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 September 26, 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, rumors 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 postwar reputation grew, so did speculation about the manuscript and its contents.