A Shade of Difference (110 page)

“I still think—” Lafe was saying in the delegation, but Hal Fry shook his head.

“I’ll go back pretty soon,” he said. “This will be over in a little while, and then I’ll go … Look, Lafe,” he said softly, “I’m not under any illusions. The next will be worse. And the next. And the next. And the next … When I go back to the hospital tonight”—and a bleakness that wrung the hearts of his two colleagues as they leaned close to listen came suddenly into his eyes—“I won’t be coming out again. I know that. So just—let me stay. Okay?”

Lafe bowed his head.

“As you say.”

“Anyway,” Hal said, more lightly. “I’m not through yet. I may have something else to say.”

“Now, damn it—” Lafe began again, but again Hal stopped him.

“I may not. But again I may. We’ll have to see the note on which this ends. After all,” he said with a last show of humor, “who else is better equipped to give a valedictory, if that is what it should have to be?”

“You break my heart,” Cullee told him simply.

“Listen to the vote,” Hal commanded lightly, though the dizziness and pain were back again and the pills were not really helping very much. “That’s more important than hearts, right now.”

And as the long roll call moved on, it did become important, quite literally the most important thing in the world at that moment, so that as it neared its end the great room was gripped with an almost unbearable tension and excitement in which only an occasional sharp intake of breath, a muffled exclamation, the sound of someone accidentally hitting the metal shade of his desk lamp with a pencil, broke the silence. Many delegates were keeping their own tallies, and from them there spread like lightning across the floor the startling word: the vote was coming down to its finish in a tie. Four names remained, and the President called them out with an almost defiant loudness that betrayed his own excitement:

“Denmark!”

“No.”

“Dominican Republic!”

“Sí.”

“Ecuador.”

“No.”

“El Salvador!”

“Sí!”

“On this vote,” the President said, his voice trembling slightly, there are 60 Yes, 60 No, 2 abstentions, others absent.”

He paused for a moment, while all over the chamber there was an explosion of bottled-up emotion.

“Under Rule 97,” he went on, reading from it as it lay before him on his desk, “‘If a vote is equally divided on matters other than elections, a second vote shall be taken at a subsequent meeting which shall be held within forty-eight hours of the first vote, and it shall be expressly mentioned in the agenda that a second vote will be taken on the matter in question. If this vote also results in equality, the proposal shall be regarded as rejected.’

“Therefore, if it is the pleasure of the Assembly, it is the intention of the Chair to call a subsequent meeting of this plenary session for 3 p.m. on Monday next—”

“Mr. President!” someone called from the floor, and down the aisle to the rostrum there could be seen advancing the dapper figure of the French Ambassador, walking in a purposeful but unhurried fashion as a wave of noisy speculation followed in his wake.

“Mr. President,” Raoul Barre said calmly, “all delegations have discussed this matter at great length both publicly and privately in recent days. Therefore it is quite likely that no votes will be changed should a subsequent meeting be held.

“Furthermore, I do not know how others feel, but my delegation is sick of it, we believe the time of the Assembly has been employed enough in this matter, and we are not disposed to consider it any further.

“Therefore: since another vote would result in the same tie, which in turn would result in the defeat of this resolution, my delegation, which voted Yes, will now change its vote and vote No, thus guaranteeing the defeat of this resolution, which in our opinion is inevitable anyway, and clearing the agenda for other matters before this Assembly.”

“Mr. President!” the Soviet Ambassador shouted into the uproar that followed. “Mr. President, it is out of order for a delegate to change his vote after the result is announced!”

“There is nothing in the rules that says so, Mr. President,” Raoul Barre said in a bored and contemptuous tone. “Furthermore, I do not remember the distinguished Soviet delegate being so tender of procedure early this morning when several votes were changed after announcement of the first result on Gorotoland. In any event, we have changed our vote now. There it stands. Does anyone wish to join the distinguished Soviet delegate in shouting about it?”

“Mr. President!” Vasily Tashikov cried in an anguished voice. “Mr. Presi
dent!”

“I hear the delegate,” the President shouted, furiously banging his gavel. “I hear the distinguished delegate, who will be in order! So will this Assembly be in order! … Now!” he said explosively when a reasonable facsimile of calm had been restored. “Does any other delegation wish to change its vote, one way or the other?”

For a touch-and-go minute there was a busily waiting silence.

“Very well, then. On this vote the total is 59 Yes, 61 No, 2, abstentions, others absent, and the resolution is defeated.”

“Thank
you,
Raoul Barre,” Lafe said in the delegation, knowing very well what Raoul knew—that another vote might very well go against the United States, and that he had in effect smooth-talked the Assembly into letting him prevent it. “God knows why, Raoul Barre, but thank
you.”

“If there is no further business—” the President began, but once again someone cried “Mr. President!” and in a tired voice he said, “The distinguished delegate of Portugal.”

Immediately tension returned. A wave of boos greeted the slight, mustachioed figure of the Portuguese delegate as he mounted the rostrum. He spat, rather than spoke, into the microphone.

“So now we see, Mr. President, the fine results of trying to appease those in this body who are unappeasable! Now we see that the United States, like everyone who tries to bow to pressures no self-respecting nation should bow to, reaps, like everyone, the same reward.

“Now we see, in this vote which came so close to majority condemnation of the United States that in the eyes of the world it
is
condemnation and cannot be explained away as anything else, how pointless it is to try to make friends in this body by crawling to those who are too ignorant and too hostile to be anything but enemies.

“Now we see,” he said, his voice rising against the surge of boos that began to rise against him, “what this United Nations is worth. How empty are its pretenses, Mr. President, how shabby its performances! How futile it is to abandon honor and integrity in the hopes of being rewarded by its members! How pointless to run like a scared mouse before this cat which wants nothing but to gobble you up!

“This is what you get, I will say to my friends of the United States. This is what you receive when you try to appease certain nations here. This is what you receive when you abandon principle and try to make humble bargains against your old friends and your own best interests.

“What has it profited you, to treat as you have my country, and Belgium, and South Africa, and others? You tried to please your new-found friends, but you have found they are not friends, even so.

“May you learn from this what the United Nations really is, before it is too late for you!”

And, to the applause of some few delegations but the hisses of many more, he left the rostrum, a fierce scorn upon his face, and returned to his seat, looking neither to right nor to left along the jeering aisle.

“Now,” Hal Fry said, struggling slowly to rise, “I must. Get the President’s attention for me.”

“But, Hal,
damn
it—” Lafe protested.

“Get it, I said!”

“Mr. President!” Cullee shouted, jumping to his feet. “Mr. President!”

“The distinguished delegate of the United States,” the President said uncertainly. “Which delegate is it who wishes—?”

“Senator Fry,” Cullee said.

Abruptly the hall quieted once again to a close and watching attention as slowly down the aisle, walking with a carefulness that betrayed his weariness and pain in every movement, came the senior Senator from West Virginia. But he did not falter, and when he turned to face them at the lectern his head came up with an earnest and commanding air that stirred and gripped them all.

Of the many things going through his mind, he knew in general which he would select to say; the many things going through his body he was aware of as a sort of great, dark wall of pain hanging between him and a world that, though it now seemed far away, must yet be spoken to. He did not know at that moment, so agonizing was the pain that had defied the sedatives, whether he could even utter words aloud.

Yet he felt he must, and he thought that if he could keep off the dizziness a little bit he could manage. If he held himself very tightly with the aid of the lectern, if he made no sudden gestures to induce further dizziness and nausea, if he kept his mind and attention firmly on the words that it seemed to him must now be said, then he might make it.

He took a deep and trembling breath and began to speak, slowly and carefully, but without pause or other outward sign of the terrible storm within.

“Mr. President, the United States could not leave alone upon this record, as the final words to be said about the United Nations in this debate, the comments just made by the distinguished delegate of Portugal.

“The United States can realize what prompts this bitterness. Just as it can realize, I hope, the bitterness on the other side that has filled much of this debate and resulted in a vote which is, as the delegate of Portugal truly says, for all practical purposes a condemnation of my country.

“Yet, Mr. President: That debate is over, now. That decision has been rendered. Those hostile words and feelings, the United States now hopes, can be put aside and left to history. It is now a question of where we go from here.

“Mr. President,” he said, and a note of deeper urgency came into his voice, “I would like to tell you something that I would not tell you if I did not think it would help you to listen more seriously to what I have to say.”

He paused, and in the press gallery and everywhere through the Hall, men leaned forward with a rapt and completely absorbed attention.

“A few minutes ago, as you saw, I was overcome by what the President kindly referred to as a temporary fainting spell. I wish”—and he smiled faintly with a wistful ruefulness that almost killed his two colleagues, who had followed him down and were now sitting nearby with the delegation of Tanganyika in the front row of seats—“that the President had been right. I wish it had been temporary.”

He paused again for a moment and then, after some obvious inner struggle, managed to keep his voice steady and went on.

“The word ‘temporary’ no longer belongs to me. Everything I now face is permanent.

“My visit to the hospital, of which many of you have heard, was not encouraging. The disease I have is leukemia.” There was a sudden great intake of breath all around the chamber, but he still managed a slight, wry smile. “No votes can be changed on that.”

“Oh, God, I wish he didn’t have to,” Lafe whispered with an agonized expression to Cullee on the floor.

“So, my friends, I have no more axes to grind in this world. Everything is—over—for me. And therefore, perhaps, you will believe me when I say that I am truly concerned about the lack of tolerance and mutual understanding and, if you will forgive the word—because, for me, at least, it no longer has any embarrassment—love, for one another, that seems to be characteristic of our associations here.

“I would like to think, Mr. President,” he said, and it seemed to them as they examined him more closely that there was now a certain luminous quality about his skin, a first outward intimation of his ravaging disease, “that the time has come for an end to hate in the world. I would like to think that we have reached a point in human history where we might all realize that hate is no longer effective, that hate, indeed, is fatal.

“Mr. President, I suppose that in a sense I have been guilty of it, for I have had deep suspicions of the Soviet Union. It has seemed to me that hate has been more of a conscious and consistent policy there than it has in any other nation or area. Yet perhaps it is time to put aside that part of the record, too, and appeal to all of us, without regard to nationhood or political policy but simply as human beings to deal with one another kindly and charitably in all things.

“Mr. President”—and there was no doubt that he had them completely now, so silent and attentive was the whole of his colorful audience—“what is the situation of the world at this moment? We all know what it is.

“Armies stand poised. Nuclear arsenals are full to overflowing. Rockets rest at the ready on launching pads around the earth. The arms race mounts and mounts and no one yet has managed to cancel out the logic of history which has always said, before, that arms races have but one ending.

“Hand in hand with all this go suspicion and mistrust and jealousy, bad faith and bitterness, envy and hate. The peoples of the earth huddle in terror before the weight of disaster they have mustered to their command. Nothing but awful destruction seems to lie ahead for humanity, and no fine words and no brave slogans seem any more able to prevent the blowing-out of the tiny flame of hope.

“Oh, Mr. President!” he cried, and his anguish both mental and physical lent his words a vivid power. “How does mankind stand, in this awful hour? Where does it find, in all its pomp and pride and power, the answer to its own fateful divisions? Where on this globe, where in this universe, is there any help for us? Who will come to our aid, who have failed so badly in our trusteeship of the bounteous and lovely earth? Who will save us, if we do not save ourselves?

“I say to you, my friends, no one will. No one will. We are wedded to one another, it may be to our death, it may be to our living. We cannot escape one another, however hard we try. Though we fly to the moon and far beyond, we shall take with us what is in our hearts, and if it be not pure, we shall slaughter one another where’er we meet, as surely on some outward star as here on earth.