Tim Parks - Europa

Halfway back around the left hemisphere, though on the second floor now, Sneaky-tottie again took my arm and this time began to marvel at my not being at all nervous. Are you going to quote them somebody? she asked seriously. Despite her youth, the strong chin gives an impression of strength. I just can’t believe Vikram letting us down like this, I told her. The bromazepam was fading. He’s the only one has all the facts in the end. He would have been useful.

It then appeared that on the podium there would be the Avvocato Malerba, Dimitra, the Honourable, perhaps Right Honourable, Owen Rhys, and then beside him myself with her on my other side. She was to prompt me if I ran into trouble. The bromazepam was more or less gone. In the audience there would be the Petitions Committee and the other lectors and the students.

We filed into an auditorium, a rather large auditorium with rising banks of blue upholstered seats, semicircular in three segments, shelving down to where the polished wood floor emerged like a last stretch of bright sand before the monstrous battleship of an apparently ebony conference table bristling with microphones. The Petitions Committee was late. We filed in and sat down, fussing with the arrangement of the places, each appropriately provided with notepad and pen, mineral-water bottle and sparkling glass upturned on white napkin. The Petitions Committee had got involved in another meeting. An emergency meeting apparently Looking up as I crossed the polished floor I saw that one upper wall of the amphitheatre was a glass panel with desks behind and head-phoned figures, mostly female, looking down at us. The interpreters, Owen Rhys told me. The nodding of the big head was clearly a default setting. Wonderfully skilled people, he nodded enthusiastically, and I thought: Your speech, which you haven’t planned or prepared at all, is to be translated instantly into seven or eight or nine languages for the benefit of the several and single members of the Petitions Committee, who quite rightly cannot be expected to be as proficient in English as in their native tongues. This was perfectly reasonable. But all at once, waiting for her to return from whatever she had suddenly gone to say to the blonde secretary at the back of the auditorium, I became extremely anxious at the thought of this sophisticated and expensive infrastructure being called upon to disseminate a speech which I knew would be worth absolutely nothing in any language. The world is full of fantastic infrastructures, I thought, quite inappropriately, full of extraordinary machinery — telephones faxes E-mail automatic translation radio TV satellites fibre-optic cables — all dedicated to transmitting propagating broadcasting speeches messages that are worth absolutely nothing. What will Philadelphia have to say to New York? I remembered someone having once said when some technological milestone was passed. The sort of quote you read in an encyclopaedia. Vikram Griffiths himself produced one of the most fatuous speeches, I thought, on a luxury coach equipped with an admirable PA system which made it perfectly possible for me, slightly right of centre on the back seat as we sped towards the heart of Europe, to hear every mispronounced, mistakenly inflected, hypocritical word of it. We are overwhelmed by the sophistication of the machinery that propagates our hypocrisy, I thought. Just as our ancient buildings are neutralized, nullified, by the sophisticated technology we have used to clean and illuminate them. The machinery encourages the hypocrisy, I thought. The drivel. Surely Vikram Griffiths would never have spoken such drivel if not into a microphone. Surely the people who speak on our radios and TVs would never utter the idiocies they do if they were not on the radio or TV, if they faced the funeral crowd Pericles faced when he said the last word that ever need be said about democracy and about those who have died in a just cause. What drivel was I myself about to produce, I wondered, into the microphone before me, to have dubbed and transformed into seven or eight or nine languages for the several and sundry members of the Petitions Committee, who still hadn’t arrived almost thirty minutes after the appointed time? Amazingly, both the Honourable Rhys and the Avvocato Malerba were showing great interest in Dimitra sandwiched between them, her Greek face a picture of bright cosmetic truculence as she explained to the Honourable Owen about the business of the spy. The spy! Then she arrived on the other side of me and whispered in my ear, lt’s to do with Bosnia.

What?

She sat down and I was shocked as always by the numbing effect of her presence, her perfume. Looking away to avoid eye contact, I caught sight of Peppy-tottie among the chattering students. What on earth was I going to say?

Their emergency meeting is to do with Bosnia, she said.

Could Vikram be back? I wondered, determinedly looking away. To save me. Clearly they weren’t shagging if Peppy-tottie was around. My eyes scanned the auditorium. Faking a collapse would be no problem at all, I thought. With her beside me it would be no problem at all to appear to be struck down by some kind of stroke or seizure. On the contrary. Then call on Dr Griffiths. Let him do the speech. No, the notion, I suddenly realized, overwhelmed by the effect of her presence, of your calmly asking her for a little guidance, a little help with the opening words of your address, is perfectly crazy. You’re not even able to talk to her, to sit next to her. So why on earth did you set up this situation where she was to prompt you, to answer your questions? The only question you will ever be able to ask her, I told myself, is Why? Why? And if she asks you, Why what? God knows what damage you may do. Not a trace of the bromazepam left, I thought. Perhaps that was the problem. If she asks you, Why what? God knows what may happen. You should have taken more bromazepam, I thought. Trembling, I turned my glass over and filled it with water.

So it’s fair enough their being late, she was saying. Then she actually leaned across the table and made an announcement into her microphone. The Petitions Committee were late because they were hearing somebody addressing them on Bosnia. Our sufferings could hardly be compared with those of the children of Bosnia, she said into the microphone to the chattering students on the Euro-blue seats of the auditorium. So we were perfectly happy to wait. Looking all around, I was aware that the Honourable Rhys didn’t even lift his head as she made this announcement, so busy was he with Dimitra s spy. Clearly the emergency meeting was not something he had felt duty-bound to attend. And if Vikram Griffiths wasn’t shagging Peppy-tottie, where was he? I wondered. Outside with his dog? The hotel proprietor wouldn’t have the creature. The coach driver likewise. Certainly there was no trace of him here. But now she was saying to me that sometimes she felt ashamed.

What?

All the suffering going on there, she was saying. She had a slim black dress on that turned her cleavage to cream. It’s so outrageous we haven’t done anything to stop it. The perfume was L’Air du Temps, It makes me feel ashamed, she said. Ashamed of my material wealth. My comforts, my easy life. You know. Her ear-rings were the golden scorpions of her birth-sign. Ashamed of being European. You know what I mean? For some reason she was proud of her birth-sign. As she was proud of being French. People are dying, she said, and we’re worried about the conditions of our contract. The golden creatures had ruby eyes. People are dying, she insisted, and we’re sitting here worrying about our terms of employment. Thus the woman, I thought, determinedly looking away, but still picking up a familiar rattle of bracelets as she pushed back her hair, with whom you had the most intense relationship of all your life. People are suffering, she was saying. It makes you wonder how many of us really have a proper perspective on life. And she said this, it occurs to me now, sitting here in the Meditation Room, so-called, perhaps twenty-four hours afterwards, my body assuming that attitude frequently referred to as an attitude of prayer, though this is not a place of worship , head bowed, hands clasped together, though I am not a believer — she said this as if I myself, as official representative of the lectors’ union, had been somehow responsible for stirring the inappropriate rancours of the threatened but always comfortable lectors, as if she were the only person in the world with the sensibility to appreciate that our suffering, or perhaps she meant my own suffering, was as nothing to that of the unfortunate children of Bosnia .