by Bruno Arpaia
Hannah shivered. She knew that Benjamin had been harbouring the idea of killing himself for years now. Scholem had told her that Walter had got very close back in 1932 in Nice, and that he’d even written up a will. On opposite side of the square from them a queue of about twenty people had gathered by a dock. Hannah stared at them for a while, and then looked out at the pale light coming from the street lights that had just gone on, at the last dusting of blue at the edge of the horizon. Then she spoke.
‘Look over there,’ she said. ‘You know what they’re doing? They’ll be standing there all night long hoping to buy some bread or a handful of sardines. Just think that you will be free from this torture before long.’
Walter didn’t answer. He just opened his bag and started ruffling through it.
‘Can you do me a favour?’ he finally asked.
She nodded and twisted a lock of her hair around her finger. Her hair was dirty. She could have used two hours of shampooing.
‘When you get to New York, will you deliver these papers to Adorno? There are two articles and my Theses – some ideas about history. Promise me you’ll do it. These are the most important things in the world to me.’
‘Yes, Walter. Don’t worry.’
Hannah folded the papers in quarters and tucked them into her pocket. She noticed the old man wince at how she treated the papers but didn’t comment. She just glanced nervously at her watch and slid forward on her seat.
‘You must leave, right?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I do have to go. But don’t worry, we’ll see each other again on Fifth Avenue,’ she said with a smile. ‘Good luck,’ she said and planted a kiss on his cheek. He noticed how run down she was, unkempt, worn thin by life’s beating. Walter didn’t follow her. He sat at the table watching her walk out and head down toward the Canebière and the quai des Belges. A thicket of flossy clouds blew southward over her head.
Chapter Thirty-seven
‘Come back next week, okay.’
An entire week spent huddled in a queue on the pavement. Two shirts on his back and a bundle of newspapers blocking out the cold. His jacket filthy and tattered like a flag on a battlefield. All of this just to hear some coarse Portuguese man with a piercing voice tell him to come back in a week.
Once outside the consulate, Benjamin pushed his way back through the crowd of waiting people and headed grimly to cours Belsunce, where he felt a sudden gripping on his heart and his legs folded under him. Someone revived him and settled him at a table in the Café de la Rotonde, ordered him a glass of water and helped him swallow a pill.
‘Feel better?’
‘Yes. Thank you. Much better.’
The moment had passed. Now all he had to do was sit quietly, breathing slowly, and watching the crowd swarm over the Canebière through half-shut eyes. The shadows gathered in doorways. The light was polished by the wind. A man and a woman walked by hand in hand. A legionnaire passed, he looked – too much – like Arthur Koestler. Walter stayed calm. He was used to such sightings by now and had cultivated a thicker skin. Three days earlier on the rue de Rome, Hilde Berthon appeared suddenly in front of him. And later that same day he spent the evening chatting with Kracauer in a pizza parlour. More or less everyone was, like him, the luckiest of the scum of the earth, and sooner or later they all ended up in Marseille – the gigantic funnel. All you had to do was sit on the Canebière and you’d meet someone.
‘Arthur!’ he called. The man didn’t answer, but walked right by absorbed in his newspaper. Maybe Benjamin had been mistaken. Maybe he had heatstroke, or his heart hadn’t settled yet. A few minutes later the man was sitting next to him at his table.
‘Seeing you here,’ he said. ‘It’s like you’re from another life. But don’t call me Arthur. I’m now Legionnaire Albert Dubert.’
He was wearing a handlebar moustache just like Vercingetorix, but the perennial cigarette was still hanging from his lips. So now he was a soldier? And the legionnaires – Koestler or Dubert – had a ration for a pack of cigarettes a day. Benjamin couldn’t resist.
‘Would you mind terribly offering me a cigarette?’
He inhaled slowly, savouring the smoke as it circled his mouth. He took three, four, five, six puffs before thinking to ask what day it was.
‘It’s Tuesday, why?’
‘Today they can sell alcohol and we should celebrate. Shall we have a pastis?’
To hell with his heart. They toasted to their meeting, to their salvation, and then Koestler told him about having escaped a couple of times from jail and how he’d come to enlist. He said he’d gotten the idea from a Jean Gabin film. He told about how he got to Marseille, and about Daphne who he’d lost track of near Biarritz over two months earlier. Now he wanted to get to England so that he could join the Allied forces.
‘It’s all set. I sail at midnight,’ he whispered into Benjamin’s ear.
Yes, thought old Benjamin distractedly. Koestler had ants in his pants. He had the whole world in his head and had his head stuck out into the world. He’d never managed to separate thought from action. Now Benjamin would be alone. The others would all sneak away and he’d be left to disentangle himself between visas and consulates. But how long would those ships still be leaving? How long would he have to wait?
Evening had fallen almost without him noticing; it was a brown-blue evening, warm and quiet. A dense black sky stippled with bright high stars extended over the street.
‘Where are you staying?’ asked Koestler.
‘In a welcome centre, a school. It’s an awful place, but all the hotels are full.’
‘Maybe you can take over my room. It’s just around the corner from here. Could you come now, or do you have to go fetch your bags at the school?’
‘All that I own,’ answered Benjamin wryly, ‘is here with me now.’
They slowly made their way down cours Belsunce, Koestler leading and Walter walking behind. They passed two empty fishmonger stalls, circling the stones that pinned the nets flat while they dried. The wind caught and grew fierce in the dark alleys so narrow that the walls of facing buildings almost touched. They rounded three, four corners and then climbed a steep staircase and went through an open door into a poorly lit entryway. There was a fat old lady with curlers in her hair sitting behind a counter and leafing through a newspaper with long fingers. Koestler exchanged a few words with her, and then looking up at last she pushed the register across the counter to Benjamin. Her nose wrinkled when she saw him copying out his information from his refugee pass.
‘You have to pay a week’s advance,’ she said squalidly.
He paid. What choice did he have? Koestler took the key with a number written on the side and headed into the corridor which was filled with luggage and screaming children, jumping over the bags and chasing each other.
‘They’re Spaniards,’ he explained. ‘A whole group of them are leaving on the same ship I’m on.’
The room was tiny. There was just enough space for the bed and a dresser. A rod with hooks hung in a little niche. Veins of cracked paint ran along the light green wall. And a low-set window with greenish panes looked out over an interior courtyard.
‘It’s not very much, of course,’ apologised Koestler.
‘You’re joking. It’s much much better than sleeping on the ground along with a hundred other people.’
‘Good. That makes me happy. Now I must go. The boat leaves at midnight . . . You’ll see, the war will be over in several weeks’ time and we’ll meet again soon.’
Benjamin nodded and fell back onto the rickety bed. On the other side of the door he could hear luggage being dragged and children’s voices and the landlady screaming to watch out for her vases.
‘If it were to go badly, somehow,’ he began without lifting himself from the pillow. ‘Do you have something to take?’
Koestler shook his head and stared while Benjamin started rummaging through his bag with a conspiratorial air. He pulled out the bottle of Morphium and counte
d out seventy-two pills in silence. He took half of the lot and held them out.
‘Naturally,’ he said, ‘I hope I won’t have to use them, but just in case I hope these are enough. What do you think? Will thirty-six do?’
‘Of course, that’s plenty,’ his friend assured him as if he were an expert. Even under the circumstances the conversation seemed surreal to Koestler – but only to a certain extent. Walter wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last to prefer suicide to the Gestapo. ‘But you won’t need to find out. I’ll leave you some cigarettes too. And promise that you’ll write when you get to New York.’
After he left, Benjamin stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes. He searched in the dull darkness of his eyelids for some kind of sign or clue – something that would make him feel less alone. He tried to recapture the horrible feeling of not knowing how he ended up there – on a bed in a squalid pension in Marseille, not a book to read, with thirty-six sleeping pills in his hand, feeling lost like a kite blown out of a child’s hands. He would occasionally open his eyes a slit, trying to catch one of the few objects around him by surprise, trying to locate in the sinister twilight coming in through the window the mystery that connected to his destiny.
He must have fallen asleep because he started when there was a sudden outburst on the other side of the wall – screaming children, a bustle of footsteps and luggage, the muted curses of women’s voices. Benjamin put on his glasses and peered out the door. He was in a bewildered state; his hair rumpled, his cheeks red, socks dangling off his feet.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ he said to an elderly lady in a creased flowered dress standing next to him, ‘but what happened?’
What had happened was that the whole group had gone to the port, to the docked ship, with their luggage and all, and suddenly the police arrived and without any kind of warning arrested all their men. The woman fretted as she spoke; she bit her lip, clenched her hands into fists, and shook.
‘Hijos de la gran puta,’ she spat out. ‘They said that there’s been an agreement between Pétain and Franco. All Spanish men have to be delivered to arms. Bastards. And what do we do now?’
She’d stopped addressing old Benjamin at this point. She realised that this stiff, funny man with his puffy eyes and the air of a poet would be of little help.
‘I’m sorry. Good night,’ muttered Benjamin as he disappeared quickly back into his room.
He took off his jacket and shirt, hung his trousers on a hook and climbed back under the covers. But could he sleep? He tossed from side to side as the noise outside faded, and he started ruminating on thought after thought, trying uselessly to navigate his past. Shortly before dawn he fell asleep again and was haunted in his dreams by Dora, Jula, Asja, and himself, then his sister, his brother George when they were all children and posing for a portrait. He woke with a start to a clamour in the street below. The hydrants had been opened to clean and the water was streaming over the pavements, down the kerb, and roaring in the gutters. He was better off awake; because even in his dream he’d come to the conclusion that everything was messed up and that he’d only ever been a visitor in his own life.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Done. The cow with the piercing voice told him where to sign his receipt and then as stiff as could be she handed over a Portuguese visa. So this was taken care of. Now it would be an easy matter to get his ticket. At least that’s what Benjamin thought. But when he got back to the travel agency (after another two hours in a queue) the fantastically bored clerk told him that he would still need a French exit visa and that beyond that, it would still be another month’s wait.
‘Don’t blame me. There’s no point in getting angry,’ he said through his window. His brows drew together and the lines around his eyes grew suddenly deeper. ‘Have you been down to the port? Have you seen the empty docks? It’s been a week since we’ve even had the promise of a liner coming through. Why don’t you come back with the exit visa and we’ll see what we can do.’
Outside on the street, Marseille tumbled toward the sea as if reeling from the pounding sun. The rays were too bright. The sky was a ferocious electric blue. But Benjamin couldn’t have cared less about the lovely September morning, about that wicked light that cut through things, revealing them and uncovering their every secret. He was dressed in a complete suit of sadness, pain, anguish, rage. Now what? He might have to make that decision. The moment very well may have come to bid farewell to what he’d turned into – a defeated man, bereft of a future. With that thought spinning in his head Walter walked down the quai des Belges like a sleepwalker. He looked at but didn’t see the grey chimneys of a gunboat moored near Fort St-Jean. He climbed the stairs at quai de Rive Neuve and crossed the deserted streets leading to St-Victor, stopping periodically to catch his breath. Now what? he repeated to himself as he sat down on the stairs near the church portico, just a few feet away from a little girl selling matches.
Fittko recognised him first. He saw Benjamin sitting in the shadow of a column, his head in his hands and his gaze glued to the ground, and went over to speak to him – not even bothering to check that there were no Gestapo spies around.
‘Benjamin? Doctor Benjamin – don’t you feel well?’
Hans Fittko and Walter hadn’t seen each other since they were together in Nevers. There was about ten years age difference between them, but now, just a few months away from the prison camp, Benjamin seemed like a desperate old rag man, and Hans a dapper son with a beret crowning his pomaded hair, a necktie neatly around his neck, and the stubborn conviction of someone who clings to his ideals even in the midst of a storm.
‘In times like these I’m not sure anyone can be truly well,’ replied Benjamin chasing the exhaustion from his lips with a smile. ‘But I’m very happy to see you Fittko.’
‘Me too, but we’re too out in the open here. Let’s walk.’
Walter stood and followed him as if in a dream down to the old port, which was glistening in the sun. He couldn’t manage to walk and talk so he asked Fittko if they could sit in a café. At the Brûleurs des Loups sat the same people who were always around, the people who had transformed the city into a grim seaside prison. There were heroes and thieves, poor people, doctors and writers, Germans and Italian spies. There was the stink of smoke and sweat. They chose a hidden table some distance from the bar. As they sat Hans tossed a pack of Gauloises on the table and old Benjamin’s eyes glittered. He hadn’t had a cigarette in four days – they weren’t to be found anywhere. The ones that Koestler had left were long gone, and it was usually futile to ask for them. Whoever had cigarettes kept them for themselves. It would be criminal to give them away.
‘May I?’ he spluttered quietly.
Hans indicated the pack with an open hand and watched Walter light it and hungrily inhale.
‘So how’s it going?’ he asked.
‘Badly,’ answered Benjamin disconsolately, but then he shook himself and sat up. ‘I would be perfectly fine but I don’t have an exit visa and without that they won’t issue the ship ticket. Now I have to go to the prefect tomorrow.’
‘Are you out of your mind?’ interrupted Hans.
‘Possibly. Why?’
Fittko sighed. He always had to explain everything to Benjamin. It was incredible that as bumbling as he was the old man had managed to survive this mess this long.
‘Where are you staying? You’ll never get that visa. They process them at Vichy. You might as well wrap yourself up and hand yourself over to the Gestapo. Not to mention the fact that the ship will never leave and in two or three days’ time they say this port will be shut down.’
Walter was frozen with his cup of coffee mid-air. He looked at Hans, stunned, as if Hans was revealing a secret.
‘What can I do?’ he whispered.
‘The only way is to cross the border illegally. You have to go over the Pyrenees. The border guards in Spain aren’t too bad. Sure they might invent some kind of way to give you a hard time – this docum
ent isn’t the right kind . . . we can’t read that stamp – but they always let you through in the end. Do you have a Spanish visa?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well, get one then.’
Walter was so taken aback that he let the Gauloise extinguish between his fingers. He brushed ash from the table and then inhaled, blowing out the smoke with a long sigh. He thought as he watched Hans scribble on the corner of a newspaper and when he looked up, Benjamin ventured a smile.
‘Have you taken a good look at me?’ he asked. ‘Can you really see me crossing the Pyrenees like some kind of bandit or spy? That’s not for me; it’s useless.’
Fittko didn’t answer. He just tore off the piece of newspaper and slid it across the table.
‘What is this?’ asked Walter pushing his glasses up onto his forehead. Fittko noticed the red marks they made on the side of Walter’s nose.
‘It’s Lisa’s address at Port-Vendres near the border. You remember my wife Lisa, don’t you? She’s been there for a few days and she can help you. But you must get moving. Marseille isn’t safe anymore. The Kundt Commission’s put up at the Hôtel Splendide on the boulevard d’Athènes.’
Even Benjamin had heard this news. Under the pretext of liberating Nazis in prison camps, the commission drafted lists of people that would be delivered, wrapped up in a bow, to the Gestapo.
‘But the Pyrenees,’ he protested without a hint of irony as he looked out the windows of the café over the port. A man was arguing with two dark men and wagging his finger, ‘no,’ then he brought both hands to his chest and stretched them skyward again.
‘I won’t claim it’s easy,’ admitted Hans after a moment. ‘There are already German patrols on the border and the Vichy troops are giving backup. But for now it’s still the safest route. I’ll be going over too in another few weeks.’
The arguing man outside was now being led away by the other two, his head bowed low.
‘Did you see that?’ asked Benjamin with concern.