by Jay Parini
We reached the summit in surprisingly good shape, and Benjamin collapsed to his knees. He put his forehead on the ground and spread his arms forward to balance.
“You made it, Dr. Benjamin,” I said. I pointed to a cluster of houses not five miles in the distance—a toylike village. “That’s Port-Bou.”
Port-Bou overlooked the sea, with its twilight crimson burn. The Vermilion Coast of Catalonia glittered, dark cliffs, shoaling up the water. By now, a pink sword of light jabbed through clouds on the western horizon, as if the God of Abraham and Moses were signaling His approval. I looked for a rainbow, but none was visible.
“It’s so pretty,” said Henny Gurland.
“Too bad such a beautiful country is full of fascists,” said José.
“Your father loved Spain,” said his mother. Her cheeks were glistening.
I should have let them continue on their own from here, but somehow I did not want to let go. I decided to take them down another mile, to a point where the mountain path gave way to an actual road.
We stopped to rest at one point beside a fetid pool where the water, with its froth of green foam, gave off a larval odor.
“I’m very thirsty,” Benjamin said. “You will please excuse me while I drink.”
My canteen was dry, so I could not help him, but the prospect of his drinking this water appalled me. “You’ll be in Port-Bou within the hour,” I said. “There will be plenty of fresh water there.”
“I must drink,” he said. “There is no choice.”
I found myself getting angry. “Dr. Benjamin, please. We have come all this way together. You must act sensibly. This slop is dangerous. Do you want to get typhoid?”
“I’m afraid I cannot do otherwise, gnädige Frau,” he said. “I apologize.” He crawled on all fours toward the pool and cupped several handfuls into his mouth, gagging and swallowing. Henny Gurland and her son turned away.
When he returned, I told them I must turn back. As it was, I would be hiking a good deal of the way by moonlight.
“We must thank you, Frau Fittko,” Old Benjamin said, taking my hands in his. I let him kiss me on both cheeks.
I did not want their thanks. I was not doing this only for them. It was also for my uncles, my aunts, my cousins, and so many friends in the Nazi camps. This was a small gesture of defiance, a way to lash out against something too awful and inhuman to imagine.
WALTER BENJAMIN
“If a man possesses character,” says Nietzsche, “he will have the same experience over and over again.” Whether or not this may be the case on a grand scale, on a smaller one it seems obviously true. There are paths that lead us repeatedly into the hands of people who serve the same function for us, over and over: passageways that always, in the most diverse periods of life, direct us to the friend, the betrayer, the beloved, the pupil, or the master.
12
Benjamin was almost afraid to look back. He had looked back too many times in his life already and had turned to salt on more than one occasion. With Dora, his wife, he had made an inefficient, unkind practice of reunion; years after they had decided between themselves to end the relationship, he had insisted on seeing her, and she had often acquiesced. It was perhaps difficult to say no to a man who meant no harm, who seemed always on the point of reforming himself and making amends for past failures as a husband or father.
Now he recalled a time in Paris, with Dora. It was mid-May of 1927, and the pear trees along the river blossomed, making the air fragrant, sensuous. The affairs with Jula and Asja, and miscellaneous other adventures of the heart, had come between him and his wife; quite properly, she was fed up with him. They had been living apart for several years, and yet there they were now, at his invitation, in Paris, drinking glasses of Pernod at La Coupole on Montparnasse like any respectable bourgeois couple.
He rarely drank alcohol in quantity, but the anxiety caused by seeing Dora drew him toward the bottle, and he teetered on the brink of inebriation. “This café,” he said portentously, “is the center of the center.” Indeed, the restaurant overflowed with famous artists and infamous artists manqués, with motley bohemians from all parts of the globe, with poets and poetasters, philosophers and pseudophilosophers, magicians and mountebanks.
“The French are so very peculiar,” said Dora.
“I doubt more than half of the people here are French,” he told her. “Look around you: Czechs, Poles, Americans, Spaniards.”
“And Germans,” she said.
Benjamin lifted his eyebrows. “Our friend Scholem would say that we are Jews.”
“We are Germans,” she insisted. “Germany has many religions.”
Benjamin simply agreed with her. The subject of Jews and Germany had ceased to interest him. He considered himself a voluntary exile, at home among these odd, artistic types, listening and talking, drowsing over an inexpensive glass of something while scribbling in his notebook, an eye cocked to the crowd. He had heard some astonishing conversations, and many of them had found their way into his journals, verbatim. He called them “found poetry.”
He spent a delicious week with Dora, courting her as if for the first time. The idea that he might return to her, that their marriage might blaze forth again, remained a tantalizing, hope-engendering possibility. He was not, as his sister maintained, “using Dora.” Indeed, Dora had been through this with him before, so it was not his fault that she was seduced. At least this is what he told himself in the uncountable hours after midnight, when, like a mysterious visitor in a black cape, Conscience called.
As he and Dora whispered over cognac into the early-morning hours about religion, politics, literature, and philosophy, Benjamin remembered why he had married her in the first place; he even forgot (temporarily) why their coupling had come undone. One night, after sitting under starry skies for hours on a bench overlooking the Seine from the Île St-Louis, they returned to his shabby room in the Hôtel du Midi, on the nondescript avenue du Parc Montsouris, and made love as if for the first time.
As they lay naked beside each other in their damp, scented sheets, their postcoital conversation became an isolate of their marriage, reminding them both that what they had just been doing was a bad idea from the start.
“Do you love me, Walter?” she had asked in a small voice, afraid.
“Yes,” he said. “I have always loved you. You should know that.”
“How can you say such a thing, when you sleep with other women all the time?”
“That is an overstatement. In any case, I must answer honestly to my feelings.”
“What about my feelings? Do they matter to you?”
“I regret the pain I have caused you, Dora.”
“And our son!”
“Our son, yes. I feel particularly bad about Stefan. He does not deserve me for a father.”
“You are a good father when you choose to be. Or you were.”
“I am unreliable.”
“That’s right.”
“And irresolute.”
“Completely.”
“And I do not know how to improve upon things.”
“This is frustrating. The whole subject is frustrating.”
“Why did you marry me, Dora?”
“Your good looks, perhaps? I doubt it….”
“You mustn’t tease me. Tell me the truth.”
“I married you because you say all the right things.”
“At the wrong time?”
“Of course.”
“But you know I love you.”
“That is just a sentence you appear to enjoy saying. It tastes good in your mouth.”
“You have just had sex with me.”
“I have certain animal needs, and so do you.”
“Do other men satisfy these needs when I’m not with you?”
“Th
is is not your business, Walter.”
“I suppose not, but I’m curious.”
“You have a wonderful imagination. Use it.”
“I wish you wouldn’t adopt such an attitude….”
“You want me to build you up, is that it? To make you feel masculine?”
“I cannot respond when you talk like this.”
“You are a shit, Walter.”
“I know.”
“You are poison for women.”
“Do you think so?”
“I know so.”
“Will you come to see me another time, Dora? If I ask politely?”
“Probably.”
“I am glad to hear this. I don’t want to lose you.”
“You are mad, darling.”
“Is the world any saner?”
“Not this world.”
“But I love this world.”
“I know you do.”
“And I hate this world.”
“I know, I know. I know every goddamn thing about you.”
“What will become of us, Dora?”
“We will die.”
“And then?”
“We must wait for that,” she said, “and grow patient.”
That particular conversation echoed in his head, and he smiled to himself. It was obvious now that his incessant looking back was itself a big problem: with Dora and Jula, with Asja, with the dozen or so other women he had loved. But how could one not turn around, reconsider? Wasn’t he naturally drawn to History, which keeps piling up behind us, wrecked and unruly, demanding our backward glance or reappraisal? Wasn’t History—this amalgam of stories and sighs, lumps and hunches—always threatening to reinvade the present and to become the future?
He sighed, recalling that he had looked back with nostalgia so many times on his youth in Wilhelminian Germany, on his father’s darkly paneled study on Koch Street in Berlin. That house came back to him, too: room after room filled with sumptuous pictures and Persian rugs. He remembered the day, in 1904, when his family got their first telephone, in those days a status symbol of huge magnitude. And he thought of those velvet summer nights in the Old Western Quarter of Berlin, near the Landwehr Canal, where he gathered with friends in the tremulous, sepia-tinted hours before the Great War began, and they would debate aesthetic and moral questions until the last of them was drained of wakefulness and intellectual energy. He could even recall with humor his first fiancée, the blimplike Grete Radt. What a disaster!
The tragedy of Fritz Heinle, whose suicide had prevented him from becoming the great German poet of his generation, also returned, and the pain was only a little less now. That single death had changed everything, especially his attitude toward the war. Nothing could ever be the same after Heinle was gone. He had killed himself but had taken the youth of a dozen people with him; the corpses, like stains on the floor, lay there and would not fade.
Mostly, he remembered the elusive, impossible genius of Gerhard Scholem, whose big ears and quivering eyes loomed in Benjamin’s dream life. That summer of 1918, in Switzerland, had been so pristine, so perfect; afterward, they had tried without success to reinvent that golden time, to rekindle the fires of absolute intellectual kinship by pumping the bellows of their correspondence. But there was always something missing, something a little sad and unsaid.
This past decade in France had been hard, so any nostalgia put there would be misplaced. Benjamin wanted the future now, a world redeemed by moral victory, by a new dialectic. He would perhaps return to Paris one day, after a spell in Manhattan, resuming those long afternoons at the Café Dôme, at La Coupole, at the Lipp. He would watch for the fourth or fifth time every film starring Adolphe Menjou—Menjou the Marvelous. He would visit the Grand Guignol and attempt the impossible—to read everything Simenon published as fast as he actually wrote it. He would also repair his stamp collection, his toy collection, his library of old books and autographs. Everything would be different, but nothing would change. That would be bliss.
His arcades book would appear after the war, too, transforming the way history is written. People would say, “Are you the Walter Benjamin?” and he would look askance at them for putting forward such an embarrassing question, bored by their inquiry and (slightly) irritated by their blunt intrusion. “Walter Benjamin?” he would say, raising a thick, dark eyebrow. “Who is Walter Benjamin?”
A sharp voice pierced the veil of his reverie. “Dr. Benjamin, are you all right?”
It was José Gurland, the man who provided a crutch, as needed, for his descent into Spain.
“Yes, I’m well, José. Thank you for asking.”
José was a fine, if troubled, boy. The fact that he sulked, and chafed, was not important. Who wouldn’t in his shoes? Benjamin did not himself find Frau Gurland easy. She had married Arkady Gurland, a socialist who had worked in Spain as an administrator for the Republicans during the Civil War. He was gone, dead at the hands of the Nazis, and now his wife and son were in flight. Getting them over the border became a kind of private mission for him, and it pleased him that he had apparently succeeded—if only they could make it through Spanish customs.
Thank goodness for Lisa Fittko. He could still hear the voice of Hans: “Lisa will take care of you.” After the war, he must somehow contrive to meet them both, to thank them.
The plan, as formulated by Lisa, was for Benjamin and the Gurlands to spend the night at the only hotel in Port-Bou, the Fonda Franca. Mayor Azéma had mentioned it, saying, “Beware the woman who runs the hotel. She is unreliable.” He did not suggest in what way she was unreliable, but his expression spoke volumes.
Benjamin limped beside José, who carried the briefcase, as Frau Gurland led the way over stony ground, through runnels gouged by the sudden rains. Nearing the bottom slopes, they had to push through a field of waist-high coppery grass toward the trunk road into Port-Bou. In the midst of it, Benjamin stopped, and his legs would not move. He bent his chin upward, amazed by the ultramarine blue dome, with fragments of peachy cloud-spume pinned high in the corners of the sky. He took long, slow breaths.
“We must keep the pace,” Frau Gurland said, frowning. “The sun will be gone in an hour or so. If we’re too late, the border police will suspect us.”
“They will suspect us in any case,” Benjamin said. “It is their duty.”
Her countenance did not unfrown. “You must not argue with everything I say, it is tedious.”
Her abrupt manner, bordering on discourtesy, was inexcusable in these circumstances. If his legs were capable of moving quickly, he would do it.
“You shouldn’t talk to him that way,” said José.
“I’ve had enough of your impertinence for one day,” she said. “If your father were here…”
“I am quite all right,” Benjamin interrupted, trying to hurl water on these sudden flames. “We must push on, you’re quite right about that, Frau Gurland.” His conciliatory tone seemed to give vent to her wrath.
The paved road into Port-Bou glistened wetly just beyond the grassy field, and Benjamin was relieved to feel it underfoot at last. From here on, the going would be easy. He did not even worry about customs, having heard that the border police in Spain were notoriously lax. In any case, most travelers in time of war had bogus papers.
José walked close to Benjamin. “Were you a teacher, Dr. Benjamin?” he asked.
“I am a writer,” he said. “I write critical essays, you could say.”
“They pay you for this?”
“Sometimes.” He suppressed a laugh. It still appalled him that so much effort had yielded so little money.
“Don’t plague him with questions,” Henny Gurland said to José. “It’s not a good idea to talk anyway. Remember that somebody could hear you.”
“We’re miles from town, Mother,” said José.
Benjamin looked at José closely. He liked the blond hair cut across his forehead in a straight line, platinum with streaks of darker blond, and the sharp, straight nose. There was an almost invisible fuzz on his upper lip, and his skin had a biscuity brown color. After a day’s hard climbing, he exuded a sharp but almost poignant odor. His unselfconsciousness only added to his beauty.
They walked briskly now, aware that the end of their exhausting day was in view. A quick breeze, tangy with salt, rolled off the sea, refreshing them. It rattled the high weeds on either side of the road. A large bird crossed the sky and flew straight into the sun, dissolving on contact.
“Did you see that amazing bird?” asked Benjamin.
“It’s a tern,” said the boy. He explained that his father had once given him a catalog of European birds. On weekends, they had made frequent excursions into the French countryside to look for examples.
“So what do you hope to be one day, José? When you are a grown man?” he asked. The stilted nature of his question bothered him, but he could think of no other way to address the boy. The same difficulty beset him whenever he tried to talk to Stefan. There was perhaps an inevitable distance between a father and a son, as if both understood the impossible ontological difficulty of their situation. As a father, how does one address one’s double, one’s successor, one’s executioner? As a son, how does one begin to comprehend the vast, stupid ongoingness of life itself, and the unique manner devised by nature for replicating itself? Who is this creature who made me and would presume therefore to know me?
“I’m going to be a scientist,” José declared, “or an engineer.”
“He is a bright boy,” Frau Gurland said, “with the highest marks in his mathematical exams at the lycée. Tell him about your exams, José.”