by Jay Parini
As I explained this to Dr. Benjamin, the color drained from the man’s cheeks, which turned livid, ghostly. He staggered backward.
“Rubio will spend the night. He will escort this man to the station in the morning.”
In effect, Dr. Benjamin was under house arrest: a point he obviously understood.
“The border police are responsible people,” I said. “You needn’t be afraid of them.”
“They are murderers,” Dr. Benjamin said.
The sergeant offered only a rueful laugh. What else could he do? “Where are the others?” he asked.
“Frau Gurland and her son are across the hall. I will take you there.”
Consuelo rubbed his hands together, as if anguished.
“Good night, Dr. Benjamin,” I said.
Dr. Benjamin bowed again. He was remarkably composed now, even dignified. But you could see that, from his viewpoint, his long journey had come to an abrupt and unsatisfactory halt. We left him standing there in the middle of the room, wizened and small, one of the loneliest men I have ever seen.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Death is what sanctions everything the storyteller can tell. Indeed, he borrows his authority from death.
16
José craned his neck, looking around the room. “What’s wrong, Mother?”
“Nothing, darling. Go back to sleep.”
“I heard voices.”
“It was nothing. Just the storm, some shutters banging.”
The police had left an hour ago, and though there would be no sleep for her, she hoped José might rest. The poor boy was exhausted. He had managed well thus far, but she knew he had reached his limit.
His father would have been proud of him, she thought. Arkady Gurland had been famously durable: indifferent to fatigue, unworried about his next meal. “I’ll sleep when there is nothing to do, and eat when there is food,” he would say.
Thunder shook the room, and lightning transformed the shutters into a grid of light whenever it struck. The rain swept along the walls and roof, alternately gaining and losing force.
“Arkady,” Henny Gurland whispered to herself, summoning his brave spirit. All she had now was José, in whom she could find remote echoes of Arkady: in the way he tilted his head before answering a question, in smirks and stifled laughs. He had his father’s way of throwing his head back in the wind, and sleeping with his knees pulled up to his chin.
A knock came at the door. “Frau Gurland, please! Open the door!” The voice sounding through the oak panel was disembodied but familiar.
At first her muscles simply refused the summons of her brain. She had finally allowed herself to relax and had begun to sink into the deep, desperate trance that precedes real sleep.
“Frau Gurland, I beg of you!”
José rose in his nightdress, long-legged, shivering. He opened the door only a crack at first, as his mother instructed.
“Who is there?” Henny Gurland whispered.
“It’s Dr. Benjamin.”
“Let him in!”
Benjamin lurched forward, then leaned against the doorjamb, his eyes like dark scoops in his skull, his hair frenzied. The omnipresent briefcase drooped from one hand, and he was breathing coarsely. His face twitched.
“My dear God, Walter, my dear,” she said. “Whatever has happened to you?”
Benjamin moved toward her, unbalanced, as if walking on stilts. “You will forgive, please. This intrusion…” His voice could only just be heard.
“What is wrong, Dr. Benjamin?” she asked, frightened by the sight of him.
“I—I,” he stuttered, toppling forward to his knees, supporting himself by gripping the bedpost.
José helped him, with difficulty, into a wing chair by the bed, and his mother eased his feet onto the mattress and removed his shoes.
“We’ll call a doctor at once!” she said, mopping a glaze of sweat from his forehead.
“No doctor,” he whispered. “There is no point.”
“We must do something!”
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s too late. I took some pills, you see….” He began to swoon, then caught himself.
“What are you talking about? What pills?” She battered him with questions, wishing she could take him by the collar. “Tell me what you have done to yourself, Dr. Benjamin!”
He motioned for her to come close, but she seemed not to understand. Her panic created an impasse that neither could surmount.
“Please, try to listen to him, Mother,” José said. “He wants to tell us something.”
The words fell from his lips with a muffled thud, unintelligible, spinning across the floor like coins and disappearing through the grates of silence.
Frau Gurland propped him up in the chair, then slapped him on either cheek. “You must talk to us, Walter! What have you done to yourself?”
Benjamin’s head slumped to one side.
José gasped. “He’s dead!”
“He’s not dead,” his mother said, “but he is dying.”
“Frau Gurland,” Benjamin cried, suddenly waking. “I…I—” The two of them bent close to listen, surprised by the clarity and volume of his speech. But he could not continue; the words stuck in his throat before reaching his lips.
José rubbed his eyes now. He could not believe this was happening. Henny Gurland put a comforting hand on his shoulder as he knelt close to the dying man.
“He’s trying to talk,” José said.
Benjamin began to mutter, his words just audible. “My heart, you see…And my leg. How could I walk? You must get to the train…by six. The guard won’t stop you.” He looked toward the door. “You must go…both of you, quickly.”
“We’re not going anywhere without you,” Henny Gurland said.
He lurched forward, his eyes wide. “I will be dead in a short while. You must save yourselves.” This talking seemed to revive him. “My book,” he continued, “you must send it to Adorno…in New York.” He gestured lamely toward the briefcase. “Everything is in those pages….Teddy will be surprised, you see, he…”
The Gurlands bent forward to hear the end of the sentence, but he merely closed his eyes; his head tipped back against the top of the chair.
Frau Gurland glanced at the clock and saw that it was nearly four in the morning. “Pack up your things,” she said to José. “We must leave quickly.”
“Not without him,” said her son.
“I’m afraid so,” she said, already putting things into her own rucksack.
An unfamiliar voice startled them. “Is something wrong?”
It was Professor Lott. He stood in the doorway in his nightdress, and his white hair formed a thick cap. He held a candle in his hands, which shook.
“Please, come in, professeur.” She motioned for him to shut the door. “Dr. Benjamin has taken some pills,” she said.
Lott understood at once. “I will stay with him,” he said. “But you and the boy must go.”
Frau Gurland was glad for this confirmation and cast a pleading look at José, who could see for himself now that Walter Benjamin was beyond assistance.
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“Quite sure. You must catch the first train. Before the guard awakens.”
Benjamin opened his eyes again, but he could not speak or raise his head.
“God bless you, Walter,” Frau Gurland said, bending close to whisper into his ear.
“No,” said José. “This isn’t right.”
“Please, darling,” his mother said, trying to pull him away.
“I want to stay with him. We’ve got to help him!”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “He would not want us to stay.”
The boy began to sob, standing there, too tall to cry, too old, but sobbing lik
e a child. His mother put her cheek against his chest, and he put his hands on her shoulders.
Professor Lott finally intervened. “You must go quickly,” he said, “while you can. I will take care of Dr. Benjamin; you needn’t worry.”
* * *
—
“You are kind, sir,” said Benjamin, trying to sit up. A quickness in Professor Lott’s eyes reminded him of Scholem, and this was comforting. It was a sign of intelligence and self-confidence.
“Lie still,” said Lott, firmly. He held Benjamin’s hand tightly, as a mother might do for a sick and frightened child.
“I should not have done this, do you think?”
Lott hesitated. The empty bottle of morphine lay on the floor of Benjamin’s room, and it amazed him that the man could speak at all.
“I couldn’t go on, you know. My heart…” But it was not just his heart. It was the world itself. He could no longer attach himself willingly to its bleak trajectory.
As a young man, he put his faith in good sense and in deep learning. He and Scholem, in their imaginary University of Muri, had gobbled up every morsel of information about the world that they could find, consuming knowledge like air and water. One could feed happily, indefinitely, on Plato and Kant, Frege, Goethe, Heine. Kafka would sit on one’s shoulder like a sooty crow, providing the appropriately grim music, with the dark laughter of Karl Krause sounding in the woods.
Benjamin had loved so many books: not just the texts, but the physical objects that contained them. Beloved editions had traveled with him from house to house, country to country, but they had all disappeared in the sad shuffle of works and days, and now the only eternity Benjamin could envisage was the eternity of the text, a world in which one never stopped reading, the last word becoming the first word, ad infinitum. The final labyrinth.
“Reality as text, as marginalia,” Benjamin muttered to himself. He felt perfectly awake now, even though he could not speak clearly to Professor Lott; indeed, he could hardly speak at all. Floating, as it were, in darkness, he could visualize heaven as a vast canopy, a planetarium. The luminous bodies that filled his life shone above him: Dora and Stefan, bobbing on the horizon like Mars and Venus, inescapable and distinct. And there was Asja, herself a sun, with votary planets circling. And Jula, Beatrice, and others—those match tips who inflamed his heart. And Scholem, so dear and complex, so fatally selfish, but loving, too. And Brecht, equally selfish, equally loving. Everyone convinced that his or her path was the only way.
So many faces to acknowledge, thought Benjamin as the sky snowed stars.
“Can you hear me, Walter?”
“Yes,” he said, distinctly.
“How do you feel?”
“Like a dying man.” A fractured smile crossed his lips. “Otherwise, not so bad.”
“Do you believe in God, Walter?”
“No,” Benjamin said, closing his eyes. “I’ve been trying to explain this to Him for many years, you see. He doesn’t listen to me.”
Professor Lott bent forward, “What did you say?”
Benjamin lifted his eyelids wearily. “Gerhard, I knew it….”
“Gerhard?”
“You found me, I see….”
Professor Lott wondered who Gerhard might be. “You are not afraid, Walter?”
“Afraid?”
Benjamin seemed to chuckle to himself. “Jerusalem,” he said. “Yes, I will come, if you insist.”
Benjamin could hear himself talking but felt curiously detached from the words. The sound of his voice was like someone talking in the next room, heard through a thin wall; he could almost understand what was being said, but not quite.
“Is there anyone I should contact, Walter?”
Benjamin stared at the gentle professor, who spoke slowly and loudly, as one might to a toddler just entering language. He contorted his lips as he spoke to emphasize certain words.
“Tell Dora…my wife,” Benjamin said. The words came hard, each one thrust between his teeth like a swollen tongue.
Lott nodded eagerly, pleased to have understood something. “I will write to her, I assure you.” He seemed to come alive in this crisis, looking monkish in his nightgown, with his hair like a skullcap.
“I have not been a good man, Gerhard,” Benjamin said. “Your work, I see, is important. The Kabbalah…”
The professor wiped the dribble from Benjamin’s chin.
“I have completed so little.” The hot tears of contrition lay in pools on his cheeks. His stomach was queasy, his eyelids heavy. A kind of bile seemed to rise in his throat, burning and sour. The face of Gershom Scholem bobbed above him, and he tried to reach it, to touch the bright cheeks and kind eyes.
“You are in good hands, Walter,” Professor Lott said.
Benjamin stared up like a sick animal. The bad new days were no good at all. He wanted the old ones back, and the city of his childhood, where trolley cars slurred by on glistening tracks, their bells clanging, and horses galloped over wet cobbles. He wanted a city where smoke rose comfortingly from a thousand chimneys along each street. He wanted to walk those streets again, tracing their familiar but endlessly rediscoverable patterns. He wanted a world in which there was so much time, and so little to do with it.
Scenes flickered before his eyes: the morning when he had stumbled on a slaughterhouse near the river. A boy of nine or ten, he had stood aghast, watching a stout man in a blood-spattered apron hack away at hens, roosters, geese, ducks. The feathers flew in the midst of terrible quacking, screaming, gabbling; the boy’s mouth filled with a bitter froth. It was his first taste of death. And that taste filled his mouth again, green and metallic.
He spat to one side. “The Jews!” he shouted. “Why the Jews?”
Professor Lott urged him to rest.
“The Jews,” he mumbled. “You were right, Gerhard.”
He could see them in Hitler’s camps now, their slumping shoulders, rank-and-file; his brother, Georg, was among them, thin and wan, and his cousins Fritz and Artur, and the little girl, Elise, whom he had taken to the park in Munich, and Gustav Hugenberg, Johanna Hochman, Felix Kiepenheuer, Hermann Jessner. Names on a list, and he did not doubt that most of them were dead. Hacked and shredded. Blood on the sawdust floor. No shrieking or gabbling but the mute glare of the damned-without-reason. He had not believed all the stories at first, but he believed them now.
He thought about the difference, or lack thereof, between Jews and Gentiles. Scholem had passionately maintained a belief in difference. Gentiles, he argued, are the opposite of Jews. Their God is, after all, a human being, terrestrial man—an incarnation. The God of the Jews is beyond mortality, not inhuman but definitely nonhuman. Totaliter aliter—Wholly Other. Neither man nor woman, but utterly sexless and beyond reproduction. Because, for Christians, God can be man, therefore, men can be as gods; they can do superhuman things. Thus greatness of any kind appeals to them; tyrants and destroyers are revered as well as heroic painters, poets, and musicians. Rulers of magnitude are celebrated, and magnificent rebels, too. Saints are coveted, even whores if they are extraordinary in their lust. Thrift is admired, but so is vast prodigality: A man who would give away everything is put on a pedestal. The Jews do not worship greatness, nor revere leaders, even their own. They complained about Moses; they killed Zacharias; Jeremiah was left by the side of the road to die. Even Samuel was spurned.
Professor Lott was talking, softly. He seemed to be weeping. “I had a wife, Elena. She stayed in Berlin when I moved to Belgium. We had been fighting, you see. It was silly of her. Of me, too.” He told Benjamin everything he could remember about Elena, and explained that he could not be sure if she was alive or dead now. His letters urging her to move to Belgium had not been answered. And now, he suspected, she might well be gone.
Benjamin either waved or thought he waved his hand. He caught a s
entence or two, and felt sorry for this man. Was it Scholem? Had Scholem’s wife stayed in Germany? It seemed impossible.
“We must go to Jerusalem, all of us,” Benjamin whispered.
Professor Lott seemed to understand. “Jerusalem!” he said.
Benjamin nodded, or tried to, recalling a text from the Kabbalah that Scholem had sent from Jerusalem only a few months ago:
When you attend the voice of God in all things, you become fully human. Usually the mind hides the Divine by forcing you to believe there is a separate power that causes all mental images, and voices, to arise; but this is false thinking. By listening to the voice of God in everything, you comprehend the Eternal. It becomes your mind, flows through your mind. Revelation is yours.
He was listening, alert as a dog on the night of a full moon. In being fully human, he discovered the Divine.
How thin the membrane separating the living from the dead, he thought, mouthing the words. Pressed close to this membrane, he could almost see through its translucent barrier, could almost visualize the pale shapes and shadows on the other side; they would soon have faces, features, concrete particulars.
Professor Lott closed his eyes, recalling a night many years ago in Berlin when his father, a silk merchant, died at home with his four children around him; they waited through a long, wintry night for the end. When it came, everyone stood and kissed one another, and a peculiar happiness settled over the room. They knew their own lives had been sharpened forever, given a contour, a keen edge, palpability.
Benjamin tried to say his friend’s name, Scholem. Such a beautiful name, he thought. He had certainly been lucky in his friends. The fact that so many benevolent creatures appeared at one’s elbow in a moment of struggle was a sign of repair. Tikkun olam.