The passes appeared. We were shuffled into a long queue in an antechamber with the group in front of us on wheelchairs, paraplegic, and before them a crocodile of schoolchildren come to observe the workings of the Parliament, which today would be debating, a slip of paper said, the standardization of religious education across the Community, and above all the vexed question of treatment of minority religious groupings, especially where these coincided with marked ethnic distinctions. Unless an emergency debate were to be tabled on the total collapse of the Italian Lira (not to mention the Greek Drachma) following the decision of the German Bundesbank, apparently a sovereign institution and thus outside the jurisdiction of the Community and even the German government, so they say, not to lower its interest rates. Or equally an emergency debate might be tabled on the conflict over Community Policy towards Yugoslavia, ex-Yugoslavia, in conflict, in chaos. In particular, huge numbers of children were being killed there. Our queue shuffled behind jerking wheelchairs where disabled people of different, perhaps differing, nationalities kept each other company in pidgin English and in front of them four French teachers tried, but not very hard, to stop twenty ten-year-olds from shrieking. Where was Vikram? I wondered. And what was I going to say in my speech, which according to my watch was only twenty minutes away now? I had prepared nothing.’! had thought of nothing. Then in the crush between security doors where only four people could go at once (closing one door before another could be opened), Sneaky-tottie took my arm, as she had done the day before while climbing the stairs of the Chambersee Service Station, or when offering me the refuge of her umbrella under blowing rain, took it, that is, with remarkable confidence and intimacy, as if we had been great friends for years, and remarked with a flush on her face (as though after sex almost), that it really was exhilarating to feel oneself at the heart of Europe and to see that Europe wasn’t just an idea but a concrete entity. My first reaction to this, between the two security doors, and apart from some quip to reverse the positive connotations of ‘concrete’, might normally have been to reflect that the existence of this parliamentary building on French soil, doubling up as it does for a similar’ parliamentary building on Belgian soil (so that once every month twelve articulated lorries, meeting Community Requirements of course, have to set out from Brussels to Strasbourg bringing with them heaps of documents and archives which then have to be trucked back only a week later when the Parliament returns from Strasbourg to Brussels, while at the same time five-hundred-plus rooms, of a certain standard and quality, have to be kept available in both cities for five-hundred-plus MEPs, so-called, not to mention their secretaries and interpreters, and of course two staffs of menials have to be kept in permanent and generous public employ to service these structures, so reminiscent, though on an infinitely larger scale, of the Chambersee Service Station, this in order to enhance the prestige of one
founder member, France, a favour granted once upon a time in return for the concession to another founder member, Germany, of a greater number of Parliamentary seats than might otherwise have been allotted) — the existence, I might normally have said, in response to the innocent and ingenuous Sneaky-tottie, of this parliamentary building hardly inspired enthusiasm in the European ideal. Yet I did not react like this, but merely squeezed the young girl’s arm benignly and sexlessly. Her cheeks were so full of colour and excitement. Just as I did not react as I might have reacted when finding, a few moments later in a glossily marbled area where we had been told to assemble around the secretary of a Welsh MEP beneath an announcement in more languages than one would care to count, that she was explaining to Doris Rohr and Heike the Dike and Luis and a small group of students that in the formation of a constitution for a United Europe, such as the one she was drawing up in the hope of a year’s scholarship in Brussels (and it crossed my mind that she was saying this because of the presence of the Welsh MEP’s rather attractive blonde secretary, who might prove a useful contact), the key issue was the establishment of those mechanisms which would regulate a genuinely pooled sovereignty. The expression pooled sovereignty immediately reminded me of that other execrable but intimately related expression she had once favoured, negotiable identity, and then of the time when, on noticing a considerable puddle on the bed of a fourth-floor room in Pensione Porta Genova after an afternoon’s epic exertions, I remarked, laughing and embracing her, that that was the only sort of pooled sovereignty that meant anything to me. I was reminded of these things, as I say, on entering the foyer of the European Parliament, and I was irritated, as always, by the shallowness of it all, by her criminal forgetfulness of those moments that had been intense, by the fact that the world had not chosen to stand still at what had appeared to me to be its only moment of true harmony, of equilibrio interiore. I was scandalized, I suppose, like Plato, like my wife, by how much and how callously the world could change. Waterwords, I suddenly thought, in a haze of bromazepam, in the impressive foyer of the European Parliament, remembering a poem from somewhere. Kallimachos, perhaps. Meleager. I couldn’t remember. “Oaths such as these, waterwords! Thus some ancient poet, jilted; thus my extraordinary memory, despite the bromazepam. So that it occurred to me, for example, that I might well remark that on the matter of pooled sovereignty the last word had been spoken some two thousand five hundred years ago by Thucydides in his description of the Athenian alliance. Again that memory, as if all drawn to the surface, pus-like, by a single sore, everything I have ever known brought to focus by a single rancour. Yes, The weaker states — I might quote Thucydides on the subject of pooled sovereignty — because of the general desire to make profits, were content to tolerate being governed by the stronger, while those who won superior power by acquiring capital resources brought the smaller cities under their control I might have quoted that, and not inappropriately it seemed to me on a morning when the currency markets are still in turmoil, as the radio would have it, over the sovereign decisions of the German Bundesbank, a morning when for some dealers the Italian Lira has to all intents and purposes ceased to exist. But I did not. And the reason, I’m aware now, sitting here in the Meditation Room, so-called, hunched forward in what to a casual observer might be supposed to be an attitude of prayer (and what is prayer if not an attitude?), the reason that I did not quote Thucydides, or Meleager, or anybody else, in the foyer of the European Parliament, nor object in any way to her reflections on how a new constitution must contribute towards the construction of. a European identity, was perhaps partly because I did not believe she would recognize such a quotation, recognize I mean that it had passed between us before, in the days when she always agreed with me, when I always agreed with her, and perhaps partly because, in the daze, the haze, not entirely unpleasant, of last night’s bromazepam, still happily smothering any responsible anxiety I might otherwise feel relative to my total impreparation for the two speeches I was supposed to give, one in only twenty minutes’ time, I now found that I couldn’t care less. I could not care less what she or Sneaky-tottie or anybody else said about