The Woman from Bratislava Read Free Page B

power. Here was Teddy, an academic relic, who, for some strange reason, society was still paying. And paying well.
    I lay on the bed, fulminating, the alcohol in my blood causingmy already well-developed talent for viewing my life and my career as an exercise in martyrdom to increase to the point where it gained the upper hand. I should have been leading this delegation . Instead I was merely a member, paying all my own expenses – although I was sure to find some loophole whereby the Institute would end up reimbursing most of my costs.
    There were forty of us on this trip organised by the Danish Foreign Affairs Association. The majority were elderly tourists for whom this offered the opportunity of an organised cultural tour of Central Europe. Because these were not your ordinary charter tourists. No, no. They travelled in order to broaden their minds. Six of us would be speaking at various symposiums and conferences to politicians, journalists and civil servants; giving talks inspired by the tenth anniversary of the transformation of Eastern and Central Europe, but since NATO planes had bombed Yugoslavia a couple of days after we left Denmark our conversations often ended up revolving around the war which we were not supposed to call a war. At heart we were actually all agreed that NATO had taken the only logical step, but that it had simply come to late. Just to be contrary, though, I doggedly maintained that it was immoral not to send in ground troops. That this was a clear sign of just how pampered and egoistic we were in the West; we were more concerned about not getting killed ourselves than about not taking the lives of others. Our style of warfare was a logical consequence of our civilisation. The safety of the bomber pilots was more important than the sufferings of Kosovo Albanians . We could not cope with casualties within our own ranks. Our politicians could not stomach the thought of Western men being killed and they refused to countenance the media’s pictures of such things. What we wanted was a cartoon war. A real-life version of Star Wars . But my heart really was not in this discussion . Milosevic was simply another villain in history’s long line of villains. I ought to have studied Stalin instead, like my friend and colleague Lasse. As he so rightly said: pure evil and the endeavourto comprehend it never go out of date. Lasse too was only a lecturer , but with all the newly opened archives on the Stalin era he was in seventh heaven. He now had enough material to keep him busy for the rest of his natural. Not only was he a great guy, he was also a true scholar who loved his subject. I really envied him. He was still married to the same woman. He had children only with this one woman. They had a good life and try as I might I could not convince him that he was not happy. Like me he was on the wrong side of fifty, but with something as rare in our circles as a silver wedding celebration to look back on and his beloved archives to look forward to it was also hard to persuade him that, on the whole, life was turning out to be rather like a bad movie. Another thing that annoyed me was his refusal to face the fact that, deep down, modern man was in a hell of a mess.
    We began our tour in Warsaw. The Polish capital lay cool and clear in the spring light. The city had changed a lot in ten years. Stalin had given the poor Poles a yellow wedding-cake skyscraper to remind them every day of who was in charge. Now, though, hemmed in as it was by modern skyscrapers in glass and concrete, Stalin’s gift did not dominate the skyline in quite the same way. Warsaw was teeming with cars and mobile phones, advertisements and neon signs, nightclubs and beggars. It had it all. The reek of low-octane petrol was gone. The limp salami of communism had given way to imported Danish hams and French cheeses. The party’s lies to the horse-trading of democracy. A normal country which was happy to be a member of NATO and hoped that