I was in the park on one particular afternoon, chatting to quite the most elegant of the Bone People (as we dog lovers described ourselves) when our conversation was interrupted by something stirring in a nearby bush. Thelma, the wife of a QC and the daughter of an officer in the Indian army, went over to investigate. It was then that Ivan emerged, with his ancient raincoat (so ancient that the original brown material had turned green in places) completely unbuttoned. Thelma, casting a cold eye on that part of his body Ivan had denied Giovanna for decades, remarked calmly, ‘Oh, do put that beastly thing away. It’s not a pretty sight’, and walked back to me with the question – ‘What were we discussing? A rather wholesome subject, wasn’t it?’
Rico came home, and was joined by Alison. ‘My son with a puttana’, Giovanna spat out in the course of our last meeting. Between them, Rico and his blonde, loud-mouthed lover now contrived to upset the old woman in as nasty a fashion as can be conceived. The friend, Kitty, who had told Giovanna of my interest in Italian culture, offered to help Rico who was, as usual, unemployed. Kitty invited him to paint the walls of her sitting room, and a generous fee was agreed on. Rico, aided by Alison, took on the job. While Kitty and her husband, Rupert, were out, Rico stole some money from Kitty’s purse and Alison picked up a silver bowl, which she carried round to the antique-cum-junk shop run by Dennis, a smiling Jamaican with a glistening gold tooth. Dennis gave her £30 for it, realizing it was worth more. He sold it to a stranger for £300 that same afternoon. The bowl had been given to Kitty by an aunt who had had the forethought to insure it. As a consequence, Kitty collected thousands of pounds and bought a new car. But Giovanna was mortified.
Worse was to ensue. Rico, Alison and a trio of drunks were having a Special Brew party in an upstairs room. It was decided that they would play poker. One of the men said he would prefer to watch, and duly sat on a sofa, clutching his can. The poker players were not suspicious of his sustained silence and later assumed he had fallen asleep. As morning approached, Rico started to shake him and then realized he was dead, though he maintained a firm grip on the can. The corpse was removed, and Giovanna asked her God what He was thinking of to bring such pain and suffering and shame into her life.
She died soon after, and so did Ivan, and then Marshal Tito shook off his substantial mortal coil. Andrea, who had appeared to be stoical about his parents’ deaths, was deeply hurt by Tito’s passing. He told all the shopkeepers in the district and many of the neighbours, including me, that his lovely cat had gone.
How do you let a dog know that her arch-enemy no longer exists? You can’t. I couldn’t. The ghost of Marshal Tito plagued Circe for the rest of her life. We went on crossing the road, to keep clear of the fat dictator. For eleven years, Marshal Tito was a malign immortal as far as my beautiful bitch – la bella cagna – was concerned.
Mumm’s the Word
Jeremy and I were watching a television documentary about Radovan Karadžić – the self-styled poet, self-proclaimed ‘leader’ of the Bosnian Serbs, and erstwhile psychologist to the Sarajevo football team – when a familiar figure came on the screen. Who was this clown in army fatigues pretending to be a soldier? ‘I know that man,’ I said. And then, as he began to drool over Karadžić, telling his hero he was another Alexander the Great, but greater, I saw the dreaded name: Edward Limonov. It made sense to me that Limonov should be worshipping at the feet of a mass murderer.
In May 1989, I took part in a conference in Budapest attended by some of the world’s finest writers. The event was sponsored by the Getty Foundation in America. We were put up in the Budapest Hilton and treated with lavish hospitality.
During that week, the body of Imre Nagy, one of the martyrs of the 1956 uprising, was reburied in his rightful grave. Hundreds of people were at the cemetery to witness this belated act of mercy. For all the evident grief and sadness on display, there was also a patent feeling of hope and renewal in the air. The sun was shining, and the city streets were thronged with young men and women who appeared to be happier and healthier and better dressed than their counterparts in Romania. It was almost as if the Wall had already crumbled.
The conference began, as conferences do, with welcoming speeches from our hosts at a ceremonial dinner. Then, for the next five days, there were sessions every morning and afternoon. The Germans concentrated on the likely possibility of a united Germany and what it implied in literary terms; the French were philosophical, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, a mischievous wit and raconteur away from the podium, droned on at length on that unappealing subject, The Death of the Novel; the Indians were sweet-natured, and talked of many poets and storytellers – most of them Bengali – whose works had never been translated; the speakers from Eastern Europe, who included the remarkable Danilo Kiš, who was shortly to die of cancer, were sceptical rather than optimistic about the future; the Africans looked forward to the end of apartheid in South Africa, and Nadine Gordimer mentioned several promising black writers unknown in Europe and the United States, and the Americans seemed to agree that the days of the ubiquitous Great American Novel were over. The British contingent were ill at ease, because the author appointed to make the address, David Pryce-Jones, took the opportunity to trash contemporary English fiction for not being seriously involved with political issues. But our disapproval of Pryce-Jones was as nothing to that exhibited by the Arabs and Israelis for each other’s points of view. Here was real drama – stormy exits from the conference hall, angry accusations from the floor, and desperate pleas for common sense and respect for literature to prevail.