The Angel of History

by Bruno Arpaia

  He was at Georges Bataille’s house the day the news came that General Gamelin’s order had been ‘Die, but don’t retreat.’ Though the same day the army pulled back along the Asine River. Paris was in danger but no one admitted it – perhaps in order to keep hope alive. Benjamin didn’t hide from it. He needed more time or else he needed that damned visa. Just a few days earlier he’d written to Adorno explaining all of the obstacles he encountered at the American consulate. And now he was waiting for some kind of news from New York as the earth boiled under his feet. Sitting at the Deux Magots, on the way to the library, or walking slowly over the Seine – he saw the muddy cars of refugees flooding in from the north: mattresses strapped to the tops, bicycles tied to fenders. They moved through Paris like animals running from fire. He heard the talk in the city, the rumours: Gamelin killed himself; the paratroopers have landed in place de la Madeleine; three children died in Belleville after eating poison chocolates that the Germans handed out; Arras has been seized by paratroopers who descended in the night with flaming torches. Tired and feeling insecure, he read in his landlady’s Paris soir that Gamelin was no longer chief commander of the army. Weygand, a seventy-year-old general had been installed in his place. Pétain, who was over eighty-four, had been called back from Spain to come on as the government’s new minister of defence. The posters reappeared on the streets: ‘SECOND WARNING TO THE RESSORTISSANTS.’ This time they were casting the ultimate net. The order called for everyone to be sent to a concentration camp: men under seventy-five, women, invalids, the sick – torn from their beds only to die a few days later behind barbed wire.

  Old Benjamin saw those posters in the afternoon on his way to the library and changed course immediately. He passed by the Louvre, crossed back over the Seine and Saint-Germain disappearing back down rue de l’Odéon in search of one of the few friends he had left in Paris. He walked as fast as he could, shoulders hunched, lurching forward with his head down – every bit the picture of someone who wants to defend himself, react to injustice, but instead sits curled up, blocked by impotence. He burst through the door of the bookshop, his heart in pieces, his breath stuttering through his teeth.

  ‘Not again, Adrienne?’ he said with what little breath he had left. ‘If they take me again, it’s all over.’

  They called Hoppenot at the parliament, Henri Membré at the PEN Club; they wrote a joint letter to Saint-John Perse who was a diplomat now. Benjamin had met him several years before when he’d translated his Anabase. Couldn’t he help?

  ‘Go home now,’ said Adrienne, walking him to the door. ‘It will all work out. Wait. I’ll pay for your taxi.’

  It was spring out. The sun was moving toward sunset, speckling the building fronts with sad orange, making the edges of things stand out, reddening the trim of the few scattered cotton puffs in the sky. Then it was dark and in the space of a thought, Walter was struggling to climb the stairs to his apartment, where he would pace like a soul in agony around the room. By now the heating didn’t work anymore, the hot water was barely a memory. The foreigners were all in camps somewhere, the majority of the French men were drafted, no one paid rent anymore, and the landlords had long since stopped worrying about maintenance. Benjamin was practically alone in the building, now that even Koestler had disappeared without a trace after miraculously evading the last round-up. Life on rue Dombasle seemed to consume itself, as if the rigor mortis of the war was standing behind its own avant-guard, the saboteurs, into the innermost part of its prey, and now there was hardly any more need for combat. In fact, it seemed as if one of those saboteurs had got into the pantry and demolished the provisions. Benjamin looked thoughtfully at the shelf where a crust of bread decomposed under a layer of mould. Then, without looking out onto the street, he shut the blinds, lit a candle and lay down on the bed, thinking about the crucifix. Would Saint-John Perse, Membré and Hoppenot be able to save him from another internment? His heart surely wouldn’t last a second time. And now, with the invasion of France, going to a camp meant walking right into the arms of the Gestapo. It would be better to die at home, on that very bed perhaps, and with a full tummy – better still.

  All twisted inside, Walter tried to reread an old Simenon, one of the ones he’d always loved best, but his eyes slid over the lines like he was slipping on ice. An hour later he blew out the candle and began to wait out the great silence. Like a scent it carried up from the dark street and from the dust accumulated under the furniture, distilled in the lamplight and blending with other silences, dripping from damp patches on the wall, wrapping around him as he tossed in the covers and worming through the slats in the shutters to capture the first secretions of dark, the first purities of the coming day. He skipped washing up, as he often did, and ran to Adrienne’s bookshop as soon as it opened the next day. He felt as lost as those he saw on the metro, sharing that gloomy glint of fear in their eyes.

  Whether it was the work of Saint-John Perse or Hoppenot, Benjamin was among the few who were saved from the camps. It was a privilege reserved to three or four at the most.

  ‘Thank you, Adrienne,’ he whispered seriously, lowering his head in a bow. That was all he said, but how could one know the thoughts that pass through a man’s head when he’s just been told his meeting with death has been postponed.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ said Adrienne, with downcast eyes, ‘Hoppenot says there’s nothing that can be done for Dora and Hannah. They have to report to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, and then we’ll see.’

  Dora was weeping as she walked with her brother to the metro. It was just past noon and a light breeze ruffled the trees along the boulevard. The sun had just a hint of sobriety as it rolled off the red roofs. There were formations of soldiers marching all around them.

  ‘Stop crying, please. They’ll arrest us.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ answered Dora. ‘Could that be worse than what’s happening to me?’

  ‘Be quiet,’ growled Walter. ‘I was in the camp too and now I’m free. I’m sure they’ll release you as soon as you tell them about your illness.’

  Dora’s bag didn’t weigh much at all, yet a sudden tightness in his chest forced him to stop on the stairs. ‘I’ll be there in a minute. Go ahead and buy your ticket.’

  By the time they arrived at the gate, he’d decided to stop lying to her. He kissed her quickly and then watched her leave, disappearing into the crowd of other passengers in the dimly lit hallway. Another brick of his world crumbled; the last member of his family, gone. Benjamin inhaled deeply when he got back out onto the street; the wind was gusting around him. He was overcome by an unease that seemed to come to him from a distant point in time, that slipped through the years like an old eel returning to its birthplace to die. He walked aimlessly down rue de Vaugirard, contemplating that trickle of sadness without looking up at the streets, the squares, the people and the soldiers whose paths he crossed. Suddenly, the idea of going home – of climbing all those stairs only in order to find himself in that same deteriorating squalor – seemed awful. He decided to go back to the library. There among his books and notebooks full of notes for Passagen-Werk, he felt safer. He was a shipwrecked man clinging to a sodden plank – his salvation. But in his work he could still cry out for help; release a scream that would carry forward into the edge of the future.

  Abbéville, Boulogne, the Germans arrived at the English Channel while the French and English fought them back at Dunkerque. The voice of Reynaud dangled again from the radio like a funeral banner: ‘If a miracle is the only thing that can save France, then I believe in that miracle. France cannot fall.’

  It was raining now. Raining over the people descending on the stations, on the buses and taxis parked in lots, on the Parisians obsessed with the paratroopers and with Hitler’s Fifth Column. It rained on the millions of French men and women travelling by foot, by car, on rickety carriages under the Stuka bombers. Their tents and mattresses occupied the roads; roads out of town were blocked; military action was paralysed – a mud
slick covered what remained of France. It was still raining on June 3, when the Luftwaffe bombed Paris at dawn. Benjamin had just fallen asleep, but was awakened by a muted drone in the sky – like thunder – the scattered anti-airfire and then the first sounds, distant explosions in the north. He looked out the window at the sky; the grey clouds twisted around the chaos brought on by the planes of his countrymen. They swooped and grazed, then hooked and banked. Though muffled by distance, the sound of the falling bombs was unbearable, inhuman – as savage as the death they brought to the bodies they fell on.

  He didn’t have time to grab his gas mask and go down to the street because the bombing didn’t last long. It left behind the stench of burnt flesh, fumes and gunpowder wafting through his open window and curling around with the sirens of the ambulances and firefighters. He sat for a long time in the middle of his bed, motionless, ruffled, looking out the window with bulging eyes at the columns of smoke rising over the rooftops and at the sky cracking open to let through the blue, and what struck him as an inopportune ray of sunlight. Then he heard Madame Dubois calling to him.

  ‘Are you all right, Monsieur Benjhamèn? It’s me. Is everything okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ answered Benjamin. Then he realised that hardly a breath had passed his lips and she couldn’t have possibly heard him. ‘Yes, everything is fine,’ he repeated, forcing himself to shout.

  ‘There’s a lady here. She says she’s your sister.’

  Dora! Could it be? He opened the door and almost didn’t recognise her. She seemed made of skin, her body was like a sparrow and her hair hung in heavy clumps around her face. Her cheeks were hollow and she was trembling all over, sobbing in splintered gasps like when she was a little girl. There she was looking at him and hiding behind Madame Dubois as if she were frightened of him, and should apologise for wriggling her way back into his life.

  ‘Come on. Stop crying,’ mumbled Walter as he hugged her.

  ‘I’m leaving now,’ said Madame Dubois. ‘I am going to my aunt’s house in Périgueux. I’m afraid that I don’t trust the boches and neither should you.’

  It was a while before Dora calmed down. Walter made her lie on the bed and he offered her water and uneasily stroked her hair for what seemed an eternity. Finally, staring at a spot on the ceiling, Dora was able to tell him about Gurs. It was a camp near Oloron in the Pyrenees. After a week in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, they’d been packed into trains for a never-ending journey. They were tired and starving and hadn’t a drop of water to drink. Everyone was shocked when they finally got there. Gurs was already famous. It was where they kept the undesirables: the officers of the Spanish Republican army, the insurgents and communists, the most politically active exiled anti-Nazis. They called it Inferno.And the more that Dora spoke the more Walter felt like he was listening to Koestler again – speaking of the barracks at Vernet, cold and flea-ridden, the same punishments, the same hunger, the same inhumanity. Only that as Dora spoke she did not grow indignant as Koestler had, but wept, trembled, gestured and confused names and dates. Walter understood that she’d seen Lisa Fittko and Hannah Arendt from a distance but that she’d never spoken to them. She ended up being visited by a medical lieutenant who must have been a Jew, and he sent her home.

  ‘You see? I told you they’d send you home once they saw you were sick.’

  But he’d hardly believed it himself. After so many prison stories – but no one had escaped easily. He stood up and began pacing the room, his hands clasped behind him. At last he sat at the desk. A halo of dusty sun illuminating the books piled carefully on the corner.

  ‘You’re here now,’ he said. ‘You can rest.’

  ‘Rest, yes . . . Your landlady is right. We should leave. We must escape Paris.’

  His sister was an idiot, stupid and stubborn. Walter stood again, planted his fists on the table.

  ‘Won’t you understand,’ he cried, ‘that I must finish my work. It’s the most important thing in the world to me. I must stay here and that’s all there is to it.’

  Then he saw her curled up against the wall weeping. He saw a weak woman, ill and terrified. His anger subsided and he lowered his voice.

  ‘And,’ he added more gently. ‘I have to wait for a visa. If Horkheimer sends papers and money here and I’ve already left? Just a few more days. Then we can perhaps leave together. Calm down. Let’s go get something to eat.’

  She sighed and made a clumsy attempt at a smile.

  ‘You can’t go out like this,’ he said. ‘Clean yourself up. Mother always said that your hair was like a bird’s nest.’

  That afternoon, Walter was back in the library. No one said a word about the bombing. But he borrowed money from Bataille and kept busy going back and forth between his table and the photostat counter, spreading out all of his notes for Passagen-Werk that Dora hadn’t had time to type before ending up at Gurs. Louvet noticed Benjamin’s grim expression and his splotched, dirty unshaven face. His tie was loose around his neck, and he was on edge.

  ‘Could you possibly work a little faster?’ he asked.

  ‘We close in five minutes,’ Louvet patiently explained. ‘I can finish it all up for you tomorrow. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Can you please at least do these twenty pages?’

  It wasn’t that Benjamin was really in a rush; he hadn’t decided to leave yet. It was just that he had the vague feeling that he wouldn’t be able to wait too much longer. The anxiety and craving had hit him the moment he’d come into that almost empty room. In the seat next to his place, he’d seen Asja bent over an enormous folio edition. At least he thought it was her, and his heart stuck in his throat. The same helmet of dark hair, the green eyes and careless sensual air that had stopped him like a fish on a hook on Capri fifteen years before. And that then led him to Riga and Moscow, pulled forward by the throbbing in his trousers. Asja, Asja Lacis. Of course it wasn’t her. Asja was dead – or if she was lucky she was surviving Stalin’s prison. That girl poring over an ancient book right after a bombing and in the middle of an invasion wasn’t her, but just seeing her there, right next to his place was enough to trigger a flood of visions, memories, emerging from the darkest corners of his mind.Asja leaning against a white wall at Faraglioni on Capri, rigid and irritated when he came too soon in her hand. Asja only ever looked at him once with fascination for just a moment in the café in Riga as he discussed Kant with his friend Bernhard. In sad, muddy Moscow, wrapped in light February snow, when she told him to leave while he begged her to love him without a scrap of pride. Seeing this woman was too much, despite the fifteen years that had passed. It was too much because he was tired and he didn’t want to remember. Benjamin was startled, moved, ashamed, full of regret and embarrassment – feelings that would rinse off the bitter sensation that had been tenaciously clinging to him – like one of the signs he saw predicting the future.Yes, perhaps that’s what it was. The girl was a sign; death showing herself, letting him know she was waiting for him. So he was in a great rush and didn’t notice that the time had come to leave.

  It wasn’t dark yet outside. The rain had just started to fall, scattered cars swept over the wet roads. A bicycle bell ringing right behind him startled him. A dark mass passed and shoved at his black bag. The man carrying a girl on the crossbar of his bike sent him to hell with a hand gesture.

  ‘Pay attention, grandpa.’

  Dora was waiting for him at his house, sitting in front of the typewriter. There was a pile of papers on the table that Walter had left for her to copy.

  ‘How do you feel?’ he asked coming in.

  He didn’t imagine she would actually respond. He left his bag on the chair and ran to the bathroom.

  ‘I feel better,’ she finally said, ‘but I’m still tired. I wasn’t able to type. You could have waited until tomorrow to ask.’

  ‘I know, you’re right, but it was urgent,’ he apologised unconvincingly. He wiped his hands and looked out the door. ‘That means I have to do it.’

  Dora, wra
pped in her dressing gown, stood. She looked down at the street and the sad colourless sky. Was now the right moment to tell him? The air was still; the rain was falling soft and monotonous.

  ‘Listen,’ she decided. ‘Emma wrote to me. You remember her, don’t you? Emma Cohn, my friend from school? She’s taken refuge down south in Lourdes. She says that it’s better than most places; the people are hospitable. They’re used to pilgrims.’

  Benjamin didn’t answer. He slowly tapped a finger, trying to beat down his anger.

  Chapter Thirty

  The invasion started on May 10, a Friday. The armoured divisions arrived with the paratroopers and their planes. Sure, we’d had a test run in Spain but we’d never seen so much equipment and so many weapons, and we’d never seen a war move as fast as that. The Krauts blasted through the holes in the Maginot Line; they crossed Holland and five days later were crossing the Meuse. We’d already realised that something wasn’t right with the French army. There were hundreds of abandoned cannons in the Alsatian forests. Entire regiments passed by, drifting; they came to the front line but didn’t know what to do. The situation stunk; it seemed like no one really wanted to fight. We didn’t even want to fight. They had us wandering along the border for several days, not a camp in sight. Then we doubled back to build anti-tank trenches in the Ardennes. As if they had any purpose at that point. Actually the German paratroopers ended up hiding in them to attack our retreating troops from behind. We had to work at night because all day long those Stuka dive-bombers fried us; they made a joke out of the ones we’d seen back in Spain. Towns, little villages – the planes left nothing standing. Then the tanks moved in to occupy the territory. And we were running. Then one morning we sort of stumbled onto their side of the line. The Krauts moved fast. They had already crossed the Meuse and were already thirty kilometres to our south. Lucky for us our new captain, a count from Grenoble, managed to organise a manoeuvre so that we could double back and get in contact with our guys again. But by then, it was like in Catalonia a year and a half before – we got out by the skin of our teeth, but more hectically, in the middle of utter chaos, a Babel of orders and counter-orders that basically ended up saying the same thing: run south.