People in Glass Houses

by Shirley Hazzard

  ‘You look as if you’re delivering an oration.’

  Pastore turned round. ‘I was wondering whatever became of the cortile.’

  Jaspersen frowned. ‘The courtyard? I suppose it interfered with clean lines.’

  Pastore looked gloomy. ‘This clean-up campaign.’ He put his hand to his breast. ‘Western Man —’

  How tiresome sometimes, thought Jaspersen, was Western Man with all his myths of Western Man. He interrupted. ‘I’m going down to the Committee. Will you keep an eye on things here? Luba’s disappeared.’

  ‘I fear she can be traced.’ Pastore waved his hand. ‘Yes, yes, I’ll be here.’

  Jaspersen was thin and straight with long legs, and he walked quickly even when going only as far as the elevators. Besides, he preferred to make his way as rapidly as possible through his section’s depressing inner corridor — airless, windowless, and painted grey — where a dozen typists leant woollen elbows on stained desks. Had there been some solution for these unfortunate conditions, Jaspersen, a humane man, would have proposed it. But he knew that nothing could be done — the designers of the building having judged such functional disadvantages to be small concessions made to outward harmony.

  (The Organization had been founded at the end of a colossal world war — a moment when the spirit of international cooperation was naturally at its height. Scarcely had the Founding Constitution been signed by the participating nations when a commission of the world’s foremost architects was formed to draw up plans for a building that would house this noble expression of human solidarity. The commission, in turn, had hardly sat to its task before certain fissures began to appear in the fabric of its deliberations: Dutchman contended with Swede, and Swede with Turk; Burmese fended off Brazilian, and Spaniard (through an interpreter) disparaged Swiss. The first to resign, a Frenchman who described his colleagues as being at loggerheads, subsequently became a recluse. The second, an elderly Belgian, was taken on a world cruise by his spinster niece and ultimately regained his health. The eventual design, endorsed by a group of three, was remarkable for its extensive use of conflicting primary forms, and was fittingly hailed throughout the world as a true example of international cooperation.)

  This being the case, Jaspersen hastened down the corridor to the elevators and pushed the Down button.

  In the elevator he found Nagashima, a Step Three in the Mediation Unit of Jaspersen’s section. Bowing courteously, Nagashima returned Jaspersen’s greeting; his perseverance with each syllable of Jaspersen’s name made it sound like a phonetic exercise.

  Striking a personal note, Jaspersen inquired, ‘Your daughter at college now?’

  ‘He’s at the university, yes.’

  ‘I thought —’

  ‘Yes, yes. Just the one son.’

  ‘What’s he studying?’

  ‘Humanities.’ Nagashima nodded, smiling.

  ‘Only the one play?’ asked Jaspersen, who thought he had said ‘Eumenides’.

  Nagashima beamed. ‘Yes. Yes.’ The elevator stopped at the Organization Clinic and, with a polite farewell, Nagashima got out. The doors were closing when a peremptory voice cried ‘Going down!’ and the head of Jaspersen’s department stepped in, breathing heavily.

  ‘Going to the meeting, Olaf? I’m on my way there myself.’ The Chief made a gesture of fanning himself with his own folder of Committee papers. ‘My word, they keep this place hot. Wasn’t that Nagashima who’s just got off? I thought so. Hadn’t seen him for a while — was beginning to think he’d got lost.’ The Chief laughed benevolently.

  ‘He was telling me about his daughter — turning into quite a classical scholar it seems.’ They arrived at the ground floor and Jaspersen stood back to let the Chief precede him.

  The Chief looked reflective as they walked along. ‘That sort of thing, you know, Olaf, is the real work we do. Shaping the personal lives of our own people, right here in this building. Merging their cultures through their personal relationships; children adjusting to other environments, colleagues becoming personal friends.’ They arrived at the top of an escalator leading to the basement. ‘We hear a lot about the Two Cultures, but I say it’s the Hundred Cultures we have to deal with. Bind them together, forge the common links —’ The Chief paused at the top of the escalator to take in his vision of humanity manacled and trussed. ‘Never did like these things. Fell on one as a child.’

  Warmly — with a ray of hope, one might have thought — Jaspersen said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Oh — my own fault, of course. Didn’t understand the principle. Step on and stay on.’ The Chief did this, gripping the rail tightly.

  ‘Understandable, though,’ said Jaspersen, following.

  ‘Hmm. Got to adapt oneself to the mechanism, Olaf, not fight it.’ He was making it sound as if Jaspersen were the child who had stumbled. ‘He who hesitates is lost.’

  ‘It lacks’, said Jaspersen, who as a student had read the German poets, ‘the lovelier hesitation of the hand of man.’

  ‘What does?’

  ‘The machine.’

  ‘Oh I quite agree.’ The Chief took on a look of liking nothing better than the larger view. He added obscurely, ‘The individual comes first.’ He gave his full attention to stepping off the escalator before he continued. ‘I want a word with you some time about next year’s manning-table. We’re getting overloaded in certain grades. Not enough slots to go round.’

  Now they were walking along a wide corridor that sloped downwards, as it reached the Committee Room, like an undersea tunnel. Officials carrying papers came towards them and passed on purposefully, like salmon headed upstream. There was a multiplicity of doors, and a notice board that listed meetings. Another board displayed glossy photographs for the use of the press — the Spanish delegate enjoying a joke with the Custodian of Refugees, the Soviet representative opening the Children’s Art Exhibit. When he reached a pair of handsome doors, Jaspersen grasped one of the inlaid handles that had been the gift of Finland and stood aside to let the Chief enter the chamber.

  The ceiling of the Committee Room was earth-coloured, the carpet blue: it was as if the skies had fallen. The room was formed like a theatre, with a high public gallery. The action, so to speak, took place in the pit, where a more or less circular arrangement was created by an arc of tables — at which sat the representatives of various nations, all labelled, like plants in a public garden, with the exotic names of their countries. A certain bloc of seats was reserved for senior officials from the Organization itself, and it was in this section, in a leather chair, that Jaspersen seated himself, directly behind his Chief. The discussion had already begun, and Jaspersen, laying the folder of papers carefully on his knees, clipped over his ear the small electric interpreting device attached to the chair, his face assuming as he did so the grave and attentive expression of everyone else in the room.

  Ismet concluded his draft memorandum with the word ‘implementation’ and gave it to Leslie for typing. He then got up from his desk and stood at the window. Resting his fingertips on the inner sill, he closed his eyes. When he opened them, a face was looking back at him from the glass.

  This reflection gestured, mouthed, nodded, and, pushing up the window, climbed into the room. ‘Gave me a turn, standing there like that,’ it said reproachfully, helping Ismet to pick up the papers circulated by the rush of air. ‘Wasn’t expecting it.’

  ‘Why should they clean the windows on a day like this?’ Ismet asked.

  The man clapped the last memorandum down on the desk with an irreverent hand. He shrugged his shoulder before readjusting the harness over it. ‘Orders from above.’ He jerked his head skyward. ‘The way I see it — there’s more chiefs than Indians round here.’

  Ismet said reasonably, ‘But that is the way you see it, isn’t it? I mean, you only see the offices that have windows. The offices of the chiefs, so to speak.’

  ‘Plenty of Indians in the dungeons, eh?’ The window-cleaner laughed uproariously, making
Ismet regret his rational explanation. ‘I’m better off on the outside, if you ask me. Watch out for the bucket.’ Ismet had almost knocked this over in pulling out his chair. His visitor swung the bucket up over one arm and made for the door.

  Ismet said, ‘I’m sorry I startled you.’

  ‘Should be used to it by now. Plenty of you looking out when I come along.’

  Setting his papers in order, Ismet heard the bucket loudly put down in Pastore’s room next door. A moment later, Pastore was in the doorway.

  ‘Nothing but interruptions all morning.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Ismet.

  ‘I need Leslie to take a message to Jaspersen in the Committee Room.’

  ‘She’s doing a memorandum for me.’

  ‘This is urgent.’

  ‘So is mine.’

  ‘I’ve already asked her to go.’

  Nothing, Ismet thought, makes a more fanatical official than a Latin. Organization is alien to their natures, but once they get the taste for it they take to it like drink. They claim to be impulsive, but they’re the most bureaucratic of all, whatever they may say. ‘Whatever you say,’ he told Pastore.

  ‘The combination and interplay of such components,’ the speaker was saying, ‘within deeply rooted conflicts —’

  Try as he would, Jaspersen could not take it in this morning. He pressed his hand to the device over his ear. He even glanced surreptitiously at the interpretation dial beside his chair, to make sure it was turned to the proper language.

  ‘— obstruct the evaluation process …’

  ‘Personal life,’ the Chief had said; ‘personal friend.’ One’s life, one’s friends presumably could not be other than personal, yet the distinction had developed. I suppose this is my official life, Jaspersen said to himself, looking about the chamber. ‘Official life’ sounded like a posthumous document, some tedious work of commissioned biography with all the interesting incidents suppressed.

  ‘My government takes the view …’

  Everyone else was scribbling now, on scraps of paper, on the margins of documents, on pads provided for the purpose.

  ‘My government thinks, my government feels …’

  It gave him a sense of isolation, being the only one having personal thoughts in such an official chamber.

  ‘Bearing in mind my government’s long devotion —’

  One said ‘relationship’ nowadays about those one loved, and put one’s friends in slots: words like ‘devotion’ were reserved for official purposes.

  A young man in grey had come to where Jaspersen sat, at the end of the row of seats, and was handing out copies of an amendment. Jaspersen, passing them along, thought how like church it all was. The deferential hush, the single voice intoning. O Organization, wherever two or three are gathered together in thy name. … Jaspersen gave an unholy laugh.

  Someone sitting beside the Chairman looked round repressively. One or two acolytes — the man in grey, a woman in black — silently carried papers back and forth across the room. The man had the stubby, earnest walk of a schoolboy; the woman appeared to glide over the blue carpet. In a man, Jaspersen thought, one could always see the child; whereas in a little girl one could always foresee the woman. The child Jaspersen who long ago had laughed in church, laughed in the schoolroom, had no place here, not even in memory. The idea that these guarded Committee faces had ever been childlike, or that they were sometimes even now transfigured by secular passions, was totally irrelevant.

  ‘— to the preservation of freedom. For if freedom is to be effectively preserved, a solution must be found —’

  One would have thought freedom was a museum piece — some extinct creature being pickled in a jar of spirits. The voice went on, on. Jaspersen’s father, a gaunt old man who loved Schiller and had no knowledge of world affairs, would have quoted ‘No incantation can compel the gods’ (might even, for he was getting quite eccentric, have quoted it out loud), but Jaspersen knew better; had more than once thrown in his lot with incantations in this very room and seen the gods compelled. Was it not worth while, this compelling of the gods in a good cause? And if so, why could Jaspersen not rejoice as he sat there this morning? The trouble was, official life had grown so remote from life itself.

  ‘— together with adequate safeguards …’

  Jaspersen was not a man to succumb to despair: in fact, with his quick walk, he had quite outdistanced it. He would never ask himself ‘What will become of me?’ — much less the more terrible question ‘What has become of me?’ Here, however, twenty feet underground, in filtered air and fluorescent light, amid the aspirations ratified by one hundred member nations, a certain depression had managed — God knew how — to penetrate. There is no armour, there are no adequate safeguards. Deeply rooted conflicts are within us and obstruct the evaluation process.

  Leslie sauntered down the corridor, her head uncharacteristically lowered as she studied the effect of her new shoes, which buttoned across the instep. When the elevator came, she got in jauntily. She liked to have errands away from the section, and often combined them with a leisurely coffee in the cafeteria or a visit to her friends in the filing room. Her sense of responsibility took her first to the main floor, where she got out. Descending to the basement, she stood on her toes to avoid wedging her vinyl heels in the grooves of the escalator. At the end of a corridor, a guard admitted her to the Committee Room, and she discovered Jaspersen sitting in a row of seats near the door.

  A speech was being made, and Jaspersen was listening so intently that she could not attract his attention. Someone motioned her to sit down behind him and wait, and she did this, feeling important as she sank into the leather seat and watched her skirt draw back above her white knitted knees. The room was brightly, hotly lit, and was decorated — somewhat datedly, Leslie thought — in blond wood and blue furnishings. Absently folding the message for Jaspersen over and over until it began to part at the creases, Leslie looked curiously up at the half-empty public gallery and the glass booths of the interpreters. This was more like the real thing: more, in fact, like television. It was the setting in which Leslie had imagined herself when she applied to the Organization, and of which she had not, until now, caught a single glimpse. Her duties consisted in the main of inter-leaving pages with carbon-paper and typing on them at someone else’s dictation. Yet Leslie had repeatedly been told by her superiors that what was wanted was someone who would take an interest in this work. What was wanted, Leslie concluded, was some kind of a nut.

  Leslie did not care to know what was going on here in the Committee; since everyone else obviously did know, involvement on her part seemed unnecessary. She felt agreeably secure in the presence of all these diligent faces. And Jaspersen, she noticed, was the most engrossed of all, his elbow bent on his knee, his hand supporting his intent brow.

  ‘Recognizing the basic fluidity of the situation’ — the speaker paused, poured water into a glass — ‘and in the firm conviction’ — he drank — ‘that the pooling of resources …’

  When Jaspersen raised his head, a hand appeared at his elbow. It was a curious little hand, plump and pink with astonishing silver nails. Some of these nails were of oriental attenuation, others were bluntly broken off. Jaspersen, staring at the hand, was tempted to take it in his own. However, he merely accepted a pleated paper from its irregular talons.

  He opened the paper, turned it round, and read. ‘Unification is postponed.’

  Jaspersen sat still for a moment or two, with the paper in his hand. He then put it in his folder and dismissed Leslie with a backward nod. He leant forward and touched his own hand to the elbow in front of him.

  The Chief’s head veered to a familiar attitude — not detached from the proceedings of the meeting, yet inclined, receptive, authoritative. It was an attitude of head and shoulders that had been perfected within the Organization and was best demonstrated on the floor of a large conference room.

  Jaspersen whispered into the leaning ear. ‘Unif
ication is postponed.’

  The ear appeared to frown. ‘Not coming up?’

  ‘Not today.’

  ‘— and fervently believing in the vital importance —’

  ‘Nothing to stay for then,’ the Chief murmured, turning further round.

  ‘— and crucial significance —’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  They slid out of their seats furtively, like patrons leaving a bad film. Outside, Jaspersen said, ‘Now we’ll never know who did it.’

  The Chief had a way of permitting a joke to register while denying it official recognition. ‘I’m anxious’, he said gravely, ‘to have our item come up.’

  The postponement of Unification had gone to Jaspersen’s head. ‘You realize’, he said, ‘that they may not approve of what we’ve done?’

  The Chief smiled tolerantly. ‘We must know how to accept criticism, Olaf.’ He spoke as if it were some useless gift to be stowed in a closet as soon as the guests had gone. ‘A most helpful discussion of Item Five, I thought, by the way.’

  ‘Didn’t quite get it,’ Jaspersen said.

  ‘Not get it?’ The Chief had not known Jaspersen in this mood before. For a moment it seemed that he was going to stop in his tracks, half-way up the sloping corridor, on the rug donated by the Republic of Panama. ‘Not get what?’

  Jaspersen took hold of himself: he did not want to go too far. (To go too far, in the Organization, was to travel no great distance.) ‘Oh — just an unfortunate phrase or two, perhaps —’ They had reached the Up escalator, and the Chief had paused and was frowning. Pulling himself together at last, looking more like himself than he had done all morning, Jaspersen went on hurriedly, ‘In an otherwise excellent speech.’