Peace Talks

by Tim Finch

  Nothing in your voice.

  Nothing back.

  It was getting fainter, more infrequent anyway. Conventional wisdom has it that this is a good sign. But conventional wisdom gets these things all wrong, I’ve found. I remember Caroline laughing at me saying that.

  It is an odd thing about our much-recorded life together that I don’t have a recording of your voice. I can hear it in my mind’s ear, though. Yes, the music and the modulation of your voice – quite low and husky (we used to laugh about that; the husky way you said ‘husky’). I can hear it now. But it is as if you have stopped talking to me.

  Well, it’s not as if that didn’t happen sometimes.

  Still nothing.

  GHENT

  The city has a population of more than a quarter of a million people, and it is just half an hour from Brussels, but for many years Ghent was ‘our secret’. For one thing, few of our friends back then, all of whom had been to Bruges and many to Antwerp, had visited Ghent. Some even claimed not to have heard of it. Or only very vaguely. It was, as you once put it – anticipating that things would change – like an ‘indie band before it charts’.

  Our lasting attachment to Ghent stemmed, as these attachments often do, from having had an especially lovely time the first time we were there. I can’t recall the exact occasion – it wasn’t a birthday or anniversary, I know that much – but everything was just right. It was wintertime: cold and blue, cold and black – with stars! Our visit was neither too long, nor too short – a long weekend, probably. The hotel was boutique before that just meant small and overly expensive. We found a little restaurant which we knew on the first night – and declared as much – would become a regular haunt thereafter. And rather surprisingly – you were never much of a lover of medieval art otherwise – Ghent’s most famous attraction, The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, made a deep impression on you. We went to see it twice on that first visit and returned on every subsequent trip.

  We never tried to analyse our love for Ghent, though such an exercise would have been easy enough. It was eminently suited to our ‘High European’ sensibility; our love of history, of art, of architecture, of culture generally; of good food, good wine, good living. But it was quirky too, a bit boho with it; a student town as well as a tourist town, though this element did little more than add a plastering of posters to café noticeboards or a pile-up of locked bikes to railings or some early-hours hooting and laughter from below our hotel window. We didn’t mix with any students – or locals.

  Of course, this ridiculous, this delicious, idea that Ghent was somehow ‘discovered’ by us was a factor too, though over time we were steadily disabused of the notion. The friends we mentioned Ghent to now seemed all to have worked for institutions connected to the EU or to be – or partly be – Belgian. Or Dutch. It became a game for them to say to us, ‘Oh, Ghent, of course …’ and then to rhapsodise about Liège or Namur or Durbuy. None of which we ever got to.

  But I mention all this, why? I am not in Ghent, if that is what you are wondering. I haven’t been back since. The reason is the news – which has seriously disrupted proceedings here, at the talks, as the group responsible for the attack has links to one of the sides to the negotiations. Alleged links, I should add; links that are vehemently denied. ‘You can’t imagine we would countenance such an atrocity,’ Noor’s expression seemed to say when he caught my eye in the corridor. ‘Not at such a critical time for our proceedings,’ he managed to add as I rushed past, head lowered, not to be swayed. It was he who stepped aside at the last moment. Having got his point across. I was on my way in to a one-to-one with his chief, the ambassador, Sabbagh. We have been at Gold Level throughout the day: a sign of the seriousness.

  It started with the other party – with breathtaking cynicism (Sabbagh is right about that) – declaring that they would be withdrawing for the day as a mark of respect for the dead. ‘The martyrs of Ghent,’ they called them – which sounded like the title of another altarpiece, I mused at a low point. Not entirely appropriately, perhaps. They have been holding a vigil in their prayer room, though not saying prayers as such, I am advised. Apparently, Muslims are forbidden to pray for the souls of non-believers. Did Noor hold to this offensive injunction? I wondered. Probably not. Though my next thought was to enjoin myself to stop wondering what Noor might be thinking. What mattered was his party’s line, which has been that continuing with the talks, getting on with the business of peace-making, is the more respectful response – a response that is of course as self-serving as the other party’s withdrawal, however much I might personally sympathise with it.

  Fifty-nine killed. Another eighty-eight injured. Not the highest number of casualties we have seen in recent years, but the very fact that we are almost inured to carnage on this scale tells its own story. It was one of these lorry attacks – in this case, two lorries, ploughing into a political rally staged by a right-wing party. The party leader is known for his vehement anti-immigrant views, and he and his followers are not – to say the least – the most pleasant people in the world, though that is hardly to the point and certainly no justification. As it happened, he – De Smet – and most of the senior figures in the party escaped unhurt. The casualties were overwhelmingly ordinary supporters, curious bystanders or incurious passers-by – or indeed, counter-demonstrators. Even so, you can imagine how this is playing politically across the continent.

  Sabbagh has been insistent throughout the day that the group which has claimed responsibility for the incident is no longer an ally. ‘The alliance we briefly had with them was always a loose one anyway,’ he added. ‘But at a certain point, as you know, Mr Behrends, the regime was crushing us; the situation was critical. How do you say it? We were a ragtag army – opposition forces, various separatists and, yes, religious militants, without a unified command, and bound only by most desperate circumstance.’

  The information I was receiving through the day suggested that the alliance was not only stronger than Sabbagh suggested, but more intact. What was less clear was the extent to which the attack was in fact directed by the militant group in question. The drivers of the lorries, both of whom were shot dead close to the scene, were identified as local boys, Brussels-born and radicalised – ‘home-grown terrorists’, as they say.

  ‘Mr Behrends, who I know is a student of his continent’s history,’ Noor chipped in. He had joined the early-evening session, but not contributed much, it must be said. ‘Mr Behrends will recall the alliance between Great Britain, the United States and Stalin’s Russia to defeat a common enemy, the greater evil, Nazi Germany. Sometimes―’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Sabbagh interrupted with untypical brusqueness. He had judged – rightly – that Noor drawing this parallel at this time was not likely to be well received by me. Noor, a little shaken, withdrew from the exchange – a nod of the head; a stiffening of the back. He had clearly overreached himself. Quite right, I thought. This correction was overdue. Something of the proper order had been re-established. Noor needed to remember I was much the more senior figure, a diplomat of repute and long-standing. There had been too much of this sense – just a slight pulse in the air between us – that we were equal partners in some sort of joint enterprise. Or at least, two men who understood each other in a way that others didn’t. But he was wrong about that. I had continued to chair these talks with the most scrupulous even-handedness. There was no special closeness between me and Noor. And if I had given him that impression, that was a lapse on my part. ‘The point is, Mr Behrends,’ Sabbagh continued, addressing me directly, ‘we have long repudiated all the activities of these terrorists. They are butchers and barbarians. All that is happening here is that the regime …’

  We worked all day on a form of words; something Sabbagh’s leader, back in the region, could put his name to. It was a process not made easier by the most unhelpful statement from the other side rushed out in the immediate aftermath of the attack. That and this vigil of theirs was a destabilising move,
I felt. By withdrawing for the day, they had pushed us into a proximity with the other side, thereby upsetting the exquisite balance of the talks. The absence of one side and not the other became more and more uncomfortable. We shouldn’t have worked all day on something for Noor’s leader, I realised too late in the day. The other side, the regime side, had played their hand more cleverly, I began to think. Though, in truth, I didn’t know what to think – except that I had handled things very badly.

  And all the time, I was thinking of Ghent. Not so much about the people of Ghent, or the victims of the attack, but of the Vrijdagmarkt, and of other squares, and of bridges and streets and canals and cafés. I was remembering places dear to us, in other words, and thinking how my precious perception of them had been disturbed, and perhaps for ever altered. Not in a foundational sense, but there would be that slight re-ordering of my thoughts about Ghent from now on. There would just be a beat in which this terrible terrorist incident came to mind before anything else. Before I recalled our many happy times there, before I thought of you and me together, which was all, really, that Ghent meant for us.

  This must sound most self-absorbed, and, late in the day, when I watched a television report for the first time, my thoughts did extend beyond ‘our Ghent’, as it were, and indeed beyond the ramifications for the talks. The TV correspondent used an obvious framing device: top-and-tailing his report with the story of a five-year-old Turkish girl, Elif – ‘little Elif’, as she quickly became known – who was the first named fatality, and the youngest.

  An immigrant Muslim child killed by Islamic extremists targeting an anti-immigrant rally: the point was not lost on us. Nor the irony, if irony it was. We knew we were being manipulated. But we were moved nonetheless. (And I say ‘we’ because I saw tears in the eyes of all my team – hardened as they are – as we watched this TV report together in the hotel lounge.) Indeed, this element of manipulation was essential to release emotion in us. Up until then, the enormity of the attack was such that we could not process it, and anyway we immediately channelled the anger and fear and sorrow it generated into dealing with the geopolitical consequences. We were lucky to have that outlet, in some ways. We could tell ourselves that we were working so that ‘some good would come from this tragedy’, that we were helping to create conditions in which it would ‘never happen again’, that we were building a peace that would be ‘a lasting memorial’. Just such bromides were being spouted by politicians and civic leaders in Ghent and far beyond. Same tactic: deflection. But it doesn’t do to deflect deep feeling for too long. This is another thing Caroline taught me.

  It was welcome, then, that the atrocity had been reduced in dimension, packaged, to the size of a five-year-old, a huggable little thing, kitted out – in the photograph that had been released of her – in a woolly bobble hat, a bright anorak and a Peppa Pig rucksack. Rendered thus, the horror was bearably unbearable. A sliver of the parents’ grief, rocking us for a moment – that dry gulp, that abysmal shudder – but releasing us back on the other side, where sadness is sweetness, stirring proof of common humanity, almost feel-good.

  You? No, you were not brought up today, as you are not most days, though today the non-mentioning was the more studied for being top-of-mind. Exquisite and literal pains were taken. Lines in the forehead; a tightness around the eyes: these intended to make clear to me that I, you, us were in their thoughts, their prayers even, but they would never do anything so crass as to … Though Noor, right at the end of proceedings, started to say something. ‘Could I just say personally …’ What desperation was this? Again, Sabbagh cut him short, whether sensing or not. Noor’s humiliation was complete. Worse for him might follow. I took a savage delight in that. The day needed an injection of malice on my part. Any inclination to softness would have finished me.

  Noor’s own wife – admit it; you are expecting me to say: died in an air strike or was blown up in a car bomb? – is still living. The file on Noor is not specific about where; she has been at various times in Damascus, Amman, Cairo, Tunis. She is, like you, a medical doctor. In paediatrics rather than psychiatry. Noor himself is a doctor of philosophy. Degrees from the American University of Beirut, Sciences Po, the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture. He and his wife met at the first of these. There is not a single extant photograph of her, which is surprising and lends her mystery – probably undeserved. If she were a ‘subject of interest’, a drone or satellite image of her could have been obtained, wherever she is in the world, prior or not to her elimination.

  These files: do they have something similar on us? Of course they do. We are all looking for any vanities or foibles. Where to probe. What to massage. What do they have on me? I wonder. It is all part of the psychology of this game. That I want to know. That I can’t just look myself up. That I know what I know about them but don’t know what they know about me.

  I have neglected to mention it until now, but I have not neglected to think it: for every one of our Ghents, they have endured hundreds. They have Friday markets that have been attacked not just once, but multiply. Where the stalls are set up each day, amid uncleared rubble, on stones baked brown with blood, almost in expectation of a suicide attack or a massive car bomb. Then the funerals are attacked and the emergency services attending these funerals are attacked. Dead piled upon dead piled upon dead. Cries of grief becoming calls for revenge becoming cries of grief. And on and on it goes. They have their Annas too. (Not Noor, but several of the members of both delegations have lost wives.) And armies of little Elifs …

  Ah now, have I betrayed myself? Armies: is that the appropriate word? Am I at some level thinking of armies with bombs packed into their Peppa Pig rucksacks? Am I at some level thinking their dead matter less than our dead? Is that it, Mr Behrends?

  Yes, there is something in that, Dr Noor, as you insist on the point. It is why I resist so strenuously any exercise in equivalence. To take the instance you yourself have raised: children as perpetrators as well as victims. We would never sink so low. There are lines we do not cross. There are moral differences that at times amount to a gulf. Though that is not to say that we are not implicated, even where we are not directly involved, through alliances, proxies, arms sales, diplomatic failures, histories stretching back. We are implicated by dint of being human. The pathogen is species-wide and infects us all. That is why we are here.

  War may now seem unimaginable on our old continent, but just think, what wars to get here! Wars of such destruction, atrocity and chaos! Wars of such virulence that finally, after centuries, millennia, and the one last hemoclysm – and that after a war to end all wars – we seemingly immunised ourselves against war. At most the odd outbreak in sixty, seventy years. The Balkans, the Ukraine. Nothing central to the nervous system of Pax Europaea. But then, who is to say this new normal will last? The End of History – remember that? Fukuyama has never lived that down. I went to a talk by him in Davos last year. He had a new book out, but no one was very interested in that.

  In the meantime, we have found this other thing to occupy ourselves with. The business of peace. Brokerage and arbitrage. Whenever there is war elsewhere in the world – and there is no shortage; we make sure of that – we offer our services. Suave representatives of the savage protagonists are invited over and quarantined in luxury. Our best resorts, once sanatoria for the treatment of tuberculosis and other chronic diseases, are now sanatoria for the treatment of war. Our magic mountains, we trust, will cast their convalescent spell. The waters of our spa towns will be psychosomatically curative.

  The picture I have in my mind is of an austere and monumental grey stone building; clerical in character, a seminary or the refectory of a monastery, perhaps? Two lines of Gothic arched windows, the lower line taller and more sculpted than the line above. A steeply pitched and tiled roof, punctuated with projecting roof windows. The mass of the building rising out of and reflecting in the black of the canal. A door with steps down to water level; those same steps leading back up to water
level. A mirror image. There is no boat. And there are no lights in any of the windows. The evocation is deliciously sinister – a bat flits out of one of the windows, perhaps – certainly somewhat mysterious.

  That was not the whole of it, of course. The building is artfully lit to create this effect. Indeed, the whole medieval quarter is illuminated in this way – see the Ghent Light Plan, first designed in 1998 and the winner of numerous prizes. Many other cities have followed suit. This is a city as a stage set, a brilliant fake: the Dark Ages subtly electrified. See also any number of restorative cleanings and repointings. Frontages re-rendered as they never were.

  And when we are placed in the picture, you will see that we are walking back to the hotel from ‘our’ restaurant, hand in hand, pleasantly drunk, mildly horny. I think it is early spring. A pleasantly warm day, but a distinct nip in the late-evening air. A very comfortable bed, in a slightly overheated room, awaits us. We will probably pass on the sex but will sleep deliciously. Almost post-coitally. Perhaps in the morning we will be more in the mood. Perhaps not.

  The waiter has just returned with my dry martini and a little bowl of salted cashew nuts. I thank him. His name is Anton, I believe, though I do not thank him by name. I have never been the type to do that. Maybe that is a pity, but there it is. I won’t change now.

  I am in the bar, if you’re wondering. Yes, again. I have managed to nab the chesterfield by the great open fire. Cruickshank claims his room at his university hall of residence (he went to Exeter) was rather smaller than this fireplace, which might almost be described as ‘walk-in’. The woodpile outside the hall is taller than a man and runs along an entire end of the building. Whole tree trunks are hauled down the mountain using chains and a sled and a snowmobile. Then men set to work with chainsaws. We hear the noise during the sessions. Those metal teeth tearing through wood flesh.