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kissed the girl in the hall. His mother always received heartfelt words when she was alone with him. However, for the most part she discussed business affairs with his older brother.
    As he returned home from the library around noon one day, it occurred to him that he should leave. What else was he to do here? He had studying to do.
    He found himself alone in the house and so went into his father’s study as had been his custom. Here on the divan, the deceased had suffered his final hours. The blinds had been lowered because it was hot, and through the slits the sky shone. The girl came in and put some anemones on the writing desk. Otto stood leaning against the divan and, as she walked past, he pulled her towards him silently. As she pushed herself up against him, they lay down together. After a while she kissed him and got up; he did not hold her back.
    Two days later he departed. He left the house early. The girl walked beside him, carrying his suitcase, and Otto told her about the university town and his studies. But on parting they only shook hands as the station was crowded. ‘What would my father say?’ he thought to himself as he leaned back and yawned the last bit of sleep from his body.
    â€”
    Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski .
    Written 1913; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften IV , 723–5; also translated in Early Writings , 128–31.

CHAPTER 22
The Siren

    Singer of the Comic Opera (Sängerin der komischen Oper) , 1923.
    O ne speaks of people who took their secret to the grave. Not much was missing for Captain G to have numbered among them. It was his misfortune that he did not keep his secret to himself. For those who love wordplay, one might say that it was his misfortune that he did not keep his misfortune a secret, even though he had sworn to himself that he would.
    He was no longer a young man when he let himself go for the first and final time. This happened in the harbour of Seville. Seville lies on the Guadalquivir, which is navigableuntil said harbour, though naturally only for vessels with small or medium tonnage. Captain G had not advanced beyond the command of the Westerwald , which could hold two-and-a-half-thousand tonnes. The load line of the Westerwald was half a metre above the water. The cargo comprised iron scaffolds bound for Marseille and seven hundred tonnes of ammonia bound for Oran. Claus Schinzinger was the name of the sole passenger.
    The most remarkable thing about this passenger was the care he took to appear for every meal in the officer’s mess with a different pipe, which he produced as soon as the rules of decency permitted. But perhaps even his considerable stockpile had been exhausted during the twelve-day journey, which had brought him from Cuxhaven to Seville. In any case, it was an unsightly growth, or rather a stump, from which the smoke curled upwards as Schinzinger dreamily listened to a story. His half-closed eyes were but one sign that his entire soul had resolved to listen. For Schinzinger – and perhaps this was the Captain’s great misfortune – was a great listener.
    Indeed, one would really have to possess G’s level of aloofness and misanthropy to keep one’s interactions with this passenger as rigidly within the confines of convention as had been the case during this passage. Schinzinger, for his part, appeared not to have waited for them to connect by any means; yet his willingness to endure even the longest pauses without a hint of awkwardness demonstrated sufficiently that he was a born listener. For the first time in a long while, both the captain and the passenger sat at a table where the wine in their glasses did not pitch and toss. It was a calm evening. No wind moved through the tops of the palm trees in the large park which surrounds Seville like a belt. The Westerwald was docked in the harbour as placidly as the sturdy garden pavilion out ofwhich the guests, who sat at hidden