Exchange Place

Oubliette

I woke. I must have dozed off as a consequence of the dope. For a moment I didn’t know quite where I was. I came to myself at my desk, left cheek on the open pages of the Muji notebook I’d been writing in, the Japanese Sailor pen in my right hand. I had been dreaming of John Harland, and, as I tried to remember the details of the dream in order to write them down, I suddenly remembered the Japanese box he had given me the last time I set eyes on him. He was wont to do that, present me with little knick-knacks from time to time: a netsuke tortoise whose head withdrew into the shell — fake, but very well done, he said, crafty piece of work; a Georgian silver salt-spoon; a lighter shaped like a miniature gun; that kind of thing. I see him now in my mind’s eye, smiling as he stands before me in a blue cotton jacket, showing me his hands, turning them this way and that to emphasize their emptiness. He cups them, rubs them together, and opens them to reveal a small package wrapped in blue cartridge paper. He hands it to me with a flourish, and I take it. He has done this kind of magic trick on me before. The package is light in my hand. I smile, and nod. Don’t open it until you get home, he said, and I left, and I never saw him again.

When I got home I undid the package. Inside was a buff cardboard box inscribed ‘The Belfast Ropework Company Limited: Ropes, Cords, Lines and Twines’. When I opened it contained yet a smaller parcel wrapped in pale green crêpe paper, and on unwrapping that I found a small cardboard box with an interlocking labyrinth pattern on the lid. I lifted the lid and inside was what? I shook out the object and held it between thumbs and forefingers, examining it, turning it over and over to admire the complicated marquetry of what seemed to be a rectangular solid about one and a half inches by one by one. I looked again at the box in which it came and saw that jammed against the underside of the lid was a postage-stamp-sized piece of folded paper. I took a philatelic tweezers to it and teased it out. Unfolded, the leaflet measured some three inches by two, and I had to take a magnifying glass to it to read the tiny print of what looked a set of instructions. ‘MAME’ it began, 14-step Japanese Trick Box. But the more I read the more I realized it was a description, rather than a user’s manual. I quote a little here from the text which is before me as I write. The mosaic and wood inlaid work a traditional handicraft are used. In this case, the marquetry and wood inlaid work serves as the pattern for the box; and it is thinly sliced and pasted on the box. This pattern also to maintain proper function of the trick box. The trickbox, with its advanced technological aspects, requires preseverance [sic] to manufacture. Despite this intellectually fascinating design and function, the trickbox is anything but mechanical. The feel and sound by which the tree runs are simple and gentle. This is the charm of the trickbox. ‘MAME’ is bean in Japanese. Under this last line Harland had written, From Harland to Kilfeather.

Underneath that again was a diagram of a box covered in numbers and directional arrows. I thought this might truly be the instructions. So I set about trying to open the box according to what little sense I could make of the diagram. Solid though the box seemed, it weighed too lightly for that. But the chamfered edges were smooth to the touch and showed no palpable means of ingress. I took the magnifying glass to it and could see no joins. I pushed and pulled at it every which way for a good half-hour, but for the life of me I could not get it to open. I tried it again three or four times a day for a day or two; again I failed, and I put it away in a place I forgot about, which I’m trying to remember now. I go through all the drawers in my room, from desk to cabinet to the two miniature chests, and discover many things I’d forgotten, but not the trick-box. I think of my procedures for putting things away, whether in a safe place, or too safe a place, or a thoughtless place, or somewhere I might identify later by some mnemonic, some incongruous but related image that might serve for the thing itself, a locus in the memory palace. I’ve been reading a good deal of French lately, and I think of a nineteenth century French-English phrasebook I bought in the market many years ago, charmed by the quaintness of its English as I had been by that of the Japanese leaflet — ‘My postillion has been struck by lightning’ — that kind of thing. I can see its faded gilt lettering glowing on an autumnal Morocco spine. But where exactly is it? I search for some time before I find it on a top shelf I have to take the three-step library ladder to. I ease out the book and crane my hand into the space behind, and find the box which contains the trick-box and the little leaflet. I take out both trick-box and diagram, trying to figure it out again. I turn the box over and over trying to find some purchase on it. Then unwittingly I do something or other I’ve never done before; there is a click, and I find an end panel of the box has shifted a fraction of an inch from its bearings. And bit by slow bit, sometimes backtracking and beginning again, trying this combination and that, I eventually crack the secret of the trick-box: a sequence of fourteen steps that turns out to be blindingly simple once you know how it works, each step leading inevitably to the next. Now I can do it with my eyes shut, for everything is in the movement, which is palpable and audible.

The inner compartment contains a miniscule scroll tied with the finest of threads. I open it. 41 Rue du Sentier, it reads, in a tiny nineteenth-century legal hand. And that is all. Intrigued, I put the address between quote marks and look for it on the internet. It is in Paris. Among the 54,300 results I come across a list of addresses of historical interest, including 41 Rue du Sentier, described as ‘maison du notaire Jacques Ferrand, 1838’. Further investigation reveals that the solicitor Jacques Ferrand is not a historical person but a character in Les Mystères de Paris, a sensationalist novel by Eugène Sue published in 1838. This leads me to an English translation of the novel in which the house is described in some detail. It has a lodge, a garden, outhouses, and offices approached by a stone staircase, all in various stages of picturesque dilapidation. I turn to Google Maps and drag the pegman icon to 41 Rue du Sentier on Street View. A modest shop front in a narrow, empty street, it looks nothing like the house in the book. It bears no name, only the number 41 above the door. The blinds are drawn. As I pan along the street I know I have been here before, in the garment district, walking past window displays of bolts of cloth and tailor’s dummies, I would have walked past No. 41 without registering it then. And I get that uncanny feeling sometimes generated by Street View, that one is actually there, a disembodied spirit roving along a street in the here and now, except it is not now, for the Street View photographs are continually outmoded by the present. There is a time lag. The Rue du Sentier I am viewing is no longer there. It is a ghost. And I picture Harland walking down that ghost street years ago perhaps, though whether it was his hand or that of another that was responsible for the scroll in the Japanese box, or whether it was magicked there from some other dimension, I have no way of knowing.