(Text partially based on Gershom (Gerhardt) Scholem's intro to the Moscow Diary. Scholem was Benjamin's good friend; he disapproved of Asja and didn't understand their relationship.)

G: Watch a couple lacking joy and easy courtship, looking at frustration and the city as a fortress. They're almost always adversarial and she is so elusive she is slippery, slutty, slatternly, she wants a new dress.
Conintually rejecting the man, and standing him up again and again, he's asking himself, "Well what can I do, if she might show up I'm not waiting in vain..." She's enigmatic, baffling, an erotic cynic -
Grasping and quarrelsome, unresolved, diffident, hostile, cruel and sick.

A: You can't say the attachment was easy - in fact at first the whole thing made me kinda queasy. The man is so obsessed with tragedy, he never learned how to romance a lady! Gerhardt, you can call me a cynic, but your buddy here is downright pathetic. You'll never get this man to Palestine: I'm the queen of Moscow and he is mine.