People in Glass Houses

by Shirley Hazzard

  ‘Yes. This is predictable.’ Miss Bass relaxed in her chair.

  ‘Immediately after my arrival, meetings were set up with local officials to alert them to Civic Coordination projects in the vicinity and to inform them of the terms of my assignment as agreed between their own government and the Organization.’ Edrich returned to the film, where a herd of shaggy goats had appeared in the main street, followed by a donkey. ‘A committee was appointed to evaluate needs and resources and to establish work priorities.’ The scene changed to a row of sunburnt men in dungarees and open shirts. One was leaning self-consciously on a tall staff; another was waving at the camera. ‘After a certain initial language confusion — owing to a particularly corrupt dialect spoken in this region — my project was accepted enthusiastically, although a slower time-table was eventually agreed upon.’

  Here the film came to a splicing, and a series of horizontal black lines twitched frantically up the screen.

  ‘I believe the pictures will speak for themselves from here on.’

  There followed, when the film resumed, a succession of scenes involving prodigious bodily labour of all kinds. One by one the men and women of the town passed across the screen — carrying great baskets of earth, digging deep and narrow ditches, or with muscles braced and heads bowed, pushing against a boulder. Once Edrich himself was glimpsed sitting on a rock and mopping his brow. And once, to the horror of Flinders, a tree was chopped down. A bridge was built, across a stream whose course was subsequently diverted. A little blockhouse of raw brick was laboriously constructed among the whitewashed domes and in no time at all bore the legend ‘Administration Building’ in three languages. In the final episode, every able-bodied member of the community was shown on hands and knees, breaking stones for a road that would connect the area to the nearest industrial centre.

  The film came to its end in a shower of black and white flecks, and the lights were turned on. Members of the meeting got up to stretch their legs and to question Edrich about his fourteen points. A concealed fan was switched on and vibrated with a slow hum. The technician was running the film back onto its spool. Watching him, Flinders regretted that the course of events could not be similarly rewound. What of the women at the well, he wondered? What of the laughing child that somewhere on the machine spun back to his former deplorable condition — and the flock of chickens now laying their eggs in electrified coops all through the night? What improvements were being inflicted on those static industries that had for centuries repeated themselves in the graceful jars about the well?

  ‘Coordination’, the voices were insisting, and ‘basic procedures’. Edrich was pulling out his chair and saying ‘issue-oriented’. Flinders resisted claustrophobia: the room was like an upholstered bomb-shelter.

  ‘You have your films with you, Mr Flinders?’

  Rodriguez-O’Hearn was looking at him. Flinders brought up his briefcase from beside his chair and produced an envelope of coloured slides. ‘Only a few stills, sir.’

  The meeting was settling down again. He was being listened to. He knew that he cut a poor figure with his nine or ten slides, after Edrich’s film. The Arabs had rather disliked being photographed, and in any case he had often forgotten to take a camera on field trips. He handed the envelope over to the technician with a sinking heart. ‘They’re not too clear,’ he said.

  Flinders had never made a speech before. He had been intimidated, too, by the eloquence of Edrich. His hands were shaking, and he placed them flat on the table before him. All the faces were turned, waiting for him to begin.

  ‘In classical times,’ he said, ‘the lands bordering the Mediterranean were much more thickly vegetated. We know this, for example, from Euripides’ description of the area around Thebes, or Homer’s account. …’

  Here he paused to draw breath, and the Chief of Official Records asked if he had submitted his final report.

  Mr Addison confirmed that a short account of Flinders’s performance in the field was at that moment with his own typist.

  ‘But your final report, Mr Flinders,’ the Records Chief persisted with thinly veiled patience. ‘Your evaluation of the success of your assignment, in six copies, your recommendations for future concrete measures.’

  ‘Given the fluidity of the situation,’ Edrich put in, with a sympathetic nod to Flinders.

  Flinders said slowly that the success of a mission such as his must depend on the survival of trees which had only just been planted.

  The Records Chief declared that such a condition could not be regarded as an obstacle to the submission of a final report.

  ‘One must give them a chance,’ Flinders said. ‘The growth of a hybrid poplar or even a eucalyptus may be very little in the first seasons.’

  ‘A long-term project, in other words,’ said Edrich.

  ‘In other words,’ Flinders agreed.

  Rodriguez-O’Hearn addressed him down the table. ‘Why, Mr Flinders, have we been subjected to so much erosion since classical times?’

  Flinders looked at him. ‘In the main, sir, it is due to over-grazing.’

  Edrich said, ‘Correct.’

  How does he know it’s correct? Flinders wondered irritably. He went on to speak of the movement of soil at certain elevations and in certain winds, the presence of useful or destructive insects, the receptivity of the land — all the circumstances, in fact, which had led to the selection of the trees at El Attara. ‘In conditions such as these,’ he said, looking along the row of fatigued faces, ‘the drought-resistant species has the only hope for survival.’

  ‘And it is this type you are concerned with?’ asked Rodriguez-O’Hearn.

  Flinders nodded. ‘Very often these don’t give dramatic results. You see — some of the most valuable types in the world are unspectacular. But they hold their own by … pereverance.’

  The slides had been set up, and the technician asked for permission to turn out the lights. Flinders got up and stood by the screen. In the dark he could not find Edrich’s ruler, and at first, being a rather awkward man, he got in the way of the picture. The slides were in colour and, although Flinders had no skill whatever as a photographer, they did derive a certain clarity from the sharp air and splendid light of the countryside.

  The first slide had been taken from a hilltop; it was a panorama of the area to the south of El Attara. The contours of this country were European rather than African and Flinders had often found it possible there to imagine how France or Italy might have looked before spaciousness was diminished by overpopulation. The hills were sometimes covered by green grasses so short that after heavy rain the soil showed through in violet streaks. This picture, however, had been taken in summer, and the pebbled course of a dry stream wound through a valley of orange groves and cypress trees. The next pictures were of a depleted slope, furrowed by weather, on whose receding earth a number of sheep were pessimistically feeding.

  Flinders said, ‘This is the site we chose for the first plantation.’

  The pictures that followed were so repetitious that he could not help wondering why he had taken them. The same hillside, and a large area nearby, were shown in various stages of preparation — but these preparations were so gradual and so little obvious to the layman that there seemed to have been no purpose in recording them.

  ‘The work near El Attara’, Flinders said, ‘serves as an experiment. The country has a conservation programme now, and the local authorities have their own plans for the future.’

  Someone said uneasily, ‘And this is good.’

  Flinders said, ‘Naturally.’

  Edrich called out, ‘Correct.’

  Rodriguez-O’Hearn’s voice inquired whether Flinders spoke Arabic.

  ‘Not very well, sir, I’m afraid.’ Flinders hesitated. ‘I’ve been studying for three years. Semitic languages are difficult for Westerners.’

  ‘You made yourself understood, however?’

  Flinders smiled. ‘As to that, sir,’ he said, ‘how does one kno
w?’

  The last slide came on to the screen. It was a shot taken by Flinders on the morning of the first planting. Half-way up a slope, a parked truck leant inwards on a narrow, unsurfaced road. The angle of the truck was made more precarious by the ditch into which it was partly sunk and the way in which the photograph had been taken. That the truck had just stopped was evident from the cloud of white dust still rising about its wheels. Nevertheless, the gate of the truck’s open back was down, and two young men in djellabahs had scrambled aboard. One was already handing down to a forest of upstretched hands the first of the small trees with which the truck was loaded. The waiting peasants — the men in brown robes, the women mostly unveiled and wrapped in the bright colours of the country folk — reached up excitedly, but the youth on the truck held the plant with extreme care. Behind him in the truck, young trees were stacked up in even rows, their roots wrapped in burlap; on the hillside above the road, dozens of small craters had already been turned in the fresh earth.

  Flinders had forgotten taking the picture, although now he remembered it with a pang of nostalgic pleasure — the brilliant January morning, the shouts of delight which greeted the arrival of the loaded truck, the many serious shakings of the hand, the good omens invoked, and the long day’s work that followed. He recognized all the faces in the picture — most were from the vicinity of El Attara, and a few from villages close to the planting site. Everyone in the photograph seemed to be smiling, even two children who were rolling up stones for the wheels of the truck.

  A voice in the dark said, ‘They look happy, at any rate.’

  The technician said, ‘I guess that’s all.’

  The lights went on, and the slide, remaining a moment longer on the screen, grew pale. Flat and dreamlike, the hillside stood at one end of the conference room, and the reaching figures threw up their arms on an empty wall.

  With a click, the picture vanished. Addison lit a cigarette. The members of the meeting were looking at their watches and speaking of appointments, perhaps thinking of their afternoon tea. A girl with flat black hair had come in and was handing a message to Rodriguez-O’Hearn. The one or two questions asked of Flinders had, he felt, little to do with what he had said, and he thought this must be his fault. Addison made an appointment to lunch with him next day, and the girl from Peaceful Uses said shyly that she looked forward to discussing with him the effects of nuclear testing in the Sahara. In the meantime, Rodriguez-O’Hearn, whom Flinders had wanted to meet, had disappeared. A secretary came in to empty the ashtrays and align the empty chairs. It occurred to Flinders that another meeting was about to take place here: the very idea was exhausting.

  He left the room and walked down a grey corridor. He wished he had gone to the trouble of taking a proper film, like Edrich, or had at least prepared the right kind of final report. At El Attara he had thought these things peripheral, but here they seemed to matter most of all. He should have been able to address the meeting in its own language — that language of ends and trends, of agenda and addenda, of concrete measures in fluid situations, which he had never set himself to master. At El Attara they had needed help and he had done what he could, but he found himself unable to speak with confidence about this work. He knew the problem of erosion to be immense; and the trees, being handed down that way, had looked so few and so small.

  At the elevator he met Edrich. Edrich seemed older and shorter than he had in the conference room. Flinders would have told him what was in his heart, but he somehow felt that Edrich was not the right recipient for the information. They took the Down elevator together, and Edrich got off at the Clinic. Flinders continued to the main floor and, leaving the building by a side entrance, went out through the rose garden.

  Rodriguez-O’Hearn put down the telephone. Hearing him ring off, his secretary brought him his afternoon coffee in a cardboard container.

  ‘Thank you, Miss Shamsee.’

  ‘Regular with sugar.’ She pulled up a metal blind. In the early outside darkness, red and yellow lights were being turned on. The river icily reflected the crimson Frosti-Cola sign.

  ‘Any other messages?’

  She put a slip of paper in his calendar. ‘Tomorrow afternoon, meeting at three-thirty. Two experts reporting: Suzuki in public accounting, and Raman, malaria control.’

  ‘Better get up their files.’

  ‘I’ve already sent for them.’

  Rodriguez-O’Hearn drank his coffee, and made a space for the container among the papers on his blotter. He tipped back his chair. ‘To think,’ he said, ‘Miss Shamsee, that when I was a young man I wanted to be the conductor of an orchestra.’

  She took the empty container off the desk and dropped it in the waste-basket. ‘That’s what you are,’ she said, ‘in a manner of speaking.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said, but tipped his chair down again. ‘Such mistakes we make,’ he said.

  When the girl went out he looked through his In-tray. He then wrote a note asking Addison to bring Flinders to see him the following day, signed several recommendations for new experts, and began to read a report, making notes in the margin. When his secretary next came in, however, with an armful of files, she found him looking out of the window.

  ‘Miss Shamsee,’ he said gravely, ‘I’m afraid we have suffered much erosion since classical times.’

  She was used to him, and merely put the files in his Intray. She saw, as she did so, that on the edge of his blotter he had drawn a small tree.

  4. Swoboda’s Tragedy

  It was the documents that finally got Swoboda down. His colleagues supposed that the further postponement of his promotion had been the last straw, but in fact it was the documents that did it. In the past he had been ready to carry out the often tedious duties imposed on him by the Organization — he was by nature almost too ready in this respect — but the documents finally did it. It was too much.

  Like most great turning-points in life, the matter presented itself gradually. Mr Bekkus had stopped one day at Swoboda’s desk and casually asked, ‘Oh Swoboda, would you,’ and Swoboda had said, as he had always said, ‘Certainly Mr Bekkus,’ and that was how it began. The arrangement was that he would send out these documents each morning, just for a few days until someone else was found to do it. The documents, which came in various related series all beginning with the symbol ‘SAGG’ (Services of Administration and General Guidance), then started to arrive daily, in stacks of one hundred apiece, on Swoboda’s desk. He had been instructed to send them out in separate large brown envelopes to their eighty-five designated recipients throughout the Organization, in his spare time. But several factors operated against this plan. In the first place, Swoboda had no spare time. In the second place, it was impossible for him to attend to any of his normal clerical work until he had cleared the stacks of documents off his desk each morning; by then much of the day was gone and he was faced with the necessity of staying after hours. And thirdly, no attempt was ever made to find another person to cope with the documents and they were thus laid, almost literally, at Swoboda’s door for ever.

  Swoboda was not a brilliant man. He was a man of what used to be known as average and is now known as above-average intelligence. The years during which he might have been formally educated had been spent by him in a camp for displaced persons, but he had educated himself by observation and reflection, and had exploited to the full a natural comprehension in human affairs. He was not audacious; he lacked aptitude for self-advancement. As a member of the Social and Anthropological Department once put it, Swoboda was over-adjusted to his problem. However, if he had lost his opportunities, he had kept his self-respect. Now he felt this to be threatened. Mr Bekkus had let him down — if this expression may be used where there has been no bolstering-up. The work was not fit for Swoboda to do. It was work one might have given a deficient person in order to employ him.

  At intervals in the course of his years with the Organization, commendatory remarks had been entered on Swoboda’s personal
file. From time to time, one of his superiors had told him that he deserved promotion — that it was a pity, even a disgrace, that nothing had been done for him by those responsible. At first, on these occasions, Swoboda had felt encouraged and had related them at home to his wife as a guarantee of advancement in the near future. Eventually, however, it became clear to him that responsibility for his promotion lay with the very officials who deplored his situation, and that they had no intention whatever of exerting themselves to the necessary extent on his behalf — having, as they imagined, dealt with the matter by proclaiming it a disgrace. Their exertions, if any, were reserved for those more insistent, less self-effacing than Swoboda. Finally grasping this situation, Swoboda declined to make life hideous for himself and those about him by constant complaint, as was the habit of so many of his colleagues. He kept his trouble to himself and sought consolation in his natural philosophy.

  All the same, it hurt him. It was demoralizing. It amounted simply to this: that no one was willing to take a chance on him.

  For several months Swoboda uncomplainingly sent out the SAGG documents. For several months he arrived home in the dark to find his dinner in the oven, his wife in distress, his child already in bed. If he were absent for a day, for illness or holiday, he was haunted by the certainty that a double load of documents would await him on return. During his annual vacation, an empty office on another floor had to be appropriated to house the accumulation. At last a day came when he was visited by a sensation that had been familiar to him years before, but which, even in his worst moments at the Organization, he had not re-experienced until now. And this sensation overcame his diffidence. He acted.

  It was a sensation associated with his first job, in a time before he came to the Organization. Released from his DP camp, equipped with a coveted visa, sped on his way by relief committees, the young Swoboda had obtained employment in a fruit factory. Here he was to earn his first wages and his first right to call himself an independent person. This factory was to provide the slipway from which his sane new life would be launched. Here the world would make amends for his deprivation. Willing, even jubilant, Swoboda had reported for duty and punched his clock for the first time.