by Jay Parini
“You must be the last Jew in Paris!”
“Please,” he said. “May I come in? I would like to sit down.”
Julie closed the door and put her arms around him. She kissed him gently on the forehead. Although their romantic affiliations had ended, they maintained a small ritual of intimacy on these occasions. Once, only the year before, this ritual had led to sexual intercourse, quite unexpectedly, but that was the exception.
“Have you eaten?”
“A little, in the café. But I am still hungry.”
“Then you will join me,” she said, with the firm expectation of obedience typical of a good headmistress. “I hate to eat alone.” Within a few minutes, she put down before him a large bowl of broth thickened with onions, carrots, and bits of pale yellow celery; fragments of chicken floated to the surface when he stirred. An open bottle of Bordeaux sat on the table, and Julie expected him to help himself.
“Paris is not itself,” he said, swirling the wine in his glass. “Everywhere, the people seem restless.”
“Haven’t you seen the placards?” Julie asked. “You don’t look around you, do you? For you, politics is theoretical.”
“But not history,” said Benjamin, between slurps. “History is real enough.” He turned to the soup again. “You must excuse my etiquette,” he said. “My mother used to scold me about bad manners. One never outgrows these habits.”
“There are placards everywhere,” Julie said. “All ressortissants allemands must report to the military for transportation to special camps. It’s what they call protective custody. If you choose to disobey, you will find yourself in prison. They are not joking, Walter.”
Benjamin’s face registered no impression. “I am not a German citizen,” he said, “as you well know. I’m a refugee in flight, an anti-Nazi. What could they possibly want with someone like me? If they arrest me, they will have to feed me. I will be a drain on their economy.”
“Even the Austrians, the ones who fled the Anschluss, must report,” she said. “They aren’t picking and choosing. Everybody with the slightest connection to the Reich….” Her voice trailed off into a vapor of hopelessness, a kind of breathless sigh. She knew there was no point in talking to him about this. Benjamin would do as he pleased. “To the French,” she explained, “all German-speaking émigrés are the enemy, les sales boches. They despise the German accent, so anyone with the slightest trace of it must be a spy.”
Benjamin said in a high, thin voice: “I have a hard time believing the same nation that produced Voltaire and Montaigne could be overrun by such pettiness and…stupidity.” He tipped his chair back, precariously, as if daring fate to hurl him to the floor and break his neck.
“Philosophy aside, you will have to report,” she said. “But they will sort out the good Germans from the Reichsdeutsche pretty quickly. You had best go along with them.” She reached across the table to touch his hand. “Don’t let them think you are hiding something.”
Benjamin gazed into her eyes, chewing slowly, almost gingerly, as if the food contained hard foreign objects; he sipped the wine and let a whole mouthful seep into his gums before swallowing. “It’s all quite insane,” he said. “Preposterous! Let them come for me, if that is their wish. I will not condone their paranoia.”
Julie swept her hair to one side, and he saw again how lovely her face was, with a straight, small nose, her lips pale and pink. Her eyes burned distantly, like moons on early winter mornings. Unexpectedly, he wanted to make love to her again, to feel the length of her beneath him, and her heels digging into his back. He reached for her leg under the table, and she let him slide his hand up to her panties.
“It would be far worse if the Germans got you,” she said, touching his face as if it were a piece of Limoges. “You know what they are like. You grew up among them.”
“Let them take me to prison,” he said. “It will be their punishment. Also, I’m quite heavy, as you know. Hard to carry.” He pulled close to her and began to nibble her ear.
“Most of the men have already gone,” Julie said. “It’s a little crazy that you should be here. I don’t see how you’ve survived this long. You remember Hans Fittko—the man who introduced us?”
Benjamin nodded. The Fittkos had been on the periphery of his consciousness for several years, and he had once visited them at their small flat in Montmartre, at the intersection of the rue Norvins, the rue des Saules, and the rue St-Rustique: a crossroads painted several times by Utrillo. Benjamin admired the paintings more than the actual site. It was curious, he thought, how one loved reality in reflection more than in its unmediated form. Life without art would be too bare, too unadorned.
“I saw Lisa yesterday,” Julie continued. “Apparently Hans has been taken to a camp in the south. She is to report to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, for relocation.”
“Impossible!”
“My dear Walter, you don’t read the newspapers, do you?”
“The news is far too depressing, and in any case I prefer Baudelaire.”
Julie stood to allow him to unlatch her belt, and her skirt fell to her ankles. Benjamin slipped her panties down as well.
“I find Baudelaire just as depressing,” she said, letting him kiss her stomach. “The Germans are on the outskirts of Paris, you know. Thousands of troops. I heard the artillery fire last night. If they get their hands on you…well, who knows? I cannot imagine you in those camps, Walter.”
Benjamin stood to embrace her. He kissed her lips, then paused. “They will murder me, I suspect. It is part of their program, and I don’t really object.”
“How can you say that?”
“They have already murdered thousands of Jews. The whole world knows this. My sister-in-law, Hilde, has written to me about these things. And my brother, Georg…is missing.”
“Is he alive?”
He shrugged. His expression, for the first time, betrayed a feeling of hopelessness, a sense of ruin. He already considered himself among the names of the lost. “The situation has become impossible.”
“Nonsense,” she said, opening her mouth to his deep kisses.
They fell back onto the purple couch, and Benjamin made love to her quickly. He was always like that: pouncing, never lingering. When he was finished, he quickly pulled on his trousers and sat beside her. She lay back, naked, watching him coolly. A cigarette dangled from her lips.
Benjamin lit the cigarette, then took one for himself from her pack.
“I will miss you, Walter,” she said, exhaling the smoke.
Benjamin leaned forward and touched her cheek. “The sad thing is I have not finished my work here. I had so many plans.” His eyebrows twitched in a way that told his excitement. “May I read you something? I think it will interest you.”
Julie sat back with her arms folded, her back stiff: a rather masculine posture that reminded him of Asja. He used to read to her in the evenings on Capri, and she would sit with her arms crossed like that, in passive judgment.
“I have this marvelous picture in my flat,” Benjamin said. “You remember it?”
“The Klee?”
“Yes.”
“It’s a peculiar image,” she said. “One doesn’t forget it so easily.”
He dug a manuscript from his briefcase and sat beside her, close. He bent near the page to discern his tiny handwriting, which transversed the page in a crabwise scrawl. “A Klee painting called ‘Angelus Novus,’ ” he read, slowly but distinctly, “shows an angel looking as if he were about to move away from something he is gazing at with steady concentration. His eyes stare ahead, his mouth hangs open, his wings are outstretched. This is how one might visualize the angel of history. His face is fixed on the past, and where we may see a chain of events, he perceives a single catastrophe that continually heaps wreckage upon wreckage, and that hurls this wreckage at his feet. The ang
el may wish to stay, to waken the dead, to restore what has been ruined. But a gale is blowing in from Paradise; it has caught its wings so violently that the angel can no longer fold them. The gale sucks him backward into the future, the wreckage still piling skyward before his eyes. This gale is called progress.”
After a long pause, Julie said, “That is very sad, Walter, but quite beautiful.”
“History has failed us,” Benjamin said. “But I was unrealistic, I suppose. I thought everything would happen differently.”
Julie watched him intently. She could only just comprehend that such a creature lived and breathed, so eccentric and lovable.
Benjamin continued: “You remember what Kafka said. ‘Yes, there is hope, lots of hope. But not for us.’ ”
Julie stroked his hair now, but Benjamin seemed not to notice. His mind plowed itself up, churning in the moment’s mud. Suddenly, he began to cry. She had never before seen him cry.
“Are you all right, Walter?”
“I must go home,” he said. He began to button his shirt now and to search for his tie. “My sister is waiting for me. She will be worried.”
“You have probably frightened her to death, making her stay in Paris. Take her away quickly.”
Benjamin still did not, or could not, hear this. “Where could we go?” he said. “I have only my flat, a few belongings. But everything I love is here.”
“Get to Marseilles—before it’s closed. There are ships leaving every day, but not for long.”
“I don’t want to leave France.”
“But you must!”
Benjamin sighed. “Everything is ruined,” he said. “I don’t see the point.”
“You must not talk like that. The Americans will join the war. It’ll be over in a few months, but you must not do anything stupid in the meantime.”
He smiled. “This will be difficult for me, as you know.” He rose slowly to put on the rest of his clothes, and Julie put on a bathrobe. In moments, he was standing in the doorway, his tie in place, his briefcase suspended from one hand. He felt like a stray bird in a windstorm, blown from limb to limb. There was nowhere to rest for long, and no comfort in the world.
“Have you had enough to eat?” Julie wondered. “You never finished your soup.”
“You are better than soup,” he said.
She put her arms around his neck, close enough to smell his breath. “I will miss you,” she whispered, letting her chin rest on his shoulder.
“You are very dear, Julie, and kind as well.”
“Write to me, Walter. Wherever you go.”
She went to a drawer and took out an envelope of money, and she tucked a wad of bills into Benjamin’s pocket.
“You’ve already given me so much,” he said, scarcely protesting. “I don’t feel that I can take this.”
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Are you sure?”
She nodded, letting him kiss her formally on either cheek. In her heart of hearts, she believed she would never see him again, not in this life, and she needed every ounce of energy not to break into loud sobs. He would have hated sobs.
Benjamin pushed blindly onto the dark landing, his steps uncertain, his head throbbing from the wine, the exertion of sex. As he climbed down the staircase, he could feel himself falling into a pit. The ground—terra firma, the literal and unimagined world—seemed impossible and far away, a point in space and time he could never reach, not in a million years. He would get to the bottom of this winding stair only to find himself face to face with the Minotaur, who would devour him.
WALTER BENJAMIN
The people cooped up in Germany today can no longer see the contours of the human personality. Every free man strikes them as an eccentric. Imagine for a moment the peaks of the high Alps silhouetted not against the bright sky but against folds of dark drapery. The mighty forms would show up only dimly. In exactly this way a heavy curtain shuts off the sky in this abominable country, and we can no longer see profiles of even the greatest men.
3
LISA FITTKO
Dear Hans,
I miss you, darling, wherever you are. As I write, I am hoping you are alive. I know you are. You are not the sort they can kill so easily.
I’m writing from Gurs. You know Gurs, near Oloron, where we sent letters to friends in the Brigade? Didn’t Lars used to call it “the Gurs Inferno”? He liked to exaggerate, of course, to make things sound more dangerous, more exotic. I’ve been here for several weeks, and it’s nothing like Dante. More like Hell in that painting you once showed me, “A Garden of Earthly Delights.” What was the painter’s name? Since coming here, my memory has played dreadful tricks. I can barely recall my own name some days.
It’s part of their strategy, perhaps. To try to make you forget the past. To become a number, not a name. It’s much easier to manage people who do not know themselves or their past. History does not exist here. There is only the moment, which dangles like a lightbulb from a fraying cord, unshielded and ugly. There is no hint of a future here, either: that glint of hope pulling us forward in time. The word tomorrow has dropped from our vocabulary. We live in the present, which surrounds us like a gunmetal tube, with no light at either end.
Let me try to reassemble what happened, for myself as much as you. Getting the words down will clarify something.
Not long after they took you away, the women were herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver. The police took into custody virtually anyone with a German name or passport or even the slightest connection to the Reich. Blond hair and blue eyes and a straight back would do it! Woe to those of us with an accent!
Paulette and I decided to report together, and we stood in line for almost five hours outside the stadium, waiting to be “processed,” while the guards stared at us like we were diseased cattle.
Some of the women were hysterical and had wild excuses. Such imagination on display! None of us lacked an absolutely irrefutable reason why it was utterly absurd and impossible that she could be under suspicion of any kind.
“I’m a Pole,” one said. “They’ll never intern a Pole! Poland is the enemy of Germany! This doesn’t make any sense!”
“I’ve got a bad heart,” said another. “Feel my pulse! Have you ever felt such a pulse? And my liver is shot. I drink, you see. I’ve been drinking for twenty years! Gin and vodka, the worst stuff in the world. My doctor gives me not months to live, but weeks! Do you hear me, weeks!”
“Look at my swollen ankles,” cried a minuscule woman in a red dress to nobody in particular. “How can they put a woman with ankles like this behind bars?”
“They will never put us in prison,” said another, a woman with hair like a white dandelion puff, her voice quavering with the faint hope of the damned. “There must be ten thousand women here. What jail in Paris could hold so many people? They will let us go. All of us. This whole exercise is pointless—typical French bureaucratic madness.”
These women didn’t seem to understand that each individual case is just one small part of the greater case called History. We are all the daughters of Ruth, aliens in time.
The criblage, as they called it, was being done by this garlicky police commissioner, who interviewed me with Paulette, assuming we were sisters. I am my own worst enemy sometimes, Hans, as you have noticed more than once. I said to the man, “You asshole, I’m not a German! Look at my papers! Do these look like the papers of a German?”
This wasn’t clever of me, but I knew they were interning the lot of us anyway, so it hardly mattered what I said. It was important to let off steam.
“I decide who is a German and who is not,” he said, grunting with a short cigar pinched between his lips, the tobacco juice drooling onto his chin. Of course, he didn’t even glance at my papers. I was a wiseguy, so dangerous. A white-haired guard with bad l
ungs took me away, wheezing through a cough; he was a good fellow and said it would “all be over soon enough.” For him, I suspect, it will be.
You know, Hans, it still amazes me how many of the people I thought were friends have proven fickle. Is it just human nature? You remember Mme. Girard, with the frizzy hair and blue shadow on her cheeks? The bearded landlady? I ran into her in the street, only a day or so before leaving Paris, and she pretended she didn’t even know me! As if I hadn’t taken her mother to the hospital in a taxi only a month before! I was shocked, but I guess it was silly of me. I keep wanting to believe the human race is finer, more altruistic and generous, than it really is.
The scene in the Vél d’Hiv, Hans…How to describe it? You could easily think you were listening to the cries of a slaughterhouse behind the black iron gates at the west end of the stadium, where most of the older women had been led to a glass-roofed section by the time night fell. I was glad to sleep out under the stars, where I felt free and happy. But those poor women…Nobody laid a hand on them, but suddenly the weight of their situation became clear; the reality hit them in the face. They were not ready. Who can be?
Paulette, bless her, had come prepared. You know Paulette. Toothbrush, a pot with a handle for cooking, two spoons, lipstick, and razors. (The razors were our safety net, in case there was no other way out.) We slept on loose tufts of hay provided, so the rumors went, “by the Americans.” What Americans? Why do they get all the credit these days, when they do nothing but sit on their isolationist asses, as usual? Paulette swore the hay came from a Jewish relief organization run by a friend of hers, but I didn’t believe that, either. There is no way of separating truth from untruth in times of war: Rumors are everything, and you cling to them for consolation and for hope. They are like small footbridges that span the moments; without them, we would all be lost.
Paulette is such a schoolgirl, laughing at everything, even snickering. That pug nose of hers, and the freckles, and the way she shakes her hair into place—all so adolescent. Perhaps because I’ve known her for so long, I no longer even notice the eccentricities. Friendship is like that: You ignore those excesses of character that a stranger might find disagreeable.
