Borderlines

by Michela Wrong

  ‘We’ve found it.’ My mobile phone call caught Winston scouring the morning papers at his desk in Washington. In the gathering dusk, Francesca and I were sitting at one of those overpriced cafés in Piazza Navona the guidebooks tell you to avoid, celebratory glasses of chilled white wine before us. It had taken two days. The letter and attached map had fallen out of a file dedicated to a 1927 survey of Tripoli port, which Tadesse had called up the previous November. ‘And you were right. There is something dodgy about it.’

  22

  ‘Good morning, and welcome to these magnificent surroundings,’ intoned Judge Mautner. ‘I am delighted to welcome the representatives of the parties to the opening session of our five-day boundary hearing on this fine May morning. I know everyone present has been keenly awaiting this moment, and I also know that each party fully appreciates the gravity of what will take place between these four walls.’

  ‘Oh, do get on with it,’ Winston muttered, so quietly only I could hear.

  I had on what I thought of as one of my Jake outfits. Tight, black, androgynous, and probably twice as expensive as anything anyone else in the room was wearing. A hangover from my previous life, a legacy of the Paula who once was. Putting into practice a habit acquired at law school, where dressing up was the prescribed way of dealing with performance anxiety, I had gone through the ritual of light foundation, mascara, eyeliner and a wisp of eye-shadow in the Peace Palace bathroom.

  Winston hadn’t noticed until we’d got under the bright lights of the Small Hall of Justice, when he’d looked shocked. ‘You’ve done something,’ said the man who hated change. He was in the ubiquitous lemon sherbet suit; he must have had ten versions of it.

  ‘War paint.’

  ‘It makes you look … um … different. Harder.’

  ‘Mission accomplished, then.’

  Judge Mautner droned through the introductions, dutifully listing everyone present for the record. We had won the toss on which side got to go first and I was quivering with adrenalin, my heels soundlessly drumming on the floor. Yohannes, officially in charge of PowerPoint, was similarly hyped. Winston’s eyes were hooded, his posture so ostentatiously relaxed he looked as though he might slip off his chair. Across the way, Alexander was studying his nails, while Watts gazed at the ceiling.

  ‘So, without further ado, let me invite the agent from Lira to begin his presentation.’

  Judge Mautner turned towards us, his eyebrows beckoned suggestively, and Kennedy, the foreign minister, sprang to his feet. This was scheduled to be his only speech and he was intent on making the most of it, slowly pivoting on his heels as he surveyed the room. He cleared his throat with unnecessary emphasis.

  ‘Mr Chairman, commissioners, Your Excellency, my esteemed colleagues and counterparts, ladies and gentlemen …’ he began.

  Judge Mautner looked alarmed and switched on his microphone. ‘Perhaps, Your Excellency, we should dispense with the honorifics, given that we have all, to a certain extent, got to know one another over the last few months.’

  The minister looked crestfallen. ‘Very well. Er … As I was about to say. Yes. Indeed.’ Then he was off. ‘My country may be one of Africa’s smallest, but there is nothing modest about its instinct for justice or its proud tradition of independence, as ancient as the mountains themselves. We not only threw off the shackles of Western colonialism, we triumphed over the horrors of occupation. Our people have always shown themselves ready to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend the most fundamental of all human rights: the right to exist as a nation state …’

  I became aware of the gentlest of raspings. I glanced at Winston and realised, to my horror, that his eyes were firmly closed. He was snoring. I leaned to one side as though consulting my papers, moved an elbow surreptitiously until it touched him. Then, slipping a hand beneath it, I gave his arm a sharp pinch.

  He arched one eyebrow without opening his eyes. ‘Just a bit of jet-lag,’ he murmured, adjusting his bifocals. ‘Not to worry.’

  And then it was his turn.

  I once worked as a waitress in a seafood restaurant in Brighton, a brief summer job. The black-and-white-tiled venue, close enough to the sea to hear the pebbles’ roar, was modest but its owners nursed big ambitions. Alongside Carmen, the flirtatious Spanish meeter-and-greeter, Carlos, the morose Mexican barman, Angelo, his deputy, and a bevy of waitresses, I ferried squid ink and pumpkin risotto, fresh scallops in lime and coriander coulis, and miso cod with pickled ginger to the tables, a small cog in a humming machine. We never won any stars, and the reviews came too late to stop the place closing. But we knew. At two a.m., when the chefs were cleaning the Japanese knives and the last dishwasher load was churning, there would be, in the exchange of satisfied glances, the quiet acknowledgement that together we had pulled off something miraculous. All the staff bitched about their colleagues, none of us liked one another enough to socialise after hours, yet we felt a grudging affection. Rising above our individual failings, we had achieved magnificence for a moment, and we were grateful for the chance.

  Working with Winston was like that. Even today, even after everything, I feel retrospectively privileged to have played a small part in a performance all the more poignant for remaining effectively unrecorded – the transcripts, which omit timing, expression and emphasis, give a flavourless hint of a proceeding whose flamboyant virtuosity was doomed to be unappreciated by clients who just wanted the job done, never mind the flourishes.

  The other side worked through every argument with the dogged application of a prisoner breaking rocks on Robben Island. Correct pronunciation of local names, towns and geographical features was not a courtesy they extended to either government. If a point could be made once, they saw no reason not to make it four times, and even the commissioners – men with a high tolerance for legal stodge – sometimes rolled their eyes in exasperation. They stuck to bullet points; we used as many visual aids as we could legally justify. Winston would have sneaked a musical soundtrack in if he could have got away with it. He cracked jokes; they never cracked a smile. It was like watching a mastodon chomping through the undergrowth, small eyes unblinking as the great jaws worked stolidly away. Where they lumbered, Winston pirouetted. When they droned, he chirruped. ‘The trial lawyer’s first duty is to entertain,’ Winston would intone, when we analysed the day’s proceedings back at the Royal Delft. ‘Bore your audience – and let us never forget that they are an audience – and you’ve already lost half the argument.’

  And I don’t think I’m imagining that when it was our turn to present the commissioners perked up, sat a little straighter in their leather-covered thrones; a hint of amusement appeared on previously stony faces and the atmosphere in the Small Hall of Justice subtly changed. Winston prepared meticulously in advance, but the order, links, illustrations and framing of his arguments were often done on the hoof. Nothing, he knew, was more appetising than the zing of freshness.

  At a nod from Winston, Yohannes tapped his keyboard and a black-and-white photograph appeared on the large screen set up on one side of the room. It showed a nineteenth-century dandy in vaguely military regalia, one hand languidly resting on a ceremonial sword. A huge moustache curled like a double question mark around a frankly mischievous mouth.

  ‘Count Lorenzo Camillo Fittipaldi was an emotionally incontinent man,’ Winston began. ‘It would be fair to say he lived life to the full. He eloped with his governess when still in his teens, fathered fourteen children – five out of wedlock.’

  Judge Mautner was staring at Winston with incredulity. ‘What exactly are you playing at?’ hovered on his lips. Registering the rising gavel, Winston picked up speed. ‘He was married three times, and spent much of his life as an adventurer and mercenary, surviving adventures that seem to have come straight from the pages of Sinbad the Sailor.’

  He took a deep breath and paused. ‘But, of course, we are concerned here with the professional man. And the professional man was a nit-picker. A stickler for accuracy, a sk
illed mathematician and an amateur engineer, he revelled in detail. He was a draughtsman so skilled his back-of-the-envelope sketches could be used as templates by architects. And it is to that count and his work that I ask you to look now, for it was he who provided us with the authoritative definition of the border drawn between Italy and Darrar back in July 1890 when, dispatched on assignment from Rome, he carried out the first complete survey of the area, moving from settlement to settlement in a long caravan of mules, camels and soldiers.

  ‘My team has provided each of you with a full transcript of his report and a copy of the map he sketched, the outcome of an official fact-finding mission funded by the Italian Foreign Ministry. Next slide, if you please, Yohannes.’

  Winston practically stroked the documents in front of him. As well he might. It had taken the office, with Dr Berhane’s help, weeks to locate a photocopier in Lira that could properly capture the fading colours of the original and retain the full legibility of Fittipaldi’s spidery copperplate.

  ‘I would ask the commissioners to look at the overall shape of Fittipaldi’s border. We have provided you with blow-ups of the eastern, central and western sector. Taking the eastern sector, where the port of Sanasa lies, you will note this distinctive diagonal. The slope is produced by running a straight line from the ancient clifftop monastery of Tolandino until it hits the junction between the Shishay and Abubed rivers. The Shishay subsequently serves as the frontier as far as the sea, and the river’s mouth lies south-east of Sanasa. You will see – here, we have measured it for you – that the diagonal is exactly fifteen degrees to the horizontal. For the skiers among us, this is the gentlest of green runs. Now let me direct you to the hundred and twenty other diagrams we have submitted, also in your folders.’

  Yohannes clicked on cue through the images, as Winston read out the dates and names of the surveyors: ‘This map is the work of Sicilian cartographer Antonio di Perri, sent to the Horn of Africa by Rome in 1895. This one was drafted later that same year by British merchant Thomas Cullin. Here are two produced in 1902 by Portuguese railway contractor Pedro da Souza, exploring the possibility of a narrow-gauge railway … In summary, each of these documents demonstrates this identical diagonal, with this same fifteen-degree angle.’

  I remembered Winston’s words back in the Ristorante Torino: ‘Did you know that a map carries almost no legal weight?’ As promised, he wasn’t letting that inconvenient fact stand in his way. A hundred and twenty maps, I thought. Not bad, surely.

  He took questions from the commissioners, flicking backwards and forwards through the various maps until it was clear they had run out of comments.

  ‘Let me conclude with my prize exhibit,’ said Winston. ‘This is a photograph taken just outside the Interior Ministry in Darrar, sent to me by a loyal customer of the premises in question. Some of his friends might say he is rather too loyal a customer, if his expanding waistline is anything to go by. This is one of the cardboard boxes in which the popular Red Sea restaurant on Revolution Square delivers its pizzas.’

  ‘SLICES … OF SHEER DELIGHT!’ ran the slogan on the box, superimposed on a map of the region and a grinning customer’s face. ‘As you can see, that diagonal, with its fifteen-degree angle, is so uncontested in the region that even carry-out restaurants in Darrar use it in their marketing.’

  A sudden snort of surprise from Yohannes. I looked at him with curiosity. He had spent weeks on this PowerPoint presentation but had clearly never fully digested what he was preparing. His hand was over his mouth now, stifling laughter. Eddie Connors gave an appreciative chuckle. François Rainier pursed his lips but could not prevent a quiet smile. The pizza-box shot was irrelevant, legally speaking, but it had amused the commissioners and, crucially, they were unlikely to forget it. We had imprinted our map of the border onto their subconscious minds without them even noticing the sleight of hand.

  I shot a look at the opposition. Winston’s presentation had pushed eccentricity as far as it could go without losing all claim to seriousness. The lawyers’ faces were blandly unreadable, but their foreign minister’s was as tight as a punching fist. He was staring at Winston with an expression of undiluted loathing.

  That evening, the team gathered in our headquarters at the Royal Delft to mull over the day’s events. ‘We could just buy a proper bottle of whisky, you know,’ I said, extracting a clutch of miniatures from the mini bar.

  ‘Ah, but these are so very dinky,’ said Winston, as I collected glasses from the adjoining bathrooms, ejecting toothbrushes as I went. We cracked open the bottles with a flourish and toasted ourselves.

  ‘Day one!’ said Winston. ‘Four to go.’

  ‘Day one!’ murmured Abraham and Yohannes, and we all took a gulp.

  ‘What is this?’ spluttered Abraham.

  ‘Oops, sorry, Abraham, looks like you got the Malibu. Here, swap it with my Bell’s.’

  He grimaced in manly disgust, downed my whisky as though cleansing his palate of an abomination, then left to watch football in the bar. Yohannes retired to a corner to check the following morning’s PowerPoint, leaving Winston and me to study the room-service menu.

  ‘Steak and chips or steak and chips, Winston?’

  ‘Oh, steak and chips, I think. Medium rare. And Dijon, not Coleman’s.’ I picked up the phone and placed the order, then lolled back on the double bed, savouring the moment of free time before we got back to work.

  ‘Impressions so far?’ asked Winston, polishing his glasses.

  ‘Fun, but frightening. As you’ve remarked a million times, it’s just very different from a court case, isn’t it? The commissioners got stuck in more than I expected.’

  ‘Yes. From our perspective, that’s all to the good. The more questions they put, the clearer a picture we can form of their foibles and idiosyncrasies. Knowledge that allows us to work our eventual crafty magic.’

  ‘You’re not implying, are you, that they’re anything other than coldly logical decision-making machines?’

  ‘Ah …’ Winston sipped his whisky, ‘When I was young and credulous I worked on that assumption – this tastes a bit of toothpaste, you know – but now I know better.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘When I started out I assumed law was like math. Here was this universe of beautifully limpid rules. A problem arises. You formulate an argument. If the premises are agreed, a certain verdict becomes inevitable. Axiom, deduction, proof. A bit like a Bach cantata. But the law isn’t like that. One of the major revelations of my working life has been the realisation that judges, commissioners, arbitrators don’t give a shit about rationality.’

  ‘I’m not used to you swearing, Winston.’

  ‘Blame it on your whisky-flavoured mouthwash. Believe me, the principle of one plus two equals three counts for nothing. I’m not saying these men and women aren’t smart enough to recognise logical sequiturs when they see them. They just view them as potted plants on a ballroom floor, there to be nimbly waltzed around.’

  ‘Are you saying it’s all actually politics?’

  ‘Not politics in the classic sense – I’m not suggesting the commissioners are covert Republicans or taking sides in some geostrategic power play, although I wouldn’t rule that out, either. I’m talking about the politics of competing world visions, the type of politics you – we – can influence rather than the sort we can’t.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand what you mean, Winston.’

  ‘Law students go into law for all the wrong reasons, wanting to believe in a world of structure and process. But that would mean missing all the fun. What we’re doing here is so much more creative than formulating a dry mathematical proof.’

  The person he was describing, I reflected, had been me. I had plunged into law in the search of intellectual rigour, a steadiness I’d been unable to find at home amid the shouting matches between my divorcing parents.

  ‘So what are we doing, then?’

  ‘Operating in a world of fluctuating passions a
nd subjective emotion, in which power lies with a group of people who fondly believe they possess all the merciless objectivity of a computer. So, to be effective, we need to imagine ourselves into their heads and turn those prejudices and quirks to our advantage, persuading them they always wanted what our side just happens to want.’

  ‘How do we do that with these commissioners?’

  ‘We vacuum up the tiniest hint of how they view the world and adjust our arguments accordingly. For example, it’s clear to me that Eddie Connors harbours certain romantic notions about nationalist stirrings in the region during pre-colonial times. If he’d bothered reading Peter Lewisham’s account of his parley with old One Eye, he might have grasped that patriotism is a nuanced, qualified sentiment, but I’m happy to pander to his adolescent view of history if it makes it a smidgeon more likely he’ll find in our favour.’

  Room service’s arrival interrupted his flow. ‘Maybe students prefer the maths analogy because it feels pure, virtuous,’ I said, signing the chit. ‘Some might find your approach rather cynical.’

  He looked up from the task in hand, surprised. He had started smearing a molecule-thin layer of Dijon mustard across the surface of his steak, just as he always did. ‘Cynical? Moi? You won’t find a bigger idealist in The Hague, dear Paula.’

  ‘You take a lot longer to undress these days.’

  Jake, lying in bed with a book, is watching me dither around the room, preparing my outfit for the following day. My ‘executive look’: cream silk blouse, Oscar de la Renta skirt and matching jacket, patent-leather high heels. Getting to the meeting from Lake Cottage will involve a painfully early start and a trip standing in a crammed commuter train. It would have been a lot easier, I reflect, to spend the night in Greenwich Village, take my time over breakfast, and stroll to the venue. But it’s been a while since we saw one another.

  ‘Do I?’ I say absently, not really listening. I’m looking for a pair of fresh tights.

  ‘It was one of the things I always loved about you, the speed with which you got naked. I never met a woman who could strip as fast. No fake modesty, no coyness, it was incredibly erotic. Now it’s more like an airline pilot running through checks before take-off.’