a less luxurious hotel than my parents, and we fortified ourselves with several glasses of wine before heading out to meet them for dinner. Perhaps it was paranoia from smoking weed, or perhaps it was sheer nerves about the confrontation with my parents, but we both had the distinct feeling we were being watched.
Image: Stokkete, Shutterstock
Not only were Celia and I being watched; we were being followed.
By two hefty, not very subtle men in brown suits. They were behind us when we left for dinner with my parents, and behind us when we returned to our hotel. In the lobby, one of them came up close to me, and said: “Miss Schindler, is it true you will be traveling to Vienna from here?”
Well, that was pretty direct. I didn’t know what to say. It was true that I was flying from Naples to Vienna to meet Werner (I had lied to my parents about that, telling them I was taking a break from school and would be spending a few weeks with a musician friend in Vienna), but how had these two men -- actual, bona fide SPIES -- known that? From guarded phone calls? From surveilling us since we’d left London, or before?
Werner was a well-known photographer who by then had published dozens of books on the art of China, India, the Pacific Northwest, who had traveled widely and whose activities were closely watched by the Soviets. So of course it made sense that, by association, I was being watched, too. The two brown-suited men evaporated from the lobby when I said, yes, I was going to Vienna and why did they want to know, and Celia blurted, “Wow! Spies!” But the film noir aspect of my life deepened over the next year as my relationship with Werner intensified, and I continued to veil the truth of what was going on in my life with bullshit stories to my parents. I managed to secretly travel to Iran with Werner, where, because I hadn’t done the research, I brought skimpy sundresses revealing far too much skin, and had to quickly purchase scarves and a chador to cover up.
Of course, I thrived on all the intrigue and drama, a young, foolish girl who romanticized the craziness she’d gotten herself into. But a year later the seriousness of my situation was pushed right into my face when the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia and closed the country down.
I knew something about horrific political events because of the persecution my parents had suffered in Germany and the lengths they'd gone to in order to escape. But I’d never experienced anything like it -- the grip a country could have over its citizens -- firsthand. When it became apparent that all communication with Czechoslovakia had ceased, I didn’t know what to do or think. Frustration, fear, panic, anxiety -- I experienced all those as I sat in front of the TV waiting for news. But my immediate reaction was to shut down and stop eating, a response I was to have the rest of my life when things got rough. I simply couldn’t handle the stress, and turned into a zombie.
Werner Forman
Image: Louis Eclipx Hansel
I spent a week in a strange nether world where I wasn’t able to eat or sleep or do anything but watch the news. Kind of like being stuck way up high in a tree and refusing help to climb down. Without word from Werner, my soul was crushed and I was as empty as if I didn’t exist. But then, a week into the crisis, things began to shift.
One morning I woke up and felt hopeful for no particular reason -- the news hadn’t changed, Czechoslovakia was still shut down, and there was still no word from Werner. But as the day progressed, my mood lightened which made me think now I was really going crazy. For the past week I had barely eaten; but that night, around ten-thirty, I suddenly became ravenous. We had no food in the house, so I ran to the nearest pub and bought up all their sandwiches. Then I went home and waited.
I had no idea what I was waiting for. But I knew something was about to happen, and couldn’t stop pacing the flat. Then, at one o’clock that morning, the phone rang and it was Werner. He was in Vienna. Safe. Later, when we compared notes, it turned out that that whole day, as my mood slowly brightened, he’d been traveling by train toward the border, which he crossed exactly at ten-thirty, the same moment I ran to the pub for sandwiches. (He was able to do this because he had a valid exit visa.) So there was definitely some weird serendipity between us. It was agreed that I’d travel to Vienna to meet him, which I did by train, standing in the aisle, smoking one cigarette after the next, surrounded by people like me rushing to Vienna to reconnect with loved ones who’d managed to get out of Czechoslovakia.
Image: Jonathan Borba
Werner had very little luggage, maybe just one suitcase. He didn’t look as though he’d been through an ordeal, but then this was a man who’d experienced serious trauma at the hands of the Germans in WWII, so who knew how difficult his flight to and across the border had been for him.
There was also the matter, which I wouldn’t hone in on for the next year or two, of Werner’s telling tall tales (a form of Munchausen’s syndrome?), dramatic stories in which he played the hero, escaping prison camps or surviving knife attacks, making it hard to discern what was true and what wasn’t.
But back then, leaving Prague with one suitcase (and, as it turned out, leaving his unwell, elderly father whom he would never see again, behind him), he knew he had to make a choice. He met me at the train station in Vienna and we had a joyous reunion. We did not discuss his immediate plans. In fact, there was no discussion of what would happen next till after we flew to London a few days later and were going through passport control.
Image: Martin Lopez
We hadn’t discussed Werner’s plans. I had no idea what his intentions were. For the past year, he’d been a handsome, mysterious, older man I’d been having a secret affair with who happened to live behind the Iron Curtain. Up to till now, in a way, it had all been nothing but a gigantic adventure.
But this was real life. We headed for passport control where an official took Werner’s passport, studied it closely, looked at Werner and said, “What do you want to do, Sir?” To my surprise, Werner indicated that he was seeking asylum. “Right, then,” the official said. He waggled Werner’s Czech passport. “I’ll be keeping this, and you stand over there.” He pointed to a spot where we should wait. He’d already looked at my passport and handed it back to me.
We were kept waiting for about fifteen minutes and then led to an empty room somewhere behind the scenes at Heathrow airport where, basically, both of us were interrogated. Who was I? What was I doing in the UK? How much money was in my bank account? Where would Werner be living? Who were his publishers? The whole thing took about two hours and we weren’t released till they’d spoken to each of Werner’s many editors. It was a little too official for me.
I was a young girl with a taste for drama, but backroom interrogations with an official squinting at me and asking personal questions was more than I had counted on.
My parents still knew nothing about my affair with Werner. I had been living a stop-and-go life this past year in London, going to art school while I waited for phone calls and visits from my forbidden lover in Prague.
Werner Forman
And now, suddenly, I felt the bite of reality. Part of the excitement of being with Werner was the fact that our affair could never be permanent, that he was always about to leave and go someplace else. But after surrendering his passport to the authorities, he wouldn’t be going anywhere for awhile -- his home would now be in London. With me. When they had finished interrogating us, we found a cab and drove to the flat in silence. It was a drab day. Looking back all these years, the image I retain is of Werner ceremonially carrying me up the front steps and over the threshold -- but that’s not what happened. We got out of the cab. I was behind Werner and watched him climb the steps. And as I did, I suddenly had a feeling of boredom and reluctance. This was my future and I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I quickly pushed the feeling down and followed Werner into the flat. For the next eight years, my life would be tied to his.
This story was originally published in six parts on April 20, 2021, on nicolejeffords.com.
Cover photo: Priscilla du Preez
