Story for performance #736
webcast from Paris at 09:58PM, 26 Jun 07

Disaster for Palestinians

K was born in the Transylvanian border town of Turda, Romania. In 1944, Nazi pressure raised the spectre of Jewish deportation. In an unpublished autobiography, Marginal in the Centre, he recalls how German aircraft strafed his family as they fled Turda on a Gypsy wagon. Theirs was a bilingual household—his diplomat father spoke Romanian, his more literary mother, Hungarian. Realising his talent, they hired a private tutor. But young K’s privileged childhood effectively ended on St. Andrew’s Day of 1952 when he and his brother Radu were sent by their father as hostages to Vatican City, to curry favour with the Pope.

Mr K’s biweekly audiences with the Pope were largely centred on his strategy to build a bridge between faiths. One of his great aims, K had a tendency to declare during this period, was to secure a reconciliation between Islam and Christianity. ‘A curious tack for a Semite,’ the Pope teased him.

‘He was not very tall,’ was the papal legate’s recorded impression of K, by this point in his thirties while still a scholar-prisoner at the Vatican. ‘His face and chin were shaven, but for a moustache. The swollen temples increased the bulk of his head.’

The two brothers were ultimately released by the Vatican as pawns in the struggle between its expanding empire, Iran, and the provisional authority of Wallachia. K was, on Monday, appointed to the position of special envoy to the Middle East Peace Process.

The job description does not look attractive. The envoy has four bosses who frequently disagree and are currently in despair over how to reunite the Palestinians and inject some life into the new Peace Process. He arrived in Jerusalem in bad weather. It took thirty minutes for the battered plane to descend the final 800 meters of its one hour flight from Jordan. When he settled into the back seat of his limousine, it was very late in the evening.

As the car crept silently through the mist and darkness, K’s thoughts turned to his predecessor, Wolf, a former bank president, who gave up in April 20__ after spending a year trying to make some headway on this very same Peace Process. Though it has been over a year since Wolf, thought K, his seat remains warm.

‘There has been no Peace Process to speak of,’ bit back a white-lipped Julian Bell, diplomatic editor. He sat across from K in the non-denominational café opposite the hotel. K watched without saying one word as Bell, his eyes fixed on an empty street, smoked the last half of his cigarette and left. After the wet night, the spring morning air was almost frigid.

Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and pro-western Arab states are expected publicly to welcome K as the special envoy of the Vatican and Transylvanian Peacemakers, though governments acknowledge that he is deeply unpopular with ordinary people across the region.

We asked K what his first priorities would be now that he was in Jerusalem. Sitting in the ornate office of a former security chief, K smiled and pointed to a plaque on the desk. It roughly translated to, ‘Whoever sits in this chair does not own the chair. Only the office owns the chair.’

An Arab official was more skeptical. ‘I don’t know what K is going to be able to achieve,’ he said. ‘And anyway, what does Palestinian governance mean at this point in time when there is a geographical and political separation between the West Bank and Gaza?’

Touché, thought K, who read the account online by means of the ethernet connection provided by his hotel. The unnamed Arab official went on to further clarify what he believed K’s role would be in the new arrangement.

‘There is considerable suspicion in this town that what we are seeing is Dr R washing her hands of this problem. There is no expectation of any breakthrough. Quite the contrary, there is little chance of success, and she would like K to be the one to break the bad news,’ he said.

Brian T., 32, a civil servant, described the appointment of Mr K as ‘a disaster’ for Palestinians. ‘We have been saying for a long time that K is nothing more than a poodle.’ he said. “Nous nous souvenions!

‘There is enough food but other items such as cigarettes are running out.’ The young Israeli man stood before K with this bland assessment of the situation. He was smoking in K’s office, something K thought he might, from here on out, through the dissemination of a printed memorandum, disallow in all public areas of the building.

The Transylvanian Embassy just this morning has condemned a video of the kidnapped envoy, K, which shows him with a belt of explosives strapped around his waist, a device known locally as ‘Gerstäcker’s Mother.’

‘This latest video from K’s kidnappers has upset his family,’ reported Bell, ‘particularly because of the explosive belt he’s apparently wearing.’

‘As you can see,’ says K, ‘I’ve been dressed in what is an explosive belt. The kidnappers say they’re willing to turn the hideout into what they describe as a ‘death zone’ if there is any attempt to free me by force.’

Today his father said they (K’s family) were most concerned with this latest development. ‘For all of us who love and care for K it is very distressing to see him treated in this way.’ As the media educate themselves on K’s history with his father, the statement has since raised some eyebrows in the international press.

‘I do appeal to the Hamas movement,’ K continues in the video, ‘and the Transylvanian government not——not to resort to the tactics of force in an effort to end this. And I would ask anyone in the larger Romanian and Moldovan states who wish me well to support me in that appeal. It seems the answer is to attend to negotiations, which I’m told are very close to achieving a deal.’

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by James Tierney.