by Jay Parini
“Are you afraid of thunder, madame?” he asked her, reaching for her hand.
“I don’t want to die,” she said.
“How old are you?”
“Seventy-three,” she said.
“That isn’t old,” he said. “My grandmother lived to be eighty-seven.”
Somehow, his tone of voice soothed her, even though what he said might not, under normal circumstances, have given much comfort. She was grateful, however, for his attentions and asked if he might stay with her for a few days. He declined, of course, explaining that he must try to find a berth on a ship as soon as possible.
“You see,” he told her, “I am a Jew.”
She nodded slowly, thinking, then spoke: “You must go then. This is no place for Jews.” To his amazement, she took some money from a rumpled purse that she used for a pillow. “It’s all I have,” she said. “But you must take it, sir.”
He smiled and took her hand. “I have just enough for my ticket to Cuba,” he said. “But I thank you, madame. You are very kind.”
The next morning, quite by chance, he ran into Hans Fittko in the street. He had not seen Fittko since leaving the camp in Nevers.
Fittko recognized him first, and said, “Dr. Benjamin, what a surprise! Are you well?”
“Nobody is well, I think,” he said. “But it is always good to see a familiar face.”
Hans bought him a cup of coffee in a local bar, and he wrote Lisa’s address in Port-Vendres on a small scrap of paper. “You must go to her,” he said. “She will take you out of France.”
Benjamin explained that he was waiting for a visa.
“This is mad,” Fittko said. “You will never get a visa. Anyway, the ships are full.” He lit a cigarette and sucked on it hard, as if it were a straw. “Do you smoke?”
“Yes,” said Benjamin, taking a cigarette. It was the first cigarette he’d had in several days, and it filled him with hope. As long as one could smoke one more cigarette, the world was not over.
“Where would you go, if you could?”
“I have friends in New York,” Benjamin said. “But I really must get a berth—it doesn’t matter where.”
“They will be closing the port of Marseilles any day now.”
Benjamin listened, growing steadily more anxious, as Hans outlined the hard reality of the situation. The prospects for each of them grew bleaker every day. Hans was himself going to abandon Marseilles in a week or so. “The only way out is over the Pyrenees,” he said.
Benjamin thanked Hans for the coffee, the cigarette, the good company, and most of all, for Lisa’s address in the south of France.
That same day, in the afternoon, he saw Fritz Frankel sitting in a sidewalk café. Dr. Frankel had been a famous doctor in Berlin in the twenties; he had been in Paris for much of the past decade and was respected among the émigrés, who sought him out eagerly for his expertise in nervous disorders. Benjamin himself had once consulted Dr. Frankel, at Dora’s insistence.
The doctor noticed that Benjamin was staring at him, and he stood. “Benjamin!” he cried. “Come and sit down! Let me buy you a drink.”
Benjamin bowed politely and accepted the invitation.
“So what brings you to Marseilles?” the doctor wondered.
It was just like Frankel to ask a dumb question, thought Benjamin. What was any Jew doing in Marseilles right now? “I’m here for the Olympic tryouts,” he said. “Did you forget I was a pole vaulter?”
“Listen, you stick to me, and we’ll both get out of here,” Dr. Frankel said. He explained that it was impossible to get a berth on a ship in the usual ways. Every berth had been sold long ago, and the authorities were cracking down on exit visas. Nobody could leave France now except by hook or by crook. Excitedly he explained that he had discovered a way out that had already worked for dozens of people he knew. You dressed up as a sailor and were taken aboard a merchant ship heading for Ceylon. The other sailors, for a small fee, were more than willing to smuggle you aboard. If Benjamin had any money, there was no doubt they could both make it to Ceylon in a month.
“What do you do once you get to Ceylon?” Benjamin asked.
“It is British,” Dr. Frankel explained. “The Germans can’t touch you out there. And I hear it’s quite pleasant, with tea plantations and lots of fruit. You like fruit, don’t you?”
Benjamin looked at the old man’s shaggy, long white hair and fragile body and wondered to himself if Dr. Frankel could really pass himself off as a sailor. Perhaps money talked louder than he had previously imagined.
“You are apparently skeptical, sir,” Dr. Frankel said.
Benjamin shrugged. At this point, it was worth a try. One heard of more fantastic escapes every day. Indeed, an eighty-five-year-old Jew from Odessa had apparently escaped into Spain in a helium balloon. Given his fear of heights, Benjamin was much happier to go by sea, even if he had to pose as a deck swab. As for the money, what did it matter?
Dr. Frankel took Benjamin back to his boardinghouse, inviting him to sleep on the floor.
“I’ll make a bed for you,” he said. “There is a sofa in the hallway. I’ll get the cushions.”
“Please, just a blanket. At least you have a roof.”
“Make yourself at home,” the doctor said.
There was a comfortable chair by the window, and Benjamin settled in for the afternoon. The doctor had a volume of essays by Karl Kraus, and Benjamin was delighted to spend an afternoon in such company.
“Will you be all right, Benjamin?”
“Yes, thank you.”
The doctor said he had some urgent business and left Benjamin alone. Early that evening, he returned with a sailor’s costume for each of them. They were mildly absurd: rough wool uniforms with baggy trousers, berets.
“You’ve just been drafted into the merchant navy,” he said. “You look like a sailor, did you know that? Try it on.”
“The trousers are too small. I can tell by looking.”
“Maybe you are too big,” the doctor said. “Look, we’re not going on a fashion show. We’re going to Ceylon, where Jews are safe. Wear what is to wear.”
That night, as Benjamin lay on the floor on lumpy cushions beneath a moth-eaten blanket, Dr. Frankel described Ceylon in colorful detail. It was a marvelous place of small brown people and large gray elephants, a land of cardamom, cinnamon, saffron, paprika, breadfruit. The luscious names filled Benjamin’s heart with desire. All night he dreamed of bare sandy beaches, with an orange moon hanging between big-finned palms. There would of course be no books, no libraries, no European newspapers, and their absence was a definite problem, but he had enough material in his briefcase to keep him busy for a year or two. Perhaps he would even write stories, or maybe even poems!
The next morning he and Dr. Frankel crept from the boardinghouse in their ill-fitting uniforms. Benjamin left his suitcase in the station; it would be unwise to take it with him, and it contained nothing he really cared about. He carried his briefcase and a small satchel with a change of clothes. Aware that he was going to sea, where dampness is often a problem, he carefully wrapped the manuscript in waxy paper that he bought from a fishmonger by the docks. Dr. Frankel’s small and tattered suitcase was strapped to his back.
They took a trolley to the waterfront, where they stopped at a bar for a cup of café crème and a hot croissant, consuming them greedily at a table that had a wide-angle view of the bay. The prodigal sun had tossed a million gold coins on the water, which was so bright one could scarcely see the dozens of ships coming in and out of the old harbor. The tangerine sky was streaked with clouds, and gulls swooped to feed on garbage. Indeed, there was garbage everywhere. “Even the people are garbage,” said Dr. Frankel, referring to the riffraff that gathers in ports of call. “Whores, pimps, winos, bums, pickpockets, swindlers, Gypsies,” Dr. Frankel mu
mbled.
“And Jews,” said Benjamin.
Dr. Frankel looked at him curiously. “You are a strange fellow, Dr. Benjamin.”
“I have heard this before,” he said.
Because he was leaving France this morning, perhaps forever, everything that touched his senses was bathed in nostalgia. He even decided that he loved Marseilles—its thronged, tree-lined avenues as well as its putried smells, the grating noise of engines, the clanking of chains, the lurid calls of women who loitered, even at this hour, along the docks in search of custom. He twisted his neck to see, through the dazzling light, a heavily laden freighter ply its awkward way into the harbor with its whistle gasping, dwindling into echoes, ghosts of steam.
“Have you ever visited a brothel, Benjamin?” asked Dr. Frankel.
“Many times, when I was younger. Mostly in Berlin,” he said. “But also in Munich. Once or twice in Naples, I think.”
“You think? You don’t remember?”
Benjamin wished he had said nothing. “I have never been to a brothel in Paris,” he said. “I don’t know why. Age, perhaps. I was never a young man in Paris.”
Dr. Frankel raised his eyebrows. “You are still a young man, dear fellow. Forty-eight years old! I am sixty-three!”
Benjamin was surprised that Dr. Frankel was only sixty-three, especially since he looked well over seventy. It was the war, of course. It put a decade on everyone.
A tall gendarme suddenly passed them, and they grew still. This was no time to have to produce their papers, and increasingly the police were demanding identification. They knew that before long the Nazis would swoop into Marseilles, and that those who lacked a proper attitude would suffer. Lenience would not be tolerated.
After breakfast, they made their way to the Italian freighter, the S.S. Genovese, which would carry them to Ceylon. It was a long, hulking freighter with a rusty bow and portholes like bloodshot eyes. Oil spilled into the water around it, forming a thin blue skirt on the water. There was considerable activity, with men loading huge barrels into the hold; the grinding sound of winches forced them to raise their voices when they spoke.
“Are you certain they will take us?” asked Benjamin as they approached the gangway.
“Of course. My contact is called Patrice. He is in charge of all deckhands.” After a pause, he added: “We are deckhands, you see.”
Sure enough, a dark-skinned man called Patrice welcomed them aboard; he was about forty, with thick eyebrows, a curly beard, and a large belly that bulged the dark blue horizontal stripes of his shirt. He accepted the roll of bills from Dr. Frankel without bothering to count, as if nobody in these circumstances would dare to cheat him.
“You must hide below,” he said. “I will show you where.” They followed him down into the dim, smelly bunkroom. “Don’t even show your ugly faces till I say so.”
“I can hardly thank you enough for this,” Benjamin whispered to Dr. Frankel when they were alone.
“Please, enough,” he said, beaming. “For a start, it’s your money. Second, you will do me a favor one day. Life is like that. It’s called tit for tat.”
Benjamin lay back on his bunk in the sweltering room. “My wife and son are in England, you know,” he said. “Sometimes I miss them both, even though I’m divorced.”
“Ah,” said Dr. Frankel. “Someday I will tell you what happened to my wife and my son. It is not a pretty story.”
They lay quietly on the bunks provided by Patrice, and it was thrilling to hear the clanking of chains as the anchors lifted at around seven; the huge engine, not fifty feet from the bunkroom, chittered and whined, and the ship began to tremble. At some barely discernible point, it was obvious that they were moving. The engine began to purr, and the ship rocked gently forward and backward, parting the slight waves. It was a pity, thought Benjamin, that they did not have a porthole.
Suddenly, a gruff man appeared in the doorway, shouting, “All hands on deck!” He paused beside Benjamin and Dr. Frankel. “You, too!” he shouted. “Both of you! On deck! Now!”
Benjamin reached for his briefcase. He was not going anywhere, even on deck, without his manuscript.
“Come, Walter,” said Dr. Frankel. “We must do what they say. This is only routine.”
Benjamin scrambled up the narrow ladder behind the doctor, his heart pounding in his temples; halfway up the ladder, he had to pause for two or three minutes. An invisible fist seemed to press into his solar plexus, and he could hardly breathe.
“Are you all right, Walter?” Dr. Frankel cried, peering back down the ladder behind him.
“Give me another minute, please,” Benjamin said. “I am not used to ladders.”
“On deck! Quickly!” shouted the sailor, snapping at Benjamin’s heels. “Get your fat ass up that ladder!”
Somehow, he dragged himself into the blazing light, onto the broad deck, where an officer of some kind was haranguing the deckhands like children. He spoke in argot, not easily understood. Benjamin guessed he was from Nice, with Italian roots. You could tell from his eyes, and the sneering grin, that he was not a pleasant man.
Patrice stood beside him, gesticulating weirdly, pointing to Benjamin and Dr. Frankel, who stood side by side with the other deckhands, who were mostly in their late teens or early twenties. They were Italian or Greek, Benjamin guessed, with Mediterranean skin. Even the youngest of them looked wizened, even prunelike.
The officer lurched toward Benjamin and stood over him, smelling of brandy. “Give me your papers,” he said.
Benjamin produced a number of faded documents from his briefcase, including an old library card from the Bibliothèque Nationale. He could see from the look in the eyes of Patrice that this was a mistake.
Dr. Frankel was clearly distressed, shifting from foot to foot. He said, in hideously mangled French, “We have worked on many merchant freighters. We are very good sailors, I swear. Give us a chance, sir, please!”
The officer seemed amused, and grinned. His teeth were like iron nails driven into his gums. “May I have the names of several ships you have worked on before? Perhaps we have worked together?”
Dr. Frankel showed considerable invention, although none of the freighters he mentioned seemed to ring any bells.
“How old are you?” he asked Dr. Frankel.
“Forty,” he said.
“Ah, you are well preserved,” he said.
To Benjamin: “You are nineteen, I suppose?”
“I am thirty-one, sir,” Benjamin said.
“Ah, a truthful man!”
Benjamin stared ahead, trying to give away nothing with his expression. Any flicker of distress or failure of nerve could be disastrous.
“Can you swim, sailor?”
“I am a good swimmer,” said Benjamin. Weren’t all sailors?
“And you?” The officer glared at Dr. Frankel.
“Me, too,” the doctor said. “I swim very well…for my age.” He looked at his feet. “I require, perhaps, a little practice.”
“That’s quite easy,” the man said, trying to restrain a laugh. “Overboard with them!” he shouted.
The other deckhands looked nervously at their superior. Was he kidding?
“Are you deaf? I said, overboard with them!”
Two husky seamen seized Benjamin and Dr. Frankel by the arms.
“What does this mean?” Dr. Frankel asked in a loud voice, almost threateningly. He turned to Patrice. “We have paid good money!”
Patrice looked anxiously toward the deck.
The officer said, “What this means is that you will have an opportunity to practice your swimming.”
Benjamin could hardly focus on what was happening. All he could think about was the briefcase, which he clung to fiercely, even as the officer’s henchmen tossed him over the railing. He felt himself droppi
ng swiftly, turning head over heels. The sensation of hitting the water was surprisingly transitory, and the first thing he knew, he was underwater, still holding the briefcase, still dropping, taking for granted the fact of his death. It was simply not possible to survive this, the plunge, the infinite amounts of water, the vacuum that seemed to suck him downward, down and around, the spiral to oblivion.
Suddenly, his head broke the water, though he could see nothing.
“Benjamin!” cried Dr. Frankel. “Over here!”
A young man in a rowboat had pulled Dr. Frankel into his small craft.
Benjamin, of course, could not move. It amazed him that he was floating.
“Give me your briefcase,” the doctor cried, reaching down for it.
Benjamin relinquished it and soon felt the upward pull, the astonishing and unexpected lift to safety.
As he shivered in the boat, unable to see through watery lenses, Benjamin half wished he were still tumbling in those unimaginable depths where fish are blind and black rocks huddle for shelter from the faint light that filters down. How he had managed to get from the water into this rowboat was beyond guessing, another miracle—a major miracle, this time. He knew for certain this morning in the harbor in Marseilles that God existed, for in a Godless universe he would certainly have lost everything by now.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Streetcar travel in Moscow is a supremely tactile experience. Here, the newcomer soon learns to adjust to the odd tempo of the city and the ancient rhythm of its peasant population. A total interpenetration of technological and primitive modes occurs here, in this brave historical experiment—the new Russia. A ride in any streetcar will illustrate my point. The female conductors hover in fur coats at their stations like Samoyed women on a sleigh. A vigorous shoving and lunging during the boarding of a car already loaded to the point of bursting happens without the slightest murmur of objection, and with immense cordiality. (I have never heard an angry word uttered on these occasions.) Once everybody is inside, the journey begins in earnest. Through the ice-glazed windows, you can never quite discover where the car has stopped. If you do find out, it hardly matters, since the way to the exit is blocked by a human wedge. Because you must board at the rear but exit from the front of the vehicle, you are forced to thread your way through the human mass. Fortunately, people travel in bunches, so at all important stops the car is virtually emptied.
