Benjamin's Crossing

by Jay Parini

Walter changed his tactic, still hoping to persuade me. “In fact, it is beautiful inside. I have come twice already, you see. This is my third visit.” As he spoke, he reached out and took my left hand, then gently, almost imperceptibly, led me into the cave, which rose gradually into a dark recess. “You must not be frightened,” he said in a kind of stage whisper.

  “Why are you whispering?”

  “Caves are full of spirits,” he said. “Some perhaps more dangerous than others. And then, there is the Minotaur at the bottom. It is best to let him sleep.”

  My back was suddenly pressed against the wet, cool wall. I could see nothing but felt Walter close to me. And he was hard, his groin against me, his head on my shoulder. It was more peculiar than erotic, although I confess I did not find it unpleasant in any way. Men are men, and one must not expect otherwise.

  It was certainly never my intention to get involved with Walter Benjamin. Not in a romantic way. Indeed, I was never in love with him. Never dreamed about him, not in the way one dreams about a lover. But I found his needs overpowering, and his attention—his guileless, relentless attention—was compelling. He fixed me with his eyes, and like an insect caught in his web I was stung into submission, or near submission. The truth is, I never gave myself wholly to him. Never let myself go. I never truly became, in any meaningful sense of the term, his lover.

  That time in the Matermania was our first “exchange,” as he called it. And it was typical. A bizarre pattern of titillation and frustrated expectation was established, one that he would retrace compulsively for many years.

  He pressed against me, and eventually his lips moved toward mine. I let him kiss me, although I did not eagerly kiss him back. I was passive, and he invaded me.

  I could feel his hand moving my hand toward him, toward the hardness that pressed against my stomach. He had by now unbuttoned his trousers, which had fallen about his knees. I liked the hot flesh in my hand, its curling hardness; he came, it seemed, within seconds, and he said, “I love you, Asja. I love you.” It was disconcerting.

  I did not respond, as perhaps I should have, but it was not possible under those circumstances. Over the next month, we met several times for “exchanges,” but they were all like the one in the cave: slantwise, cryptic, somewhat less than visible. We never commented afterward on what happened between us, as if we had done something so terrible that it must never be mentioned. I don’t, to this day, understand why I permitted it to go on.

  The truth is that Walter was not a physical man. To begin with, he was so myopic that he never looked at anything like the rest of us do. Everything was quickly abstracted into language, framed, hung on the broad wall of his mind. Even the erotic aspects of life were well removed from the normal levels of physicality, although the embers of eros were often fanned by my resistance. It is like this with many men: They want passionately whatever they cannot have. If you give it to them, they disdain it. If you refuse they drive you mad with begging for it.

  Near the end of the summer, my relations with Bernhard had degenerated, and I was ready to abandon him altogether. In a foolish moment, I said to Walter, “All right, you may return to Riga with me. We can live together in a house owned by my cousin. It is a wooden house, with a tile roof that shimmers in the rain. You will like it.”

  A dark shadow crossed his face, and then he looked at me with a sadness he had by this time in his life perfected, accompanied by a melancholic plunge of the eyebrows; the spirit of the man absconded through the eyes, so that he became the husk of Walter Benjamin. The expression frightened me.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Isn’t this what you want?”

  “I am in love with another woman,” he said. “Her name is Jula. Jula Cohn.”

  This took me by surprise. “What about your wife, Dora?” I asked. “And your son? Do they matter so little?”

  “I have been in flight.”

  “Ah, flight,” I said, unable to suppress an ironic twang. It was bad enough that he was married with a child, but he had a mistress, too. I was merely another mistress: a lady-in-waiting to his throne.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “Did I hurt your feelings? If so, I apologize.”

  “Don’t feel too bad, I wasn’t going to ask you for your hand.”

  “It is not that, it’s just…”

  “Please, Walter. It doesn’t matter. Not at all. Life is complicated. I understand.”

  “It does matter.” He brought a closed fist to his forehead, a remarkable gesture for him.

  “It doesn’t,” I said. “We all make mistakes.”

  I felt ridiculous, having to utter such banal nonsense. It’s what happens to people in these situations. Even intelligent people with brilliant philosophical minds talk to one another like morons when it comes to love. When I left the next day for Riga, via Naples, Rome, and Florence, I knew that Walter was not going to let it go at that. And somehow I did not believe his story about Jula Cohn. It was a ruse, a way of not committing himself to a course of action.

  Jula Cohn was a sculptress, or so everyone said. (I never saw any piece by her in the Berlin galleries.) She was apparently passive, almost plantlike, and it was later pointed out to me by Brecht that Walter’s best single essay, on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, was written in response to a crisis over Cohn. She was Goethe’s Ottilie—the erotic ideal which can never be fully humanized. “Great writing,” said Brecht, “is always a response to pain.” This may or may not be true, but Walter was clearly in agony when he wrote that essay. It saturates every turn of phrase.

  Jula had actually predated Dora by several years. She and Walter had met in Berlin before the war, and he pursued her in his paradoxically fitful but obsessive manner for years. Even after he married Dora in 1917, he continued to see Jula and write to her. In Heidelberg after the war, she knew everyone in the arts. In fact, her name was mentioned a few times by Bernhard and his friends, who regarded her as a hanger-on, a member of the self-important fringe that grows in concentric rings around most artistic circles.

  Fringes never interested me, that feeling of hanging around the edges. A Communist wants power: The power to feed those who are hungry, to give shelter to those who need it. The power to break down walls between classes and eventually to eliminate classes altogether. You cannot achieve these things by standing on the fringe. Marginality appeals only to the bourgeois sensibility. It allows the bourgeoisie to justify their own ineptitude. It is a good place to hide, to feel safe and satisfied.

  I moved to Moscow precisely because it was the center of the people’s revolution. I was eager to experience genuine power, and so was Bernhard; he intended to make a name for himself in the theater there and possibly at Gosfilm, where the Soviet film industry had lately blossomed. The Moscow horizon, for both of us, appeared endless. Indeed, I quickly established ties with an organization devoted to bringing out the hidden creative forces in the proletariat, called Proletarskaia Kultura. (Walter showed not the slightest interest in this movement: another sign of his doggedly bourgeois sensibility.)

  Walter had a way of appearing in my life like an electrical storm that blows up from nowhere, booms and flashes, tingles the air, then slips over the horizon, leaving behind his after-echo and days of rain. Having first refused my invitation to Riga, he came uninvited a few months later, taking a room in a fleabag hotel without even saying he’d come. He began walking the streets, hoping for a glimpse of me. In a fragment called “Stereoscope,” he wrote:

  I appeared in Riga to see a woman. Her house, the city, the language were unfamiliar to me. Nobody was waiting for my arrival, and nobody knew me. For a couple of hours I wandered the streets alone. It was the only time they were ever so empty. From each gate a flame shot, each cornerstone spraying sparks, and each streetcar raced toward me like a fire engine. Somehow, it was important that, of the two of us, I be the one who saw the other first. She c
ould torch me with her eyes, which were matches. Had she touched me first, I’d have exploded.

  It was agony to deal with a man in this state. Like an idiot, I let him stay in my house for two weeks. Crazier yet, I let him seduce me one night, after many drinks. He said, “My dear, you look painfully stiff. Let me give you a massage.” Before I knew what was going on, his hand was between my legs. One thing led to another, then his body lowered itself upon me, from behind. I was immobile, and I could not resist, although the next day I said to him: “We must never do that again. I do not want to have sex with you. Bernhard is my lover.” I asked him to be my friend, a real friend. “Friends are more important than lovers, you know,” I said. He seemed hurt by this and left Riga in a bitter mood.

  In the winter of 1926 he appeared, again without warning, in Moscow. I had been living in a sanatorium, recovering from a breakdown. The doctors all agreed that years of straining for professional success in the theater combined with political activism had taken a harsh toll on my nerves; I was not by nature a strong person, though I pretended to be tough. My relations with Bernhard, to start with, were unsatisfactory. He played games with me, showering approbation only to undercut what he said with smirks and subtle digs. He was, I think, used to having actresses jump through whatever little hoops he put before them. I found this intolerable and would scream, “You are not my director!” But it was hopeless. Bernhard’s personality was set in concrete.

  I had no wish to see Walter just now, but there he was beside my bed, fidgeting and smoking one cigarette after another; he begged me with those dark, sad eyes to abandon Bernhard, to become his lover. What an absurdity! He telegraphed his arrival, asking poor Bernhard to pick him up at the Belorussian-Baltic station. (Bernhard, of course, agreed; he considered Walter “a dear old thing.”) They came straight to my room—Bernhard puzzled, Walter breathless with the kind of expectation one can only frustrate. He presented me with One-Way Street, his manic little book of fragments. It was dedicated to me: “This street is named Asja Lacis street, after the engineer who laid it through the author.” Bernhard, when he saw this dedication, looked at Walter in amazement. There was no jealousy in him, thank goodness. It was not in his nature. Privately, he said, “You mustn’t lead him on, Asja. The man is obviously mad about you.” But I was not leading him on. I wasn’t leading him anywhere!

  What exactly did he expect to gain from this visit? I was not going to let him leap into my sickbed: One can only do so much for the People, and Walter was already wavering in his political commitment. He had seemed, in his letters, on the verge of joining the Party, but now, having arrived at the center of the revolution, he resisted. “I am not sure about Bolshevism,” he would say, “yet I believe in the principles of socialism. It’s just that I cannot see how, in practice, this ideology will be productive. There are many things I must settle with myself before I join.” On and on, indecisively, he prattled.

  I explained to him that if he wished to stay in Moscow and get ahead in the literary world there, he must join the Party. Contacts would soon occur, and these would lead to assignments. He could review plays or write articles for the New Soviet Encyclopedia. There was plenty of money available for the right cultural products. The Soviets were especially eager to improve relations with Germany, and they needed advocates in the press, native speakers. Who better than Walter Benjamin, who already reviewed for several important papers in Berlin and Frankfurt? “Play your cards right,” I told him, “and you’ll make out big. They’ll hire you in the Kremlin!”

  As usual, Walter nodded vaguely. He was always nodding vaguely.

  I suspect the Ernst Toller affair turned him against the Soviet state. Toller was by far the most influential socialist playwright of the day, a member of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic. His plays, in translation, were produced in Russia before huge audiences. Now his arrival in the capital had been loudly trumpeted: Posters appeared everywhere, plastered to walls and fences, on the sides of trolleys, in the railway stations. He was scheduled to give a lecture at the Kameneva Institute, and hundreds turned up to hear him. Alas, he was attacked just before his arrival by an enemy, Paul Werner, who argued that Toller’s work was counterrevolutionary. Pravda unexpectedly sided with Werner, and when Toller appeared to give his lecture, the doors to the Institute were locked.

  “This is outrageous,” Walter kept saying. “Imagine turning on Toller like that, forbidding him to lecture. He is a very great man!”

  I tried to explain to him that in Russia many conflicting ideas were in circulation, and received opinion shifted constantly. Toller’s star in the theatrical firmament would rise again if he proved himself a valuable member of the Party.

  “Who cares if he belongs to the Party or doesn’t?” Walter asked, a little too loudly, as he sat beside my bed. Some of the attendants in the sanitorium were already suspicious, having overheard us talking facetiously about one thing or another.

  “We must pull together,” I said. “One Party is all we can afford. There may be differences of opinion within the Party, of course. There ought to be. But the forces of reaction will kill us if we show too much division among ourselves.”

  Bernhard would sit behind Walter, rolling his eyes; he did everything he could for him, even introducing him to the editor of the New Soviet Encyclopedia, who commissioned an article on Goethe. One might have expected gratitude from Walter, but no. His mind was elsewhere, on me.

  I can still see him sitting there, sighing, staring into my eyes like a dying man afraid of darkness. He would appear at my bedside every afternoon, his arms laden with flowers, sweets, honeycakes, fresh cream. He talked fantastically about our future: “We must return to Capri,” he kept saying. “To the Matermania Cave.” Once or twice, when Bernhard was absent, he lunged at me, and I had to play a cool game, running my fingers through his hair but not giving too much. I became quite frightened once, when he began to weep, telling me that if I could not return his love he would surely die, perhaps on the floor beside my bed.

  “Do you love me, Asja? Please tell me the truth!”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I love you more as a friend.”

  “More as a friend than what?”

  “Than a lover…”

  This produced sobbing and remonstrations. He was so childish about everything….

  “Look,” I said, in desperation, “I will come and visit you in Berlin, soon. We must sort this out.” I begged him, however, to restrain himself in front of Bernhard, explaining that most men in Bernhard’s position would have murdered him by now. I also tried to point out that I myself was not a well person.

  “You will visit me in Berlin?” he asked, his eyes innocently wide.

  “Yes, I promise.”

  “Without Bernhard?”

  “By myself, alone.”

  I knew that if I did not promise something along these lines, he would stay in Moscow forever, hoping eventually to seduce me. I could see that Bernhard was losing patience with him; indeed, one night in my room, he urged Walter to leave Russia as soon as possible. “You will never be able to live by your pen here, Walter,” he said.

  “You are quite right,” Walter said, much to my surprise. “I will go home.” He reached for Bernhard’s hand, which he grasped. “Thank you for being frank with me.”

  Bernhard was also frank with Walter about his work, often shockingly so. “A good writer does not always write beautiful, dense, and memorable sentences,” he said to Walter one afternoon, referring to One-Way Street. “The ratio of splendid sentences to mediocre ones is about one to thirty in Tolstoy or Gogol. But in your prose, every other sentence is dense and memorable. There is finally too much to remember. There is no forward tilt.”

  On hearing this, Walter seemed quite upset at first; then he said, “You are exactly right, I’m afraid. I will never find an audience.”

  “Not unless
you change your style,” Bernhard said.

  “I cannot do that,” he replied. “That would be immoral, would it not?”

  This was perhaps the turning point of the Moscow visit. The next day he began to make his preparations to leave.

  I was feeling well enough the next week to accompany Walter to the station myself. It was early February, but a thaw had set in; the snow was all slush at the sides of the broad Tverskaia, and one had to step around the puddles and steaming manure piles. Walter held my hand tightly as we walked, saying nothing. Twice he stopped, looked intently into my eyes, and sighed.

  As he boarded the railway car, he turned and stared at me pitifully.

  I said, “Are you going to be all right, Walter? Really?”

  “I would give anything for your love,” he said.

  “I know, I know.”

  “Is there any hope?”

  “There is always hope,” I said. “What is life without hope? But you must not dwell on this.”

  Walter bit his lip severely. Then he began to speak, his lips moving distinctly, though no words came out.

  Much to my relief, the conductor blew his whistle, and the train sighed as the brakes released.

  “You must find your seat,” I said.

  “I can think of nothing but you.”

  “Please,” I said, “there are better subjects. Think about Goethe.”

  “You are more important.”

  It is so tedious when a man loves you more than you love him. And heartbreaking. I tried to wave to him as his train pulled away from the platform, but he would not look out the window. He had his face buried in his hands, and his shoulders were hunched forward. Maybe it was just the light, but his hair seemed white as frost, a ghostly puff around his head. I suspect he was weeping. What a great bloody bore, I thought. A great bloody bore.

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  The déjà vu effect has been described quite often. Nonetheless, I wonder if the term is well chosen, and whether the more appropriate metaphor should not be taken from the realm of acoustics. One might do better to speak of events reaching us like an echo awakened by a call, a sound that seems to have been heard somewhere in the darkness of our past life. Accordingly, if we are not mistaken, the shock with which moments enter consciousness as if already experienced in some previous life usually strikes us acoustically, in the form of a sound. A word, tapping, or a rustling noise is somehow endowed with the magical power to transport us into the cool tomb of long ago, from the vault of which the present seems to return only as an echo.