The Angel of History

by Bruno Arpaia

  Gisèle struggled to remain calm. She wanted to convince him, explain things the way they were but she also knew how hard-headed he could be once he made up his mind about something. Old Benjamin would do exactly as he pleased. Period. She sighed, almost ready to acknowledge defeat.

  ‘But don’t you see that for the French, anyone with a boche accent is an enemy now? Daladier knows that and he’s exploiting the situation. However, it is better to show up at the stadium than risk ending up in jail which frankly doesn’t seem like a heartening prospect.’

  Benjamin huffed and pinned his eyes to the point of his knife. He kept his gaze there obstinately until he saw the reflection of the waiter passing – and he called him over.

  ‘Excuse me. I changed my mind. Can I order a filet instead?’

  ‘Rare or well done?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  He hesitated again, embarrassed, and toyed with the unlit cigarette in his hands. Then he looked around the room as if someone else at another table or something on the wall might provide an answer.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he eventually muttered. ‘I’ve reconsidered. Pretend I said nothing. I’ll take the fish.’

  Gisèle shook her head. She didn’t know whether to laugh or get angry. Adrienne reached out her hand and rested it on Benjamin’s shoulder.

  ‘This is only a temporary thing,’ she said gently. ‘There will be a committee there to sort out the friendly Germans from the Nazis and it will only take a couple of days.’

  The fish wasn’t bad. But as he ate,Walter’s eyes kept drifting over the plates of steak, garnished with steaming potatoes.

  ‘I can’t believe this,’ he suddenly said. ‘I have to work. I have an important piece to finish and they want to shut me up. Here, no less, in the land of Voltaire and Montesquieu . . .’

  ‘Stop it. I’ve had enough philosophy,’ exploded Gisèle. ‘Do you read the papers or not? Think about what would happen if France were to fall into German hands. Now why are you staring at my plate? Do you want to trade? Go on, take it. It doesn’t matter to me. Better that than let you ruin my lunch.’

  ‘Thank you. Thank you very much,’ whispered Benjamin, switching their plates. He seemed shaken by her outburst, almost won over. ‘Please don’t get mad. I’m begging you. Just tell me what to do.’

  Now they both smiled.

  ‘Report to the stadium and then we’ll get some people involved and you will be out in a couple of days.’

  And Benjamin just nodded. As he ate the meat he allowed himself to mull over his thoughts.

  ‘I was right the first time,’ he eventually announced with some displeasure. ‘The fish was better. This steak doesn’t have any flavour, does it?’

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Thousands, tens of thousands, armed with blankets and enough provisions for a few days at the most. They were Jewish refugees, anti-Nazis in exile, tourists taken by surprise and veterans of the Spanish Civil War. There might have been among them some agent of Hitler’s who’d carelessly let himself be caught. They were wearing summer shoes and clothes and all were hoping that the Commission de criblage would review their papers quickly and send them home before nightfall. Instead, the day was consumed and darkness wrapped the stadium.

  Benjamin had packed a toothbrush, a nightgown, two baguettes and cheese in his black bag. In the inside pockets he’d also put his notebooks and Montaigne’s essays, and letters from Valéry and Romains sponsoring him for French citizenship as well as letters from Adrienne Monnier and Max Horkheimer lauding the high value of his work as well as his devotion to France. From the early morning of that first un-endurable day, Walter sat on the stairs of the stadium waiting to be able to present the letters to someone. He’d been there for hours, his briefcase on his lap, watching the September sky shine like an enamel blade beyond the barbed wire. He was thinking of his life raining down on him in slow motion like in a gloomy silent film. And slowly his mind had become grey and dense like an empty blackboard, like a sky without any trace of blue. When night fell he hardly noticed everyone else bustling about trying to gather a little straw to sleep on. There was even quite a bit of shoving as people tried to secure themselves a space under the covered part of the stadium. Walter just sat where he was, his back hunched over in his fraying suit, his eyes half-closed and his brow furrowed as if he were trying to see something in the distance. That’s how he was when Max Aron saw him.

  Max was about twenty years old and had a rebellious shock of blond hair falling over his forehead and a ferocious will to live. That first evening he was, like everyone else, concentrating on getting himself a little bit of dry straw and he worried about food and water. How long would they be in this stadium? But then a motionless old man caught his eye, a perfect rock in the middle of the crowd, solemn and dignified amidst the mayhem. He didn’t look a day under sixty. Max thought he must have misread the poster and reported by mistake. He went to sleep but then the next morning as he was trying to work out his kinks, he saw the old man again in exactly the same place as if he hadn’t moved all night long. Poor old man. Had he eaten anything or managed to sleep at all? Max jumped up, brushed his trousers off with his hands and asked. At which point old Benjamin stood and attempted a bow.

  ‘I welcome your concern, Mr Aron. Thank God I feel fine at the moment and don’t need anything. I thank you again.’

  He sat back down and then stood suddenly, mortified.

  ‘Pardon me. I neglected to introduce myself. I am Doctor Walter Benjamin of Berlin.’

  The sky was a filthy clamour and it didn’t seem obvious that the sun would ever come out. A heavy dampness rose from the field, the smell of hay, rotting grass and dirty, sticky people.

  ‘Would you allow me to ask just one question, Mr Aron?’

  Benjamin didn’t stand up this time but spoke with such gentility that Max almost thought it was affected.

  ‘You’ll forgive the, shall we say, intimate nature of the question,’ and he lowered his voice, ‘but where does one go to address his private needs?’

  The young man held back a smile and pointed toward a gathering of men on the side of the platform.

  ‘It’s over there, you see? Just some buckets, copper buckets. We’ll have to make do, adapt ourselves a bit.’

  ‘Thank you,’ replied Benjamin but he didn’t move a muscle.

  He was inscrutable from the outside. But he was a wreck inside. He cursed the world and all of its misfortunes – to have to piss there in front of everyone. If he forced himself he might even manage to do it, but to relieve himself – no, it was out of the question. And yet this wrenching in his gut was making him paler with every tug. He shut his eyes and dismissed outright the idea of sitting on a pail. He decided to stay right where he was. This all, la via cruces, couldn’t possibly last much longer. Hopefully they would call him soon. Perhaps they were going in alphabetical order and he would be among the first allowed to leave. He settled his case on his lap and waited. He waited until nine o’clock when the stadium speaker turned on and began playing a military march. Now, they would start calling people. The steady rumble of conversation ceased and thousands of people looked expectantly up at the platform. But that voice, the voice they’d been waiting for, came crackling and whistling through the speaker. The announcement was that from this point, they should all consider themselves prisoners. This was a measure that had been taken for their own protection and that they would be shortly transported elsewhere.

  Shortly lasted ten days. Which were spent walking around the racetrack, dozing on rancid straw, gossiping on the stairs and asking each other one or two thousand times why they were there, and when and how they might be released. They ate pâté three times a day, fishing with their fingers in the tins and then spreading it on bread with their fingers. The pâté got gummy in their hair and stuck to their faces and gradually worked its way into every available pore. There wasn’t much water, so cleaning was a challenge too – just a single pail for every fi
fteen people and one was grateful for that.

  Benjamin spent the day reading Montaigne and talking to Max about Kant and Baudelaire; or strolling, hands clasped behind his back, his eyes roving around the field, composing petitions in his mind in which he complained about this treatment. He assumed that he would be released as soon as possible. At least he had a friend in Max, who brought him pâté, fetched water for him, held a cover up in front of a pail when Benjamin finally resolved to take care of his private business, and freshening his pallet when he could with new straw.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Aron,’ he said each time, bowing.

  Then, fortunately, he also found Sahl. It was the afternoon of the fourth or fifth day and it seemed about to rain so people began crushing toward the shelter of the box seats. Max was pushing and elbowing a path and old Benjamin was following, his briefcase hugged to his chest.

  ‘Excuse me, excuse me,’ he repeated. ‘Do you mind leaving me a bit of space?’ No one listened, they just pushed and screamed. He turned sideways to slide through and a hand grabbed his shoulder and pulled. He was turning in surprise when he heard his name.

  ‘Benjamin! Is it really you?’

  He almost wept upon seeing a familiar face in that inferno. Sahl stared at him uncertainly, a faint smile hesitating on his face. Could this really be his friend Benjamin, this man with the bristling hair, long beard, hollow cheeks, a face that was all teeth and nose. And on top of that, one could never really be sure how to approach Benjamin. There was always the risk he would start acting peculiarly. He had a mania for mystery, for example. There are some situations of course that might send even the most stable person over the edge. But now Walter let himself be hugged and hard – he didn’t even shrink from Sahl’s filthy hair.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t say this,’ he whispered in his ear, ‘but I’m so very happy to see you.’

  He couldn’t tell if Sahl heard him because in that same moment a long rumble of thunder seemed to crack the black sky and the rain came right after falling in buckets. The downpour lasted an hour or two, beating on the copper roof, filling the field with mud and puddles, flooding the stands, carrying off every little bit of straw. The downpour became a mist, almost a fog, and then became a slow chilly rain, forcing everyone to stay amassed and crushed under the overhang, trying uselessly to nap through the storm. At dawn the western sky seemed to break and a little blue poked through. At eight o’clock on the dot, the guards, mostly elderly reservists, braved the throng in order to dispense the bread and pâté. Max wrangled enough for three and carried it over to his companions tucked safely under his jacket.

  ‘Thank you, Mr Aron,’ said Benjamin.

  ‘From now on,’ whispered Sahl seriously, ‘we have to make sure they don’t separate us.’

  There were all together the morning when a second announcement came over the speakers following the usual military march. This time it explained that they would be transferred throughout the day to volunteer labour camps all over France. There would be a roll call and then they should board the trucks parked out in the square.

  The stadium filled with whistles, screams and hollering. Voluntary labour camps? And they had the nerve to say it was for the refugees’ own protection.

  ‘French bastards,’ spat Max. ‘They’re treating us all like spies, like criminals.’

  Abrahamski, a hulking Pole who’d come with Max to the stadium, was in a blind rage. Like everyone else, he wanted to know what had become of the famous criblage. Weren’t they planning to pick out the Nazis from the refugees? Not a word more had ever been said about it.

  Benjamin shook his head and breathed heavily in the dense, humid air.

  ‘Keep calm, Mr Abrahamski,’ he slowly said. ‘It would only be a farce if there were a criblage.You know very well that even with the best intentions in the world it’s impossible to review the cases of thousands of people.’

  The truth was, Sahl would write many years later, that France hadn’t been prepared for that war. The decision to intern the refugees was made at the last minute. To make matters worse, the French military was incapable of ‘identifying any kind of German opposition. For the readers of Action Française there was no difference between the Germans who opposed Hitler and the ones who supported him.You needed to fight back together.’ Koestler was even harsher. ‘During the first months of war,’ he wrote in his novel, ‘it became a deliberate policy of the Minister of Information to feed the public terrifying tales of crimes committed by foreigners (this was long before the psychosis about secret agents even started). He depicted a situation in which the government was locked in a heroic duel against the dragon named sale métèque. One needed to remember that almost three-and-a-half million foreigners were living in France, which was almost ten per cent of the total population. The foreigners were an even better fall guy than the half-million Jews in Germany. French xenophobia wasn’t anything but a local variant of Ersatz, of German anti-Semitism.’

  So that mid-September morning, the tens of thousands of men interned in Colombes stadium had no choice but to wait. Name after name after name hissed out of the speaker. The sky was destroyed and the field overturned from the storm. Benjamin and his friends’ names were called well after noon and, filing between two rows of soldiers, they boarded a black, flat-bed truck. If someone didn’t move fast enough, hampered by luggage or blankets, they got a powerful whack on the back from the flics – the police.

  There were ten rows of benches to each truck, one foot soldier with a raised bayonet positioned at the front and back and each corner. The trucks caravanned through the almost deserted quais, down the Louvre and the Tuileries. At the Gare d’Austerliz there was a long freight train parked on tracks waiting for the prisoners. They were divided into groups of fifty and loaded into the trains. It was so dark inside the wagon cars that they couldn’t see each other’s faces, couldn’t tell who was a friend. Walter tried. He peered between the slats, trying to figure out where they were being brought, but the train sped through the stations too quickly to read the names of any of the towns. They travelled for hours. They were sweating, parched, and their legs ached from standing, until at last they arrived at the Nevers station – the whistle blaring loudly enough to cover up the hollering and cursing.

  Walter recognised the name. It was a little city in the Loire. He may even have visited once over the winter with Gisèle. The air was bright and cool out in the open and the sun was setting behind a row of poplar trees growing along a little canal. About ten men and women standing by the stationmaster’s hut stared grimly at them as they tumbled out of the train. Benjamin thought they would have lynched them if they could and the thought got stuck in his throat. He took off his tie, shut his eyes and focused on breathing. When he opened his eyes again the train had left and there was a queue in the square of three or four hundred prisoners. Max took his arm and told him not to worry.

  ‘Just be strong for a little longer,’ said Sahl comfortingly. ‘We’re almost there.’

  Hell if they were. The guards forced them all into a long single file, poking some of the resistant prisoners with their bayonets.

  ‘Forward march!’ cried a captain finally.

  ‘Give me your bag. I’ll carry it.’

  ‘I thank you heartily, Mr Aron,’ said Benjamin.

  They started out down the road toward Paris, a single stretch of asphalt cutting through the green countryside, the vineyards, the deserted villages where the shutters were all drawn – a long black ribbon winding toward the saddest sunset.After two hours of walking in total darkness they found themselves at the castle of Vernuche, a low, wide building with a steep tiled roof, one square tower on either side.

  Benjamin had difficulty on the walk. He often gasped for breath and tried to stop and rest but the guards tormented him. Twice he was on the verge of fainting, but Max pulled him upright and made him drink. Old Benjamin stayed the course. They were like a prophet and his guide, an old wise man escorted by a young disciple up
to the temple. And then almost at the top of the hill, the prophet starts feeling a quivering and his legs go so weak they collapse under him, and he tumbles into the dark.

  ‘My heart,’ he whispered.

  After that, Max, Abrahamski and Sahl carried him to the castle.

  ‘I’m fine now, thank you,’ he said with a bow. He climbed up the stairs, followed the dark and empty corridors to the dark and empty rooms where they would stay. There was no light, no beds, no seats, tables, or even hooks to hang something. Max spread the blanket on the ground and Benjamin fell instantly asleep and didn’t move again except to occasionally toss in a dream.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  He dragged himself from sleep as if from a viscous desert, a desolate inferno of thoughts. The wobbling light coming in through the window outlined the shadowy figures in the room, it was a tableau of unreal perspectives, and Benjamin, eyelids still heavy, suddenly recognised the tenuousness of his future.

  ‘Already? What time is it,’ he asked, tapping at a painful rib between the buttons of his shirt.

  Sergeant Guizot woke them at six o’clock on the nose, screaming like the devil and poking each one with his bayonet. Within half an hour they were gathering in the courtyard standing in front of an empty booth. An icy hint of storm swept the clouds in the sky, promising certain betrayal. Squeezed between Sahl, Max and Abrahamski,Walter stared at the gravel on the ground. He was worried. Occasionally he turned around to look incredulously at the castle of Vernuche, with its ivy-covered walls and slate roof, the tiles uneven in the light. His companions were stamping their feet to keep warm. When he turned around again, he saw Hans Fittko a few rows behind them. He was standing straight as a rail, defying the wind and the French with a stony face. Even his hair, carefully combed and pomaded, stood out in the midst of all the messy heads. Benjamin nodded at him and smiled. Then he lowered his eyes, turned back around and snuggled, trembling, into his coat.