The Angel of History

by Bruno Arpaia

  ‘The agony,’ he said sadly, ‘is that there are still two thousand people there. Good people. I met an Italian name Leo who’d already spent nine years in a Fascist jail. And a Hungarian poet who’d already served three years of hard labour at Seghedino. Then two Spanish soldiers – this was their reward after all those years of fighting Franco. I’m only here because my English friends moved heaven and earth to get me out.What hope do the rest of them have?’

  They’d arrived across the street from Madame Suchet’s shop, but neither of them moved. They both looked at the ground, lost in thought, hunched into their collars. Then Benjamin took Koestler’s arm and pulled him gently through the middle of a convoy of trucks filled with soldiers, and around the puddles on the pavement. Madame Suchet was alone, perched among her cheeses.

  ‘We’d like some Borgogna,’ said Koestler, ‘and a nice piece of Camembert. Make sure it’s perfectly ripe, stinky but not over done.’

  ‘Cher monsieur, I can only give you 350 grams but I will have to charge you ten times the official price. What can I do? If you report me, I know, I’ll go to jail, but if I were to stick to the government rates I’d have to close the shop right now. Blame it on the damn war.’

  ‘Fine, we’ll take 350 grams. What news does your husband send from the front?’

  ‘Sorry to be crude, but his backside is full of haemorrhoids because of the disgusting food they make him eat. He asks me to buy him medicine. They don’t even provide that in the army. Then the newspapers tell stories about how wonderful life is at the front. The truth is that France should mind her own business. What do we care really about Poland?’

  Koestler was about to answer, but he felt Benjamin pulling on his sleeve.

  ‘Please leave it be. Pay and let’s go,’ he whispered between his teeth. He spoke in German and faced the lady with a little smile pasted onto his mouth.

  ‘French brains are full of shit,’ Koestler said when they left. ‘You know the worst torture. The worst nightmare? The minute they release me, I run to the police station to renew my papers. They send me here and there, five or six offices and then I get to a clerk who is stamping my papers and he realises that I am Hungarian and that I have just come from Vernet. “In that case, I can’t stamp these,” he says.

  ‘“What does that mean?” I say. It means there’s nothing to do about it. If he knew that I am a well-known journalist and a citizen of a neutral state . . . but no. It’s Eloignement for me. You know what that is? Expulsion. But there’s a war and it’s hard to expel someone so they’ve invented this régime de sursis, which consists in refusing to renew visas and then conceding only short extensions – the sursis. They gave me twenty-four hours, and now five days. I don’t know how much longer this can go on. Every time, I have to stand for hours at the police station. French bastards.’

  ‘What’s important is that you’re free now,’ said Benjamin in an effort to console him, ‘and can you slow down? I fear I’m out of breath.’

  ‘It already feels like we’re walking in a funeral procession.’

  The road was quieter now, as if petrified by the evening. The shutters on the houses were already drawn as they rounded the corner back onto rue Dombasle. They walked side by side, lost under the blackening sky. They looked just like two friends – two friends experiencing the same inexplicable defeat.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  They were his footsteps echoing through the atrium and carrying breathlessly up the stairs. He ran along the corridor, past the rooms filled with index cards and came to a hesitant stop at the door to the reading room. Benjamin heard every one of his footsteps, listened to them float through the silence. It was the first time he’d set foot in the library in four months. He’d imagined it as a homecoming but instead he felt like a stranger as he walked among the tables, under the vaulted ceilings. There were hardly any readers there, the clerks were all hidden in their offices and there was an icy silence. Discouraged, he leaned on the desk, holding his new library card in hand. He read it and reread it as he waited for someone to appear to fetch his books: ‘Numéro 3454,Benjamin Walter, Titres:Docteur en philosophie,critique littéraire. Adresse: 8, rue Dombasle.’ They’d even got his address wrong.

  That’s when he heard the applause and saw the clerks emerging in a line from the stacks at the other end of the room. Georges Bataille came over to him with a smile.

  ‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘Welcome home.’

  Louvet from the photostat room opened two bottles of wine he’d taken from his father’s cellar. Madame Grenelle from the loan desk had baked pastries.

  ‘Now you are safe back with us,’ said Bataille comfortingly and sentimentally. In a daze Benjamin ate pastries, shook hands and tried to find the words to thank everyone, although deep down he just felt that old weariness, that sense of resignation – like a person who only glances or smiles shyly at the world. Then Bataille took him by the arm and led him to his desk.

  ‘Work well,’ he told him with a hug.

  From then on, that desk became the Maginot line of Benjamin, that room with its columns and tiles; it was from here that he pushed back the assaults of the world. ‘Leave while there’s still time,’ his friends said. Scholem wrote from Jerusalem. Adorno, Horkheimer, even Brecht told him to leave: ‘Go to Portugal, Cuba, the United States, get to Marseille and take the first boat out.’

  ‘What about a visa and money?’ he answered. And so he stayed. He came in to work in the early afternoon, turned on the art nouveau table lamp and lost himself in his reading as the light painted his face with amber reflections. For many days he was undecided whether to keep working on Baudelaire or to start a new essay on Rousseau and Gide for the Institute. ‘My hesitation,’ he wrote to Gretel Adorno, ‘is the fear of having to abandon the Baudelaire once I will have begun writing the sequel. The sequel will be a work of monumental breadth and it would be a delicate matter to have to start and stop again and again. This is, however, the risk I would have to take. I am constantly reminded of it by the gas mask in my small room – the mask looks to me like a disconcerting replica of the skulls with which studious monks decorated their cells.’

  Never before would he have liked more to put the Gracián motto into practice: ‘Seek to enlist time on your side in all things.’ He’d copied it out into a notebook over twenty years earlier. But time pressed on him heavy and consumed his thoughts. ‘Every line that I might publish,’ he wrote to Scholem, ‘is a victory seized from the powers of darkness, for how uncertain is the future we’ve been promised.’ And so he doubled his efforts, pretending that his time unfurled endlessly and would be made up of mornings spent reading in bed and long afternoons at the library. He had to pretend because he knew that time was caught up in other circles and isn’t always as steady and empty as it seems – that it doesn’t only move forward infinitely. But Benjamin was not good at pretending. By virtue of thinking about it so much, instead of writing about Gide or Baudelaire, he ended up writing about time and history.

  ‘War,’ he wrote to Gretel Adorno, ‘and everything it brings with it, has convinced me to put down in writing several ideas that I can safely say I’ve been holding inside of me for at least twenty years, keeping them all for myself.’ Now that someone seemed to have signed a death warrant on his world, these ideas welled up and took form. He wrote in a fever, as often happened to him, starting with a triviality, an image, a crumb that would be transformed into dense phrases and revelations, perfect sequences of words. He wrote these eighteen ideas on the back of his notebook, filling the margins with his minuscule cramped calligraphy, transported by the urgency of each reconsideration and refinement. He wrote as if he were finally putting Marxism and Messianism together, bound in a final terrible defence against obtuse faith in progress, against the senselessness of history. He wrote with gleeful irony, crossing boundaries between theology, philosophy and literature, as if in these dark times every mode should be called upon to participate in salvation.

  Al
l February and March he spent in the library, rubbing history the wrong way. Then in the evening he’d dictate his notes to his sister. Every now and then, Dora would lift her eyes from the typewriter and stare out the window at the closed shutter and sigh with hunger and tiredness. Then she’d look at him.

  ‘That’s enough for now, Walter. My eyes hurt.’

  ‘Just a little more,’ he pleaded and he’d start reading again.

  ‘There is a painting by Klee named Angelus Novus,’ he said one evening, dictating what would become one of his most famous passages, ‘it shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.’

  ‘You said killing?’

  ‘I said piling, Dora, piling. One single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’

  ‘I’m not sure I entirely understand that, Walter.’

  ‘I’ll explain later, Dora. Let’s eat something now.’

  ‘Bread and salad without dressing. I’m out of oil and I haven’t been able to find any for two days.’

  Dora disappeared into the kitchen. Walter sank into the armchair and closed his eyes to ruminate. The future. Hope? Outside the rain fell silently on the dark streets.

  ‘It’s ready. Come eat.’

  ‘Wait, Dora. Write this down before I forget.’

  ‘Can’t it wait? I’m hungry.’

  ‘Just a minute more. Type. It’s noted that Jews are prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and prayer rituals teach memory. This liberates Jews from any fascination with the future, and keeps them from becoming succubae to fortune-tellers. But that doesn’t mean that the future becomes a homogenous, empty state. Because every second of time offers a little door through which the Messiah could come. Now I’m done.’

  ‘The sound of Walter’s voice when he dictated to me is still in my ears,’ Dora would tell Scholem several years later. It was a collected, melodious voice, surefooted, presenting one argument after another without ever tiring. It was the voice of a prophet, serene and bursting with a sureness that could never be shaken. It was the voice of a man who looked at defeat and saw only the verification of his prophecy. Who would undertake the reordering of the world’s catastrophic burden ‘in a whale’. Tikkum olam, say the scriptures.

  These themes weren’t born for publication, at least that’s what Benjamin claimed. But deep down he wanted all of his friends to read them and to discuss them with the lucidity of someone who from a hilltop understands the battlefield better than those who are fighting. In early May, he wrote about the themes to his friend Stephan Lackner in the States. ‘I’ve finished a little essay on the concept of history. It’s not inspired by this new war but rather by the whole experience of my generation, among those perhaps most severely crippled by history. You might ask if history wasn’t forged through the cunning synthesis of two Nietszchean concepts: the good European and the last man. What comes out of that is the last European man. All of us are struggling not to be the last European man.’

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  You know what Mariano said? We were taking a shower after crushing the fourth company three to zero. I’d even made a goal off my head in the second half after Alfonso gave me the perfect pass from the right.

  ‘It won’t last,’ he said, drying himself off. ‘This carefree feeling won’t last.’

  Mariano always knew everything. And in fact as the weather got better we started to hear the Germans from the opposite shore. By early April they were hammering us, and every day the Junkers flew overhead. We used to call them los Ramones when we were in Spain. We heard them before the French did because we’d learned their engines. It brought the mood down. It wasn’t that I was scared; it was just that the more they bombed the more I thought of Barcelona and Mercedes. It was like torture, a stabbing pain, an old scar that suddenly started hurting. I knew that in order to stay alive in the middle of the trenches and cannon fire I had to not think of it. I had to pretend that I’d never met her but instead I slept at night with my teeth clenched and my jaw tense going over and over my memories. During the day I cursed myself for not even having a photo of her. I was scared I’d forget the curves of her body, the green lights in her eyes. I was so worried that I’d have nothing left of Mercedes in the end, just some powdery dust, nothing else, not a damn. I talked about her to Alfonso one evening.We were out in the dark walking in the courtyard. There wasn’t much time left before curfew and we were the only ones out.

  ‘I wonder how Mercedes is,’ I said in a whisper, as if only for my ears.

  But he’d heard. He lit a butt in the cup of his hand and looked up at the thick blanket of stars in the black sky.

  ‘Have you heard anything of Ana María?’

  I’d almost forgotten he’d left someone behind too, and that the both of us were dragging around our bundles of sadness.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I haven’t heard a thing.’

  Then Alfonso took a picture from his wallet, lighting with the flickering match. It was a photo of him and Ana María standing in a café in the port of Barcelona. In the background, almost hidden behind a wall, was Mercedes, smiling – at me, I was sure. It was as if that smile could fly through time and space and conquer the years; it could leap across the Pyrenees and the Vosque mountains to find me here at the ends of the earth in the trenches of a war that didn’t really belong to me. But instead of minding my own business and thinking about how much I missed that smile, I started lecturing Alfonso.

  ‘You have to forget about her,’ I said seriously. ‘You need to forget that she exists. A man in war who can’t shed useless memories is a dead man walking.’ I don’t have the slightest idea why I said that. It would have been better if I’d shut up or lectured myself with those stupid words. Alfonso looked at me, astonished. Laughing might have been too much, he must have thought. So he just smiled.

  ‘So, should I write it down?’ he asked. After a moment he added, ‘You know there’s a saying in Italy, have your picture painted by someone who doesn’t know you.’

  I didn’t say anything. Soon we were worrying about the war and had entirely different things to think about. Two days later we were all sent to work on the Maginot line at Sarreguemines, a few metres from the German trenches. That’s when the bullets were really whistling by our ears. Each day was worse than the one before. And that’s how we ended up once again unloading cases of bullets in Forbach and then in Longwy on the border of France, Luxembourg and Belgium. We had covered over 200 kilometres by foot. We marched by day and stopped before dark fell to work. The good part about this phase, we thought, was that for the first time in six months we would be seeing civilians – men and mostly women. Up to now we’d been so cut off, because all the villages along the Maginot line had been evacuated months before. But when we got to Sarre-Union we found that people hid from us as soon as they saw us. Even the shopkeepers – if they were willing to sell us something – kept their heads down and were gruff. The infamy of the Red Spaniards preceded us. No one talked to us at all.What could we expect of the women. They turned and ran or spied on us through the shutters as if we were strange animals. The beauty of it was that by that point humiliation was our daily bread and we laughed it off, joked about it like children. Sepúlveda was happier than the rest of us. He sneered and teased us. But he had something on his mind. He broke away from the group and hea
ded down an alley, and I knew. He’d seen the church spires from a distance. He returned a few minutes later, a victory fist in the air and a smile on his face.

  ‘Mission accomplished. Long live Bakunin,’ he said.

  But there was no peace on our road. In just a few days they moved us several times through the whole sector. In Sarrelouis they had us flattening a road between two forts and later they sent us to Thionville to unload trains, dig ditches, build a dam in order to flood the camps, to blow up bridges. And then one fine day, Mr Hitler decided that the time had come to invade.

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  The invasion started on Friday, May 10. Guderian armoured cars moved down the Maginot Line, navigating the hair-raising hills and valleys of the Ardennes Forest. Sedan was evacuated on the fourteenth. Stuka dive-bombers hit Rotterdam. On the fifteenth the queen of Holland and her government flew to London. The Germans crossed the Meuse at Sedan. No war had ever moved so fast. The French army was taken by surprise and retreated in spurts. But the enemies advanced even more quickly, mounting new attacks in less time than it would have taken to figure out new positions. ‘This battlefield,’ wrote Marc Bloch at the time, ‘saw the meeting of two adversaries from two apparently different epochs of human civilisation.’ It was lances against rifles as in the colonial days; but this time, it was the French army on the side of the savages.

  All they knew in Paris was that everything was going fine – at least until Tuesday. The newspapers and radios reported several German victories around Maastricht and Allied advances through the Ardennes. The brutal wake-up call for the French came that day in Sedan – it didn’t open their eyes but rather plunged them into the midst of a confused, horrifying nightmare. Benjamin lived through it by fishing in the arid streams of his ‘profound calm’, scrupulously repeating the ritual part of every day, clinging to any kind of order in the middle of disaster. He always put his right foot first when he stepped out his door. He used the same route, over the same pavements; he placed his pen on the desk with the point always facing precisely to the right. Before going to sleep, he never neglected to put his glasses on the book that he had just closed and set on the night-stand. But he knew that the tanks could destroy even these rituals. He knew it with certainty when he heard the funereal voice of Prime Minister Reynaud at Adrienne Monnier’s house: ‘Because of a grave error that will not go unpunished, the bridges over the Meuse were not destroyed and German artillery penetrated our front using that route.’