The people were watching the Chairman and the deputy chairpersons of the parliament who were sitting behind a long table placed on what seemed not as high or as unstable as a cloud, but higher anyway than where the few MPs who were listening to what the Prime-Minister was saying about the great mistake the opposition had made in asking for a non-confidence vote.
The vote had not been supported, as had been expected, and maybe because of that expected lack of support it had been asked.
The hall had been even emptier during the discussion of urgent issues and laws that had been partially changed but were not yet perfect.
A few more months, a few more years could be spent in polishing and refining them before a new government came to declare them outdated or outright illegitimate, and spend a mandate in working out new ones, or altering these, for the members of parliament to gather regularly and vote in harmony with the duration of their own mandates.
During the discussions, all the experienced and learning politicians were in the parliament cafes, rooms, and smoke rooms.
There were some who were in the hall, waiting to take the floor and give a best performance of all the different combinations of heavy modern rhetoric colloquialisms and practical, supported by incorrect statistical data, reference extracts.
The hall had been overcrowded, for a single quarter of an hour, by the full volume of the representatives of the people, who came in for the vote and cleared out as matter-of-factly as they had entered.
As the evening was drawing in, the hall was getting to know that it was about to be left alone to accommodate its dense atmosphere and answer its own questions, one of which was whether there were not always two sides to everything, just like in a coin.
As everything is always turning and topsy-turvying, there had been in the past one political party of four major teams: lots of specialists, lots of economists, lots of politicians, and lots of administrators.
Now the former specialists were consultants, the former economists were businessmen, the former politicians were state authority, and the former administrators had parties in opposition.
Everybody knew much, but could not apply it in his sphere of activity. And everybody needed some material and social insurance for the future, and tried to get as much out of the moments of glory and power as they could.
Of course, direct links were barred by rules and rivalry, but there were all the roundabout ways through which corruption passed to make its secret channels of social reinforcement.
While this mysterious consolidation through the individual interests was going on, there were proclamations of the social duty of every single consciousness to either experience the debris of personal guilt and suffering, or help to turn everybody’s guilt and blame into common stability achieved through co-operative struggle for the formation of groups combating corruption and lawlessness.
It was obvious that the world was exhausting itself: the people were exhausting their potential to develop and prove their qualities in the finding or keeping of a job, and the eternally old, forever young and innovating, structures of power and control were exhausting themselves in the testing for durability of the qualities which their systems needed in order to adapt to the undiscovered principles of modern consolidation and compatibility.
The television viewers were watching history on the screen on which was the parliament hall and their representatives.
It was real history they were watching not because of a historical act but because everybody knew that no law was passed unless it had already been found the breach of, and not even one representative of the people was personally chosen.
History was, almost tangibly, present in the hearts of the viewers who had been given, by their own lives, a non-confidence vote.
The MPs were representing it.
V.P.Toucheva 22.02.2008 Sofia, Bulgaria