* * *

  —

  No such bliss awaited Andor in Budapest, where he drifted through the academy’s two-year baccalaureate program in three years. He graduated in June 1912, shortly before his eighteenth birthday. Uncle Poldi promptly got him a job as a clerk at Giro Bank and Transfers, linked to the Budapest Stock Exchange. (The giro system is an alternate banking system in which money changes hands through direct transfer from one account to another.) Andor hated it no less than school.

  After work, he attended soccer, boxing, and rugby matches. He joined a sports club and began lifting weights. He took an interest in art too. But his enjoyment was blunted by discomfort about his lack of critical acumen. After spending the better part of one Sunday with a friend at a museum, Andor lamented in his diary: “Today I could see how useless I am. I believed that I am capable of judging pictures, although I barely am. I judge them too much according to my own personality, which I should not do, as one’s personality, unless it is something extraordinary, is usually ignored. I am unable to pass judgment according to the taste of the masses.” That was a strength, not a weakness, but Andor saw only his flaws. “I look for the poetic in everything. Criticism requires enormous knowledge and courage. I lack both.”[40]

  He felt similar inadequacies as a theatergoer. Andor joined his brothers and friends at the great halls of the Hungarian capital, sampling fashionable offerings like Lajos Bíró’s The Robber Knight, Eduard Knoblauch’s Faun, Menyhért Lengyel’s The Czarina, and Pierre Veber and Henri de Gorsse’s The Young Lass, a four-act “Frenchie.” He carefully noted the name, location, and cast members of each play that he attended yet hardly dared formulate an opinion. “The first French comedy I have seen,” he reported of The Young Lass. “I was pleased by it. I am not able to judge plays yet, but to my greatest joy, lately I am somewhat able to judge objects of art and other solid artistic creations, although only in broad outlines. I cannot penetrate deeply yet.” He had no idea how to articulate his responses to works of art. In a statement that sums up what would prove a lifelong problem, he wrote, “I lack the words, even though I have it inside me.”[41]

  Around the time of his graduation and birthday, Andor purchased, or received as a gift from his mother (perhaps meant to be shared with Jenő), a cheap German-made box camera. It came from a shop owned by a classmate’s parents. Andor had been wanting a camera for years, he later claimed. But because he hung back from asking directly, he had grown up getting bicycles and such from his parents. “Whenever I saw something it stayed with me. I said okay, I’ll take a picture of it later when I have a camera,” he would explain. “Instinctively I started to compose. I learned how to observe the moment.”[42]

  Andor and Jenő set about plumbing the mysteries of photography. The camera took 4 by 6 centimeter glass plates. It had one preset shutter speed.[43] The novice photographers’ first challenge was to determine the proper aperture for each picture they wanted to take. Mostly they guessed. After they made several exposures, a bigger challenge loomed: How to develop the negatives? They pored over an instruction manual, then set up a darkroom in a big armoire. They mixed chemicals, filled their trays, rigged up a safelight. Working at night, they had to whisper so as not to awaken their early-rising mother and brother.

  One plate seemed promising. But they ruined it by neglecting to shut tight the armoire door as they were developing. Eventually they did manage a few decent negatives. They then turned to printing, using printing-out paper rather than the developing-out paper that would become standard. With the sheet of paper set in a copy frame, Andor and Jenő brought out the image using exposure to light (as opposed to the chemical development used with developing-out paper). There was no fixed developing time. They just eyeballed the emerging picture. When they decided the print was ready, they submerged it in a water bath, fixed it, washed it again, and air-dried it. It took two days to fumble their way to their first satisfactory picture, a paint-chip-size portrait of Andor by Jenő.

  That Sunday morning, they sneaked a picture of Jolán. But Jenő botched the fixing of the negative, and then the plate broke. Jenő then asked for, and was granted, permission to photograph Jolán and her two sisters, who posed in their kitchen doorway. He and Andor hastened to process the image — the best one so far. “I am so happy, there are no words for it,” gushed Andor.[44] But he came home from school the next day to discover that standing water on the washbasin had damaged the print. So he and Jenő made two more, one of which was fine. “Tiny picture, but sharp,” Andor wrote in his diary. “I can stare at it endlessly, and I am very happy. We gave a copy to [the Balogs] too.”[45]

  The adults in the Kertész family took no interest in photography except as a means of representing themselves as comfortable middle-class Hungarians. Andor had watched older relatives pull out cameras at family gatherings. One or two of his cousins had snapshot cameras like his. Photography was a popular hobby for boys, who often got cameras for their twelfth or thirteenth birthdays, just as children from a later generation might get a video game console.

  Andor was uncommonly observant. He liked looking at pictures and discussing art with friends like Fekete. All the same, his ability to experience certain works of art was limited by tritanopia, a partial color blindness in which blues fade into greens, yellows veer into violets, and tertiary colors can be confusing. Whether or not Andor was aware yet that others perceived colors differently than he did, he did show his fondness for images in which tonal values, rather than hues, dominate. That was the case with both photographs, virtually all black-and-white in that day, and drawings.

  Andor would long remember a certain descriptive geometry class. His instructor set up an object, maybe a box, for students to draw. Fascinated by the double shadow caused by the light from the two windows flanking the object, Andor concentrated on that.

  “What’s this then?” asked the instructor, pointing to the shadows.

  “Well, that’s what I’m drawing.”

  “No, there’s no need for any of that. You don’t need the shadow. I’m only after the form,” responded the instructor, failing to recognize his pupil’s equally valid interpretation.[46] The use of shadows would become Andor’s poetic signature as a photographer. Figuring things out by himself would remain his modus operandi. Everything he would ever do well was self-taught.

  From the start, he used his camera for more than special occasions. He took it on rambles with his brothers and friends. He photographed Jenő in the park and Imre by the Danube. He recorded his father’s tombstone. During his lunch hour, he lined up office colleagues on a bench and did a group portrait. He also returned the favor of Fekete’s drawings with moody photographs of his friend wearing a hat at a rakish angle and viewed in profile against a backdrop of trees. Village scenes enchanted Andor too. He came home from late-winter excursions to the ancient hamlets of Strázsa and Szepesszombat brimming with enthusiasm about returning that summer to take poetic pictures.[47] Another day, he photographed at his mother’s coffee shop.

  Establishments like Ernesztina’s were essential to the cultural fabric of Budapest. Confections of marble, mirrors, and brocaded wallpaper, the great coffeehouses like Café Gerbeaud, New York Café, and Művész Coffeehouse catered to the powerful and the would-be powerful.[48] There deals were hatched, intrigues plotted, love affairs kindled, billiard matches won and lost, and articles penned and delivered to editors. Meanwhile, hundreds of less glamorous businesses like Ernesztina’s Teleki Téri Kávémérés served ordinary folks their coffee and pastries. Cafés doubled as a home away from cramped and chilly apartments. One could meet friends, relax after work, or even, as Andor’s picture testifies, catch a wink or two.

  His indifferently dressed subject in Sleeping Boy probably worked at the Teleki Tér market. Coffee and clatter notwithstanding, the boy has dozed off while scanning a newspaper. His collar open, one elbow planted on the table, his palm on his cheek, his eyes hooded, and his mouth slack, he sleeps. At top center of the photograph a bright triangle of newspaper hanging from a wall rack points to his head. It meets a second triangle, the points of which are the top of his forehead and two corners of the neglected daily. The recessed paneling behind him brackets his face. To his left and right are soft pockets of darkness like sleep closing in. Using light and dark metaphorically, Sleeping Boy puts viewers simultaneously inside and outside its subject’s mind. It also reveals a beginner’s unexpectedly effective use of geometric form. What’s more, it nails a gently amusing moment. It’s a visual version of the anecdotes of café life that spiced up the columns of the reporters who scoured the city, seeking to witness and interpret its comings and goings.

  Andor also created, in effect, a self-portrait as an insomniac, dreamer, and evader of responsibilities. Developing the image may have felt like sizing someone up in a mirror, then abruptly realizing that it’s you.

  * * *

  —

  Andor’s relationship with Jolán grew ever more fraught. Mrs. Balog had long suspected that the son of “the coffee people” was courting her daughter. So the two adolescents would meet at the library or arrange to ride together on the tram. After the library closed its doors and winter set in, they resorted to the ice rink, where Andor begrudgingly shared her with others.

  One night, Jolán and her girlfriends went to a dance and didn’t come home until dawn. After stewing about this event for two days, Andor sarcastically suggested that she go dancing more often and stay even later. They quarreled. Wedded to romantic notions about women and idealistic expectations of love that he’d absorbed from novels, Andor was a wreck: “I wish I never knew her.”[49]

  Yet when she wasn’t driving him to despair, she was leaving him quaking with happiness. One June morning, she appeared at the Kertészes’ apartment wearing a stunning white dress, and Andor fell senseless with joy. Another time, she modeled a black dress she’d acquired because he’d said he wanted to see her in black. He felt “a very soulful connection.”[50]

  Best of all, Jolán made good on her promise of a picture of herself. After she gave Andor the tiny studio portrait, he raced out to order an enlargement. Then she added a locket for the picture, and his contentment swelled. A portrait of him should go opposite hers in the locket, the young romantic decided. So he made an appointment for a formal studio portrait. He posed in a bow tie with his every hair in place. He surprised Jolán with a small print. When he wore the locket (as some young men did then), there were the two of them, faces touching, close to his heart. Jolán’s picture served to poultice the wounds she inflicted. The picture he gave her doubled as a test of her commitment. As they stood talking one day, Andor blurted out, “Where’s my picture?” to find out if she was carrying it.[51] She was.

  That spring, Jolán discovered a passion for tennis. She favored the courts in the Zugliget, a forested park in the Buda hills, a long tram ride from their homes in Pest. Andor disliked the game and refused to play. But the idea that Jolán would play without him made him sick, even though his interests in art, weight lifting, and sports excluded her. One of her partners was a boy named Révész, whom Andor suspected of playing only as a means of seducing Jolán. Andor begged Jolán to give up tennis, but she refused. Occasionally he did manage to derail her tennis excursions and take her for walks instead. One Saturday in May, the two stood amid the Zugliget’s trees expressing their passion with hugs and kisses. Two weeks after that, they smooched on a bench in the park. Later Andor photographed what must have been that same bench in its woodsy and melancholic setting. Such pictures would have revealed to him that photographs could be more than mechanical likenesses: They could accede to a fuller expressivity.

  On a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts (now the Hungarian National Gallery) a few days later, Andor purchased a postcard of Sándor Bihari’s 1903 oil Honeymoon. Bihari’s anecdotal painting depicts two newlyweds in prey to passion. Interrupting their simple meal, they have scraped back their chairs, then collapsed onto a sofa in an ardent embrace. Here was Andor’s bench-kissing with Jolán projected into the early days of their marriage. Pinning a postcard to the wall proved easier, however, than pinning down Jolán herself.

  In 1910s Hungary, a young woman was supposed to be shy and compliant. Jolán was not living up to that ideal. Irked by her independent streak, Andor spoke to her about the duties of a wife-to-be. She was falling short in other ways too. He was annoyed by her laugh. She wasn’t intimate enough. Often he came away from their trysts feeling empty because the “physical urge was stronger than the soul bond. Something is missing.”[52] When they crossed paths in the courtyard one day, they had nothing to say to each other and not from too much emotion. Yet for eight years, Andor had worshipped Jolán. When he sensed she was slipping away, he panicked.

  As the days turned colder, they traded the bench in the Zugliget for the Kertészes’ kitchen, which was mostly deserted when Ernesztina was at work. Even though he and Jolán had found the love nest they had been seeking, the bliss enjoyed by the husband in Bihari’s painting continued to elude Andor. When Jolán saw Révész, he agonized; when she did not, he was bored.

  Meanwhile, he slogged into the office each weekday. He had no idea how to be anything but a clerk in a city where education and upward mobility were all-important and a successful Jewish man was a doctor, lawyer, intellectual, or businessman. “I do not deserve to be alive,” Andor wrote in his diary. “I do not have a drop of ambition in me.”[53] Had that been true, he would never have felt so guilty about the shortcomings he perceived in himself.

  Andor penned more mawkish poems, attended more plays, and planted himself on other park benches to stare at the trees and brood. On weekends, he and Jenő rowed on the Danube north of Budapest, their hands becoming calloused and their arms bulky and tanned. With friends, they took weekend-long hikes along the river, sleeping outdoors and plunging naked into the Danube before catching a ferryboat home. The girls who went with them skinny-dipped too but at a proper distance.[54] On weekends when they stayed in the city, they headed for Luna Park to play shooting games, sample the rides, and amuse themselves at the funhouses.

  The trams clattered up and down Népszínház Street, every noon a cannon boomed from the Citadella atop Gellért Hill, and the Habsburgs would rule Austria-Hungary forever.

  * * *

  —

  As the former German chancellor Otto von Bismarck had predicted, it started over “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans.”[55] On June 28, 1914, a Serbian nationalist murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, during his visit to Sarajevo. Seizing upon this opportunity to annex Serbia, Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum that it knew would be unacceptable, rejected the Serbian response, and then declared war. Russia leaped to defend its Slavic ally and Germany to meet its treaty obligation to support Austria-Hungary in any conflict with Russia. Diving into the rushing current, France and Britain went to war with the Germans. Festive bellicosity swept Hungary, never mind that the dead archduke had been unpopular and anti-Hungarian. “Serbia, you cur!” scolded the Budapest daily Az Est.[56]

  Andor turned twenty that summer when the Great War was brewing. Like a poster child for European guilelessness about what was to come, he spent his free days larking around Szigetbecse, camera and tripod in tow. The weather was perfect. Mornings dawned fresh. The meadows were sweet, and the sky eggshell blue. His brother Imre had given him a 9 by 12 centimeter Voigtländer Alpin with a Zeiss Tessar f/6.3 or f/6.8 lens and a triple-extension bellows, making it good for close-ups.[57] Andor loved the camera, even though the weight of the glass plates (he carried up to twelve at a time) and the need for a tripod limited the number of pictures he could take on a single excursion.

  He photographed farmhouses, water, trees, fields, reflections, village elders, shepherd boys and their dogs, his brothers, and their relatives. One of his favorite subjects was the draw well. The traditional Hungarian draw well pulls up water in a bucket attached with a chain to a long wooden sweep. It looks like a rustic letter T with a bar that tilts up and down. In the nineteenth century, draw wells on the puszta, the mythic grassland of eastern Hungary, served as an emblem of national identity and a favorite motif of painters like Károly Lotz and poets like Sándor Petőfi. Draw wells would have appealed to Andor not only as graphic elements against the blank summer sky but also as tokens of a life he romanticized, that of pastoralists living in harmony with Szigetbecse’s kispuszta (little puszta).

  As a beginner, Andor knew nothing about the rules of photography, so he worked under few constraints. What he saw in his viewfinder and pictured in his mind did not always show up on his negative. Yet he kept trying new things. Taking advantage of the Voigtländer’s capacity for close-ups, for instance, he sought to capture the details and folds of Margit’s lace curtains.[58] In another experiment, he aimed down from the window of a choir loft, excited about framing a scene from above.[59] Another time he took an intentionally semiabstract image of a lily-padded river blotting up the dark clumps of surrounding trees.[60]

  Fascinated by the way objects change character when viewed from near or far, in context or isolation, Andor imagined a lens that could glide from one focal length to another. (Focal length measures the distance between the optical center of a lens and its point of focus, that is, the film or glass plate. The greater the focal length, the closer the subject appears and the narrower the angle of view.) If he spotted something photo-worthy in the distance, he fantasized about turning a ring on his lens and seeing that object fly toward his viewfinder.[61]

  Back in Budapest, Andor photographed a quartet of gymnasts with shaved heads and farmers’ tans. The cast shadow of one hand-standing youth looked intriguingly spiderlike. Pursuing his fascination with shadows, he headed for Buda one evening with Jenő in tow. There they wandered the Tabán, a picturesque section of the city that was another favorite subject of painters. When they saw the ancient stone houses in Bocskay Tér, they halted. In one photograph Andor took, the square’s only lamp turns a section of street into a starkly lit stage. A solitary man in an overcoat and hat, his model Jenő, hugs a wall as if in the opening scene of a Gothic melodrama, half merging with his doppelgänger shadow.