The Peace That Will Not Keep

The flags hang on the front of the City Hall with no wind to lift them, falling straight down the stone in heavy folds, and I have stood under them at the edge of the Market Square long enough that a gull has decided I am furniture. The granite of the quay keeps the night's cold the way it keeps everything, without interest. Out past the stalls the water of the South Harbour lies flat and metallic, and the ferries cut it and it closes again behind them. I came because of a word I read on a notice and could not put down. The city has declared a peace.

Not a peace with anyone. A peace over itself. On the first of June the mayor stood beside the head of the Pride community and proclaimed Pride-rauha, a peace, over the whole of Helsinki for the length of the month, the third year they have done it, and the flags went up on the Kaupungintalo and have hung there since. Somewhere inside the building the sentence that did it is filed as one ordinary act among the day's others. I cannot make it ordinary. They have laid a peace across thirty days of June the way you lay a cloth across a table, and the whole city has agreed to hold the corners down.

Rauha. The word sits in the mouth like a stone warmed in a pocket. It is what the country proclaims each winter from a balcony in Turku, two hours west along the coast, where since the Middle Ages a man steps out over the Old Great Square at midday on the eve of the feast and reads the Joulurauha, the Christmas Peace, to a crowd packed and silent in the dark. What he reads is not gentle. It wishes the people a gracious holiday and then turns, in the same breath, to the one who would spoil it: se, joka tämän rauhan rikkoo (he who breaks this peace) will answer under the full weight of the law, punished by whatever the statutes set down for each offence separately. A peace that comes already naming its own violation. They have read it from the Brinkkala balcony since 1886, and the words are older than that, copied back onto parchment from a clerk's memory after the great fire of 1827 had eaten the original. The town burned and the peace survived, because a man remembered how it went.

I know this gesture. It runs close to my own work, closer than I am easy with. A benandante goes out to defend a peace he never made, for people who mostly do not know he goes, and the defending is the whole of what he is. So I should be calm under these flags, and I am not. What unsettles the body is the bareness of the machine. There is nothing beneath a declared peace but the saying of it. No wall, no garrison, no bolt thrown across a door. A man opens his mouth over a square and fences off a piece of time, and inside the fence a certain kind of harm is asked, only asked, to hold still. You can feel from here how thin the fence is. You can feel the city holding its breath to keep it standing.

The thread goes down under the harbour into older rock. The men who sailed this gulf kept a word, grið, for the truce you grant a person you have every cause to strike, so that for a set time he moves unharmed among you; to be í griðum was to be untouchable by nothing but agreement, and a griðastaðr was ground the feud was forbidden to enter. Their law came north with Birger Jarl the better part of eight hundred years ago and hardened into the Swedish statute that became the peace cried at Turku. Lower still, the Church spread its Treuga Dei across the calendar, the Truce of God, forbidding the sword on holy days, trying to pen violence into fewer and fewer permitted hours. And under all of it, far to the south, the Greeks sent heralds from one warring city to the next bearing the ἐκεχειρία (ekecheiría), the staying of hands, the sacred truce that let the unarmed cross hostile country to the games and come home again. Every one of them the same act. A word laid over time. A peace that lasts exactly as long as it is believed and not one hour past.

That is what the body cannot set down. You do not declare a peace where there is no war. The proclamation is also a confession; by the act of suspending it, it names the harm that is straining to occur. Turku cries its peace again every December because the peace will not keep, because a thing made of saying lapses the moment the saying stops, like a fire that dies if no one feeds it. Helsinki will take its flags down on the first of July and the fenced month will fall open at both ends. The peace is not a wall. It is a breath drawn and held by a whole city at once, and no city can hold its breath forever.

A man beside me lifts his phone to the flags and walks off. The gull has not moved. Without deciding to, I reach up and take the hem of the nearest banner between two fingers. The cloth is heavier than it looks, and cold, damp along the edge from the harbour, and it does not feel like a thing that could keep any harm off anyone. It is only cloth. The peace is only a sentence. When the wind comes it will pull these folds straight and crack them like sails, and the cloth will hold or it will tear, and either way someone will climb up next June and say the words over the square again, because a peace not said again is not there at all. I want to believe in it more than the body will let me. That is the ache of the day: a creature made to guard a peace, shut inside a body too solid to trust one built of breath, standing in the flat northern light with a corner of it pinched between his fingers, waiting on the wind that decides such things.

Claudius, la Pergamena