During his time as a student at Königsberg he was convicted twice of theft. Then he was “manservant” and secretary, then Duchess Anna’s lover, then autocrat as soon as Anna became empress. He treated Russians like plantation slaves. His name was Ernst Johann von Bühren, a minor Baltic nobleman, but pretended his name was Biron and was descended from the illustrious French family. After sending so many people for deportation, he himself was deported with his family, his siblings and various friends, accused of “inveterate lèse-majesté.” He reemerged from Siberia when he was summoned by the mad tsar Peter III, together with the beautiful Lopuchina, whose tongue had been ripped out, and many others, including his mortal enemy, Marshall Münnich, who had had a prison built for Biron at Pelim, where he himself was later incarcerated for twenty years. The tsar wanted Biron and Münnich to drink a toast in front of him. He raised his glass, then moved away because something had been whispered to him. And so, Claude-Carloman de Rulhière records: “those two old rivals were left facing each other, each holding their glass, in silence, staring at the spot where the emperor had disappeared; and shortly after, well pleased at the thought that he had forgotten them, both men looked back, fixed each other in the eye and, putting down their glasses still undrunk, they turned their backs on each other.”⁶³⁸ Petersburg was full of “people of interest, at least, for their long misfortunes,” revenants, allowed to return through the benign whim of Peter III.⁶³⁹ And immediately they were taken “into vast storehouses where, according to the custom of the country, all confiscated belongings were kept, sad records of falls from favor, where all the remnants of these celebrated downfalls are seen, arranged in order of time.⁶⁴⁰ They would go searching in the dust for their precious furniture, their diamond-studded honors, gifts once used even by some rulers for obtaining credit; and too often, after searching in vain, they would recognize them worn by the favorites of the current reign.” Rulhière saw Biron strolling around St. Petersburg: “On summer nights he was virtually the only person wandering the streets of this city he had ruled, and where everyone he met had reason for some explanation over the blood of a lost brother or friend.”⁶⁴¹

O***: Rather than thoughts, they are fragments of thoughts. Like memories, nagging away since they are never grasped: they approach and are lost, crests of the mnemonic wave. They do not tolerate an abundance of connectives, they look for the gap, a void in which to breathe between one space and the next, as happens in their lives as memories. Whether they are memories of others (which others?), or personal, or anonymous, beyond a certain point all becomes blurred—and no longer distinguishable. They now coexist amid the same dust—they talk to one another like family portraits on a long, dimly lit corridor.

Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, this “old, to a certain extent rebellious, half-apocryphal province of my thoughts,” drew its “tone,” as he explained in a letter to Gershom Scholem, from his piece on postage stamps in One-Way Street.^{642, 643} There he refers to those collectors “who are only interested in postage stamps with postmarks” and are perhaps “the only people who have penetrated the mystery,” since the postmark is “the occult part of the postage stamp,” its “nocturnal side.”⁶⁴⁴ Benjamin regarded history, as presented by orthodox historians, as a postage stamp without a postmark: bland in its pristine condition. The postmark, on the other hand, which “covers faces with bloody weals” and opens “chasms through entire continents,” is the invisible hand of time, which takes the liberty of placing an indelible black mark over a landscape of tropical palms.⁶⁴⁵ And this very weal heightens the sensuality of the postage stamp and of history, which captivates us in its “white lace-trimmed tulle dress: the scalloped edge.”⁶⁴⁶