Exchange Place

The Found Hour

As I stood in the vestibule of 14 Exchange Place, lost for a moment in a lost time, I heard the Albert Clock tolling the hour as it had done, hour by hour, for the fugitive protagonist of Odd Man Out. I counted three strokes. I looked at my watch. It read four. Spring forward, Fall back. I realised I’d forgotten to turn the clock back last night, the last Sunday in October, Hallowe’en as it happened. Today was All Saints’ Day. Then I remembered that the same thing had happened to me when I wrote in the missing notebook, when was it? One or two or three years ago, years that had passed in a blur so that it seemed to me only yesterday. I could hardly tell one year in the past decade or two from another; as we age, subjective time accelerates. The summers of our childhoods seem to stretch forever; now they seem over before they have begun. On the other hand, when we are abroad, away from our routine existence, time seems to slow; every day is full of incident, new things to see, and a week seems a month. And indeed, the three days of my enforced absence from home, when I was abroad as it were, seemed much longer than that. As it was, I had an hour to kill. I set my watch to three o’clock, the Omega likewise, sat down on the stairs, and took Harland’s notebook from my briefcase. It was still pouring rain outside.

I opened the notebook at random and glanced at the handwriting that was still familiar to me after all these years, a formal miniscule out of character with his ostensibly open face, and the broad strokes and swirls of his painting. I had remarked on it to Harland once and he said he had modelled it on the tiny handwriting of Walter Benjamin. He said it disciplined his thoughts, and he then showed me a book he was reading, written by a Lisa Fittko, who had helped Benjamin escape through the Pyrenees. Benjamin had spent some time in Lourdes before embarking on that fatal journey. The hotels and boarding houses of the town, usually catering almost exclusively to Catholic pilgrims, were packed with refugees, many of whom were Jewish: one of those bizarre displacements that happen in times of war. It was September 1940. Benjamin had already tried and failed to escape through Marseilles, a city in whose apocalyptic atmosphere, said Fittko, there were new stories every day about absurd escape attempts; plans involving fantasy boats and fictitious captains, visas for countries not found on any map, and passports issued by nations which no longer existed. She referred to Benjamin as ‘Old Benjamin’ — she didn’t know why, since Benjamin was only forty-eight or so, she said, the age that Harland and I were at the time, and we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as old. Yet the photograph of Benjamin in the book showed a man who looked much older and wiser than us, wearing wire-rimmed glasses, his hair rising from the high brow in a shock of convoluted waves shot with grey, the very image of an intellectual.

Benjamin had a heart condition, and his ascent through the mountains was arduous. He was carrying a heavy, black leather briefcase which contained his new manuscript. Timing himself with his gold watch, he would stop every ten minutes to rest for one minute. At the time Fittko had only a vague idea of Benjamin’s reputation, and to her the briefcase was a superfluous burden, ‘a monstrosity’. But he would not be parted from it. He dared not lose it, the manuscript was more important than himself, he said. Of course we all know what happened then, said Harland, Benjamin took an overdose of morphine when he arrived in Portbou, and the manuscript vanished. Years later scholars searched high and low in Portbou for the manuscript, descending even into the catacombs of the town. But it was never found, though the briefcase was entered in the death register, with the notation, ‘and some papers of an unknown content’. So the briefcase became a relic made all the more potent by its disappearance. There’s another twist not mentioned by Fittko, said Harland. Benjamin was buried not as a Jew but as a Christian, in the Catholic cemetery of Portbou; the death certificate was made out in the name of Doctor Benjamin Walter, and the parish records contain a receipt for payment of a Mass for the dead man’s soul, and the rent of the cemetery niche. So in death Benjamin became someone else, a reversal of his name, said Harland.

Death is the sanction for everything that the storyteller can tell, Benjamin has written elsewhere. And I reflected, in this hour granted to me by an arbitrary act of temporal authority, on Benjamin’s saying that Marcel Proust was most aware of his approaching death when he was writing, as the syntax of his prose enacted, step by step, parenthesis by parenthesis, his fear of suffocating through asthma: a counterpoint of ageing and remembering, not what he experienced, but what he recollected. A fugue in other words, left necessarily incomplete by the author’s death; Proust, when alive, and dying, was constantly revising in the light of what he had written since, and there could be no end to the enterprise. And when Benjamin suggests that Proust’s celebrated involuntary memory is much closer to forgetting than to remembering, I think of how little remains to me of my times with Harland, from sober encounters to drunken, ecstatic nights when we lived life to the full, whose details were almost entirely forgotten by us the next day, and faded into nothingness thereafter. When Proust in a well-known passage described the hour that was most his own, he did it in such a way that everyone can find in it his own existence. We might almost call it an everyday hour, a lost twittering of birds, a breath drawn at the sill of an open window. And I remember sunlight falling through stained glass windows at a certain hour of an afternoon, what year it is I do not know, and sunlit bubbles rising through a glass of beer as Harland raises the glass to me and to himself. What did I, Kilfeather, really know of Harland? I did not even know where he came from. When I would hazard a question as to his previous existence, the answers were always ambiguous or vague. We lived in a present of which I remember only some fragments. I see him painting me, or painting himself, and can no longer remember which was which.

It is late at night, and it is dark, but a shaft of moonlight falls through the dormer window of the studio, illuminating Harland’s pale face as he draws on the Black Rose, then hands it to me. We listen to the Albert Clock toll the hour. Twelve strokes. Ask not for whom the bells tolls, I said. Not quite, said Harland, never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. John Donne, ‘Meditation XVII’. He got up from the chair, lifted a book from a shelf, and riffled through the pages. Ah yes. And just before that, we have this passage: All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another. One John to all the others, said John Harland.