by Paul Bailey
Tito’s life was charmed, as his size testified. He was the most pampered animal in the neighbourhood, often to be seen spread out on the central windowsill, sleeping the sleep of the glutted. Giovanna fed her beloved tabby whenever he indicated that a meal would be welcome, his raucous miaowing silenced with offerings of freshly cooked fish or chicken. Marshal Tito was a gourmand, thanks to her tender solicitations.
I came to know Giovanna in a curious manner. A friend, who lived two doors along from her, told her of my interest in Italy, which I visited as often as I could, and that I spoke Italian. I was putting the rubbish out one morning just as Giovanna was turning the corner, walking stick in hand. ‘Buon giorno,’ she called out to me, and I replied in kind. Then she stopped at the gate and said something truly alarming to me, a stranger. ‘Mio marito non mi chiava adesso,’ she confided. Had I heard correctly? I stared at her in astonishment. ‘Davvero?’ I asked. ‘Si, davvero,’ she responded. ‘Certo.’ She was telling me what I didn’t wish to hear – that her husband no longer fucked her. She had chosen the verb chiavare rather than the more sedate fare l’amore, which would have suggested a falling out of love instead of a refusal to satisfy her physical needs. I was embarrassed by this revelation, though I did not say so. In the years of our friendship, she never repeated it. We talked of different, infinitely sadder, things.
Giovanna ruled, or tried to rule, over a troubled household. Her sexually inadequate husband’s face was set in a permanent scowl. He spent his days in the streets, out of the sight and sound of the wife he loathed. He spoke solely to himself at all times, in a mixture of Ukrainian and English. When he came home at night, he slumped in his chair, Giovanna informed me, and slept. He wasted none of his precious words on his sons, Andrea and Enrico, except to shout at them occasionally, when they presumed to address him.
Ivan was born and raised in Kiev. He arrived in England as a young man in the late 1930s. He worked for a considerable period as a sous chef in one of the grand London hotels, but was sacked after his excessive drinking became problematic. He met Giovanna, who came from a small town in the Veneto, and whose first job in England was as a maid at Eton College. Their house in the west London street where I still live has four storeys, so they must have been doing reasonably well when they moved in during the 1950s. It is hard for me to imagine the desiccated Ivan and the grossly fat Giovanna, her legs swollen from rheumatism, as ever being youthful and attractive, so cruelly had circumstances treated them.
Why did they never separate? Giovanna was staunchly Catholic, and the idea of divorce was not countenanced. In a peculiar sense, they were separate in each other’s unacknowledged company, as they sat night after night – she staring at the television; he snoozing, or remaining stubbornly silent, in his chair – like two characters out of Strindberg performing in dumbshow. I learned of this bizarre domestic routine from Giovanna, as she stooped to stroke Circe, whom she called la bella cagna. I learned, too, of her younger son’s drug addiction and his battles with the police, and that her eldest boy, who had once been happily married, was now back with his doting mother. He was the only member of the family, apart from Tito, who really appreciated her cooking. His English wife had murdered the pasta he loved.
Giovanna introduced me to Andrea, her bello ragazzo, who instantly turned ‘Paul’ into ‘Paolo’. I was Paolo thereafter. He was invariably cheerful as he jabbered in Italian or English of banal concerns, yet I quickly detected that behind his sunniness was someone seriously disturbed. He had a slight hold on reality, I discovered – the cause, perhaps, of the failure of his brief marriage. He reminded me, and continues to do so, of those unworldly, childlike grown-ups in Dickens’s novels – Mr Dick in David Copperfield; Fanny Cleaver, alias ‘Jenny Wren’ in Our Mutual Friend; even the pathetic Smike in Nicholas Nickleby. He had lost certain essential bearings, and needed Giovanna’s protection, as much as she – it transpired – needed his. He was a beaming outcast in that world in which most of us function. He probably still is.
There was nothing sunny about Enrico, who was known as Rico to the addicts and drunks who were his frequent companions. He was surly and short-tempered, given to sudden rages when he was not brooding on whatever was obsessing him – his next heroin fix, more likely than not. He would disappear for months at a stretch and then return to torment his mother, now almost wholly reliant on the support of Andrea. The police, to Giovanna’s understandable distress, were regular visitors to the house, especially when Rico was missing. Giovanna was not at all happy when her renegade son brought Alison, an ex-prostitute, home with him. He took her to his bedroom, which she occupied when she wasn’t in detention or prison. Alison’s command of language was severely limited, like that of the owner of the Staffordshire bull terrier, to one or two oft-repeated expletives.
Silent and sullen misery was now replaced by high drama. Alison and Rico screamed at each other with such ferocity that Ivan felt compelled to join in. Once, during yet another of Rico’s mysterious absences, Giovanna bolted the front door against Alison, who eventually availed herself of a brick which she hurled through a window. The police carted her off, to the echoing cries of her favourite word, which were aimed at the sick and increasingly desperate woman who lived in dread of becoming her mother-in-law.
With Rico on his travels and Alison locked up, peace of a kind descended on the house again. Giovanna prepared delicious meals for Andrea and Marshal Tito, and the single annoyance to cope with, by way of ignoring him, was her moody husband, who returned every night to sulk or sleep. The former chef ate in a workmen’s café in Shepherd’s Bush when he felt like eating, but he was generally sustained by the gin he consumed in amazing quantities, to judge by the empty bottles he deposited in the litter bins in Ravenscourt Park, where I exercised Circe each morning and afternoon.
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.
Edward Limonov was a late arrival, taking his fellow Russians – who loathed him – by surprise. He had been living in Paris, where he had written the punk autobiographical novel It’s Me, Eddie. His reason for being in Budapest, it seemed, was to insult the Hungarians by praising the Russian soldiers who were sent in to thwart the possible revolution in 1956. He was unstoppable in his condemnation of all the countries in the Soviet bloc. He was not consistent, though. If he was attacking those nations for anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, why did he turn his venom on the Jews? And, indeed, the Arabs? He was playing the role of anarchist, antagonist and denigrator of the status quo up to, and beyond, the very hilt. He was twice evicted from meetings, when he was dragged out screaming.
On the last day of the conference a representative from each country was chosen to thank the hosts and to offer a few general comments. I was elected to speak on behalf of the British writers, and I said how moved we had been by the scenes at the cemetery and how much we had enjoyed the experience of seeing Budapest and meeting poets, novelists and historians we had hitherto admired from afar. There had been only one severely disruptive influence, but I would desist from naming him.
Limonov knew who I was referring to, as did everyone present. That night we had a party on a boat cruising up and down the Danube. I danced with Madame Robbe-Grillet, who was encased, as ever, in tight-fitting black leather. It was long after midnight when we returned to the hotel, where a small group of us – Angela Carter, Richard Ford, Amitav Ghosh, Gianni Celati, Christopher Hope and myself – decided to order champagne as a farewell nightcap. The Russians, minus Limonov, were seated nearby, drinking beer and vodka.
We were into the second bottle of Mumm when Limonov appeared, wild-eyed and spoiling for a fight with anyone. He clearly intended that I was to be that anyone. He strode over to my chair and looked down at me.
‘Are you for or against capital punishment?’
‘That’s a strange question to ask at two in the morning,’ I replied.
‘Answer me,’ he demanded. ‘For or against?’
‘I’m against it, of course.’
‘I thought so, you fucking Western liberal.’
I took a breath, and said, ‘What is it with you? You’ve been foul to everybody all week. Do you have a problem? Are you by any chance a closet transvestite?’
Hearing this, Limonov picked up the empty champagne bottle and struck me on the head.
I can’t recall how long I was unconscious. There were scuffles. The Russians darted over to our table, grabbed Limonov and threw him into the lift. When I had come to, the biggest of the Russians asked me what I had done to annoy Limonov. I told him, and he thanked and embraced me.
‘You were lucky it was a champagne bottle,’ Angela remarked. ‘A wine bottle might have broken.’
Limonov reappeared, shouting, ‘Have I killed him? Have I killed him?’ The Russians dispatched him again.
I had a sore head for weeks afterwards, and often had to lie down to ease the pain, with the ever-attentive Circe at my bedside.
So there was Limonov in the company of his hero, who invited him to use the machine-gun that had been strategically positioned to kill or injure as many innocents as possible in the city below. Limonov accepted the invitation fulsomely, spraying bullets indiscriminately, joyful at the prospect of polishing off a Muslim or two.
A decade after the incident in the Hilton, I visited Sarajevo. I met men and women and children with missing limbs, and several with a missing eye – the lasting mementoes of the gunfire that came at them from the surrounding hills, where Karadžić was now in hiding, protected by his private army. They all said how lucky they were to be alive.
In Banja Luka, two days later, I was shown Karadžić’s office in the council building. His name was still on the door. Someone was expecting him back.
In the spring of 2002, Edward Limonov was in prison in Moscow, awaiting trial for drug-dealing and fraud.
Crime Passionnel
I somehow knew the woman was from Central or Eastern Europe before I discovered she was Polish. I attained that knowledge simply by observing the way she dressed. Her elegant clothes had a dated look about them – tailored suits in the lightest of tweeds; dainty, wasp-waisted jackets with fur collars; sequinned pink or mauve jumpers; crisply pleated skirts; shiny court shoes. I had seen such outfits on well-to-do women in Budapest, Prague, Bucharest and Warsaw. They conjured up a vanished conservative age, when fashion was muted rather than ostentatious. Her slightly podgy prettiness suggested a diet of sausage, dumplings, sauerkraut, roast pork and beer.
> She came into the park with her dog, an Alsatian whose coat she brushed lovingly. She smiled and said good morning to everyone, but little more than that. She always looked as if she had just visited her hairdresser, for her dark brown hair was never less than perfectly coiffured. In winter, we regulars trudged through the mud in our wellington boots, but she wore galoshes over her shoes. She was shy and modest in her demeanour, yet she made an impression on us as she moved gracefully in our midst.
Adjacent to the roundabout near Ravenscourt Park is a stretch of grass known as Starch Green. It’s a favoured haunt of the local alcoholics, who gather there all the year round. The star among them is Peggy, a volatile pensioner with an impressive collection of funny hats – a jester’s cap with bells; a medieval liripipe; a gentleman’s topper – who sings and dances lewdly before passing out. In June 1993, the Polish woman and the husband she had barred from their flat because of his own problems with drink walked towards Starch Green with their lustrous pet. The man had wanted to visit her, but she had insisted they discuss their differences in the open air. It was a balmy evening.
They sat on a bench on the green and talked. She was seen to rise, and then he produced a gun and shot her dead. He turned the gun on himself, collapsing beside her.
The police and paramedics were unable to remove the bodies. The dog wouldn’t countenance them doing so. He was protecting both master and mistress, baring his teeth at anyone who came remotely near them. An hour passed. A dog-handler appeared, gently coaxing the distraught Alsatian to come to heel.
What was the dog expressing? The deepest devotion, I care to believe.
A Time in the Hills
There is a soup in Britain called Brown Windsor which tastes of nothing in particular. I think I last consumed it in Darjeeling in March 1994, but I can’t be certain. It was set before me in the dining room of the Windamere Hotel, which the poet Dom Moraes had recommended to me, with a chuckle, as the only place in India that still served steak-and-kidney pudding. It looked brownish, and there were no suspect pieces of meat floating in it. Yet when I swallowed a spoonful I realized that it tasted of warm water, with the faintest suggestion of beef extract. The very faintest suggestion of beef extract.
