The Angel of History Read online

  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 flying over to Berchtesgaden all ready to make concessions to the Führer, or of General Franco in Spain conquering one republican territory after another. Fortunately the newspapers arrived late in Skovsbostrand, so one felt less apprehensive opening them. When the Munich agreement was announced over the radio on the evening of September 29, the news was like a betrayal that came with the force of a dagger in an already open wound.

  ‘We’re fucked,’ said Brecht running his hands through his short shaggy hair. Benjamin sat in front of him worrying his chin with a finger and rocking back and forth in his seat.

  ‘Fucked. Fucked . . .’ He couldn’t seem to think of anything else to say.

  At least his book was done. ‘I felt I was racing against the war,’ Benjamin wrote to Adorno in early October, ‘and, despite choking anxiety, I nonetheless experienced a great sense of triumph when I finally wrapped up the flâneur, after almost fifteen years in gestation and just before the end of the world (the fragility of a manuscript!).’

  With no little regret, Benjamin’s visit came to an end. The book was dispatched to New York. Benjamin used his last few days in Denmark preparing the hundreds of books in his library that had been in Brecht’s care to be shipped to Paris. Something in the air, however, gave him the impression that his efforts were in vain. ‘I am increasingly coming to feel, however,’ he wrote to Adorno, ‘that this destination will have to become another stepping stone for me and the books. I do not know how long it will still physically be possible to breathe this European air; it is already spiritually impossible to do so after the events of the past weeks.’

  If he only had known that great historical events weren’t the only things set to ambush him. Back in Paris, he found his sister, the other Dora in his life, now living close by him, had fallen gravely ill, and there was bad news from San Remo, as well. Stefan’s emigration to London was snarled in bureaucracy – it seemed that it had become harder to leave Italy. And then there was Baudelaire.

  It was Adorno who wrote to him after a rather suspicious delay, a long, cautious, carefully worded letter expressing the opinion that Benjamin would have to reconsider the structure of the essay. It didn’t work – didn’t work at all. He’d imposed an ‘ascetic discipline’ on himself by ‘omitting everywhere conclusive theoretical answers’, he’d hurt himself trying to give a nod to Marxism, denying space to the most courageous and fruitful thoughts with a kind of preventive self-censure inspired by mat-erialistic categories. ‘If one wanted to put rather drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism.’

  It was a devastating blow and he was hurled into a deep depression. Born under the melancholic sign of Saturn, Benjamin would often even renounce eating, staying for hours and hours in bed, ruminating on his misfortunes and cursing the hunchbacked dwarf from the nursery rhymes who never left him alone. He forced himself to respond to Adorno and hash through his agreements and disagreements concerning Baudelaire. He decided to seriously pursue becoming a naturalised French citizen. He went about it, as he said, ‘with discernment, but without illusions’. He would write, ‘If before the only uncertainty was hesitation, now even the utility of this process has become problematic. The collapse of human rights in Europe makes legalisation of any description effectively illusory.’ Benjamin was among the few German émigrés who recognised this. And as always, his ability to understand the state of the world didn’t help resolve practical matters. Despite the help of Paul Valéry and Jules Romains, Benjamin never did obtain French citizenship.And yet in that enormously difficult predicament in which staying in Paris at all was a deadly gamble, did he ever really consider leaving the country? His ex-wife Dora, who came to visit at the end of December, couldn’t even convince him. Stefan’s problems meanwhile had been remedied and now mother and son were moving to England.

  Dora had been an extraordinarily beautiful woman and hadn’t lost any of her charm as she grew older. She still had the energy and determination to face life that she always had. While the man she had been married to seemed to find pleasure in every delay, and felt perfectly comfortable with every indecision, it was profoundly irritating to her by now. Though she couldn’t help but worry about him.

  ‘You can’t stay here,’ she announced harshly one evening. They were in a café on Montmartre, two cups of steaming tea on the table between them. An icy wind blew scattered pages of an old newspaper down the street, the Christmas decorations strung between two buildings shook. ‘Why don’t you come to London with us? We’ll put you up for a while. You would certainly find something to do . . .’

  Her offer might have been laced with pity and Benjamin very well may have felt that lace wrap him up. He grew aggravated.

  ‘Let’s not speak of it,’ he sharply answered. ‘Let’s not talk about it again. The only place I can work is in Paris.’

  He stood, put on his coat, the same coat he’d worn through the last seven winters, and then he leaned down and stroked her face, pushed his fingers into her hair. She leaned against his hand, squeezing it between her cheek and her shoulder. Walter stood for a while looking at her.

  ‘Bon voyage,’ he finally said. ‘Tell Stefan to forgive me if he can.’

  Back on the street, he dug his hands into his pockets and walked with his eyes on the ground. As he headed up the steep pavement, he could feel the cold air on his teeth and his heart struggling to beat.

  Chapter Thirteen

  That evening Mariano told us to pitch the tents under the almond trees in a field near Falset. There were sixteen of us again, because they’d assigned us three new men: Jacque was French and had a pointy nose and pomade in his hair, Luigi was
an Italian communist who instantly hated Alfonso for belonging to a different party. And then there was Sepúlveda – I never did learn his first name. He was CNT – anarchist union – from Maros, a little village in the province of Jaén. What a character: dark, hairy, outspoken, he ate priests for lunch. Just think, every morning he’d wake up and run down into the town to piss.Where? Against the church – the prelate would chase and curse him for centuries and he’d yell right back, ‘Homo! Go kiss a rich person’s ass! Parasite!’ We’d try to make a point of going to see the show before starting our exercises on the hill.We hunted rabbits in the afternoon. There were thousands of them and we ate a lot, and traded others with farmers for fruit, onions and tomatoes. I couldn’t say how long we were there.War’s like that.You live in the day and you don’t have much use for calendars. Until the moment when you’re forced to wrestle time again. That happened the day we saw the disinfection truck parked in the village square. They distributed the new uniforms. The day of the attack was getting closer.

  The next day, July 24, I remember it well, we were heading up the road running alongside the Ebro. It was almost dark when we settled into a cane field south of Mora near Miravet. The order to cross the river came down at midnight. This time we were serious; we were attacking en masse. There were a hundred thousand men covering a ten-kilometre-long front. Our mission was to push through their lines, get on the road to Saragozza and cut the Moroccans off as they were retreating. Alfonso could barely stay in his skin. He was the one who had to carry the ropes over the river so that we could cross and mark the route for the boats coming in with the rest of our troops. It was a dark, moonless night.

  ‘I can’t see shit,’ he said and jumped in. Fifteen minutes later we got the signal. He’d tied the thick rope around a fig tree on the other shore and was waiting for us. The water was high, but not too cold.While the 11th division was transferring boats, we got out of our wetsuits and put on Franco’s uniforms. The others were getting into position as we left and headed west toward Corbera.

  ‘Forward march,’ ordered Mariano. ‘And I’ll shoot the first person who talks.’

  An hour later we were in our positions, grenades and machine guns ready in ditches by the side of the road. We were near a river. Orders were to shoot on sight anyone who tried to pass. It would be impossible to make any mistakes, our men would head north from the Ebro; the only people passing over our bridge would be enemies retreating. And they came. In groups and then in waves. We took them by surprise and sent them back in the same direction they came from. Pale, ragged, scattered: Guardia Civil, the Tercio de Extranjeros, Requetés, Italians and the Regulares. The only ones we had mercy on were the conscripted men, the Spanish, everyone else . . .Alfonso worked them over with the grenades and Lech the Pole mowed them down with the machine gun.

  ‘A hundred and eighteen, a hundred and twenty-five, a hundred and forty-six,’ he counted.

  You couldn’t tell how he managed to count in the middle of all that smoke and the darkest dark.

  ‘What in the hell are you counting, you ass?’ yelled Sepúlveda.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said Mariano. ‘We have to get to the gates of Corbera now.’

  We marched through the night Indian file, until dawn, and then we started seeing the houses of the village in the distance. There was a wet, humid haze hanging over the road. A motorcycle sentry arrived and told us that the orders were to take Corbera.

  ‘How? There are only sixteen of us,’ Luigi protested.

  ‘You’re a lowly turd, that’s what you are,’ said Alfonso.

  We had to force the two Italians apart – and we barely managed. Luckily Mariano intervened, his fingers in his hair, his eye steely.

  ‘Finish it up, you two. We can do it. We just need to buy enough time so that the other units can get here to back us up.’

  We went in two rows, marching down the pavements of the main street. Then they started shooting from a bakery window. Just two steps in front of me the English guy got hit from behind and he fell to the ground. I saw him leaning up against the wall, his chest bloody, his breath hoarse. He tried to cover the wound with his hand, maybe he was trying to block the blood getting into his throat. He didn’t make it. He died with his eyes open and we launched grenades into the bakery.When it was silent, we went in. It had been a woman shooting at us. Now she was lying dead on the ground, tattooed with shrapnel, the machine gun still in her hands. We found three pilots in the basement, Germans. We shot them there and then and resumed our advance, bullets whistling by our ears. I don’t know how we got to the other end of the town, to the cemetery. We’d lost the Andalusian, the black guy and the Galician. Luigi was wounded on his arm, not badly. It must have been ten in the morning when the planes arrived. They were sweeping the ground with machine-gun fire, like demons, they even hit their own soldiers as they ran. There were six planes, then ten, then six again. Luigi was happy. This was his specialty. He planted his weapon and began shooting. He waited until they drew near and then showered them with fire. He got two; they spiralled and exploded in mid-air.

  ‘There goes one, and two . . .’ he counted.

  ‘He knows how to count,’ Sepúlveda whispered to me as we squashed up against a wall.

  At one o’clock under a deadly heat, our men took Corbera, but the battle wasn’t over for us. They gave us replacement soldiers and ammo and sent us south toward Gandesa.

  ‘We’re leaving immediately,’ Mariano announced.

  ‘Wait,’ argued Sepúlveda.

  ‘What’s the matter? Are you busy?’

  ‘I’ll be back in two minutes,’ he said, disappearing around the corner.

  I knew what he was up to and so I followed him. There he was, motionless in front of the church steps, his trousers around his ankles. He was relieving himself and muttering curses like an old anarchist. But this time no priest emerged to yell at him and he seemed almost disappointed as he walked back toward me, buttoning up his trousers.

  ‘Sorry, Lieutenant,’ he said. ‘But I made a promise, a vow.’

  We got to Gandesa too late. Our men had already occupied it just before dawn. Good. But our advance had been too quick. There were still troops behind us and those of us at the front – our unit, for example – had to wait for new orders. Exhausted, we rested up for three days in a grove. There were some bombers and a few tussles with scattered groups of Moroccans or Italians, and then one day a communications officer told us to head over to Sierra de Pandols, which Franco’s men had just taken back the day before.

  We left right after dawn, at six thirty, and we walked for hours. To fight a war in those days you had to have strong legs. It was hot. Mariano had us drink a lot of water before we left, and then save water during the march. We moved slowly; we didn’t rush, the sun along the way practically made the rocks squeak.

  ‘What’s the point if we get there too late?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s better to arrive refreshed,’ answered Mariano. ‘A tired man is a dead man walking.’

  ‘I’ll write that down,’ I said, falling back. Lucky for me, he grinned.

  We passed a battalion climbing up to the front and then we slid into a deep, walled ravine that opened onto ten caverns. It was like a ring of hell, I swear it was, with all those ambulances coming and going. The grottos were full of wounded men, and others were stuffed with corpses. They’d built a mess hall in one grotto down near the bottom. We filled up on hot soup and bread and then set off again. At the far end of the ravine, passing another clearing that was about two hundred metres long, carpeted with dead and wounded soldiers, we saw Sierra de Pandols. It was a tall, heavy-walled fortress, stippled with the scars of bombs and grenades. Up top there was a blockade where the enemy was positioned. At the base of the wall there were a couple of units, ready to attack. And another unit was hidden under the jutting cliffs about halfway up. Everywhere there was the stench of dead bodies left to rot.

  It was sheer luck that the mortars didn’t get us as
we crossed the plain and started climbing up the left side of the Sierra. Our orders were to get as close as we could to the top, observe the enemy and pass on instructions for the attack. But we stopped about halfway.

  ‘We can’t get any closer right now,’ said Mariano. ‘We’ll wait for nightfall and then go.’

  It was brutal how slowly time passed under that unforgiving sun. There was nothing to drink. And the machine guns would start up in periodic angry bursts. Then our tanks arrived and there were more grenades. One by one our companies joined the formation. But it didn’t make any difference. It was a massacre. We were coming in from the front, out in the open, and they were positioned above us in the hundreds. We’d get close and they’d start shooting. They even shot at the guys trying to get the wounded off the field. Mariano sent Jimmie the Irishman up ahead. There had to be some other route to the top. In fact Jimmie came back in about an hour and told us to come and see.

  It was incredible. From where we stood, even higher up, hiding in the shrubs, we could see out over the whole company. It was like an ant farm teaming with Moroccans and the Spanish Foreign Legion. Mariano looked at me and smiled.

  ‘We’ve got them now,’ he whispered.

  I was the one who had to go back down and convince a major and a captain that we’d have to change our strategy that night. And I was right behind Mariano when at around two in the morning we launched our attack with grenades. Directly behind us, hidden, there were two units waiting for our signal. We took a nest of gunners by surprise, and Lech set up his own weapon to cover our descent into the barricade. They ran, shot, and fled in every direction. The Dutchman threw up a green flare and our men got within a few steps of the top. Poor Jan though. He still had the rest of the flare in his hand when the first bullet hit him, but he kept on shooting as if he weren’t feeling any pain, as if he’d never felt that bullet take a piece out of his lungs. He must have screamed when the second bullet got him, but his body didn’t settle down for an instant. He took the third one in the face and fell. He had red mush for a face by the time I got to him. I guess ever since then I’ve been afraid in some way, because it’s hard to erase the image of his face. But how can I explain something like that to you?