All That Is (13 page)

They sat beside one another on the plane, Baum calmly reading the newspaper as the engine noise swelled and they began to move, the takeoff with the plane trembling and the roar, water blurring the cabin windows. London, Bowman thought. It was early May.

In the morning there was England, green and unknown beneath broken clouds. They drove in from Heathrow in a cab making a sound like a sewing machine with the driver offering occasional comments in a language difficult to understand. Then there were the outskirts, drab
and interminable, becoming at last streets at odd angles and buildings of Victorian brick. They turned onto a wide avenue, The Mall, with the dense green of a park alongside and black iron fence peeling past. At its end, far off, was a great pale arch. They were driving swiftly on the wrong side. Bowman was struck by the proud, outdated character of the city, its irregularity and singular names. The most important thing, its separation from the continent, was not yet known to him.

Though it was more than fifteen years after the war, the ghost of it was still present. England had won the war—there was hardly a family, high or low, that had not been part of it—through the early disasters when the country had been unprepared, the far-off sinking of warships that were thought to be indestructible, symbols and pride of a nation, the absolute catastrophe of the army sent to France in 1940 to fight beside the French and then find itself encircled and trapped on the Channel beaches in the hopeless disorder of men without equipment or supplies, everything abandoned in the retreat, and only by last-minute effort and German forbearance be brought home in every boat that could be found, large or small, exhausted, beaten. And still the task remained, the seemingly endless struggle, the unimaginable scale of it, the desert war, the determination to save Suez, the reeling war in the air, great walls collapsing in darkness, entire cities on fire, calamitous news from the Far East, casualty lists, the readying for invasion, the battles without end …

And England had won. Its enemies stumbled through ruins, went hungry. What was left of their cities smelled of death and sewage, the women sold themselves for cigarettes, but it was England, like a battered fighter somehow left standing, that had paid too much. A decade later there was still food rationing and it was difficult to travel, currency could not be taken out of the country. The bells that had tolled the hour of victory were long silent. The ways of before the war were unrecoverable. Putting out a cigarette after lunch, a publisher had said calmly, “England is finished.”

They first stayed at the house of an editor and friend, Edina Dell, on one of the small enclaves that were called terraces, with a brick-walled garden and some trees outside the dining room, the bottommost room of the house. She was the daughter of a classics professor but seemed with her irregular teeth and offhanded manner to have come from a larger
life, some great country house with paintings, worn furnishings, and known indiscretions. She had a daughter, Siri, the result of a ten-year marriage to a Sudanese. The daughter was a soft, seductive color, six or seven years old and filled with love for her mother, she often stood by her mother’s leg with her arm around it. She was a gazelle, her eyes dark brown with the purest whites.

The man with whom Edina was involved was a large, elegant figure, Aleksei Paros, who came from a distinguished Greek family and was perhaps married—he was vague on the matter, it was more complicated than it seemed. He was an encyclopedia salesman at this stage, but even in his shirtsleeves, walking around the house looking for cigarettes, he gave the impression of someone for whom life would work out. He was tall and overweight and could charm men as well as women with little effort. Edina was drawn to men like him. Her father had been this type and she had two illegitimate brothers.

Aleksei had been away, in Sicily, and had just come back by way of a London club the night before. He was known there, one of his habits was gambling. He liked to stroll about carrying his chips in one hand, stroking them unconsciously with his thumb. He had no system for gambling, he bet on instinct, some men seem to have a gift for it. Passing the chemin-de-fer table he might suddenly reach in and impulsively make a bet. It was a Mediterranean gesture, rich Egyptians did it. Except for his looks, Aleksei might have been one, a minor playboy or king.

He stood at the roulette table listening to the sound of the ivory ball as it circled, a long, decaying sound that ended in the fated clicking as it glanced off partitions between numbers and abruptly dropped into one.
Vingt-deux, pair et noir
. Twenty-two, the year he was born. Numbers sometimes repeated, but he did not have that feeling. There were some younger people at the table and a man in a worn suit keeping track of which numbers had come up on a card in his hand, then making a small bet on red or black.
Faites vos jeux
, the croupier was saying. A few more people arrived. Something invisible drew them to a particular table, something in the stale air.
Faites vos jeux
. A woman in an evening gown had pushed in, a younger woman, and people were standing sideways between the chairs. The baize cloth was thick with chips. As soon as someone bet, two more would follow.
Rien ne va plus
, the croupier was
calling. The wheel was turning, now it was turning faster, and suddenly the ball shot out from an expert hand and began to circle fast in the opposite direction just beneath the rim, and at that moment, like someone jumping aboard as the ship pulled away, Aleksei placed fifty pounds on the six. The ball was making its beautiful circling sound one could listen to forever, a sound of immense possibilities, he stood to win eighteen hundred, and for five or six seconds that seemed much longer he waited calmly but intently, almost as if the guillotine blade were being raised, then the slowing and sinking of the orbit until the final instant when there was a steely hopping and the ball fell definitively into a number. It was not six. Like the practiced gambler he was, he showed no emotion or regret. He bet fifty pounds several times more and then moved to another table.

In the morning he sat in the garden with his coffee, the garden of reconciliation, as he called it. In his white shirt, at the round metal table he was like a wounded man on a hospital terrace. You could not be angry with him. He did not talk about the previous night but rather about Palermo,
palla-irma
, city with no signs.

“It’s absolutely true,” he said. “You can go anywhere and not a street is identified. Everything is in complete disrepair.”

He was straightening a cigarette taken from a crushed pack. Everything he did was in a way the act of a survivor and at the same time of someone who would survive. He seemed to have played the game already somehow.

“Filthy with crime, I imagine,” Edina said.

“Sicily? Yes, of course,” Aleksei conceded. “There’s some crime. But you don’t see it. Kidnapping. Stealing women—that’s why I didn’t want to take you.”

“For fear I’d be kidnapped?”

“Yes. We’ve already had our war over an abducted woman,” he said.

“What can you do?” she said helplessly to Baum.

“We’ll take a trip to America,” Aleksei promised, “get a car and drive across the country, go to St. Louis, Chicago, see the Great Plains.”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “I’ve been counting on it.”

She excused herself, in fact to do her yoga on the floor in her bedroom, to seek understanding, her arms and legs gently swimming in the quiet air, then later in the morning to read.

It was in London with its haughty shops on Jermyn and New Bond Street; the houses plaqued with the famous names of former occupants, Boswell, Browning, Mozart, Shelley, even Chaucer; the hidden luxury from imperial days with its guardians in the form of silver-trimmed doormen at the great hotels; the exclusive clubs; the bookshops, restaurants, and endless particular addresses on terraces, places, roads, courts, crescents, squares, avenues, rows, gardens, mansions, and mews; the many small, even shabby hotels with rooms without bath; the traffic; the secrets one would never know—in this London he formed his first idea of the geography of publishing, the network of people in various countries who knew one another, especially those who were interested in the same kind of books and possessed similar lists but, equally important, were friends, not intimate perhaps, but colleagues and rivals and through this and their common endeavors, friends.

They were, in the main, able and even superior men, some very principled, some less so. The most prominent or at least the most talked about British publisher was Bernard Wiberg, a stocky man in his late forties with an eighteenth-century face, not difficult to caricature, prominent nose and somewhat pointed chin together with arms that seemed a little short. He had been a German refugee and had come to England just before the war without a penny. In the first years he had shared a room, and his only extravagance was once a week having a coffee at the Dorchester surrounded by people having a meal that cost thirty shillings or more, one day he was determined to be among them.

He began by publishing books that were in the public domain, but doing them handsomely and marketing them with style. He had great success with racy memoirs of women who made their way up, preferably from a young age, man by man in Regency London, and he published, ignoring general outrage, some books about the holocaust but from the other side, including a best-seller called
Juliet of the Camps
, based on various myths about a beautiful Jewish girl who for a time saved herself by working in a concentration camp brothel where a German officer fell in love with her. It was both an insult to the countless victims and a lie to the survivors. Wiberg took a lofty tone.

“History is the clothes in the closet,” he said. “Put them on and you will understand.”

He was referring in a way to his own life and his family, all of whom
had perished in the terrifying nightmare that had been Eastern Europe. He had put that behind him. His fingernails were polished and his clothes expensive. He was fond of music and the opera. He was quoted as saying that his publishing house was based on the arrangement of a symphony orchestra: the bass fiddles and drums were in back, the foundation, so to speak, of major works, tapering forward to flutes, oboes, and clarinets, which were books of lesser weight but which made people happy and sold by the carload. His greater interest lay in the drums—he wanted to have Nobel winners inscribe books to him, to have a beautiful house and give parties.

He possessed the house, actually an apartment of two entire floors that overlooked Regent’s Park. It was luxurious, with high ceilings and walls enameled in deep, soothing colors and hung with drawings and pictures, one a large Bacon. The bookcases were filled with books, there was no noise from traffic or the street but instead patrician calm and a servant bringing tea.

Robert Baum and Wiberg had some innate understanding and over the years did a great deal of business together, each of them claiming the other had gotten the better of it.

Edina had a different view, not solely hers.

“There are wonderful German refugees named Jacob,” she agreed, “excellent doctors, bankers, drama critics. He’s not one of those. He came here and sought out the Achilles tendon, he took advantage of English Christian gentility. He did terrible things. The book about the Jewish girl who falls in love with the SS officer—you have to draw the line somewhere. And, of course, he climbed. He couldn’t get into society but he always hired girls from the best families. He gave them money. Well, that’s his real story. Robert knows my feelings.”

In Cologne, Wiberg’s counterpart, more or less, was Karl Maria Löhr, also a homely man, who had inherited the publishing house from his father, its founder, and who liked to sit on the floor of his office drinking whiskey and talking with writers. He had three secretaries, all of whom were or had been, at one time or another, available to him. One of them, Erna, often went with him on weekends, ostensibly to visit his mother who
lived in Dortmund. Another, younger, was diligent and did not object to working late since she was unmarried. The night sometimes ended in a casual restaurant favored by artists and open late with a lot of talking and laughter, and then a drink in the paneled library of Löhr’s house where Katja, the second secretary, kept extra clothes and even had her own bathroom. Silvia, the third one—she was actually in promotion, having changed jobs—had accompanied him to book fairs in Frankfurt and London and one especially memorable time to Bologna where they dined in a restaurant called Diana, on the leafy terrace to one side, and stayed at the Baglioni. There was often a long interval when he would not have slept with her and her relative newness and the travel excited him. She always came to bed holding her forearm beneath her breasts, which were a little heavy. Silvia was spirited and amusing things happened with her. Once in a waterfront bar in Hamburg a sailor asked her to dance. Karl Maria did not mind but then the sailor had wanted to give her twenty-five marks to go upstairs with him. She said no, and he made it fifty and followed her back to the bar, where he offered her a hundred marks. Karl Maria leaned forward and said, “
Hör zu. Sie ist meine frau
—she’s my wife. I don’t mind, but I think you may be getting too close to her price.”

The sailor was drunk, but they managed to leave him and go back to the hotel, where they had a last drink at the ornate, empty bar and laughed. Löhr could drink and drink.

The Swedish publisher was an urbane man who had brought Gide, Dreiser, and Anthony Powell to the house, as well as Proust and Genet. He published the Russians, Bunin and Babel, and later the great émigrés. He had been to Russia, it was a terrible place, he said, like a vast prison, a prison where all hope had to be abandoned, and yet the Russians themselves were the most wonderful people he had ever met.

“I like them more than I can say,” he said. “They’re not like we are. For some reason there’s a depth and intimacy you find nowhere else. Perhaps it’s the result of the endless tyrannies. Akhmatova, I would love to publish her but she’s published by someone else. Her husband was executed by the Communists, her son spent years in a prison camp, she lived in a single room, under the surveillance of the secret police, always
in fear of being arrested. Friends would visit her and, while talking of other things for the benefit of the eavesdropping police, she would hold up a piece of cigarette paper on which she had written the lines of a poem she had composed so they could read and memorize it, and when they nodded she would touch a match to the paper. When you go to their houses and sit down with them, in the kitchen usually, even if it’s only drinking tea, they give you their souls.”