by Jay Parini
While he was walking in the Alps with Grete, he received a postcard from his father which said, simply and enigmatically: “Sapienti sat.” A word to the wise. Assuming this was a note of encouragement, if not a mandate, from his father, he proposed to Grete at once, and she accepted the offer with some befuddlement. It seemed odd that a man who had never kissed her, never even struck a romantic note, should make such a move.
The immediate consequence of the proposal, according to Benjamin, was that Grete allowed him to come straight into bed with her that night. It was his “first time,” he told me. “I was dizzy with erotic desire, and I made love to her for three days straight. We hardly stopped for meals, and she was scarcely able to walk at the end of our holidays.” He continued, in his usual blunt way on this subject, to recount their various postures during intercourse, and her animal responses. It was always odd, listening to Benjamin on this subject; he became clinical, exasperatingly honest. (I am not prudish, mind you. I simply do not kiss and tell. A gentleman does not discuss his sexual activity as though it were a behavioral science.)
Benjamin later discovered, much to his chagrin, that his father had simply been trying to advise his son—in cryptic language that would evade the censors—to remain on neutral territory, in Switzerland, until the war had passed. In the latter years of the war, only the paralyzed could actually count on avoiding conscription.
It took Benjamin two full years to extricate himself from this engagement. The crowbar separating them at last was the aggressive Dora Pollak, who later became Benjamin’s wife and the mother of his only child, Stefan. Dora was lovely to behold: beautiful, quick-witted, worldly. She was taller than Benjamin by four inches, with cascading blond hair and gray-blue eyes. Her full breasts and large hips were in those years nicely contained, even explosively so, though discerning eyes could see a tendency toward the Junoesque. She was passionate, with a quick temper, and her tongue could sting.
Her father was Professor Leon Kellner, an early Zionist and Shakespeare scholar. He was later famous for his edition of the diaries and letters of his Zionist friend, Theodor Herzl. Perhaps I was more impressed by her pedigree than Benjamin, whose attention was almost wholly directed toward her breasts, which he once described as “hanging like exotic fruit from the tree of her body.” He said this in front of her parents, much to my terror and amazement. It was just like him to say the most embarrassing things in public, though in general he was reticent about his feelings.
Benjamin met Dora in Munich, where he had gone after managing ingeniously to fail another physical exam. For many years he had known of her existence, even before her marriage to Max Pollak, a rich financier. She was active in the Youth Movement in Berlin before the war, and she often attended Zionist lectures. I myself had admired her from a distance many times and was eager to make her acquaintance, if only to gain access to her father.
I visited Benjamin several times in Munich, where he lived in a smoky basement flat across from the Holtz gardens. I was there, in fact, in November of 1917, when Franz Kafka was reading to a literary society. The poster announcing his appearance said he would read a story called “In the Penal Colony.” Kafka was never much in the public eye, so this was a rare occasion, but neither I nor Benjamin could attend that night. Given Benjamin’s later obsession with Kafka’s fiction, I’ve often wondered what might have happened had the two actually met. Probably nothing, of course: Both were extremely shy. Men of genius are like massive continents—wholly bounded by water, and discreet. They have very little to say to one another, and it is usually a mistake to bring them together.
The war was going badly for Germany, as everyone except the government seemed to know. Millions had been slaughtered by January 1918, when Benjamin received in the mail a call-up order. He was suddenly reclassified as “fit for light field duty,” which meant he was fit to be lined up before enemy guns without further ado. My own situation was not much different: I had been repeatedly hauled in for reexamination. In those years I suffered from a nervous condition that the military doctors had diagnosed as dementia praecox; this lovely disease meant I could not possibly be subjected to violence on the battlefield, and I was classified as unfit for duty. As one might have expected, my physical condition did not improve, so I never had to lay my body on the line in aid of German nationalism.
As in the past, I spent the night before his latest physical exam with Benjamin, dining with him and his family. We were served, as usual, by servants in black dresses with white lace collars, and we dined on veal and cabbage (even during the war one could, for a price, obtain decent food). Herr Benjamin produced an elegant bottle of Hoch, and cigars were passed around to the men. It pleased me that Herr Benjamin believed that neither I nor his sons should fight in this war.
“It is one thing to lose a war,” he said, “but another to lose a son.”
It always puzzled me that Benjamin himself did not understand his father’s sympathies. I, for example, would have been pleased if my father remotely understood my position on the war, but I was broadly considered a traitor and coward in my own house.
Benjamin and I talked until dawn in the living room, which featured a large Christmas tree decorated with sweets and candles. It was disconcerting to see this blatantly Christian symbol in a Jewish household, but the Benjamin family was no different from most liberal Jewish families in Berlin at this time. When I expressed my feelings on this subject to Benjamin, he chimed in with his father: “Christmas is a national festivity. It is not a religious holiday anymore.” Imagine such nonsense filling the mouths of intelligent men, and Jews!
Much to our horror, Benjamin passed the exam, which took place on a Friday morning, and was ordered to report for duty the following Monday. From what I later discovered, he spent the weekend in seclusion with Dora, who used hypnosis to produce sciaticalike symptoms. A doctor was called in, and he wrote a detailed report saying that his patient had suffered a relapse of an old back ailment and could not possibly be moved without risk of severe injury. A flurry of letters was exchanged, and the army medical board eventually acquiesced; the invalid was given a few months’ reprieve.
Wisely, Benjamin slipped over the border into Switzerland not a week later, and Dora followed. I was at this time studying philosophy and mathematics at the university in Jena, and Benjamin had decided to enroll at the university in Bern for doctoral work. I thought about my friend every day. It was as if an inexplicable force drew me toward him, and I kept wanting to drop everything and cross the border. I wanted his attention and advice, but especially his conversation.
Benjamin invited me to Bern that summer of 1918, just a few months before the Great War ended so ignominiously for Germany, which deserved everything it got. I joined him and Dora for a sojourn that lasted well into the next year. What should have been an idyll of companionship turned rather nastily into something else, although I am still not sure what went wrong. It was not simply a case of my not wanting Dora to come between Benjamin and myself. My brother kept saying this was so, but he knew nothing of the situation. In truth, I came to understand Benjamin much better through his wife. She was a prism, and my friend’s soul-light was all the more radiant when refracted through her. They were married, but still a good deal of courting went on between them—and this included a kind of emotional tug-of-war that looked, from the outside, like hell.
We lived minutes apart by foot in separate apartments on the outskirts of Bern; the village was called Muri—a delightful little place, with a few shops and a school for young children. Chalets dotted the hillside, and the tinkle of goat bells could usually be heard. My bedroom had a big desk in front of the window, and I looked out across a meadow, with snowy peaks in the distance. The sky was invariably blue, or so it seemed. (Memory is a thick gauze that filters out whatever information does not fit, is it not?)
Our arrangement in Muri was potentially cozy for everyone. We wo
uld write and read in the mornings, pursuing our various projects; in the afternoons we would meet for chess or walks in the deep pine wood behind the village; in the evenings we would dine together. I loved to cook in those days, and I prepared some of the best meals of my life for them: an array of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern dishes. I had recently increased my vocabulary of kosher dishes, too, and I tried several of them on my supposedly Jewish friends, who made jokes about my “shtetl kitchen.”
Benjamin and I were not especially similar in temperament, despite our shared intellectual concerns. I was, and remain, fairly high-strung, nervous. I work to the point of exhaustion, then collapse until my energy gathers slowly, then I attack my work again. Benjamin worked steadily, was quite relaxed in general; he could digest terrifying quantities of material, but there was invariably a block when it came to writing. “Leaping the gap from silence into language is so intimidating,” he would say. “Just get it down,” I would tell him. “You can worry about revising later.”
We were both academic renegades in those days, drifting hopefully from one university to another, always looking for the right mentor. It was not easy. German and Swiss universities were spilling over with pompous bores who knew how to strangle the life from any subject, however interesting in itself. I was at dreadfully loose ends, trying to decide whether or not to pursue doctoral studies in the philosophy of mathematics at Jena under Paul Linke, who had been a pupil of Husserl’s.
For his part, Benjamin had used the influence of his father-in-law to enroll at Bern for doctoral work under Richard Herbertz, a colorless and narrow man, but his prospects there did not look good—at least not to me. “One must be practical about these things,” or so Benjamin, the least practical of all men, told me. “Herbertz may be dull, but he is not capricious or evil, so he won’t plot against me. I can do whatever I want, and he will ignore it. In the end, I will get my degree, which is all that matters.”
It amused me to see Benjamin in this mode of worldly wisdom, but it also annoyed me a little. I looked to him for spiritual guidance, not cynicism. No man was ever by nature more ethical, but he could say the most awful things; it was as if, being extraordinarily moral by instinct, he had to counterbalance this with a vein of crude expediency. The awkward question of money, for example, arose one night soon after my arrival, and it kindled our first real argument. I had mentioned that I felt guilty living so well on what was, after all, my father’s money.
Benjamin listened impatiently, drawing slowly on a hand-rolled cigarette. After a lengthy pause, he said, “I am living off my father, too. He bought this very chicken we are now so greedily consuming. He paid for this excellent wine as well. Let’s drink to him!” He and Dora grinned and clinked glasses.
When I refused to participate in their little joke, he scowled at me, saying, “Oh, dear Gerhard. You are suffering from scruples again! It is always a bad sign in people.”
Dora saw my ears go crimson but could not resist fueling the fire. “He is still terribly young,” she said to him. “And idealistic, too.”
“I do not understand,” I said, trying to remain cool. “You are so eager to live like the bourgeoisie, whom you despise. You talk about morality, but look at you….”
“Look at you,” said Dora, turning on me with those diamond-hard eyes of hers, which I had come to fear. “You spend your father’s money just as we do, but somehow you imagine that because it troubles you, you occupy some high moral plane. That’s not only outrageous, it’s conceited.”
“At least I am honest.”
“Nonsense!” Benjamin cried. It was a rare outburst for him, and it quite surprised me. “I’m unhappy to hear such a ridiculous sentence on your lips. You are an intellectual. We are all intellectuals. Our obligation is therefore only to the world of ideas. The money be damned!”
“I’m afraid that’s hypocritical,” I said quietly, “unless I’m mistaken.”
“Then so be it. I feel no need to make my ideas and my life conform to some external law. I am not a rabbi, thank goodness.”
“You make me strangely uncomfortable, Walter,” I said.
He stood, rather grandly. “That is because you are a small boy in your heart, and not a man. When you grow up, you will see that one does what is necessary. The work matters, and nothing else: politics, family, love. You must become ruthless, amoral.”
He was angry now, and perhaps a little drunk. A trifle uncertainly, he poured another glass of wine for himself, swirled it in his glass, sniffed the bouquet, then gulped it down. After smacking his lips, he left the room, tripping as he crossed the threshold.
“He is drunk,” I said to Dora, “and irrational.”
She lowered her eyes rather seductively. “Don’t take his little poses too seriously,” she said. “He should have joined the Yiddish theater.” Her fingers picked at my sleeve—a gesture of intimacy that I thoroughly disliked. “Have another drink with me.”
Reluctantly, I accepted a glass of brandy. They had very good brandy.
Dora suddenly came around behind me to massage my shoulders.
“Relax,” she said. “Why are you so stiff?”
I tried to relax, but she was making it impossible. I took several deep breaths.
“You are very sexy when you get angry,” she whispered in my ear. “Have you ever been with a woman, Gerhard?”
“Yes, of course,” I said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Your belief or disbelief is quite irrelevant,” I said.
Now her hands moved through my hair, and—unwittingly—I began to get an erection.
Suddenly Benjamin called for her. “Dora!” he shrieked. “I am in bed, and naked.”
“You see what a pig he is,” she said. “It’s not all Kant and Hegel around here.”
I stood, brushing her aside. This situation made me hideously uncomfortable, and it was not untypical. “I’m afraid I must go, Dora.” I swilled the brandy.
“What, you don’t want to join us?” She gave me a teasing look, then flicked her own glass against the stucco wall so that it shattered on the tile floor. I realized how drunk she really was.
“What are you doing out there?” Benjamin cried. “I am waiting for you!”
Dora was busy pouring herself another drink and lighting a cigarette. But before she could say another word, I had slipped outside, into the clear, cold night.
The next day, at lunch, nothing of what had transpired the night before was mentioned. It was like this between us. We would say rude things, part company, then pretend that nothing hurtful had ever been uttered. Once or twice I had stumbled in upon Dora and Benjamin at the wrong moment—when they were in the act of sexual intercourse, in fact—and even this was never mentioned. I don’t think either would have minded if I’d sat at the edge of the bed to watch them fornicate!
It was obvious now that Benjamin was unhappy in his marriage to Dora. They would shout at each other in front of me, as if unaware of my presence, occasionally saying things too cruel to believe. It unnerved me to see a man whom I admired so profoundly, even revered, acting like an ordinary, run-of-the-mill jackass. Dora would call him names, deride his vanity, and bemoan his lack of attention to her, tossing various small, hard objects in his direction: a book, a cup, a piece of bric-a-brac. Once she actually shattered a china plate on his forehead. He looked up, virtually unfazed, and said: “Why do the English make the best china? Has it anything to do with the fragility of their empire? It is built on sand, you know. They do not have the necessary temper.”
One night, in the midst of dinner, he and Dora began arguing about something trivial. Benjamin suddenly dismissed her concerns as too boring to discuss, and Dora rushed off to the bedroom in tears; rightly sensing that he had gone too far in humiliating her, he followed her, and I was left to finish the meal alone.
Later t
hat night, close to midnight, there was a knock at my door. Since Benjamin almost never came to my apartment, I was quite surprised to see him standing in my doorway, nervous as a child who has done something wrong. The whites of his eyes were speckled with red, and his hair was disheveled.
I brought him inside and tucked a snifter of brandy between his icy hands.
“Thank you so much,” he said, shuddering. He brought the golden-brown liquor close to his face, inhaled deeply, then drank. The relief on his face was palpable.
“You were so agitated tonight,” I said. “Can this marriage possibly work, Walter?”
“My dear friend, you are young. You don’t understand about love. There is always difficulty, even real pain, but it doesn’t matter. What you can’t see very well from where you stand is that I do love Dora.”
“What I see is a man in distress. You fight with her about everything. Not one little thing appears to satisfy either of you.”
Benjamin made an odd face, taking another long sip, which he held in his mouth for a full minute before swallowing. “We have not made you happy, Gerhard,” he said at last. “I hope you have not regretted coming to Bern.”
“I’m learning a great deal,” I said.
“About love?” he asked, laughing.
“Love of the kind that you and Dora must endure does not interest me. It might as well be called war.”
His remote little grin tumbled quickly into a frown. “Love is war, perhaps.” He paused, hunching forward in his chair, holding the brandy up to the candlelight as if to inspect it for impurities. “One day you will understand.”
“You are patronizing me,” I said.
“I’m sorry. You are right.” He leaned toward me, as if searching for something. “What I like about you is your directness. You say exactly what you think. It’s what drew me toward you in the first place.”
