4 ideas
The suitcase holds Weidel's letters, papers and an unfinished manuscript. In Marseille the consulates take the narrator for Weidel and grant him Weidel's visa. There he falls in love with Marie, Weidel's wife, who is searching for her husband without knowing he is dead. He never tells her. In the end he gives up his passage and stays in France, and the ship she sails on is reported sunk by mines.
To leave, a refugee needs a destination visa, transit visas for every country on the route, a French exit permit and a paid ship berth. Each document is issued only on proof of the others, and each expires on its own schedule. By the time the last is obtained, the first has often lapsed, so bureaucratic prerequisites form a loop rather than a sequence.
In a regime of permits, officials recognize whoever holds the documents, so identity becomes a property of paperwork rather than of the living individual. A dead man can go on existing administratively while a living man without papers effectively does not exist. That gap lets a person slip into another's life, but it also empties out his own.
Everyone around the narrator treats departure as the only meaningful goal, which reduces the present to a waiting room. When he gives up his passage and chooses to work on a farm in France, he shows that the obsession with exit can itself be a trap. Rootedness in shared labor and in the people at hand is presented as an alternative to endless provisional existence.