The Angel of History Page 2

  And yet, he had to go. Benjamin didn’t believe that the Nazi spectre would eventually pass; he knew it would last. Nevertheless, all those weeks he spent shut up in his studio, he’d been waiting for something, ruminating on his doubts and apprehensions, until, at last, all of the indecision of the past years and months seemed to evaporate in a moment. He put his affairs in order, sublet the apartment for a year, and left quickly for France. He brought a couple of suitcases with him, filled with more books, manuscripts and notes than clothing. But he was forced to leave his library behind in Germany – the library that he needed for his work.

  Benjamin left alone, because there was no one left who could bring him to the station. He arrived alone, because there was no one at the station to meet him. He stepped down from the train pale and exhausted. Sighing deeply, he looked out over the gentle rain, just barely liquid, falling over the Paris sky, and picked up his bags.

  Chapter Four

  You think it was easy to tell Mariano to his face that fighting was useless, that we had to get out before it was too late? Courage was what we needed back then. But lucky for us, he gave in just a couple of days later. German planes had downed a submarine and a destroyer in the port of Musel. They’d burned our stock houses. Gijón at night was like a scene from hell and it kept burning through the day. Our company abandoned the bridge we were defending and scattered: our front line had been eliminated. There we were, the two of us, at three in the afternoon, walking down the road that ran from Pedroso to Contriz. It wasn’t as if Mariano would ever admit that I’d been right. When he saw a car approaching, he abruptly said, ‘We’ll requisition that car, get to Gijón and head out from there.’

  We didn’t really want to take the car, but we had to get out. The Musel wharf was in shambles, an obstacle course of shrapnel.You couldn’t tell who was in command in that stampede. People weren’t carrying permits; no one wore their stripes on their shoulders. Everyone – gunners, drivers, police and asaltos – was fighting to be the first on board a ship. But the few ships that were still seaworthy were already crowded with women and children. And the people on board were doing everything they could to keep anyone else off – otherwise they’d sink under all that excess weight.

  I didn’t even have time to say goodbye to my brothers Marcial and Libertad. We drove right to the wharf, climbed out of the car and headed for an old fishing boat that must have been held together with spit. Three armed soldiers blocked our path.

  ‘You have to stop here, comrades.’

  The boy pointing his rifle at my chest and staring me down was younger than me. I grabbed the barrel with my left hand and planted my 9-millimetre Star sub-machine gun into his gut and screamed, ‘I’ll blow you to bits!’

  But as soon as we got on board, we joined the others keeping people off. The fact is there were hundreds of us crammed onto that boat, and not even a miracle would have made room for more. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t take it. I’d been on the battleground just a few hours before. I couldn’t count how many days it had been since I’d slept . . . or eaten. I heard some people in the distance agreeing to get off the boat as if in a dream, and then someone else said something about there being no more coal left. Then I realised that the boat was actually pulling away from the dock. Mariano was snoring next to me. Lucky him. He didn’t seem to mind the sweat, the stench, all those bodies packed in like cigarettes in an unopened pack, the weeping women who’d left their children behind. The sea was calm enough, fortunately, but then just a few miles out we ran smack into the Cervera. It was dark already and the boat circled ours, shining lights at us, and then suddenly their cannons fired, falling in the water not a hundred metres away. That was when Mariano woke up. ‘What the hell?’ he said. All around us people were vomiting, trying to eat their identification papers, trying to get the captain to gun the engine, while other people were screaming for him to stop.

  The Cervera came closer and a voice called out ‘Who are you?’ The guy at the command kept cool. ‘Women and children,’ he answered. Someone shone a flashlight into the stern and we flattened ourselves against the deck as best we could. The light circled and then went away.

  I could hear the order. ‘Head towards El Ferrol – we’ll follow you in.’

  We all started breathing again. The motor rumbled back to life, the night was dark, the wind rushed against the portholes. The Cervera kept close behind us.After two hours, they communicated that we should change our course and that another ship would take us into port. They turned and disappeared – out on the hunt for more important prey. Once they left we didn’t know what to do. We argued about it. Some people wanted to follow the orders and others wanted to head north to France. We didn’t have any food and the Cervera had sequestered our water supply to keep us from escaping.

  ‘How long does it take to get to France?’ I asked.

  ‘Three days.’

  ‘Is there fishing equipment aboard?’

  ‘Do you see any? This old tub has been retired for more years than I can remember. There’s no equipment at all left on her.’

  Mariano, who hadn’t said a word up to this point, suddenly tried to stand up, his rifle in his hand, but his head crashed into the ceiling. No one laughed. He dug his fingers into his hair and stared at the commander.

  ‘That’s enough talk,’ he said. ‘We’ll head to Bordeaux.Anyone who has a problem with that should tell me now.’

  They fell as silent as carpets, every last one of them, except for the babies who never stopped whimpering.And so we headed north, tired, stupid, racked with hunger. There wasn’t even the shadow of the other ship. It was just sea, then sea, then more sea. Night-time came, dawn, and then daylight brought the wind, lifting the foamy waves high.

  ‘When will we get there?’

  The captain didn’t answer. He looked up at the horizon. He was almost ready to collapse from thirst and hunger just like everyone else. Even the babies had stopped screaming. The coal started running low on the fourth day and the sea grew angry, the waves mounted. One man went crazy. He grabbed a pistol and started shooting. He wounded two people before someone shot him. And do you know what we did after that? I still get shivers thinking about it.We threw him onto the fire as a substitute for coal. Rest in peace. Thanks to him, though, we saw the coast of Lorient the next day. I think we all had this idea that we’d get a hero’s welcome in France. They had a Popular Front government, right? But I already knew what we were in for – history. They treated us like enemies. As if all we were worth was the crust of bread they gave us before they loaded us onto trucks and sent us right back to Spain. Get out from under our feet. So that’s how Mariano and I found ourselves in Barcelona. It was December . . . no; it was the end of November 1937 when we stepped out onto the Ramblas.

  ‘All right,’ said Mariano, wiping his hands. ‘So we start over.’

  Chapter Five

  Destroying everything took only a couple of years. Just a few years in a country on the skids, feet mired in crisis, head stalked by the Nazis. And yet the few years around 1930 were, as Benjamin himself said, the high-point of his life. He was part of Brecht’s circle, working at the national radio station and publishing in two highly regarded literary journals. He wanted to become a top German critic and had come quite close. He completed his long essay about Karl Kraus at the end of 1930, the beginning of 1931, attempting to reconcile his Janus-like mixing of theology and materialism. He never made much money, though after his divorce from Dora Kellner he managed to find himself a place to live. It was a large two-room studio in Wilmersdorf, on Prinzregentenstrasse, attached to his cousin Egon Wissing’s house. The two-storey structure stood at the end of a lane, in the middle of a garden and underneath a willow. The entrance was in the back, up a steep, narrow stairway. In the study he’d arranged his library of two thousand books, a little drawing from his son Stefan’s birthday, and several devotional paintings: a three-headed Christ (reproduced from an ivory Byzantine bas-relief), a trompe-l�
�oeil of the Bavarian forest, Saint Sebastian, and ‘the only prophet of the Kabala, Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus’.

  The move had been costly and each month he struggled to get his rent money together. But he was happy in that house, adapting to the bachelor life and his new working nest. From his window he could see the old Wilmersdorfer Luch clock, which over time became a luxury he regretted having to give up. In the winter he could even see the children on the ice-skating rinks. Instead of sitting at a table, he’d write and work reclining on a sofa inherited from the former tenant. On that sofa, surrounded by his books and pictures – a vision of calm – he’d been able to start his Passagen-Werk, a sweeping portrait of nineteenth-century Paris that he’d spent years gathering material on. There were obstacles to spare, but for the first time Benjamin seemed resolute, free from that ‘exhausting slowness’ that seemed to cling to him. In truth he spent those months reconciling his debts – to himself and to life.

  Disappearing, committing suicide, being over and done with everything – this was the thought spinning in his head like a sluggish, trapped horsefly. It pursued him through his travels in 1932 along the Riviera and down to Ibiza and then back to Germany. Sometimes, when he was reading at home on his couch, Benjamin could barely manage to finish a page without drifting into such a total state of disembodiment he’d forget to turn the page. He’d reflect on his project and plan it out. Should he do it at home or in a hotel? Was it really inevitable? The more he thought about doing it the more peaceful he felt. This ‘project’ dogged him for a year, working its way into his head and making him fluctuate between depression and ataraxy. He never revealed any of this in his letters to friends, despite the fact that it was distracting from his edits on what would eventually and miraculously become the short prose pieces in Berlin Childhood. Until he almost did it. It happened in Nice, at the Hôtel du Petit Parc near the end of July in 1932, two weeks after his fortieth birthday. It must have been an awful day – the doomed moment of gathering up all the threads of his life, putting the weights on a scale, everything that was and all that should have been. If he’d looked in the mirror that day, he would have seen a man who women found bodiless, a friend at most, a tired, poor, melancholy man, a stranger in his own world – a world that was slowly evaporating. This is why a few days earlier, when he was still on Ibiza, he’d written to his oldest friend Scholem, who had emigrated to Palestine. Of course he’d revealed it in his own way, with that passion for obscurity and mystery that had set him apart even when he was a young man, sending cryptic, desperate messages hoping that sooner or later his friend would understand. ‘To think,’ he wrote, ‘that I’ll be spending my birthday in Nice, in the company of a very silly man who I’ve met frequently on my trips, and we will drink to my health, unless I decide to be alone.’ Who in the world was this man, wondered Scholem, trying to understand. Today, we might suppose that he was writing of the hunchbacked dwarf of childhood nursery rhymes who haunted his worst nightmares – his destiny already formed. Exhaustion seized Benjamin at the Hôtel du Petit Parc. It was as if the entire predicament of his existence were falling on him at once, as if the stars guiding his life had lined up in a perfect trajectory of misfortune.

  He spent the day he arrived in Nice sitting on a bench on the Promenade des Anglais watching the sea. There was a heavy, hot sirocco blowing; it took his breath away. The wind mounted and the sea churned, the waves tossed up on the beach, sending up a foamy, brackish odour. And then Benjamin tore his gaze away from the horizon, took his fountain pen from its case and wrote Scholem a letter full of signs, breadcrumbs and clues about the tangled thoughts cluttering his mind. The letter was difficult to decipher. He wrote of looking reality in the face with a solemnity that felt like desperation. He’d had enough of the compromises he’d made in order to continue his life. He closed his bag and walked slowly through the alleys of the old city, working his way through the flower market, inhaling the good smells coming from the restaurants, watching people rush around finishing the day’s errands. Just before sunset he counted the money he had left and ordered a croissant in a café on Place Rossetti. Then, his decision made, he returned to the hotel. He was very close to taking the final step. He spent the night stretched out on the bed, smoking his pipe and contemplating the faint ray of broken light that streamed hesitantly through the blinds from a street lamp. Until that yellow light turned golden in the early dawn. Then Benjamin closed the shutters and sat down at the table by the bed and composed his will. All of his manuscripts would go to Scholem. He carefully extracted a few pieces of paper and wrote three short messages to Ernst Schoen, Franz Hessel and Jula Cohn – one of the three most important women in his life along with Dora and Asja Lacis. He wrote to Jula: ‘You know that I’ve loved you for a long time. And standing here on the brink of death, life offers me no rewards greater than those I suffered for you. This farewell must be enough.Yours, Walter.’

  When he had finished writing, Benjamin removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. They were tired and as fiercely blue as ever. He stood, lit his pipe and then lay down on the bed, his shoes still on, staring motionless at a corner of the ceiling. Outside the July sun beat mercilessly on the old city and over the sea; it snuck into the alleys and worked through his shutters – the sound of the street rising with it. His pipe went out and Benjamin thought to himself that he wouldn’t even be allowed to die in silence.

  Chapter Six

  Of course I haven’t forgotten. We’re getting to your philosopher. What was I talking about? Ah yes, how we ended up in Barcelona. Well, I would have liked a few days of rest, to steal some time back from that damn war, just walk around the city. But not Mariano. He got angry and stamped his feet and said that it was treachery to sit around with your hands in your pockets at a time like this, to act like a tourist while our brothers were fighting. So the very next morning we reported to the recruiting headquarters. They were very good to us. We were welcomed like rich men at a bank. ‘Please come in. A pleasure to meet you. Make yourselves comfortable.’ A captain asked us where we were from and then complimented us on our work. In the end, he gave us coupons to eat in any of the mess halls, a travel pass through the Republican zone, ration books, money and cigarettes. Most importantly, we walked out with a thirty-day leave. They said we’d talk about us going back to the front after Christmas. I was almost jumping for joy, but Mariano was practically black in the face he was so mad.

  ‘Don’t be upset,’ I said. ‘Command knows what’s best for us.’

  It didn’t happen overnight, but we started taking pleasure in that life. We’d eat in whichever mess hall we pleased, or at the Basque tavern near the post office.We walked down the Ramblas and around the Barrio Chino, buying pack after pack of toasted almonds. Sometimes we’d go all the way down to the sea to wait for the fishermen to come in and we’d gorge ourselves on fresh sardines.We frittered away our time at the cinema and in crowded bars, until one morning there were sirens and we ran for a shelter. That’s where I met her. What do you mean, who? Mercedes! Are you sure I haven’t told you about her already? She was from Port Bou, near the border, but she was living in Barcelona. She was a nurse in the Calle Talleres hospital. Brunette – looked a little Gypsy with her high cheekbones and those green eyes. And if you could have seen her ass. She reminded me of my first girl, Pilar, who I’d taken when I was sixteen, by the barricades. They even had similar temperaments. But Mercedes was more hot-headed. To think she was an anarchist who was forced into marriage as a girl with an old fascist lawyer! She did away with him herself during the first days of the insurrection. But I didn’t find out about that until much later. I didn’t know anything when I saw her for the first time, sitting on a bench, in the dull lantern light, her legs crossed like a queen in the middle of all those hundreds of people cowering in the shelter. She was with a friend, Ana María – a pretty piece of work herself. Outside we could hear the bombs whistling and the explosions getting closer. We were all quiet and tense, but those tw
o girls acted like nothing special was going on, whispering together. It’s a mystery to me how women always find something to talk about.

  I might have stood there forever watching her like an idiot. Lucky for me, I had Mariano.You could tell that he liked Ana María. He nudged me with his elbow and then put his hand on my back.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said.

  He had to push me physically because he knew what a disaster I was with girls. My stomach got all twisted and words would get stuck in my throat. He never thought twice about plunging right in. I kept quiet, but by the time the bombing was over and we left the shelter we were already laughing and joking together as we walked them back to the hospital. In reality there wasn’t much to laugh about.You couldn’t even count the dead and wounded. The smoke and dust was everywhere, the ambulance sirens were screeching all around. Entire buildings crumbled like cookies. Craters gaped in the street. Water shot from broken pipes and swirled around the bodies of the godforsaken people who hadn’t made it to the shelter. We helped; we did what we could and then went to the Carl Marx mess for lunch. That night we saw Ana María and Mercedes again on the Ramblas and an hour later we were all in bed. That’s how it was back then. People living under death’s shadow do things intensely. Is my grandson Andrés still around? Good, so I can tell you. That girl would have made a corpse stiff. She wanted it; she was hungry and open to anything. I didn’t have much experience but I was the happiest man in the world.You know what? Get closer, so I don’t have to shout. I thought I should just stick it up her ass and throw away the key and burn the receipt. That was such a great life. Nights in bed with Mercedes. And then during the day while she was working and our men were falling by the thousands in Teruel, we were off raising hell with our buddies. Even Mariano was happy. But it all ended on the fourth of January when they called us all to the barracks. There were two hundred of us altogether – mostly Spaniards, but not only. There were Czechs, Brits, Poles, French, Italians and Finns.