Europa (27 page)

The Vice-president, who hadn't seen fit, or hadn't been able (because of us?) to attend the emergency meeting on Bosnia, now stood up and introduced us. We were foreign-language lectors from the University of Milan. We were representing both the European lectors at our own university and those at universities all over Italy. It was our contention, the Honourable Owen Rhys said blandly, head nodding with ritual conviction, that, contrary to articles 7 and 48 of the Treaty of Rome, we were being treated differently from Italian citizens. Unfairly, that is. Our case would be presented briefly by Dr Jeremy Marlowe, a British lector who had taught English at the University for over twelve years. After which we would be submitting an official and thoroughly documented petition signed by more than four hundred lectors presently working in various regions of Italy.

It was at this point that it occurred to me that I hadn't seen the petition itself. Not since I signed it. Who has the petition? I whispered to
her
as I stood up to speak. The look on her face, her French face, her razzled face Vikram Griffiths had said, but handsome, was one of alarm. And she actually said, Oo la la! As when once she imagined she heard her husband's car arriving while we were making love in his second or third or fourth house up in the mountains. Above Selva di Val Gardena. But it was only the technician come to prepare the swimming-pool for summer. Now things were far more serious. She closed her eyes theatrically, as one receiving appalling news. From Sarajevo perhaps. From Bihac. Vikram has it, she said. Vikram had the petition itself, the papers and signatures. Then, as I pulled and pushed at my microphone, she was walking round behind me to whisper to Dimitra, who swiftly vacated her seat, so that as I began to speak the Greek woman was already striding swiftly, unpleasantly somehow, up the aisle between two banks of seats with chattering students.

Ladies and gentlemen, I said. Members of the Committee. I spoke softly, shakily, wondering what I would say, but the microphone carried my voice right around the auditorium, magnifying its tremors and nerves, while three or four of those in the front row adjusted their headsets the better to pick up their translations. From the back, on her feet, Heike the Dike smiled with great warmth, great encouragement. Likewise Sneaky-tottie. The door banged and Dimitra had gone. In search of our petition.

Ladies and gentlemen, you have just left a meeting where you have discussed the grave and worsening situation in Bosnia. I coughed. I looked down and looked up. We can hardly claim that our poor problems today can in any way compare with those.

Beneath the desk, I felt a hand lightly caress my thigh as
she
returned to her seat. I breathed deeply, waiting for the words.

No, it would be ridiculous to draw comparisons, I said, between ourselves and that war-torn population. On the other hand, one can hardly ignore the fact that the situation that I shall now briefly describe to you is nothing other than an infinitely milder form of the same thing: the desire by one group, one majority ethnic group, language group, to deny full rights and privileges of citizenships European citizenship, to another group.

Thus the drivel the microphone drew from me, the interpreters above were interpreting for me. There were knitted brows on the bowed head of the token woman member of the European Petitions Committee as one hand pressed an earpiece of her headset and the other scribbled on a slip of headed paper. Barnaby Hilson nodded approval. And sitting here in the Meditation Room it is perfectly clear to me now that one need only open one's mouth in a public situation and the words will come. You will do what is asked of you. Bromazepam or no bromazepam. Orthodoxy is in the air. That is the truth. In the patterns of speech. The inertia of what you hear around you every day will take you through. Will write your speeches and your books. Will even explain to your wife why you're leaving her. Why hadn't I understood this before? Why had I worried so much about everything I said? Why had I fought so hard, stupidly criticizing the book my daughter gave me (swim with the tide, she had told me), stubbornly refusing to accept that
her
gesture of friendship to Georg was indeed a gesture of human friendship? After all, she did come back to me. Why hadn't I simply said what was required of me? The words that are in the air. The water-words. Some comment on us all belonging to the human race. Under the table
she
touched my leg again.

Then one says, I went on, more confidently now, seeing sombre faces nodding in agreement, one says, ‘an infinitely milder form', but the truth is that discrimination, however apparently mild in comparison, is always discrimination, and always ugly, especially when perpetrated along ethnic lines. One population keeping another out. One population denying another the equal right to a job. The loss of one's livelihood, I said to the sombre faces of the Petitions Committee, the loss of one's vocation - for this is what I am here to talk about - can cause immense suffering, mental and physical, even in situations of apparent well-being, even when the victims do not risk hunger and violence. The woman in particular, I noticed, was taking notes. One of our members, for example, I said, had to return urgently to Milan in the early hours of this morning because the mother of his child had suffered another disabling crisis in her ongoing muscular dystrophy. You can see, I said, how the loss of financial security in such a case could prove disastrous. Not to mention the humiliation, I said, for a man in his forties who loses his ability to care for those close to him. The Committee listened. Another member confessed to me this morning, I invented, that he had not slept for weeks because he was anxious about losing his job, a job he has held and faithfully performed for more than ten years. The only job he really wished to do, he told me. Perversely, I was beginning to enjoy this. The only job he honestly felt he was suitable for, I insisted. I was beginning to feel powerful. His concern being, that since he was living in a foreign country, supporting a family in that country, a family made up of Italians it must be said, it would be far more difficult for him than for a local national to find another form of employment. If not impossible. I paused. I'm referring to one of our group who should have been presenting our case here now, in my place, to the person indeed who organized our petition to the European Parliament, but who in the end felt too nervous even to be present, so much is at stake.

The job of the Committee is to hear about people suffering, I thought. One must impress upon the Petitions Committee that people are suffering. And then identify a guilty perpetrator of that suffering. This was what was in the air, I thought. Not unlike 
Black Spells Magic
.

Let us go on to consider, then, ! proceeded, marvelling at how easy it all was, the simple though sly injustice that is being perpetrated at our expense, the subtle discrimination that the Italian state is operating to the benefit of Italian citizens and the detriment of those from other areas of the Community, a Community that the Italian government is always and so hypocritically the first to uphold, as it is likewise always and so destructively the first to flout.

There was silence in the audience now, and, I could sense, genuine admiration, not only on the faces of Sneaky and Plottie, but likewise on those of Luis, whose Spanish pesetas were worth more lire with every moment that passed, and Barnaby Hilson too, and Doris Rohr, who had probably never been more convinced than now that she was a victim of racism. And I remember, here, now, in the Meditation Room, how, as I went on to describe the way we were subject to rules relative to the termination of our employment which no Italian in the state sector was subject to, singled out, that is, for an entirely different and harsher treatment than any other state employee, I remember being overtaken by a sort of exhilaration, a sort of restrained hilarity, as if drunk and dazzled by the facility, the credibility, the power of these words that, though true, in the sense of factually accurate, I nevertheless did not believe in at all, could not believe in, and would never have sunk to speaking save into a microphone and on behalf of my feckless colleagues. Drunk too, and spurred on by
her 
frequent, light touches of my leg. Her approbation. Her encouragement. Was it all about to start again? Was it? I was so excited. Then I had just reached the whole delicate question of salary, entirely convinced that I would have no problem at all in making it appear that we lived a life of extreme poverty, and even toying, at the back of my mind, with the idea that I might conclude by quoting, if only to satisfy Sneaky-tottie, Pericles when he says:
As for
poverty, no one need be ashamed to admit it: the real shame is in not taking practical measures to escape from it
. Yes, I was seriously considering winding up with this remark, however ludicrously inappropriate, in order to explain, to justify, as it were, our extraordinary and dramatic decision to come to Strasbourg, to present our grievance to the highest authority, insisting, I suddenly realized I might then add, on those principles of
liberté, égalité
and
fratenité
which more than any other lay at the heart of Europe - and certainly everybody was going to say, for I could feel this, what a talented public speaker I was and why had I never offered to be representative in the past? - I was just about to launch into this preposterous conclusion when Dimitra came rushing back into the auditorium.

Dimitra banged through the double doors, almost knocking over the Welsh MEP's secretary. Distraught and tight-lipped, she raced down the shallow steps of banked seats, skipping and stumbling, until finally she threw herself against the battleship table at the front.

Ine fovero
, she screamed, her voice only half amplified in the directional mikes.
Aftoktónisse. O trelos! Aftoktónisse, O theotrelosl

Sobbing for breath, her big breasts pressed and heaving against the desk, Dimitra shouted these words, and ‘others, two or three or four times, apparently not understanding why we didn't understand, until the tall, lean member of the Petitions Committee in the front row hurriedly pulled off his headset and in a heavily accented English demanded, Who has hanged himself? Where?

Vikram Griffiths lived alone in a dilapidated third-floor apartment in Via Pastrengo. But roomy. Thus I describe to myself my colleague, my acquaintance, sitting here with my bag beside me in the Meditation Room of the European Parliament. He did not die with the lectors' petition pinned to his tweed jacket as this morning's European claimed. Nor was the petition signed by more than a thousand names. Pastrengo was a battle, as I recall. Another Napoleonic triumph. Unless that was Marengo. Or both. When I phoned his wife - I think both - she asked was this what the British called a practical joke?

But to say he lived alone is to give the wrong impression. Everybody on the coach returning from Parliament to hotel was eager to rehearse, in lower voices than before, though the driver had not forgotten to turn the radio on, their memories of Vikram Griffiths. And for most these focused around the time they had rejected, or in one or two cases accepted, a pass from him. For the men it was a question of recalling times they'd got blind drunk and he had told his life-story before they fell asleep on his floor. Only two men said Vikram made passes at men as well as women. It is inexplicable, I thought, travelling back to the hotel on the coach, how strong my desire for Georg is. How much I wish that he were here. He made a pass at me last night,
she
said. Most of the women remembered he went quite brutally for the hand up the skirt. And they laughed about it, as if it were a minor and indeed endearing misdemeanour. He'd had a couple of drinks, one student explained. But when had he not had a couple of drinks? And
she
said, If only I had accepted, last night, perhaps none of this would have happened. She had tears in her eyes, speaking to four or five people, and her accent was more French than ever. The Ys, the Ts. Why on earth didn't I accept? she said. Because you were fucking Georg, most probably, I thought, before he was called away to the mother of his child. A cordial fuck, I thought. How can I wish so hard that he were here? But I do. I like Georg, it occurs to me now. We were good friends after all, she was saying. What difference would it have made? I should have gone to bed with him, she said, apparently with real remorse at a generous deed undone. Then she said we must make a collection for Vikram's widow and his orphaned child. We must make a collection. Though the two were not connected. She wanted to find a hat or something there and then and make a collection, in the coach on the way back from the Parliament only a couple of hours after the body had been found. It would be important for her to see she had our solidarity, she said, even though they were engaged in acrimonious separation proceedings, even though the second wife had apparently testified on behalf of the first in their bitter child-custody battle. And she actually began collecting money, holding out a small plastic bag of the variety they put cheese and sliced meats in at. the supermarket. She began to go up and down the aisle of the coach as it drove around the Strasbourg ring road to our remote and cheap hotel with its cheap reproductions of modern masterpieces. Goya's
Executions
perhaps. You could see into her cleavage when she bent over.
Guernica 
even. She knew it. Her black dress was quite short above her slim knees. The poor woman will be frantic, she said. Her heels dug the purple carpet of the aisle. It's the least we can do, she said, bending over Colin with her plastic bag. Everybody was eager to give, as befits people who have lost a friend and leader. But nobody had any currency. What with the collapse of the Lira, the decisions of the Bundesbank. Better to wait till we're back at the University, Barnaby Hilson said. A student asked where the dog was. We should start
a fund
, the Irish novelist said. Certainly the creature wasn't in the coach. Doris Rohr promised to give generously, though she was apparently the only female lector Vikram Griffiths had never made a pass at. He seemed so full of fun last night, Plaster-cast-tottie said. Sitting beside her, the Avvocato Malerba said there were special rules for setting up funds of this kind and he would be glad to sort out the legal side.