Benjamin's Crossing

by Jay Parini

  The traffic in Moscow is to a large degree a mass phenomenon. Thus one finds whole caravans of sleighs blocking the streets in a long row because loads that demand a truck are being piled on five or six sleighs. The sleighs, of course, must first take the horse into consideration, then the passengers. These animals do not understand the excess: a feeding sack for the nag, a blanket for the passenger—that should be enough. In any case, there is only room for two on the narrow bench, and since it has no backrest (unless you are willing to call the low rail such a thing), you must keep a good balance on sharp corners. Everything is based on the assumption of the highest speed; long journeys in the cold are difficult to bear and distances in this city immeasurable. The izvozshchik drives his sleigh close to the sidewalk. The passenger is not enthroned high up but looks out on the same level as everyone else and brushes the passersby with his sleeve: an incomparable experience for those delighted by the sense of touch.

  Where Europeans, on their high-speed journeys, enjoy a feeling of superiority, of dominance over the masses, the Muscovite in the little sleigh is closely mingled with people and objects. If he has a box, a child, or a basket to take with him—for all this the sleigh is the cheapest means of transport—he is merged into the street bustle: no condescending gaze but a tender, swift brushing along stones, people, horses. You feel like a child gliding through the house on the sleigh’s little chair.

  8

  ASJA LACIS

  Walter was odd, but I loved him. Perhaps love isn’t the right word, but I can’t think of a better one. He was terribly, terribly important in my life. He drove me mad, but I needed him, too. I adored his conversation. He amused me, flattered me, teased me, scolded me. Every conversation was an act of attention, and I have not found another like him in the whole world.

  We met in 1924, just off the piazza in Capri. It was an exhaustingly hot day in midsummer, and I was trying to buy some almonds. Sometimes one simply wants almonds. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t recall the Italian word for that delectable nut. The grocer gestured wildly, spouting a dialect I could not fathom. He kept handing me things that were not almonds. Exasperated, I was about to leave without the almonds when I noticed a short, bespectacled man in a white suit. He stood right beside me, breathing heavily through his mouth, staring through thick glasses.

  “May I help you, please, dear lady?” he asked, bowing in a courtly manner and tipping his white straw hat. I took him at once for a Berliner.

  “Do you know the Italian word for almonds?”

  He began to sputter a peculiar dialect, and suddenly a large bag of almonds was in my possession. I did not even have to pay for it.

  “I can’t thank you enough, sir,” I said. “I adore almonds.”

  “May I accompany you?”

  “If you like,” I said. It was a peculiar request, but I have entertained worse. “I must be getting back to the hotel. My husband is waiting.” I was not married, but I felt like saying that, as a precaution. With men, one can never be sure about their intentions.

  He took the bag of almonds from me, as if they were terribly heavy.

  “There is no need,” I said. “I am quite strong.” I flexed my muscles.

  “Please, dear lady. I must carry the almonds. They are the product of my tongue, after all.”

  It was quite ludicrous, but I didn’t mind. I was bored on Capri, where the light is blinding. Who wants to live at the center of a diamond chip? After a certain point, even leisure becomes tedious, and I was eager to return to Berlin.

  As we passed through the piazza, Walter volunteered to buy me a drink at a café with huge green awnings, and I accepted. I was thirsty, and my feet were killing me.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said, stirring countless lumps of sugar into his coffee like an Arab and lighting a cigarette. “I am Dr. Walter Benjamin.”

  “And I am Dr. Asja Lacis,” I said.

  He looked at me skeptically. I was not a doctor, but I could not resist the temptation to tease him. I have never liked this Germanic obsession with titles. Herr Doctor this, Herr Professor that.

  We had a pleasant, if somewhat indirect, chat, and he insisted on following me back to the little hotel where Bernhard and I were staying. We had left our friend Brecht in Positano and had come out here to be alone, but we seemed to quarrel as soon as we stepped off the ferry.

  Walter Benjamin went out of my thoughts as soon as we said goodbye at the gate to my hotel, but a day or so later, he entered a café where I was sitting with Bernhard and a German theatrical agent named Willie Manheim, whom we had met on the ferry. Walter found a small, marble table by the door and began scribbling in a notebook. Every now and then he looked up, looking in my direction with that peculiar intensity one associates with myopia. He would nod gravely, then resume writing. Each time, I met his gaze directly and nodded back.

  To end this silly game, I went to his table and invited him to join us, as both Bernhard and Willie seemed eager to meet another literate German. To everyone’s delight, he talked knowledgeably about the Deutsches Theatre in Berlin, which Bernhard administered, giving the impression that he had seen every major production in the past ten years.

  “He is a learned gentleman,” Bernhard later said. “I’ve read a few of his reviews. We actually met once or twice, in passing, at one of those big parties in Berlin that Benno Reifenberg used to throw.”

  “Ah, Reifenberg,” said Willie. He was always keen to associate with the right literary editors, and Reifenberg ruled one of the better roosts in Germany, the Frankfurter Zeitung.

  “Isn’t he a homosexual?” I asked, quite innocently. But my question seemed to freeze both Willie and Bernhard, who found such topics unacceptable.

  “He is a very gifted and unusual man,” said Willie. “Quite unusual, in fact.”

  Walter somehow lingered in my mind, and I felt certain that we’d see a lot of each other in the coming years. I’m a bit of a clairvoyant when it comes to relationships, and it struck me from the beginning that he found me attractive, though I found him mildly repulsive. There was something about his smell that put me off. Worse, his stumbling and periphrastic manner was irritating. I like people who approach a subject directly, forthrightly. There is no need for circumlocution, for beating around every bush.

  My hotel overlooked the sea, as most of the good ones do in Capri, so the view was dazzling. I liked our room, too, with its white, pasty walls, the vaulted ceiling, and brightly painted tile on the floors; one stepped through Venetian doors onto a terrazzo for breakfast under a broad canvas flap. Elegant cypress trees rose up like needles in the garden just below, aromatic in the soft breeze. In the early evenings I would sit alone there and read as the sun dropped behind the limestone cliffs; the air grew chill, and swallows dipped and veered, making passes at the fountain below. I was enchanted by the island, which like Prospero’s cell entertained so many lively spirits, some of them at odds.

  I thought frequently of Ariel and Caliban, the opposing creatures of Shakespeare’s play, and could feel their clash in the island air: the fluting voice of the sprite above the gurgle and belch of the monster. Earth, air, fire, water were all present here like primary colors, transmutable substances. Earth and water belonged to Caliban, whereas fire and air were Ariel’s. I began to write a poem about this, but as usual it unraveled in my hands. I am not a poet.

  But I love poets. I loved Bernhard, who was a poet of the theater. And I loved Brecht, the greatest poet of them all. I began to think of him as Prospero’s evil brother. It was clear to me that he hoped to rule over my kingdom, wanted to make me another of his many pagan brides. But I was not so foolish. Not like the others, all fawning and frightened. They somehow imagined that the oxygen would be withdrawn from their world if Brecht ceased to meet them once or twice a month for a night of passion. What held them so? His snaggletoothed smile never appeal
ed to me in that way. His eyes were cold as mine. We would have frozen the universe.

  It is not that I’m cold inside. I’m perhaps a little too hot at times. When I crave a man, it is impossible to think of anything else, or to dampen the flames. What’s the line from Racine? “I burn for Hippolyte”? That sings to me. When I first met Bernhard, I knew a part of me was finished. Here was destiny, the snake that eats its own tail. I had borne a child already, had moved through several lovers. But Bernhard, with his dark glances and insouciant smiles, lit a rare fire. I took him away from the woman he was soon to marry, and I left my child for him. I surrounded him, became a whirligig of attention. My focus never wavered. I became irresistible.

  Like most women, I wanted, I needed love: the erotic love that makes a night blaze in memory like a torched stubble-field; I would walk the cindery, sparking ground in a daze the next morning, and for weeks afterward. It was always painful, beautiful, and fraught.

  Sometimes I think I sought these memories more than the experiences themselves, the afterglow rather than the burn. But with Bernhard, it was the nights themselves, the fire licking the ceiling of his bedroom, the walls flickering, and the twinning shadows of our nakedness.

  I was, at heart, a woman of the theater, and this was all part of my attraction to Bernhard. Ever since my days as a schoolgirl in Riga, I was drawn to the stage. Not always as an actor, but as a spectator. I prefer life transformed, perfected, by art. But I insist that art be revolutionary, too: It must address the demands of the present, transmit a feeling of urgency to the people.

  It is too reductive merely to assert that economics rules the world—the basic Marxian presupposition—but there is some obvious truth in it. The material world is all we have and the only world we will ever know. I do not understand religious people. They have been sidetracked, hoodwinked, hounded into adopting preposterous notions. There is a God, but He is the world: rocks, streams, clouds, people. Every man and every woman is a little god. If anything, I preach the religion of man, the divinity of man, the sacredness of daily life. The hierarchies must go: man over woman, king over subject, rich over poor. The ideals of the French Revolution still strike me as the correct goals—liberty, equality, fraternity. Perhaps not in that order. Equality precedes liberty: We cannot be free until we are all equal, materially if not socially. As long as one man is begging for bread in the streets of the capital, there is no equality among men, and there can be no freedom or brotherhood.

  My dear Walter Benjamin was no Marxist, though he was apparently moved by my arguments that summer in Capri, and he dutifully worked his way through Kapital, my very own copy, which he borrowed and did not return. I also gave him my copy of History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukács, a book he had already read but not properly.

  It was there, in Lukács, that Walter found his own thoughts about the degeneration of German society confirmed and elevated to a system that was, as I think he put it, “coherent and epistemologically consistent.” Lukács examined in his rigorous style the spiritual crisis of the West. Walter had himself experienced this crisis, and it had driven him in esoteric directions, toward mysticism—a sure sign of dissolution. It seemed important to him that Lukács was able to rescue the spiritual tradition of the West and turn it to better use, suggesting ways to harness these same energies and transform them into instruments of social progress. Walter began, for the first time, to understand that without radical change in Europe, there was no hope at all.

  He gulped down the books I gave him, and I was awed by his mental powers. Bernhard and I were both struck by his way of speaking slowly in complete and beautifully structured paragraphs. He had a philosophical turn of mind and had been trained in the Germanic tradition; Hegel (whom I had never read carefully) was second nature to him, which made Marx and Lukács appear quite simple. I became, simultaneously, his teacher and his pupil.

  Walter leapt ahead of me, intellectually, in no time. He quickly understood the finer aspects of dialectical materialism better than I did. But he was not, and would never be, a committed revolutionary. He was intractably, incorrigibly bourgeois, a Berliner of the old school, a man of the burgher class. No matter how much he claimed to reject his background, it was always there, undermining his revolutionary zeal. He was, at base, a collector, a connoisseur, a mystic. I don’t think he ever committed himself to revolution except in the most abstract and cerebral ways. In fact, he was downright pathetic when it came to revolutionary zeal. His skeptical nature made him the most improbable of would-be Marxists, and it quite irritated me when he feigned commitment. It was all humbug.

  We met several times in the same café in the piazza, and he drew me out patiently, asking questions that grew increasingly personal.

  “You will forgive me, fräulein,” he said, “but I want to know everything about it. It is like that when I first make someone’s acquaintance.”

  “You must be very busy,” I said.

  “I mean, when I make the acquaintance of someone terribly special…a friend of the future.”

  He seemed idiotic but also compelling. I generally like intelligent men who present a complex argument based on concrete knowledge of the world. Walter, of course, had read everything, most of it twice. He was a walking, breathing encyclopedia, almost to the point of caricature, with this insane, compulsive, inhuman desire to know everything about everything that could be found in books.

  It is not that I dislike reading; novels especially, and books on history, are part of my life. I was reading Tacitus and Suetonius at the time, both of whom told appalling yet wonderful stories about the Emperor Tiberius on Capri. What a monster he was! A pure fantasist and libertine, self-indulgent to a sublime degree. He reminded me, in a perverse way, of Brecht.

  The café with the green awnings faced the cathedral, and we usually met after lunch. By midafternoon a blunt perpendicular light splashed over the adjacent stone stairway, although the steps themselves were obscured by flowers in vases. At one side of the piazza was a terrace surrounded by tall white columns; a black-and-white sign pointed to the funicular, which carried one to the sea. Above, an old bell tower boomed the hour, its clock face made of blue tile, which it wore like a monocle. It sported a Bourbon crest, the mark of some previous era of colonization. What I liked about Capri was its feeling of survival; many conquerors had come and gone, but the island itself remained—a glittering rock of freedom in the bright green sea. It was timeless and equal to anything that history could give it.

  The piazza was crowded with elderly gentlemen in waistcoats, with leathery-faced fishermen, chattering housewives, children, and tourists from around the globe. It was all teeming, tumultuous, squawking. White, yellow, and pink facades squinted in the sun, and red peppers hung from a long beam behind our seats. A distant smell of onion, olive oil, and garlic touched our nostrils: part of the ongoing, obsessive task of meal preparation that is Italy’s only religion.

  One day Walter leaned over and said, “Will you come to the cave with me? Tomorrow?”

  This was uttered sotto voce, like a proposition. After some hesitation and polite questioning, I agreed to follow him the next morning to some legendary cave. How could one turn down such a proposal? Bernhard was preoccupied that morning, and he did not think of Walter Benjamin as a potential rival in matters of the heart, so I was quite free to explore the island with him. “Just make sure he doesn’t fall into the sea,” Bernhard said.

  We met at nine in the piazza and proceeded on foot along the Via Croce: a steep, narrow path with thickly planted gardens in a string on one side and a nearly vertical descent to the sea on the other. Walter huffed and puffed like a steam engine, and I made fun of him. “You are out of shape!” I said. “Look at that potbelly! How old are you, sixty-five?” He just squinted and smiled, accepting my ridicule as a form of intimacy.

  We came to a crossroad at the end of our climb, and from there co
uld see the Tuaro Hills and a panoramic view of the sea, with its mass of dark shadows and, in the near distance, the Faraglioni—tall standing rocks that jut from the water like spires. Sorrento glimmered in the distance, a white coin in the red of the rocks. It was almost too beautiful.

  I followed Walter into the woods, then up another steeply banked path through a patch of olive trees, arriving suddenly at the mouth of a large cave called the Matermania. It burrowed into the sheer sides of a limestone cliff, surrounded by myrtle bushes and mastics. Close by stood a patch of elegant sea pines, pungent with their ooze of pitch. Seagulls hung in the air, white-winged, like angels.

  Unfortunately, I am by nature claustrophobic and detest small spaces, which means that a cave—however spectacular—is my worst nightmare. I have dreamed of caves all my life: winding caves with no end, with no possibility of a return to the light. Labyrinthine caves.

  Walter beckoned from the shadows.

  “I’m sorry, Walter,” I said. “But I can’t do it. I have this fear. You must forgive me.”

  “Please, Asja,” he said. “Come!” There was something a little frantic about his plea.

  “It would kill me,” I said. “It really would.”

  He began laughing. “You are neurotic. Of all people! Who would guess?”

  “You may insult me all morning,” I said, “but it will not persuade me to get into that cave.”