The Angel of History

by Bruno Arpaia

  ‘My papers are in order,’ protested old Benjamin. ‘I even have a visa for the United States.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re in order? No one can ever be sure. Tell me. Do you have a visitor’s permit?’

  Perhaps it was his deep calm voice that made him nostalgic. Walter didn’t feel angry at the way this old stranger butted into his life. He offered the man a strange, perplexed look. And then van Erde’s face collapsed into the patient, bemused expression that one might save for children or idiots.

  ‘You have to get a visitor’s permit,’ he explained, ‘to stay here in Marseille. You have to report to the prefect’s office in place Baret. Unless you get one it’s useless to try to escape with just your visas.’

  ‘Visas? Isn’t one enough?’

  ‘Forgive me for saying this, but you don’t know very much, do you. And yet, you’re lucky if you already have a visa for the United States. Now all you need is an exit visa and a travel permit.’

  Benjamin narrowed his eyes and looked at van Erde, then he looked outside again beyond the window. A cloud cast a dark shadow over the buildings. He looked at the old man again, stunned. He didn’t believe him and couldn’t believe him. He’d thought that he was at the end of a via cruces, and now this man was spoiling everything.

  ‘I’ll explain it all to you,’ offered van Erde. ‘But would you treat me to a coffee. I’m short. Very sorry.’

  Walter counted out the coins and then signalled for the waiter. Van Erde drank his coffee and stretched out in his chair, launching at last into a long explanation. He seemed happy now, as if the complicated discussion would save him from quite a lot of solitude.

  ‘In order to get to the United States you have to get to Portugal – and get through Spain, right? You’ll need a transit.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Didn’t they explain anything to you, my son? We’re the plague. Any country that we pass through wants to ensure that we won’t be stopping there, that we’ll leave right away. The most important thing to get is a Portuguese visa, but you have to have a ticket on a ship to New York in order to get one. If they do give it to you, then you have to report to the Spanish consulate and get a Spanish transit. All of this costs money. I don’t even know why I’m bothering telling you all of this. In the end, you’ll still need an exit visa from France which is very difficult to get.’

  Outside it had suddenly started to rain. It was one of those quick angry storms that sometimes happen in the Marseille summers. Long tears of water beat against the windows; people out on the street hid in doorways. The chatter inside the café stopped for an instant. It wasn’t the best moment to talk, but Benjamin didn’t realise that until too late.

  ‘Exit visa?’ he shouted – eyes turned his way from every table in the room. ‘But why?’ he added in a lower voice. ‘The French have to keep people from leaving?’

  Van Erde sighed and shook his head. ‘Watch out,’ he said. ‘I believe you’re German, right? You know that the people in charge now are the Germans. They control everything and they want to control whoever leaves this continent.’

  Ten minutes later the downpour stopped as suddenly as it had started. The sky opened back up, and the sun was already drying the water gathered on the pavement. The café was thick with the smell of dampness and people clustered together.

  ‘Or,’ said the old man slowly, picking the conversation back up, ‘even with all the visas, then it’s not a given that you will be able to leave, that you’ll find any way at all to get to Lisbon or to America.’

  ‘What do I do?’ asked Benjamin.

  After not talking, his words came out husky. He cleared his throat but didn’t continue. He waited for the old man to finish licking his spoon and look back up at him.

  ‘What?’ he repeated.

  ‘So,’ said van Erde, ‘you need time and a lot of it. And you mustn’t get discouraged. Me, for example, I had a contract to go teach in Mexico and with the contract there was a visa and a transit too. It took a month to get the exit visa and in the meantime the transit expired, and without the transit I lost everything else. Now I am waiting for the contract to be renewed so that I can start over.’

  Now it was his turn to look outside and he didn’t like what he saw at all. A car with a cross stencilled on the side panel was slowly descending toward Canebière. The first one in Marseille. There was a driver and two men in uniform looking out. One of the men was tapping his glove against the window and smiling.

  ‘Hurry,’ whispered van Erde. ‘Bring your papers to the prefect. You see there’s not much time left.’

  At place Baret they sent him to the office for foreign nationals in rue Louvois. There wasn’t much of a queue there, just two or three people pacing in the waiting room. Before stamping Benjamin’s visitor’s permit, good for a month, the clerk asked Benjamin what he was doing in Marseille.

  ‘I have to leave,’ said old Benjamin. His husky voice betrayed his agitation, ‘and I need time to put some of my affairs in order.’

  ‘Okay,’ said the clerk and then stamped the paper at the bottom, signed it and passed it back. ‘Good luck, Monsieur Benjhamèn,’ he said with a half-smile.

  Walter didn’t get angry this time. Instead he felt almost happy. He tucked the paper into his bag and went back out onto the street. It was just past noon. On the opposite pavement the clerk for Transport maritimes was writing names and departure dates for ships on a blackboard. There was a queue of people right behind him. Benjamin headed in that direction, toward the quai des Belges where scattered seagulls sat in the sun. His happiness from a few minutes before had already passed. He sat on a step and stared at the water, the boats bobbing in the harbour, their rudders almost touching, streaming to the breeze. Where had he ended up? In an enormous open-air concentration camp, surrounded by the barbed wire of fruitless hopes and endless waiting. The sun was there, a minute point at the edge of the continent – where Europe ended and the sea began.

  PART FIVE

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Leaving. Getting out. No matter where he was, in the café, on the pavement, in a queue at the pharmacy, it was the only thing anyone ever talked about. Tickets, captured ships, ships that never arrived, visas, false passports, distant states and countries that welcomed refugees. All of that discussion only served to make the waiting less intolerable – it kept hope alive. In these days the Luftwaffe attacked England, Pétain dissolved the labour unions and prohibited consumption of alcohol in restaurants, windows of Jewish shops were shattered in the name of the national revolution. But the assorted refugees of Marseille never spoke of these things. When Benjamin brought up one of those topics, he’d get a shrug; and whoever he was talking to would resume a story about a friend who’d snuck onto a ship but then got thrown overboard, or about the travel agent at Thomas Cook who for two hundred francs would sell you a fake ticket for the States on a non-existent boat, or of that little office on rue Saint-Ferréol that sold Chinese visas for one hundred francs. After a number of weeks someone finally translated the ideograms on the embossed documents, only to find that it read: ‘The bearer of this paper is prohibited under any circumstance to tread on Chinese soil.’ And yet, using this visa, someone had managed to procure transit papers for Portugal.

  ‘Obviously if the Portuguese in Marseille don’t know a word of Chinese . . .’

  Laughter was how you tricked time, how you pretended to the same people that you met over and over again in the bars or in the consulates or in the squares – while hiding from the wind – that desperation hadn’t won out.

  Benjamin spent his first days in Marseille at Mont Ventoux, a café on the corner of the Canebière and the quai des Belges. He sat there for hours contemplating the white houses around the old port, the sun shining over the forts, the bobbing ships’ masts, the fishing nets drying on the docks. While out on the streets, spies patrolled, the police walked the boulevard looking for people with boche accents and no papers. If he thought about hi
s discomfort, focused on the anguish of being caught in that trap, Benjamin would have drowned in the acid that gripped his insides, he would have been dragged down to the very bottom. But there were books still to be published, his notes and essays tucked into his black bag. He didn’t say it aloud, but he clearly felt that in those pages there was the cry of a prophet condemned to repeat again and again his vision of the future – until it would be eventually fulfilled. This was why he had to go on, why he couldn’t abandon it all. So he telegraphed the Institute in Geneva and had them send money for his journey. The next day he went to the American consulate in the place Saint-Ferréol.

  There was a table in the lobby, groaning with piles of papers, at the top of the stairs leading to the main offices. A formidable clerk regulated the crowd, pushing the table aside with his hip when it was time to let a lucky person through. Walter timidly approached the clerk.

  ‘Good morning. I am Doctor Benjamin,’ he said, holding out the telegram he’d received in Lourdes. ‘There should be a visa here for me.’

  ‘Wait over there with the others.’

  The few chairs were already occupied. Men, women, children, old people were all gathered there, cleaned up and ready to make a good impression on the consul. They came and went impatiently, they watched the table and examined their papers; they spoke quietly among themselves wondering whether or not to hide an illness or a pregnancy, to conceal or explain that they’d been driven into poverty. The faces were pale, tense, as if everyone had just emerged from hiding – some were familiar, he’d seen them hundreds of times already on the road or in the cafés. Benjamin exchanged ironic smiles with them, knowing, as they all did, that they would be seeing each other again.

  ‘The consul is a good man, you’ll find. I know him,’ said an elderly man with his hat in hand, who Benjamin recognised from the day before at Mont Ventoux.

  Walter smiled faintly, nagged by the guilty knowledge that he was among the elected; that he practically already had a visa in his pocket. Soon he would be walking down those stairs with a document in hand, sealed and tied with a red ribbon, a man who still had a chance for life. It was two hours before the clerk called his name and pushed aside the barrier. He went into a waiting room on the second floor that was already full. He’d have to be patient for another bit. Soon a woman looked out and called him in to meet the consul, a slight, indifferent man in an oversized suit, who seemed lost behind a desk that was too big for him. Walter stood before him, gasping for breath, what felt like ice in his stomach, the anxiety scratching at him like a fingernail, while trying futilely to remember that everything would work out and that there was no way the hunch-backed dwarf had followed him all the way here.

  ‘So,’ began the consul, as he shifted through a folder, ‘I see that you have very good sponsors. Why don’t you hurry up and get through the paperwork with the young lady and then we’ll talk again.’

  The lady was already waiting in the doorway as the consul spoke. She was very young, with a head of brown curls like lettuce. She politely led Benjamin into the next room, where, without ever lifting her eyes from the typewriter, she began soberly grilling Benjamin on every last detail of his life. The questions were so comprehensive, so inescapable, almost a web, that Benjamin was on the verge of telling her to forget it and just leaving. But instead she stood and sat him in front of a little table for fingerprinting. She showed him how to press his finger to the paper, just hard enough but not too hard, and then each of his fingers and his palm. He began to feel more relaxed, less like he was facing Saint Peter and waiting to learn whether he’d be admitted to heaven.

  ‘Will I receive a red ribbon now?’ asked Benjamin.

  She laughed and brought him back to the office where the consul was standing as solemn as a priest. There was some more tapping on the typewriter, and then the pens came out, a flourish of signatures and seals. And there he was at the top of the stairs, looking out over the heads of the jealous crowd. Benjamin looked at his festooned visa and then stuffed it quickly into his bag. Eyes lowered, full of humility, he cut through the swarm and burst out the front door. The square was deserted. There was no one standing under the trees in the middle of the garden, there was no one by the news-stand. Everyone was in the café and they stared at him silently when he entered, sought out a table in the back of the dining room, placed his bag on the floor and sat. Among all those stares, he felt forced into that terrible kind of empty time when everything that was happening seemed unreal, and he would have to start waiting again.

  A week passed before the money arrived from Geneva, seven endless days spent in the café, the backdrop of his destiny, surrounded by smoke and the conversation of other refugees, or, if his lungs felt strong, strolling among the tangled streets of the old port, from cours Belsunce to boulevard d’Athènes and along the quai de la Joliette. He would scrutinise the empty docks, allowing himself to sink unarmed into anguish and the urge to end it all, to be done with it. He gritted his teeth and resisted the urge. He thought about all the books he would be able to publish in the States, the articles he’d write for money, of his name being bandied about with admiration in the important circles. This was the only way he was able to summon the strength to spend his days checking to see if the money had arrived. Until that Tuesday morning in September when his money arrived and he raced to the travel agency. It was too late; the queue was already out the door and the Corsican clerk had just posted a CLOSED sign in the window. He would have to return at dawn, join the queue in the cold morning, stand with shivering people who were complaining that the port of Lisbon had been blocked and that the Alexandra would be the last ship out – and wait until nine when the yawning clerk opened for business. The office was minuscule, divided down the middle by a worn wooden partition. For hours on end, Benjamin listened to prayers, threats, bribes, begging – people jammed up against that partition who had visas but no money, who had a ticket but whose pass had expired but they still wanted a pass for the steamer. When it was his turn the clerk, his hair stiff with pomade, yawned.

  ‘Do you have money?’ he asked rudely from behind the window.

  Then he became polite when he saw Benjamin’s money. He stopped yawning and explained that he would of course go ahead and book his passage, but he wouldn’t issue the ticket until he had seen all of the papers necessary. Benjamin could have a receipt in the meantime.

  Out on the street the air was still, the shutters on the houses were all closed, a gloomy silence hung heavy over the afternoon. Benjamin sighed and pulled the damp shirt away from his sweaty back. It was done. He could put down another marker in this chapter of his existence. What a strange chapter too, full of paradoxes and trap doors though which his life might disappear. A dark desire inside of him urged him to bring an end to it all, to let him have the last word. And something else drove him to keep writing, to keep fighting. Following the second way, he may never reach the end of this chapter. It could all still be irretrievably lost in this maze of visas, files, ships, tickets and consulates.

  He sat at the Café Cuba near the Rotonde reflecting and lingering over an olive and anchovy pizza that he had bought with recently acquired coupons, when he thought he saw her – just beyond the window. Her face was tense and worn; she almost walked with a hunch. The late afternoon light fell on her black hair, catching on the bronze reflections with every step of her quick gait. Benjamin quickly paid, grabbed his bag and raced out onto the cours Belsunce. He was panting as he overtook a group of four or five legionnaires out walking. He called out,

  ‘Hannah,’ he shouted, and bit his lip. He knew it was dangerous to have done that.

  She turned but didn’t see him at first. When she recognised him, she smiled and spoiled him with hugs and kisses that she never would have dared before.

  ‘You’re here, too?’ asked old Benjamin emotionally.

  ‘That’s a stupid question,’ she answered seriously. ‘Not at all your style, but I’ll forgive you.’

 
Later, in a little café on place Jaurès, Hannah told him about how she had escaped from Gurs along with a hundred other prisoners the night before the Gestapo got there. She had walked across the south of France, from Pau to Tarbes to Montauban, sleeping out in the open or in barns, begging bread and eggs from farmers. She’d travelled alone because she thought it was safer that way. In Montauban she met up with her mother and her husband, Heinrich. She’d been in Marseille for a couple of weeks already and had managed to procure everything – tickets, visas, passage on a ship that eventually would go on to Lisbon. All she needed now was a visa for her mother.

  ‘What about you?’ she finally asked.

  Walter shook his head. What could he say? He still didn’t know the answer himself. The truth? Maybe. The sun outside was setting over Fort St-Nicolas and it had already grown dark over their corner table. Benjamin held his chin in his hand, rested his elbow on the table, and draped his other arm over his black bag. He wanted a cigarette, or some tobacco for his pipe.

  ‘Me? I can’t go on,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t born for situations like these. The misfortune just clings to me. Enough already.’

  ‘Oh Walter, you can’t still be going on about the hunch-backed dwarf. Look around. Don’t you see all these people? No one is taking care of them anymore. They have to extricate themselves all by themselves. At least you have friends in the States. You have a visa and money. You’ll see. Soon you’ll be able to leave.’

  The evening cast a grid of shadows and fog over the streets and the little gardens off the square, extending out to the sea beyond the lighthouse. Walter scraped the sugar at the bottom of his coffee cup and sighed.

  ‘It’s easy for you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But not for me. You know that you were right last year when you said that I wasn’t cut out for these dark times. Modernity, the epoch of hell. It makes me think certain things sometimes. I just want it all to be over with.’