It is said that the universe contains two kinds of courtrooms. The first is the courtroom of this world, where people arrive in their best suits, clutching thick files, armed with arguments as long as a railway line and with memories that turn according to the wind. There, facts are still open to debate. Documents are still open to interpretation. Sentences can still be twisted until their own authors are baffled that they ever uttered them. And mistakes can still be given other, more polite names: a breakdown in communication, developments on the ground or, for those in luck, a policy the public has yet to understand.
The second is a much quieter courtroom. There are no cameras. There are no microphones. There are no press conferences, no spokespeople, no legal team seated in a solemn row behind you. There is no chairman rapping the table to announce, “Time’s up.” There is no button marked “no comment”, and no corridor in which to dodge reporters while walking briskly. There are only questions. And answers.
In this world, people quarrel with one another about what actually happened. And the quarrel almost always opens with a set of phrases we know by heart, so often have they been used:
“I don’t remember.”
“I didn’t know.”
“I wasn’t there.”
“I never discussed that.”
“I never agreed to it.”
These sentences are scattered like dry leaves in the autumn of politics, piling up in the courtyard, swept away by the cleaners, then falling afresh the next morning. Oddly, the more important an event, the more people suddenly lose their memory of it. It is as though human memory came fitted with an automatic sensor: the higher the stakes, the faster it switches off.
Notice how selective this affliction is. No one forgets when receiving an appointment. No one forgets when receiving applause. No one forgets when the group photograph is posted in the press, complete with a smile arranged from the most flattering angle. No one forgets the name of the room in which they were sworn in, the colour of the tie they wore, or who shook their hand for longest. Yet when history presents its bill, memory so often takes extended leave without leaving a note. It may be the only kind of amnesia that never strikes at harvest time and always strikes at collection.
Perhaps this is because human beings are too accustomed to living among other human beings. We are used to judges who can be persuaded. Journalists who can be avoided. Opponents who can be rebutted. Supporters whose spirits can be stoked. A public whose opinion can be split, and then split again, until only fragments remain, busily blaming one another. Armed with all that, anyone feels reasonably safe. But there is one opponent that nobody, however strong their team, has ever managed to defeat: the trace.
The trace has a deeply undemocratic character. It does not care about office. It does not care about party. It does not care about rank, title, or how long the string of letters after a name may be. It does not care who is in power, and cares even less who is popular. A signature remains a signature. A document remains a document. An archive remains an archive. And the record has an extremely irritating habit, especially for those who were counting on it: it refuses to forget along with everyone else. It cannot be lobbied, cannot be taken to lunch, and is never swayed by the words “let’s look to the future.”
So one can imagine that, some day, there will be a very simple conversation. Not long. Not complicated. It will require no constitutional lawyer. It will require no political communications expert, still less a consultant paid handsomely to craft the phrase “I am not in a position to comment.” It will require no polling firm to establish which answer the public prefers. There will be just three questions:
“Were you present?”
“Did you know?”
“Did you agree?”
Three simple questions. So simple that it is hard to hide behind a speech. So simple that the intricacies of politics suddenly lose their use, and every trick that once seemed so potent, from the artful dodge to the deliberately elongated foreign term, becomes ornament nobody will buy. In that room there is no point answering, “In our considered view, the context needs to be examined first.” The context is already there. The context is what actually happened.
Perhaps that is the genius of the metaphysical question. It does not ask, “Who won?” It does not ask, “Who is the strongest?” It does not ask, “Who went viral?” It cares nothing for follower counts, nothing for approval ratings, nothing for whose hashtag lingered at the top of the trending list for three days. It asks only, “What actually happened?” And, unfortunately, such a question often knows the answer before it is posed. It asks not because it does not know, but to see whether the person questioned is willing to be honest.
In this world, a person can argue with a journalist. A person can argue with a judge. A person can argue with an academic, or with an entire panel discussion at once. A person can even argue with a document, and win, at least in the eyes of their supporters. But it is exceedingly hard to argue with a conscience. For a conscience keeps an archive that has never been printed. It is not stored on a server. It is not stored in a filing cabinet. It is not stored in a digital cloud that can be wiped with a single click by a suddenly diligent member of staff. It is stored in the one place that goes wherever its owner goes: into the meeting room, onto the podium, and under the duvet at three o’clock in the morning.
And so we begin to understand why there is a saying that is so brief and yet so fierce: “Forgetting is allowed; hypocrisy is not.” Forgetting is a defect of memory, an ailment that can befall anyone, from the car park attendant to the highest official. Hypocrisy is a conflict between what one knows and what one admits. Forgetting is a human weakness. Hypocrisy is a decision. Forgetting makes a person lose the way. Hypocrisy makes a person pretend never to have walked that road, though their shoes are still muddy and the driver of their official car still remembers the turning.
In truth, the world is fairly forgiving of the first. A person who says, “I’m so sorry, I really have forgotten,” with a face that truly looks forgetful, is usually still offered a cup of tea and a second chance. What cannot be forgiven is the forgetfulness that arrives right on cue, that always turns up before the final question, and that, curiously, attacks only the inconvenient parts. That is not an illness. That is a strategy.
And in the end, perhaps every political controversy will finish in the same way. The news will sink, buried under news that is newer and noisier. The hashtag will vanish, leaving a few loyal accounts to repeat it alone. The debate will go stale, and the pundits who were so certain yesterday will move on to the next topic with equal certainty. Supporters and opponents will go looking for a fresh issue, since outrage, like food, cannot be stored for long. But the archive will stay quietly on its shelf. Waiting. Patient. Not angry. Not shouting. Not campaigning. Not buying advertising, not hiring online mouthpieces, not holding a clarification briefing. Simply waiting for someone to come, and say, softly, without a script, without a spokesperson:
“Yes, that is indeed my signature.”
For history, at its core, is not a collection of events. Events have passed and cannot be summoned back. History is a collection of confessions: what people eventually dare to admit about those events, whether before one another or before themselves in a room with no cameras. And that is why, among all the questions that might be put to a human being, there is one that is hardest to answer with a smile. Not a policy question. Not a question about figures. Not even a question about who was to blame.
The most frightening question is not:
“What did you do?”
Rather, it is:
“Why did you pretend you hadn’t?”
