Yes!
You can tell me everything!
He listened, nodded and nodded again, uttering the odd, drawn-out “O.K.”, to show that he was listening, and in the end he said, So how can I help?
You’ve got to ask for me. Can you . . . request me? I want to come back to Trade. Or could you have a word with Queneau? You get on well with him. He listens to you. Maybe he can do something. I have to get out of Culture. I’m suffocating!
Yes, he said. All of a sudden he was scared. Perhaps that’s too strong a word. He felt a trepidation he could not explain. He never thought about his life. He had thought about his life back in the past – a long time ago when he’d had no life experience. They had been fantasies, dreams, he’d confused dreams with contemplation. It couldn’t be said that he had pursued his dreams. Just as a traveller heads to a particular platform at the station, so Kai-Uwe had made for the starting point of a journey to a particular destination, and ever since he had been on track. Deep down he knew that it was often simply luck that stopped you being derailed. As long as you were on track there was nothing else you had to think about. Life. Either it functions or it doesn’t. If it functions, then the “it” becomes replaced by “you”. You function. He didn’t think all this through; it just seemed clear to him. He confused this clarity with solid ground on which he was walking without having to think at every step. But now it felt slightly crumbly underfoot. Why? He didn’t ask himself the question, he merely felt a faint trepidation. I need to pop to the loo!
He washed his hands and looked at himself in the mirror. He didn’t feel like a stranger, but that isn’t the same as feeling familiar. Frigge slipped a Viagra tablet from his wallet. He always had one on him. He crunched it between his teeth, took a sip of water, then washed his hands again.
He knew that, like him, Fenia had to get up very early the next morning. Which meant they would have to go to bed soon. They had to function.
They took a taxi to his apartment in Ixelles. He faked desire for her; she faked an orgasm. The chemistry was right. The blue light of Bar Le Cerf Bleu’s neon sign on the other side of the road flashed through the window. Kai-Uwe Frigge got up to draw the curtain.
Was there a man at the window? Zorro. The Phantom. Batman. It looked like a comic-strip character painted on the wall of the abandoned house. All the windows of this building, diagonally opposite Hotel Atlas at the corner of rue de la Braie, were dark, and the display window of the shop was nailed up with boards on which fluttered the shreds of torn posters. On the wall beside it were graffiti, illegible words, – a secret script, symbols. In front of the building a construction hoarding bore the sign of the demolition firm De Meuter. Inspector Brunfaut knew that this black figure, framed by the window on the first floor of the dead house, was obviously not a graffito. But that was what it looked like. In all the nooks and crannies of this city the façades of buildings and firewalls were painted right up to the roofs with comic-book images, copies of, and variations on, drawings by Hergé or Morris, animals by Bonom or works by younger artists who regarded themselves as the heirs to these legends. If Brussels was an open book, it was a graphic novel.
Inspector Brunfaut had emerged from Hotel Atlas to instruct his colleagues in the van to do the rounds of the neighbouring houses, to ask if anyone might have seen anything from their window at the time in question.
It’s a good start to the year, Inspector!
Every day starts well, Brunfaut said. The rain had let up, the inspector stood with his legs apart, hitched up his trousers and let his gaze wander along the fronts of the buildings opposite as he spoke to the men. And then he saw it: the shadowy figure framed by the window.
There was a man standing at the window. Of a house under demolition. The inspector stared up at him. The man didn’t stir. Was it a real person up there? Or a dummy? Why would a dummy be standing at the window? Or was it a shadow, its contours deceiving him? Or a graffito after all? The inspector grinned. Not a real grin, of course, but an internal one. No, that was a man there! Was he looking down? Could he see the inspector peering up at him? What had he seen?
Right then! Inspector Brunfaut said. To work! You take this house, you that one! And you . . .
This derelict building too? But it’s empty!
Yes, this one too – look up there!
But the shadow man had vanished.
He stepped back from the window. Where were his cigarettes? In his coat, perhaps. His coat was on the kitchen chair, the only item of furniture left in the apartment. David de Vriend went into the kitchen and picked up the coat. What did he want? The coat. Why? He stood there indecisively. It was time to go. Yes. Here there was nothing left. To do. The apartment had been completely cleared out. He looked at a rectangular mark on the wall. A picture had hung there. “The Forest at Boortmeerbeek”, an idyllic landscape. He could remember putting it up. There it had remained for an entire life until he no longer saw it. And now it was an empty space to show that something had been on that wall which was no longer there. A life story: an empty outline on a length of wallpaper that itself had been pasted over a prehistory. Below it he could see the outline of the cupboard that had stood here. What had he kept in that cupboard? The sorts of things that accumulate over a lifetime. The filth behind it! Balls of fluff, streaks of greasy, sooty, mouldy grime. You can clean all your life, indeed, spend all your life cleaning, but in the end, when everything’s cleared out, a layer of filth remains. Behind every surface that you clean, behind every veneer that you polish. When you’re young don’t imagine there’ll be nothing rotting, mouldy or putrid when the time comes for your life to be cleared out. Perhaps you are young and think that you’ve had nothing yet of life, or too little. But the filth that lurks behind is still the filth of an entire life. All that remains is the filth because you are filth and you end up in filth. If you get old: lucky you! But you have deluded yourself because even if you’ve spent your entire given life cleaning – in the end everything is cleared out and what’s left to see? Filth. It’s behind everything, beneath everything, it’s the basis of everything you’ve been cleaning. A clean life. That’s what you had. Until the filth appears. That’s where the sink was. He washed up continually. He never possessed a dishwasher. He washed up every plate, every cup, straight after having used it. Whenever he drank a coffee alone – and he was alone, he was almost always alone – he drank it standing up beside the sink so he could wash the cup straight away, take the last sip of coffee and turn on the tap, it was always one and the same thing, wash out, dry up and wipe till it shone, then replace the cup so that everything was clean, this was always important to him, a clean life, and now . . . what’s visible where the sink was? Mildew, mould, grease, grime. Even in the darkness or the gloom you could see the filth. Nothing was there anymore, everything had been cleared out, but that was still there, that was still visible: the streaks of filth behind the cleaned life.
He put his coat down over the chair. He wanted to . . . what? He looked around. Why wasn’t he leaving? He ought to go. This was no longer the apartment he had lived in. These were just rooms in which a past life had existed. One more look around? Why? To stare at empty rooms? He went into the bedroom. The wooden floor was lighter where the bed had stood; in the dim light the faded rectangle looked like a large trapdoor. He walked past it to the window; why didn’t he walk across it, why, in this empty room, did he walk around it, as if fearful that this rectangle might really open up and devour him? He wasn’t afraid. The bed had always stood here, and he went from the door to the window as he had all his life: around the bed. He looked out: the fire escape of the next-door building, a school, was almost within arm’s reach. Once a year there was a fire drill. A siren would wail and the pupils would come down the fire escape in an orderly fashion. How often David de Vriend had stood at this window and watched. The escape. An exercise. Within arm’s reach – that’s what it’s called. The fire escape had been within arm’s reach when he moved in here. It wa
s also one of the reasons why he took the apartment. It’s a well-located apartment, the vendor had said, and de Vriend had looked out of this window at the fire escape and agreed with him. Yes, the location is excellent! It had occurred to him that if necessary he would be able to leap onto the fire escape from this window and disappear while fists were still hammering on the front door. He’d reckoned he could do it, yes, back then there had been no doubt. But now? – inconceivable. Now the fire escape was out of arm’s reach. For half a century the children practising their escape had remained the same age, always children, only he had grown older, too old in the end, weak and fragile, and out of practice. As he peered out of the window he no longer saw an arm’s reach. He realised he wanted to smoke. He ought to go, finally disappear. He walked across the hallway, not into the kitchen where the coat and his cigarettes were, but into the sitting room. He stood there uncertainly, looking around as if searching for something. An empty room. He wanted to . . . what did he still want to do here? He went to the window. That was it: he wanted to take in this view one more time, the view across the square on which he’d lived all his given life and tried to find his “place”.
He looked down at the blue light, thinking nothing. He froze. He knew why. Mentally he didn’t process the fact that that he knew or that this wasn’t worth another thought. Old knowledge was embedded in him; he didn’t need to formulate it in his head. Standing absolutely still, he stared at the police cars, his heart contracted, then expanded again – a shrug of the soul.
When he was a teacher it was something he had always tried to banish from his pupils’ essays – these blah-blah-blah-comma-he-thought sentences.
But he couldn’t stop them. Children really believed that when people are alone their heads are full of he-thought/she-thought sentences. And then these he-thought/she-thought heads came together to produce he-thought/she-thought sentences. In truth, it is so unbelievably silent beneath this godless firmament, all the way into people’s heads. Our verbiage is merely the echo of this silence. His heart contracted coldly and expanded again. He breathed in, he breathed out. That blue light really was pulsating!
He heard the bell, then a fist thumping at the front door. He went into the kitchen and put on his coat. He went into the bedroom, and the pounding continued. Again David de Vriend walked around the non-existent bed as he made for the window. He looked out. Not within arm’s reach. He sat on the floor and lit a cigarette. The pounding. The thumping.
Two
Ideas interfere with things that wouldn’t exist without them.
YOU NEED TO be able to allow yourself a bout of depression. Martin Susman would survive. He worked on “Noah’s Ark”. He was an official at the European Commission, Directorate-General for “Culture and Education”, assigned to Directorate C, “Communication”, and ran the EAC-C-2 department: “Cultural Programme and Measures”.
Internally, colleagues simply referred to their ministry as “Noah’s Ark” or simply “the Ark”. Why? An ark has no destination. It rolls across the currents, pitching and tossing on the waves, defying the storms and with only one aim: to save itself and whatever it is carrying on board.
It didn’t take Martin Susman long to realise this. To begin with he was delighted and proud to have nabbed this job, particularly as he hadn’t been sent to Brussels as an “E.N.D.” (Expert National Détaché) by an Austrian political party or authority, but had applied directly to the Commission and passed the concours. He truly was a European official, without any obligation or duty to his country! Before long he had to conclude that the “Culture and Education” ministry had zero profile within the European Commission; others gently mocked it. Within the organisation people simply referred to this Directorate-General as “Culture”, dropping the “Education” despite the remarkable successes chalked up in this sphere, such as the development and implementation of the Erasmus Scheme. And when people said “Culture” there was always an undertone, it sounded like Wall Street brokers saying “numismatics”, the hobby of a cranky relative. But even amongst the public, insofar as they were at all interested, the image of “European culture” was a poor one. Martin Susman had only been in his job for a short while and he was still reading the newspapers from back home – the usual beginner’s mistake – when outrage erupted in Austria because, as the papers said, the Austrians were being threatened with “Culture”. Each E.U. Member State had the right to a commissioner’s post; that country’s government nominated an individual and the president of the Commission assigned them a ministry. When the ministries were reshuffled following the European elections the rumour emerged that the commissioner nominated by Austria would be getting “Culture”. The coalition government in Austria began squabbling because the party of the designated commissioner suspected intrigue on the part of its coalition partner. There was protest, the Austrian newspapers kicked up a fuss and they could rely on the acute indignation of their readers. “We’re being threatened with culture!” Or, “Austria’s being fobbed off with culture!”
Quite an astonishing reaction when you consider that Austria has eagerly, if not “regarded”, then at least described itself as a “cultural nation”. However, the response tallied with the profile and significance that “culture” held within the European power structure. The profile and significance of a ministry depended on the size of the budget it was able to distribute, and the influence it commanded over political and business elites. “Culture” was poorly endowed in both. Ultimately the Austrian commissioner didn’t get the Culture ministry, but Regional Policy, which led to celebration in this cultural nation: “We,” the Austrian newspapers now trumpeted, “have a budget of 337 billion!”
“Culture” went to Greece, which seemed wholly appropriate when you think of Ancient Greece as the fundament of European culture – or thoughtfully cynical, if you wish to correlate the decline of democracy in Europe with the slave-owning society in Ancient Greece. In any event it was quite simple: because of its now endless financial and budgetary crisis, Greece was out of credit, which left it defenceless and obliged to take what it was given. The least-esteemed ministry. This was no mission, it was a punishment: those who are bad with money better not be given any, and thus are assigned the ministry without a budget. The Greek commissioner, a dedicated woman, fought to get a strong team she could trust and which might afford her some political weight in the Commission after all. To fill the key positions in her ministry she succeeded in requesting compatriots with prior experience in the Commission apparatus, who were well connected to other directorates-general and enjoyed excellent reputations. Thus Fenia Xenopoulou had been removed from Trade and promoted to head of that directorate in “the Ark”, where Martin Susman worked.
Fenia had not been able turn down the promotion. If you wanted to make it to the top of the Commission apparatus, you needed to demonstrate your mobility. Anybody who failed to show the requisite willingness and spurned an offer to change domains was out of the frame. And so she had relocated to the Ark with the intention of demonstrating her mobility more than ever. This she would accomplish by immediately striving for her next move, paying particular attention to her visibility. Being visible, working in a way that got you regularly noticed, was just as crucial for rising up the system.
Fenia knew what hardship was. She had experienced it. She possessed that intense energy common to those whose souls burn incessantly with the hardship of their early life. No matter how far they have come they can never detach themselves from this adversity because their soul always accompanies them. From the beginning she had proved time and again that she was ready to grasp every opportunity. Whenever she was shown a door and told, Find the key and you’ll pass through this door to the outside, she would meticulously search for that key, and was even prepared to spend ages patiently filing down all possible keys until one fitted, but at some point she simply grabbed an axe and smashed the door down. The axe became her skeleton key.
Martin Susman could not stand
Fenia. Ever since she’d entered the Ark the atmosphere in the ministry had deteriorated. It was obvious that she despised the work that needed to be done here, but at the same time she was trying insufferably hard to ensure she was more visible.
Fenia Xenopoulou slept well. For her, sleep was all part of bodily control, self-discipline. She plugged into sleep as into a charging unit. She drew in her arms and legs, rounded her back and pressed her chin into her chest, thereby loading energy for the next day’s battle. But she never had any dreams.
Did I snore? Fridsch had asked her early that morning.
No. I slept well!
Like a child.
Yes.
No, more like an embryo.
An embryo?
Yes, the way you lay there reminded me of photos of embryos! Fancy some coffee?
No, thanks. I’ve got to be off! She was about to give him a good-bye kiss and say, “Think of me!” but instead she just nodded and said, I’ve got to . . .
Martin Susman had got the latest information on the way to the office. Whenever the weather permitted, that’s to say, when it wasn’t raining, he cycled to work. It gave him a bit of exercise, but this wasn’t the principal reason. The Metro made him sad. Tired, grey faces, even in the morning. People with their wheelie suitcases and briefcases, and their willingness to look dynamic, competent and competitive. Ill-fitting masks beneath which their true faces festered. The gazing into space when beggars got on with their accordions, played a tune and then held out a yoghurt pot for a few coins. What were these songs? Martin couldn’t have said, perhaps hits from the twenties and thirties, the pre-war era. Alighting. The mechanically moving streams of people trudging onto escalators that were out of order, dragging themselves along the dirty corridors of the underground, a permanent building site boarded up with plywood, past the sliced-pizza and kebab shacks, the smell of bodily excretions and decay, then the wind tunnel on the way up to street level, up into a daylight that can no longer penetrate the sombre soul. Martin preferred cycling. He very soon became a member of the E.U. Cycling Group, which provided a personal trainer for every E.U. official who joined, to teach them the basics – for example, how to get across le square Montgomery alive. The trainer worked out the safest route from home to their work place, then they would spend a few days practising this route together and members would also learn how to slap “You’re in the way!” stickers onto cars parked in cycle lanes. The stickers didn’t damage the cars, they were easily removable. The E.U. Cycling Group was a great success, its rapidly increasing membership leading to a doubling of the number of cyclists on Brussels roads within a few years.
The Capital Page 3