The Angel of History Page 4

  ‘The men are tired,’ I said one morning. ‘They know these midnight walks are as good as useless.’

  He seemed to think about that. Then he snorted and heaved a glob of spit the size of an egg on the ground.

  ‘Remember that I’m your Lieutenant,’ he said and went off to sleep.

  Something ugly had come between us but we didn’t have any time to clear the air. Franco moved down the front and even those of us at Aragon came under fire. They forced us down with artillery and then charged. We were face to face with the Moroccan soldiers under General Yagüe. He was a tough character, a Falange fascist who had always been commander of the Regulares d’Africa. We couldn’t have been in a worse situation. Mariano and I had faced the Moroccans in ’34 at Gijón, and then again in Bilbao and Santander the summer before. They were worse than animals; they were inhumanly cruel, raped women and cut your throat laughing like possessed men. They even got a kick out of the lowest kind of actions, like occupying a hospital and exterminating the doctors and the wounded with their bayonets, goring them in their stretchers. Now they were advancing along the right bank and coming toward us, razing everything in their path. There weren’t many of us and we weren’t well armed. Meanwhile our front was collapsing, Belchite, Alcañiz, Rudilla. Colonel Aranda took Montalbán.

  We decided that I should go to Barcelona to get more ammunition and bring it back fast. I drove the truck full-speed and pulled into headquarters in the early afternoon. The city seemed numb from a recent bombing. Over the last few months the Italians had gone mad, they were taking off from Maiorca and dropping as many bombs as they could. Barcelona had turned greyer and sadder, people dragged themselves grimly through the dusty streets. A colonel at the command station told me that it would take them all night to load the truck. Six o’clock and there I was waiting in front of the Calle Telleres hospital. Who else would I be waiting for? Mercedes. She was what she was. My woman. With her flashing green eyes, and curves in all the right places. It was like she was made just for me. I had two months to catch up on and just seeing her again triggered something in my trousers. She was happy to see me. Sure. But not happy enough.

  ‘Did you meet someone else?’ I asked outright as we walked up the Paseig de Gracia.

  She stopped and looked me in the eyes. Then she raised her hand, folded down her thumb and waved her remaining fingers in the air.

  ‘I have four others,’ she answered, smiling sadly. ‘But that’s none of your business. I’m a free woman, got that?’

  Free love and all that crap. Do you remember it?

  ‘Please,’ I managed to say to her. ‘Why would I care?’

  Of course I cared and boy did I. My stomach was in knots, my intestines were growling and twisting. But little by little she kept getting sweeter and soon it was just like before. Within two hours we were back at her house in bed. She was on all fours, face in the pillow, and I took her from behind. I already told you that we liked it like that. That was when we heard the sirens and a faraway grumble, that buzz that kept getting louder and heavier and the next thing you knew all you could hear were engines rumbling. Heinkel planes.We could hear the first bombs fall, far away, beyond the train station.

  ‘Don’t stop,’ she said. ‘Keep going.’

  Well, that’s easier said than done. The troops were already starting to pull out, abandon the front. Plop it went – getting out of the trench.You want to be able to shake it off, but nothing doing. The planes were coming and going low overhead. Mercedes turned around and looked at me, head to toe.

  ‘You’re really just a boy,’ she said. ‘Okay. Let’s get dressed now and we’ll go down into the shelter.

  We didn’t know what was in store for us.We ended up staying there for two days, packed in like sardines. Nothing to eat or drink. All that whimpering and snivelling in between the blasts. A dust came down over us every time the walls shook from the explosion. The bombings came in waves, about every three hours, sometimes more frequently, hitting every neighbourhood and every civic and military target. We’d never seen anything like it before – it was the first time there’d ever been a bombing like that, and there I was in the middle. Once we could come out we realised right away that the death toll would be in the thousands. Streams of blood were running down the pavement; there were arms, heads and legs just scattered in the middle of rubble. The smell of burnt earth, stone and flesh got into your nose. I should’ve built up a tougher skin by then. But I couldn’t manage to keep calm. Mercedes looked slowly around and started sobbing. Then I hugged her and we kissed.

  ‘I have to go now,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to get to the hospital.’

  ‘When will we see each other again?’ I asked.

  She shrugged and indicated the disaster all around us.

  ‘When you get back from the front,’ she answered and took off.

  The front. Damn. They were still waiting for ammo back at the camp. I got there right in time – in time to partake in the dismantling. Mariano shouted when he saw me.

  ‘Back already? You could have stayed on for a while longer. Our own little lord out on a jaunt and we’re back here dying. Three-day lock-up.’

  Mariano loved to cut people down. He liked it twice as much when he was doing it to me. But I answered back this time.

  ‘Didn’t you hear that they bombed Barcelona? The whole world is angry at Franco and Mussolini and you’re taking it out on your friend.’

  ‘Friend my ass,’ he yelled. ‘Remember that I’m your superior.’

  He never got over that. I was about to jump on him when Mariano looked at me and smiled, ‘Did you see Ana María?’

  ‘Yes, sure,’ I lied. ‘She’s thinking about you and sends her best.’

  The peace didn’t last. On March 22, Solchaga and Moscardó’s troops attacked between Huesca and Saragozza. It was our turn the next day – us against Yagüe. When I saw the Moroccans coming across the river in their fezzes and white trousers, I realised that it was all over. Even Mariano realised it; and he gave the orders to abandon our position. We ran for kilometres, days on end, we crossed Aragon under air fire, through lines of civilians abandoning their villages and cities, dragging carts filled with mattresses, chickens, goats. And then Lérida fell on April 3. Two weeks later the fourth Navarra Division led by Camilo Alonso Vega reached the sea near Vinaroz. Our territory was cleaved in two.

  Chapter Nine

  Five years after his arrival in Paris, Benjamin finally scraped together enough money to rent a room for himself. Number 10 rue Dombasle in the fifteenth arrondissement was an early twentieth-century building, a good distance from the centre. A lot of German immigrants lived there under the surveillance of Madame Dubois, an elderly but good-natured landlady. The Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler, who, after having been condemned to death by Franco for his coverage of the German and Italian participation in the civil war, scandalously left the Communist Party, lived there. Above him lived his lady friend, the very young English sculptor Daphne Hardy. Elsewhere in the building: Fritz Fränkel, a famous doctor who in the past had supervised Benjamin’s hashish and opium experiments; a German psychoanalyst; and Lisa Fittko’s brother, Hans. Benjamin had met Lisa Fittko and her husband – also named Hans – one afternoon in 1933 at the Café Dôme. The Fittkos with their anti-Hitler activism were a little like a parsley sprig among the leftist exiled intellectuals. But Benjamin never had much interest in them. Though he did spend an evening at the couple’s little apartment in Montmartre looking out over an intersection of rue Norvis, rue de Saules and rue St-Rustique that had been often painted by Utrillo. Since Hans lived right above Benjamin, he came to appreciate him in time – tall and handsome and a theoretical physicist.Without his favourite chess opponent, Brecht, Benjamin spent many winter evenings playing with Hans instead, bombarding him with questions about his research but never revealing the first thing about his own.

  Five years to secure an apartment and gather his papers and books.Yet Benjamin never man
aged to resolve the problem of furnishing those few square metres. Despite his best efforts, the room stayed bare and uncomfortable. The only thing Benjamin really had was a splintered mahogany desk on which he kept a leather briefcase that had belonged to his father. On one wall hung the only painting he’d managed to keep, Klee’s Angelus Novus – his secret emblem.

  It was fine. Sometimes, sitting at his desk looking through his books, his light adjusted low almost on the desk, Benjamin would think back with disgust on the places he’d lived during his years of exile. The last one had been a small ground-floor room, dank and dark, looking over one of the main thoroughfares out of Paris. The roar of trucks getting onto the highway had actually kept him from working on his Baudelaire essay. Here on rue Dombasle, the lift just on the other side of the wall made a racket that drove him to distraction. On very hot days, when he opened the window, the street noise managed to drown out the squeaking pulleys and hollow hum of the motor, permitting him several hours of concentration.

  Gershom Scholem visited him in that room late in February. He’d been invited to New York to give a series of lectures on Jewish mysticism and organised a five-day stopover in Paris so that he could see his old friend. The encounter had been cancelled so many times, left up in the air and postponed, that Walter had written that he was starting to think of it as ‘the meeting of leaves torn from their distant trees in a storm’.

  They hadn’t seen each other for eleven years. Benjamin even let himself be hugged before settling onto the bed and smoking one Salomé after another. Pipe tobacco had become so expensive that he only allowed himself a very occasional pipe, and in the meantime settled for the dreadful, cheap Turkish cigarettes instead. Sitting uncomfortably on the least shredded of the chairs, Scholem sized up his friend. Walter looked older than his forty-six years; he’d grown rounder, his moustache was thicker and neglect speckled his sober bearing. Under his now grey hair, his face had turned ashen, his brow was heavier, and a hint of a double chin appeared when he nodded. His knuckles were pale and swollen. Scholem assumed it was due to poor circulation or his heart.

  ‘You look well,’ he said at last.

  ‘Liar,’ responded Benjamin disconsolately. ‘That’s what you say when it’s not true anymore.You know what Lisa Fittko calls me? She’s Hans’s sister – the man we just met on the stairs. She called me old Benjamin. A lot of people do. They just don’t know that I know.’

  When they went out later for a stroll, Benjamin clung to Scholem’s arm. Scholem was significantly taller and younger too.

  ‘Are you trying to kill me, Gerhard?’ he said, using Scholem’s childhood name. ‘Go slower. Remember that I’m old Benjamin.’

  It wasn’t an easy encounter after so many years. Intense years that hadn’t chipped away at their friendship so much as assailed the ideas they once had in common. If they disagreed now, sparks flew. They fought on rue Dombasle, in the cafés along Boul’Mich’, and they fought on the street. They argued about Walter’s friendship with Brecht, about his essay on the work of art in the mechanical age, about Céline and anti-Semitism, about the trials in Moscow that the world was watching with bated breath. Benjamin was reticent. His responses were torturous, he treated Scholem as if he were a party member, a ‘class enemy’, despite the fact that Scholem had never officially joined up and often disparaged the communist leaders. He may or may not have known then the fate of Asja Lacis, the revolutionary Latvian that Benjamin had met on Capri in 1924, the woman that he perhaps loved best of all, and who in the end fell victim to the great Soviet purification.

  Benjamin continually side-stepped things, avoiding, even dodging the subject of his arrangement with Horkheimer and Adorno’s Institute, which Scholem was not enamoured of. His friend attempted to engage him, but Benjamin brusquely and stubbornly shut him out.

  ‘I’m very happy with them,’ he’d say with conviction. Then, not half an hour later, he would admit that he could neither stand nor respect Horkheimer. ‘I don’t know. He’s not trustworthy, even on the theoretical level. Not a small thing . . .’

  On their last evening together, the two sat on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, resting. It was already getting dark, and it was cold. The sky was gritty and an angry wind announced that winter was on its way. Straining for breath, Benjamin stared at the branches of a nearby lime tree that looked unhealthy.

  ‘Under the roof of the institution,’ he announced as if talking to himself, not looking at his friend, ‘the tattered thread of my life is lost.’

  ‘Kafka?’ asked Scholem, sinking his chin into his collar.

  ‘Exactly,’ smiled Walter. ‘Two years,’ he added with a sudden seriousness. ‘I would really need two years of not having to depend on the Institute. To be able to concentrate on Passagen-Werk. It’s not even a viable option here in Europe, but if you were able to rustle up some kind of appointment for me, something, then I could liberate myself from Horkheimer. I swear I would. Could you ask your editor friend, Schocken, if he would let me write a book about Kafka? Then I could at last come to Palestine.’

  The light in the sky slackened and seemed on the verge of disappearing. Lower on the horizon, just over the tree line, darkness was gathering. Scholem looked angrily at his friend, as if the shadow of a cloud had crossed over him. His expression read vexation and pain as if some old decay had suddenly emerged.

  ‘You remember Magnes?’ he suddenly asked.

  ‘Magnes who? Your chancellor in Jerusalem? Him?’

  ‘Yes, him,’ replied Scholem.

  They weren’t looking at each other as they spoke but staring at the gravel by their feet and at the hedges along the street. But Scholem could imagine his friend’s face gone red with anger and embarrassment.

  ‘You remember,’ he added to fill the silence, ‘don’t you, that ten years ago I asked him to lend you money so that you could study Hebrew and come to Palestine? You changed your mind, but you never returned the money. Now you want me to ask again on your behalf?’

  The last sentence seemed to come from Scholem’s feet, as if he were trying to subsume his anger.

  ‘I can explain that. I can explain everything,’ muttered Benjamin, watching a dog go into a flowerbed at the end of the path.

  ‘Of course you can explain. But how do you explain it to me, Walter?’

  Benjamin looked up and tried to smile now.

  ‘Do it for a friend,’ he said. ‘It’s the last favour I’ll ask.’

  Scholem didn’t blink for a long, a very long minute.

  ‘Okay, I will try,’ he answered.

  Walter looked at him hopefully. He was struggling to keep down another thought that he knew should surface – he had to hide it. Just a little while before this he’d scolded Adorno when he left for New York. ‘You have to stay,’ he told him. ‘You have to stay here. If we all leave, Europe will cease to exist.’

  But now he’d reneged even on himself. He sat with his gaze cast down, and pushed the pebbles around with his toe. The park was slowly emptying. Beyond the gate, the street lights of rue de Fleurus had already come on.

  ‘It’s late. I have to go,’ said Scholem with a sigh.

  That was the last time they saw each other.

  Chapter Ten

  You know, we didn’t have a chance of winning and we should have admitted it back then. Think about it. While Franco was attacking Aragona, Hitler swallowed Austria whole – in a single night. While everyone – France, England – they all just shut up, sat back and watched. This whole line we got handed of non-intervention. If it weren’t also a tragedy it would be a farce. It wouldn’t have even taken much; a child could have seen it. Hell if Mussolini and Hitler weren’t going to intervene. After Austria, people started admitting it, but didn’t concede it. As if no one could see what the Germans were up to. Everyone was too busy fawning over them. Adolf pointed and everyone else saluted. Even Stalin. And believe you me, the idea that he was our ally should have been looking dubious by then. France opened its borde
r for a while, just enough time for us to get some arms in, but then they closed right up again. Europe was abandoning us. And then what did they go on to do?

  Don’t look at me like that. I know this is the sort of stuff you say afterwards. The situation was not perfectly clear back then and in any case it wasn’t like we could just open the battle up to those sons of bitches. We didn’t have any choice back then.We had to fight anyway, and all we could do was pray for god knows what – a miracle. Or that no one had the last word yet.

  After the retreat, Mariano and I walked around Barcelona as dejected as could be. During the day we hung around headquarters waiting for the platoons to be reorganised and for someone to tell us what to do.At night, lucky us, we’d be with Ana María and Mercedes. But something had changed, though I didn’t know what.You could see it in the way we smiled, the way we talked. It was just like before but wrapped in a sadness that wouldn’t go away if you scraped it. Mercedes and I kept up like before but something was prickly between the other two. Then they had a fight one evening when we were heading to the movies near Paralelo. Mercedes and I were walking ahead. Ana María must have said that she didn’t love him anymore or something like that because suddenly we heard Mariano screaming from behind us, ‘There’s someone else, isn’t there? Admit it.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ana María. ‘So what if there is?’

  I turned and saw Mariano, fist digging into his curls, staring at her.