Ger@rd B😊😊ij

Dear Mr. President, I am writing from the tram. My shoes are wet again. This is not a metaphor. Oslo has decided it is October and therefore the rain is simply hanging in the air, judging everyone who walks under it, and I have once more failed the rain's inspection. There is a half-eaten kanelbull in my pocket that someone's wife sent to the meeting. It has put cinnamon sugar on my coat. I will not explain this further. We met this morning. Five of us. Coffee. The portraits. Mandela looking as if he already knows how the day will go. The one we do not discuss still hanging there, 1973, bombs still falling, two predecessors having resigned, Tom Lehrer having declared political satire obsolete. We leave him up. Every family has the uncle who once did something, after which everyone simply agreed to keep passing the potatoes. You will be pleased to hear that your name came up. Not because anyone nominated you in a way that counted, those had to be in by the 31st of January, which is to say before you had, by your own arithmetic, finished ending the wars, but because several people kept phoning and posting and then announcing that they had phoned and posted. Israel's prime minister put it on the internet. The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced their nominations as though the announcing were part of the scoring. Iran, as usual, was both on the list and not on the list, depending on which day the fish was measured. A man flew around the world collecting endorsements the way one collects signatures against a noisy dog. We watched. Norwegians are good at watching. We have long winters and very little else. The number of wars, we noticed, kept increasing. Eight, then more. Like a fish. Every time someone said the number, the fish had grown an inch. Sometimes Iran was the extra one; sometimes it was already finished and also still ongoing. We did not weigh the fish. We do not grade homework. "He made peace" is not a sentence that ends in a medal, no matter how loudly it is said or how many heads of state are asked to say it into a phone. The will of a dead Swede who invented dynamite and spent his final years trying to launder the phrase "merchant of death" does not, it turns out, contain a clause about volume. So we gave it to an eighty-five-year-old woman who was, at the hour we told the world, sitting in courtroom 600 in Nuremberg. The actual room. The one where the law once stared down the precise kind of man who believes wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his. She did not phone us. She did not post. No one flew anywhere on her behalf. She wanted the work and not the medal. The medal found her anyway. This is not a rule we wrote down. It is simply the only pattern that has survived a hundred years of our mistakes. Which brings me to the purpose of this note. Since the calendar already closed the window, and since the prize itself has a well-documented allergy to anyone who explains, in public, at length, why he deserves it, I have decided to send you the one form of recognition that can actually be purchased. A $9 participation trophy. Eight for the wars. Plus one for Iran, which refused to stay counted and therefore, we felt, deserved its own line. Not a medal. Not a portrait on a wall. Not even a cinnamon bun. Just the ordinary, honest kind of prize, the kind that does not flee the moment you reach for it. I have marked the memo "Nobel condolences," which is the closest thing to the real article your campaign will accept by card. Think of it as the uncle's contribution. Or the rain's. Or the fish's, including the Iranian one that would not hold still long enough to be weighed. We are only five damp people in a room with wet shoes and a long table and a plate of buns that is always, somehow, already empty. We have been wrong before. Kissinger is still on the wall. We may be wrong again; a future committee may one day hang a portrait of this very morning and decline, forever, to explain why. But not this year. This year the old woman in Nuremberg got a phone call she did not ask for, and you get nine dollars and a note from a man whose shoes are wet. Takk for the eight wars. And the extra dollar, for Iran. The number is no longer our problem. Kristin said "well" an hour ago. I have to change trams.

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. You may have read my letter yesterday. A great many people did, which is its own small Norwegian tragedy, because we are a people raised under Janteloven, the unwritten law that says you are not to think you are anything special, and now I have been noticed, and my sister has sent me a text with an exclamation mark in it, and I have had to lie down with a cold cloth. It is the next morning. The rain has not improved. Same tram, same wet shoes, failing the same daily inspection the sky conducts on all of us. No bun today. I ate the bun. Under Janteloven I am required to add that it was not a very good bun and I did not enjoy it, which is a lie, but a patriotic one. I have been watching the television, because today, it turns out, is an anniversary. One year ago, on this exact wet day, the man across the ocean stood on a stage in Egypt in front of a green folder and asked, out loud, into a live microphone, “Can we get the documents, please?”, as though the peace he had come to sign might have wandered off to get a coffee. One year ago he announced it had taken three thousand years to reach that moment, a figure he revised, in the same breath, to somewhere between five hundred and six thousand, settling nothing, insulting all of the intervening millennia equally. And a year ago, twenty people came home. Children’s fathers. Somebody’s son, walking into his mother’s arms on a hospital floor. I said it then and the law of my land will have to forgive me for saying it plainly again: that part was good. That part was the only part a dead Swede’s will was ever about. And here is the thing I have learned in thirty years of this, the thing that separates my committee from every excitable capital on earth: we do not grade the homework on the day it is handed in, glowing, for the cameras. We grade it a year later. In the cold. When the folder is in a drawer and the crowd has gone home and we can finally see whether the thing was a peace or a press release with a long enough shelf life to reach the next awards season. So. One year later. The verdict. It mostly held. I want you to understand what it costs a Norwegian to say even that much. “It mostly held” is, in my dialect, delirious praise. It is the most enthusiasm the climate permits before November. There were strikes. There were violations, theirs and his and everyone’s. It wobbled, it cracked, it was patched, it is still, this morning, more or less a peace, and twenty people who were in the dark are, a year on, still in the light. By the standards of the thing we actually measure, that is not nothing. We noted it. We are, despite the rumors, not made entirely of frost. But I was watching for the other thing, because I am built to watch the thing beside the thing, and the thing beside the thing has not stopped for one single day in twelve months. The campaign. He did not, you see, end a war and then move on with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has done a good turn. He ended a war and immediately entered it into evidence. For a year he has been submitting it. Re-signing it. Re-announcing it. Holding it up to the light at every available podium like a child who has brought the same drawing back to the refrigerator three hundred times. And I know exactly what it is, because it is addressed to me. To the five of us. It is an appeal, lodged the morning after we told him no, against a verdict he received four days ago when the prize went instead to an eighty-five-year-old woman who never once asked for it. We call this, in Norwegian, when something becomes loud and chaotic and completely out of proportion, helt Texas. Totally Texas. It is real slang, I promise you, we say it about blizzards and traffic and weddings that got out of hand. And I sat on my tram this morning, watching a year of footage from a man who is, himself, quite near Texas, and I thought: there is no more precise word in my language. The whole performance is helt Texas. A year of it. An anniversary of it. Now, honesty, because it is apparently the only product I am now known for. It might still work. That is the sentence the audience cannot bear from me, and it is the only one worth your time. We are not pure. We handed the medal once to a man nine months into a presidency for things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly nauseous about it for fifteen years; his portrait situation is, let us say, under review. We are five vain, wrong, weather-beaten pensioners administering a dead dynamite salesman’s guilty conscience out of a building on a street named after Henrik Ibsen, who wrote almost exclusively about respectable men discovering they are frauds, and who would have found all of this unbearably funny and then written a four-hour play about it. So I will not tell you the man can never win it. I will tell you what my entire nation says instead, the most devastating phrase in the Norwegian language, deployed at the end of a long cold silence: vi får se. We’ll see. Because the trouble, the genuine trouble, is that this year he did not merely want it. He learned. He learned to chase the medal with his hands full, and a man chasing it with twenty freed hostages in his arms is much harder to look away from than a man merely phoning to say he deserves it. It is, I will grant him, and it costs me to grant it, cleverer than anything we have had to ignore in a hundred and twenty-five years. But he has broken the one law older than ours. Not Janteloven, though he breaks that one so completely that Norwegian schoolchildren could study him as the photographic negative of a well-raised person. The older law. The only rule the medal has never once gotten wrong in its whole history: it finds the ones who do not chase it, and it flees the ones who do. He has spent a year running after it, at the top of his lungs, holding up the drawing. And every day he runs, he proves the one thing that disqualifies him, which is that he does not understand what it is for. The old woman in Nuremberg understood. She sat in courtroom 600, the actual room, and did not phone anyone, and the medal walked across the water and found her. That is not a system we designed. It is just the only pattern that has survived a century of our mistakes. The tram is slowing. My stop. The rain is still hanging there, auditing me, and I have failed again, and somewhere across the ocean a year-old green folder is being photographed, for the thousandth time, for a submission that closed in January and reopens, in his mind, every morning of his life. Vi får se. We’ll see. Kristin thinks he gets it next year. She didn’t say so. She said “well,” on a falling tone, while looking out the window, which is how a Norwegian screams a prediction. I have learned to read her the way sailors read the sky, and that particular “well” meant: brace yourself, it’s coming, and we’re going to have to live with it. I hope she’s wrong. Under Janteloven I’m not permitted to think my hope matters more than hers. I have to change trams.