Europa

by Tim Parks

  The students milled on the grey esplanade taking photographs of each other and of the flags twitched by a damp breeze. It had stopped raining but clouds were constantly forming and breaking in a liquid sky and the light was shattered everywhere by steaming puddles and gleams and sudden sunshine stabbing in the shadows of concrete and glass. The Parliament is isolated from the rest of the town, as well it might be, set apart on an artificial mound in its own abstract space, and the flags, I noticed, through a haze of bromazepam, as the students photographed each other, joking and laughing and standing on one leg, embracing and pulling faces, were studiously arranged in the random abstraction of alphabetical order, this to avoid, one presumes, any offence of hierarchy. And staring at their bright colours -the Belgian flag, the Danish flag, the German flag (Deutschland), the Irish flag (Eire), the Greek flag (Ellas), the Spanish flag (España), the French flag, the Dutch flag (Holland), the Italian flag, the Luxembourg (ish?) flag, the Portuguese flag, the Union Jack (UK) - it occurred to me how notoriously difficult it is to arrange objects in space without generating meaning. Without causing offence. Since all meaning, so-called, causes offence to somebody, I reflected. As my wife always objected to my objecting to her keeping all the wedding photos so prominently displayed along the piano-top. As I threw a tantrum when I saw she had inserted The Age of the Courtesan alongside all the books we had read together: Chateaubriand and Sophocles and the Satyricon of Petronius. The arrangement of the flags outside this Parliament building must be entirely meaningless, I told myself. Otherwise it would give offence. Or rather, any meaning here expressed must lie in the absence of meaning, in the absence of any hierarchy in the relation of these flags the one to the other. Here arrangement must point away from arrangement, I thought through a fog of bromazepam, must point to that ideal of perfect indistinction and equality which can only come, perhaps, in the absence of any real relationship, only exist for people, countries, thousands of miles apart. Or with death, I told myself. The indistinction of death. The cemetery is the only level playing-field, I told myself. Where Chateaubriand and Robespierre and Eulogius Schneider are equal at last. And I recall now, sitting as I am at present in this not unattractive space which forms the Meditation Room, so-called, of the European Parliament, that it was looking at the flags, or rather the arrangement of the flags, with the Avvocato Malerba getting himself photographed, by Plottie, in double-breasted suit and European tie, then returning the compliment (close enough to get all the signatures on her plaster-cast braced against a flagpole), and with a general atmosphere amongst students and lectors alike of self-congratulation, and also of awe, as of pilgrims newly arrived at a shrine, it was milling about the esplanade in the damp breeze as we waited for entry passes to be made up so that we could penetrate this shrine, this sanctum, as supplicants, and present our petition to those appointed to set right whatever wrongs had been done to us, that I observed that there was no Welsh flag, for of course Wiles does not constitute a nation-state, and I set off to find Vikram Griffiths and to mention this fact to him, in jest. That there was no Welsh flag. That he wasn’t properly represented, didn’t even turn up, as the Scottish and Irish did, as decorative elements, trophies really, within the British flag, the Union Jack, which anyway Europeans notoriously refer to as English. How could he sing, Freedom in the flag is flying, when there wasn’t one? Not to mention the absence of Empire. I looked for Vikram, thinking this was the kind of provocative if banal reflection that might elicit some wit and sparks from a man who claimed to have been the first, perhaps the only, non-white to have been a card-carrying member of Plaid Cymru. Might cheer him up. In the way that old enmities can be heartening, galvanizing, as I myself in my bromazepam haze had felt galvanized earlier this morning seeing the numbers 4/5 on the cheap flap-down calendar in the hotel reception, galvanized (so far as the bromazepam would allow) and somewhat ridiculous for having ever given any importance to something that could hardly be more significant than the arrangement of the flags outside the European Parliament, or indeed any mere arrangement of numbers and letters. But I couldn’t find Vikram Griffiths.

  The passes appeared. We were shuffled into a long queue in an antechamber with the group in front of us on wheelchairs, paraplegic, and before them a crocodile of schoolchildren come to observe the workings of the Parliament, which today would be debating, a slip of paper said, the standardization of religious education across the Community, and above all the vexed question of treatment of minority religious groupings, especially where these coincided with marked ethnic distinctions. Unless an emergency debate were to be tabled on the total collapse of the Italian Lira (not to mention the Greek Drachma) following the decision of the German Bundesbank, apparently a sovereign institution and thus outside the jurisdiction of the Community and even the German government, so they say, not to lower its interest rates. Or equally an emergency debate might be tabled on the conflict over Community Policy towards Yugoslavia, ex-Yugoslavia, in conflict, in chaos. In particular, huge numbers of children were being killed there. Our queue shuffled behind jerking wheelchairs where disabled people of different, perhaps differing, nationalities kept each other company in pidgin English and in front of them four French teachers tried, but not very hard, to stop twenty ten-year-olds from shrieking. Where was Vikram? I wondered. And what was I going to say in my speech, which according to my watch was only twenty minutes away now? I had prepared nothing.’! had thought of nothing. Then in the crush between security doors where only four people could go at once (closing one door before another could be opened), Sneaky-tottie took my arm, as she had done the day before while climbing the stairs of the Chambersee Service Station, or when offering me the refuge of her umbrella under blowing rain, took it, that is, with remarkable confidence and intimacy, as if we had been great friends for years, and remarked with a flush on her face (as though after sex almost), that it really was exhilarating to feel oneself at the heart of Europe and to see that Europe wasn’t just an idea but a concrete entity. My first reaction to this, between the two security doors, and apart from some quip to reverse the positive connotations of ‘concrete’, might normally have been to reflect that the existence of this parliamentary building on French soil, doubling up as it does for a similar’ parliamentary building on Belgian soil (so that once every month twelve articulated lorries, meeting Community Requirements of course, have to set out from Brussels to Strasbourg bringing with them heaps of documents and archives which then have to be trucked back only a week later when the Parliament returns from Strasbourg to Brussels, while at the same time five-hundred-plus rooms, of a certain standard and quality, have to be kept available in both cities for five-hundred-plus MEPs, so-called, not to mention their secretaries and interpreters, and of course two staffs of menials have to be kept in permanent and generous public employ to service these structures, so reminiscent, though on an infinitely larger scale, of the Chambersee Service Station, this in order to enhance the prestige of one founder member, France, a favour granted once upon a time in return for the concession to another founder member, Germany, of a greater number of Parliamentary seats than might otherwise have been allotted) - the existence, I might normally have said, in response to the innocent and ingenuous Sneaky-tottie, of this parliamentary building hardly inspired enthusiasm in the European ideal. Yet I did not react like this, but merely squeezed the young girl’s arm benignly and sexlessly. Her cheeks were so full of colour and excitement. Just as I did not react as I might have reacted when finding, a few moments later in a glossily marbled area where we had been told to assemble around the secretary of a Welsh MEP beneath an announcement in more languages than one would care to count, that she was explaining to Doris Rohr and Heike the Dike and Luis and a small group of students that in the formation of a constitution for a United Europe, such as the one she was drawing up in the hope of a year’s scholarship in Brussels (and it crossed my mind that she was saying this because of the presence of the Welsh MEP’s rather attractive blonde sec
retary, who might prove a useful contact), the key issue was the establishment of those mechanisms which would regulate a genuinely pooled sovereignty. The expression pooled sovereignty immediately reminded me of that other execrable but intimately related expression she had once favoured, negotiable identity, and then of the time when, on noticing a considerable puddle on the bed of a fourth-floor room in Pensione Porta Genova after an afternoon’s epic exertions, I remarked, laughing and embracing her, that that was the only sort of pooled sovereignty that meant anything to me. I was reminded of these things, as I say, on entering the foyer of the European Parliament, and I was irritated, as always, by the shallowness of it all, by her criminal forgetfulness of those moments that had been intense, by the fact that the world had not chosen to stand still at what had appeared to me to be its only moment of true harmony, of equilibrio interiore. I was scandalized, I suppose, like Plato, like my wife, by how much and how callously the world could change. Waterwords, I suddenly thought, in a haze of bromazepam, in the impressive foyer of the European Parliament, remembering a poem from somewhere. Kallimachos, perhaps. Meleager. I couldn’t remember. “Oaths such as these, waterwords! Thus some ancient poet, jilted; thus my extraordinary memory, despite the bromazepam. So that it occurred to me, for example, that I might well remark that on the matter of pooled sovereignty the last word had been spoken some two thousand five hundred years ago by Thucydides in his description of the Athenian alliance. Again that memory, as if all drawn to the surface, pus-like, by a single sore, everything I have ever known brought to focus by a single rancour. Yes, The weaker states - I might quote Thucydides on the subject of pooled sovereignty - because of the general desire to make profits, were content to tolerate being governed by the stronger, while those who won superior power by acquiring capital resources brought the smaller cities under their control I might have quoted that, and not inappropriately it seemed to me on a morning when the currency markets are still in turmoil, as the radio would have it, over the sovereign decisions of the German Bundesbank, a morning when for some dealers the Italian Lira has to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. But I did not. And the reason, I’m aware now, sitting here in the Meditation Room, so-called, hunched forward in what to a casual observer might be supposed to be an attitude of prayer (and what is prayer if not an attitude?), the reason that I did not quote Thucydides, or Meleager, or anybody else, in the foyer of the European Parliament, nor object in any way to her reflections on how a new constitution must contribute towards the construction of. a European identity, was perhaps partly because I did not believe she would recognize such a quotation, recognize I mean that it had passed between us before, in the days when she always agreed with me, when I always agreed with her, and perhaps partly because, in the daze, the haze, not entirely unpleasant, of last night’s bromazepam, still happily smothering any responsible anxiety I might otherwise feel relative to my total impreparation for the two speeches I was supposed to give, one in only twenty minutes’ time, I now found that I couldn’t care less. I could not care less what she or Sneaky-tottie or anybody else said about Europe. Whether true or false. And for a moment it even occurred to me that I might join in. Why not? That I might myself remark on the need to use a constitution to reinforce those characteristics we Europeans, north south east west, do doubtless have in common, to wit our belief in reason, our belief in progress, our belief in technique as the tool of reason for the promotion of progress, not to mention our post-Christian obsession with charity, with self-sacrificial love (showing solidarity to a man the mother of whose child was in hospital with an incurable disease), our respect for animals, ancient poets and dying languages, our undoubted vocation to solve the problems of the entire world, the planet, the cosmos (substituting ourselves for the loving God we have lost), our unslakeable thirst for the imagined gratitude of those nations (and animals) we shall save - all these creditable characteristics might usefully be reinforced, I could have said, perhaps interrupting Doris Rohr, who was now airing that stale piety about Germans feeling safer from themselves in a United Europe, by a constitution of immense sophistication that took into account at every point the need to make decisions collectively, across nations, across religions, across classes, across economic categories, industries, regions, and then across those even deeper divides that separate the old and the young, the sick and the well, that make the old incomprehensible to the young and vice versa, the sick incomprehensible to the well and vice versa, right down to that deepest divide of all that keeps men and their women, women and their men, in a state of total and mutual and irretrievable incomprehension. Collective decision-making was the key, I might have said announced proclaimed in the foyer of the European Parliament, and I was suddenly amused to think that should I choose to, I myself, Jeremiah Jerry, as people have frequently called me, could make the bold proposal to use a new European constitution to engage every element of society across the entire continent, wherever its borders might eventually be established, in the decision-making process and thus simultaneously and necessarily to render, which is surely the European ideal par excellence, every aspect of life political, and hence, with patient planning and negotiation, soluble, from cross-border immigration to the size of a condom and the quality of a mushroom and the strength of a perfume. As problems in a relationship could also always be solved, dissolved, she said, if only two people were sincere and thus had all the facts before them to manipulate. But I insisted, on that particular evening, that there had been no problem before she had decided to be sincere. Before she so gratuitously told me of her infidelity. The problem was her sincerity — why on earth had she told me? (why had I told my wife?) - her gratuitous sincerity relative to the generosity, so-called, of her friendship towards a man who sent her flowers and phoned insistently, the mother of whose child was dying, slowly, of muscular dystrophy. Her sincerity was mere bragging, I told her that evening. And again this was a time when I hit her, no, when she asked me to hit her. Bragging about her sexual escapades, bragging about her sensitivity towards this sufferer, bragging about her confessional vocation. If it makes you feel better, go ahead and hit me, she said. She was naked. Go on, she insisted. She screamed. Hit me! She said it in French. Frappe-moi! And when I hit her it was always across the face, the facade. Her generosity! No, when I hit her it was across the mouth, the mouthpiece. How was this kind of sincerity going to help us solve anything? I shouted. I hit her where the words came. The waterwords. I felt desperately ugly, desperately stupid. And breathing deeply, there in the impressive foyer of the European Parliament, breathing out long and slow as if one could simply exhale one’s angst with a lungful of air, I almost choked out laughing to think that I was perhaps about to make this bold political statement, in favour of the most comprehensive constitution the world has ever seen. Was I going to make it? After all, and this came home to me with some force, gazing around the smooth surfaces of wood and marble and brushed metal laminates, after all, You have nothing against Europe. So you told yourself, with some surprise. You have nothing at all against Europe. It was a surprise for me to realize that. Or such projects in general. You have nothing against the fantasy utopias of Black Spells Magic, or the ecology movement, or happy monogamous marriages, or even the United Colours of Benetton. You just happen not to believe in them. Not to be able to believe in them. It’s a detail! A joke. It wouldn’t get in anybody else’s way. And for a moment I allowed myself to imagine how I might say what I had just thought of saying and how she might feel grateful to me for making such a contribution, for applying my intellect, such as it is, to the not inconsiderable problem of a constitution for a United Europe, and how she might say, with a bright, intelligent smile, that if I didn’t mind she would rather like to introduce my central concept of, what shall we call it? permanent pan-factional compromise, into her preamble, the preamble to the constitution she hoped would win her the prize of a year’s scholarship in Brussels. This she would say loudly in the presence of the Welsh MEP’s secret
ary, who might be useful, if only in bringing her to the attention of the Welsh MEP, who was Vice-president of the influential Petitions Committee. She might even, I told myself, should I actually say what I had thought of saying, and should she then be in a position to get a word in edgeways - the Avvocato Malerba having this minute taken it upon himself to hold forth to all the young students, only two of whom were boys, on the principles that had inspired the original architects of the Community (of whom not the least important, he insisted, was the Italian Alcide De Gasperi) and namely, above all, the desire to eliminate forever the threat of armed conflict between our nations, of violence between one European and another, he claimed, which would always be civil war, the Avvocato Malerba said, family violence, he insisted, fratricide, as in Bosnia at this very moment, while the Welsh MEP’s secretary (herself from Yorkshire it seemed, a county not without a certain vocation for civil war) was now suggesting that we might follow her towards the left hemisphere of the building - yes, had she been able to get a word in edgeways in all this group confusion and the general fervour of solidarity that had invaded our coach party upon entering the indubitably impressive, not to say lush, atmosphere of the European Parliament (and if anybody was capable of getting a word in edgeways it was her), she might have wanted to thank me, I mean for my idealistic formulation, had I formulated it, and bestowed a smile on me, one of her quick French pouty smiles, a smile which would doubtless have reminded me of so much. But I didn’t say it, I did not propose the notion of permanent pan-factional compromise, just as I didn’t quote Thucydides. And more than anything else perhaps, my reason for remaining silent, as all the girls now chattered about Europe and we proceeded up a gracefully curved staircase, was that I was looking forVikram Griffiths. Not because I wanted to remark to him on the absence of the Welsh flag, which in fact I had now forgotten, but simply because I was suddenly intrigued, surprised, disconcerted by his absence, and perhaps because I had begun to nurse a vague fantasy that at the very moment I was to stand up to address the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament I might, with nothing in my head, feign some kind of illness, or even collapse, mental or physical, and, perhaps gasping for breath, choking, invite my colleague Dr Griffiths, doubtless better prepared than myself, to speak in my place.