His name is Khalid, he is thirty-nine years old, he was born in Ras Laffan but he grew up in Doha, and for eighteen years he has translated from Persian into English, and from English into Arabic, and sometimes into the Arabic of the Gulf, which is a thing unto itself and which his family spoke before his family moved into the city because of the gas, because the gas at Ras Laffan changed everything, the language too, and now Khalid speaks the Arabic of Doha, of the office, of the Corniche, but when he goes back to the village for the feast of the aïd his father's sister tells him that he speaks Arabic like a minister, and that he ought to feel at home, and Khalid knows that this is not a compliment but does not answer back, because his father's sister is seventy-seven years old and must be borne with, and because Khalid in fact no longer feels at home in the village, and no longer feels at home in Doha either when he comes back from his missions, and now, on this Monday the twenty-second of June two thousand and twenty-six, seated in the meeting room of the Bürgenstock hotel above Lake Lucerne, at eight hundred and seventy metres of altitude as the receptionist told him when she handed over the key, Khalid does not feel at home even inside his own jacket.

In front of Khalid the table is oval, it is of pale wood, of a maple that does not grow in Doha, because in Doha there grows, to say it plainly, only the palm that the municipality decides to plant, and on the table there are nine microphones, and Khalid knows that of the nine microphones two serve the Iranian delegation, two the American delegation, one the Qatari delegation which is his own, one the Pakistani, one the Swiss which stands as host, and the other two are held in reserve, and Khalid knows that the reserve, at tables such as these, is never useless, because Khalid worked in Vienna in two thousand and fifteen, and that time the reserve saved a sentence, one sentence only, but that sentence then became the opening sentence of the JCPOA, and Khalid has asked himself for years whether that sentence, without the reserve, would have stayed in the secretary's memory or would have been lost in the echo of the room. The room at the Bürgenstock has no echo. It was designed, the conductor of the summit explained to him, by a Swiss acoustician according to the principle of total absorption: every word said in that room is absorbed at once by the panels of felt. The acoustics of the room cost more than all the stationery of the summit, the conductor had told him, laughing. The stationery of the summit was two thousand fountain pens with the Bürgenstock logo, four hundred pads of headed paper, and twenty-two pencils with an eraser at the end. Khalid had taken one of the pencils. He had taken two, in fact, but one he had put in his pocket without thinking about it. The one in his pocket was still whole. The one on the paper had its point worn down by three sheets of notes.

At eleven seventeen in the morning, the American vice president says in English the word ceasefire as the passage to sentence number four of the draft understanding. The head of the Iranian delegation, the foreign minister Abbas Araghchi, is about to say it in Persian, and Araghchi already has a word ready, a technical word, atash bas, which is the word for the cessation of fire, and which Araghchi will use because the record will use it. Khalid is seated behind his delegation, with the pencil in his hand and the sheet of the record in front of him. The pencil has an eraser at the end. Near his elbow, on the left-hand side of the table, is his fountain pen from the head office, with black ink. Khalid writes on the sheet, in Arabic, with the pencil, the word hudna. Hudna is not atash bas, and it is not ceasefire. Hudna is a word of the Qur'an and of Islamic jurisprudence, and it means provisional truce, a truce that can be withdrawn. Khalid knows that in Tehran there are those who hold it sufficient, and others who do not hold it at all. He does not lift the pencil from the sheet. The word is there. The black fountain pen, to his left, is at the same distance as when he set it down this morning. He does not take it.

At eighteen fourteen the roadmap of the sixty days is signed. The signature at the foot of the draft is in black ink, the same that Khalid's fountain pen has. Beneath the sheet of the record signed in ink, however, is the sheet that Khalid has kept in pencil, where the word hudna is written once only, and where it is not struck out. When the Swiss deputy secretary comes round to collect the working papers, Khalid hands him only the first record, the clean one. He keeps the pencil sheet. He folds it in four, puts it into the inside pocket of his jacket, over his chest. As he goes down in the lift of the Bürgenstock, he feels the sheet through the cloth of the jacket. The hudna written in pencil will hold or will not hold for sixty days. Khalid does not know, and knows that he will never know. What troubles him, during the four minutes of the lift, is that it is not he who decides whether it will hold. Things decide. The missiles decide, the ministers decide, the weariness of the people who died today on the building sites decides, everyone decides, except the pencil.