This morning in Rome the air weighs twenty-seven degrees and the sky is composed of those Mediterranean clouds that no painter has ever truly captured: white at the edges, ash within, drifting above the umbrella pines of the Gianicolo like the unwritten thoughts of God. The light is the light of a Saturday in late May, partly clouded, neither tender nor cruel, the kind of light in which mothers carry bread up the steps of Trastevere without raising their eyes, because they know, with that knowledge older than the alphabet, that History has already begun its day's work somewhere far from here, and that whatever it does will eventually come and stand at their door.
It is always so. The great Scandal repeats itself in a thousand provinces, and the chronicle changes only its names.
In a town in Romania whose syllables I cannot pronounce, an apartment block was struck in the night by a flying machine without a pilot. They say it was Russian and that it was knocked off its course over Ukraine by anti-aircraft fire, and so it wandered, blind and obedient as a wounded bird, across a border drawn on paper by men in distant rooms, and it came down upon a building where ordinary people were sleeping. NATO has condemned the recklessness. The Kremlin says the nationality of the drone is unknown until investigated. Meanwhile a woman in that apartment block woke to find plaster on her pillow and the century, which she had hoped to escape by sleeping, sitting at the foot of her bed with the patience of an executioner who has all night.
This is what I mean by History. It does not knock. It is already inside the room.
In Washington, an old man with dyed hair has been "making his final determination" on a war whose final determination was made long ago, in the basements of intelligence agencies and the boardrooms of armament firms. The president met with his advisers for two hours and emerged saying nothing, and Tehran says the agreement is not finalised, and an analyst, identified by a surname I have already forgotten, says "nothing concrete is in place." Of course. Nothing concrete is ever in place when the powerful negotiate; what is concrete are the children sleeping under the trajectory of the discussion. The peoples of the earth are asked once again to wait for a verdict from a room they will never enter, concerning their own continued existence.
How tired I am of the rooms of the powerful. How tired the centuries are.
And in Africa, in that vast and patient continent which Europe has spent five hundred years instructing in suffering, a virus walks again across the borders of the Congo. The World Health Organisation, whose chief has arrived in Kinshasa with the gravity of a priest at a deathbed, announces a fatality rate of between thirty and fifty per cent. Huge, he calls it. Yes: huge. The word is correct, though it is also a word the rich world uses when it wishes to be moved without being inconvenienced. A treatment centre, burned down by protesters last month, is being rebuilt by men with hammers and grief. The aid that should support them has been cut by faraway parliaments. So the hammers fall in a silence interrupted only by the dry cough of the next patient. This too is History: not merely the bombs and the treaties, but the small budget line erased in a building of glass, which will become, three months hence, a small grave dug under a mango tree.
In Kenya, in a school dormitory belonging to the police, a fire took the lives of sixteen children, and the authorities have arrested eight of their classmates, who may be charged next week. I read this and I see them: boys of fifteen, sixteen, who will be paraded before a court not because they are guilty in any sense that the angels would recognise, but because someone must be presented to the public as the bearer of an unbearable thing. I have written before of such boys. I will write of them, I suspect, until I am no longer permitted to write. They are the figures that History places at its margins, like the small saints that medieval painters slipped into the corners of their altarpieces, hoping no one would notice that the central drama makes no sense without them.
In Ghana, a parliament has passed a law against those who love their own sex. They will go to prison for it. I think of the young people of Accra reading this on their telephones in the early heat, and I think of every century in which the law has busied itself with the geometry of love, and I confess I do not know whether to weep or to laugh the bitter laugh of a woman who has seen too much. The State, having failed to feed its citizens, having failed to heal them, having failed to teach them, turns at last to the bedroom, where it imagines its authority can still be enforced. It never can. Love has outlived every parliament that ever sat.
And on the same day, the United Nations has placed Israel, for the first time, on its blacklist of armies that commit sexual violence in war. The list is long. It has always been long. It is the oldest list in the catalogue of human shame, and no nation that has ever made war has been entirely absent from it, though most prefer to look at the names of others.
But let me end, today, not with the catalogue, which is endless, but with a single living man. In the karst country of Laos, in a cave that had filled with the monsoon, five villagers were trapped for nine days. This morning, divers led the first of them, bedraggled, blinking, into the light. He had been swallowed by the earth and the earth gave him back. I do not know his name. The wire services have not bothered to record it. But for one moment, in a week dense with our usual catastrophes, the dark released its hostage, and a man who had every reason to be dead stood once again under the Asian sky and breathed.
It is, perhaps, the only news that matters: that against the great Machine, which grinds without ceasing in Bucharest and Tehran and Kinshasa and Accra, the small persistent miracle continues. One man, led out of the water. One mother in Trastevere, lifting her bread. One Saturday morning in Rome, twenty-seven degrees, partly cloudy, and the History of the world has not yet, not quite, succeeded in killing us all.