BACK IN LONDON, I returned to Leon’s papers, gathering up all the photographs I was able to find, which were in no apparent order. I put to one side all the images of Max, arranging them in chronological order as best I could.
The first photograph was a formal portrait, taken by the Central Atelier in Vienna in November 1924. On the back of the little square image, Max wrote an inscription (“To my friend Buchholz, with memories”). The last image of Max in Leon’s album was taken twelve years later, in May 1936, the two men lying on a grass field, with a leather football. Max signed it “Mackie.”
Between 1924 and 1936, over a period of twelve years, Leon had several dozen photographs of his friend Max. Not a year passed without a photograph, it seemed, and often there were several.
The two men on a walking holiday. Playing football. At a function. A beach party, with girls, arms entwined. By a car in the countryside, standing together.
Over a dozen years, from the age of twenty until just a few months before he married Rita, when he was thirty-three, the photographs signaled a close relationship. Whether it was intimate in another way was unclear. To view them now, with Herta’s recollections in my mind, pointed to a particular kind of intimacy. He said he never wanted to get married.
Max managed to get out of Vienna, although when or how I did not know. He went to America, to New York, then to California. He stayed in touch with Leon, and many years later, when my mother was in Los Angeles, she met him. He married late in life, my mother told me, no children. What was he like? Warm, friendly, funny, she said. “And flamboyant.” She smiled, a knowing smile.
I went back to the only letter from Max that I found in Leon’s papers. It was written in May 1945, on the ninth, the day Germany capitulated to the Soviet Union. It was a reply to a letter sent by Leon from Paris a month earlier.
Max described the loss of family members, the sense of survival, the renewed sense of optimism. The words conveyed a palpable sense of hope. Like Leon, he embraced life, a cup half-full.
The last, typed line caught my eye, as it did when I first read it, although in a different way back then, without the context, without having heard Herta. Did Max linger on the memory of Vienna as he typed out the words, as he offered “heartfelt kisses,” before closing with a question?
“Should I reciprocate the kisses,” Max wrote, “or are they only for your wife?”