bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2000-2001) — Winter 2000/2001 // Hiver 2000/2001, pp. 38–39
Leslie and I came back to Ottawa on home leave one dusty June. Returning from a hardship post was more bizarre than I had anticipated, but a week of decompression and trips to both Canadian Tire and Tim Horton’s restored my sensibilities to their normal, florid timbre. For Leslie, our trip home was not just a respite from thinking up lesson plans and marking exams, but an occasion to walk around town by herself, far from the virtual house arrest of our (otherwise comfortable) staff quarters. Soon we were eating bagels, drinking tap water and paying the GST, while all around us, motorists were stopping at stoplights, and pedestrians were not carrying AK-47s. However, I think I am still mad at Sir Sandford Fleming for having invented jet lag.
On a certain room-temperature Thursday, I steeled myself to tackle the Pearson Building. Leslie, meanwhile, visited with her best chum from university, and enjoyed the distinct pleasure of sauntering through the market without being stared at, followed or jostled by overheated goatherds. Stores full of books, posters and teaching supplies beckoned. (My wife is the kind of person who can tell you the difference between a phospholipid and a wax, or a participial adjective and a gerund, and convince you that this is worth knowing. By comparison, I am able to distinguish the key differences between crunchy and smoothy or Batman and Robin, but the subtleties of the tastes great/less filling dilemma leave me baffled). Leslie even promised to rescue me at the end of my bureaucratic day, and buy me egg rolls. As her father’s Ford chugged away into the distance, I turned my face toward the shadowy gates of Fort Pearson.
Actually, things went fine that morning. After a few hours of inter-office shuttling, I was standing, breathless, by the big Commissionaires’ desk. My colleague from Riyadh’s wife was filling me in about the not-so-niceties of being pursued by religious police and cornered in a diplomatic grocery store for iniquitously wearing open-toed sandals. Suddenly (as it always seems to me) and with the padding skittishness of a cat or an English actress, up strolls my pal Sophie all in navy blue. Her demeanour was still as bright as the June sky over the Olympic Saddledome, but her Canola-blonde hair was a foot-and-a-half shorter than it had been the last time we had poutine together in Hull.
I think Sophie’s family is from Polish or Bavarian or some such normal Calgary background, so her distant ancestors would have gainfully spent a millennium alternately invading each other or having their bottoms booted by the Germans, Russians, Prussians, etc. Her more recent ancestors are from a generation of post-Lougheed prairie libertarians which resents both the lack of Senate reform and the periodic inclusion of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the CFL eastern conference. The only other Sophie I have ever met is the towering Swiss wife of my (non-Swiss) boss. Calgary Sophie is neither towering nor Swiss (nor German, Russian, Prussian, etc.), though she can yodel. What she cannot do is sing, and to this day bears the trauma scars from an incident when her grade six teacher asked her to please not sing along with the others. But I digress.
Sophie was just on her way to visit with Personnel. The mere mention of that word produced in me an involuntary shudder as energetic as a break dance. I had visited there myself that very morning, to discuss the boundless opportunities (if any) of my foreign service career (if any). What I discovered, no junior bureaucrat should ever know for sure: the Administration doesn’t like my new suit. The exact words were, “You won’t get very far with me, wearing earth tones.” Ouch. And this wasn’t my Sears suit or even my Moore’s suit, but a suit from an actual haberdashery. So much for my mastery of foreign policy fashionability.
By contrast, all was well with Sophie that day. In the previous twenty-four hours, she had completed her Master’s degree and passed her “C” level in French. And then she got to have lunch with me (another staggering achievement). While Sophie communed with Personnel, I collected one other person, and together the three of us walked over to City Hall cafeteria.
My favourite person at headquarters was a floor-length farm girl named Doris. She was also Sophie’s elder sister, and the resemblance is obvious especially the Mycenaean nose). Doris worked on the same floor of the A-Tower as Sophie, Sophie’s boyfriend, and the guy who runs the hockey pool. I like Doris. I am never quite sure what she thinks of me, but she is always kind, and invariably greets me with a toothy grin eerily similar to both her getting-her-picture-taken smile and her it’s-a-shame-you-are-such-a-goof smile. It was Doris who explained to me that “Sodexho” is neither a curse nor an onomatopoeic Yiddish word for a suppressed sneeze.
When she gets to talking business, Doris is usually about as flippant as Stalin during a gloomy period. Mercifully, we had precious little business to transact that lunchtime, especially not in the potential presence of municipal employees, Russians, Prussians, etc. Doris was as engaging as ever, managing to fend off both Sophie’s incisive questions and my blithering.
As tray-carrying, shell-shocked bureaucrats shuffled past, Doris amused us with tales of a recent series of journeys she had made around the Pacific Basin, preparing for summits and confabulations among various high muckety-mucks. She is a young woman who represents her country overseas, so Doris still has to face an awkward delay in dealing with many foreign (male) diplomats and officials. Before she can start projecting Canadian interests abroad, she must first establish that she is not the extramarital “niece” of whatever man she happens to be sitting next to. I am a white male inept but earnest Second-or-Third Secretary, so I usually have the luxury of demonstrating that I should be ignored on my own merits, not because of prejudice.
“Hey,” said Doris, “I have a question for you.”
Uh-oh. Questions from Doris are risky. I certainly had no desire to have her plumb the depths of my ignorance any deeper than is routinely necessary (I have had some departmental bathyscaphes down there before). And the last time Doris asked me a question, I had ended up working in a Chancery building that has water buffalo on the front lawn.
“Uh-oh,” I said manfully. Here it came. “Is Pakistan in the Seeka?”
My mind raced. I calculated and deduced at the throttling speed of Eddie Shack with a charley horse. One synapse fired, then two, then a dozen. Soon my grey matter was generating enough raw intellectual power to light a lava lamp. That very concept emerged in my consciousness. Memories seeped in of an evening two decades previously when, after a game of road hockey, a sneaked cigarette and an episode of “Get Smart”, I had burned my elbow on my Uncle Mike’s lava lamp. Of course, Uncle Mike is now a biker who does ductwork and knows Dan Aykroyd, whereas I am an FS-1 who does paperwork and was once bitten in the bus line by a guy named Gerry. Which only goes to show.
There was a pause. Doris waited patiently for my expected fatuous reply. The only contribution from our table to the clattering-nattering din of the cafeteria was the mild squishyness of Sophie inhaling an outsize plate of pasta. (Sophie is frustrating for those of us working towards the physical prowess of the average 60-year-old Swede. She eats like a lumberjack and looks like a fashion model, owing to her having the metabolism of a stick insect). I scrunched my somewhat glutenous City Hall sandwich and tried to remember what the question was.
“I’m sorry,” scrunch, scrunch, “I didn’t quite catch that.”
“Is Pakistan in the Seeka?”
That’s what I thought she said. Now, if “in the Seeka” was like “in the soup”, the answer was clear. But what if it was like “in the loop” or “in the know” or “in the money”? Was the Seeka a place, like the Maghreb, or a condition, like insolvency? A few more neurons clicked over. I tried the lava lamp memory again, but this was no help.
Subtly, and trying not to disturb her consumption of epoxy Alfredo, I bent close to Sophie’s ear.
“What,” dear Sophie, “on earth,” I asked, “is the Seeka?”
Sophie looked at me like Fay Wray looking at a five-storey simian, two takes before she got the scream right. She even stopped chewing, which was a bad sign. This was serious. Most of my understanding of the foreign affairs universe was predicated on Sophie being able to tell me what is going on.
İ felt like I was in the Seeka myself.
Neither of my usual dodges would work here. Doris had previously witnessed (and not fallen for) the feigned coughing fit, and my ever-popular “maybe you should ask Leslie” would be diminished in value by the non-presence of my wife. I glanced at Doris again, and her truth-serum eyes demanded a reply.
Another tack, that’s what I needed. A little zig, a little zag. Activate the media training, and dazzle her with my Principal Overarching Information Goal (POING).
But what was my poing? fiscal responsibility? staying the course? doing more with less?
“The real question,” I poinged, offering a statement and not a question, “is that the Calgary Flames should never have traded Gary Suter.”
Undiverted by my doncherryish tangent, Doris explained that the Seeka was the CICA. This provided such blinding clarity that I spilled iced tea on my lapel.
“The Seeka,” she elucidated, enunciating carefully the way one does with preschoolers or New York City taxi drivers, “is a Kazakh initiative.”
Well, no wonder.
“Last week,” Doris continued, “we were asked about the probability of the Seeka eclipsing the ARF”
ARF. Arf. We needed to know if the Seeka was eclipsing the Arf.
The last time I had to deal with a question of such fulsome geostrategic importance, I buck-passed it to my boss (the one with the towering Swiss wife). His rejoinder to Ottawa had constituted a milestone in his 24-year Foreign Service career: he was able in a classified telex to employ the phrase, “while having sex with a donkey.” I may be in trouble for quoting that, but the source of the information was as public as the alleged animal boyfriendry about which he was reporting. May I please emphasize that no cabinet ministers, living or dead, were involved in the incident.
As it turns out, Doris and a team of bloodhounds were eventually able to locate the one person at DFAIT who had ever heard of the Seeka. This unlikely deskfiller opined that the Seeka would not soon eclipse the ARF or anything that looks like or rhymes with the ARF. And let me tell you, a whole lot of ARF-supporters are sleeping more soundly. Another victory for Canadian foreign policy.
All this serves to illustrate the extent to which J am beyond my ken in the world of glamorous acronymia. Doris told me I should work in a busy functional bureau when I came back from my posting. Sound advice, but perhaps I am not cut out for the perpetual briefing book esoterics, connecting flights and ministrations to the under informed that are hallmarks of her current assignment. And T understand Veterans’ Affairs is looking for a few good men…
Either way, these lunches with the Calgarians are just too stressful. Next time, I think I’ll order a pizza.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2000-2001) — Winter 2000/2001 // Hiver 2000/2001, pp. 38–39. Read the rest of this issue →
