Christopher Priest - The Separation

At ten in the evening Dr Burckhardt sent word to our team that we should stand down for the night. The main conference was being adjourned for twelve hours. As we raised our heads, we realized that we had been working without a break more or less since the end of Hess’s speech. I was not only exhausted, I was famished too. I knew everyone else must be the same, so we broke off from our tasks with relief, leaving unfinished whatever we were doing. It was not long before we were being driven back to the hotel in Stockholm, where a late supper was waiting for us.

In the morning, refreshed a little, we returned to Count Bernadotte’s country house.

The page on which I had been working the evening before was still in the roller of the typewriter. I sat down, loosened my tie and took off my jacket. Someone opened the window shutters to let in the morning sunlight. I read through the last few lines of the translation, thinking myself back into what I needed to do. I had been working on a position paper drawn up by the British negotiators, who were concerned with the German idea of parity. It was seen by both sides as central to the peace accord. Hess, the day before, had used the German word Gleichheit, which in English translated as ‘parity’ with the meaning of ‘equality of interest’. To the British team, equality of interest was neither quite what they wanted it to mean nor what they thought (or hoped) Hess had meant to convey. They preferred to substitute ‘equality of rights’ {Parität), or ‘equality of status’ (gleiche Stellung), phrases loaded with significance when it was remembered that Churchill insisted on signing the armistice himself. It was obvious he would have nothing to do with a deal which implied that the British were losing the war and had sued for peace, which might be the interpretation if the only equality that was admitted with Germany was one of vested interests. I had been trying to decide what to do about the problem - was it a question of interests, rights or status? - when we closed down for the night.

I stared at the sentence, trying to concentrate.

I was still sleepy, a condition that ever since my episodes of lucid imaginings made me apprehensive. I was somewhat reassured by my hurried consultation with the psychologist, Mr Clark, who seemed to think the problem was at an end, but to me nothing was certain. Most of those episodes had occurred when I was sleeping or sleepy. I was concerned that I had hardly slept during the night and that I had started the morning feeling unrested.

I found myself thinking about the different meanings of ‘parity’, in English as well as in German.

It was a concept I grew up with: parity in all things is a concern of identical twins, often in a contradictory way. We wanted to be equal in the eyes of our parents but to be favoured by them, to become individuals with independent lives while remaining twins, to develop separately while retaining a special bond.

Perhaps this was what Hess was trying to suggest: introductory material to the draft agreement spoke sentimentally of a tradition of brotherhood between Britain and Germany, twin countries, forever joined, forever separate, benevolent neutrals. The Germans described what they saw as common cultural purpose, innate likeness between the two peoples, a shared sense of civilized responsibility. Fine words, so long as you did not consider the war. That was what they sought: to remove the war, to strengthen the natural bond.

Was it a coincidental clue about me and my brother Jack?

Through over-concentration I was becoming blind to the subtleties of meaning that existed between the various translations, so I called over one of the constitutional lawyers and asked his advice. One of the Quaker advisers who was from Germany sat with us while we discussed it. Semantic nuances were a concern of us all. Our work with the documents took place in a situation where diplomacy, language and national interests intersected. The lawyer considered for a moment, then said he thought that gleiche Stellung, parity of status, would be the correct way to express the concept. The German Quaker agreed. We consulted an official from the German Embassy in Stockholm, a member of the document group, and he also thought that was right. Gradually we crept to agreement. It went into the next version of the draft, submitted to our principals in the main conference hall.

Not wanting to work everyone to exhaustion again, I used my discretion as leader of the team and called a thirty-minute break in the middle of the morning. Several of us walked downstairs and out into the grounds, admiring the cold peacefulness of the pine forest and the large, calm lake. Birds flew noisily and freely in the neutral air. I remembered many of the other document workers from the days in Cascais; our mood was different here. In Portugal there had been the exhilaration of possibilities - an armistice was an enthralling prospect. Now that peace was in sight we simply wanted to conclude the process and the work was more of a grind. Most of the translators drifted back to their desks long before the end of the break period.

We had resumed work when I was summoned to Dr Burckhardt’s office, a small room next to the main conference chamber.

‘[It has been agreed by the principals that the talks will end by 6 p.m. today,]’ he said brusquely. ‘[There will not be an extension beyond that time. Anything that has not been settled by then will have to remain unsettled. Do you think you and your team can complete all documents?]’

‘[Yes, sir, if we have the texts to work with. There have been no obstacles so far. Everything seems to be working smoothly]’

‘[Good. No one is expecting any real problems at this late stage, but you never know.]’

He said nothing about the reason for the decision, so I assumed it had been adopted as an artificial but agreed deadline, to make sure that the negotiations would not drag on for ever.

We therefore entered the last and hardest period of translating and editing, reacting to the increased amount of discussion that was taking place between the principals. We did not stop for lunch but were provided with a cold buffet from which we took what we needed. There was a burst of extra activity soon afterwards, but then the pressure began to ease. By mid-afternoon I was able to delegate the actual drafting work that I would have done myself and by four o’clock at least half the team had no more work piled up on their desks. Half an hour later, the last document was sent through to the principal negotiators and their advisers.

Everyone in the document team had seen sections of the draft armistice, sometimes many times over. A few of us had been able to see the whole thing. I knew to my own satisfaction that it was as nearly complete as it was possible to be. It was an intriguing, complex document, almost shocking in the way it confronted what a few weeks before would have been unthinkable. For all the complexity of the ideas and principles the armistice addressed, and the difficulties we had sometimes found in writing them down, we finished the work an hour and a half before the deadline.

In the period of calm that followed, an unreal sense of euphoria mixed with apprehension settled on me. The impossible seemed to be about to happen: the war would end. At the same time, the thought of the armistice going wrong at the last minute was terrible, with the USA, the Soviet Union and Japan being drawn into a global conflagration.

All international treaties are as significant for what they don’t say as for what they do. Every page I had worked on was heavy with unstated fears about a wider war.

I was pacing about on the lawn beneath our window, feeling chilled by the easterly wind but needing a few minutes of solitude, when I was approached by a man I recognized as one of Dr Burckhardt’s staff.