20 diciembre
"Whether I will achieve the secondary purpose of my journey - to escape the deadly melancholy of the Christmas season - remains to be seen. If I am still holding out fairly well, it is also because despite everything, I recognize Asja's attachment to me. The familiar Du seems to have gained ground between us, and the long gazes she directs at me - I cannot remember a woman granting gazes or kisses this long - have lost none of their power over me. Today I told her that I now wanted to have a child by her. Certain gestures, spontaneous yet rare and not without significance given the control she has now imposed on herself in erotic matters, tell me she is fond of me. Just yesterday, as I was in the process of leaving her room to avoid an argument, she grabbed hold of me violently and ran her hands through my hair. Also, she often says my name. At one point in the past few days she said it was entirely my fault that we were not now living on a "desert isle" and didn't have two children. There is some truth to this. On three or four occasions, I directly or indirectly avoided sharing a future with her: when I didn't "run off" with her in Capri, but how? - when I refused to accompany her from Rome to Assisi and Orvieto, when I didn't follow her to Latvia in the summer of 1925 and didn't want to be tied down waiting for her in Berlin that winter. What came into play were not the financial considerations, nor even the fanatic urge to travel, which has since diminished in me over the past two years, but rather the fear of those hostile elements in her which only now do I feel I can confront. In the past few days I also said to her that had we decided to join together back then, I don't know that we wouldn't have split up long ago.
Everything happening in and around me combines to make the idea of living apart from her more intolerable to me than it ever was before. A contributing factor is certainly the fear that in the future, when Asja is finally well again and living here with Reich on stable terms, it will only be with a considerable amount of pain that I will be able to come up against the boundaries of our relationship. I still don't know if I will be able to disengage myself from it. At this point, I have no cause to sever myself from her completely, even admitting I were capable of it. The thing I would prefer the most would be the bond a child might create between us. But I have no idea whether I could even now bear living with her, given her astonishing hardness and, despite all her sweetness, her lovelessness. - Life here in the winter is richer by a dimension: space literally changes according to whether it is hot or cold. People live on the street as if in a frosty hall of mirrors, and every decision, every stop becomes incredibly difficult: it takes half a day of deliberation to go drop a letter in a mailbox, and despite the bitter cold, it takes an effort of the will to enter a store to buy something".
-Walter Benjamin, Mascow Diary, p.35.
