by Bruno Arpaia
‘Pretend you didn’t see it,’ Hans whispered. ‘Bastards, damn bastard sons of whores. Finish your coffee and we’ll leave. Stay calm. I’ll take you back to your pension.’
Fittko stood, and Walter put Lisa’s address in his bag and followed. The sun was already low, the sky was heavy, just a few immobile clouds gathered on the horizon. Two lone fishing boats were out on the water pitching in the northwesterly. As Hans walked he kept looking around him, checking around the corner of every alley all the way down the cours Belsunce. Benjamin hobbled behind him, his heart in his throat. It was dark when they parted. There was a little sun still peeking through the roofs but the fronts of the houses were stagnant with ancient heavy shadows.
‘I’m counting on you. Say hello to Lisa for me.’
Walter clambered up the stairs and arrived gasping in the foyer. The landlady and her lavish bosom were resting on the counter. Her wide mouth was stretched into a smile and she pegged him in a second.
‘Ah ha, monsieur, you owe me another week’s rent in advance, remember?’
He remembered. And how. Just the evening before he’d looked over his situation, counting for the ship’s passage, it wouldn’t be long before he had nothing at all. And yet he had no choice. He drew a couple of bills from his wallet and spread them out in front of that bosom and turned to go to his room.
‘The key!’ she yelled after him when he was already halfway down the corridor to his room.
Walter opened the door and threw himself onto the bed. He crossed his hands under his head and rested his gaze on the ceiling. He was crying. In his own way, making no sound and shedding no tears, as if he were walking on tiptoe so that no one would hear him. Chalk it up to the anguish of finding himself for the first time in his life unable to melt away the strange pain with words, this futureless cry right now, right away. It was because of the pity he felt for what had become of his thoughts, as they were made ever less of projects, and fell in ruins around him. Pity for that damned decision he would have to make and that voice inside that told him that there was no room left for error.
He rose when he thought that it was light out, but when he came out onto the street he saw that there was still a faint line of violet dawn over the cathedral hill. He walked for a long time, not knowing where he was going, as the sky turned red, then magenta, while the women lined cours Belsunce to mend the nets stretched out on the pavement. The brightness seemed to come from everywhere and the sky flickered from the hills to the sea. He finally reached a decision, out of a calm that seemed to come from far away and soothed his inquietude. He was serene again, imperturbable, as if he’d just passed through the kingdom of darkness and emerged safe and sound, as if he’d stared death in the eyes, and had nothing more to fear. For now, he’d listen to Fittko. To hell with Marseille and its ships! To hell with Vichy and French visas! One way or another he’d cross the Pyrenees. And that’s how he ended up at seven that same morning in a queue outside the Spanish consulate, his face flushed, his hands in his pockets, and his bag tucked between his feet, teeth chattering in the north wind that chilled to the bone, surrounded by the familiar conversations of queues and cafés.
‘The visa came,’ a boy behind him was saying, ‘at the very last minute, an hour before the boat was to leave. He ran and ran but didn’t make it in time. In the end he couldn’t join his wife – who was already on board. And do you know what she did? She just waved at him, and left. If you could see him now.’
The main doors opened and a thin functionary was letting people through in drips and drabs. Every ten minutes the throng outside took a little step forward.
‘Would you like some?’ asked the lady in front of him, holding out a package of dried bananas. ‘It’s not much, but since there’s no bread to be found.’
‘Thank you. I’d love some. I am Walter Benjamin,’ he said, introducing himself with his usual bow.
She was an attractive lady of about forty, blond, but a little hardened. Her face was traced with lines and bitterness. A sullen child stood next to her. His blue eyes shone against his dark skin and unformed adolescent features.
‘This is my son, José, and I’m Henny Gurland,’ said the woman, brushing her hair out of her eyes. Her pupils glimmered with anger and pain. ‘Are you alone?’
Those dry, bittersweet bananas were truly disgusting, off-putting even, but hunger was hunger. Benjamin choked them down, while trying to quell the embarrassment her question provoked in him, like a punch in the heart. He searched her face trying to see if he could trust her or not. He must have liked what he saw there, because he relaxed, smiled, and tears filled his eyes.
‘My son and ex-wife are safe in London. Hopefully I’ll join them after the war.’
So that was it. That was why he’d gone soft for a moment, a moment long enough to be painful – he’d seen himself reunited with Dora and Stefan. There are some things that a man can neither invent nor forget, the curve of a woman’s back, the body of a newborn child sleeping on his shoulder, certain words, simple words that for some reason stick like nails in the memory. Walter just barely noticed that Gurland was talking to him.
‘My husband Arkadij was killed in June,’ she said looking down, her voice breaking. ‘He was in prison in Tours, waiting to be sent back to Germany. They shot him while he was trying to climb over the wall.’
She told the whole story like that in a single breath. José stood next to her staring at Benjamin, his blue eyes betraying him; he tried to keep himself from crying. A man never cries.
‘Will you help us, sir?’
It was the first time in his entire life that someone asked him for help. Old Benjamin. But he wasn’t even capable of helping himself.
‘Yes,’ answered Benjamin. ‘Don’t worry. We’ll work it out.’
Three days later, when he went back to collect his visa, Gurland and her son were there again. José waved and called him over, making a space for him in the queue.
‘Nice business,’ protested an old man from the back of the queue. ‘If I’d known how clever everyone was going to be, I wouldn’t have got up so early.’
‘It’s my father,’ answered José shaking a fist, and Walter blushed, his cheeks like two tomatoes.
‘If they give me a visa today,’ he said, trying to mask his embarrassment, ‘I’m going to set off for the Pyrenees tomorrow.’
The woman seemed on the verge of tears, but then she smiled, her face smoothing over, like a blast of wind on the sea.
‘Will you take us with you?’ she asked.
He coughed and stiffened like a pine tree. Her face was like the bright hopeful smile of a small animal basking in a sunbeam.
‘Yes, yes. Okay,’ he finally said.
José grinned. Perhaps for this short moment, he felt happy.
Chapter Thirty-nine
The first thing that I saw when I opened my eyes was Mercedes’ body, dappled in the light coming through the blinds. The sheet was pulled up just to the top of her bottom. Within a minute the troops were deployed. I was twenty-four, what can I say? I rubbed her shoulders then ran my tongue down the perfect curve of her back. I moved down farther, farther, pushing aside the covers. I kept going down. Two hours later, Mercedes was a bundle of cuddles, caresses and kisses. You know women. Even if they deny it, there isn’t a one who doesn’t like a rumble early in the morning, still wrapped up in sleepy smell, drowsy. I need two cups of coffee and a cigarette before I can shake that thick feeling.
Alfonso had been pacing the kitchen for three hours while doña Pepa, her upper arms undulating like laundry in the breeze, had swept and was cutting zucchini into a pot on the fire.
‘Sleep well?’ she asked.
Alfonso growled a response then sat across from me and scraped at the sugar on the bottom of his cup with a spoon.
‘I’m leaving tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m going to find Ana María.’
I tried to discourage him, and then Mercedes tried, and then her mother. But it was usel
ess. He was stubborn as a mule. And nothing we could say was going to stop him. He was obsessed.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘what I have to do.’
‘But the state you’re in now, you can’t tell shit from jam,’ I argued.
He looked at me angrily, and maybe with envy. ‘You’re a fine one to talk. You’ve got your Mercedes.’
Nothing doing. He had to go. And we kept trying to convince him otherwise, until we were interrupted by a little voice coming from the other room – Mamma. Mamma.
There she was. María. About six or seven years old. Her pyjamas hung off her skinny body. She was darker than Mercedes and her features were coarser, but her eyes were exactly like her mother’s.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Who are you?’ she spat.
‘I’m Laureano and this is Alfonso.’
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Soon,’ I answered with a lump in my throat. ‘Don’t worry. Soon.’
Alfonso was true to his word. He left that same evening promising he’d be back sooner or later. But where was I going to go? The war had been my life. I didn’t have anything else. The only thing I had in the world, Mercedes, was near me now. Everything else was a flurry of heavy, fat clouds, racing through my head and gnawing at my thoughts. I spent the days absorbed in nostalgia, and lived there like a prisoner. I helped doña Pepa in the kitchen, and only left the house at night when I went out into the courtyard to get some air before I dived back under the covers with Mercedes. Little by little I was trying to win over María. Easier said than done. She played pranks, she made horrifying faces whenever she saw me, when she fell and hurt herself she’d tell doña Pepa that I’d got angry and hit her. Not a day went by that she didn’t ask me when I was leaving, when I’d stop bothering her, and when I’d leave her mother alone. I wanted to tell her to go to hell, but then I’d think about her misfortunes and I’d smile idiotically instead. I was worse than Judas.
‘I’m leaving soon,’ I’d say. ‘I told you I was leaving. Don’t you believe me?’
Meanwhile I was doing everything I could to find out what her story was. You know? I couldn’t just keep doubting Mercedes, letting my imagination eat me up. Then I’d go into a panic thinking about what Mercedes might tell me. I tried to find out from doña Pepa, but she just turned her eyes to the ceiling and shook her head. ‘My son,’ she’d say. And that was it. End of discussion. Until one night I finally gathered my courage and asked outright. We were in bed, just like the old times – maybe with an extra hint of melancholy – but good too. Every time we did it, every time I’d take her from behind on all fours, her face smashed into the pillow, we both went crazy. She seemed even more satisfied than usual one night, and told me for the first time that she loved me and so I took advantage of the occasion. The moon was high and the room shone with a pale milky light.
‘If you don’t want to answer, you don’t have to,’ I started, struggling to find the right words. ‘But I’d like to know about María, and well . . . who her father is?’
Mercedes sat right up and grabbed for the cigarettes on the nightstand. She sat at the edge of the bed and lit one. The room was silent and I could only see her back, the cigarette smoke drawing curlicues in the dark. A cloud must have passed in front of the moon just then, because it suddenly got darker and the shadows loomed heavily.
‘I’ll tell you,’ she said. ‘But then I never ever want to talk about it again. Understood?’
I nodded yes, my head still sunk into the pillow. What an ass. As if she could see me nod in the darkness. She wasn’t even looking at me. But she must have understood my silence, because she went on in a low voice.
‘She’s my husband Francisco’s daughter. The fascist.’
Mercedes was near tears as she told me what had happened. It was a night like this one, August, four years before, soon after the war started. From the beginning he treated her badly. Beat her every night on earth. Yelled at her, called her a whore and a dirty communist, hurled the worst kinds of insults and humiliated her. Mercedes had come to loathe him and was already thinking about how she could get out of the marriage. But these were things that you thought about, or said just to say them. But that one evening she came home early and saw enough. Enough so that she grabbed María and took her to the kitchen and then came back with a gun.
‘The baby,’ she said. ‘The baby was undressed and he was jerking off in front of her. That’s it. Do you hear what I’m saying? Later, after María was in bed, I brought his body down to the courtyard. I told everyone that the comrades had ambushed him. Everything was so confused in that period, and they believed me. That’s it. That’s everything. Hug me now. I want to sleep.’
A great silence fell over the room. Some time passed and then a breeze started making the shutters knock against the wall, and then a storm blew up and made the windows rattle. It was a while before I could take her gently in my arms, hug her, run my fingers through her hair. It was a while before sleep came.
Chapter Forty
If Benjamin had more time, that sunset would have been an enduring memory. Looking out the train window, he had the mysterious impression that he was already looking at a memory. He felt strangely nostalgic for the red, mauve, violet sky stretching out over the Camargue, for the black-rimmed clouds streaking with jagged colour, for the rose puffs, leaden in the bloody light over the plain and the marshes, the horizon and the sea. The country was drenched in an encroaching shadow, and then there was nothing but darkness and the city lights flashing out at him as the train bounced wearily south. Benjamin, Henny Gurland and her son didn’t talk. It was easier like that and they all needed to rest. Walter curled up on the hard wood bench and fell asleep late in the night, his emotions twisting and turning in him. He thought they might break him – the missed opportunities, all that he’d lost in this world, and in other potential worlds, everything that teamed at the margins of his life. He slept soundly without dreaming, like a drunk, until he felt José’s hand softly touching his shoulder.
‘Wake up, Doctor Benjamin. We should be coming into Port-Vendres now.’
It wasn’t even light out when they got off the train, wrapped up in their coats, their breath visible. To the south, where the Pyrenees blocked the horizon, there was a faint luminous line, as if some god had been entertaining himself by doodling the silhouette of the mountain range with neat, pen strokes.
‘Now you wait for me here. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’
Looking back into the lobby as he left, he could see Henny Gurland slowly pacing the floor, hugging her black bag to her chest, her shoulders sloping. A shadow in the pale light. Day rose gradually as Benjamin walked. Pink, white, blue houses emerged from the shadows, teetering on the cobblestones leading out to the sea, which was still, purplish and smooth as velvet. Benjamin had forgotten how peaceful the world could be. Then two solders patrolling the main road passed, reminding him that he was in France, he was Jewish, and they had to escape.
It was still early when he knocked at the door of the garret room where Lisa Fittko was sleeping. She batted her eyes in the grey half-light that filtered in through the window. That soft knock again. She thought it must be the neighbours’ daughter. She rose groggily and went to the door.
‘Who is it?’ she struggled to say.
‘Gnädige Frau.’
It wasn’t the girl. The Gestapo? Or the border guards? Lisa rubbed her eyes when instead she found standing in her doorway an elderly man, his necktie tight around the collar of a dirty shirt, a grimy threadbare jacket and filthy trousers. It took her a minute to realise that Walter Benjamin was standing before her.
‘Gnädige Frau,’ he said, swallowing his words and rocking back and forth on his heels. ‘Forgive the intrusion. I hope that this isn’t a bad time.’
Old Benjamin. The world was falling apart and yet he still clung to his courtly ways.
‘Ihr Herr Gemahl,’ he said. ‘Your husband told me where to find you. He al
so told me that you’d help me cross the border.’
There was no doubt that Benjamin wasn’t lying. Only Hans would have stuck her in that kind of situation. He was the only one who could be so sure that she’d find a way to sort it all out. Walter stood in her doorway, his head lowered and his glasses sliding down his nose.
‘Okay,’ said Lisa. ‘Let me get ready. Wait for me down at the bistro in the market square.’
Her nervous hands, the hard lines in her face, her sharp curiosity – Benjamin realised quickly that Lisa was a decisive and resolute woman. After she had dressed, walked to the square and had a coffee, the two walked leisurely arm in arm down the street, trying to avoid looking suspicious. Although, by then, Port-Vendres had seen hundreds of fugitives pass through and the people of the town harboured no hostility toward them. A clingy slow wind was blowing but the scattered clouds in the sky didn’t stir. They hovered over the mountain peaks, stuck in an almost pristine blue.
‘My husband,’ said Lisa with a smile, ‘certainly does get me into sticky situations. But he’s always right in the end. Though there was no way he could have known that I had already found a route into Spain.’
Benjamin didn’t answer. He walked next to her, staring at his shoes, or lifting his head now and again to take in the warm air. Meanwhile, she explained that two days earlier she’d heard about the Lister Trail from Monsieur Azéma, the mayor of Banyuls-sur-mer, a nearby town.
‘He’s quite a man, an old socialist who spent hours with me going over everything to the last detail. He said that the old road that runs near the Cerbère cemetery has become dangerous. Over the past few months many people have used it, but now there are agents of the Kundt Commission patrolling that route.’
‘And so?’
They reached the beach, where the sea was beating slowly against the shore. There was no one there. Just the sour smell of seaweed washed in by the tide to die. Benjamin sat on an overturned boat, stuck his hands in his pockets and crossed his legs.