Walter benjamin stares a.., p.1
Walter Benjamin Stares at the Sea, page 1
ALSO BY C. D. ROSE
The Blind Accordionist
The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure
Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else
WALTER BENJAMIN STARES AT THE SEA
First published in 2024 by Melville House
Copyright © 2023 by C. D. Rose
All rights reserved
First Melville House Printing: November 2023
Melville House Publishing
46 John Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
Melville House UK
Suite 2000
16/18 Woodford Road
London E7 0HA
mhpbooks.com
@melvillehouse
ISBN 9781685890841
Ebook ISBN 9781685890858
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945611
Book design by Beste M. Doğan, adapted for ebook
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
a_prh_6.3_145914334_c0_r0
I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
If we could but separate kairos, a moment in time, from chronos, its flow, everything would become known to us.
—LUCREZIA FINTA
Time is a river that sweeps me away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.
—JORGE LUIS BORGES
I like things that flicker.
—ANGELA CARTER
STORIES
OGNOSIA
THE DISAPPEARER
SELF-PORTRAIT AS A DROWNED MAN
EVERYTHING IS SUBJECT TO MOTION, EVERYTHING IS MOTION’S SUBJECT
I’M IN LOVE WITH A GERMAN FILM STAR
VIOLINS AND PIANOS ARE HORSES
ARKADY WHO COULDN’T SEE AND ARTEM WHO COULDN’T HEAR
THE NEVA STAR
SISTER
TROUVÉ
ONE ART
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE SHORT STORY
PROUD WOMAN, PEARL NECKLACE, TWENTY YEARS
WHAT REMAINS OF CLAIRE BLANCK
HENRI BERGSON WRITES ABOUT TIME
ST. AUGUSTINE CHECKS HIS TWITTER FEED
WALTER BENJAMIN STARES AT THE SEA
TO ATHENS
THINGS THAT FLICKER, THINGS THAT FADE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OGNOSIA
Leidner’s train pulled in around four, too early and too late to do anything useful, so he walked the couple of miles across town to the hotel and by late afternoon was happily sitting in the back bar, a place he found familiar even though he’d never been there before. All alcoves and corners, worn seats at wide tables, narrow windows onto a side street, and dark stairwells: such places were where he belonged.
He made sure he had his back to the wall so he could see who was coming or going, set his notebook on the table, checked the battery in his phone (if the interviewee was a talker he’d need the voice recorder), then flicked through the book they’d couriered to him. It wasn’t his beat, but their regular hack was double-booked. The money would be handy, too.
‘Have a look at the pictures, ask some questions, two thousand words by next Monday,’ his editor had said. ‘You’ll recognise her when she walks in.’
Leidner was still getting over the train ride, which had been marked by an uncomfortable misrecognition. A man across the aisle had been reading a book and Leidner had squinted to see what it was, an old habit, but he couldn’t make out the title, then looked up to see the man looking back at him. For a tenth of a second they shared a glance as though they might know each other, but they didn’t. The person Leidner was thinking of lived a thousand miles away and, besides, was also dead.
This book was heavy, 120 pages of 200 gsm paper, the size of an LP. There were a couple of introductory essays, which he ignored, then the pictures. Each one (colour, full page) showed a scene set but not yet occupied. An anonymous motorway sliproad at dawn, or maybe dusk; a provincial railway station, a goods yard to its side, the tracks cutting through the frame; banked rows of plush red-velvet theatre seats, then the reverse angle—an empty stage. Each photo was a place waiting for something to happen. A small study or office centred on a desk piled with books, spines illegible; a blustery seascape; more empty streets. There were no people. Leidner found them cold, pointless. Great composition, great light, but what else? What were these pictures supposed to mean? Then the last one: It was this place. The hotel bar he was sitting in now. His seat by the window empty. All of it empty. As though the picture had been taken but a few hours earlier.
He looked up to see if he could work out the exact angle or spot the photo had been taken from, and as he was scanning the room he again saw someone, not the same guy from the train, he thought he remembered but could not place. It was today’s thing, obviously. Leidner took a deep breath, looked away, wanting to avoid the jitters, the worries, the anxieties that came with the thought that everything might be connecting in a way he wouldn’t like at all, then looked back to find the man was still looking directly at him, though actually he wasn’t looking at Leidner at all but merely staring into the middle distance, rapt at a memory of the point in his life when he had been happiest. This had been some time ago, in the late ’90s or early noughties maybe, sitting on a beach, alone. Das had been working as a teacher and had taken a group of Spanish students on a day trip to the seaside then managed to give them all the slip, leaving them in an amusement arcade while he wandered off with the vague idea of getting a beer and sitting in the sun. He’d ended up on the beach instead with a cheese sandwich, some loose change, and nothing much else. He listened to the crunch of the pebbles under the weight of the tide, watched the light bouncing off the waves, and thought that his heart might burst for no reason other than that he was there, and alive, and when he had realised that he might never be happier this fact made him sad, as though the wave had crested.
The moment had never left him, and today he had gone back there, to the very place where it had happened, in an attempt to find it again. His old mate Griff was getting married for the third time and there was a stag. Das hadn’t wanted to go even though they’d promised it would be a quiet one, but when he saw it was there, in that place where he’d been so happy all that time ago and had never been back, he thought again. He’d get there early, go down to the beach, find the exact spot, and have his moment again. Only it hadn’t worked that way: he hadn’t been able to find the place, or even anything like it. The beach wasn’t the same one he remembered at all—not the long expanse of sand-coloured pebbles and blue water but a narrow strip of grubby sand hemmed in by an industrial port. Das wondered if he’d got the place wrong, if it hadn’t been here but somewhere else, and if his memory had been faulty or blurred all these years, if it had overlapped with one or two or more other incidents, if his perfect moment of stillness had never, in fact, happened at all.
He checked his phone again to see if any of the others were on their way yet as much as to avoid the gaze of the guy sitting by the window, now staring at him in a way that was almost creepy, then set it to ring in an hour’s time, then two hours, then three. He’d never been able to put up with the group of honking bores any gathering of more than three men inevitably became, especially if booze was involved. The phone trick was simple: a faked incoming call that he’d get up to answer, then go outside, then drift off and disappear completely. That lot would be bladdered within the hour, grown both bullish and maudlin. They’d not notice him gone for ages, if at all.
Das saw himself walking into the cooler night air, cadging a cigarette off a stranger, striking up a conversation, going on somewhere else entirely, a club, maybe, where they’d be playing thumping techno and he’d get talking to someone glamorous dressed in black and he’d get close to them and go back to theirs, that was how it would happen, then he’d wake up the next morning in a strange place, in an unfamiliar bed that would be too comfortable, ashamed, or maybe not, maybe in love again, and he’d have to explain to everyone how he’d met this person who’d come into his life like this, he’d tell the story of how he’d been on a stag do then wandered off, but it wouldn’t last because—
‘Sir, are you okay? Sir?’
‘What?’
‘Sir, are you okay?’ Lena had only just started her shift and really couldn’t be doing with crying drunks this early on a long night, especially when she was going out later and had a big one planned.
‘You didn’t look very well. Is everything all right?’
‘Sorry, no. Sorry. I’m okay, thanks. Fine. Sorry.’
Turned out the guy wasn’t drunk after all, just lost. It happened. Lena felt as though she’d intruded and backed off, leaving the man to dab his tears with a paper napkin. It’d be at least an hour before she could sneak out for a smoke.
There were two groups booked in later, but for the while it was quiet. Lena hoped Zan would turn up soon, as she was on her own at the moment and wouldn’t be able to cope with the rush. The tips never made it worthwhile unless you flirted, and there was no way she was doing that again. Lena was utterly uncut out to do this job. Sh
She reached for the sketchbook in the pocket of her apron. It was kind of a habit, nothing more than doodles, really, perhaps more of a compulsion than a habit, this need to recreate faces, to note them, or record them, to put down something solid from the shifting mass. Zan had told her she should try selling her pictures, or showing them somewhere, but Lena didn’t really get that, it wasn’t why she did it. Zan had all sorts of ideas, like the scam, which had come to nothing because no one used cash anymore, not enough to make it worthwhile, anyhow, though now she had something involving phones that Lena was equally unsure about. Lena had only ever had one job that she’d considered ‘proper,’ and that had turned wrong after the boss had insisted on looking at her sketchbook, which, of course, had a fairly unflattering picture of him in it. The boss said it was funny, and that she was certainly talented, but Lena was fairly sure that was why, three months later, her contract hadn’t been renewed.
She hoped it wouldn’t get too busy before Zan turned up. Zan was always late. She hoped Zan would at least show before Rasputin did, anyhow. Rasputin came in every night and ordered one negroni with double Campari, which he nursed until closing. He had a disturbing stare and an exaggerated interest in Lena’s tattoos. ‘Which one of those do you regret?’ he’d asked her. What sort of a fucking question was that? Zan would have had a smart answer; Lena’s was ‘None of them.’
Lena hadn’t even managed to get the sketchbook out before someone else was calling her.
‘Excuse me, have you seen my phone?’
‘I’m sorry, I haven’t. If anything’s lost it gets handed in to the bar. I can go and ask if you like.’ Lena was worried that this was something to do with Zan’s scam and hoped it wasn’t. Karsh, on the other hand, was more worried about how they’d get in touch with Ginny if Ginny didn’t show soon as this was Film Club, after all, the one night each month they’d get together as they had been doing for the last ten years to go and see a film, and now Karsh had lost their phone and there was no sign of the usually punctual Ginny.
‘Can you tell me what it’s like?’ asked the waiter, but Karsh couldn’t remember anything more about the phone than it being black and shiny and phone-shaped and phone-sized, and right now was more taken by the fact that this waiter, shaved head apart, looked exactly like the actor in the film they were supposed to be going to see whose name they couldn’t remember, nor what the film was called. It had been Ginny’s turn to choose and as usual she’d chosen something art-house weirdy-beardy, not Karsh’s thing at all, but that was how Film Club worked.
Karsh carried on looking at the waiter as she walked off to the bar, wondering if it was that actor she looked like or someone else altogether. It was an increasingly familiar feeling. Everyone was starting to look like everyone else these days. Same with the films: it didn’t really matter which one of them picked; Karsh found they couldn’t remember much about them half an hour after they’d finished. There’d been one grainy black-and-white thing, probably Ginny’s choice, that had stuck with them, though if pushed they wouldn’t be able to say why. Good job they had the Book: Karsh kept a record, had noted the title of every film they’d seen plus their thoughts on it and a mark out of ten in the notebook they had with them right now. Ginny made fun, but that was what Ginny did. Karsh dug in their bag, fished it out, and flicked through it, trying to remember what that one film was. Even reading it back didn’t help much. None of the descriptions made much sense. They used to write them together when they went for a drink after. Film Club, Karsh knew, wasn’t really about the films.
They reached for their phone again, only to remember they’d lost it. Never mind; Ginny was sure to show up soon. Karsh was always losing things these days, or forgetting them. There seemed to be so much more now, both things themselves and things to remember. No wonder it was getting harder to keep track of it all. The phone was supposed to help but had only made things even more complicated.
‘Excuse me, do you know why you’ve been put on this earth?’ Karsh looked up to find a woman with rinsed-out blonde hair looking at them intently. ‘Why it is, I mean, that you’re here?’
Karsh wondered if this was something else they were supposed to know and had forgotten again.
‘I’m here,’ they said, ‘to meet a friend.’
‘No, I mean, not tonight, I mean, like, on this earth. I mean, in a bigger way. Like, really.’
‘We go and see films together. Once a month.’ The woman looked like the kind of person who’d ask to speak to the manager. Trouble was, Karsh didn’t have a manager. ‘She’s late, my friend. Should be here any minute. I think.’
The woman didn’t seem to be listening, though. She was looking upward, as if she could see something but wouldn’t tell anyone else about it. Karsh wondered if she was an evangelist or some other kind of proselytising fanatic, but that was unlikely in a place like this. Maybe just a hippy, or an eccentric. There was a man with her, though he was standing aside, as if embarrassed. She was clearly half-cut, thought Karsh, but she wasn’t, Anja hadn’t even had a drink yet, though she was waiting for her companion to go and get her one. Actually, Anja was thinking that she was disappointed by the fact that so few people had ever been able to answer her question. She’d taken to asking it of random strangers a few years ago, and it had done her little good. People thought she was aggressive, but she didn’t mean to be. ‘Do you know why you’ve been put on this earth?’ She was honestly just curious. She’d had her own moments of certainty: an intense but brief bout of religious faith when she was thirteen; deciding to live for rave when she was eighteen; finding herself in Goa by the time she was twenty and staying there for far too long, then somehow ending up working in corporate event management for nearly a decade. After that had collapsed, she’d developed the strong feeling that, in accordance with the ancient Mayan calendar, the world was due to end in 2012. When it hadn’t, she’d had a bit of a reckoning. Now she genuinely wanted to know: Why are we here?
Anja had just asked the man she was with right now, who she’d met waiting to cross the street ten minutes ago, and whose name she didn’t think she’d quite gathered, and he’d said that he didn’t, no, but that he might like to talk about it over a drink, but he was already inching away from her by the time they’d got into the bar, she could tell, this wasn’t a new thing. There was only one person who’d ever replied with certainty: a man she’d sat next to on a bus once. She’d asked the question, and instead of pretending it was his stop, he’d told her a long story about walking up a mountain and meeting God at the top. ‘It was like a cloud coming down over my face,’ he’d said. Anja couldn’t remember much else about the story.
Her interviewee proving unforthcoming (Anja wondered if they were all there), Anja sat herself down in an alcove (there were so many of them here) next to a man to whom she’d intended to ask the question, but he seemed to be asleep. Gil wasn’t quite asleep, though, but on the verge and starting to dream, and this was what he was dreaming: His lover was dancing happily to a punk band playing in the corner of a supermarket, and he felt happy because his lover had been troubled of late, it was good to see her so content, so he let her be and walked out onto a narrow English alley, which he took to be somewhere in Sussex (even though he’d never been to Sussex), then carried on and turned onto a Mediterranean esplanade, deserted, lined by palm trees and pale yellow late-nineteenth-century buildings. A warm spray from the sea touched his face and an intense light glowed around him. They should live here, Gil was thinking in the dream, if only it weren’t so expensive, and then someone was asking him something, and he was waking somewhere else.
