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 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
