by Jay Parini
Once again, serendipity had led him to the perfect text. “Oh, tyrant love, please set me free!” He found himself weeping as he read.
When he looked up, the whole valley was bathed in a soft, vermillion glow, and Benjamin could see in the distance a scattering of vineyard workers; the wind carried aloft the distant gong of the Church of St. Simon, which poised on a hillock overlooking Banyuls. Soon, he thought, the world will blaze with daylight, the sea and sky mirroring the darkest blue, and the vineyards sloping greenly toward the village, flecked with gold. The mountains above him would loom, a wall of purple, jagged, thrilling. And the sun, climbing high at last, would scatter a million spears of light in all directions, and not even death could kill so much glory.
WALTER BENJAMIN
I found myself in a labyrinth of staircases. This labyrinth was open to the sky in places. I climbed up; other stairs led downward. On one landing I realized I was standing on a kind of summit, with a wide view across open country. I noticed that others stood on other peaks. One of these people was suddenly seized by vertigo and began falling. A feeling of light-headedness spread; others toppled from other summits into the depths. Everyone was laughing. When I, too, was overwhelmed by this giddiness, I woke up.
11
LISA FITTKO
The local cocks had long finished crowing by the time Henny Gurland finally tried to wake her son, who kept rolling over and drifting off. I suppose he wanted to return to the dreamworld shattered only a few months ago, when his father was taken away, never to return. In some ways he reminded me of my own brother, Hans, at that age: a beautiful, dreamy boy whose curiosity about the world was self-defining. I wondered if that curiosity could survive the brutal facts he wrestled with now. Certainly he was not ready to face the daylight that lay before him. He wanted to roll back, to plunge into soft dreams, to get away from here.
“He used to wake up so quick and alert,” his mother said. She leaned over him, her prematurely silver hair hanging forward in bangs, and kneaded the muscles of his neck, trying to ease his waking. “His father used to say José could circle the world in the time it took the rest of us to brush our teeth.”
“His father has just died,” I said.
“José is very strong,” she said, ignoring me. “When we had to leave Spain, he was so cheerful. You should have seen him, Frau Fittko.”
Henny Gurland puzzled me. She was herself a dignified, highly intelligent, well-educated woman, but she seemed not to recognize that her world had been turned topsy-turvy by the war, and that she was struggling with her own sadness and anger. Under everything she said, I could see a running superscript that read: I should not be in this situation! I do not deserve it!
I sat on a small cane chair and studied the map that Mayor Azéma had drawn for us. “We should try to get away before sunrise,” I said firmly. “We can’t afford to take the risk of—”
“I know, I know!” said Henny. Her cheeks were apple red and wrinkled.
I bit my tongue, reminding myself to remain patient. She couldn’t help it that the Nazis wanted to kill her and her son or that her husband was dead. In a better world, she would be letting José sleep till noon in their villa in Bavaria, and he would be fed milk and honey for breakfast.
“Forgive me,” she said. “Will you have a glass of juice, Frau Fittko?”
I saw that nothing would hurry them, so I accepted.
At five-thirty, half an hour later, we left the Pension Lumise in a powdery pink light. The pastel houses, with their jagged rooflines, were still tightly shuttered for the night; they stumbled on their knees up the hillside, led by a trail of pencil-thin cypress trees. The narrow streets of the village were empty, but one could hear a child’s voice calling for its mother, and the ancient cackle of geese and chickens in backyards.
We followed a cobbled road beside an iron railing, then cut across open pastureland toward the path that rose into the foothills. The bulk of vineyard workers had already left Banyuls, but there were plenty of stragglers for us to hide among—dozens of hulking ghosts in thick sweaters, carrying buckets. Nobody spoke, keeping to the habit of all early-morning voyagers en route to work. I had noticed this habit on the early-morning trams in Paris and Berlin—men and women filled with a deep nostalgia for the dreams they have left behind and, like José Gurland, hesitant to plunge into the daylight world.
I carried a rucksack filled with provisions and a canteen with fresh water: Old Benjamin would certainly be thirsty and hungry. He was not the sort of man who would miss his daily feed with good humor. Men of his class and generation were notoriously insistant upon regularity in meals, merely assuming that food would somehow be produced by the hands of women and brought to their tables, hot and tasty.
I had tried my best to get Benjamin to return with us to Banyuls, but he believed passionately that his feet possessed only so many steps per day and that he had already used up his quota in getting to that first plateau. I only hoped his quota wouldn’t run out before I delivered him over the mountains. He assured me he would spend the night in a stable and be fit as a bull to charge over the Pyrenees this morning, and I decided not to argue with him. What was the point? Here was a man who suffered racking chest pains when he walked more than ten or fifteen minutes without stopping. “There is a tiny man in my chest,” he said, “who keeps squeezing my heart. A cute little fellow. He works my lungs like a bellows. I would banish him, but he’s good company.”
I never knew how to take remarks like this; there was something vaguely mad about Benjamin, something impossibly childlike. And for all his commitment to reason, he could be quite unreasonable. Should I have suggested he turn back, he would have simply laughed and marched ahead, with or without me. I had no doubt about this.
Before beginning the day’s climb, I spoke frankly to the Gurlands. “We were a little cavalier yesterday, and we got lucky. Let’s take no chances today. On the path itself, you must not speak. Voices carry in the country. Walk steadily, slowly, and silently. Avoid eye contact with anyone you pass.”
I was mildly alarmed that José carried a knife in his belt, and my first impulse was to ask him to abandon it; then again, why spoil his fun? His boyhood was not one to remember with pleasure in later years. If he felt like a bit of swashbuckling today, what harm was there?
We picked our way among chunky stones, with linden trees at either side, some already gold with autumn; broad slopes of marram grass dropped all the way to the sea. It was too bad we’d lingered in the boardinghouse; the sky was brightening quickly along the east rim of the horizon, and the high crooked outline of the mountains loomed. It seemed impossible that we would cross them today.
Less than a few miles from the village we found a sentry posted in the path. He leaned against a large rock, his head tilting forward on his chest, though he seemed awake. A rifle lay across his lap.
“Don’t look at him,” I whispered to the Gurlands, who walked behind me.
He never even acknowledged us as we passed, which was just fine with me; he stared dumbly at the ground in front of him as if he could not believe his bad luck in being posted here, in the middle of nowhere, at this hour. Poor boy, I thought. He was hardly a year or two older than José.
The path grew steeper, and in one spot we had to climb with our hands as well as our feet, looping our soles in damp, black roots that stuck through the red clay. Because it had rained steadily for three days the week before, one had to avoid the wettest places.
Old Benjamin had taken a good hour to ascend this particular patch the day before, so I knew it would take longer to cross the Pyrenees than Mayor Azéma predicted. “Ah, you’ll be there before dinner,” he had said, blithely. “Give or take thirty minutes.” I wanted to add, “Give or take Old Benjamin.”
The three of us made good time, but as we approached the clearing where Benjamin supposedly waited, I began to fret. What if he had wandered of
f, then lost himself in the woods? What if the border police had discovered him already? Would he have told them about us? My fantasies ran wild, and I half expected to find the stable full of laughing Nazis, with Benjamin swinging from the rafters. “Lisa, you always imagine the worst,” my husband, Hans, often said. “Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because anything you can think of will never happen. That’s the way it works. So always try to envision the most hideous possibilities…as a way of eliminating them.”
I began to long for Hans and wonder where he could be. If he’d made it to Tangiers, he would probably cool his heels till I arrived. That was our last plan. I would go from Portugal to Tangiers, an easy crossing, and we would go together to Cuba or New York on a freighter. “I’ll be staying at the Hotel Larouche,” he said. How did he know the name of every hotel in the world? Why did he trust me to get to these exotic places by myself? Was he testing me? From the beginning, I’d sensed his pride in my independence, and this forced me to live up to his expectations. Now I must not allow myself to feel weak inside or become afraid that the world could not be managed. This was no time for second thoughts or self-consciousness. The thing was to get the job done. These people had put themselves into my hands, and I must not fail them.
The sun warmed my face, with a few pink clouds moving swiftly across the sky. The slopes in the distance were studded with boulders, but the field beside the ruined stable was deep in grass. I took in slow, meditative breaths and looked back at the valley, the sea, the windy, reeling sky, while José ran ahead to fetch Old Benjamin. There was a catch in his long stride, as if something were holding him back.
He entered the stable and reappeared. “He’s not here!” he shouted.
Henny and I ran to see for ourselves.
“How could he do this to us?” she said, her voice pinched. “He knew we were coming for him.”
“He’s probably nearby,” I said. “I don’t think he’d just walk away.”
“Why did you let him sleep here?” she complained. “He’s inept at this sort of thing.”
“There will be an explanation.”
“Why don’t you give it to us, then?” José said, like a little brat. “You seem to have all the answers.”
“Please be respectful to Frau Fittko,” said his mother. “She is trying to help us.”
“She’s always helpful, isn’t she?”
Henny Gurland turned apologetic eyes toward me, but I brushed aside the look. I was not about to let this boy upset me. There was work to be done.
Sure enough, we found Benjamin asleep nearby with a book of poetry on his chest. He might have been dozing on a sandy beach somewhere, with a glass of wine on a table beside him, the waves lapping at his feet. Our voices and footsteps did not wake him. Dark, wiry hair seemed to have grown on his hands overnight.
José squatted and shook him gently, breathing close to his face. His fingers played across Old Benjamin’s chest. Seeing the patch of milky skin exposed above José’s socks, I thought of a boy I’d known in Germany, a boy whom I had once kissed by a bridge. It’s funny how you suddenly remember these things.
“Ah, you have come for me, dear boy!” said Benjamin, opening one eye first, then the other. “It is good to see you again!”
José shook his platinum hair into place.
“I see you’ve found yourself a pleasant spot,” I said. “Is there any chance that you might come with us?”
“Indeed,” he said. “A little walk into Spain might do me some good.”
We smiled, but he looked terribly unwell.
“Something has happened to your eyes,” Henny Gurland said, referring to the huge dark spots, reddish-purple in color, circling his eyes.
He took off his glasses and, with a handkerchief, wiped them off. “The dew, you see. The color rubs off on my face.”
Perhaps it was merely a stain, but I remembered seeing rings like that around my father’s eyes in the month before his death. My father also had the sallow skin, like old parchment, and the chest pains and tingling hands. He died just after taking me ice skating on the river near our house, and the strain may have hastened his death—at least that’s what my mother always said. “What did you do that for, Lisa, take an old man skating like that?” I can still hear her voice.
“Have you anything to drink, Frau Fittko? I’m afraid my thirst is prodigious.”
Prodigious? I handed him my canteen, and he drank in huge gulps. “Please, no more!” I warned. “It will make you sick.” I was also conscious of having to conserve; we had barely enough water for the three of us today. I broke off a crust of bread for him and cut a piece of cheese with my army knife. “Eat something. You must have been cold last night. It was freezing in Banyuls.”
“In fact, it was quite lovely in the stable. I should have been a farm animal, you see. I love to sleep in loose straw.”
“You’re more adaptable than I imagined,” I said. His formality put a stiffness into my own speech.
“I would make a good soldier,” he said, “if only my heart were stronger.”
Henny Gurland looked at him sternly from under the silver helmet of her hair. “Are you absolutely sure about this trek, Walter? It may be wiser for us to return to Banyuls. The route along the coast is bound to open again. This isn’t the only way out of France, you know.”
“The situation for Jews is getting worse,” I said. “I can’t really recommend we go back.”
“Are you Jewish?” José asked.
“Yes, I am,” I said. “But not Hans, my husband.”
“He’s a Leftist,” said Benjamin. “That’s worse than a Jew.”
“So what does that make me?” I asked.
“A Jewish Leftist,” he said, “like my brother, Georg…if he’s alive.”
“I still think we should reconsider,” said Henny. “That is, if Dr. Benjamin is—”
“We will cross the Pyrenees,” Benjamin cut in loudly. “You must not worry about me, Frau Gurland. I’m much more durable than I look.”
“Enough conversation,” I said, holding up my hands. I had never imagined that a group of refugees could be so unconscious of the danger they were in. They constantly made me feel as if I were interrupting their afternoon tea.
The path ahead ran parallel to a more accessible and widely known route that traced a ridgeline and was actually tucked beneath the ridge in critical places, making it fairly safe from the border police. Elsewhere, the two parallel routes almost met, so one had to be utterly silent. Mayor Azéma had marked the dangerous spots on the map with large blue Xs.
Benjamin walked swiftly at first but was soon forced to stop for a rest. He squatted to the ground, leaning his back against a rock. His breathing was coarse and erratic. “If I stop every ten or fifteen minutes, I’ll be able to maintain the pace,” he said apologetically. “I find I must stop before the pain begins. I waited too long just now.”
I asked to take his pulse.
He said, “Fast or slow, what does it matter? We must get to Spain.”
“Spain is a rotten place,” said José. “I used to live there.”
Frau Gurland sighed. “Please, dear. You don’t mean that.”
“How do you know what I mean, Mother?”
“You should think about what you’re going to say before you speak.”
“Father used to say that about you,” he said.
I decided to keep out of this. These were not, thank goodness, my relatives.
Finally Old Benjamin said, “I think I am ready now.”
“Let me carry your briefcase for a while,” I said. I could hardly fathom his motives in lugging the old briefcase. He was like a child with his favorite blanket or stuffed animal.
“You will forgive an old man his tedious obsession. It’s all I have, you see. I prefer to carry it myself.”
“It’s lighter than a case of wine,” José said, “but not as much fun.”
Dr. Benjamin smiled. “A sense of humor in dire circumstances is always a good thing to possess, José.” It amazed me how the boy never seemed to rankle him.
In a short while, we passed through a wood composed mainly of cypress trees, several of them uprooted, with black mud dripping from the clumps. They made me think of human corpses, the bare branches splayed on the bank, their fingers clutching at air. I shivered. Old Benjamin was a bad influence. Normally I never allowed myself such peculiar thoughts.
It was with some relief that we started along the main trunk of the Lister, which rose through vineyards thickened by the blue-black, swollen Banyuls grapes, just about ripe for picking. There were deep channels where storms had washed down from above, and the ground was still wet, with branching rivulets in places. The tiny streams sputtered and seeped.
Benjamin picked a handful of grapes and tasted them. “They are so sweet!” he said. “The sugar will give me strength.”
On the edge of the vineyard, we gathered for a late breakfast in the bright sun. Young Gurland sat beside Benjamin, the sun on their backs, while he lit a cigarette. Benjamin made me smile; crooked and pale in his rumpled suit, still panting from our journey, he nevertheless preserved both his dignity and a buoyancy of spirit. José slouched beside him, his posture echoing Benjamin’s stoop, but his biscuity brown skin and shining hair proclaimed youth and good health. In another time they might have seemed a funny pair—Weary Adolescence sitting next to Old Before His Time—except that in José I sensed a genuine despair beneath the rude veneer. I saw that he never sniped at Old Benjamin the way he did at his mother. Perhaps some inner code of honor prevented his attacking the nearly dead.
Henny Gurland and I went to pick some grapes. We tore off silvercoated clusters at the edge of the vineyard and dropped them into Henny’s bag.
“I hope you will excuse my son,” said Henny, breaking our pleasant silence.