Benjamin's Crossing

by Jay Parini

  He had since learned not to have expectations. Even now, with the horizon amazingly clear, he did not dare hope that he would make it to New York. Nevertheless, he now recalled what a former acquaintance from Berlin told him about the universities in America and their need for teachers. They were apparently thirsting for scholars with German doctorates, and the salaries were stupendous. He had jotted down the names of several institutions: New York University, City College of New York, Colorado University, the University of Delaware. He would send letters to all of them from Lisbon, if he ever got there, proposing a course of lectures on the development of French culture in the nineteenth century. On the train from Marseilles to Port-Vendres, he had filled his notebook with possible courses he might offer. With almost no preparation, he could lecture on Goethe, Proust, Kafka, Baudelaire, and a dozen other authors. He could teach philosophy, German history, cultural politics. Surely some university would want such a man?

  This would be especially true after his book on the Parisian arcades was published; indeed, he might well be lured back to Paris. Or perhaps Berlin was a better choice. There would be obvious satisfactions in returning to his native city as a mature man, a man of culture and attainment. His father had more than once declared, “You will never succeed at anything, Walter. You are too indecisive.” If he became a professor in Berlin, this would be the ultimate response to his father. He would stand over Émile’s grave and say, calmly, without resentment, “So I am indecisive, Father? Is that what you said?”

  He would give anything now for a single fresh morning in Berlin in early May, when the flowers spilled from stone pots along the path to the covered market—always his favorite destination as a boy. The compulsive buying and selling, and the atmosphere of controlled frenzy, lured him forward through the big wooden doors hinged on whipping springs; once inside the forecourt, he was in thrall to the female vendors, those high priestesses of Ceres who stood behind their bins and purveyed all manner of edible goods: fruits of the field, pickings of the orchard, wild birds and beasts, some of which hung threateningly from hooks, their eyes filled with the blank gaze of eternity. The flagstone floor was always slippery with fish swill, with scraps of lettuce or banana skins, and he could still see the hunchbacked little man who hosed off the scum, his red cap bobbing up and down as he worked. “Step aside, ladies!” He would shout.

  A steady supply of housewives and old family retainers carrying wicker baskets and cloth bags filled the forecourt. He had often gone there with plump Gretel, their cook; he would follow her at a slight distance, amazed by her skill at bargaining. Tough-minded, quick to reject a bruised piece of fruit, an inferior cut of meat, or a head of lettuce going brown at the edges, she stood up to each and every vendor, thrusting her substantial breasts forward like cannons. “This will not do!” she would bark. He admired Gretel, even now, as he contemplated the prospect of escaping the Fonda Franca by eluding the guard. Even if he made it free of Port-Bou, there were many difficult passages to thread, and he wished Gretel were here to make rapid, intelligent decisions.

  The pink sky framed in the big, open window of the bathroom was darkening with thunderclouds. Suddenly, a flock of geese crossed the windowpane, heading south toward the horizon in a V formation; the eerie cries of the long-necked birds trailed behind their perfect wedge like a kite’s tail. Benjamin could hear the birds long after they had crossed the window, and he listened keenly, trying not to think about his knee, his shortness of breath, and the pain rippling up and down his arms. He wanted to go south with those birds, and farther.

  The bath had soaked away the nervous energy that had kept him going for hour upon hour since before dawn, in what now seemed another life. Exhaustion suddenly piled its dark shadows into every crevice of his body; his lungs filled with its black soot; his joints locked. It was as though his body itself, his sheer corporeality, had evaporated, and he lay there limp, invisible, as the water turned cool and the stain of evening covered the bathroom ceiling. He became, in effect, the dwindling light, the rising wind, the clatter of dishes in the room below, and the distant pulse of the sea.

  * * *

  —

  Professor Lott read his newspaper in a dilapidated leather armchair in the shabbily ornate parlor of the hotel; Benjamin, newly washed and combed, sat on the other side of the room by an oblong mahogany table, a plate of cold meat on his lap. A small Bechstein piano was pushed against the wall beside him, an exact replica of the one his mother used to play in their house on Nettlebeck Street, in Berlin. The mere sight of this particular piano was comforting as thunder sounded in the distance, echoing across the bay, and the chandelier flickered overhead. For a moment, the room went dark, then the lights came on, even brighter than before.

  “A storm at sea,” said Lott, in German.

  Benjamin looked across the room without expression. It was difficult, with his myopia, to see clearly at such a distance. “I rather like a good storm, don’t you?” he said.

  “It depends.” The gentleman folded his newspaper and removed his glasses. “You are a German, sir? I think I hear a trace of Berlin in your accent.”

  Benjamin instinctively trusted this man. He was obviously a benign creature or he would not have been so blunt.

  “Yes, that is right.”

  Lott nodded eagerly. “Madame Ruiz told me you crossed the border this afternoon.”

  “Madame Ruiz has not lied to you.”

  Exhaustion and shyness combined to make Benjamin more laconic than usual, and Lott could not pry open the conversation. “I don’t mean to frighten you,” he said. “I am myself a refugee. My mother was actually from Düsseldorf. Her name was Eva Blum.”

  Benjamin visibly relaxed at this confession. Here was another Jew, with German connections.

  “I’m a Belgian,” Lott said. “My passport, I should say, allows me to boast of Belgian citizenship.” He paused. “If you get sent back, go to the Belgian consulate in Marseilles. It is still possible to get a passport there, I am told. The staff understands our predicament. Ask for Monsieur Peurot.”

  “I will remember this. Thank you,” Benjamin said. Shakily, he crossed the room toward Lott. “I am Dr. Walter Benjamin,” he said, bowing slightly.

  “Alphonse Lott,” he said, dipping his head forward. “Have you by chance written essays for some journals, Dr. Benjamin? Your name is familiar.”

  Benjamin settled into a wicker chair that had seen better days, delighted to have found a reader. It was, for him, the rarest of rare experiences. “Yes, but mostly for German periodicals.”

  “The Literarische Welt?”

  Benjamin brightened. “And a few others. For a while, I made my living as a freelance reviewer. It was, at best, a precarious life.”

  Lott explained that he had been a professor in Brussels and was something of a writer himself. His reviews appeared in several well-known Belgian papers, although not in the last fifteen years.

  The two gentlemen sat for some while, talking about books. Professor Lott, like Benjamin, was a fan of Simenon, but he had read Proust as well. It was a relief for Benjamin to find someone who shared his interest in literature and ideas. It was indeed quite exhausting to be around people who did not share his interests; he was forced to feign enthusiasm for things that truly bored him to death. Ever since leaving Paris, he had felt lonely for real conversation.

  “And what are you reading now, Professor Lott?” he asked, leaning toward him eagerly, his eyebrows lifted. “I can hardly remember when I last browsed in a bookstore.”

  * * *

  —

  Having bid good-night to Professor Lott, Benjamin climbed the stairs to bed, taking each step slowly. Because his knee kept locking, he was forced to rest on each landing. When he finally got to his room, a severe pain in his chest caught him unawares, hitting him like a sledgehammer behind the rib cage. He crumpled to the floor, fal
ling face-forward, and lay there for some time, unable to breathe, his nose digging into the filthy brown hemp of the rug. He tried to call out to Henny Gurland, whose room was only across the hall, but no sound emerged. At last, he managed to roll over onto his back.

  I am dying, he said to himself. This is the end, and I am not sad.

  Half an hour passed, the crunch in his chest eased, and soon he was able to sit up, then stand. His hands groped his body like a blind man feeling a page of poetry in Braille; he was really there, alive, himself. And he was not in pain. Despite his relief that the acute discomfort was over, he felt disappointed by this miraculous recovery. He had been ready, even eager, to die. The end had seemed to come, and he was not sad or afraid. He was even a little happy.

  He spent a long time getting into his nightgown, crawling into bed, sitting with his back against the oak headboard, and staring ahead, breathing methodically, listening to the fat tick of an old clock on the dresser. An eternity seemed to hang between each tick: the time before and after life, the brightness at either side of this dark passageway he had been nosing along for nearly half a century.

  The ceiling, disfigured by a gaping hole in the middle, intermittently rained plaster, dropping chalky bits on his pillow and into his face. In his head, he called it Spanish snow and laughed quietly to himself. He was still pleased that sadness or regret had not been part of the experience when he fell to the floor; death was benign, a kind of physical forgetfulness. It was not the end but the beginning. The body simply forgot its daily, rueful existence, and the soul fluttered away, found a new life elsewhere, a tangible kingdom beyond mourning and petty discomforts, beyond (as Nietzsche said) good and evil. He was all for it now, whatever it was that lay ahead: the fabled infinite, the pure abstract of heaven. He would hold hands there with his Beloved, with Asja Lacis, hold hands forever.

  It was clearly Asja, not Jula, who came to him as he looked up, her face a numinous sheen. Time had done its proper job of winnowing.

  Outside, thunder rolled across the bay, and a fine rain picked at the window of his room. The wind whipped off the sea, penetrating the walls of the Fonda Franca as if they were mere lattice. It was cold in the room, and Benjamin wished for a fire in the grate. When earlier in the evening he had asked for one, Madame Ruiz had lifted her eyebrows and left the room abruptly. One apparently did not ask for fires in decent Spanish hotels. To wish to be warm was déclassé.

  In the house on Nettlebeck Street, every room boasted a fire on a frosty winter evening, and in the morning a servant would steal into Benjamin’s bedroom just before dawn to light a fire. As the flame transfigured the high ceiling, he would wake slowly, letting the room gradually absorb and radiate the heat. On school days, when he had to get up before the room was properly warm, he would leap from bed to dress quickly, huddling so close to the flames that his shins would sting. But it was a good pain, the pain of abundance.

  The weight of memories pressed on his chest like thick marble, and he recalled a famous Brechtian maxim: Do not build on the good old days, but on the bad new ones.

  He found himself missing Brecht, his sly temperament and breathtaking egotism. That last day at his house in Denmark, two years ago, had been a perfect coda to their friendship: a hot summery day, with the sky hard and blue. Benjamin sat all afternoon in the garden under a weeping birch, reading Kapital, which he had abandoned several times before. A floppy white hat protected him from the sun.

  Brecht came to him with a cup of tea and said, “Ah, Marx! He is rather old hat, you know. Nobody reads him now, especially the Marxists.”

  “I prefer not to read books when they’re in fashion,” Benjamin said. “It’s somehow degrading.”

  Brecht spat into the grass. “You are quite right, Walter. When a book is popular, I like to hold it, perhaps smell the pages. But I never read it. Not till the author, or his reputation, dies.”

  The night before, Brecht had showed Benjamin a new poem called “The Farmer to His Oxen.” It was obliquely about Stalin, although Benjamin had found it hard to discern his friend’s attitude toward this vicious and megalomaniac leader. Brecht was clearly not in favor of the dictator, nor was he wholly against him; he seemed to hedge his bets.

  Benjamin, like his host, still retained a whimsical hope that something good might come of world socialism, but he could never forgive Stalin for his crimes of the past decade. Millions had been murdered or tortured and imprisoned. Reports of the recent show trials in Moscow, and the purge of the intelligentsia, had demoralized Benjamin and most Western socialists. Even worse, he had not heard a word from Asja, who was still living in Moscow. He feared the worst, though he could hardly bear to let his mind rest on the possibility that she was dead.

  The attitude toward literature that seemed to emanate from the Kremlin disturbed Benjamin and Brecht alike. As always, Brecht had a theory. “Literary writers make the Reds uncomfortable,” he said. “They hate to see genuine artistic production. It is unstable, unpredictable. You can’t tell where anything will come out—or how the people will react. And they themselves do not want to produce anything. God forbid! They must play the apparatchik.”

  Benjamin had shifted the conversation to the familiar ground of Goethe’s novels, although Brecht seemed at a loss midway through their discussion; when Benjamin pressed for a response, Brecht said, “I am sorry, Walter, but I have read only Elective Affinities.”

  Benjamin concealed his amazement. Brecht usually knew a little about everything, and he rarely admitted to gaps in his own knowledge. On the other hand, he adored finding these gaps in other people.

  “Elective Affinities is certainly a perfect novel,” Brecht continued, unable to resist a pronouncement. “This is surprising, given that Goethe wrote it when he was young.”

  “He was sixty,” Benjamin said with a slight note of superiority in his voice. “That was young for Goethe, perhaps, given that he lived into his mid-eighties. But it makes me feel rather like a babe in swaddling clothes.”

  Brecht sniffed. “You are teasing me, Walter. Good for you.” He folded his arms, raising his elbows like wings. “What I like about Goethe’s novel is that it shows no trace of Philistinism. The Germans, even at their best, are horrid Philistines.”

  “The novel was not well received, you know.”

  “I didn’t know this, but it hardly surprises me. In fact, I’m glad to hear it. The Germans are dreadful people. It isn’t true that you cannot draw conclusions about the Germans from Adolf Hitler. He is quite typical, I’m afraid. My teachers at the gymnasium in Augsburg were all like Hitler.”

  “But what about you, Bertolt? You are German!”

  Brecht arched his back, and the sunlight formed a white ring around his head. “Let me confess something, Walter. What is dreadful in my work is the German element. And don’t look surprised! There’s a great deal that is truly dreadful in everything I do. You know it’s true!”

  Benjamin insisted otherwise, but Brecht silenced him with a wave of the hand. “What makes the Germans intolerable is their narrow-minded self-sufficiency. Nothing like our free imperial cities ever existed anywhere else but on German soil. Lyons was never a free city; the independent cities of the Renaissance were city-states, but they were very different. They had a sense of community. The Germans do not understand that word.”

  Benjamin could hear Brecht’s voice so clearly now, as he lay in bed at the Fonda Franca; he scrambled for his notebook, which he’d left on the table beside the oil lamp. He wanted to record these conversations exactly as he remembered them. There was so much to record, to remember. “Art is simply memory organized,” Goethe had once said—and the line popped into Benjamin’s head as he began to scribble his recollections of the conversation with Brecht.

  The oil lamp wavered as Benjamin wrote, and the letters blurred. The nib of his pen seemed to stick on the page. The exertions and aggravat
ions of the day had ruined his nerves, and his hand was shaking. He could not write or read.

  He closed his eyes now, letting the past flood in like surf breaking the seawall, eating the land. It seemed that his ear had been pressed for decades to a conch, and he could hear the sea only in the pearl of distance; tonight it was strangely close. He could smell the water, and the salt stung his eyes. The marine breeze whistled in his face. The light on the water dazzled him. And a beatific figure seemed to float toward him on the water, skidding on the waves like Botticelli’s Venus: a divine yet thoroughly embodied presence.

  It was Asja again, his own Venus. His mind turned naturally toward her, and he smiled. She was really there, and he could see Brecht standing behind her, putting a hand on her shoulder; the juxtaposition made no sense until he recalled that she had once worked with him as assistant director, in Munich, on a performance of Edward II. The battle scene at the center of that play must hold the stage for nearly three-quarters of an hour—an impossible feat for most directors. During one rehearsal, Brecht had turned to Asja and asked: “What is wrong with these soldiers? What is their dilemma?” With care, she replied, “They are pale and afraid of dying.” Brecht thought for a moment. “Yes, and they are thoroughly exhausted,” he said. “We must make them look ghostly.” Each soldier’s face was, at his bidding, covered with a thick layer of chalk. As Asja later said to Benjamin, “The epic theater was suddenly born that day—Athena sprung fully grown from the head of Zeus.”

  A knock at the door brought him back to the present, and the ghosts of Brecht, of Asja Lacis, fled through the ceiling.

  “Just a moment, please,” he said, annoyed, lifting himself to his feet with difficulty. He put on his shirt and crossed the room slowly, sucking in deep breaths.