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 diaphanous 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!”
Kaddish. Benjamin wondered if these ceremonies had any effect on the living or the dead. Yes, he believed in God, most certainly, but he could not visualize a God so personal that one particular fate, among so many, mattered. God was the energy of the universe, and he represented only a small portion of that energy. It would not surprise him if, after his demise, he returned to earth as an animal, perhaps a hedgehog. He would like to be a hedgehog, since hedgehogs were not overly troubled by niceties; they did not, like the jesuitical fox, require a multitude of options. He recalled the famous line from Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” He guessed that those who knew one big thing were happier in life.
He had himself been a fox, darting among ideas, shape-shifting, trying out this ideology or that dogma. Brecht was a hedgehog, of course; he knew one big thing: that the workers must get control over the means of production. Scholem was another hedgehog: He knew that God was hidden in the world, and that only the best would ever find Him after patient searching through a wilderness of signs. Benjamin, alas, distrusted both of these Big Things, although he understood the truth of both. It made him dizzy just to know he could see so much, so many sides, with options galore. Even here, tonight, he could see many choices.
Life and death were the crude fork in the path before him, but there were countless branches of each, and alternatives to alternatives. He could stumble in the dark, dragging himself back to Banyuls or Port-Vendres, where he could wait in hiding for the war to end. There were Jews in every village along the border, stowed in attics, lofts, cellars, barns; indeed, there was hardly a forest anywhere in southern France that did not contain a clutch of Jews. “The Jews are everywhere, hanging like fruit from the trees,” his grandmother used to say, citing a Yiddish proverb. The Jews would certainly outlast Hitler.
The Führer was doomed, Benjamin was sure of it. Nothing so inhuman, so lifeless, so essentially dull, could survive for very long. The puzzling thing was how Nazism had managed this well so far.
It doubtless appealed to a certain class of people, mostly the uninformed. For bizarre reasons, it had also attracted a handful of bright people, such as Heidegger, that monster and egomaniac, who perhaps saw Hitler as a projection of his own will to absolute intellectual power. As long as Hitler remained out of reach, in Berlin or perched on some distant yodeling hilltop in Austria, he was unthreatening. One could almost imagine him letting Heidegger, the presumed heir of Nietzsche, run the University of Freiburg in his own way.
But this was implausible. Heidegger had taken over as Rector at Freiburg in April 1933 only because the Nazis would not let the gentle Professor von Möllendorf, a Social Democrat, assume that position. To his credit, Heidegger resigned the following February, having refused to capitulate to Nazi mandates on every point. (They had insisted, for instance, that he fire two deans, including von Möllendorf.) This moment of grace notwithstanding, Heidegger had made some horrific speeches during his tenure in that post, once declaring it the “supreme privilege” of the academic community to serve the national will. He had practically wept at the revival of the German Volk, which had “won back the truth of its will-to-be.” Hitler himself represented, to him, “the triumph of hard clarity over rootless and impotent thinking.” Heidegger had gone so far as to publish, in the Freiburger Studenten Zeitung, the following sentence: “The Führer himself is the only present embodiment and future embodiment of German action and its law.”
This article had been sent to Benjamin in Paris by a friend in the philosophy department at Freiburg, who scribbled in the margins: “Was this man not the lover of your cousin, Hannah Arendt?” It was true, and impossible. The world was topsy-turvy. Poor Hannah, he thought. She did not have her wits about her when it came to men.
Hannah had last been seen in Paris, before the invasion, and he did not know if she was alive or dead. She was but one of thousands of intellectuals whom the Nazi machine had mangled in its iron teeth. “And the fools crush what they will not, cannot know,” Goethe had written, and it seemed truer now than ever.
Benjamin had been defeated as an intellectual force in the world, but he had no fear of death as such. Death was simply one more among so many mysteries. As a child, he had once questioned his mother about death, and she—in her inimitable way—explained to him calmly that upon dying, a magic carpet would take him to Jerusalem, where all Jews would eventually gather at the feet of the Messiah. That was the sort of thing Sabbatai Zevi would have preached in the seventeenth century. Or Nathan of Gaza, his rapt disciple, who did even more than Zevi to spread all manner of fantastic teachings, many of which still lingered in certain quarters in asinine, watered-down versions.
Despite his antiliteralism, Benjamin believed in heaven. It was not a place, which is to say it was neither up nor down, neither here nor there. It was a dimension, and transported to this dimension he, Walter Benjamin, would find himself the master of his own experience for the first time. What had made this earthly life for him such an imperfect paradise was a feeling of fraudulence that secretly governed every performance of every text he had written.
He had once turned this ambivalence to his advantage in a story, his only good story: “Rastelli erzählt.” In that tale, he conjured a conjurer: the fabulous Rastelli, a famous juggler whose genius lay in his unbelievable ability to manipulate a single ball. Whoever saw Rastelli perform came away with the impression that his ball was a living creature. It would leap into the air at the juggler’s slightest command, electric, independent of gravity. It could loop and spin, dip and veer. One moment it whirled on Rastelli’s scalp, and the next it popped from his vest pocket.
But Rastelli did not practice an honest form of sorcery. His secret was that the mystifying ball contained a minuscule dwarf who controlled its motion though a network of invisible strings.
In Benjamin’s story, the juggler is invited to perform before a famously cruel and temperamental sultan. Should the performance fail, Rastelli would be instantly beheaded or shackled forever to a damp wall in some dark chamber below the earth. He is at his best, however, on the night of this command performance; the ball, it seems, has never been more responsive, rising and falling, springing to life so uncannily that the sultan is stunned into admiration and gratitude.
As Rastelli leaves the theater, an urgent note from his dwarf is pressed into his hand. “Dear Master,” it says, “You will please forgive me. I am ill today and cannot possibly assist you in your performance before the sultan.” In this way Rastelli is himself deceived in the midst of his own deception; he becomes, unwittingly, authentic for the first time.
The moon was high now, eerily bright though not quite full, orange-colored, pillaring through a scrim of clouds; it seemed, absurdly, to be eavesdropping on Benjamin’s thoughts, and he stepped into the shadow of a tall pine. This kind of audience he did not need.
Standing with his back to the tree, he pressed the rough bark to his spine; he was hiding from the moonlight, much as God in the tradition of Kabbalah withdrew from the world. It was Isaac Luria, writing in the sixteenth century, who characterized God’s self-exile, tzimtzum, so vividly. To make room for the expanding universe, God had hidden himself, sending holy light into the world to buoy it up. The world, alas, could not bear so much glory; it shattered, and the cornerstones of the world—in the shape of vessels—shattered, too. Evil now permeated the world, having found a point of entry. The expansion of the universe had given evil the space it required to live and grow, and it was everywhere now, spoiling what was once good. To humankind was left the agonizing yet essential work of restitution, Tikkun olam, the repair of the world.
Benjamin spoke the lovely phrase aloud: “Tikkun olam.” He drew himself up, feeling a surge of defiance. Having struggled to get here, within sight of the summit, he must not give in, slip back, die. He must repair the world.
Listing slightly to one side, like a drunk, Benjamin crossed the clearing. His feet seemed to weigh a hundred pounds each as he dragged them through the wiry grass. The moonlight flooded the valley below, giving it an otherworldly tinge, and it sparkled on the sea, dazzling to behold. The wind, less intense than before and somewhat softer, was fragrant, smelling of pine and salt; it felt cool but not bitter on his cheeks.
Suddenly, a voice startled him. Instinctively, he fell to the ground, digging his face into the coarse grass. Not fifty yards away a small patrol passed, chatting freely among themselves. Benjamin listened tensely, hoping they would not see him. His heart seemed to throb loudly in his chest, like a kettledrum. There was no hiding on this bright night, but the path was well below him, and they would have to crane their necks to see where he lay.
They spoke in French, not German, and this was reassuring. They were probably just local boys pressed into service by the border police. For so many of the younger men in service, the war was fun, a boy’s adventure; they would look back on these years later in life with nostalgia, with a vague but unmistakable sense that something important and interesting had once happened to them and was gone. The sad truth was there was no war at all; there were thousands of little wars, in thousands of different places. One could not comprehend such diversity.
When several of the guards broke into loud laughter, Benjamin could not resist lifting his head. They were shockingly close, the moonlight glinting off their helmets and bayonets. Benjamin watched as they filed into the distance, disappearing around a bend in the path, their voices gradually diminishing. He waited for half an hour before lifting himself to his feet to confirm that they were gone.
Afraid that another patrol might be near, he bent low as he walked toward the stable. If they caught him, he would surely be sent to a holding camp, then transported by cattle car to Germany, where he would die. He did not doubt that he would die there; his heart was weak, and he lacked the will to survive in appalling circumstances. Even Georg, his willful brother, was probably dead by now; at least that was his sister-in-law’s opinion.
Benjamin entered the stable and stood for a long time, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. At last, he could see a pile of straw in the corner, its sulfurous silver gleam. He did not care if it was moldy or filled with rats and merds, and he burrowed under it; the straw formed a blanket of sorts, and within ten minutes he felt much warmer. What he missed was a glass of brandy, its prickly heat at the back of his throat, the aftertaste of sweetness. But there was, of course, nothing to drink here, and he must not think about it. One of the few things he learned in exile was that you must not dwell on what you do not have.
At least he had a few cigarettes. For comfort and warmth, he lit one, letting the smoke stay in his mouth, in his throat, in his nasal passages; he filled his head with smoke and let his mind float. It surprised him that he felt no need to exhale; he was, perhaps, closer to death than he realized. Death as stillness at the center, a divine breathlessness, suspension of desire.
He had wanted so much in his life, a good deal of it unobtainable: coveted editions of favorite writers, oil paintings, exotic toys, objet d’art. And women. He often found it pleasant to think about women before he fell asleep; the force of eros was such that it took one’s mind off everything else. Self-consciously, he let his mind drift to Asja, then to Jula Cohn. An erotic dream would be lovely at this moment, the perfect escape.
The fire of his love for Jula had dimmed, but the coals might still be fanned by fantasy. He had met her for the first time in 1912, in Berlin. She was a puppy then, full-breasted though still in her teens. Her silky black hair was cut short, daringly so; when she brushed it back, it gave her a boyish look that Benjamin found irresistible. The puffiness around her eyes was merely part of her adolescent charm, as was her moodiness. But mostly, he adored her gaze, its way of attaching itself firmly to his own. She did not have to utter a word to communicate desire.
Benjamin met her secretly many times in obscure cafés, and they would talk into the morning hours, sometimes holding hands beneath a small table. Once, in an isolated section of a park near the river, they kissed deeply; it was a smoky dusk, with a mist floating above the water, swirling around them like a stage set from Wagner. Geese paddled by, snorting, honking, sometimes whirling in rings overhead. Passively, Jula opened her lips for him, letting him dig into her mouth with his tongue, his watery affection drooling into her throat. Another time, nearby, in a grove of copper beeches (he could still see their trunks rising, the bark smooth as steel), she had touched him where no woman had dared to touch him before, unbuttoning his trousers with delicate, moist fingers.
He tried to conjure that time again. It was midsummer, and they had taken a picnic into the park; as the sun dropped behind the high trees, she had casually, unexpectedly, reached for him. He had fallen, weak-kneed as a calf, to the ground, and she sat on top of him, taking the full length of him into her hands. He came too quickly, much to his embarrassment, but she said, “It is all right, my little Walter. This is natural. It is really quite nice, in fact.”
Not long after this incident in the park, Jula left Berlin with her father (her mother was dead); they moved to Heidelberg, where Benjamin visited her on several occasions, even after his marriage to Dora in 1917.
It had been so awkward: loving Jula, living with Dora. The birth of Stefan only made things worse, tying him to the marriage in a most insidious way. But he continued to dream about Jula, to write and visit her. The distance between them, and the physical and moral obstacles to their union, only inflamed him. He often pondered the question of love. Why was it so difficult for him to love what was accessible? He thought of Dante, who merely glimpsed Beatrice on a bridge one afternoon in Florence, yet this image was enough to fuel a life’s work. The beloved is perhaps best captured, possessed, in a text, in lines that writhe on the page, that smolder and burn.
Benjamin wished his marriage to Dora had been better. He had made a bad husband, although this had never been his intention. He had wanted to worship her, to make her happy; he had wanted to be a sympathetic father to Stefan, unlike his own father, who had never listened when he spoke. Benjamin always listened well: It was a cardinal trait, and Dora admitted as much. “You listen, Walter, but you hear things that have not been said,” she used to scold. It was funny at first, then rueful; at last, it was nothing short of tragic. Whenever his wife spoke, he heard other voices; when she looked at him, he averted his gaze. Her hand on his grew colder, day by day.
Why was he such an enigma to himself? Why had self-knowledge of the most rudimentary kind eluded him?
He sank deeper into the loose straw, the musty odor of mulch permeating his clothes. Bat wings flickered above in the rafters, and he did not like bats. Nor was he fond of spiders; he imagined dozens of them around him now, invisible, crawling into his trousers, under his shirt. His back itched terribly, but when he tried to reach under his shirt to scratch, a sharp pain rippled through his right shoulder and he groaned.
I will soon be skull and bones, he thought. Fleshless. Bleached. Empty. But he did not mind. There was, in fact, a little comfort in this notion of emptiness, of cessation. This terrible running would soon be over. Looking up, he saw the moon breaking through tiny cracks in the ceiling, as through a rib cage. This reminded him that the world was his body, and that he would shine beyond the point of fleshlessness; he would shine like the moon, and his horizons would be infinitely broader.
“Dora!” he said aloud. It startled him to hear the name, embodied, floating in the dark. Yet, why was he calling her of all people? How could he expect her to help, when he had not helped her in the least, when he had made her life so frantic? He deeply regretted that he had allowed Jula to share their apartment in Berlin. What madness was that? How could he have been so crazy? Dora had begged him to send Jula away. “What do you want with her?” she cried. “Do you sleep with her when I’m not here? Is that it? When I go shopping, you seduce her in my own house? I hope the two of you burn in Gehenna!”
Gehenna. Benjamin began to understand the meaning of hell as a concept. Hell was not something reserved for after death; it was part of life itself, some inversion of life. He had burned in Gehenna throughout those months in Berlin when Jula slept in the room beside his, so close he could often hear her breathing through the wall. He often made love with Dora while imagining it was Jula throbbing beneath him, wrapping her long, smooth legs around him, pressing her breasts tightly against his chest. Once, at orgasm, he had actually cried her name, and Dora, startled, rose from the bed, put on her nightgown, and went into the sitting room, where she warmed her hands by the embers of the fire. Benjamin, as if temporarily seized by wisdom, did not try to console her. He could say nothing. It would have been offensive to her if he had tried. For some things, there is no excuse.
Day after day, he had tried to negotiate the impossible. How to live with two women was the issue—the mad, irresolvable issue. Benjamin had studied the matter in the mirroring, mediating shield of Perseus held to his eyes by Goethe in his overwhelming novel Elective Affinities. Benjamin’s first triumph as a critic had been his essay on that novel, which meant so much because he saw in that painful, perfect text the uncanny reflection of his own contradictory life. Goethe’s characters—Eduard, Ottilie, and Charlotte—reeled before him now. Goethe had understood that love is never fully consummated in this earthly incarnation; it requires translation unto death. Benjamin had written in this essay: “Death, like love, has the power to make us naked.” In sexual congress, one is divinely naked; in death, too, one enters the divine presence without the guilty pretense of clothes.
He wanted nothing more than to lie in a crypt beside Jula or Asja. Or both! Were they not, in a strange way, the same woman? Or was he so contemptuous of the other sex that he considered them all mere manifestations of the Eternal Female? This Jungian nonsense irritated him as he thought about it. Indeed, he had frequently inveighed, in his letters to Adorno, about “bourgeois psychologizing,” believing Jung even worse than Freud in this regard. At least Freud did not wrap himself in a cloak of facile mysticism.
Benjamin had in fact loved many women, and each he had loved singly, finding some instance of the Divine in every one of them. Each breath, each caress, each point of laughter or tears was unique. But he could not deny that nature—as embodied by the attraction of men to women—had him fully in its febrile grip, and only death could free him. The ideal of married love, as conceived by Goethe, was achievable only through escape—the leap from nature to whatever lies beyond. Perhaps before the face of God, love and marriage were possible. But never here. Life was only missed connections, sleights of affection, approximate words.
The face of Goethe, not God, floated before him as an actual vision. He studied the long, arrogant nose, the massive brow, which was larger on one side than the other, a distortion that drew every eye toward him. He saw the feminine lips that curled in a wry smile, the eyes that coolly observed everything and gave away nothing. What was this attraction to Goethe? This fanatical dependence on the image of genius captured in one man? Was it merely a dream of total competence? Goethe had indeed perfected his life, as Benjamin had not. The master, whose life was founded on concealments, appealed to him in ways he could barely explain.
As a very young man, Benjamin had read the well-known biographies by Gundolf (which he disliked) and Baumgartner, and he had fixed a vision of perfection in life. Having conceived of Goethe in such a fashion, was there nothing left for him but failure? How does one emulate a god?
Benjamin’s own poetry had come to nothing but mere fragments, echoes of Goethe, Heine, and Georg. His stories were mostly unrealized, however ingenious. He did not possess the sheer coldness of heart required of a major artist. Even as a critic, he had not yet published an important book. His doctoral thesis at Bern, on Romantic art criticism, had remained deservedly unpublished. His postdoctoral study of the origins of German tragedic drama of the Baroque period was decidedly a botch; indeed, his assessors in Frankfurt (among them the pretentious and dull-witted aesthetician Hans Cornelis) had rejected it, and him, describing the treatise as “obscurantist, willful, convoluted.” It was no wonder his academic career had skittered to a halt.
Benjamin had tried to write a major exposition of Goethe’s life and work for the New Soviet Encyclopedia, but that, too, came to nothing: aimless, endless notes, a draft of an essay too rough to seem worth fixing. Even his masterwork on the Parisian arcades had exploded in his hands like a loose pack of cards. The final version, which he clutched to his cheek as a makeshift pillow, would need considerable work. But ultimately, ultimately, it would justify his labors. Here was the sign and signal of his genius.
Even it, however, was finally a book of fragments. His life was composed of fragments, quotations from other, better writers. His days were lived between quotation marks, and the high points of his existence merely italicized and familiar phrases. When he was working on his treatise on German drama, he had gathered more than six hundred quotations, had pinned them to the wall of his room: one index card for each quotation in his tiny hand. A compulsive collector of phrases, bits of poetry, aphorisms, he had lately come to believe the ideal critic was merely a gifted assembler of quotations. “The great book of the future,” he had written to Adorno, “will consist of fragments torn from the body of other work; it is a reassembly, a patchwork quilt of meanings already accomplished. The great critic of the future will remain silent, gesturing firmly but himself unable, or unwilling, to speak.”
The face of Jula flashed before him again, replacing Goethe. She was much prettier than Goethe, he thought, laughing softly to himself. “I love you, Jula,” he whispered, reaching involuntarily toward his trousers. Was it possible that erotic motions could stir in this, the bleakest night of his life? Were sex and death so prone to mingle?
He remembered only too well that terrible stay with Jula on the Côte d’Azur. He was by then a “free” man, was he not? The marriage to Dora had dissolved, and Jula was traveling with him. On the train, she had put her head affectionately on his shoulder, and he had been pleased when an elderly gentleman looked at them jealously. Jula was his now, he had thought. She had seemed quietly eager for his love for some time, although (despite what Dora had charged) they had never actually had full intercourse. Jula had always withdrawn from his advances at the last moment, whispering, “Another time.” How many “other times” were there?
He had come to the Côte d’Azur to pursue this relationship to its natural climax. It was like a ball tossed into the air: One had to hear it, even see it, land. They had taken a room in a boardinghouse by the sea called the Mariposa, a clean, crisp room with a high, vaulted ceiling and white, virginal walls. The room smelled of plaster, and daffodils were bunched in a vase beside their bed—a sign of early spring. The elderly landlady winked at him coyly as she handed him the key to their room, which she knew had only one bed. “Pour monsieur et madame,” she said, aware that neither of them boasted a matrimonial ring.
The butterflies in Benjamin’s stomach turned to wasps in a glass jar as he watched Jula undress, her back against him as she sat on a low stool before an unframed mirror. The bare room somehow added to her nakedness as she sat, quietly, before the mirror and contemplated her own body: the alabaster skin, the dark pubic hair, the taut, expansive breasts. Her stomach protruded ever so slightly.
Benjamin undressed, his damp clothes pooling on the floor. He crossed the room, utterly naked, erect, his feet cold on the blue ceramic tiles. He pressed himself into the hollow of her spine.
“I cannot make love with you,” she said, flatly.
“I love you, Jula,” he said.
“There’s something wrong between us,” she insisted.
“My darling Jula.”
“Forgive me, Walter. I would do this, were it possible. You must believe me.”
He pressed against her harder now, swollen to a point of exquisite pain.
“Please, Walter, don’t.” She dangled her black hair before her face like a curtain, and the vertebrae at the back of her neck glistened like an ivory chain. “I don’t want this.”
It was too late, however, for him to stop. He could not control himself.
Jula did not move but let him finish.
Benjamin wiped her back clean with a white towel, saying, “I’m so sorry, my darling. I am ashamed of myself.”
She was sobbing now, her shoulders shaking.
Benjamin led her gently to the bed. He tucked her into the cool sheets and smoothed her hair on the pillow. Her back was turned to him, but she had stopped sobbing. It was possible, he told himself, that he had broken the ice, and that tomorrow their relations would improve. But he also knew better. Something had always been slightly amiss between himself and Jula. They were like radios tuned to different channels.
It was the same with Asja. Those brief, hideous months when she stayed with him in Berlin under false pretenses still puzzled and enraged him. What was her point? She had let him make love to her, but without reciprocal enthusiasm; it was as if she were fulfilling some grim duty. “This is not love,” he said to her one time, in the midst of intercourse, “it is hydraulics.”
She had sat up abruptly in bed. “It is what you wanted, isn’t it?” she said. “To fuck.”
“Why do you torment me, Asja? I love you,” he had responded.
“You love yourself,” she said.
“Please, dearest. You know that from the first time I saw you—in the little shop in Capri—I have thought about you again and again. I…I…” The limitations of his expression, so mired in cliché, were agony, and he stuttered toward silence.
Asja raised her eyebrows and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke into his face. After a while, she said, “You’ve been thinking about a lot of things, Walter. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps you think too much?”
“You are mocking me,” he said, getting out of bed. “This is not lovemaking. I don’t know what to call it.”
Asja sighed. She had left Bernhard Reich back in Moscow, alone and unhappy, for no good reason. To annoy him, perhaps. They had been feuding ever since that dread winter when Benjamin came to stay with them. Reich had, with some justice, considered himself abused by them both, although he blamed Asja for the way she flirted with Benjamin right under his nose. He had seen her, on two or three occasions, put a hand on the poor man’s knee. If only he had known the worst: the way she seized him on several occasions and kissed him, voraciously. Once, during their kissing, she had let him reach under her blouse and cup her small breasts in his hands. “I want to fuck you,” he had said to her. She replied, coyly, “Not now. Perhaps another time.”
Benjamin could not understand the way she had unexpectedly marched into Berlin that spring and weirdly, even cruelly, offered herself to him like a fillet on a platter. He recalled their first time in bed together, drawing his legs up to his chest now in the musty straw, shivering. She had undressed him first, a peculiarly sexy move, then stood kissing him for a very long time, melting around him. Floor after floor tumbled through the burning house of his body. At last, she pushed him onto the bed and consumed him.
Her lust had been distracting, upsetting. It was not followed by the tenderness he expected; indeed, she dressed quickly and went into the kitchen to make herself a drink. She sat alone by the window of his small room, staring at the rain, which made traceries on the glass. Her cheeks were wet with tears.
Benjamin could not comfort her. “What is wrong, my Asja?” he asked, stroking her hair.
“It has nothing to do with you, Walter,” she said.
“I wish it had. I could help you.”
“I must return to Moscow.”
“There is nothing for you there. I am here. You must stay with me. We can work out whatever problems you may have. I can help you, if you will let me.”
“I must go,” she said.
He would have let her go willingly, if that would have cured her sadness. But he knew it wouldn’t, and she knew it, too. So she stayed, and for two months he lived in complete agony beside the woman he loved more than life itself. The nonsense of this horrified him.
Asja, like a vast foreign city, remained inaccessible yet alluring; he could follow her down labyrinthine ways and hope, foolishly, that satisfaction would occur, that they would meet, embrace, commingle. But without her genuine assent, that sacred commingling could never occur. Even while sharing his bed, she had proved the most difficult text he had ever tried to read, a site of contradictory signs. She demanded his complete attention, like a poem, but she did not reward his attention with a reciprocal gaze. Often, she mocked him, as in Moscow one day when he sat beside her bed in the pale green room of the sanatorium for hours; instead of thanking him, she wondered aloud if he would soon “be sitting beside some Red general with a fawning gaze.” Then her whip cracked again, more loudly: “That is, if the general is as stupid as Reich and won’t toss you out.”
Reich had stoically put up with Benjamin, aware that Asja was toying with him as a cat would with a helpless mouse before eating it alive. Reich had indeed pitied him, and offered brotherly advice. They were both, after all, fighting the same battle. “If you were to attend cell meetings in Berlin, you would find many women like Asja, real firebrands,” he said. Benjamin had wondered how Reich could have been so foolish. You cannot substitute, in love, one body for another. He could fall in love with a million other women, but they would not be Asja, just as Asja was not Jula. Nevertheless, it intrigued him that each woman was Woman, too: a piece of the Platonic form.
Leaving Moscow with a battered suitcase on his knees, his eyes wet, his heart contracting painfully, he had decided that erotic love was impossible, at least for him. If he learned one thing in the past few years, it was that he must move beyond the inanity of possession; the lust for women was all part of an outmoded bourgeois desire for property. His desire to own Asja, or Jula, had been retrograde. He would, from this point on, focus on his writing.
For years he hovered between the apparently opposite poles of the aesthetic and the political. He worshiped writers like Goethe and Proust as the embodiment of the aesthetic, then swerved toward the position that Asja occupied: the Party position. Now, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, on this terrifying border, he knew that if he should survive this war, he would argue that only in the convergence of the aesthetic and the political was the art of the future going to find a new life. “Una vita nuova,” he muttered aloud, savoring the phrase.
He fell asleep wondering what this art of the future might look like. Somehow, he sensed that reading as he had known it was coming to an end; works of art, too, were doomed by their very reproducibility. How could one put a value on something multiplied into infinity? Then again, one could hardly deny the profound effect of films and photography; the cinematic image held massive sway throughout the Third Reich, for example. Hitler’s propagandist, Leni Riefenstahl, had created something completely unreal and yet monstrously effective: The Führer would not be as thoroughly embedded in the public mind without her and her ilk.
Benjamin imagined a future in the West when capital controlled the film industry so thoroughly that every image became a product, with each film itself creating a further line of products. Clothes, furniture, architecture, family constructs, love relations, tastes in art, music, even literature, would be mastered by men like Cecil B. DeMille. Morality would rest with them—the Masters of the Image. Eventually, reality would exist on film or have no credibility; people would work to make enough money to have their lives filmed, and they would be considered successful only if the image they could find on their private monitor matched some elusive archetype. The boundaries between art and life would be obliterated, and the job of the emperor (or prime minister, president, or king) would be to decide which was which, but even he (or she) would be so constructed by cinematic images that nobody would know what to believe; the ontological crises of the future were dazzling to contemplate.
Benjamin opened his eyes with a start, aware that he had been drifting in the no-man’s-land between sleep and waking. Disoriented at first, he looked through the window at the cold sky, which had turned slate gray but was tinged with violet. The hushed moments before dawn were a time of day he always treasured. The moon had by now dropped over the far horizon, yet the sun had not begun its rampant charioteering as he groped his way out of the straw pile, desperate to pee.
Standing in the entrance to the stable, he relieved himself on stones that cobbled the entrance; the dark urine hissed and stank, misting the stones. The stars had been thoroughly absorbed by night, digested; a rosy hue was beginning to appear over the mountains, and Benjamin could see the peak that would be his to climb. In the valley below, faintly, he could hear a cock crow.
Feeling groggy, his joints stiff and swollen, hungry and wild with thirst, he limped to a mound behind the stable, dragging his briefcase. The dirt formed a kind of easy chair, with a back of moss; he settled into the seat to watch the sun rise. His mind returned—a tongue to a broken tooth—to Asja Lacis.
He had tried to resign himself in Moscow to life without eros, but this was impossible. He continued to think of Asja almost daily, sometimes removing photographs of her from his wallet and studying them like Rembrandts, trying to conjure her presence, to hear her voice. Mysteriously, he found her in the green eyes of a dozen other women, some of whom he followed through the streets like a pathological lecher. He had paid for the services of dozens of whores, squeezing his eyes tight at the moment of orgasm, inventing Asja over and over. He had missed her so badly. His life, without her, was empty.
And he missed Jula, too, though not so badly. Asja meant more to him. She was brighter, quicker, meaner. She had exacted more from him than anybody else, even his mother, the exhausting Pauline, who had dogged him emotionally for decades. She had never understood his spiritual side, his desire to lift himself above the commercial world of his father. She had supported him, covertly, by sending money, but she had withheld the essential thing: that uncomplicated affection he craved so badly, even today.
In his briefcase, tucked in a pouch behind his manuscript, was a small book of verse by Goethe. He flipped the pages to a favorite poem:
Heart, why now this rude insistence?
What is it that makes you grow
so alien inside me, strangely tense?
Heart, I scarcely know you now.
Gone are the things I once held dear,
and the pangs that I fear;
gone is your ardor and your rest.
Dear heart, what makes you feel unblessed?
It is just the way her youth entrances,
and her form as well, its perfect flower.
And the kindness of her sidelong glances,
each of which displays her power.
When I try to stay, or to withstand
her sweet barrage, I’m helpless. Hand
in hand we go. Her slight command
is more than I can ever stand.
She holds me by some silver thread
that’s from a magic spindle spun.
I gaze upon her dear, wild head
and know that I am thus undone.
The sorcery is strong that holds me,
binds me, my desire, molds me.
Where is the man I used to be?
Oh, tyrant love, please set me free!
Once again, serendipity had led him to the perfect text. “Oh, tyrant love, please set me free!” He found himself weeping as he read.
When he looked up, the whole valley was bathed in a soft, vermillion glow, and Benjamin could see in the distance a scattering of vineyard workers; the wind carried aloft the distant gong of the Church of St. Simon, which poised on a hillock overlooking Banyuls. Soon, he thought, the world will blaze with daylight, the sea and sky mirroring the darkest blue, and the vineyards sloping greenly toward the village, flecked with gold. The mountains above him would loom, a wall of purple, jagged, thrilling. And the sun, climbing high at last, would scatter a million spears of light in all directions, and not even death could kill so much glory.