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 that 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 Baudelaire 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.
Now he and his sister made their way through darkened streets to the station, their heads down, hurrying. Like most people in their situation, they simply abandoned their worldly goods, hoping that after the war they might retrieve them. Tonight, it was enough to carry a few small bags—and Benjamin’s manuscript, although Dora couldn’t see why he had to bring it. “Give it to Monnier, let her look after it. Or somebody else! It’s safer here than on the road!”
“You don’t understand,” he said.
“It’s a bag of bricks. It is slowing us down!”
As they pulled away from the dimly lit station, which smelled of oil and dust, the Eiffel Tower shone above the city in garish moonlight: the world’s most preposterous radio transmitter, and Benjamin imagined it calling invisible cries of desperation across the dark Atlantic to anyone who might be listening. It is often like this with technologies, he thought. Function follows form.
The tower itself, he recalled, had been erected whimsically, a monument to the sheer magniloquence of steel. Three hundred skyjacks had sunk two and a half million rivets to create what seemed, at first, like a three-hundred-meter flagpole. It had been a mere fancy, a piece of artifice, an unnatural wonder of the world that tourists might gawk at for generations; then came radio, and in 1916 the edifice suddenly acquired a meaning. Benjamin took a notebook from his briefcase and wrote: “Meaning as after-echo. The point of apparently pointless events, too, becomes clear long after. This is the end of history: the post hoc accumulation of significance for random, inarticulate events, beautiful or cruel.”
“What are you writing, Walter?” asked Dora, sitting beside him. “You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.”
“Nothing,” he said.
“What does that mean? Nothing! Talk to me.”
“I have nothing to say, that’s what I mean,” he said, a trifle angry. He did not want his thoughts interrupted.
“You seem so sad,” she said.
“I am not sad,” he insisted.
“You are.”
He yawned. It was exhausting to deal with Dora.
“Ever since you were a little boy, I could tell when you were sad,” she continued.
Benjamin closed his notebooks and wanly said, “You are quite wrong, Dora. The truth is I may even be a little happy.”
They traveled through the night, sleeping fitfully in the crowded railway car. He watched Dora as she dozed, her head sloping to her chest and a double chin forming. It reminded him, again, of his mother, who had grown pudgy in middle age. And himself, for that. A family replicated the production of the world, the organic historical growth of objects in time: He and Dora were still connected in the most literal sense to his parents, Émile and Pauline. He withdrew from his wallet a yellowed photograph of his family, an instant locked in the glacier of memory that preserves such images. There he sits, bald, in a long white gown with ruffled collar, on his mother’s lap, his right hand raised slightly, a look of concentrated attention on his face; he is perhaps five months old. Georg holds his left hand, protective, loving. Already a lostness narrows his gaze, a bewilderment born of credulousness. His black hair is ruffled, and his dark eyes burn holes in the picture. Pauline sits primly, the billowing sleeves of her dress a sign of affluence and ease. There is a firm aura of control in her expression, in the way her right hand balances her child so effortlessly. But there is fear on her face as well. Her confidence has been shaken, and she does not know if she will find herself capable of summoning Motherhood on such a scale. This self-doubting is visible in the arch of her back, the way she leans forward ever so slightly, as if afraid she might slump and then crumble. Only Émile shows total confidence; he stands a full foot above everyone, or more; he is centered in the photograph: paterfamilias, provider, benevolent source of life. His vast, meticulously sculpted mustache is much in contrast to Benjamin’s, which is stubby and thick, unkempt.
Dora began to snore heavily, embarrassing him. He wished he could simply get off at the next station and leave his sister forever. He wanted to separate from the Benjamins of Berlin, from his inherited place in the continuum of pain and responsibility. He wanted the experience of total freedom, that free fall beyond time and place. But he knew better, and he stood and wrapped a blanket around Dora’s shoulder and was relieved when she did not waken.
From the inside pocket of his coat he took a weary letter from Grete Steffin, Brecht’s lover. He and Grete shared an affection for Brecht that was unbroken despite the fact that he had treated them both with contempt. Brecht treated everyone horribly—everyone except those who promised to get him something: money, sex, fame. He was a disturbing man. A little boy, really. All he wanted was adulation, gratification. He pretended to be a Communist and attended every world conference on literature sponsored by Stalin, feigning a profound social conscience, but Benjamin felt that Brecht was in some ways a fake, a brilliant fake. It was the underside of his genius.
They had met in Capri that fateful summer of 1924, the same time he met Asja Lacis, who had simultaneously ruined his life and given him the one important thing he had ever had: the experience of deep, erotic love. But this particular love had brought desire, and desire had consumed him. He had never been free again. Sometimes he could think about nothing but Asja’s green eyes, the faint, alluring smell of her breath, the way her hair fell lankily across her forehead. Often, in the sixteen years since he met her, he lay in bed all night thinking of her, unable to waste himself, to drain himself, to exhaust this terrible need.
He was dreaming of Asja when the train pulled into the station at Lourdes in the bluish pink of dawn. He and Dora found a room in the boardinghouse where Emma Cohn was staying on the rue de la Cité; it was a modest room, but it overlooked a garden full of lemon trees and hibiscus. They each had a bed, and there was a bathroom down the hall shared by a dozen or so others, mostly refugees from Belgium. It pleased Benjamin that Dora had a friend here, as he did not relish spending too much time with her.
When, in mid-July, the opportunity arose for Dora to accompany Emma to a town in the south of France where refugees were apparently making their way into Spain quite easily, he encouraged her to go.
“It’s your chance,” he said. “You must take it, Dora. We can meet in New York, in a few months.”
“I’m afraid, Walter.”
“If you stay, there is no hope. Horkheimer and Adorno are sending me a visa. Not two visas, but one. And passage on a ship to New York. I am expecting this.”
“You should come with me.”
“Why are you always like this, Dora?”
“Like what?”
“Insisting, resisting…”
“You treat me like a child, Walter.”
“This is a ridiculous conversation.”
“Emma says there is room. You could join us. What if they don’t send you a visa or get you a berth?”
“I will take my chances.”
“You are being stubborn. Look where it’s got you.”
He was getting angry now. “What are you talking about?”
“You expect everyone to take care of you. You expect miracles.”
“I don’t have to listen to this.”
“You are worse than Georg.”
“Please, enough of Georg. Enough of this chatter.”
“I will go alone, with Emma.”
“Good.”
“You are a disappointment to me,” she added. “Mother was always right about you.”
Benjamin chose not to answer. His sister made him furious. She was perpetually opening old wounds. She could not let any dog lie buried.
“I will never see you again,” she said, and began to cry.
He drew her near. “Dora, you exaggerate everything. You worry all the time. Mama used to say, ‘Dora, you fret too much.’ Remember?” He took a handkerchief to her eyes. “She was right about you.”
“I will go to New York,” she said.
“That’s good,” he said. “You always wanted to go to America, didn’t you?”
“No,” she said, “that was you.”
“Ah,” he said. “I will give you Teddy Adorno’s address. You must write to Teddy. He will know my whereabouts.”
“Come with me, Walter.”
“No,” he said. “I will go to Marseilles, then to Cuba.”
“You will hate Cuba.”
“Or Buenos Aires.”
“That is worse.”
“Or Antarctica.”
They both started laughing. It was a relief to have this conversation behind them. Later that day, he took her and Emma to the train station, and he gave Dora enough money to last three months: exactly half of the money Adrienne Monnier had given him. “And remember what I told you,” he said. “I will see you soon, believe me. A few months, no more.”
“I believe you, Walter,” she said, her expression betraying her actual words. She did not believe him. Indeed, disbelief flooded her last looks, dampening the tiny fans of wrinkles that widened from the corners of her eyes. Benjamin watched the train pull out, with its breath of ashes. He understood perfectly that he would never see Dora again.
The heat of July nearly exhausted him, and he lay in bed most of the day, reading and writing letters: to Grete Steffin, to Adorno, to his ex-wife, Dora. Near the end of July he wrote to his cousin, Hannah Arendt, explaining his situation: “Hideous and stifling weather reinforces my need to maintain the life of both body and spirit in a state of suspension. I cloak myself in reading: I’ve just finished the last volume of the Thibaults and The Red and the Black. My extreme anguish at the thought of what is going to happen to my manuscripts is now doubly painful.” He sent the letter to the last address he had for Hannah, in Paris, although he could not imagine it would find her. The mail was so fickle now. You dropped a letter into a mailbox without the slightest sense that it was going anywhere, although some letters, amazingly, seemed to get through. Since many of his correspondents were in flux, or flight, there was no telling where they might be. Letters occasionally came back marked undeliverable at this address. Most of them dropped, like feathers, into the well of history.
Alone in the boardinghouse in Lourdes, he felt unbelievably lazy, but he did not mind. A sentence from La Rochefoucauld returned to give comfort: “His laziness supported him in glory for many years in the obscurity of an errant and hidden life.” He considered himself a deeply lazy man, and his life had certainly been obscure. Many of the people he knew, especially the writers, loathed any form of sloth, but he did not. He had tried for many years to cultivate leisure, to let happen what happened, to allow his imagination room to graze, always searching for that distant valley where larks rise on strings of sound all day and the sun is steady in the sky.
He believed in chance, in lazy luck, and the benefits of serendipity. It had never let him down, and he had stumbled upon so many treasures in nearly five decades of living; these formed his secret hoard. The fact that he had never written a whole book, a “real” book, apart from the Habilitation on German tragic drama, bothered him, but only a little. If the war ended soon, he would publish the arcades book, and that would be his magnum opus. The work on Baudelaire would follow, a brilliant adornment. And a neat, pocket-size selection of his best essays and aphorisms would be lovely, and perhaps a posthumous book would appear. He had, after all, scattered countless fugitive pieces in odd publications in different countries. Surely one could assemble miscellaneous collections from these, and they would make for good reading. (Indeed, he had once published a collection of random jottings called One-Way Street, and it had found its way into many appreciative hands.)
An aphorism stuck in his head: Scripta manent, verba volent: Writing stays, but talk flies away. Was that Martial or Juvenal? Either way, he knew it was true. But he loved conversation as much, even more, than written words. He had loved the long hours with Gerhard Scholem, the late-night talks with Brecht, the prolonged, even timeless café mornings in Paris with Bataille and Klossowski. In the few times when he and Asja Lacis had been alone, they had often talked through the night instead of making love. Now he had nobody to talk to, so he was dependent on letters: writing even more than receiving them. He found himself in his letters, pulling from peculiar depths an energy that was then shaped by the expectations of a particular, well-imagined reader.
My selves are many, he thought. One by one they emerge in my letters. They are all true, even when contradictory. I embrace them all.
If he regretted anything in his life it was the way he allowed himself to disappear in the presence of strong personalities, like Scholem or Brecht. Scholem was somewhat easier to deal with: The man was a scholar to his fingertips, and he understood the vulnerabilities of a scholar, the dependence on the text, the material at hand; he was acquainted with the need to lose oneself in digging, in rooting for truth; he also knew that one must invent the truth over and over, never forgetting that life is a process of continual revision in the interest of greater understanding. But Brecht…My God, what a difficult man! What an impossible friend!
Brecht abused his friends and used his enemies. He was ruthless with women, lying to them constantly about his affections, pretending to be faithful when no man was ever less faithful. He had nearly ruined Elisabeth Hauptmann, who wrote portions of The Threepenny Opera in exchange for affection. And he had worn out poor, dear Grete Steffin: She was a bag of skin now, her lungs as fragile as flypaper; she coughed up blood each day and was light-headed, weak. But she loved Brecht. She would do anything for him, swallow any lie, do any cruel deed for a smile from him, a wink, a gesture of acknowledgment.
The sad letters poured in from Grete: Not even the war could stop them. Sad news travels well, it seems. Benjamin wanted to take her by the hand and lead her to freedom, but he was not free himself when it came to Brecht. He considered Brecht—for all his reliance on the women in his life as editors, even cowriters—a genius. It was unmistakable. The fact that others contributed to his works did not matter; he gathered their language into his own groundswell; he transmogrified everything.
That last summer in Denmark with Brecht had been equally exhausting and exhilarating. Brecht was ailing, and he lay in bed most of the time, demanding constant attention. Night after night, Benjamin sat beside him and listened. Occasionally he would offer a response, or an objection, and Brecht would flare into anger: “How can you say such a thing, Walter?” or “You are too intellectual, Walter. You do not understand the real world.” He was, like Gramsci, a pessimistic Marxist. Fascism had definitely taken over the world, or would soon rule everything and everyone. But the future, said Brecht, is always a place of hope. One must never give up hope.
Brecht had taught Benjamin what he liked to refer to as plumpes Denken, or “crude thinking.” All useful thought must be simple, crystalline, and fresh. The elaborate metaphysical turns that had become second nature to him through long years of philosophical study must be sacrificed now. He was going to write the most straightforward sentences he could imagine. To make himself crude, peasantlike, and useful. His essays would become tools, picks and shovels, and he would put them into the hands of ordinary people. Here was the hope he kept alive in his heart: a dream of future writing.
Almost in defiance of the historical moment, he maintained a small flame of hope as he boarded the train for Marseilles. He decided that the only plausible way out of this beleaguered country, for him, was by ship. One heard fantastic stories of eccentric captains taking shiploads of refugees to strange (and mythical) islands. Benjamin discounted most of these tales, but he felt sure that plenty of ships left Marseilles every day: merchant marine ships, cargo ships, passenger liners of one kind or another. He had been told it was quite easy to get false papers, and that Cuba was wide open. It would make a fine temporary layover. And when the war ended, he would go straight to New York to found the firm of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin, Ltd. It sounded like a company of haberdashers, but he and his friends would sell ideas to the world instead of clothes. “It is astonishing how a few men with the right ideas can shift the world,” Adorno had written to him only the year before. “We must become these men.”
It was maddeningly hot and humid in the train, and Benjamin was forced to stand in a vestibule beside the toilet all the way to Marseilles. He spent three agonizing days in search of a place to stay, sleeping at night in parks with his head on his briefcase. (He checked his bag at the station, aware that he was too weak to cart it around; the briefcase was another matter, since it contained his manuscript. One could not risk leaving it unaccompanied.) His chest pains, which had eased somewhat in the healing air of Lourdes, returned with a vengeance in Marseilles, and he frequently had to stand still for twenty minutes, frozen in place by pain that radiated, like filaments, down his arms to the tips of his fingers.
Life would have been difficult had he actually found a place to sleep, but it seemed impossible in these conditions; exposed to the elements, trudging from one makeshift bed to another, he wondered if he might die in Marseilles, a city that felt like the eye of a storm: strangely lit, awkwardly peaceful, with occasional swirls of wind reminding him that war was everywhere but here. One could see any number of uniformed men in the streets: fragments of the scattered French army, delinquent members of the Foreign Legion, military policemen on loud, brawny motorcycles. Whole convoys of troops occasionally moved through the city streets, as if randomly searching for the war. Lumpish cargo planes flew overhead, as did bi-winged trainers. But the war never actually erupted on this particular spot.
On Benjamin’s third night in Marseilles, as black rain fell, he was forced to take shelter beneath a sandstone bridge with an old and toothless woman. Zigzag lightning ripped the nearby grass, and thunder boomed. The woman suddenly began to sob.
“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 mumbled.
“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 dropping 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.