He felt a hand grab him firmly on the upper arm, the hand jerked him back, almost making him drop his brush. Well, what are we doing out here? Madame Joséphine shouted. We can’t stand out on the balcony naked, can we now, Monsieur de Vriend? Alright?
He looked at her, she was still squeezing his arm and talking far too loudly: We’re going to go inside and put some clothes on now, aren’t we?
He wasn’t deaf. The only reason he hadn’t understood her immediately was because she was shouting her head off.
Didn’t you hear the telephone? she screamed. Right then, let’s go inside, shall we, come on, look, there you go, there’s your shirt, we’re going to put that on now and . . . my, my it’s sodden, you really must have been sweating, we’ll have to put a fresh one on, won’t we, come on, let’s fetch a fresh one. Alright?
She pulled open his wardrobe, peered in, reached inside and de Vriend said, No! He didn’t want that, he wasn’t going to allow someone to just open his locker and rummage around . . . but she was already saying, that’s a lovely shirt, such a lovely white shirt, let’s put that on, shall we?
Madame Joséphine took the brush from his hand and placed it on the small table. De Vriend’s suit trousers had slid from his arm and were lying on the floor. As she helped him into his shirt she spotted the number tattooed on his arm again, hastily threaded the arm into the sleeve and was about to say, Well done! but thought better of it.
She picked up the trousers from the floor and handed them to him. Without a word. He put them on. Without a word. He buttoned up his shirt, fastened his belt. She looked around, saw that his shoes were beside the bed; he saw where she was looking, went over to the bed, sat down and slipped on his shoes. He looked at her, she looked at him, then he bent down and tied his laces. He sat up, looked at her. She nodded.
Madame Joséphine was a seasoned carer. She had seen a lot in her twenty years of service. During her training she had taken a psychology course and only a couple of years ago she had completed her most advanced training course. She was the more surprised of the two when suddenly she said, Auschwitz?
He nodded.
He wanted to get up but couldn’t. He stayed sitting on the bed.
She thought she had gone too far. So she went one step further: What was it like? Do you want to talk about it?
She sensed an asphyxiating horror. Because she had asked this question.
De Vriend sat on the bed, looked at her, then said, We stood for roll call. We stood for roll call. That’s all.
After Madame Joséphine had left the room, de Vriend stayed where he was for a while, then got up, wandered around the room, eyes peeled and . . . there was his brush.
Slowly he got undressed, picked up the brush, put his arm into one of the trouser legs, stood naked on the balcony and began to brush.
Private Secretary Strozzi knew, of course, that the president of the Commission would never declare his opposition to an initiative designed to polish the Commission’s image and prestige. This was why he had assured Fenia Xenopoulou of the president’s support straight away. Carte blanche. But Strozzi also knew that this peculiar project would throw up more problems than it would benefit the Commission. The whole idea of the Jubilee Project was madness, and even if you could provide perfectly sound justification for it, as Fenia Xenopoulou undoubtedly had done, in a political sense it was anything but auspicious. And so the carte blanche had been a feint, a favourite ploy of the old swashbuckling bureaucrat Strozzi: if you wanted to kill off an idea, first you had to agree with it and offer your full support, upon which everyone happily dropped their guard. The best thing about this was that often you didn’t have to make the decisive strike yourself. It was an old fencing joke: if you can induce your opponent to commit hara-kiri you no longer need to attack, but watch out that they don’t collapse wheezing into your arms. And with Fenia Xenopoulou the ruse had worked once again: buoyed by his support she had carelessly agreed to his suggestion that the representatives of the countries which had founded the Commission should be informed of this new Commission project. What could she have offered by way of an objection? In any case he had already got to his feet, a signal that their conversation was at an end. She wouldn’t be able to claim later that he had stabbed her in the back. On the contrary, the bout had been fair and square. Now all he had to do was make sure she didn’t collapse into his arms and stain his waistcoat with her blood. And for that he needed a little chat with his friend Attila, the chief of protocol of the Council president.
It was a crazy venue for such a conversation: two senior officials with ice tea in Kitty O’Shea’s, the Irish pub behind the Berlaymont building, sitting at a table sticky with spilled beer, surrounded by bellowing Guinness drinkers and darts players.
At least we won’t be overheard here, Attila Hidekuti said in his charming “Hunglish” – Änglish with ä Hún-gä-ri-an äcc-ent.
Strozzi smiled. For some years now he had maintained an excellent dialogue with Attila and they’d resolved many issues in detailed consultation with each other. Whenever there was a clash between the Commission and the Council – a frequent occurrence – or if the Commission president wanted something from the Council president – not a rare one – then Strozzi preferred to talk to Hidekuti than to the Council president’s private secretary, Lars Ekelöf, that hardcore Lutheran from Sweden who by definition found the Baroque Italian count rather sinister. Conversely, a scornful Strozzi had once said of Ekelöf, On contentious issues it is impossible to reach an agreement with a man who feels morally superior at every turn and thus regards any compromise as a betrayal of his morals! And with an ironic smile he had added, The reason why Ekelhöf can never be lured out from his cover is that he’s nothing but cover, he is cover personified. If you could get behind it you would find nothing apart from a fleeting aroma: the dissipation of self-righteousness.
The opposition between north and south ran precisely between these two men who worked north and south of rue de la Loi in Brussels.
And we Hun-gä-rians are grrr-ound to pów-der bet-wéen you! (Hidekuti)
Now Hidekuti was watching the darts players standing uncomfortably close to him. The darts fly low in here, he said.
One of them said hello, Hidekuti returned the greeting with a nod, shifted his chair to the side, then another player raised his glass and toasted Hidekuti and Strozzi.
Come on, let’s sit over there, Strozzi said, and then: They’re the Brits. British E.N.D.s. Since the start of the Brexit negotiations, all some of them have done is come here for the beer and darts in preparation for their return home. I prefer this lot to the other Brits who soldier on, with Brexit not yet signed and sealed, yet all they’re actually doing is diligently obstructing our work.
Is this why you asked me here? Are you having problems with officials in my department?
No, Strozzi said, then he told him about the Jubilee Project.
Hidekuti realised at once the turmoil the project would cause. It wasn’t so much that the Commission was planning a solo effort against the other European institutions, or at least without including them, even though this in itself was highly problematic. No, it was this idea of parading witnesses whose biographies and destinies were supposed to show that nationalism had led to the most heinous crimes in human history, and for this reason it was the Commission’s moral duty to work for the overthrow of the nation state. To infer from the trite “Auschwitz: never again” the need to “overthrow nationalism and ultimately overthrow the nation state” and to try to sell this to the public as the moral imperative and political mission of the European Union was something the heads of state and government could never accept.
We have experts for everything, Hidekuti said. We can make it rain and we can see to it that the Commission stands out in the rain.
I know, Strozzi said. That’s why I’m telling you all this.
“Auschwitz: never again” is right and proper.
Yes.
You could say i
t in a sermon every Sunday.
Yes. So it’s never forgotten. Never forget, this needs to be said over and over again.
Exactly, but it’s not a political programme.
Morality has never been a political programme.
Especially when morality produces conflict.
Exactly. The Council could never agree to the “overthrow of the nation state”. That would mean war. Against the Commission. And people in every country revolting against Europe.
Exactly.
So?
I understand what you’re saying. We will put the lid on this prrró-ject before it even sees the light of day.
Strozzi knew he could rely on his friend Attila.
And Attila Hidekuti made an excellent job of it. It wasn’t a big job: a signature, a telephone call, basically a click of the fingers. This got the ball rolling, which hit the next ball and so on to produce a momentum, and very soon nobody could remember who had actually started it, but the energy was transmitted from ball to ball until the final one rolled out of play, into the void, into a black hole. That was the aim. That was Hidekuti’s job. Even the individual who triggers such a process ends up being just another one of those balls, which knocks into another, basically no more than a marble or a grain, invisible by the end, an atom – the fissile nucleus of intangible political energy. The Hungarian foreign minister was already on the telephone the following day to his “esteemed colleague and dear friend” the Austrian foreign minister, informing him that under the pretext of jubilee celebrations the Commission was planning to trigger a process that would lead to the abolition of the European nation states.
You know what it means, dear friend, when the E.U. decrees that Austria isn’t a nation, he said sanctimoniously. No, you couldn’t call it sanctimoniously, for the nation really was his sanctum. Only his own nation though, the Hungarian one. He didn’t really care whether Austria was a nation or an occupational accident of history, quite rightly pruned back in its megalomania to a mini state of mixed-bloods, although “in private”, as he liked to say, he tended towards the latter. But he knew he had an ally if he “scratched the balls” of his neighbour’s nationalism, as he put it to the Hungarian prime minister.
Around 86 billion neurons were communicating, and within milliseconds complex electrical processes occurred in thousands of cells, semiochemicals did their job and the synapses were working. In short, the Austrian foreign minister was thinking. And within the twinkling of an eye – or a few anyway – he had weighed up the alternatives and come to a decision. Option one was to do nothing for the time being until the Commission went public with its project, then enter the ring as the defender of the Austrian nation against “the E.U.”. At first his synapses glowed with relish, but what was this? Now they began to flash red. He had already done the anti-E.U. crowd a service with his statements on European refugee policy; taking a step further into the arena of outright rejection of the European idea (thank goodness this was so unclear anyway) would not only unsettle “the economy”, but position him close to the party of right-wing hooligans, who with their “Austria First” nationalism were garnering ever greater support. He didn’t want to be the monkey on the shoulder of the organ-grinder, he wanted to be popular without the whiff of populism, which meant that if nation and nationalism were to become a major public topic of discussion, he was undoubtedly holding a bad hand. Thus option two: he had to stop this project. If he were able to prevent a debate about the pros and cons of the nation state, he could on every issue appear as the representative of Austrian interests, of the interests of the national voters and also as a European – he would be the organ-grinder.
He thanked his dear friend, his Hungarian colleague, “of course” promising harmonised cooperation, then drummed up his staff and allocated the tasks. Everyone hurried zealously out of his office apart from the press officer who cleared his throat. He reminded the minister that they still had to fill out the questionnaire.
What questionnaire?
For Madonna, the women’s magazine. Where we had that photoshoot last week.
Oh, yes. Well, fill it out, then.
But I’d like to run through it with you, Minister. The personal questions, such as your favourite book.
What do you suggest?
It’s traditional in Austria for politicians to mention The Man without Qualities. You can’t really opt for a lesser work. And living authors are strictly taboo. People don’t want living authors.
Alright then, let’s be good Austrians. The Man without Qualities. Kreisky loved that book as far as I recall.
And Sinowatz, Klima and Gusenbauer.
Only socialists?
No, Mock and Khol too, even Molterer.
Well then, I can’t go for anything lesser.
Next one: Who’s your favourite character in literature?
What’s up with this magazine? Do they only have literature graduates working there?
No, Minister. It’s just these two questions, then we get onto music and food.
O.K. My favourite character. What’s the chap from The Man without Qualities called?
Ulrich. But I wouldn’t recommend him. As it says: without qualities. I Googled him, he’s got incest issues. I recommend Arnheim.
Who’s that?
He’s perfect for you, Minister. He’s described as a “great man”, a politician and an intellectual. And he has a deep Platonic love relationship.
Seriously?
In The Man without Qualities.
Fantastic!
The following day the Polish government instructed Polish officials in the various ministries to pull the plug on this European Commission “campaign”, which was an attack on the pride of the Polish nation. In particular the D.-G. COMM needed to be reminded that Auschwitz extermination camp was a German crime and therefore a purely German problem. The Federal Republic of Germany was cordially invited to dismantle the German extermination camp on Polish soil and exhibit it as a museum in Germany. In any case a culture of commemorating crimes committed on Polish soil by occupying powers would be an inappropriate moral canopy over an economic community.
On the desk of the president of the European Council there arrived a note from the Austrian foreign minister, which made unequivocally clear that the Republic of Austria was both for and against the project: she supported the European Commission’s initiative, but could not give her approval to the plan in its current form. In the name of the Austrian government, the foreign ministry unreservedly backed the European Commission’s initiative to “market Europe better to its citizens”. In Austria, however, the notion that a Polish camp where thousands upon thousands of Austrians died should now be a reason for questioning the existence of the Austrian nation was unmarketable.
The ambassador of the Permanent Representation of the Czech Republic to the European Union relayed a note of protest that was worded more sharply: The Czech government would not permit the European Union to plan a campaign of so-called “coming to terms with the past” by which Czechia would once again be wiped off the map. There was no mandate for this, nor could there be one.
A few hours later there came a similar-sounding communiqué from the Permanent Representation of the Slovak Republic.
Attila Hidekuti smiled. As expected, the little countries had been the quickest to offer their resistance when their national . . . what? identity? honour? or even their right to exist? had been questioned. He could rely on that. He could work with that. Now the big and crucial question was how would Germany react? What about France? Britain was out of the game, even though she was still hanging around on the pitch. Hidekuti thought it possible that the United Kingdom would instruct its Brussels officials to support the project and push for it, announce it publicly, only to exploit it domestically as further proof of the necessity of Brexit. Britain, Hidekuti thought, could be used as further leverage against the Ark and the D.-G. COMM to stop the project at all costs, before it became public.
Lars Ekelöf was markedly composed when he came into Hidekuti’s office. He had so internalised the need to behave comme il faut anywhere and at any time that only fleetingly had he felt the urge to storm in there and scream, “What the hell is this crap?” But he would not allow himself to indulge in uncontrolled emotions and filthy language. Never. Naturally he suspected that Hidekuti somehow had his finger in the pie of these peculiar protests that were arriving at the president’s office from the foreign ministries and embassies of some Member States. Because this Hungarian hussar with a permanent mischievous sparkle in his eyes and that wobbly grin above his double chin always had his finger in the pie. Ekelöf couldn’t prove it, but he suspected that Hidekuti had a habit of inventing problems he then solved, to show off to the president. And he, Ekelöf, the private secretary, was left out of the loop every time. Taking a deep breath, he entered and said, I’ve got a little problem and I’m sure you can help me.
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