The Rule of the Nearest Map

Bardi came to find him on the fourth of April, which Emil had expected since about the second, and did it in the pleasantest possible way, by inviting him to lunch at a place on the Canal Grande where the fish was good and where a translator's salary would not have covered the wine.

He was perhaps forty-five, from Bologna, and he had the particular ease of a man who has been assured since childhood that rooms improve when he enters them, and who is right often enough to have never had the belief tested. He talked for eleven minutes about the fish and about Trieste and about a production of Rigoletto he had seen in Milan, and he was extremely good company, and Emil enjoyed it and was aware the entire time of enjoying it.

"You made a query," said Bardi, over the coffee, in exactly the same tone. "About a village." "I made a query about a name." "About four names, I think." Bardi stirred. "You know, it is the most extraordinary country up there. I went in March. Four hours from here and it is another world. Do you know what struck me? The doors. Every house on that road has a door out of a different century, and the man who put it in was under a different flag from the man who put in the one next door, and none of them moved a metre."

"They moved a great deal," said Emil. "My grandfather went to Trieste in 1869 and came back in 1874 and my father went to Vienna and came back and I went to Graz and came back. It is not that nobody moves. It is that the frontier moves faster." Bardi laughed, genuinely, and Emil noted that he had said my grandfather and that Bardi had noted it too and had let it go past without a flicker, which was itself an answer to something.

"The commission will settle it," said Bardi. "In the spring." "The commission will settle it on the ground, with surveyors, against the treaty text. That is the whole of its mandate." "Yes." "And there will be two treaty texts." Bardi looked at him with great warmth. "There will be one treaty, Signor Vasari, in several authentic languages, as there always is, and the delimitation commission will interpret it, as it always does, and it will do so in good faith. You are describing an ordinary feature of an ordinary treaty as though you had discovered a crime."

And the maddening thing, Emil thought on the walk back along the Riva with the wind off the gulf and his hands in his pockets, was that this was true. There was nothing unusual in what had been done. There were four names because there were four peoples. There were four texts because there were four languages. The clause had been amended because a delegation had asked for an amendment and had got it, which is what delegations are for.

Nothing had been done. That was the thing he kept coming back to and could not get past. Nothing whatsoever had been done, by anybody, at any point, and at the end of it eight hundred people would find out in about four years which country they had been living in since 1919, and would find out from a man with a theodolite who did not speak their language.

The Yugoslav delegation's man came at him from the other direction eleven days later and it was, in its way, considerably worse, because Dr Pavlin was on his side and was appalling.

They met in a café near the station because Pavlin insisted on it, and Pavlin talked for forty minutes without a question in any of it. He knew about the article. He knew about the amendment; Emil never found out how. He described it as an outrage, a theft, a piece of Roman banditry, and he described the eight hundred people of Sveti Duh with such warmth and at such length that it took Emil most of the forty minutes to realise that Pavlin had never been there.

"You are from there," said Pavlin at last. "Yes." "Then you understand what is at stake." "I understand that there is a mill on one side of the watershed and a church on the other, and that the Kozar family have the mill and the Furlan family have the field behind the church, and that if you put the line where you want it the Kozars keep their customers and if Bardi puts it where he wants it the Furlans keep the road to market, and I understand that both of those are real and that neither of them is Rome or Belgrade."

Pavlin waved this away with a hand, physically, off the table, and Emil watched it go and understood that he was not going to get it back. "Details," said Pavlin. "The principle is the thing. A Slovene village must be in a Slovene state. You will help us. You have the texts."

"I have the texts because I made them." "Then you will make us a copy." And there it was, at the end of forty minutes, in four words, and Pavlin said it in exactly the same warm voice he had used for everything else, and looked at Emil with complete confidence, because to Pavlin this was not a request for anything improper. It was an invitation to be on the right side.

Emil said no. He said it politely and he said it four times in eleven minutes and by the end of that Pavlin was no longer warm at all, and the last thing he said, standing, putting on his hat, was: "You are one of us and you will find that out when the Italians are finished with you." Which Emil thought about for some years afterwards and which was, in the narrowest and most literal sense, correct.

He walked home the long way past the station and thought: Bardi wants the village in Italy and does not care what it is called. Pavlin wants the village called Slovene and does not care very much what happens in it. And the doors on that road are out of four different centuries and none of them moved a metre, and neither of these men has ever opened one.

He began the schedule that night, without deciding to, in the way that people begin the thing that will define them: he took a clean sheet and wrote a heading on it, meaning only to sort out his own mind before bed.

The heading was Schedule of Toponyms, Eastern Sector. Under it he ruled six columns: the Slovene form, the Italian form, the German form, the Hungarian form where one existed, the form used in the French drafting, and last, on the right, the coordinates from the imperial cadastral survey of 1876, to the nearest hundred metres, which he had in three bound volumes on the shelf because nobody else in the building had wanted them.

He put Sveti Duh on the first line. Then he sat looking at the four names in a row, side by side, on one sheet, with one pair of numbers at the end of them, and understood that he had just done the thing that everybody involved had spent four months not doing, and that it had taken eleven minutes and a ruler.

Because the trick only worked while the names were apart. San Spirito in an Italian text and Sveti Duh in a Slovene text were two villages, in two documents, in two filing systems, and no man alive read both. San Spirito and Sveti Duh on the same line, against one set of coordinates, were one village, and a village cannot be north of a line and also south of it, and any clerk in any ministry in Europe could see that in four seconds without knowing a word of either language.

He worked until three. By the time he stopped he had eleven villages, four hamlets, nine watercourses, two passes and a chapel, all through the eastern sector, and he had found — because once you build the instrument you cannot stop it working — that Sveti Duh was not the only one. It was the worst one. It was not the only one. There were four others where the texts differed in some degree, three of them almost certainly by accident and one of them not.

He put the sheets in the drawer and went to bed and did not sleep, and lay in the dark doing the thing he had been avoiding since the thirty-first of March, which was working out what he was actually going to do with it. Because he could not publish it; he was a clerk on a temporary engagement with papers from a dead country. He could not give it to Pavlin, who would make it a grievance in a newspaper within a fortnight and get eleven people arrested in the valley.

And he could not give it to Bardi, obviously, and he could not give it to Aylward, who had told him in as many words that he could not be instructed. Somewhere around four in the morning it occurred to him, with the clarity that only arrives at that hour and is usually wrong and this once was not, that he did not have to give it to anybody at all. He only had to file it.

Doreen Aldridge had been typing for the commission since January and typed at a speed that had caused an American colonel to ask, once, in genuine curiosity, whether it was a trick. She was twenty-eight, from Leeds, had a fiancé who had been killed at Cambrai and did not mention him, and had, Emil had noticed by about the third week, read every single document that passed through her hands.

He put the schedule on her desk on the twenty-second of April and said, "This is not a commission document. It is a working aid I have made for myself. I would like it typed in six copies and I will pay for the paper." Miss Aldridge looked at it for rather longer than was necessary to establish what it was.

"Six," she said. "Six." "Who gets them?" "One for the file of the eastern sector, one for the file of the western sector, one for the gazetteer shelf, one for the registry in Paris with the drafting materials, one for the Colonel, and one for me." She looked up. "That is a very well-distributed working aid, Mr Vasari."

"It is a translator's note," said Emil. "Translators file notes. It is the least remarkable document in this building." "It is going to sit in four archives in two countries for the next hundred years." "Yes," said Emil, and neither of them said anything else about it, then or ever, and she typed it that afternoon, and she typed the heading in capitals without being asked, and she put a date on it, which he had forgotten to do and which turned out to matter more than almost anything else about it.

She did one other thing, on her own initiative, which he did not discover for four days. At the foot of the sixth page she had typed, in the ordinary way of a typist recording provenance: Prepared by E. Vasari, translator, from the cadastral survey of 1876 and from local usage. Not a commission instrument.

He came to her about it and she looked at him steadily and said, "It is either a commission instrument or it is not, and if nobody says which then in thirty years somebody will decide it was, and then whoever finds it will have to decide whether to believe it, and they will not know you." She went back to the machine. "Now they will know you. That is the whole of what I did and I would do it again."

It went into the boxes with the drafting materials on the fourth of May. Emil watched the porter carry them down the stairs and out to the van for Paris and stood at the window on the second floor of a shipping office on the Riva with his hands behind his back, and had no idea whatsoever whether he had done something or nothing, and would not find out for twenty-eight years.