Ghosting (9 page)

People spoke of “Frankfurt fever,” and evidently with good reason. For in this vast place, filled with neon and noise, rumours abounded: secret deals, manuscripts being read under secure guard, big books, big bucks, big buzz. There were life-sized cardboard effigies advertising popular characters from children's books, and high above, floating in the rafters, there were huge coloured balloons. Gossip was spread like dung on fields, and the dung-beetles—in the form of publishers, agents, scouts—wallowed in their element, hatching, feeding, regurgitating. In the bars that were dotted around the halls, people talked over beer and sausages of The Next Hot Thing. Figures were plucked from the air and were doubled, even trebled, before they had a chance to be written down.

As I wandered along the aisles between the bodice rippers and the diet manuals, the art books and the Bibles, the foreign language texts and city guides, there was no doubting that publishing had become big business. This was unquestionably a massive trading centre. It was hard to imagine that writers themselves had changed much—theirs would always be a solitary activity undertaken
away from the big lights—but those in the publishing business had learned how to sell the writers, how to package their books, make them pop up, change colour, talk, smell and grab the reader in every way possible. In Hall Five I saw a middle-aged woman sitting in a large cardboard carton with the words
POET IN A BOX
inscribed round the top. She was writing verses in ink with a tulip-shaped pen—a silent protest against the hypermarket.

The days at the Book Fair were tiring and headache-inducing. There was the constant hubbub of large numbers of people talking and moving around, and the air in the huge halls was heavy and smoke-filled. By contrast, the evenings were spent in the cool air of Wiesbaden, a beautiful spa town about twenty miles west of Frankfurt with over two dozen natural hot springs. The first impression on entering the town from the autobahn was one of opulence combined with gracious living. It is one of the oldest towns along the Rhine and, unlike the rest of Germany, most of its buildings came through the Second World War unscathed, including a Russian Byzantine chapel with five golden domes and a splendid theatre built in neo-baroque style for Emperor Wilhelm II.

Tiger had booked his usual accommodation—the presidential suite in a luxury hotel in Kaiser Friedrich Platz. “Wait till you see it,” he said to me. “It's where they put all the presidents—they keep it for me every year.” The four or five other members of staff, who had travelled ahead to Frankfurt to set up our stand, stayed in a smaller hotel nearby, but I was given a room in the grand hotel so that—this was how it was explained to me—Tiger would not have to eat by himself or travel alone, two things he detested. Besides, I spoke German and he wanted me on hand for any interpreting that was needed. A sign above the desk stated that our hotel was one of the world's best. The whole building had the feel of a grand
stately home, with all the rooms lavishly furnished and decorated. It was built on top of one of the springs, which fed into a huge swimming pool surrounded by glass. On arrival Tiger was fêted like a demigod. The
maÎtre d’
welcomed him back effusively and was at pains to show that he had remembered all his special requirements—continental breakfast at 7
A.M.,
a board under the bed, and so on. When I asked Tiger why he chose to stay in Wiesbaden and not in Frankfurt where the Book Fair was, he was aghast. It was clear that I had made a
faux pas.
“Do we want skyscrapers?” he asked, throwing his hands in the air, “Do we want concrete? Do we want the filth of the city? Of course we don't! We want to be comfortable. We want to live in
style.
Isn't it?” There was certainly style aplenty in Wiesbaden, with its wide tree-lined avenues, elegant arcades, jewellery shops and select boutiques.

In the evenings we all had dinner together. Although everything was new to me, a routine had clearly been established over the years. On the first evening, for example, we all met up in the hotel bar and went on to dine in the in-house gourmet restaurant. The next few evenings were spent at different restaurants a short stroll away. Tiger was in his element on these occasions, taking full charge and clearly relishing the role of host. He had all those French qualities that there are no words for in English:
panache, éclat, élan, savoir-vivre.
He attracted a good deal of attention, not least because he was dressed to kill—a spangle of silks and cashmeres, rubies and diamonds. To study the menu he took from his top pocket a pair of collapsible spectacles. They were made, so he said, from Inca gold. “Aren't they cute?” he smiled, unfolding them from a tiny pouch. “They were made for me by Asprey's. Exclusive for me. Look, they even have diamond hinges!”

Tiger communicated with his whole body, waving his arms
around, slapping his thighs, smiting his brow, clapping his hands together. It was all so very physical. Those sitting on either side of him got a regular thwack on their upper arms whenever he was trying to make a particular point. He needed a lot of space to function even at a basic level, but when he was ordering from the menu or telling a story, it was a kind of circus act, a cross between juggling and slapstick. What did our fellow diners make of it all? Next to him, so I thought, the rest of us must have seemed like a dull group from a faded photograph, though we probably all felt a little vicarious
folie de grandeur.
Once the food arrived, he ate very fast and exhorted us to do the same. “Go on! Eat! Eat!” he said, as if at any moment our plates might be whipped away. He had a talent for talking exuberantly at the same time as eating, with no spaces between one word and the next. He was full of indiscretions and innuendo, and he spoke in great tidal waves that gathered and swelled and filled and quickened before crashing on the rocky shores of sense and syntax. Once he got going, the English language did not know what had hit it. Subject and predicate were in a kind of happy free-fall, with the component parts, unable to agree, fighting it out and coming near to killing one another.

The Book Fair opened at nine o'clock in the morning, but Tiger didn't want to spend the whole day there. The others travelled early to Frankfurt by car, but we usually took a taxi later in the day. There were some fine antique shops in Wiesbaden, and Tiger loved looking round for whatever he was collecting at the time. He was ecstatic when he found something for his collection and, though it was in his nature to haggle, once he had set his heart on something he had to have it no matter what it cost. I loved his freedom and flair with money. My mother, who came from a long line of Presbyterians,
always found it difficult to part with money, and when she did it seemed to make her miserable. It was culpable to be profligate, and she felt guilty if she spent money on herself. Tiger had no such hang-ups.

He did have other hang-ups, however. For example, he was very particular about planning the days, announcing in advance what we would do and when. Each event or activity was given an allotted span, timed to the nearest five minutes. “In fifteen minutes,” he would say, looking at his watches, “we shall walk in the park.” And just in case I got the idea that it might be an open-ended walk, the sort you might prolong if the sun was shining and the birds were singing, he would add, “We will walk for twenty-five minutes exactly, then we will return to the hotel.” During the walk, he would check his watches compulsively, apparently unable to relax into the moment, always having an eye to the next thing. “In ten minutes we will turn round … in five minutes we will be at the hotel… in twenty minutes we will take some tea,” and so on.
Carpe futuram.
Sometimes we sat around in the hotel lobby waiting for the next event—usually lunch—but not in the relaxed, easy-going way of hotel guests who are happy to watch the world go by while they wait. No, the waiting itself was the heart of the matter; it assumed an existential significance and threatened his peace of mind. He would become furious with himself—how could he have failed to arrange our programme properly? How could he have slipped up so badly? Now there was this terrible wait. At these times he was in a state of, as it were, dispersion, unable to engage with the world, the people around him, the newspapers on the table, anything at all; for he was already looking away, agonised by the intermediate. He was unmoored, nonplussed by this brief enforced standstill in
a restless existence. His impatience was baneful, making it impossible to do anything other than join him in it. Together, we willed it to be midday when the restaurant opened its doors.

The moment we sat down in the restaurant his spirits lifted. The white linen, the beautiful wine glasses, the prospect of lunch—everything was suddenly well with the world. “Isn't this amazing?” he said, as a beautiful waitress brought a platter piled high with a dozen different breads. “You know, bread is my favourite thing. I love it!” It was engaging to be in the presence of such naked pleasure. Once the bread had started to take effect he summoned the
sommelier
and went through the wine list with him. When, after some discussion, a bottle was finally chosen, he rubbed his hands together in anticipation. “Just wait till you taste it! It will be like nectar for the gods!” Tiger knew a lot about wine, and he enjoyed sharing what he knew. “White wines are never actually white,” he would sometimes say, holding his glass up to the light. “They can be yellow or amber or green or golden—the more colour, the more flavour there is. But watch out if a wine is brown—it's almost certainly bad. Worse than piss.” He also delighted in the elaborate rituals attached to the serving of wine, and though haste was important in every other corner of his life, he was respectfully unhurried in the presence of a Château d'Yquem. When the waiter poured the first trickle for tasting, Tiger had a long look at it to begin with, turning the glass round by its stem, then took a quick whiff followed by a second deeper whiff, and only when he had exhaled completely did he put the glass to his lips and take a sip. “Ah, the taste, the fragrance, the sensation,” he whispered, slipping into the language of love, the gratification of desire. Everything was purified and rendered new. It was hard to
believe that this happy man could have been morose in the hotel lobby only minutes before. A fine wine can change the world.

On the last day of the Book Fair, my colleague from the Old Guard, the one who dropped his aitches, sidled up to Tiger and announced: “The eagle ‘as landed.” Tiger gave a nod and said, “Understood.” When the Old Guard left, I risked asking Tiger what this meant, but he wouldn't tell me. He said that I would find out that evening and added, mysteriously, “We have a tradition at Frankfurt.” During dinner there was an air of expectancy, and afterwards we went back to Tiger's hotel suite. He put a DO NOT DISTURB sign outside the door, drew back the curtains, opened all the windows and arranged the chairs in a circle. I prepared mentally for some black magic ritual. I earnestly hoped it would be brief and untroubling. A few moments later, however, once we were seated, two spliffs were solemnly removed from a box, lit and passed round. No one said a word. We puffed in turn, in stoned silence.

By the end of the Book Fair I had made several contacts with literary agents, some in the UK, others in Europe. As soon as I got back I set about buying books in Russian and giving them out to professional translators. It felt like a real job now. A year later, towards the end of 1982, I got an unexpected break.

At 8:30
A.M.
on 10 November 1982, Leonid Brezhnev, First Secretary of the Communist Party, died of a heart attack. In keeping with Soviet tradition, however, his death was kept secret for over twenty-four hours. The first sign that something was amiss came on the evening of 10 November when television schedules were
suspended and sombre music was played instead. This gave rise to speculation that Andrei Kirilenko, a prominent member of the politburo, was gravely ill, or even—as
The Times
suggested in its headline the following day—dead. Rumours about Kirilenko's terminal illness had been circulating for some time, but they were actually part of a disinformation process orchestrated by Andropov, then head of the KGB. In fact, Kirilenko was alive and well; he was simply in the process of becoming invisible.

The gap between Brezhnev's death and the official announcement gave me my first (and only) publishing coup. As so often in these cases, timing played a crucial part in the sequence of events. A few weeks before, towards the end of October, I had been asked by one of my colleagues, a formidable “young woman with connections” (YWWC), if I would read a manuscript in Russian— something rather special and hush-hush, she said—for one of the editorial directors at Collins publishers. The book had come highly recommended by the literary agent but the publisher urgently needed a reader's report to help him decide. The report had therefore to be done quickly—in a matter of days—but Collins would offer a decent reader's fee as an incentive. The YWWC said all this
sotto voce,
in the manner of someone plotting, or at least someone entering into the spirit of someone else's plotting. I was intrigued and agreed to have a look at it.