Читать книгу The Angel Of History - Bruno Arpaia - Страница 16

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 managed 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.