Love at First Sight - Part II
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.
THIS IS PART 2 of a SIX-PART STORY
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.