Tim Parks - Europa

Really we live pretty well She wears pink lipstick when she dresses in black. I mean in comparison with those kids being slaughtered and starved every day. You know. And she never fails, which is something I love, to have the fingernails match. I love that. While our institutions — I love that feminine attention to detail, to their own sense of themselves as objects of beauty — are doing nothing but cast about for a fig-leaf to drape over the shame of their selfish nonintervention. It’s outrageous. We go into the Gulf when it’s a question of keeping our cars running. But do we bother about the children of Sarajevo? Not at all. It makes me so ashamed.

Thus her speech, and probably there was more of it, in French no doubt, though recalled now, by myself, here in the Meditation Room, after all that has happened, in English, following a process not unlike that which my own speech was about to undergo at the hands of seven or eight or nine interpreters. And I recalled that during the Gulf War we drove out into the hills above Como once and made love in her husbands BMW Series 7.

Maybe you should make some statement to that effect, at the beginning, she said. I mean, to make it clear that we’re aware that our own sufferings are nowhere near on the same level. You know. And then it would set the right tone. Because we mustn’t come across as shrill or …

I had turned to look straight at her. I had turned against my will. I was looking into her eyes. I said how pointless it was to make comparisons.

What?

You can’t compare suffering with suffering, I said. Then I realized I was back in the territory of the phone-call to my daughter. Philosophical niceties. It was dangerous to be looking in her eyes. To cover my tracks, I casually remarked that Vikram Griffiths, for example, was totally obsessed by the fear of losing his job and being unable to meet his commitments, to maintain his child. He was desperately afraid of losing this key card in the custody case with his manic-depressive first wife. His superior ability to support the child. Vikram could think of nothing else, I said. Vikram was a haunted soul. I had seen that clearly enough yesterday evening. All his high spirits were just so much desperation. To tear his mind away.

But surely you can’t…

II faut cultiver notre jardín , I said.

But when I see those children on television, she began, and think how we …

I reached under the table, gripped her leg at mid-thigh and dug the nails in fiercely. Her cry was immediate, but immediately stifled. The others were chattering about the spy. Our eyes met. I said there was no discrete unit of measure as far as suffering was concerned.

You’re sick, she said.

I hate you.

She laughed her French laugh, of old, tossed her hair. Oh come on, I was only talking about Bosnia.

Precisely, I said. Only.

What do you mean, precisely? Only?

Work it out.

You’re shaking, she said.

Then she said I must swallow my pride and go and see someone. She put her hand over mine still on her thigh. And what she meant was an analyst.You’ve got to make this speech any moment now, she said. For Christ’s sake think about that. Think about other people instead of yourself for a change. Our jobs are at stake. Jerry, please. Grow up!

Things should never be compared, I said. It wasn’t me had started talking about Bosnia. One lost all sense of things when one compared them, I said. They had to be savoured one by one. And you could only really savour the things that were yours, not other people’s. You had to savour them for what they were. Who’s looking after Stephanie while you’re away? I asked.

If you cultivated your own garden at all, she said, you’d know that she was going to Suzanne after school and then sleeping with her grandparents. Suzanne’s so wonderful, she added. You’re so lucky to have such a lovely daughter. I can’t understand why you don’t see each other more often.

Thus the woman for whom I left my wife.

I see her more often than you do, she said.

It’s her birthday today, I said. I was totally in love with her again. Jealous beyond all comparison.

I know, she said, I gave her a present. Then I asked her what she had given and discovered she had given my daughter underwear. All girls of that age love nice underwear, she said. They love to fantasize themselves. You know? But all I knew was that she was wearing stockings and suspender belt. Her tottie-gear. I’d felt them. She said: Suzanne’s got such a stunning body. She asked, What did you give her?

I leafed through the three typed pages of the notes she and Georg and Dimitra had put together for the speech I was about to deliver. Then my hand clasped her thigh again. The finger-nails cut right through the silk. They sank into the skin. This time she didn’t cry out. The door swung and the Petitions Committee filed in. She gasped, Jerry! And thinking about this now, sitting here in the Meditation Room, when really I should be thinking of other things, and most particularly when I should be asking myself whether there wasn’t something I might have done to prevent what was perhaps already happening, it occurs to me how completely she had freed herself from me. To the extent that she could allow herself to play with my violence, my ineptitude. Though at least I hadn’t asked her whether there was anything between her and Suzanne. To the extent that later that day she would even be able to suggest we spend one more night together, for old time’s sake. When I withdrew my hand, she held on to a finger for a moment.

The Committee filed in. People in their fifties and sixties, men in suits and spectacles, one with a limp, then a token woman of sober elegance. Talking amongst themselves in fragments of various Indo-European languages, they ambled to their seats on the front row, where one took a light-hearted swipe at a fly. Perhaps with a sheaf of papers from Bosnia. The tall man limping was intent on a plastic cup which steamed. Thus the Petitions Committee. Thus my perception of the Petitions Committee, brimming with unpleasant emotions, deprived of all bromazepam, still casting about for Vikram Griffiths, hoping for a saviour.

The Vice-president, who hadn’t seen fit, or hadn’t been able (because of us?) to attend the emergency meeting on Bosnia, now stood up and introduced us. We were foreign-language lectors from the University of Milan. We were representing both the European lectors at our own university and those at universities all over Italy. It was our contention, the Honourable Owen Rhys said blandly, head nodding with ritual conviction, that, contrary to articles 7 and 48 of the Treaty of Rome, we were being treated differently from Italian citizens. Unfairly, that is. Our case would be presented briefly by Dr Jeremy Marlowe, a British lector who had taught English at the University for over twelve years. After which we would be submitting an official and thoroughly documented petition signed by more than four hundred lectors presently working in various regions of Italy.

It was at this point that it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the petition itself. Not since I signed it. Who has the petition? I whispered to her as I stood up to speak. The look on her face, her French face, her razzled face Vikram Griffiths had said, but handsome, was one of alarm. And she actually said, Oo la la! As when once she imagined she heard her husband’s car arriving while we were making love in his second or third or fourth house up in the mountains. Above Selva di Val Gardena. But it was only the technician come to prepare the swimming-pool for summer. Now things were far more serious. She closed her eyes theatrically, as one receiving appalling news. From Sarajevo perhaps. From Bihac. Vikram has it, she said. Vikram had the petition itself, the papers and signatures. Then, as I pulled and pushed at my microphone, she was walking round behind me to whisper to Dimitra, who swiftly vacated her seat, so that as I began to speak the Greek woman was already striding swiftly, unpleasantly somehow, up the aisle between two banks of seats with chattering students.