Ghosting (10 page)

Since I was travelling back to Scotland that very day, the YWWC arranged for the manuscript to be sent over by motorbike courier—even this was a bit of a thrill. Inside the fat package there was a covering letter on headed notepaper with tantalising references to the confidential nature of the arrangement I was entering into. The manuscript, entitled
Red Square,
was “shit-hot,” so it said, and I was to speak to nobody about its contents. I was to report
within three days to the publishing director summarising the plot and giving a view on its commercial potential. In addition I was to say how it compared with
Gorky Park,
the recent thriller by Martin Cruz Smith, also published by Collins.

With the manuscript tucked tight under my arm, I arrived at King's Cross station, feeling the
frisson
of conspiracy and subterfuge. I looked around, half-expecting to be mugged or pierced by a poison-tipped umbrella. On the train I found a seat with a table, laid out the huge typescript, about seven hundred pages, and started reading.

The book began with a telegram appointing a special investigator at the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office to look into the circumstances surrounding the death of the First Deputy Chairman of the KGB, a man by the name of General Tsvigun. A classic beginning in the detective novel mode, except that Tsvigun was not a fictional character, but the actual former First Deputy Chairman of the KGB and also the brother-in-law of Leonid Brezhnev. Earlier in the year,
Pravda
had reported Tsvigun's death as the result of a “prolonged illness.” According to Kremlin-watchers, however, this was an implausible explanation since his health had been good. In
Red Square
the special investigator conducts an inquiry into whether Tsvigun had committed suicide—the version of events favoured by Andropov, head of the KGB—or whether in fact he had been murdered.

By the time the train arrived in York I had established that the book before me was a compelling blend of fact and fiction, a kind of
réalité à clef.
It relied heavily on reportage and our natural fascination with corruption in high places. The joint authors, Topol and Neznansky, presented much of the material through official documents, telegrams and internal memos, all precisely dated and
timed. The unfolding story therefore had an authentic ring, helped no doubt by the fact that one of the authors had worked in the Prosecutor's office and later practised as a lawyer in the Moscow City Collegium. By Newcastle I was hooked, and by Berwick-on-Tweed I was wishing that the agent had offered it to me for consideration instead of to the man at Collins. By Edinburgh, there had been two murders and several death threats. Inverkeithing, Kirkcaldy, Ladybank and Cupar were swallowed up in a rush of espionage, sex and corruption.

Over the weekend I wrote a reader's report of
Red Square
recommending it unreservedly for publication. I said it compared well with
Gorky Park,
and because there was a blend of known facts and events it had the added advantage of sounding more true-to-life. I posted the report and sent the manuscript under separate cover to Collins in London. A few days later, on 10 November, I had a telephone call at home from a literary agent whom I had met in Frankfurt the previous month and from whom I had bought a couple of Russian books. She said that she was ringing to offer me “something special” and that she would send it to me provided she could have a quick answer on it. When she said the book was a thriller and that it was very hush-hush, I had a sense of something familiar.

“What's it called?” I asked.

“Red Square.”

“No need to post it then—I've read it.”

“But you can't have done,” she said. “I've only shown it to one other publisher. Apart from that it's been kept completely under wraps.”

I explained the situation and told her that I had written a
favourable report for Collins. She said they had declined to make a firm offer and, as far as she was concerned, the deadline had passed. She would be happy to do business with me if I wanted to make a “reasonable offer,” but she couldn't give me much time. Although it was late afternoon and I was busy with the children, I said I would get back to her that day. Tiger never left the office before 6
P.M.
I telephoned him immediately. “Buy it!” he whooped. “Make her an offer.” His enthusiasm was sometimes quite wonderful. If an idea appealed to him, he never minded spending money. He was also able to make his mind up immediately, an unusual quality in a publisher, and once he had done so he didn't waver or go back on his decision. Within an hour, the deal was concluded and the English language rights had been secured for £4000. At around six o'clock the agent and I shook hands on it over the telephone.

The next morning it was announced to the world that Brezhnev was dead. Very dead. Indeed, when I was negotiating to buy
Red Square,
Brezhnev was already laid out for burial. If this had been known at the time, the price would have been many times what we paid for it. In an instant the book had become extraordinarily topical: it dealt with an attempted coup on the Kremlin, spearheaded by Andropov for his own political gain; and with Brezhnev now dead, Andropov was poised to take over as leader. Suddenly this book was dynamite.

Tiger was delighted. He immediately issued a press release saying that we hoped to publish early in the New Year.

“How soon can we do it?” he asked me.

“I've no idea. But 150,000 words—that's a huge undertaking.”

“Nothing is impossible,” he said.

“I'll see what I can do,” I promised. It was the sort of thing builders say when they know it's hopeless but don't want to lose the contract for the new roof.

“It has to be January, not February,” he said. And then, as if imparting a state secret, he lowered his voice. “Beloved,” he said, “February is too late. It
has
to be January Otherwise we're dead.”

Tiger said “otherwise we're dead” a lot, which rather lessened its intended impact. In the present case, however, time was obviously crucial. We had to take advantage of the huge surge of public interest in the Soviet Union. But the length of the book was too much for one translator to handle in the time available. It would have to be a collaborative effort.

After a few phone calls I had managed to get three old friends from the Russian world on board. Part of the agreement was that their identity would be protected—they did not want to be named as translators of the book. It was important to them to be able to travel to the Soviet Union, and this sort of work might have put their visas at risk. They were academics, all of them excellent linguists, and quite keen to earn some extra money. It helped a lot that Tiger had made a large budget available for the translation.

For the second time the manuscript made its way up to Scotland, this time on an aeroplane. The first thing to do was to make three more copies so that the translators could read it as soon as possible. I had already decided that I would not simply divide the book into thirds—that way the breaks would surely be obvious. I thought it would be better if everyone did a stint from the beginning, the middle and the end. My job would be to iron out the stylistic creases and cracks, to homogenise the whole translation.

Meanwhile a scurrilous story appeared in
Private Eye
alleging that Tiger had outbid Collins for the book when they had believed
“they had the deal sewn up.” I was named as the villain of the piece and, though I was elevated to the rank of professor and described as “a noted Russian expert,” I had evidently “duped” Collins into allowing me to read the manuscript “for a substantial fee.” Tiger reached for his lawyer and threatened to sue. He delighted in being litigious, seemed energised by it. Faced with my sworn affidavit and Tiger's threat of a lawsuit,
Private Eye
published a retraction, which included the information that my substantial fee had been £65, minus the cost of the postage.

To make the January deadline, we were told we would have to have everything at the printers by 1 December. That gave us only eighteen days. It would take two days for the team to read the manuscript before the translation could even get underway. That left sixteen days, just over two weeks. It seemed impossible.

But somehow we managed it. Eighteen days of furious cottage industry, midnight oil, loss of sleep, black coffee and increased phone bills. There isn't much daylight in Scotland in late November, so we became like creatures of the night, toiling away in the dark. Every three or four days, we met at my house, usually in the evening after the children were in bed. We all had young children and working partners, so looking after children often had to be fitted around the translating work. During these meetings we made a list of questions for the authors, usually about slang from the brothel or prison, which none of us felt confident about. The authors were both recent immigrants to the USA, so I made long transatlantic phone calls, often in the middle of the night, to try to sort out the problems. The authors also faxed additional pages to remove anachronisms and take account of the latest political events. The whole translation also had to be typed up since the translators all wrote in longhand—it was before the days of personal
computers. It was a formidable task, frenetically executed, and we could certainly have done with more time. But we got away with it.
Red Square
was delivered to the printers on 1 December and the first 10,000 copies were ready by 23 December. The book was published in January 1983 and the story it told made the
One O'Clock News.
A week later I was interviewed by David Frost on the launch day of the breakfast television programme
TV-am
— after adverts for washing powder and before Madhur Jaffrey talking about Indian cooking. The paperback rights were sold to Corgi for £25,000, and Kyril Fitzlyon, the distinguished translator of Tolstoy and Chekhov, wrote in his review that the translation was “superb to the point of invisibility.”

In the dead of night, alarms went off at the palace. The police rushed to the scene but by the time they arrived the burglars had fled. Tiger, summoned from his residence in Mayfair, was distraught. He didn't care about stolen office equipment and other standard swag. The only thing that mattered was that Kaiser, his beloved tiger pelt, had gone. It was an incalculable loss. New Scotland Yard took on the case, but when they failed to get a quick result, Tiger took matters into his own hands.

“I am going to infiltrate the underworld,” he declared.

Over the next day or two, notices appeared in the classified columns of the
Evening Standard
appealing for information about Kaiser's whereabouts and offering a reward for his safe return. Meanwhile Tiger sat by a special phone connected to a tape recorder, waiting for news from the hostage taker, living and breathing every moment of the drama. He made hundreds of calls on another line, his voice alternating between hushed conspiratorial tones and, when it came to the police whom he thought incompetent, full-scale roaring. “My tiger is
irreplaceable.
I need to get it back! Don't you
understand?”
Like onlookers at a road accident,
his entire retinue stood by, entranced by the ghastliness of it all. It was hard not to conclude that at some basic level Tiger enjoyed the excitement—he thrived on sensationalism, and the case of the kidnapped tiger skin had all the necessary elements. It also gave him a chance to take control. His plan was to outwit the police and tackle single-handed the shady world of gangsters and goons. It was pure theatre. In between phone calls he talked about the mindset of the criminal, telling Gothic tales of villainy and violence among the scarfaces, their wickedness redeemed only by a strict code of honour. It was this last point that convinced him that his “baby” would be returned safe.

“I know these people,” he said. “They will slit your throat, but they have tender hearts.”

He was right. The tender hearts soon got in touch and a plan was hatched. One of Tiger's girls—he always called her La Diva on account of her sultry looks and passionate temperament—was to walk up and down Bond Street wearing a scarf in distinctive colours. Contact would be made, provided there was no police presence and she brought with her £1000 in used notes.

“She will carry the money in her knickers,” announced Tiger, masterminding the operation.

After parading in Bond Street for about ten minutes, La Diva was whisked off in a fast car and driven to King's Cross station where, in exchange for the thousand pounds, she was given a key to a left-luggage locker in which she found Kaiser safe and well. Tiger and Kaiser were reunited, and both smiled for the cameras. “I have paid a king's ransom for a king,” he told reporters.

Over the next year or two, the Russian list made good progress. The success of
Red Square
helped subsidise a number of less obviously marketable writers, mainly dissidents who risked reprisals at home by publishing their books abroad. Others, such as Kornilov, Kuznetsov and Voznesenskaya, had been expelled from the Soviet Union and now lived in exile in Germany. Many Soviet writers were drawn to Munich, the home of Radio Liberty (which broadcast to countries behind the Iron Curtain), and they were usually represented by literary agencies in Western Europe, mainly in France, Germany and the UK.

Perhaps the most famous exiled writer at the time was Georgii Vladimov. He had an international reputation as both a novelist and a champion of human rights, and in 1969 he had written a book called
Three Minutes’ Silence,
first published in a censored version in the Soviet journal
Novy Mir.
It was set on board a trawler and provided a devastating critique, both explicit and symbolic, of Soviet society. Previous attempts to translate it into English had failed because of the almost insuperable difficulties of conveying the richly textured language of the sea together with the trawlermen's slang. Michael Glenny was arguably the finest translator of Russian literature in the whole of Europe—he had already captured Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov brilliantly—and I was thrilled when he agreed to take on the Vladimov. Michael Glenny had a musical ear and he loved words. Their sounds and rhythms together with the power they contained were all elements that he excelled at bringing into English.
Three Minutes’ Silence
was a formidable undertaking but he was equal to it, and the English translation came out in 1985. Just five years later, at the age of sixty-two, Michael died suddenly in Moscow after a heart attack. He was there to work on the archives of writers who had perished
in the camps and he had arranged to receive documents from the KGB, the organisation most feared and detested by all dissident writers. This was an irony that Michael above all would have appreciated.

Another interesting writer on our list was Julia Voznesenskaya. She had founded the first independent women's group in her country, and as a result she had been sent to a Siberian labour camp. At home she was known as a poet, but after her expulsion she became the voice of those she had to leave behind.
Letters of Love
was an anthology of letters from women political prisoners to their husbands and children, written on whatever scraps of paper were available in the camps and smuggled out to their destinations. We also published
The Women's Decameron,
her account of ten women quarantined in a Leningrad maternity hospital, detailing the hardship and grim reality of their lives.

Naturally enough, most of these émigré writers wrote harrowing tales reflecting their own experience, and after a while the weight of all this misery was quite oppressive. Just by looking at the titles on the list I could feel the load of human suffering. In 1984, however, I was offered a book that was beguilingly different from the others. It was a haunting, magical tale of a young boy's first love and the discovery of something mysterious that threatened both him and those closest to him. It followed the cycle of the seasons and was set on the shores of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world and so beautiful that Chekhov called it “the pearl of Siberia.” Threatened by terrible industrial pollution, it was the perfect metaphor for the tension between old and new values in Soviet Russia. The book's author, Leonid Borodin, was first arrested in 1967 for being a Christian. In 1969 he had gone on hunger strike along with Yuli Daniel and Aleksandr Ginzburg at the infamous
Camp 17, one of the strictest camps in the whole country, reserved for those who were feared for their ability to influence other prisoners. In spite of all this, Borodin continued to believe in the incorruptibility of the Russian soul—for him even the prison guards were not by nature bad men. This gracious faith shaped his novel and gave it a dreamlike quality. When I finished reading it, I decided not to give it out for translation but to work on it myself. In Russian the book was called
God Chuda I Pechali,
which became in English
The Year of Miracle and Grief,
a title that in some measure was to foreshadow the next part of my own life.

On a Monday morning in November 1985, I drove to Edinburgh airport to meet my husband. He was returning from Australia where he had spent two months on an academic fellowship. It was a clear day, the sun was low in the sky, and as I drove through Fife towards Auchtermuchty the curve of the Lomond Hills was a huge green dragon on the horizon.

On the way, I had dropped the children off at their primary school. They were madly excited at the prospect of their father coming home. Jonathan, aged seven, had been promised a boomerang and couldn't stop talking about it. His sisters, five and nine years old, chose bright yellow ribbons for their hair to mark the special day. Two months is a long stretch in the lives of young children, and at the start they had found it impossible to imagine the size of so many days and weeks lumped together. To help them get the idea, I acquired a huge roll of paper from a local mill, cut two pieces measuring ten feet by six, stuck them together for extra strength, and bound the edges with strong masking tape. With the
help of a long ruler, felt tip pens and six small hands, the sheet was divided into sixty squares, each square representing one day and marked with the date and the day of the week. The children all liked the idea of filling the squares with “something for Daddy”— a poem, a picture, an account of something that happened at school, a message or a short letter that he could read when he got back. I said it could be a sort of diary, a record of what they had been doing or what they had been thinking about when he was away. In a way it would be like speaking to him. I told them they didn't need to do something every day, just when they wanted to.

The huge paper sheet was pinned up in the kitchen. It stretched from floor to ceiling and took up nearly the whole wall. I explained to the children that for the first few weeks they would have to stand on a stepladder to fill in the squares, but as time went by they would be able to reach without the ladder, just by standing. When they could sit or kneel on the floor to fill in the squares, it would nearly be time for their dad to come back. The wall chart looked intimidating at first, very white and empty, but soon it began to fill up. And as the weeks passed it was transformed into a wonderful specimen of modern graffiti art. There were complex compositions in bold leaning letters or soft curly script, thoughtfully decorated with polka dots or crosshatching; and every so often, great surrealist splashes. Emily, the eldest, filled some squares with more abstract pieces that reminded me of the paintings of Mark Rothko—indeterminate shapes in muted, tender colours.

I arrived early at Edinburgh airport and sat down to watch the comings and goings. You are allowed to sit and stare at an airport without being judged a snoop, without feeling that you have to look away. You can even feel a kind of closeness with complete strangers. It's interesting to try to spot the different types of journey—you
can easily tell the short business trip from the six months abroad, for example—and after a while you become expert at it. With young lovers, the length of separation is more difficult to judge; they kiss and embrace at the edge of a volcano, thinking themselves free and outside the rules, not yet doubting their ability to stay true. Young people can still bear the weight of love.

Observing men and women meeting and parting can tug at the heart, but you often see the best of people at this time, the moments when they are saying goodbye to one another, or else waiting for someone to arrive. Their faces tell a particular story—you see the precarious happiness in their eyes. The emigrations are unmistakable: there are usually elderly relatives in attendance, not knowing quite how to fill the last moments, trying to hold onto something before it slips away. The women touch their hair, the men hitch up their trousers. There are lost continents in these partings.

After an hour or so, the information screen said the plane had landed, and I made my way to the arrivals gate. The prospect of seeing my husband again made me light-hearted and lightheaded. It was long before the days of electronic chatter, and telephoning Australia was still quite expensive. It had been a long time, without much contact, and we weren't very good at being apart. Up till then we had been separated for only a day or two at a time. Over the weeks we had written long, loving, missing-you letters—I have them still—in which we had vowed never again to be apart for so long.