Post #130: Of Scars and Suitcases

18 Aug. 2024 (at Cytat Café, Krakow)

     “My mom always told me never to buy a rigid suitcase,” says my best friend and consigliere. In this as in so much else, there is undeniable wisdom in a mother’s common sense. I, meanwhile, have not only favored the ultra-rigid aluminum classics by Rimowa for more than thirty years, I have seen the bitter truth in these maternal counsels borne out every time I’ve picked my mauled equipment off the conveyor belt after a flight. Do these airlines have specialists for inflicting wounds on our cherished luggage, in economy class at least? (Presumably they know better than to play their dirty tricks with the Louis Vuitton crowd.)

     They seem no more concerned, these aviation ruffians, with repairing the damage than with avoiding it. No great surprises there, I suppose. Austrian and Lufthansa—the latter, at least, not exactly a bit-player in the skies, for better or for worse, usually the latter—have contracted out the business of making amends or repairs to an outfit so shady that they do not deign to answer desperate pleas for help, while maintaining their website so poorly (with every intention of dissuading requests, I suspect) that one’s reports of an incident won’t even get through after one has jumped through all of their absurd hoops for twenty minutes. Shame on you, Lufthansa, and not for the first time.

     But one should make a point of taking responsibility for one’s own contributions to such mishaps. Not only have I been relentless in my passion for the Rimowas, knowing full-well what it means in terms of inviting beatings from the airlines’ baggage manhandlers, I also compounded the invitation to disaster in this case with an added rigidity. (Needless to say, not being of the Vuitton class, I would not and could not pay the absurd prices that Fräulein Rimowa charges at her official outlets. I nearly black out, and see red simultaneously, every time I look at a price tag, just for “fun,” at one of their ridiculous little “boutique” stores. Yikes. But as a Bangkok resident, I have certain remedies against such outrages: for all I know my beloved suitcase had all the requisite labels certifying undeniable authenticity, “made in Germany,” removable tags and all. I would be shocked, shocked to find that anything untoward is going on here! Bangkok is a haven for great deals: that’s all I know…)

     The compounding rigidity on my part had little to do with the suitcase and its provenance, but rather with a classic case of self-defeating reasoning, resulting in the very injury that it was meant to preclude. When I could only get my suitcase to close with the greatest effort in Budapest, I reasoned that it might be safer to scramble the combination on the locks this time, lest a hit from the wrong angle open the clasps and spill my precious belongings irrecoverably. (I also used a luggage belt, just to be sure.) Maginot Line thinking, alas. Had I left the locks alone, the suitcase might have opened as feared, but the belt would have prevented the worst; but with the locks unable to open, the deadly blow ended up blasting the tops right off the plastic clasps instead (can’t say that I ever trusted the damn things). In other words, instead of an open suitcase, though held together precariously by a strap, I now had one that was no longer closable at all, hence good only for disposal. All of which was revealed to me at a glance upon arrival at Krakow airport, at midnight, after getting up at 4 am that morning and a full day’s layover in Vienna, as happy as it was busy. (Dear Sir, but what of my beauty sleep? And my sanity sleep, even more vitally?)

     Not arriving at my hotel until well past 1 am (there were papers to be filed and more emergency belts to be applied), I was fit only for bed, yet set about, in my innocence, composing the desperate plea for help, via e-mail, that I alluded to above—the one that still remains unanswered on my third day here. When no one responded, I tried backing up my message with a report on their website (as per their instructions), only to be told at the end of a rather exasperating process that unfortunately my case could not be processed online for technical reasons, and to send them an e-mail instead. It was at this point that I realized just how seriously our supposedly respectable flag-carriers take such cases. I could gave guessed; but I reckon that one should always begin one’s games of tit-for-tat by initially cooperating and showing good faith; defect only upon provocation or non-reciprocation.

     Since only two more days in Krakow remained before I was scheduled to fly on to Berlin, where my parents still live, I realized how slim my chances were of resurrecting the suitcase from its comatose condition—those two days also being a Saturday and a Sunday in August. I put the odds of survival at less than ten percent to my consigliere, but figured that while I needed to prepare myself for saying my good-byes, so long as the patient was still alive, everything should be tried to save him. I had some sense, from the craftiness of East Berlin kendo-fighters before the fall of the Wall gave them access to Japanese equipment, that the history of shortages on the shelves had bred, in these former Eastern parts, a kind of practical ingenuity that is not at home where things are more easily thrown out and cheaply replaced. I also realized that these colorful characters were probably a dying breed, even in Poland, but that a few of them must still be around.

     The difficulty was how to discover them in the haystack—on the weekend, and only my second day ever in the city. A very good friend of mine, originally from Krakow, now a Torontonian, found me two potential candidates when I described my predicament—but one turned out to be on vacation, the other did not even answer the phone. The concierge at my hotel, the last resort I could think of, was a sweetheart, but no more the mechanical type than I. “Hopeless case, it looks to me,” he declared when I showed him the patient. I admitted that I thought more or less the same, but that I had some faith left in the miracle cures of certain hands-on magicians who saw such things with different eyes than ours—wonder-workers in finding practical solutions that the more theoretically-inclined would never think of. “Hmmm,” went the concierge, “that reminds me of our maintenance workers: they are clever guys.” Yes, that’s right, I thought, that’s it!

     But again, it was Saturday morning, and the guys’ well-earned weekend off. One of them was at home with his wife and five kids, somewhere in the surrounding countryside. I felt bad about disturbing him, but desperate times calling for desperate measures, the concierge tried him anyway; nothing doing, of course. (I did put on offer a considerable sweetener; not to buy anyone off his family, but because I don’t wish to prejudge such situations. His call; and he made it unmistakably. Good for him, though less so for me.) The other fellow, my last hope (or shall I say ours, since the concierge was by now warming to the fight), was no more interested—at least not until he would return to work at 7 am on Monday morning. (My flight to Berlin being scheduled for 2 pm, this might have left just enough time for either a repair or a quick funeral and run to the mall for a replacement—plus the complications of packing a suitcase with not an inch or an ounce to spare.) Having done what I could, I was ready to let things take their course. I headed to the nearby mall, to make sure I had an emergency suitcase at hand if the need should arise on Monday morning, then let it all go for the time being.

     I usually keep the ringer on my phone turned off, so I was quite surprised to hear it go off perhaps two hours later. A local number. The concierge. One of the Monday-morning wizards had called back, he reported, to say that he happened to be in town and that he was willing to take a quick look. As I said, I prefer not to prejudge domestic arrangements. Probably it was the sweetener that did it, perhaps also the challenge, a little; perhaps the magic of home and hearth was not much in evidence that day. Whatever the reason, he was ready to give the job a go, so I rushed back to the hotel with renewed hope.

     As I had anticipated, what looked so bleak to me (and to the concierge too) bore rather a different aspect for the wizard: to him it was a puzzle with pieces that only he could see, and more a matter of whether he had the right parts at hand than of any kind of impossibility in principle. As luck would have it, he found just the thing, three tough little metal bits that he bolted ingeniously to the plastic. It was all very Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance—a great favorite since my late teens—and the crisis issued in the perfect denouement. To cover the broken plastic completely would have taken four pieces, two on each of the busted lock-tops; but he only had three available. In other words, while the left side was repaired near-perfectly, the right side was just a little short—probably good enough to hold, but with enough of a potential Achilles heel to remind me of the sacred precariousness of all our worldly concerns.

     My suitcase now had scars, one might say, but the “stitches,” though unmistakably improvised, went so beautifully with the rest of the thing that its overall character was rather enhanced than diminished—a bit like the shim that the narrator in Pirsig’s book proposes to cut from an aluminum beer-can to fix his groovy buddy’s slipping handlebars. The hipster cannot see the beauty of the remedy at all: instead he is appalled at the very idea that his precious BMW should be treated in so cavalier a fashion and prefers to keep his handles slipping. But to the man himself, what makes the solution so elegant is precisely that it did not come out of a box and that beer-can aluminum is in fact the perfect material for the job, if you know your stuff.

     Not that cuts and wounds such as might leave scars should be invited gratuitously in life; injuries are no joke, whether to man himself or to the instruments of his survival and enjoyment. What cuts us may make us stronger, sometimes, but this may come in the form of ungainly scar tissue; and what is more, what can cut can also kill, by going a little too deep in the wrong place, or by getting infected, or by any of a thousand remote but real nightmare scenarios. We should protect ourselves as best we can, handle knives with care, and see accidents coming before they occur, if possible; but do what we may, it is also inevitable that sometimes things will go wrong for us, that nature red in tooth and claw will scratch or tear into us, sometimes pulling us to pieces outright, more often giving us a taste of her powers and letting us go, bloodied, for now.

     A suitcase is nothing, or rather, no more than a reminder of these deeper truths about the precarious existence we must lead as human beings—so formidable when it comes to our powers of self-protection that Freud rightly called us “prosthetic gods,” yet so very exposed to hazards on every side that any moment could be our last, quite literally. Near-gods though we may be, we must walk through this valley of the shadow of death, all our days, on a frightfully narrow ledge over the abyss. We should not, perhaps, look down too frequently or deeply, lest we get scared and lose our balance; but neither should we forget this most defining feature of our existence.

     It is not so bad, then, to have a few scars; so long as they don’t get too disfiguring, they bear witness to our powers of survival. The shadows will catch up with us at last; but in the meantime, let us carry our banged-up suitcases with hope, faith, and love. Tomorrow it may all be over, who knows, or later today. But not now, not yet! Let us be grateful for that. Mazel tov!

P.S.: A darker possibility that I am reluctant to dwell on was suggested to me at  the airport, when I made my damage report: the suitcase may have been broken open deliberately by Polish Customs, TSA-compatible locks be damned. I shudder at the possibility, between two reasonably civilized EU-countries with no policed border between them. Anything is possible these days, I suppose. Signs of the times notwithstanding, let me put my Old Liberal conviction on record: only thuggish regimes break into a gentleman’s suitcase with no provocation or specific grounds of suspicion, especially in an age of luggage scanners. If the authorities in question don’t have TSA keys, they need to get their act together, not violate the most basic decencies of civilized policing and amity between friendly nations. Apparently this needs insisting upon in our age: the right to be secure in our persons, homes, papers, and effects—including our private communications and our luggage—is not an optional extra, for any trigger-happy brigand in officialdom to violate at will, but a standard of civilization. It would not have occurred to me that the Polish Republic could flunk such a basic test in 2024. I continue to hope that I am right in my faith and that what happened was an accident, not a deliberate outrage.