The Capital

by Robert Menasse

  Those in the third group were smiling. Like the conceited, they smiled knowingly, but knowing better and having the last laugh – thereby laughing the longest – whenever the idealists had merely prevented the worst. These were the lobbyists. But some distinctions needed to be made here too. Wasn’t he, Professor Alois Erhart, a lobbyist himself? The lobbyist for an idea? The lobbyist for certain interests, even though these – in his opinion – were for the common benefit? These lobbyists didn’t have an idea like his; they couldn’t even conceive that it might exist. The community, common interests – that was something they had to sell. Buy and sell, that was their world, and perhaps they even believed that this was where the only common interest lay. In such Advisory Groups they didn’t represent large corporations, but the foundations of corporations. One mustn’t disparage all the things they promoted, financed, supported, one ought not even to moan about their investing in mere cultural alibis, every so often all of it was of substantial benefit to society, and Professor Erhart wasn’t trying to dispute that, he was an old hand not just as an economist, but also in acquiring external funding for his university. What made him mad about this think tank, however, and drove him to despair, was that the lobbyists hijacked every discussion and always came out with the same mantra: We need more growth! Whatever subject they were discussing, it always led to the same question: How do we create more growth? In-growing toenails were a problem with growth, Erhart once interjected, reaping nothing but blank looks, but the general loss of faith in European institutions was a consequence of poor growth, the menacing threat of right-wing populism – clearly if there were more growth there would be no growth in right-wing populism. And how could we generate more growth? Through greater liberalisation, of course. Instead of the Union stipulating common rules, each Member State ought to axe as many rules as possible for itself. Although there would never be a real union, there would be growth, and this would be best for the Union. It was already perfectly clear that in the end the “New Pact for Europe” group would deliver a paper to the Commission president in which the recommendation would be: We need to ensure more growth. The president would thank them politely, praise the group’s important work, and then put the paper to one side without reading it, for he wouldn’t have to read the paper to be able to say in his next keynote speech or interview: We need to ensure more growth!

  Erhart knew that these lobbyists weren’t complete cynics, not all of them. They really did believe what they were saying, first because they didn’t know any different, and second because they’d learned to earn their money this way. Their mantra was well paid, everything else was less well paid or not at all. That was their experience at least. You couldn’t criticise somebody for aspiring to prosperity, not even for aspiring to wealth, but you could condemn them for being venal. And they were. Objectively. With their ignorance of ideas that didn’t fit the formula they were paid to defend. When they talked of the future they talked rather of a frictionless extension of the present. They couldn’t understand this because they believed the future consisted of trends that prevailed for evermore. At the last session one lobbyist said, The trend is now clearly heading in the direction XY – we need to ensure that we are prepared for this development! Erhart replied, At the end of the 1920s the trend was clearly heading in the direction of fascism. Was it right to prepare for this development, or was it not perhaps better to offer resistance?

  The conceited were stunned, the lobbyists grinned and the idealists – stupidly – just nodded, but then they bailed out anyway because what Erhart went on to say contained details they could not follow.

  Yes, Erhart had been naive. His publications over the past few years had led him to be invited into this circle. But he had over-estimated it. He had actually believed that through his ongoing work with the Advisory Group – in the president’s antechamber, as it were – he would gradually be able to exert influence over the political elites and make a difference. Work on schemes that were relevant to saving the European Union. And then the ball would be in the court of Europe’s political leadership.

  But that was not how things played out, a fact he realised all too soon.

  He would, however, stick with his keynote speech. He had promised. Even though the hopelessness of the whole situation was driving him crazy. He had committed himself, he was reliable. And he also owed it to his teacher, Armand Moens, whose grave he was now looking down on. He had arrived in Brussels around noon and the meeting with his keynote speech didn’t begin until 6.00 p.m. To fill the time he had decided to take another trip to Brussels cemetery and visit the grave of his teacher, who he would cite at the beginning of his speech: “The twentieth century ought to have been the transition of the nineteenth-century national economy to a twenty-first-century economy for mankind. This was thwarted in such a horrific and criminal way that afterwards the desire returned with greater urgency, but only in the minds of a small political elite, whose successors soon no longer understood the criminal energy of nationalism and the consequences that had already been drawn from this experience.”

  Having taken the decision to leave the club after this, he had completely rewritten his paper. He no longer saw any reason to spend a year very patiently attempting to make it from the substitutes’ bench onto the pitch. He would never get into the game. This had been his mistake: to believe he could join in with the others while also changing the rules. That didn’t work. Never, ever would he win over a single person from this circle – it was as unlikely as being able to bring an assembly line to a halt by patiently carrying out your repetitive hand movements while every day telling your colleagues that you had a different notion of useful work. He would merely fulfil his duty and deliver his keynote speech. He had drafted a radical paper – for this audience it was totally insane. Just for once he had possession of the ball. And this time he had made sure that the ball was going to get its grease.

  Are you talking to the dead too?

  Professor Erhart looked up and saw an old man whose light-blue eyes contrasted strangely with his black, bushy eyebrows, lending the man both a radiant and sinister air. He had very little hair, but it was still black, and it looked as if it had been daubed onto his stooped head with ink. He was wearing a fine suit that was slightly too large and too warm for this hot day. The man had said, Praat U ook al met de doden? Professor Erhart hadn’t understood. He couldn’t speak Flemish and he knew that if as a German speaker you thought you’d understood something, you were invariably wrong. Should he say in English that he didn’t understand? “Kannitverstan” came to mind, but before he could utter it the old man repeated the sentence in French. Erhart’s French was poor; he had spent a year as a visiting lecturer at the Panthéon-Sorbonne Paris I, giving lectures in English and endeavouring to learn French in this time, but he soon learned that it was better to say he wasn’t fluent in the language.

  He was able, however, to put together this sentence: “The dead do not answer.”

  As Erhart knew, the problem with a foreign language – if it wasn’t at least your stepmother tongue – was that you only ever said what you knew, not what you wanted to say. The difference was the no-man’s-land between the world’s borders. What he had actually wanted to say was, “The dead have already given their answers before the living come up with the questions.” But his French didn’t stretch that far.

  The old man smiled. Might he sit down?

  Of course, please do.

  David de Vriend sat and said, There are too few benches here! This is the only one until the – he made an expansive gesture with his hand – until the war heroes.

  He wheezed and took a few deep breaths. Even walking was a real effort. De Vriend had in fact planned to spend the afternoon in his room, the blinds closed, until the worst of the heat had passed. But in the dark room he had soon lost all sense of time.

  He couldn’t remember how long he’d been sitting there brooding. He became thirsty.

  He opened the fridge and took
out the notepad.

  This was the pad on which he’d written down the names of survivors as he remembered them, because over the years he’d had sporadic contact with them or from time to time he had heard or read something about them. There were nine names on the list. Five were crossed out. He looked at the list in astonishment and realised that he would have to cross out another: Gustave Jakubowicz. After the liberation of Auschwitz this man had studied law in Brussels and Paris and had become a top human-rights lawyer. For the past few years – he had been retired for a long while – he had represented refugees scheduled for deportation. De Vriend had read the news of his death in the newspaper. He looked for his biro. Pulling the blind right up he was amazed to see how brightly the sun was shining on the cemetery, the green of the treetops, the white of the gravel paths, the silvery-grey of the stones – everything seemed to be gleaming.

  Then he had decided to go outside.

  Alois Erhart thought that the wheezing old man who had sat beside him on the bench needed some company and wanted to chat, so he felt uncomfortable sitting there in silence. War heroes? What did he mean? On the other side of the cemetery there was no doubt a section for those who had fallen in the war. What should he say? He groped for words. Yes, Monsieur, he said eventually, very few benches. And then: Do you come here to visit relatives who – he didn’t know the French for “fell”, how did you say “fell”? Sure, he could say “died”, he knew “die” in French – but the man was already saying, No, I come here to stroll. This cemetery is our exercise ground.

  “Our?”

  I live in the retirement home over there. The Maison Hanssens. That’s all.

  Now another man walked past and Erhart’s first impulse was to say hello because he thought he knew him, he looked familiar, but where from? Who was he? Yes, now he remembered, it was the inspector with the huge potbelly who had questioned him at the hotel on his first visit to Brussels. The inspector passed by at a lively pace without looking at them; he had lost weight, Erhart thought.

  Professor Erhart looked at his watch. It was time to leave, freshen up at the hotel and go to his meeting.

  Feeling out of breath, Inspector Brunfaut slackened his pace. His shirt stuck to his sweaty back and belly, he took off his jacket. He had underestimated the length of the avenue that led to the soldiers’ graves. By the victims of the Second World War was a memorial, “Le Mur des Fusillés”, unmissable, opposite which stood a park bench. Philippe had told him to meet there. Brunfaut was late, even though on the telephone Philippe had urged him to be punctual; somebody was joining them, and they had very little time to spare.

  Who?

  You’ll see. I can’t say over the phone.

  It’s about . . .

  Yes, exactly!

  Why there?

  It’s what . . . my friend wanted. And we’ll be able to talk in peace. Very few visitors come to the monuments, only politicians commemorating the end of the war. And that date has been and gone. So it’ll just be us and a few withered wreaths.

  Brunfaut checked the time: he was almost fifteen minutes late. He began to run. He pictured himself from an outsider’s perspective and thought he must cut an excruciatingly awkward figure with his frantic jogging – it was no longer a walk, but he hadn’t broken into a run either. He slowed down again, wiping the sweat from his face with a sodden handkerchief. Why was it so hot? This was Brussels, not the Congo!

  Finally he saw before him the squares of white crosses. And there! That must be the memorial Philippe was talking about.

  He saw it perfectly clearly, and yet had the impression he wasn’t getting any closer. It was a nightmare.

  It had been weeks since Philippe visited him in hospital to report his discoveries about the Atlas case with the means at his disposal. Or, more accurately, about the disappearance of the Atlas case.

  Our I.T. department isn’t bad, Philippe had explained, we can do quite a bit and I interpreted the boundaries of legality most freely. But don’t forget: we are the Brussels police, so we’re never using state-of-the-art technology. The whole thing is complicated by a web of security levels – how can I explain it? O.K., very roughly it’s like this. If there’s a piece of information, or rather the suggestion of some information, which, let’s say, it’s in the interest of the French secret service to keep entirely secret, then our Sureté de l’État might gain access, but not our police force. If you try to hack it, then of course an alarm goes off at their end. Now just imagine that they see the attempted hack has come from the police. And then there’s Europol. The police forces of the European Member States are supposed to cooperate and exchange intelligence. But the problem is that the exchange doesn’t work. Obviously every country wants to find out everything the others know, but none wants to proffer anything themselves. They turn up with their constitutions – “sorry, but our national constitution doesn’t allow us to do this or that” – which means nothing happens, each snippet of information becomes like a needle in a haystack. There’s always somebody who knows where the needle is, but who knows where this person is who knows it? And so we have two haystacks. No, we have hundreds of haystacks and in two of them there is one needle we’re looking for. But if we succeed in finding either needle, that means we’ve found the safe containing the thing we want. Now we have to crack the safe. And if we manage that, the first thing we find when we open the safe is another one with an even more complicated combination. Do you follow me? Let me give you a concrete example from our work. Whenever there has been a terror attack, all the pieces of information necessary to prevent the attack have been present at every different security level and behind each locked safe door. But these pieces of information have not been put together. Something we occasionally hear about in the news- papers. And then somewhere in Europe a minister of the interior is forced to resign. But that doesn’t change the system one iota. By the same token, if intelligence manages to prevent a terror attack but there’s a glitch in the process, then it’s not remotely in the interest of the secret services to have this appear in the newspapers either, and then the case disappears. One dead person in a hotel is not the same as thirty dead after a bomb at the airport. It can be covered up. It must be covered up. The intelligence agencies don’t want investigations and inquiries to be launched, let alone public discussion of why a policeman should bump off a tourist in a hotel room. And so we come to the Atlas case. I can’t prove it, but I’m 100 per cent sure that it’s an intelligence agency story. The Sureté? No. And not the S.G.R.S. either. This story is bigger. Much bigger. We began by reconstructing your hard drive. You can recover everything that’s been stored on a computer and then deleted. Unless the documents are deleted from the central server rather than the P.C. Well, that’s basic stuff. Anyway, it’s how we proceeded. Not only do you have to find weak points where you can get into other systems, you must do it in such a way that the attack can’t be traced back. While we were working our way around the Belgian system this was relatively easy. I mean, I’m sort of familiar with it, I know how our people tick and I also know where they have to skimp, what limitations and obstacles they’re working with. And listen to this, typically Belgian: the security police really have invested highly in file encryption and security measures to protect against external attacks. But what they forgot was to protect their recycle bin. Everything that’s deleted centrally goes into a central recycle bin, which is perfectly logical. Maybe they’ve also got a backup copy somewhere, which obviously I won’t be able to access. But it’s in the recycle bin too, and I can rummage through that. Isn’t it funny? Their thinking is that an external hacker will be interested in their secret documents, but what they can’t imagine is someone sifting through the recycle bin. Anyway, that’s how we went about it. Somewhere there must be a weak point where we can get at more information, not just what was deleted and covered up, but who wanted this to happen and why. Don’t look like that. I’ll tell you right now – what I believe, because I can’t prove a thi
ng. We did actually find a weak spot. It’s impossible for us to hack intelligence agencies’ computers, it would be like trying to open a safe with a toothpick. But we can detect the network they form and, if I’ve interpreted all the clues correctly, then N.A.T.O. is right at the heart of this. Yes. N.A.T.O. But wait! Listen to this: the system does have a weak spot after all, and that’s the computer belonging to the Archdiocese of Poznań. Yes, Poznań. What do you mean, what’s that? It’s the oldest Roman Catholic diocese in Poland. A few scraps of information from intelligence services converge there, but a far greater volume of information goes out from Poznań to N.A.T.O. and collaborating intelligence services. Got your attention now, haven’t I? You know that Armin de Boor is helping me, don’t you? Well, when Armin and I hit on this we looked at each other in disbelief and Armin couldn’t help laughing. This is crazy, he said, quick, type in the access code! It’s a word, just one word. Yes, I said, but which one? We have to try to decrypt the keychain. He laughed and said, Don’t you see? They think simply, try “Judas”. It’s got to be a word that a Catholic padre finds apt. But it wasn’t “Judas”. Wait, Armin said, maybe Judas is spelled differently in Polish. He opened some translation software and we found out that Judas is written Judasz in Polish. But it wasn’t that either. Armin fetched some beer from the fridge, we had a drink and all of a sudden he said, Of course! Of course it’s not Judas. They don’t want to betray anything, they want to know everything. He typed something into the translation software, then entered the password – and the portal opened. The password was “Bozeoko”: the eye of God.