Exchange Place

The Lost Briefcase

I am a displaced person. I inhabit the interlude between two movements, not knowing for how long. I am in limbo, the borderland between two states of being. After I left Beringer, I had made my way homewards, to find I had no home to go home to. A police cordon surrounded Elsinore Gardens. A police officer asked for my identity. I told him I was John Kilfeather. He informed me that ‘a situation’ had arisen at the Antrim Road shops — Video City, the Northern Bank, The Works Sandwich Bar, Zips and Rips Alterations and Dry Cleaning. I would be allowed back to my house for a matter of minutes, but was advised to take some belongings and to seek alternative accommodation for the night. How long might the situation continue? There was no way of knowing. Nor was I allowed to take my car.

The officer held up the length of white security tape. I stooped under and made my way to No. 41. I opened the door with my Yale key, feeling like an intruder. Already the house seemed to emanate an empty aura, the hallway almost alien in its familiarity. I packed a large briefcase with three shirts of various shades of blue, underclothing, toiletries, and a Muji A5 notebook. I also packed the typescript of X+Y=K. I could use this unplanned hiatus in my life to read it again and see what I had in mind all those years ago. I was almost out the door when it occurred to me to take my passport. I was abroad in my home city. On the bus into the city centre I took out the A5 Muji notebook. I opened the notebook at random. I found some pages devoted to Walter Benjamin, some of which I summarize here:

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was born in Berlin on 15 July 1892 to a well-off family of assimilated Jews. He was forced to flee Germany in 1933 and subsequently spent much of his time in Paris. In 1938 the Vichy government interned him for three months in the town of Nevers. He returned to Paris but fled Paris the day before the Germans entered Paris on 14 June 1940. He spent some time in the town of Lourdes before travelling to Marseilles, where he hoped to gain passage to the US. This proved impossible. In August 1940 he obtained an American visa to travel to the US from neutral Portugal. He would have to go through Fascist Spain, which could only be done via a clandestine route across the Pyrenees to the Catalan town of Portbou. He undertook the journey on 25 September at dawn. The path through the mountains was arduous. Benjamin, who had a heart condition, calculated he would have to stop every ten minutes and rest for one. He timed these periods meticulously with his gold watch. When he reached Portbou, exhausted, he found much of it still in ruins after Franco’s bombing during the Civil War. On presenting himself to the police at the railway station, Benjamin was refused entry to Spain. He would be handed over to the French authorities the next day, and subsequently surrendered to the Nazi authorities. Confined to the Hostal França in Portbou, he took an overdose of morphine. On the morning of 26 September his dead body was found on his bed in Room 3 of the Hostal França. He was forty-eight. His effects were described in official documents as ‘a leather briefcase, a gold watch, a pipe with an amber mouthpiece, a passport issued in Marseilles by the American Foreign Service, six passport photographs, an X-ray, a pair of spectacles, various magazines, a number of letters, and some papers, contents unknown.’ Benjamin was rumoured to have been carrying another briefcase containing an important manuscript — the final version, according to some sources, of The Arcades Project. This briefcase was never found.

Upon reaching the city centre, I booked into the Adelphi Hotel in Ireland’s Entry. A lifelong resident of Belfast, I had never stayed in the Adelphi, but had often drunk in its art deco bar, which was unchanged, it seemed, from the 1930s. I was assigned Room 7, which lay at the top of a narrow staircase. The furnishings, under the dim light of the dormer window, had the air of an even earlier period — a mahogany three-mirror dressing table, a mismatching mahogany wardrobe, a high oak bedstead, a bedside table with a night light, and a washstand with mirror. I went down to the bar. It was empty save for the barman and myself. I ordered a glass of John Powers and looked at surroundings: still unchanged. There was the alcove with three art deco mirrors on the wall, each flanked by wall lamps with bakelite stems, chrome back plates and frosted glass flame shades; there was the matching, facing alcove with matching lamps and mirrors.

I am sitting under one of the mirrors writing this in the A6 Muji notebook, referring sometimes to the A5 notebook, and from time to time I look up from my writing. I take off my hat, and see the man in the mirror simultaneously take off his hat. I hold up the pen in my right hand, and the Other in the mirror holds up an identical pen in his left hand. I take a sip of whiskey, and the Other does likewise with the other hand, we are countless men, our images forever receding and approaching in an infinite recession and progression. I am writing this with a Japanese Sailor Professional Gear pen with a Fine nib which corresponds to a European Extra Fine, about 0.5mm, and I think Walter Benjamin would have liked the Sailor Extra Fine nib, which draws, I would guess, an 0.25mm line — Benjamin whose famously miniscule hand could fit some hundreds of words on to a single sheet of hotel notepaper — Benjamin to whom the finest available nib was too broad, whereupon he would turn the pen around and use the back of the nib instead. I think of his notebooks in different formats and dimensions, crammed with writing — describing, annotating, cataloguing, speculating. I think of a sheet of buff paper found in his archive, headed with the emblem of Acqua Pellegrino, a blue-grey bottle against a red five-pointed star, on which he has written, or rather, this is an English translation of what he wrote: ‘What is Aura? The experience of an aura rests on the transposition of a form of reaction normal in human society to the relationship of nature to people. The one who is seen or believes himself to be seen (glances up) answers with a glance … When a person, an animal, or something inanimate returns our glance with its own, we are drawn initially into the distance; its glance is its dreaming … Aura is the appearance of a distance however close it may be. Words themselves have an aura … As much aura in the world as there is still dream in it.’

Above these words, to the right of the San Pellegrino star, Benjamin has written three lines at an upwards diagonal slant. In English, they make up eighteen syllables. A haiku, more or less? Knowing little German, unable in any case to decipher the tiny writing, I do not know if they are an accurate reflection of the original.

Eyes staring at one’s backMeeting of glancesGlance up, answering a glance