Benjamin's Crossing

by Jay Parini

  “Are you all right?” I asked. “I could find a doctor in Banyuls, with the mayor’s help—if it’s necessary.”

  He held up a hand. “I am perfectly well, thank you,” he said, huffing. “Just a little out of breath. I am not used to walking great distances, you see.”

  I don’t know why I simply accepted his word on this. He was deeply unwell, but there was no way of breaking through the iron lace of courtesy that he draped over everything. To question his response would be indecorous.

  The mayor greeted us with enthusiasm, taking a carafe of red wine from his cupboard. We sat on his terrace and drank several glasses of the wine, which had a tangy flavor, and listened carefully to his description of the route. He pointed to the high Pyrenees, mauve in the distance.

  “Those mountains, the ones near the top,” I said, “they seem rather formidable.”

  Mayor Azéma did not comfort us. “They are steep, but that’s where Spain lies: on the other side.” As if to comfort me, he said, “The steepness is good, you know. It will protect you and your friends.”

  Old Benjamin said, “Have you ever read Don Quixote?”

  The mayor beamed. “Bien sûr, my friend. I have a copy in my bedroom!”

  “Then you will understand my quest for Spanish soil. I shall ride into Spain on Rocinante.”

  I began to think, Yes, indeed, Old Benjamin, you have cottage cheese for brain. Your invisible horse, Rocinante, may be just what is needed.

  The mayor leaned toward us, his broad red face and massive head wobbling on his neck. “You must go now—along the lower part of the trail, before la route Lister actually begins; it is deceptive, and one can make a wrong turn quite suddenly. It is best understood in daylight.” He leaned forward over his map. “Go as far as this clearing.” He referred to a point on his sketch, marked X. “Then come back, and we will confer again.”

  “Is it a long walk to the clearing?” Old Benjamin queried.

  “You will arrive there in maybe an hour or two. A pleasant walk, I assure you.”

  “You are very kind to us, sir,” Old Benjamin said, filling his mouth with wine, which he held for a long time before gulping.

  The mayor explained that the border guards had already expanded their numbers in the Banyuls-sur-Mer region, and they were constantly on patrol. “Day and night, I’m told,” he said. “Of course, you understand the consequences. I don’t have to explain.”

  “It is always good to be warned,” I said, making sure Old Benjamin heard me. I had this eerie feeling that he was not sufficiently frightened and, therefore, might do something a little foolish.

  I can still hear Old Benjamin taking leave of the mayor, bowing steeply: “I give you a thousand thanks, monsieur le maire.”

  * * *

  —

  The Gurlands were staying in Banyuls, at a small boardinghouse, so there would be no problem with logistics. We would scout the lower path this afternoon and leave for Spain the following morning, at four sharp.

  We set off immediately after lunch. I was relieved by the apparent vigor of the Gurlands, although I quickly saw that José was remote and troubled—more so than most boys of his age—and hoped this would not interfere with the crossing. Frau Gurland was a broad-hipped, blond woman in her late forties, although she seemed younger. José was fifteen and very strong, with hard, blue eyes and corkscrew-curly hair—blond hair over dark olive skin, a peculiar combination.

  “We will have such a nice walk this afternoon!” Old Benjamin said.

  José looked at him with pity.

  “Why don’t you wait here?” I suggested. “Better to save your energy for tomorrow, no?”

  “I feel very well today,” he said. “I want to go with you, to get a sense of it. One tends to worry until the reality is underfoot, you see.” His cheeks were flushed, but he seemed remarkably eager and fresh. One could obviously not dissuade him.

  “You will let me carry the briefcase for you,” said José, who seemed fond of Old Benjamin.

  “If I feel tired, I will hand it over,” he said, “but for the time being, I am quite happy with it. I have so many good years packed inside, you see.”

  We set off in cold sunlight that clarified and examined everything it touched, as if preparing for the kill of winter meticulously, callously. A scrawny hare scurried into a deep hole. Blackbirds gathered on a broken limb. There was a sliding breeze off the sea, and it rushed into our faces, making it difficult to press forward. Old Benjamin, in his suit and city shoes, his wrinkled white shirt and food-speckled tie, seemed ludicrously out of place as we tilted into the breeze. I could more easily imagine him on the Paris métro.

  Gulls swooped overhead, some grazing in the stubble-fields on the immediate outskirts of Banyuls-sur-Mer. Bales of hay were pitched here and there, like tamed lightning. The colors in the landscape shone with the vividness of late September: blues like in oil paintings, glossy and slightly green, and browns bordering on russet. “We are walking on the world,” I said, to nobody in particular. And it was like that: as if we had acquired some elevation. I felt light, at ease, and happy. At least for now, I was not worried about the border guards.

  Each of us drifted in our own balloon of consciousness, avoiding conversation. Old Benjamin seemed much livelier than earlier, on the walk from Port-Vendres, when he had to stop every ten or fifteen minutes for a breath. At one point, much to my surprise, he was actually singing something under his breath, in German. Something from Wagner’s Tristan? It seemed unlikely that he would favor an anti-Semite like Wagner, but one never knows. Intellectuals have their own reasons. In any case it was hardly prudent to be singing in German just now. I said nothing only because there was nobody near us, and the wind was strong enough to muffle the words.

  I studied Mayor Azéma’s sketch as we proceeded, taking careful note of each landmark. The first leg of the journey, on this early scouting mission, was not going to be the hour or two of pleasant walking that the mayor had imagined. We encountered a severe upward turning in the path only forty minutes after setting off, with perhaps three or four hours of walking ahead of us. Old Benjamin gratefully passed the briefcase to José Gurland as the path inclined, and I could see from his color that he was having a difficult time. Every quarter hour or so he would stop to rest for a moment, sucking in his cheeks as he inhaled, then blowing out with a whistle of phlegm.

  In the second hour, Benjamin seemed overwhelmed, and I suggested that he go back with José. Henny Gurland and I would push ahead by ourselves.

  “I am perfectly well,” he said, adamant. “You must let me have a little breather now and then. It is normal for a man of my age.”

  What was I to do?

  Fortunately, the path soon leveled. At last, we came to a ruined stable: our first major landmark. Beyond that, we found the clearing the mayor had mentioned. Resting there, I produced bread and cheese for everyone from my rucksack. Henny Gurland had a bottle of water in hers, which we duly passed around. José had squirreled away some chocolate, which he also shared.

  “Picnics are wonderful occasions,” Old Benjamin said.

  Suddenly a patrol appeared in the distance: four or five soldiers in a file, their black shadows tilting ahead of them, clearing a way.

  “Into the stable!” I whispered, ducking. My heart jabbed in my neck, in my temples, as we scrambled toward it, keeping as low to the ground as possible.

  We waited for an hour, crouching in the stale hay. The border patrol had obviously not seen us.

  “Are they everywhere?” Henny Gurland asked.

  “These mountains are too big for that,” I said, improvising. “They probably send out dozens of small patrols, but the chances of being intercepted by any one of them is slight, especially as one gets higher. The foothills are riskier. We should probably have come at dusk.” Privately, I began to doubt the wisdo
m of Mayor Azéma, who had recommended broad daylight for scouting purposes.

  “We’re sitting ducks,” said Old Benjamin, his eyes bulging behind his glasses. It amused me to see a man of his capacities uttering a line from a third-rate detective film.

  We stepped outside and could see just ahead the huge boulder that Azéma had mentioned, a great bulbous mass like a bald pate surrounded by a fringe of grass and thistle.

  “What a monstrous thing, that rock,” Old Benjamin said. “Like Balzac’s forehead.”

  “Like what?” asked Henny Gurland.

  “Balzac,” he said, “the novelist.”

  Frau Gurland sighed. It could test one’s patience to listen to a man like this. Everything reminded him of a book, a character in a book, or the author of a book. On his deathbed he would shout, “I remember a scene in a book where it happens like this!” Only when he was dead would the references cease, the allusions to other points in time and history, and it would come as a relief, probably to him as well as everyone else. At some point, the moment itself matters and does not connect to other moments in time. The time of one’s death is like this. One is always a virgin at death.

  “The clearing!” cried José.

  Henny Gurland was unnerved by the shout, and I thought, for a horrid moment, that she would slap him, but fortunately that moment passed in the excitement of arrival.

  Indeed, a circle of grass in the high brush caught the afternoon light and shone like a massive coin about a hundred yards in the distance. It was definitely the one marked firmly on Azéma’s map.

  Old Benjamin began to walk more quickly. “Let’s go,” he said, the first and only time I heard those words come from him. White-faced, his mouth open to gulp breath, he rushed toward it, dragging the ball-and-chain of his briefcase beside him. At one point he even broke into a peculiar, listing run. Upon reaching the clearing, he simply collapsed, sprawling in the grass with his face down.

  José rushed to his side, asking if Old Benjamin had hurt himself.

  “But I am wonderful, wonderful!” he said, rolling onto his back. “This clearing…it does one a lot of good sometimes, just a circle in the woods. The light, you know, surprises me. It is quite beautiful here, I think.” He quoted a line from Verlaine.

  Poor José did not understand this babble, but he revered the old man for reasons he could only intuit. For me, Benjamin was the European Mind writ large. Indeed, as I later realized, Old Benjamin was everything the Nazi monsters wanted most to obliterate: that aura of tolerance and perspective that comes from having seen many things from many angles. Even that rueful laugh of his was part of the aura. Here before us was the last laughing man, I thought. The last man to laugh the laugh of the ages. From now on, history would be tears, and the work of intellectuals would be the work of grieving.

  We lay together in the grass now with the sun sliding down the western sky, cold at our backs; we had a good view of the dark valley below. A faint moon had already pricked through the firmament, with a silvery haze around it. It would soon be dusk.

  I said, “We must get back now, to the village. We begin again before dawn, so we’ll need our sleep.”

  José immediately jumped to his feet and began to brush the grass from his trousers.

  “Not me,” said Old Benjamin. There was an eerie firmness in his voice.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “I cannot walk another step today, I’m afraid. My legs are gone.”

  It was impossible, exasperating. How was I going to get this man over the Pyrenees?

  “You must not look so mournful, Frau Fittko,” he said. “I am perfectly capable of sleeping here tonight. The grass is quite comfortable. Indeed, I will be quite happy here, and by tomorrow I will have gathered my energy for the climb. It will give me the boost I need to make it over.”

  “Indeed,” I said. No point would be served in arguing with him, that much was clear.

  “You will freeze,” said Henny Gurland.

  “Here,” said José. “Take my pullover, doctor.” He immediately stripped and gave Old Benjamin his sweater. “I will bring your suitcase, tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, José,” he said, accepting the sweater gratefully. “You are so thoughtful. And with your sweater, I shall be toasty all night and sleep like a newborn.”

  “Newborns don’t sleep,” I said. “They feed every two or three hours.”

  “Then I shall feed on the stars, on the moon,” he said. He quoted some appropriate lines from Heine on the subject, which none of us recognized. “If it begins to rain, I will go into the stable.”

  And so we left him there, sitting like a Buddha, his legs drawn up; he was thoroughly self-absorbed, immersed in thought, even before we began our downward climb. This was certainly the most peculiar man I had ever met, a rare and difficult one. It seemed improbable that we would make it to Spain together, but at this point, turning back was not a likely option.

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  Let me tell you about my study, here in Berlin. It is not yet fully equipped, yet it remains beautiful and livable. My books are all here, and even in these harsh times they have increased over the years from twelve hundred to more than two thousand—and I have not kept many old ones. The room has its peculiarities, I will admit. For one thing, it has no desk; in the course of time, and partly because of circumstances—not only my habit of working a good deal in cafés but also various associations that haunt my memory of the old writing-desk ways—I have reached the point of writing only while lying down. From my predecessor in this flat, I have inherited a sofa that is wonderfully adequate for my purposes, although for sleeping it seems useless.

  10

  Having decided impulsively to spend this night in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Benjamin saw he was ill-equipped to make it through until morning. He had no provisions, no water or food, no blankets. Yet it was too late. The others, much to his surprise, had not argued with him; indeed, they were gone—Frau Fittko, Henny Gurland, and her son; they had left him alone here, higher in the world than he liked, exposed, in a ruined stable.

  It was already colder than he had banked on. The sun had dropped like a bomber going down in flames, and night nested on the world, spreading its icy black wing over the mountains. The moon rose swiftly, and the stars came out in clusters, inventing legends overhead: a bold anthology of giants and heroes, demons, mythical beasts. Searching the sky from the window of the stable, Benjamin imagined what a shepherd in ancient Greece might have felt, tormented each night by so many incoherent, flickering signs, an unreadable script. People needed the gods and heroes, the myths, to gather and display meaning. The mind and the world must join forces to create consciousness. Benjamin began to consider death as simply the end of signification, the removal of signifiers from the passing facts they signed.

  He could feel the blunt and irrevocable separation of words and things beginning: a slight shift of the ground he occupied. It was accompanied by the lonely hiss of wind in the high grass, the smell of decay in the stable’s rotting struts, and the dying light. And he felt afraid for the first time, realizing that his rumpled suit would never keep him warm; his tie seemed absurd in this context, an obsolete object of clothing, a vestigial organ of a civilized world that had vanished forever. It dangled from his neck like a speechless tongue. What would it say if it could talk? he wondered, then shouted, “Quack! Quack! Quack!” and dissolved in giggles.

  The giggles echoed back from the mountains.

  “I am going mad,” he whispered.

  His heart fluttered queerly, a wasp in a jar, and his arms tingled. He decided to step outside, to get air. He could not breathe in the stable.

  The clearing, its broad field of wiry grass, delighted him. Wrapping himself in his own arms to keep warm, he leaned forward into the sharp wind. His breath puffed ahead of him, a faint diaphan
ous balloon; his shoes cracked, and he could feel the blister that had formed this afternoon growing steadily more painful on his left toe, where it tingled and burned; another seemed to have developed on his right heel. These abrasions would only make his journey even more of an ordeal.

  But he found it hard to think about tomorrow as the temperature plunged and a circle of pain widened in his chest. I’ll be lucky enough to make it through the night, he said to himself, a faint sardonic smile gathering on his lips. It would shock them all, would it not, if he simply died here, in the stable? They would have to bury him in a shallow pit nearby. The ground was not yet frozen, and there was plenty of dirt around to kick over his corpse. “He’d have slowed us down anyway,” Henny Gurland would say. He knew Henny.

  But who would say Kaddish? Scholem, perhaps? He might organize this.

  Yes, Gerhard Scholem would find him, eventually. It might take him twenty years, but he would find him. This was just the sort of absurd, sentimental journey he would adore.

  Scholem would be good company tonight if, miraculously, he were to descend from a cloud. They would lie together in the hay talking about Isaac Luria and his school of Kabbalism, or some such thing. Scholem never tired of these recondite conversations.

  It had been almost silly, back in the old days, when he and Dora were fighting tooth and nail, the way Scholem would enter the room and begin a discourse on some abstruse topic; his conversations began in medias res, with never a preamble, not even a warm-up. Once, when he and Dora were about to make love, Scholem stepped into the bedroom without knocking and began to chatter away about the deficiency of Kantian epistomology. Benjamin was hesitant to interrupt him, but Dora was never shy; holding a sheet around herself, she pushed the astonished scholar from the room, crying, “Let us fuck in peace, dear Gerhard. We can discuss Kant after I’ve had a good orgasm!”