Andrew Crumey - The Secret Knowledge

“Yes,” says Benjamin, “I know Miss Lacis. You’re a friend?”

“I saw you with her,” the Frenchman declares as a fly settles on the rim of Benjamin’s wine glass. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you? I could tell. Don’t think I’m being rude, I’m an eccentric, that’s all, I speak my mind. We French, you understand, are experts in love.”

“You already told me you’re half-German.”

He laughs. “German only in my head, thank God, but I have the heart of a Frenchman. Oh yes, I’ve loved, many times, and always truthfully, I’m no libertine. But you see, sir, I embrace risk, and what greater risk is there than love? The game is only worth it if the stakes are high, and that means you must first of all love life. What are the two things men kill themselves over? Money and women. I asked if you would put a loaded revolver to your head. I’ve done it. Pulled the trigger and… click. I live another day. Imagine if everyone in the world were to do that.”

“Millions would die.”

“And the rest would love life. They would end all war and poverty, live together in peace and prosperity in a world blessed by chance.”

“You’re a utopian.”

“While you, I take it, are a Bolshevik, like the actress.”

An unexpected challenge to define himself; Benjamin doesn’t know what he is. “I think Marx was a philosopher of profound insight.”

“But does the situation in Russia prove his theory? You can hardly call it a Marxist revolution, more like a Blanquist one.”

“You mean a conspiracy rather than a proletarian uprising? Blanqui never had much success with that in France.”

“But Lenin has in Russia. Make everyone think it’s a popular revolution when really it’s a coup: that’s genius.”

Comparison between Baudelaire and Blanqui: their isolation. De Tocqueville saw Blanqui at his trial and described him as looking like a skeleton in an overcoat, a hideous apparition. Baudelaire drew a portrait of Blanqui, his idol. The connection may be arbitrary: all the more reason to look into it more deeply.

“We haven’t even introduced ourselves, my name is Pierre Klauer.”

“Walter Benjamin. And you must tell me exactly how you know Miss Lacis.”

“Oh, I was invited to a dinner party a few weeks ago and she was among the guests. Then not long afterwards I noticed her with you.”

Klauer must really have remembered it as soon as he arrived at the café and saw Benjamin sitting there. Nothing is random.

“You say you were a composer.”

“I gave up music and haven’t touched a piano in ten years.”

“I find that extraordinary.”

“Some men forego sex, I renounced music, which is easier for me.”

“But why?”

“Because I no longer believed in it. Rather, I came to believe in something else. I was working on a large-scale orchestral piece, all I had done was a piano version; but that, I decided, would be my final work. As a composer I died. And was reborn.”

“As what?”

“A man who loves life. But you, sir, you aren’t happy, and it’s because of the actress. She’s leading you a merry dance, anyone can see it, even a perfect stranger like myself who happened upon you both in a restaurant.”

“It was really so obvious?”

“Painfully so. Intellectuals are always the worst victims, too much thinking.”

“Then what should I do?”

With a bent finger Klauer beckons his companion closer. “Get hold of a revolver, put a single bullet in it, spin the chamber and let fate decide.”

He imagines Asja’s face when she hears: Walter Benjamin has killed himself. He imagines his wife and son, his friends. But mostly he imagines Asja.

“What if I survive?”

“That’s the point, my friend, you will. Or if you don’t, you’ll never know anything about it, so what is there to lose?”

It is Pascal’s wager for the era of mass production: the phantasmagoria of immortality.

“I lack your courage,” says Benjamin. “And what of your family and friends, did you renounce them too?”

“Completely. Though I did return to my parents’ home in Paris, just once. I knew they would be away, I only wanted to see the place.”

“You doubted your decision to leave?”

“Not at all, I thought of retrieving my last work and burning it. And as I walked in those once-familiar rooms I truly felt myself to be a ghost, for my mother had made the place a shrine to my memory. Here is posterity, I said to myself, here is what you craved, to be remembered, and what does it amount to? The tears of those few who knew you, the continued indifference of the multitude who did not. Pierre Klauer can be removed from the world like a loose brick and who will notice the hole he leaves?”

“You say you loved women.”

“They found other men. We are interchangeable.”

“If everyone thought like you there would be no art or science, no great works passed down the generations.”

“And every generation would be a world renewed. But I didn’t burn my score, because when I opened the drawer of my desk I found that it was gone, in fact for a moment I wondered if it had ever really been there. Its destiny, you see, was always to be non-existent, and I was glad that it was missing, I hoped that someone else had put a match to it, as I would have done. Yet the drawer wasn’t empty. I had also deposited a book there, that I used while composing the work.”

“The source of your inspiration?”

Klauer smiles. “You could say that. I took it with me and still have it.”

“Then you are more attached to art and literature than you care to admit.”

“The book is neither,” the Frenchman says with an air of satisfaction, as though a point has been scored. “It’s very old, written in a language I don’t understand, elegantly bound in yellow calfskin. And now that my finances have taken a bad turn I’m thinking of selling it. I expect I’ll let it go for far less than it’s worth.”

“I’m a collector of books.”

“Are you really? Then isn’t this a fine stroke of chance for both of us?”

Conroy sits alone in the darkness of his rented flat, place where no one can find him, view through the uncurtained window of purple night clouds scummed with streetlight orange. In a world gone mad he’s the only one who can see the truth. They made Laura disappear, now it’s Conroy himself who must surely be next. Eliminate all witnesses, erase the evidence, already he can feel the breeze of annihilation airbrushing him out of history. That’s why he’s hiding, covering his tracks, making himself a non-person before those bastards can do it to him. If oblivion’s the only option it’ll be on his terms, not theirs.

Art and death: two lines of escape. And another, disappearance. The landlord wanted references, bank details. Conroy gave a false name and a wad of cash and that was sufficient, he’s been here a week and no one has knocked on his door. A telephone squats in a corner on the grubby carpet, Conroy doesn’t know if it’s connected and doesn’t plan on using it. His mobile went in a bin, his laptop is in the house he left.

Conroy refills his whisky glass, the bottle’s nearly empty. The portable TV is perched muted on a cardboard box he hasn’t bothered to unpack, he can see the start of a science documentary, that physicist who used to be a pop star or something, kind everyone can relate to. He’s standing on a mountain side waving his arms, Conroy thinks of turning the sound up but the remote is further away than the Glenfiddich. He couldn’t bring a piano here, not even the upright, enforced musical celibacy is driving him nuts. This is what it’s like, life without art. Wake up, do stuff, watch TV, go to sleep, start over next morning and you’re no different except a day older.