by Jay Parini
“Another coffee, monsieur?”
Benjamin looked up from his notebooks, wearily; he was exhausted now, mentally and physically. Sometimes it was painfully awkward to fight through the scrim of thoughts that he had drawn, meticulously, around his consciousness over the past decade. All gestures from the outside world felt like incursions, and were unwelcome. “Coffee?”
“Would you like another cup of coffee?”
“Ah, coffee!”
The waiter shifted from foot to foot, trying to fathom what Benjamin had meant; then he left. He had, by now, grown accustomed to this customer’s odd ways.
Benjamin tapped his fingers on the tablecloth. It had been several weeks since he sent his essay on Baudelaire to New York. He hoped his friend Max Horkheimer would soon get back to him, perhaps with good news, although it worried him that Max had showed an edge of coolness in his letters for several years now. Benjamin himself considered it harder to reject than to be rejected, so he appreciated Max’s situation, which he interpreted as the necessary coolness of all editors. Nevertheless, the essay was brilliant. He knew it was brilliant, and it was distressing that Max had not responded quickly.
If the article was accepted, a little money might be forthcoming—something beyond the pitiful stipend that had sustained him, more or less, for some years. His situation had never been so precarious, not even during those first years in Paris, when he lived on next to nothing. Had he not borrowed a sum of money last month from Julie Farendot, he wasn’t sure where he would be. Julie’s loan had made it possible for him to eat at all, and now that money was gone, too.
He gazed out the window as a large military truck scattered a bank of pigeons, which ascended in a cloud and settled among the pearl-and-black frieze of a building, blending in perfectly; when several of them fluttered in the air, it seemed as if part of the facade were flaking into wings. This image, or series of images, brought to Benjamin’s mind the philosophy of Heraclitus, who believed all nature was flux. Everything changes, so there is no point in resting one’s hope on any given moment; there were no good and bad times, only changing times. He admonished himself for his own reluctance to admit change, for the way he clung to whatever in life happened to seem familiar and comforting at any given moment.
The linden trees along the curbside were beginning to turn pale yellow, riffling like pages in the wind. The air itself was cold today, unseasonable. It was June, after all—a time for blowzy winds and languorous hours, with no hint of metamorphosis. A time for disguise and false hope. Benjamin would have liked even a little false hope. The knife-edged breezes of autumn should still be gathering far away, on the Russian steppes, far from the long slow burn of a Parisian summer.
But everything was different these days, ominous and out of sorts. You could trust nothing and no one. “There are German spies everywhere,” Dora warned him. “You must be careful!” But what was he supposed to do about these spies? Stab them? Turn them over to the authorities? Pursue them down blank alleyways like a character in some film noir thriller? The peculiar melodrama of this moment in history bored him to death. His attraction to Marxist dialectics notwithstanding, he longed for the stasis of some ancien régime, a world of predictable circumstances and reassuring conventions.
All eyes swung to the entrance, where a tall, rather imposingly handsome military policeman appeared with several underlings in tow. He wore black leather gloves, which he meticulously removed while scanning the room, as if looking for someone. Benjamin knew that “aliens” like himself were being rounded up and sent to “relocation centers,” supposedly for their own protection, and he dipped his eyes to the floor. Under no circumstances would he consent to this kind of relocation.
He fumbled to close his notebook, as if he had written something illicit. The mâitre d’ seemed quite dizzy with excitement, motioning to the waiter who had served Benjamin. They exchanged whispers, and then the waiter came to Benjamin’s table.
“I am terribly sorry, but we need this table,” he said.
“Ah, yes,” Benjamin said. “I understand.” But he did not understand. In the past decade of his life in Paris, he had never been dislodged from a café table. It just didn’t happen.
As he left, Benjamin caught the officer’s eyes; they were strangely remote, as if without pupils. He had once read a cheap French novel about a race of aliens who invaded the world; their only distinguishing nonhuman characteristic was their eyes, which had no pupils.
Benjamin put his head down and stepped outside, into the cool air. A hollowness filled his chest, and he noticed—much to his horror—that his hands were shaking visibly. What was wrong with him these days? Was forty-eight such a vast age that he should tremble and quake like an elderly gentleman? In the evenings, he could actually feel the energy dribbling through his mesh of consciousness, draining him of motivation. His heart was very bad, he knew; he could not walk ten minutes without gasping, and even the three flights of steps leading to his flat at the end of the rue Dombasle had become an obstacle. If he could afford it, he would see a doctor soon. There was a man in the rue de Payenne who specialized in heart patients, and he would go to see him as soon as a check came from New York.
His apartment was bare, unpleasantly so. Indeed, its single adornment was a chipped mahogany desk with a leather top, which once belonged to his father, Emil Benjamin. His brother, Georg, had managed to ship it from Berlin just before the Nazis took him under “protective custody” in 1933. Five years later, Benjamin had written sadly to Gretel Adorno: “My brother has been transferred to the penitentiary at Wilsnak, where he is forced to work at building roads. I believe life there remains bearable. The great threat for people in his situation is, I’m told by German friends, the concentration camp, which is where they take long-term prisoners. It is most distressing, although perhaps Georg is safer in these camps than on the front.” It was distressing that Georg could not write to him and he could not write to Georg. He had tried many times, but the letters were mostly returned, and there was no reason to believe that the few that had not been returned had gotten through.
Walking the streets on the Left Bank this morning, Benjamin noticed the tension in the faces that passed him; he heard the mad blowing of horns in the streets and the intemperate shouts of passersby. All night, sirens blew at the city’s distant periphery. Perhaps I am wrong, Benjamin said to himself. Perhaps the Germans really are coming? He wondered how he could have done this to Dora, who counted on him. His sister-in-law, Hilde, had written urging him to leave, and Scholem, in Jerusalem, had warned him many times. “Get out while you can,” he wrote only last month. Adorno, Horkheimer, and even Brecht had tried to get him out of Paris. “Go to America! Go to Portugal! Go to Cuba!” they screamed in their letters. But who can leave Paris so easily? If Adorno and Horkheimer had been serious, why had they not sent money, and why not several years ago, when it would have been easy to leave France?
Of course, he would have left only with profound reluctance. Paris was the universal library, a vast reading room, and a boudoir so cruelly seductive that it had trapped him and nearly everyone who came under its spell. At night, sleepless, he imagined himself in its arms as a fire burned in the cracked marble fireplace at the far end of his bedroom. He dreamed of being surrounded by swelling cushions, sleek skins, and knickknacks of tinted glass and china—rather like Balzac in his private chambers. A silver vase on the mantel sprouted the ten lilies of the city’s coat-of-arms, and there were books, sets of books everywhere in elegant buckram covers, row upon gold-lettered row.
Paris was also a particular library, one that he knew like a blind man knows his own house. For much of the past decade he had sat in the same chair at the same polished table in the Bibliothèque Nationale, in the brilliant shelter of its famous reading room, which had been designed by Henri Labrouste, libertine and architect laureate of the Second Empire. Its nine domes, colorful en
ameled tiles, and cast-iron columns emulated the chambers of the ideal mind, the mind in glorious contemplation of eternity. For a decade he had worked there, reading and writing, often in an attitude akin to prayer; he had waited, with infinite patience, as if a voice might speak to him as light flooded in overhead, huge pillaring beams that caught a billion dust motes in their bright atomic dance.
One reason he especially liked the reading room was that it recalled the ornate synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse in Berlin. He would go there for refuge as a teenager, not to worship but to sit and think. Built in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a place removed from the chaos of his life; a place where the holy lingered, undogmatic, even unassertive. Its vast Oriental dome had been the wonder of European Jewry. This temple of tolerance proclaimed to all the world: Yes, the Jews of Germany are acceptable people after all! The neo-Gothic facade seemed to swear the allegiance of Germany and Judaism.
Berlin was, after all, the city where Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Lessing had strolled arm in arm together in their long cashmere coats through the manicured, well-ordered parks, discussing metaphysics and aesthetics. Think of what German culture owed to Heine and Börne, to Egon Friedell and dozens of other playwrights, composers, poets, and painters! All were Jews, and all were Germans.
It had been a melancholy day when Benjamin’s cousin Hannah wrote to him in the autumn of 1938 to say that the synagogue had been destroyed, burned to the ground by crazed nationalists who did not understand that Germany had room enough for all. “There is no hope for us now,” Hannah had written, much to Benjamin’s despair and disbelief, “none whatsoever.”
Benjamin blended into the Parisian crowd, anxious and alert as more army vehicles passed in the streets, making the ground shudder. Indeed, a terrifying phalanx of soldiers crossed the Pont Neuf, and Benjamin paused to listen to their boots drumming, drumming. An elderly woman in a black shawl stood beside the bridge, weeping, and he went up to her.
“Is there anything I can do, madame?”
She looked at him curiously. “What is that?”
“May I assist you in some way?”
The woman stared at him, uncomprehending, and Benjamin merely tipped his hat and withdrew. He realized that he did not understand the French as a people, though he had been living in Paris for more than a decade; perhaps he would never understand them.
Now he rushed toward a stalled trolley, with its antennae poised awkwardly above its black-and-white exoskeleton. As he got within several yards, it sped away. “Stop!” he cried feebly, then bent forward to catch his breath. His heart seemed abruptly huge and violent, ripping through his chest, and pains rippled down his forearms. He noticed three small boys nearby, laughing at him, their cheeks smudged and pinched. One of them, whose features gathered on his face like fungus, stuck out his tongue, and Benjamin noticed with horror that it was covered with dark splotches. Was this whole nation suddenly diseased? Were even the children tainted?
Julie Farendot lived nearby, on the rue de Buci, and he decided to visit her before going home. It was like this in Paris: You set off in one direction and found yourself moving in another. Impossible to decide on a course of action. Everything in Paris caught the eye, beckoned, enticed with options. It would take the mind of Descartes, with its steely focus, to plunge forward unabashed amid such plenitude; or the heart of Balzac, which could take in everything and give it back in kind. Benjamin was neither Descartes nor Balzac, though he could once in a great while understand what lay behind these different kinds of genius. He had those unusual powers of empathy afforded only the rarest of critics, and he knew it. What he needed now was time to finish his masterwork and to assemble a collection of his best essays on literary and cultural topics. There was so much good work ahead of him: on Baudelaire, on Brecht. But where would he get the time, now that everyone seemed intent upon pushing him away from the library, and Paris?
Even today, in turmoil, Paris beckoned enticingly. It was somehow above and beyond the pettiness of war. It was the city of arcades, that dazzling consumer invention which had been the subject of his research for over a decade. He recalled his original enthusiasm for the arcades project, recorded in a letter to Scholem. The arcades, he said, were “the embodiment of the collective dream of French society.” And this dream would necessarily be unsatisfying. The desires and longings of human society may have found expression in this materialistic glitter, but they had done so in such a repressed, censored, and displaced way that it could never have been satisfying for anyone. This kind of involuntary, collective dreamwork kept the nation, as a whole, from waking to its fullest expression. It left it prey to spiritual aliens, who would trample on their dreams.
Asja Lacis—the only woman he had ever loved so intensely—would say to him, liltingly, “My dear Walter, a classless society is the ideal. A society where justice prevails. You know that very well. I don’t know why you fuss so.” It was just like her, to dwell on his fussing. He was, at heart, convinced that the economy should not rule, or consume, people’s lives. A line from Max Horkheimer kept returning to him: “The blind sentence passed by the economy, that mightier social power which condemns the greater part of mankind to senseless wretchedness and crushes countless human talents, is accepted as inevitable and recognized in practice in the conduct of men.”
“You are an artist, Walter,” Asja would say to him. “You, unlike the rest of us, are free.”
But Horkheimer was right on this, too: “Individuality, the true factor in artistic creation and judgment, consists not in idiosyncrasies and crotchets but in the power to withstand the plastic surgery of the prevailing economic system which carves all men to one pattern.”
“You stand alone, Walter,” Asja would flatter.
“I wish it were so,” he would say. “But I do not have the strength of a major artist. I am not a poet. My stories are incomplete, a maze of false starts. Even my essays are unfinished.”
Benjamin had visited her in Moscow in the winter of 1926, hoping to ignite their romance, to come to permanent rest in her love. He wanted a lover who shared his political ideals and who understood his spiritual project. But a peculiar distance seemed to grow between them whenever they discussed serious matters. Her Marxism was oddly unfocused, uncomplicated. She just bought the Party line, which he inevitably found embarrassing. Indeed, he could not help smirking when she introduced him to her Soviet friends as Comrade Benjamin.
His old friend Scholem had his own ready answer to the question of what fullest expression might be. “The restoration of a messianic kingdom—tikkun,” he would say. It was a lovely concept, tikkun. But what Gerhard (who now called himself Gershom) Scholem meant by restoration was so filtered through a library of arcane works on Kabbalah that Benjamin could not approach it without a feeling of unease. It would take Scholem a lifetime to understand the concept himself, so what chance was there that he, Benjamin, could glean its essence? Perhaps if he learned Hebrew and settled down to a proper course of study, these hesitations would vanish….But that dream, like many others, had dissipated. He would never learn Hebrew and would never, in fact, see Jerusalem. Worse yet, he doubted that the world would ever be repaired in his lifetime.
* * *
—
Benjamin fought his way through vendors and pushed open the iron gate at 17 rue de Buci, turning in to a damp courtyard that smelled of laundry and stale garbage. He stepped over a broken tricycle and climbed several flights of dark stairs to Julie Farendot’s flat.
He recalled that day, perhaps five years before, when he was introduced to Julie in the Café Dôme by Hans Fittko and his wife, Lisa. The Fittkos were omnipresent in left intellectual circles in the late thirties in Paris; they had ludicrous energy and were perpetually organizing protests against Hitler or gathering money to be sent to undercover anti-fascist groups in Austria or Germany. Julie and Lisa had worked closely on a pamphlet urging the
French to organize against Hitler before it was too late—an essay that Benjamin had read (and dismissed as impracticable) even before he met Julie.
Only a week or so after their meeting in the Dôme, he saw her in the library. She was doing research, she said, for an article on the French Revolution as a subject for historical writing. She began talking immediately about Carlyle’s history of the Revolution and his peculiar but compelling version of those shattering years. “I adore Carlyle,” she insisted, “even when he is wrong. He is so fierce. I love fierceness.”
Benjamin, who was never himself fierce, objected. “Carlyle was the worst sort of Englishman—dogmatic, rude, and megalomaniac. The London clubs are full of such people.”
This mild opposition was apparently enough to win her heart. She invited him back to her flat that afternoon, and he had no sooner closed the door behind them than he found himself unbuttoning her blouse. She was thirty-one, with tight little breasts like Asja’s, and slim hips. Her blond hair spilled in ringlets over her collar. She had the same gray-green eyes and straight teeth. She had everything that Asja had except, alas, a cold, merciless heart, and he missed that. Julie was soft inside, and therefore uninteresting except in the most superficial ways.
He knocked softly on the oak door, sighing. The climb to her flat had been difficult for him, and he felt his heart banging in his throat. He could scarcely breathe.
Julie peered through a crack in the door, keeping the chain latched. In these days, there was no telling who might come.
“Julie?”
“Walter!”
“Am I so frightful?”
“Come in, Walter. I was not expecting you.”
As she opened the door, he tipped his hat and bowed.
