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 two 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.
‘Get undressed,’ ordered the officer.
After our shower they gave each of us two uniforms, two berets, a coat, a poncho, linens, even cigarettes and a pouch of American tobacco. Two thirty, in the middle of a downpour, a military train was heading out from the Francia station, destination unknown. Mariano and I were on that train. Ana María and Mercedes were down on the platform waving their handkerchiefs. There were no tears shed. I felt more angry, nostalgic and sick. It was like my stomach was eating itself. Mariano, on the other hand, was acting like he’d just come out of a long sleep. It didn’t take much. Maybe he could already smell combat and that excited him.
‘And we’re back in business,’ he said rubbing his hands together.
I looked at him and then turned away to look out the window at the factory smokestacks getting smaller in the distance, the fields outside Barcelona reduced to swamps under the completely grey sky and the rain beating against the glass. I imagined myself back in the trenches – the cold, the cannon fire.
‘You’re out of your mind,’ I told him and then went to sit down.
Chapter Seven
Benjamin performed an about-face and completely abandoned his plan to take his own life in that little room at the Hôtel du Petit Parc in Nice. His reasons remain a mystery. Over the months that followed, he hunkered down and worked, taking full advantage of his incredible capacity for concentration and fishing through his ‘reservoir of profound serenity’ – nothing seemed to upset him. It was as if passing through death and looking it in the eyes, he’d passed some kind of initiation ritual. After that, life couldn’t present him with anything worse. In the meantime, living was worthwhile.
And yet, a year later, after his escape from Berlin to Paris, he’d spent only a few days in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower before descending back into turmoil. In bed, at a hotel on rue de la Tour in the sixteenth arrondissement, Benjamin watched his pipe smoke curl up toward the sink and the cracked mirror on the wall in front of him; it filled the grimy room, spread greyly over the grey walls. He’d come back to Paris from Ibiza at the end of September 1933 tormented by a fever that came over him in waves. Malaria, claimed the doctor.A hearty quinine cure lowered his body temperature but his strength didn’t come back. He squandered the little energy he had writing letter after letter. ‘This illness,’ he wrote to his friend in Palestine, ‘has left me just enough strength to recognise the wretchedness of my situation – but not enough strength to extricate myself from it. I’m not even healthy enough to climb the stairs of the cheap hotel where I’ve been forced to take lodging.’
Lying on that bed, covers pulled up to his nose, he listened carefully to the growl of the city beyond the closed blinds – snarling and ready to pounce. This wasn’t the same city that he’d once known. But then he wasn’t the curious carefree tourist of a few years before either. For a person like him, alone and without money or a home, without a country or a language, for a Jew running from the Nazis, Paris showed another face, a harsher, harder face. Benjamin didn’t even need to go to Ibiza and then come back to France in order to comprehend the situation. He’d already predicted it to Scholem two months earlier: ‘The Parisians are saying “Les émigrés sont pires que les boches,” and that should give you an accurate idea of the kind of society that awaits one there.’
He wasn’t wrong.With the exception of a brief period under the Popular Front government, the émigré life in France just kept getting harder. There were expulsions and arrests; it was impossible to process any kind of paperwork. As if that weren’t enough, the group of exiles and intellectuals who had gathered in Paris so committed to proving that there was another ‘better’ Germany drew far too much attention from the Brownshirts. They were put under surveillance – terrorised, robbed, assassinated. The exile centres filled with spies compiling lists, watching activities, furnishing information and trying to discourage the leadership.
