The Capital

by Robert Menasse

There! Now he could see it! The Europe Hospital. From the outside it looked like a neo-Gothic cathedral, which was why he’d walked right past it. Who expects a hospital to look like a historic house of God?

  He went in and found himself in a space station. White plastic surfaces, aluminium, bluish light, bright strip-lighting on the floor to guide patients to the different departments. Brunfaut was surprised that the people wandering about or sitting there weren’t floating weightlessly in mid-air. On the other hand, this was a perfectly ordinary hospital reception. Everything washable and gleaming clinically. It only looked like the set from a sci-fi movie because the space was entered via the façade of a Gothic cathedral.

  Brunfaut stood at the information board. The first word his eyes alighted on was “Psychiatry”. Only after that did he see “Internal Medicine”. He followed the blue strip of light along the floor.

  Arrival, admission, allocation of room, initial doctor’s consultation with anamnesis. Then Dr Drumont explained which examinations he thought were necessary and said they should be able to complete them all over the course of two days. He would schedule them accordingly. He was sure they would find a diagnosis for Brunfaut’s complaints. Had the inspector fasted? Yes, Brunfaut said. He hadn’t eaten or drunk anything today. Excellent, the doctor said, we can take a blood sample immediately, then. Nurse Anna will take care of that. She’ll come to your room. And I will arrange for you to have a little refreshment straight afterwards.

  The nurse who brought tea and waffles with strawberries after the blood sample also asked Brunfaut what he would like for dinner.

  From your chart I can see that you haven’t yet – she looked at him – been put on any special diet. So it’s normal food for you. You can have meat or the vegetarian option.

  Staring at the plate with the two waffles and three strawberries, Brunfaut said, both please, Madame.

  What do you mean, both?

  I assume the meat dish comes with vegetables on the side?

  It’s boulettes sauce lapin.

  With?

  Mashed potatoes and carrots.

  There you go, that’s vegetarian. I’ll have the boulettes, which means I’ll have both.

  Brunfaut was frightened. He had never before felt this degree of fear. But something inside him baulked at it, almost forcing him to behave as if he took none of it seriously. The nurse left. On his bed lay his pyjamas, like a disembodied corpse. His dressing gown hung limply from a hook beside the bed – this was him after his disappearance. He didn’t undress and get into bed yet. He ate a waffle, took a sip of tea and smiled when he caught himself listening with baited breath, then opening the door and glancing left and right to check whether the coast was clear. He left the room and took the lift down to reception to go for a beer in the canteen.

  No alcohol in the hospital canteen. So he stepped out of the space-age world, through the neo-Gothic façade and into the open air, walked a short way in the stream of people who weren’t thinking about death, found a café and ordered a beer.

  A small beer, Monsieur?

  A large one, please.

  He sat with a view of a pharmacy.

  Sweating, he wiped his brow with his handkerchief. Did he have a temperature? No, it was just a hot day. The sun beat down through the gap between two umbrellas and onto his back and neck. He shifted his chair slightly to one side and took off his coat.

  His mobile rang. Philippe.

  Listen he said, I’ve got something for you. Not on the phone. The picture isn’t clear yet, but there are some very interesting – how shall I put it? – symptoms. I don’t know if I can keep on with this, it’s very risky. We need to have a chat. Could we meet tomorrow?

  I’m in hospital, Brunfaut said. I’m being checked out, remember? Tomorrow I’ve got a series of tests, but —

  How’s it going? What’s the doctor said?

  The same as you: interesting symptoms, but the overall picture isn’t clear. Can you do tomorrow evening?

  Early evening. Half past six, seven.

  Good. Come and visit me in the Europe Hospital, rue de Linthout. If you’re coming by Metro, it’s Merode station.

  D’accord. See you tomorrow.

  Émile Brunfaut was in a room with two beds, but fortunately the second was unoccupied, which meant he could make a number of calls that evening without annoying anyone or feeling obliged to leave the room. He could switch on the T.V. on the wall above the table, and switch it off again without having to come to any agreement with anyone. There was an interview with the chief of police, who was rejecting accusations that they had failed to act, catching a pig was no simple matter if you didn’t know when and where it was going to strike next. Did he really say “strike”? Brunfaut wondered. Then the journalist asked, What did he mean by “strike”? What he meant was appearing out of the blue and unnerving passers-by, although . . . Brunfaut turned the television off in irritation. Because he was alone in the room, he could be as unsettled as he liked in a very unsettling night, tossing from side to side, getting up time and again, taking a sip of water in the bathroom, going to the loo, flushing – the flush was so loud it made him jump – he could curse when he crashed into the edge of the bed on his way back, he could snore and fart without having to lie their tensely, worrying about being discreet.

  But this silver lining in his cloud was gone the following day. Early in the morning he was taken for an E.C.G. and when he got back to his room there was a man in the second bed, leaning against the fold-up head rest. He was very frail and very pale, almost translucent, his thin blond hair in a severe parting. He wore pinstripe pyjamas! Dark-blue silk, the delicate stripes in orange. His legs were crossed, and on them he balanced a laptop.

  The term “ventricular extrasystoles” was still pounding inside Brunfaut’s head, wrapped in the cardiologist’s reassuring words as if in cotton wool. And now there was this man in his room, greeting him with such glee, apparently delighted to have a room-mate. Brunfaut, now standing between the beds, nodded to the man again and noticed that a crest was embroidered on the chest of his pyjamas, a light-blue snake – what . . .? Offering Brunfaut his hand, the man introduced himself as Maurice Géronnez.

  Pleased to meet you. Brunfaut said his own name and bowed – in fact he merely bent forwards to get a better look at the crest. The snake was a stylised “S”, beside which was written Solvay and beneath that, Brussels School of Economics. Brunfaut was taken aback. He possessed a scarf and T-shirt from R.S.C. Anderlecht and as a joke he’d bought a romper suit in the Anderlecht colours from the fan shop for his goddaughter Joëlle on her christening, but he had never seen or heard of anyone wearing university pyjamas.

  Of course Monsieur Géronnez wanted to swap medical histories without delay. Brunfaut said tersely that he was just here for a full medical examination, a precautionary measure.

  Well, Géronnez said, they’ll find something, they always do, after the age of fifty you can bet your life that they’ll find something; if the doctors don’t find anything wrong with a man over fifty then I start asking myself what they’ve been studying. Then you need to change hospitals. But don’t worry, you’re in good hands here, the Europe is the best of the lot, here they always find something. With me it’s my spleen. Isn’t that strange? The spleen, of all things. Now you’re going to ask me, Why is that strange? Tell me, what does the spleen do, what’s its job? You see! You don’t know, do you? Nobody does, ask your friends, acquaintances, ask anybody on the street. The liver, yes! The heart, that anyway! The lungs, the kidneys, you don’t have to have studied medicine to know what those organs do, what their function is. But the spleen? Tell me what the job of the spleen is. You see, it’s so strange! The spleen leads a shadowy existence. And yet none of the other organs we think we know about and regard as so important could function in the long term if it weren’t for the spleen. The spleen controls all the other organs, it knows everything, it checks them all the time. It fends off disease in the other organs, rem
oves damaging particles from the blood, stores white corpuscles that it releases as required, deploying them like a rapid reaction force, you might say. The heart doesn’t notice if the liver has a problem, or conversely, the kidneys try to do their job whether the lungs are working properly or not, but the spleen, the spleen notices everything about everything and responds to everything. And the other organs are aware of everything the spleen does. It is the great communicator, and at the same time the secret service that nobody notices. Why does nobody notice the spleen? Because for the most part it doesn’t stand out. The spleen is the organ that rarely has problems of its own. It solves other organs’ problems, it fends off their illnesses wherever possible, but is rarely sick itself. Do you know what I think? I think there’s something in this theory of psychosomatics. That’s my suspicion. You can eat as healthily as you like, but if, metaphorically speaking, you’ve always got a lot on your plate, you can develop stomach trouble. Do you understand what I mean?

  Yes, it’s common knowledge.

  You see? And in my case it’s the spleen. No coincidence there. Professionally I’m a spleen, in a manner of speaking, and some time ago I realised I couldn’t go on any longer, I couldn’t accept what my job was and . . .

  What? What are you professionally? I mean, a spleen isn’t a profession. Brunfaut groaned.

  I work for the European Commission, Géronnez said, in the E.C.F.I.N., that’s the Directorate-General for Economic and Financial Affairs. I’m responsible for communication. Between the various organs I am, as it were, the communicator who stands in the shadows. I have to pull together and coordinate what everybody is working on and, crucially, draft the speeches that the commissioner gives to present this to the outside world. Now, picture an organism where the lungs are badly damaged by chain-smoking, the liver by excess alcohol, the stomach by chemicals in foods and you have to detoxify all this, as well as write the speeches with which the mouth will announce that everything is absolutely fine, in so far as the greatest efforts are being undertaken to ensure the organism functions as well as possible, you might save on nail-cutting, for example, by amputating all the fingers. I couldn’t go on anymore, Monsieur Brunfaut. My problems began three years ago because I couldn’t function any longer. Then on my desk appeared the study that Webster University and the University of Portsmouth carried out in conjunction with Vienna University of Economics and Business – just wait for this!

  He tapped the keyboard of his laptop. Here! I saved it. The Impact of Fiscal Austerity on Suicide Mortality. This is dreadful, a long-term study on the relationship between fiscal austerity programmes in Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain and the growth in suicide rates in these countries. I don’t want to bore you with figures and statistics, but let me just give you an idea: when Greece embarked on its austerity programme, the suicide rate increased by 1.4 per cent in the first year. It doesn’t sound much, a low figure, but don’t forget these are people, and now listen to this: in the third year the graph makes a steep upward curve and now we have a figure that means we have to start talking about an epidemic, and 91.2 per cent of the suicides are people over sixty whose pensions and health insurance were either cut or simply withdrawn, then in the fourth year the proportion of those over the age of forty increases in the suicide statistics, the majority of them single and long-term unemployed. In the fifth year the reduction in the unemployment figure is consistent with a marginal difference of 0.8 per cent in the number of suicide cases that year. But now, conversely – he typed something – we have Ireland. My commissioner’s favourite example. There, economic growth has taken another leap forward! The model country! But what does this study show us? No drop in a suicide rate that had risen dramatically in earlier years. The study shows that the economic upturn didn’t reach those places where the safety net had been destroyed previously. Do you understand?

  The man’s delicate nostrils vibrated.

  I have to admit, I was furious when I read that. I wrote a paper for the commissioner, for the Commission’s Wednesday conference, I remember beginning with the words “We are murderers” and making a few points that he, the commissioner, must propose for the Commission to honour its task of protecting European citizens. I sent a copy to the director-general, who’s responsible for the economy of the Member States . . . at any rate, since then I’ve felt unwell. It’s my spleen, it can’t manage the detoxification anymore and . . .

  At that moment a nurse appeared. Monsieur Brunfaut? I’m here to take you for your sonography.

  Brunfaut excused himself and followed her. A speech writer who wouldn’t stop speaking – it was all a bit much. Even though he had to concede that, deep down, this man was a brother-in-arms.

  The bruise on Professor Erhart’s forearm sustained when he fell against the radiator in the hotel had turned into a substantial dark-blue patch. It looked like a poorly executed tattoo of the map of Europe.

  After the “Reflection Group” meeting Professor Erhart had not gone to dinner with the others, but instead had taken the Metro back to Sainte-Catherine. Now he was sitting at a table outside Brasserie Van Gogh, right beside the church. Passing it on the way from the Metro station to his hotel, he had spotted the oysters, lobster and prawns arranged on ice, and spontaneously sat down, as a treat. As a comfort. In defiance. After the humiliating scene at the meeting earlier.

  Although it was now evening, it was still so warm that Professor Erhart took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his chair. Then he saw his involuntary tattoo. It startled him. He touched it gingerly with his fingertips, moaned softly, but it wasn’t the pain, at least not the one in his arm; it was his despair, the burning of his soul.

  In the think-tank meeting he had behaved like one of the anti-authoritarian students he had encountered many years ago as a professor. Even though he’d been better at dealing with them than most of his colleagues, because he had the ability to recognise talented young people and take seriously the ideas that impassioned them, he fully realised that such behaviour was unbecoming in an individual such as himself. Could he be called an unconventional professor? Not in this day and age, when everything unconventional was acknowledged only if it could also come across as mainstream. His behaviour was merely stupid, and scandalous. It would have been better to keep shtum for as long as possible, pipe up with a few brief statements until he had tested the water, diplomatically speaking. But what he’d had to listen to was such utter tosh . . . So what? You can respond to nonsense calmly and soberly too. If, for example, an expert were to postulate the theory that – metaphorically speaking – the problem in question was obesity and the best way to combat this obesity would be to eat more, to force the body to excrete more, the increased volume of excrement leading to weight loss, and so on, you wouldn’t necessarily have to shout out that the expert was an idiot. It wouldn’t be hard to do things differently. Really? On the contrary. It had spooked him that from the opening of their session there had been consensus that Europe’s crisis could be solved only with those very methods which had brought it on in the first place. More of the same. Had this or that strategy failed? Then it couldn’t have been implemented systematically enough! Keep on going systematically! More of the same! Had the problems not merely been exacerbated by this or that decision? Only temporarily! Don’t allow any let-up in these endeavours! More of the same! It had driven him potty.

  He ordered a dozen oysters followed by half a lobster. With a Chablis.

  We only have Chablis by the bottle, Sir. By the glass you can have our house wine, a Sauvignon.

  Then bring me a bottle of Chablis.

  Gently he kept stroking the blue patch on his arm with the tips of his fingers.

  The oysters. Swallowing one after the other, he wondered why he’d thought he might enjoy it. Eating oysters. The taste of oysters didn’t remind him of a single happy moment in his life. So they couldn’t make him happy. The best thing about the lobster was that there wasn’t much of it. He had no patience for the
claws. He wasn’t hungry. He had simply wanted to spoil himself. He’d already drunk half the bottle of wine. In the square a man was playing German songs from the thirties on an accordion. Erhart knew them; his parents had owned the records. And then he found something he did enjoy: licking his fingers before dipping them into the bowl of warm water with lemon.

  Best of all was when one of the German economists, right in the middle of the heated debate conducted in English, had said in German to Erhart: “Show some restraint!” Restraint! Him! In a discussion that was dumb beyond all restraint. A Greek financial expert had described in painstaking detail how the Greek budget deficit had come about, explaining with the authority of a man who had taken himself to safety in Oxford that things couldn’t work without further swingeing cuts to the Greek welfare system. An Italian political scientist – of all people – agreed at once and underlined the necessity of abiding by the stability criteria. He gesticulated as he spoke, drawing figures-of-eight in the air with his index fingers, as if conducting a children’s choir. The French philosopher – to begin with Erhart had thought it exciting that a philosopher had been invited to the think tank – insisted that the Franco-German axis be strengthened again, a demand that even their colleague from Estonia agreed with. The only minor difference of opinion emerged between the two Germans who couldn’t agree on whether Germany should exercise her claim to leadership in Europe “with greater confidence” or “with greater humility”. This is how the meeting had progressed, leaving Erhart to wonder what had happened to these people that after years of study and striving for professorships and positions of responsibility, all they knew was how to formulate the well-honed experience of years and years as a desideratum for future policy. I don’t need a think tank for that, Erhart had heckled, all I need is a tabloid!

  Then things had kicked off until one of the Germans, who was unknown beyond the walls of the Department of Economic Sciences at Aachen University, said to Erhart in German, “Show some restraint!”