Several months passed before I finally accepted the possibility that no one would be coming in search of it. It had, by accident, fallen into my lap. I decided the Baroness’s request no longer applied. Now that it belonged to me, even if provisionally, I was free to read it. In one fevered sitting, on a winter’s night so cold ice was forming on the Seine, I read all three of the manuscript’s stories in the order in which I’d found them. The first of them, ‘The Education of a Monster’, appears to be a short story written by Charles Baudelaire, although no other record of such a story exists anywhere other than a brief note in the poet’s journal. The handwriting, however, seems authentic, even if the story itself does not, for reasons that will become clear to the reader. The second story, ‘City of Ghosts’, is a kind of noir thriller set in Paris in 1940, seemingly narrated by Walter Benjamin, in which ‘The Education of a Monster’ plays a pivotal role. The third story, ‘Tales of the Albatross’, is the strangest of the three: it seems to be the autobiography of a kind of deathless enchantress.
And so, having read the story, working alone in a soft dawn light, I set about binding it. In the end, I chose a conventional, nondescript binding, using a horse leather the French call ‘skin of sorrow’, in cardinal red. I had no doubt in my mind that it was valuable, perhaps even priceless, as the Baroness had contended. But the circumstances in which it had come to me suggested the manuscript should not draw undue attention to itself.
Once it was bound, my wife also read it. Upon seeing the jumble of figures scrawled on the first page, however, she immediately guessed that they were in fact an alternative page sequence, which we dubbed the Baroness sequence. She, too, read the manuscript, but following this alternative sequence. Having finished it, she urged me to re-read it the same way. To my astonishment, I encountered an altogether different book, not so much a collection of stories as a single novel – and no ordinary novel either. But the book was already bound and, given its antiquity and fragility, we decided that Crossings should remain in the order in which I’d received it – the state in which you also find it, dear reader. You will have to choose for yourself whether you wish to read it as a collection of loosely connected stories or as a single novel.
The circumstances of the death of the writer Walter Benjamin (born in Berlin, Germany, in 1892; died in Portbou, Spain, in 1940) are well known. Having fled Paris in mid-June – possibly the same day German troops occupied the city – Benjamin spent two months in Lourdes, a pilgrimage town in the Pyrenees, before making his way to Marseille to try to secure a passage to America. When this failed, he returned to the Pyrenees in mid-September, joining a small group of Jewish Germans hoping to make an illegal border crossing into Spain.
Reaching the fishing village of Portbou on 26 September, the group was initially refused entry into the country. Benjamin, his heart failing and knowing he was wanted by the Nazis, was told he would be forcibly returned to France the next day. That night, in a hotel room, he swallowed a lethal dose of morphine. The following day, the others in his group were inexplicably granted entry into Spain after all.
After the war, rumours began to circulate of a manuscript Benjamin was carrying with him at the time of his death that had subsequently vanished. According to a witness who made the border crossing with him, Benjamin had been carrying a leather satchel (his only luggage) over the mountain. When asked what was in it, he’d replied that it contained a manuscript he valued more highly than his own life. As Benjamin’s post-war reputation grew, so did speculation about the manuscript and its contents.
I cannot, in good conscience, claim that this book is the lost manuscript of Walter Benjamin. Its provenance is too uncertain, its contents too fantastic. But it purports to be just that – and nothing in it that is verifiable contradicts the claim. Let us proceed on the assumption that it is, in fact, what it appears to be. It cannot be described as anything other than a novel. We know Benjamin was a literary scholar, and that he even anonymously co-wrote a detective novel. We know that his French was impeccable, and certainly up to the task. All the same, to publish the manuscript under his name would be unconscionable. And so, for lack of another name – perhaps also, if I am honest, out of a booklover’s vanity – I decided to publish it under my own name, with the caveat that takes the form of this preface. Strictly speaking, I am but the adopted parent of this foundling – still, there are no genetic tests for manuscripts. If the ethics of my decision are suspect, I am confident I at least stand on solid legal ground. As it is now more than seventy years since Benjamin’s passing, the book (if it is indeed authentic) is, under French law, beyond the reach of the Benjamin estate.
I am convinced the Baroness never intended to publish her manuscript: she wanted it bound for her own private pleasure. While the story of how Crossings came to be published – and why, and its history – must be reserved for another occasion, publishing it was not a decision taken lightly. For reasons of provenance alone, I don’t expect its publication to be uncontroversial, at least in the remoter corners of academia or bibliophilia. Having come to know it intimately, I believe there are at least seven ways Crossings may be interpreted: as an imagined story – an anonymous work, therefore, of fiction; as an elaborate joke, prank or puzzle inexplicably fabricated by Benjamin himself; as a hoax or forgery concocted by an unknown third party; as the delusions of a man in declining health and under overwhelming psychic pressure; as a complex and subterranean allegory or fable; as some kind of enigmatic code to an unknown recipient; or as thinly veiled memoir. I am by now too close to this tale to have a dispassionate view. I must have entertained each of these possibilities at least once, and some of them several times, and still I am undecided.
NOTE TO THE READER
As related in the preface, this book can be read in two ways: conventionally (that is, from first page to last) or by following the Baroness sequence. Those reading the Baroness sequence will find, at the end of each section, a page number in curly brackets (such as that below this note) indicating which page to turn to next. Readers of the Baroness sequence will thus begin the novel on page 150. For reference, the Baroness sequence’s pagination order is outlined below. Readers who decide to read the novel in the conventional manner need only turn the page.
Baroness sequence pagination:
150–39–157–53–1–175–71–11–206–23–87–225–31–256–103–306–124–349–141–154
{150}
The Education of a Monster
A Disgraceful Episode
AS I WRITE THESE words, it occurs to me that I have never known a tale to be so beyond belief as that which I am about to relate to you, dear girl. Yet nothing I have written has ever been so true. Paradox, all is paradox. Perhaps I have taken leave of my senses once and for all. You see, as a youth, I contracted the pox, no doubt from Jeanne Duval. This scourge is known, in old age, to drive its victims to madness, so that they know not the difference between the real and the unreal. I live in the permanent shadow of my impending lunacy. But as you will learn, it is not the only way in which Jeanne haunts me still. Indeed, if I am writing to you at all, it is because of Jeanne.