What Martin liked most of all about his ride from home to the office were the spontaneous communities that formed along the way. By the time he got to boulevard Anspach he would have bumped into his first colleague, then the second, until by the end they would often have grown to a bunch of eight or ten. The German officials would accelerate past them on racing bikes, riding to work in functional clothing, as if bent on winning a circuit race. The showers in the office basement, therefore, were used almost exclusively by Germans before the working day began. The Dutch officials were relaxed on their “granny bikes”, as were their colleagues from the Latin countries, who cycled sedately in their suits without breaking into a sweat. They would ride side by side, chatting, learning more than they would in the canteen – the latest rumours, intrigues and career leaps. These cycle-lane conversations were more important than reading the European Voice and at least as important as scrutinising the Financial Times to keep abreast of affairs.
On rue de l’Écuyer, Bohumil Szmekal, his friend and colleague from C-1 (“Cultural Policy and Intercultural Dialogue”) had joined the peloton, while a couple of hundred metres further on they heard the cry of Kassándra Mercouri, Fenia Xenopoulou’s section head. Bohumil and Martin let the rest of the group go ahead as they slowed down to wait for Kassándra, then the three of them cycled on together.
Have you had any ideas yet? Bohumil asked, before shouting “Watch out!” and pointing to a car parked up ahead in the cycle lane. As quick as a flash he whipped out a sticker from his shoulder bag, peeled off the back as he continued to pedal hands-free and slapped the sticker on the side window of the car as he swept past. A chorus of horns resounded.
Bingo! Got’im! he said in triumph.
You and your stickers are a greater danger than the cars themselves, Kassándra said. She was a plump woman in her mid-thirties whose expression was always either anxious or affectionate. Beside her, short, delicate Bohumil looked like a naughty boy, even though he was a few years older. He grinned. Hey, have you come up with the great idea? The entire directorate’s work is blocked because nobody’s yet . . .
What sort of idea? I don’t know what you’re talking about!
The Big Jubilee Project! You haven’t replied to the round-robin e-mail. I haven’t either, by the way.
The Big Jubilee Project? I didn’t think we were expected to reply!
Indeed. Everyone’s playing dead. Nothing’s coming. Nobody thinks it’s important. Not a surprise, really, when I think back to the damp squib five years ago.
I wasn’t here then.
What do you mean damp squib? That ceremony with the children in Parliament was very moving! Children from all over Europe! Expressing their wishes for the future, peace and . . .
Sándra, please! Child ambassadors!? That was child abuse! Thank God the public didn’t notice anything! Well, my idea is . . . Watch it! He yanked his bike, forcing Martin into the middle of the road and already had another sticker in his hand, but then dropped it. Martin nudged him back into the cycle lane and cried, You’re mad!
Well, the way I see it is this. Learning from history means never repeating it. It mustn’t happen again. No more jubilee! It’s expensive and embarrassing! I can’t understand why Xeno’s taking it so seriously!
All the directorates-general are involved. If she commits to the project she could really distinguish herself.
She’s certainly piling on the pressure. The meeting’s at eleven this morning. She wants to hear our ideas.
I understood it quite differently, Martin said. I thought . . .
The meeting might be postponed. It’s not yet confirmed, but the boss is hoping for a last-minute appointment with the president today. By the way, do you want to know what she’s reading at the moment?
I couldn’t be less interested!
You mean, as in a book? Xeno reads? Come off it, Sándra, you’re fantasising!
Yes, a book. And I’m not fantasising. I had to get a copy for her especially. You won’t believe what it is!
Tell us!
Watch out!
Careful!
O.K. For several days now the boss has been preparing with military precision for her meeting with the president. She wants to know everything about him, from all his networks to his favourite food, everything, even his favourite book. It could come in handy for small talk. She’s most fastidious about this.
The president’s got a favourite book?
I bet it’s The Man without Qualities, Martin said.
The Man without Qualities? What an excellent title for an autobiography!
Children, please! Listen to me! She found it out through private channels. The president really does have a favourite book, a novel! It’s not public knowledge. And he must have several copies because he’s always reading it. One’s beside his bed, one’s on the desk in his office. I expect there’s another in his girlfriend’s apartment! Kassándra’s face glistened. A thin film of sweat? Pleasure? Anyway, she said, I had to get a copy of the book and now the boss is reading it!
Xeno is reading literature, Martin thought in astonishment, a novel! For the sake of her career she’s even prepared to read a novel.
Fenia Xenopoulou sat at her desk, reading. What she was reading left her bewildered. She was able to read at high speed; she had learned to scan pages and immediately file away the information in compartments in her head, from where she could retrieve it at lightning speed. But this was a novel. She didn’t have a scheme for this; what was it about? What information from it might prove useful, what in God’s name should she commit to memory? It told the life story of a man, that was all well and good, but what did this complete stranger have to do with her? And he’d lived in a completely different time, too; people don’t think and act like that anymore. More importantly, was he a real person or was the book pure invention? According to Google this man did actually exist and was said to have played a significant role in his time, influencing the political order of the continent and ultimately the entire world. But he couldn’t have been that important, or she would have heard about him at school. He was more a subject for the experts, and ultimately even they couldn’t agree as to the role this man had played.
She continued leafing through the book impatiently, skipping a chapter. She didn’t understand. Up till now, at least, the book had been about love rather than political decision-making. The entire thing was written from the perspective of a woman who loved this man. But the name of the woman didn’t appear in his Wikipedia entry. Nor was it clear whether she really loved him, or at least it wasn’t yet apparent. At any rate, she felt it was her duty to attract his attention and gain influence over him. But if this woman was an invention of the author’s, what was the point of reading about how she, a fictitious character, tried to gain power over a man who in historical times had actually been in power himself? If the author wanted to show how a woman can gain power over powerful men, why hadn’t she written a self-help book instead? There were intrigues and mischievous little games, battles with political rivals, but ultimately – Fenia skimmed a few pages, read a bit, ever more impatient, read a page, skipped the next ten – ultimately it boiled down to love or to how insignificant political power was compared to the power of love. Could you really say that? That was crazy. Novels are crazy!
Fenia leaned back. Was this really the president’s favourite book? The president was crazy! All these thoughts! What she thought, what he thought – how did the author know all this? If this man did really exist then there must be sources in archives, documents, contracts, certificates, but thoughts!? Thoughts are never – nor ever were – set down in documents. Surely anyone in their right mind would avoid doing anything that might allow their thoughts to be read.
She closed her eyes and thought of the previous evening with Fridsch, the night. Had she really thought that he . . . Had he thought that she . . .
She sat there quite still, although she fancied she was swaying. Fenia wrenched open her eyes
, pulled herself together, and at that moment saw on her computer screen a new message from Kassándra Mercouri. “Unfortunately meeting with president not possible today. President’s office will suggest alternatives in the next few days.”
She shut the book and pushed it to one side.
To: B. Szmekal (“Intercultural Dialogue”); M. Susman (“Cultural Measures”); H. Athanasiadis (“Valorisation”); C. Pinheiro da Silva (“Language Diversity”); A. Klein (“Media Expertise”)
– Fenia paused briefly, then deleted Helene Athanasiadis –
Subject: Jubilee Project
Meeting confirmed for 11 a.m., conference room. I’ll be expecting suggestions.
The telephone rang, Martin Susman glanced at the display and saw it was an unknown local number. He took the call and regretted it at once. His brother.
It’s me.
Yes. Hello, Florian!
You knew I was coming to Brussels, didn’t you?
Yes.
I’ve been trying to get hold of you for days. You’re not answering.
. . .
I must have tried at least ten times yesterday evening. Why do you never pick up, or call back?
Yesterday evening? There was a problem.
You’ve always got problems. I’ve got problems too, that’s why —
There was —
Anyway, I’ve arrived. I’m already at the hotel. The Marriott. I’m about to go to my first meeting. Do you want to meet for dinner? When do you finish work?
Around seven, half seven.
O.K., then, pick me up at half past eight.
From the hotel?
Of course. Then you can take me to a restaurant where I can smoke.
You can’t smoke anywhere.
I don’t believe that. Right then, half past eight. And don’t be late, little brother!
The Big Jubilee Project. In fact it was Mrs Atkinson who’d had the idea. She was the new director-general of D.-G. COMM, the communication service of the European Commission, also responsible for its corporate image which, as the last Eurobarometer poll had shown, had plummeted. She had realised at the outset that she needed to run the directorate-general differently from her predecessors. Good press work, a routine spokesperson’s service and formal coordination of the dozy information offices in the Member States would not suffice. Not only were the figures the worst they’d been since 1973, when regular opinion polls were beginning to be held in E.E.C. countries, the current results had to be regarded as an unmitigated disaster. Half a year earlier around 49 per cent of E.U. citizens had viewed the Commission’s work as basically positive, and even this result had been described as a “historical low”; it was unimaginable that it could ever fall short of this. Now the figure – after applying all possible embellishments – stood at barely 40 per cent, representing the most drastic fall in the history of the Eurobarometer, more drastic even than the 1999 collapse in the approval rating when the Commission was forced to resign en bloc following a corruption scandal. At the time, the slump from 67 to 59 per cent was seen as catastrophic – so what could you call this? And what was responsible for it?
Mrs Atkinson studied the papers, tables, percentage calculations, graphs, statistics and wondered how this dramatic loss in confidence in the institution could have come about. Much advance praise had been heaped on the new Commission president in the best European papers, and yet it wasn’t the Commission that profited from this but the European Parliament, whose standing rose by almost five percentage points. For the first time in history the president had succeeded in satisfying the female quota, and not only amongst the members of the Commission – twelve of the twenty-eight were now women – but also at management level in the directorates-general, where the proportion of women was now 40 per cent. She herself had benefited from the policy, and – as she said – she could openly admit this without putting into question her qualification for the job. On the contrary, it was thanks to the consistent implementation of the quota system that Mrs Atkinson wasn’t working under the totally unqualified careerist, George Morland, that pig of a man who’d initially been considered for the position and who was now running around painting a caricature of her as a prime example of the idiocy of the quota system. She’d heard on the grapevine that he was telling all and sundry she was such a cold woman that she suffered from freezing hands, which was why she always sat at her desk wearing an enormous muff. Women, eh?
Such a fantasy said everything about this schemer. The fact that he associated her with an enormous muff clearly demonstrated the upper-class British male horror of the vagina.
Mrs Atkinson had studied Marketing and Management at the European Business School in London, finishing her degree with a brilliant thesis “on counter-inductive marketing”. To take the wind out of the sails of Mr Morland’s intrigues, she contemplated an offensive tack: flipping the story in her favour and turning the muff into her trademark, a huge, outsized muff. Not only would this render Morland’s caricature harmless, it would strengthen her own brand. But that wasn’t what was occupying her just then. She wondered why this E.U. Commission success, the female quota, the clear indication of opportunities for women on this continent, had not improved the Commission’s image. The proportion of women in the European Parliament was only 35 per cent, but Parliament’s reputation was growing, including amongst women voters of all age groups, which was fine, but the Commission’s was plummeting, and that was puzzling, that was the problem. And it was now her task to put a stop to this trend and reverse it. What were the criticisms, what was the reason for the Commission’s poor image? Clichés. Prejudice. Always the same. A lack of democratic legitimacy, growing bureaucracy, obsessive regulation. She found it telling that there was no criticism of the actual tasks of the Commission; clearly the public knew nothing of these. Fifty-nine per cent of respondents thought the Commission “meddles in issues that would be better dealt with at national level”, but only 5 per cent agreed that it “performs its functions poorly”. They needed to understand this contradiction. She wondered why none of her predecessors had criticised the Eurobarometer methodology and implemented a change. If you give people the option of putting a cross beside “meddles in issues that would be better dealt with at national level” then a certain percentage will do precisely that. These Yes-it’s-true types, those That’s-what-I-always-say idiots! But if you were to propose a statement to the effect that the Commission protects citizens from injustices that arise from the differences between national legal systems, the result would be quite different.
She understood that it couldn’t be her mission to improve the image of the “E.U.”; she had to focus on the profile of the European Commission. And the idea of how she might succeed in this came to her an hour later, exhilarated on Charlemagne Brut champagne. For at that moment the door to her office swung open and she saw Catherine, her secretary, enter carrying a cake decorated with sparklers. Beyond the smoke and star-shaped sparks she could see . . . yes, it really was . . . the president, and behind him more and more bodies made their way into the room – her commissioner, managers, advisors, her entire office – and sang “Happy Birthday”.
It was a big birthday. Oh yes. But she hadn’t attached any importance to it. Her husband was in London, her daughter in New York. Both had called briefly. And she didn’t yet have friends here in Brussels she would have wanted to celebrate with. Now she was the centre of attention. Surprise! The president spoke. Just a few words. Nothing formal, all very personal, including a minor reference to her image that gave way to general laughter. People she knew only to say hello to, second, third, fourth floor, laughed, champagne flutes bubbled over, clinked as they toasted her, she was kissed on the cheek, her arm squeezed, her shoulder clapped, people who knew nothing or only very little about her showed sympathy, or a willingness to sympathise, the commissioner raised his glass, said how pleased he was to have this marvellous and competent colleague on his team, in this position, how excellent it was that the fe
male quota was in place, he himself was in favour of a 99 per cent quota, of course he didn’t want to lose his own job, but otherwise he’d be delighted to have just women . . . Whistling from the men, cries of Macho! Macho! Macho! from the women, everything gave way to laughter and Mrs Atkinson cut the cake which was now sitting on top of the Eurobarometer file on her desk, crumbs and cream on the statistics, sparkler ash on the grave of European morale.
And then she was alone again, everybody had gone back to work and she was standing at the large window in her office, looking down at rue de la Loi, at the line of dark cars crawling past, glistening in the soft rain. She rubbed her hands, stroking with one the back of the other, massaged and kneaded her fingers, which were long and delicate, and tended to lose their colour quite suddenly, becoming white and numb. She sat down at her desk, something was at work inside her and she waited for it to become clearer. There was half a glass of champagne left, she took a sip, thought for a moment, then downed the rest. She kneaded her fingers, then Googled “European Commission foundation”. When, in actual fact, was the Commission’s birthday? Was there something like a birthday for the Commission? The day of its founding? And this was the idea: it wasn’t enough to sell the day-to-day work of the Commission as positively as possible; it had to be honoured, people had to be encouraged to celebrate the very fact of its existence, they shouldn’t simply be begging for acceptance, or recti-fying clichés, or challenging rumours and myths. For once the Commission should be placed in the spotlight, not talked about in abstract and general terms as “the E.U.”. What was the E.U., anyway? Various institutions all pursuing their own agenda, but if there was any point to the whole thing then it was down to the existence of the Commission, which stood for the whole thing, didn’t it? That was how she saw it. They had to create a situation in which the Commission was standing jauntily in the middle, the birthday girl being congratulated. So did the Commission have a birthday? It wasn’t that simple to determine. Was it the founding day of the E.E.C. Commission? Or the date of the foundation of the European Commission in its current form, following the Merger Treaty? In the first instance the Commission would be sixty in three years’ time, in the second fifty in two years. She preferred fifty. Half a century. Easier to sell. And translated into human years it was an age when you were still full of beans, experienced and not yet ready for the scrap heap. Moreover, two years represented the ideal time span for preparation, whereas three might end up being too long: too much could get out of hand in three years.
The Capital Page 4