Benjamin's Crossing

by Jay Parini

  My brother’s wife, Eva, was taking her small daughter to Montpellier, near Port-Vendres, a small seaport close to the Spanish border, and Hans thought it best that I join them. “You could take them over the border,” he said. “Get them safely to Portugal.” In the meanwhile, he would help the others in their search for exit visas while Paulette continued to search for her father.

  “But Hans,” I said, “this is ridiculous.” It was just too awful to think of leaving him now.

  “It’s really better this way,” he said, “and safer. We’ll meet in Cuba or Portugal, somewhere.”

  “But when? How?”

  “Soon,” he said, kissing me on the forehead. “It won’t be a problem. We’ll stay in contact.”

  I don’t know why I always believed him, but I did. Hans Fittko was like that.

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  Marseilles—the yellow-speckled maw of a seal with brine dripping between its teeth. When its gullet opens to snag the brown and black bodies thrown to it by ship’s companies according to their timetables, it exhales a stink of oil, urine, and printer’s ink. This comes from the tartar baking hard on its massive teeth: newspaper kiosks, lavatories, oyster stalls.

  The harbor people are a bacillus culture, the porters and prostitutes issuing from the city’s continuous decomposition with a resemblance to human beings. But the palette itself is pink, which is the color of shame here in Marseilles, and of poverty. Hunchbacks wear pink, as do female beggars. And the filthy women who cruise along the rue Bouterie take their only tint from the sole pieces of clothing they wear: pale-pink shifts.

  7

  Benjamin returned to Paris in November, finding his sister, Dora, alone in semi-hiding at his apartment on the rue Dombasle. She did not, at first, answer the door. Only repeated shouting through the keyhole convinced her to open it for her brother.

  “Walter! You’re alive?”

  “Look at me,” he said, standing in the doorway. “You call this alive?”

  He had lost a great deal of weight in the camp at Nevers, and his arms and legs were ghostly, insubstantial. His eyes had been swallowed by craters of skin. The only thing that remained unchanged was the paunch, which he carried like an unwanted fetus; his belly jutted forward, an inorganic bulge above spindly legs.

  “You are sick, Walter. Look at you.” Her fingers quivered as she touched his unshaven, bluish cheek.

  “Everyone is sick.”

  She gave him a bowl of watery soup with a few egg noodles floating amid scraps of fatty chicken. He devoured a stale loaf of bread all by himself.

  “I’m so glad to find you,” he said. “You see, I thought you might do something silly.”

  “Do what? Leave? Where would I go?”

  Benjamin wiped his mouth with a yellowing linen napkin, one brought from his parents’ house in Berlin. “We must leave at once,” he said. “I saw Jules Romains at the station, and he said there were boats leaving from Marseilles to Cuba, freighters with plenty of room for passengers. They are apparently quite comfortable.”

  “It’s hot in Cuba,” she said, “and there are flying insects, poisonous snakes. What do you want with Cuba?”

  “I will get us tickets.”

  “I don’t want tickets to Cuba.”

  He raised himself up on both fists: “Then I will go without you, Dora!”

  When the moment of anger passed, he looked at her sadly, and he knew of course that he would not go to Cuba without her; he also knew he was not himself going to Cuba. He was only talking, and Dora quite rightly saw through his theatrics. His fondest hope now was to live in New York, the capital of the next half of this century. Two years before, visiting Brecht in his house in Denmark, he had gone into the bedroom of the playwright’s son and seen a map of Manhattan pasted to the wall. He had studied the map carefully, scanning the formidable grid of numbered streets, noting the blue swirl of water that buoyed it up. His eyes had fixed on Central Park: that floating island of green amid so much gray civilization. He could see himself sitting in this park, reading a book, even writing with his journal on his lap. He had heard from Teddy Adorno about Central Park, and he loved it without seeing it.

  “The war will be over in a month or so,” he told Dora, without conviction. “Wait and see. There is no need for all this fretting.” He looked up at Dora and felt sorry for her. She was dumpy and weak, without the means to negotiate for herself in this terrible world. He wished he could help her, but he now understood the impossibility of this; she was an adult, and he was not her father. It occurred to him that she might well not survive this war.

  “What are you going to do, Walter?”

  “About what?”

  “Here, now that you’re back.”

  “My research,” he said. “I see no reason to stop now. The project is almost finished. I have most of a manuscript completed, you see.” He looked toward the door, where his swollen briefcase slept against the wall like a small, pregnant animal.

  “All you think about is yourself,” she said. “This was always the case. Mother said so. ‘As long as he gets what he wants,’ she said, ‘he’s happy.’ ”

  Benjamin ignored his sister, much as he had ignored his mother—when he could. The two of them were alike: relentlessly chattering, making pointless remarks, criticizing. His mother had talked so much, so aimlessly, that he had learned at an early age to develop a strong inner life and to live in his imagination. It was still the best place to go, especially when the world pressed in, pulled, picked.

  “You’re not listening to me, Walter,” Dora said.

  “I am,” he said.

  “You ignore me. You’ve always ignored me.”

  Benjamin did not respond.

  That night he was relieved to sleep in his own bed again, however narrow and uncomfortable it might be. Though exhausted, he read for comfort from Proust for an hour or so before dozing off, the bare lightbulb above his bed burning through the night.

  The next morning, instead of beginning work immediately at the library, he wandered the city to feast on familiar sights. On the heights of Sacré-Coeur, which he climbed for the view, he thought of a passage from Daudet’s Paris vécu: “One gazes from on high at this city of palaces, monuments, houses, and hovels, which seems to have been assembled with an eye to some cataclysm, or several cataclysms.” At noon, with a croissant and piece of ham for a meal, he sat on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens and read, contentedly, from Baudelaire.

  That afternoon a doctor examined him, and the results were not good. His heart had been weak to start with, and those unsparing months in Nevers had done further damage. Benjamin would have to treat himself like an invalid now, taking frequent rests, walking no farther than was absolutely necessary. He must stop smoking, too. The doctor insisted on this.

  But he could not stop smoking, and he would certainly continue to walk the streets of Paris as long as he lived in Paris. What else were the streets for? As if to defy his doctor, he roamed the quays throughout the next weeks, stopping to admire his favorite buildings, such as the Hôtel de Ville—the historic, emotional seat of government. It was the natural place for revolt to gravitate, as it had done in 1357, when the rich draper turned revolutionary, Étienne Marcel, had stormed the town hall in an attempt to arouse peasants all over France against their despotic king, Charles V. Again in 1789, after the fall of the Bastille, rioters had flooded the hall, and throughout the Revolution it was in the hands of the Commune. It was here that Robespierre had been shot in the jaw by one of his enemies the day before he was guillotined in the frenzied summer of 1794. This noble building had played host to the new emperor, Napoleon, in 1851. And it would someday, perhaps, play host to another new emperor, Adolf Hitler.

  Benjamin knew that Paris would fall, but he could not imagine it; that is, he could not translate this abstract knowledge into images th
at might compel action. Friends urged him to flee, of course; it had become a routine conversation, and each time, he tried to explain that he must first complete his research on the arcades. He had received his new library card for the Bibliothèque Nationale on January 11, 1940, and it was with extreme lightness of heart that he entered that great building, sat under the splendid, colorful dome, and resumed work in his usual place at the long table overshadowed by a verdant fresco by Desgoffes.

  Light flooded through the north windows, pooling on his notes. He had several projects in need of completion. Foremost was the book on the arcades, which still needed work; nevertheless, it felt like a miracle that he had come so far. Another year or so of hard work and it could be done. The study of Baudelaire was gathering weight in his notebooks, though it still seemed sketchy; he had begun with a portrait of Paris during the Second Empire and hoped to proceed to a detailed survey of the poetry in light of the poet’s experience of high capitalism. Questions about the fate of poetry suddenly occurred to him as he sat there. How could this exquisite, fragile art compete with modern technology or with the high technologies of art? Was poetry doomed to marginalization, like so many other things he loved?

  He turned a page and saw a sketch he had done: the angel of history, based on the Klee print. Why did that picture obsess him? Unexpectedly, urgently, almost against his will, he found himself writing an essay on the philosophy of history at the end of his notebook, covering pages from back to front. He always worked best like this: in the margins, prompted by an urge, an image, a strange tingling that he must satisfy with exact language, with a swirl of letters on a page. His strength as a critic lay in fugitive blasts of insight, not in systematic, massively planned and executed arguments, so the essay was naturally his best form.

  His view of history seemed to be shifting under him. He could no longer believe in “the conception of progress as such.” Indeed, the last few years felt distinctly more like regress, and grand speculations like those of Marx had come to feel less and less relevant. It didn’t take a prophet to see that both capitalist and socialist economies were utterly selfish and founded on the exploitation of nature. Technology had grown to a point where nature could be mastered, or nearly mastered, and only an equally fierce technology of social power could restrain it, but with this latter technology would come the danger of totalitarian rigidity. No control or total control: The alternatives were equally demoralizing.

  The one hope he could envision lay in humanizing work, work that “far from exploiting nature is capable of bringing forth the creative potential now dormant within her.” But only in the context of a genuine revolution could such work exist, a revolution constituting a “leap into the open air of history.” This urge to revolution was “the grasping of the emergency brake by the human race as it travels on the doomed train of world history.” But what would such a revolution really look like? The Nazis had their own version, of course; the Stalinists had another. Each was horrific. How could one prevent any revolution from turning into a nightmare?

  Benjamin felt as if bright lights burned outside of his ken; he could feel the heat but not see the light. Truth seemed only to recede, further and further, as he circled each formulation. As always, he revised compulsively, hoping to bring himself closer with each version to expression identical with truth. But it was hard. At times the ontological status of language seemed itself the problem; it was not reality. Words and things embraced on rare occasions, but often without comfort. And what was history but words, an imperfect string of vocables designed to stand in for something supposedly more real? As often happened these days, Benjamin found himself weeping as he wrote, struggling with his own limitations as a thinker, as a human being.

  One of these limitations was his overwhelming attraction to erotic imagery. He could not think straight if he was sexually frustrated or aroused. A young woman from the Sorbonne had recently established herself at a neighboring table in the Labrouste room, and it had become a problem. She had short, blond hair like Asja Lacis’s, and the same green eyes. Her teeth were like ice, glittering and straight. Her long arms, when bare, had an alabaster glow, with the hairs as soft as cornsilk. Her fingernails were dangerously unpainted. And when she laughed, she cocked her head to the side, again like Asja. Benjamin feasted on her with his gaze, studying her every expression as she read or scribbled. But he never spoke to her, and whenever her head rose, he averted his eyes, pretending to stare into the distance.

  Added to this, the frustrations of his work seemed debilitating, and he would stagger back to the rue Dombasle convinced that the strain provoked his shortness of breath and caused his chest to tighten. The pain often stirred in the pit of his stomach, rose stealthily along the rib cage, and surrounded his heart like a troop of devils, jabbing forks into the beleaguered organ. Every breath would hurt, and he felt dizzy and weak in the knees. His wrists tingled. Sometimes his vision blurred. It was as if his body were exerting a pressure against the brutality of the outside world, an equalizing force from within that countered the brutality from without.

  He stopped reading the papers, even stopped paying attention to the rumors. He was sick of being told that the Germans were coming. But on the night of June 15, it became clear to him that he had to go. Even Dora wanted to go now. “What are we doing here?” she asked, as if suddenly waking to reality.

  Georges Bataille had promised to look after the research materials Benjamin had gathered for the arcades project, and this eased his mind somewhat. The latest draft—the only full draft of his work—would stay in his briefcase, however tedious it might be to lug it around the world, to Cuba or Buenos Aires or the South Pole. He could almost imagine himself happiest there, in Antarctica, snowbound, glacierbound. It was relaxing to contemplate the end of organismal life, to imagine stasis, now that every growth seemed malignant. Even the Desgoffes frescoes in the reading room had become, in his mind, a nightmare of overripeness, an example of rampant cellular multiplication and unchecked growth. He must go away, as far as possible.

  Dora’s mind was working obsessively on the matter of where to go, now that they must go somewhere. “My friends have all gone to Lourdes. It’s very pleasant, I hear,” she said.

  Benjamin did not point out that, in fact, she had only one friend, Emma Cohn, who had been at school with her in Berlin. She had written to say the place was “pleasant enough, compared to many places.”

  The idea of Lourdes attracted Benjamin, too. Lourdes was a place of hope. Indeed, generations of ailing men and women had gone to Lourdes for healing, and it had become a haven for refugees. The good people of Lourdes apparently liked pilgrims; in any case they fed and housed them. It was their lot in life to play host and to heal. It was Benjamin’s lot, or so he mused, to play guest and suffer. He was the perpetual visitor, the eternal transient. Dare he say it? The Wandering Jew. “In hard times,” he wrote to Max Horkheimer in New York, “we fall upon our essential selves. The lineaments of the soul emerge, like bones sticking through shrunken skin.”

  Horkheimer and Adorno were supposedly working on an exit visa for him from the U.S. consulate, a little bit of official paper that would liberate him from this misery. He sent an urgent note to them: A letter from the consulate certifying that I could expect my visa with virtually no delay would be of primary importance to me. Did they not understand the absolute quality of his necessity?

  He could not fathom the unreceptiveness of his friends in New York. They had seemed, only a few years ago, so encouraging; indeed, a small stipend from the Institute for Social Research, which they controlled entirely, had sustained him through difficult times. But times were more difficult, and his savings nonexistent. According to Horkheimer, the Institute itself was in financial trouble. If this was so, there was no hope for more money. In fact, he had not had a check from New York for eight months, although Teddy Adorno had promised that, at the very least, he would be paid for the Bau
delaire essay. But when? And now that he must leave Paris, how would the money find him?

  “Teddy is using you, as always,” Dora said.

  “This is inappropriate, Dora. How is he ‘using’ me?” he asked, his voice rising. “I would not have been able to live these past years without the Institute.”

  “He manipulates you. Everyone says that. You think I made it up?”

  “What people say does not concern me.”

  Benjamin hated the way gossip distorted things. He had actually stood his ground against all attempts by Adorno to reshape his ideas. He had also welcomed many of his suggestions. It was not terribly wrong to say that Adorno had brought his thinking forward into realms he never would have ventured toward if left to himself. He had been indispensable, as adviser and friend, as reader. And the money, however paltry, had kept him going for some years. But the money was gone, and Benjamin was forced to borrow a considerable sum from Adrienne Monnier on the night before he left Paris with Dora amid the blue-gray smoke of dusk.

  Adrienne had proved a reliable friend. Indeed, her letter had convinced the authorities to release him from the camp in Nevers. Now she even volunteered to send money to Benjamin’s wife and son in London, and he—with humility and gratitude—supplied their address. It would have been too selfish of him not to accept Adrienne’s charity.

  It was comforting to think that Dora and Stefan had managed to land on their feet, having escaped from Vienna in the spring of 1938. They were staying with friends in Islington, where Stefan had enrolled in school. But it also hurt him to know his son had grown into a young man without him, and that he had not been a decent father. Indeed, he barely knew the boy anymore—except in dreams, where he and Stefan were friends.