Tim Parks - Europa

But I’m too agitated to hear this out. I butt in.

Vikram, about that meeting they want this evening …

When he turns to look at me, there’s surprise on his face, as there was surprise on his face when I suggested I might be the spy, and likewise that day I grabbed his clipboard and said, yes, of course I would come on his trip, of course I would lend my support.

You do realize it’s all been set up to dump you?

The driver is saying something and Vikram with his fingers in his sideburns laughs and says eleven’s okay but later would be better, and no, he won’t be leaving the dog in the coach. He takes the dog with him. Everywhere.

Dimitra’s in on it, I insist, and Colin and Georg and — and I said her name. But her surname. She’s in on it. They let you set up the trip because you’re the only one who believed in it, but now they’re going to vote that you’re not fit to represent us when we actually get there. Because you’re too unstable. And I said: I just want you to know that I’m on your side. I’ll vote for you.

Vikram fiddles in the pocket of his shabby tweed jacket. His dark eyes are bloodshot. You should have a swig of this, boyo, he says, producing the whisky flask. Because you look terrible.

I lifted the bottle to my mouth. I took an extremely long slug, and exactly as I did so a truck went past and the address of the company written on the container this truck was carrying was Stuttgart, Widenmayerstrasse, 45.

I am lying on a narrow bed in an anonymous hotel room in the suburbs of Strasbourg, whether north south east or west I have no idea, nor interest, all I can see is that headlights pass at regular intervals stretching and flitting over wall and ceiling, their yellow glow softened by the synthetic mesh of the curtains, but with swift shards, as though of unpleasantly illuminating thoughts, where the material doesn’t pull to at the top. Attended by a slight rise and fall in the background swell of traffic noise, the intermittent brightness passes, a split second before the auditory peak, over a reproduction of something from Picasso’s blue period, a reproduction so flat in its printed melancholy, and so poorly framed in what must be extruded poly-something-or-other, it immediately makes you aware of all the other reproductions of famous paintings bought in bulk no doubt for all the other fifty or so rooms of this prefabricated, out-of-town hotel so suitable for accommodating large and unprosperous groups of coach travellers — pensioners, strikers, pilgrims — until the very subject, it occurs to me, of this reproduction hung between TV and bathroom in this room that could be any of fifty rooms in this hotel that could be any of a thousand hotels' has become, exquisitely and irretrievably, reproduction itself. This printed copy, I reflect, lying quietly in my bed, of a picture that by universal consent marks one of the supreme achievements of twentieth-century visual art is really none other than the epitome of reproduction, of reflected repeated printed-to-death sublimity, of modern myth turned motel chronicle, mass-produced and bought in bulk, as the meaning, I am now aware, of the lights that regularly slide over its textureless surface, and of the constantly rising and falling drone of traffic noise outside, must be monotony pure and simple, people following each other along the same tracks at the same speed at the same distance in the same vehicles through the night, through the day. And I realize, suddenly I know, that the couple embracing in this blue, but intermittently green landscape — beachscape — are not that intense blue couple the fabled Pablo Picasso painted, or sought to paint, or imagined he was painting, but another. They’re another. They look exactly the same, I tell myself, but they’re a different couple, both of whom are seeking to recapture, this must be the explanation, with no more than a stranger perhaps, or with a familiar person become a stranger, something they once felt elsewhere and with someone else, or with the same person before they became someone else. And watching them embrace there as the headlights pass again and again, each headlight different but each with the same effect, like the passing seconds, the passing hours, watching them locked in that embrace, the sea entirely flat behind them, you can see these two are at the thousandth attempt now, I mean at recapturing whatever it was, they’re years, if not decades on, so that it’s not really a conscious seeking they’re engaged in any more, they’re not expecting to recapture anything, but more a sort of mysterious imposition, this clasping, this rehearsal of intimacy, this placing of cheek against cheek, a blue and green ceremony they have forgotten the origins of, like the ceremonies Plutarch mentioned in Quaestiones Graecae and suggested were the most faithfully observed of all, the ones nobody could understand or explain to him any more.

The traffic is steady. The lights stretch and flit. It is past one 0’clock in this cheap Strasbourg hotel and for the last ten minutes, lying in just boxer shorts on this narrow bed staring at a poor reproduction of a sentimental painting by a lecherous Spaniard, I have been quietly laughing my head off.

I am laughing my head off because I am to be the Foreign Language Lectors’ Official Spokesman at the European Parliament tomorrow, and I am to address an assembly of the European Petitions Committee in English and another of Italian Euro MPs in Italian.

How it came about that these tasks were entrusted to me, how it came about that I, so incongruously, accepted this trust, and above all how it came about that I agreed to do so under her technical guidance and supervision, to the extent that I have already talked to her for several minutes about the exact composition and competence of the Petitions Committee and the political orientation of the dozen or so Italian Euro MPs who RSVPed our invitation to attend a meeting intended to voice our grievances to an audience who might see some small advantage in currying our favour — since EC nationals can now vote for Euro MPs in their adoptive countries — these are things that I am not sure I can fully explain, though they may have to do with the whisky I shared with Vikram Griffiths at the front of the coach as we drove across Switzerland, the exhilaration of finding a hand on my knee as the matter was discussed over dinner, my quotation, cruel but apropos, of Benjamin Constant, when Barnaby Hilson offered his own candidature as representative in a falsely self-deprecating attempt to resolve the deadlock between Dimitra and Vikram, and, last but by no means, as they say, least, my belated awareness, heightened perhaps by a disastrous phone conversation with my daughter, that I am once again on the edge of a tremendous psychological abyss , that the next two days, and in particular, the fourth of the fifth (though I have been unable to find the number 45 anywhere in my room), could prove fatal if I do not somehow break out of the suffocating isolation which brought me within an inch of striking the woman I love, I hate, in a crowded coach beneath the bearded smile and dubbed pieties of an American actor I have always loathed, thinking back on an incident of two years before that involved the sexual preferences of a man who appreciated that the only way to unite Europe was to run backwards and forwards across it with an army.

You should have a slug of this, boyo, Vikram Griffiths said, turning from trying to bribe the driver to take us into town in the evening of his own initiative without referring the time and expense to the coach company. You look terrible, he said, What’s up? So, lying with the instinctive fluency that years of betrayal engender (and if one is lying one owes it to the world to do it well), I said the combination of the coach’s movement and trying to watch Robin Williams seize the day had given me the most atrocious headache, and I told Vikram Griffiths, this feckless fragment of Empire (as he himself once described himself), this genius of broken marriages, bizarre manners and interminable good causes, this man who came to my house just once, his dog only a puppy then, and frightened my wife with his life story — told him that I had come to the front of the coach to speak to him because I had heard, in the Chambersee Service Station, Dimitra and Georg and her agreeing that he, Vikram, would have to be replaced, because incapable of putting a presentable face , I said (partly inventing, partly quoting), to our claims; he would make us look ridiculous, I said they had said, with his unkempt baldness, his bushy sideburns and wild gestures. Nobody sensible had sideburns like that, they said. Nobody drank like that! And of course I would have passed these observations on to him a half an hour earlier, I explained, I lied, when he spoke to me at my seat, except that the appalling Doris Rohr had been beside me then, Doris Rohr who inevitably, in her constant dread that we would overstep the mark, was doubtless on their (Dimitra’s) side and would have passed on my remarks (to him) to them. But the long and the short of the matter was, I insisted (partly inventing, partly not), that they were frantic; they were frantic, I said (frantic myself), and in particular they were frantic because he had started drinking in the Chambersee Service Station at only ten-thirty in the morning and getting the students to drink too, and nobody knew, I said they’d said, what state he would be in tomorrow, and people were rumouring that it had to do with the custody battle over his child, his son, which he had engaged in, they said, because of his ex-wife’s, first ex-wife’s worsening depressive state, but was nevertheless losing, partly because of his difficult separation from his second wife, which the court could hardly ignore, and so they felt it important, I finished, in a state of total self-loathing, staring past Vikram’s mottled baldness at the great sweep of windscreen collecting filth and spray from a French truck ahead, important to replace him with someone more apparently reasonable, someone who would guarantee respectability for our cause .