Mercedes is really the best piece of ass I’ve ever seen.’
‘Except for your sister,’ I growled.
PART TWO
Chapter Twelve
A few months later, penning the story of Scholem’s visit to Paris in a letter, Benjamin’s tone was off-hand. ‘Our philosophical debate whose time was long due,’ he wrote, ‘proceeded in good form. If I am not mistaken,’ he added, ‘I gave him an image of me as something like a man who has made his home in a crocodile’s jaws, which he keeps pried open with iron braces.’ The image wasn’t far from the truth. For years now, Benjamin had been gathering adversity around him like a ‘pack of wolves’. The hunchbacked dwarf had never stopped chasing him and Benjamin knew that. However much trouble he took trying to foresee danger he always seemed to end up, with the uncanny precision of a sleepwalker, in the middle of trouble. Even his nostalgia, that coward, betrayed him making the happiest moments disappear from his memory. He started thinking that his life had been reduced to shards that endlessly piled up around him. The more he tried to look backward the more burdened he felt by harbingers of the future. The Angel of History spoke to him, sent signs that Benjamin interpreted quite clearly. He hardly marvelled at all when, on March 12, 1938, not a month after Scholem’s visit, Hitler invaded Austria. It was dumb fact that the world’s history and his own personal history should cross like paths in a forest. His son Stefan was at that very time studying in Vienna.
Stefan wore his twenty years poorly. He was an isolated and rebellious man, traits that were exacerbated by the absence of a good father. Stefan risked being trapped in the Reich’s newest territory. As a Jew and a communist living in a Nazi-occupied city, the best he could hope for was a concentration camp. The only thing that Benjamin could do from Paris was to pester Dora in San Remo for news. He spent his last money of the month on agitated telephone calls. And then the telegram he’d been waiting for arrived. Stefan had managed to escape to Italy by the skin of his teeth and he and his mother were going to move to London soon. With the Fascist racial laws, Dora had to sell her pension and wanted to open a boarding house in London.
Only then, forcing himself to feel reassured, Benjamin resumed work on the Baudelaire essay. At least he tried to. But there were obstacles: the lift at rue Dombasle, chronic migraines, a stubborn laziness that clung to him like a leech, and a gripping in his chest that sometimes left him breathless. He needed a bit of fresh air.
He became convinced of this need to breathe freely while coming home from the library one day. The bright light of the May afternoon fell on him as he came out of the métro. Benjamin inhaled the sparkly air, trying to catch his breath. Those few stairs had been enough to make him wheeze. He crossed rue de Vaugirard with small steps, as if the light were blinding him, and ducked into Madame Suchet’s store. Koestler had first brought him to that dark little store with its dusty shelves and pungent smells. ‘The owner is intolerable,’ he warned. ‘She behaves as if she could stand around and talk until the end of time. But she gets certain cheeses.’
Upon entering, Benjamin ventured a nod.
‘Bonsoir, Madame Suchet. May I have a baguette and a piece of Camembert?’
‘A light dinner tonight, Monsieur Benjhamèn?’
She was teasing him.And how she went on with that Benjhamèn . . . If only one Frenchman could prove himself capable of pronouncing his last name. Just for him – as he cared so much about names. Many years earlier hadn’t he written that ‘the name is the most intimate essence of language itself,’ the only trace of the divine in human language. But he was too tired to correct her.
‘So this Hitler of yours . . . will 200 grams be enough? So do you think there will be a war? I lived through one already, lost two brothers to it, one in Ypres and the other at Verdun.’
‘Forgive me, madame, but Hitler hardly belongs to me and as to whether or not there will be a war, I don’t know. Who’s to say? I only need 150 grams, thank you.’
‘There won’t be a war, you’ll see. The boches,’ she said, again mutilating the word, ‘I mean, the Germans know perfectly well that we hold the Maginot Line and it would be useless to even try . . .’
Out on the street the light dusted the slate roofs with a weathered gold and the skirts of girls riding by on bicycles swelled in the air like sails. What a sight, though it didn’t last long. Upon returning home he discovered that the lift was broken again. This was too much, even for one such as him. He had to get away, at least for a while. When was the last time he’d been to Skovsbostrand? Two years, he told himself as he faced the staircase. Two years to the day. The moment had perhaps finally come to accept Brecht’s invitation to Denmark. He’d collected almost all the material he needed for the Baudelaire essay. He just needed another two weeks to gather his notes and then he’d go off to that fishing village where he would be able to write in peace, and all that aside, the cost of living was much less up there.
He stopped, panting, on the first-floor landing. He was convinced that he should leave perhaps immediately. But after another flight of stairs, standing by Hans’s door, he’d changed his mind again.
He ruminated and ruminated for a month, torn by the desire to see Brecht and the fear of having to depend on him financially – between his desire for tranquillity and the strain of changing his habits. Until suddenly, as usual, he resolved it was time to pack up his few items. It was June, a tepid morning that already smelled of summer, when he boarded the train heading north.
In Skovsbostrand he rented a garret right next to Brecht and his family. He didn’t need much to make him happy: a long heavy wood table to write on, a window from which he could watch the sea and the Sund, and the dotting of sailboats and little ships. There was a dense forest of fir trees on the opposite shore. At least, there was silence around him. The weather was ugly and didn’t really call one out for strolls. The sky was the colour of a donkey’s belly and the sun barely ever made an appearance. So much the better. This way he could work for eight or nine hours a day non-stop, able to concentrate. In the evenings, for distraction, he’d play with Brecht’s two children, listen to the radio, dine and then face Brecht in an endless game of chess that he almost always lost.
‘I’m just not able to concentrate,’ he’d say, brushing off the defeat. Baudelaire was his justification – the essay was a despot, demanding total loyalty, requiring a degree of commitment that kept him even from reading his friend’s latest novel, The Affairs of Herr Julius Cesar, which was nearing completion. Brecht was understanding, he knew Benjamin needed that isolation. In the evening they spoke of Russia and the bad news coming in from Moscow. Certainly Brecht was balancing on mirrors – the exigencies of Stalin’s politics could be explained, the trials. The siege of the homeland. But gradually, as time passed and the long northern nights fell on the other side of the window, they both let their guard down and admitted that everything they had committed to politically over the last twenty years had ended in catastrophe.
Now and then Brecht would ask about his work. ‘How is it going?’ he’d venture. And Benjamin would nod. If it was going well, he might elaborate about how the essay seemed to be growing under him, taking him to unexpected places, little by little turning into a ponderous book that stretched its tentacles in so many directions, lighting up new and scintillating thoughts.
Walter believed in his Baudelaire. But there was another shadow, a mischievous and evil shadow extending over his work and robbing his sleep. Standing in the garden in front of Brecht’s house one day, posing for a photograph, he was incapable of hiding his dark mood. His eyes can’t lie and his eyes, captured by the snap, were tense, vexed, staring and uneasy under that grizzled tangle of hair.
It was impossible not to be thinking about Hitler’s move into Sudetenland, about Chamberlain