An enormous crowd had gathered for the event and I took a seat towards the back, flicking through a brochure from the bookshop advertising their new titles. There was a flurry of applause when Maurice made his way towards the platform and, to my astonishment, I recognized the man who accompanied him and took to the microphone first. It was the same disgruntled actor who had been unwilling to read my chosen excerpt from Dread all that time ago; he had been hired once again for this evening and must have been happier with Maurice’s selection than he had been with mine for he read with great spirit, receiving a hearty round of applause from the audience when he had finished. Afterwards, as Maurice proceeded to answer questions posed by a journalist on stage, it struck me how confident he was up there, how knowledgeable in his literary allusions and witty in his self-deprecating remarks. He was a natural, I realized, and would surely be a great success for the rest of his life. His writing would improve and the media would embrace him with open arms. I felt certain that his future was guaranteed.
When audience members asked about me he answered them honestly and said nothing that was either slanderous or untrue. He did not try to denigrate me and continued to maintain that while his book was a work of fiction based on fact, this did not take away from the novels that I had written over the course of my life.
‘I do not believe that Erich Ackermann was an evil man,’ he remarked at one point with a shrug. ‘Just a misguided one. What you might call a fool in love. But a fool in love at a very dangerous time.’
I rolled my eyes at this. It sounded like something he’d said a hundred times before, a piece of bland fortune-cookie wisdom that he knew would lead the audience to nod wisely and consider him both forgiving and charmingly na?ve. When the event ended he stood up, revelling in the applause, and a queue formed for his signature. I was uncertain at first whether to join it but finally took a German-language edition from the pile and took my place at the back. He barely glanced up when it was my turn, asking, ‘Would you like me to put your name on this?’ but then he caught my eye and what else could I do but smile at him? He had the good grace to blush as I turned the book to the title page, shook my head and said, ‘Just a signature, please,’ which he offered with a trembling hand, watching in some surprise as I walked away. I felt a certain victory over him at that moment, although for the life of me I don’t understand why, as I had achieved nothing of consequence.
Soon, life returned to normal and the media found someone else to persecute. I had saved my money well over the years and, coupled with the royalties I had made from the sales of Dread, not to mention the financial compensation that had come with The Prize, I knew that I could survive comfortably for the rest of my life, which, I guessed, would only be a year or two longer at most. I could feel it slipping away from me already. My spirit was gone. I would write no more. And without writing, without teaching, there was really nothing left for me.
And then, one evening, the wall came down.
It was November 1989 and I was at home when the reports began to filter through over the radio that the German Democratic Republic had finally reopened its borders after more than forty years of closure. Within the hour the streets below my apartment window were filled with people and I had a perfect view of the crowds as they marched along, calling up to the guards standing on the watch-towers. I watched with a mixture of dread and excitement and then, just as I was about to turn away and retire to bed, I noticed a young boy of about sixteen, beautiful and dark-haired, filled with the exhilaration of youth, rising up unsteadily on the shoulders of his friends, his hands reaching out to grip the top of the wall as he pulled himself up to stand on it, his arms raised in the air in triumph now as the people cheered him on. A moment later he turned around for his first view of the East and someone there must have caught his eye for he reached down in turn, holding out his hand to help a boy from the other side, the same age as him, who had also scaled the wall in an attempt to reach the summit.
I watched closely, my face pressed against the window, waiting for their fingers to touch.
Interlude
The Swallow’s Nest
Howard had gone into the village to buy peaches and Gore sat alone on the crescent terrace overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea wearing linen trousers, a white, open-necked shirt and a pair of scarlet slippers crafted for him by Gianni Versace and handed over with great ceremony when the designer had come to stay a few months earlier. There was something faintly papal about the footwear that appealed to Gore’s dual passions: history and power. He had only ever met two popes – Montini and Wojty?a – and they’d both appeared overwhelmed by a sense of their own destinies, although his grandfather had once told an amusing story about an evening he’d spent in the company of Pacelli, which had turned sour only when the burdensome subjects of Judaism and the Reich had been raised.
On the table before him was a cappuccino, a pair of binoculars, a Fabriano notebook, a Caran d’Ache pen, the galleys of his new novel and two books. The first was the latest work by Dash Hardy, which he’d read a few weeks earlier and despised for its insipid prose and the author’s reluctance to describe basic anatomy. The second had been sent to him a month earlier but he hadn’t got around to it yet. He supposed that he should at least have given it a cursory glance since its author, a young man whose features were not offensive to the eye, was due to arrive later that morning with Dash to spend the night at La Rondinaia.
But it was impossible to keep up with the multitude of books that arrived, unsolicited, day after day, week after week, month after month, an endless haul that had caused Ampelio, their mail carrier of many years, to write an outraged letter of complaint, citing back injuries from scaling the steps with so many packages. Fortunately, Ampelio had recently relocated north along the Amalfi Coast towards Salerno and been replaced by a lithe, brown-legged nineteen-year-old aptly named Egidio – young goat – whose hare-lip offered him an erotic appeal that otherwise would have left his face beautiful but unremarkable. Egidio, who revelled in the athleticism of his youth, fairly bounded up and down those brutal steps with what could only be described as gay abandon and no further complaints had been issued, but as much as Gore welcomed the boy’s daily appearances and cheerful greetings, he wished that the parcels would become a little less numerous. Over the last couple of years, he’d transported most of his own books, the ones he actually wanted to surround himself with, from Rome but they took up so much space in the villa that he sometimes felt a little claustrophobic, although Howard, peaceful Howard, never complained. Would there be no end to publishing? he wondered. Perhaps it would be a good idea if everyone just stopped writing for a couple of years and allowed readers to catch up.
Gore had known Dash for decades and although he liked him well enough he knew that he was essentially a hack with a modicum of talent who’d managed to sustain a career by taking care never to offend the middle-aged ladies and closeted homosexuals who made up the bulk of his readership. His books were efficiently written but so painfully innocuous that even President Reagan had taken one on holiday to California with him towards the end of his bewildering reign and declared it to be a masterful depiction of American steelworkers, unaware that the steelworkers in question were laying their pipes with each other in the gaps between the lines. Gore liked to think that Nancy – who had been such fun in the old days, before she sold her soul to the Republicans – knew what was really going on there but had declined to tell her beloved Ronnie for fear of destroying his innocence.