Ithaca (25 page)

His taxi arrives; he bids Dieter goodbye and asks to be driven to the Marriott.

At eleven at night, the lobby of the Marriott is still full. To survive a Frankfurt Book Fair you need the stamina of a marathon runner and the iron frame of a mixed martial arts fighter, he thinks. None of these people will go to bed before two, a third will probably pair off for further highjinks, and maybe one per cent will go at it all night, or morning rather, before they drag their weary carcasses off to a breakfast meeting. Oh, to be twenty-nine again, the year of his first Frankfurt! He feels disgustingly bloated; he must be giving off the smell of meat. He heads for the loo off the lobby, where he runs into a publisher he is acquainted with. A long-haired hellraiser in a corduroy jacket and jeans, the man has just finished doing a line of coke; he cleans up the evidence next to the wash basin, raises a languid hand to Zach, drawls, “How’s it hanging, mate?” and wanders back into the fray outside.

Julia is perched on a sofa in the far corner, her coat still on. She is utterly exhausted. She spots Zach before he sees her, and a tired smile animates her face. She is glad they are beginning to repair their relationship; she knows that she is making him work hard, but he ought to – he’s given her enough trouble, hasn’t he? But perhaps the time has come for her to ease up a bit. She doesn’t doubt his love for her, and while she doesn’t know if things will work smoothly if they get back together, she is more confident than she once was that they will be able to make a go of it.

Just then Zach catches sight of her, waves. She smiles at him as he comes up to her.

“Hey, falling asleep?” he says.

“This is crazy, I don’t think I can move another step, think another thought, pitch another book.”

“That makes two of us, now I know what it means, literally, to eat an ox – or rather a pig!”

“That’s gross,” she says. “Where have you been?”

“The Wagner.”

“Oh, really,” she says, “that’s a Frankfurt institution.”

“Not for you, honey,” he says gently. “It’s only for certified – no, certifiable – carnivores. You’re not allowed entry unless you can prove that you can eat a hippo. Medium-rare.”

“Ugh!” She wrinkles her nose, and the well-remembered gesture drenches him with a huge longing.

“Julia,” he says huskily, having difficulty getting the words out, “move back in with me now, please. I love you so much.”

“That’s sweet,” she says, “but you’re drunk, better hide the flowerpots.”

He is sober enough to look abashed. In the early days of their relationship, they had gone to a party in Knightsbridge, not a neighbourhood they frequented much, but they had been at a loose end and had tagged along with a friend to the palatial apartment of a stockbroker who was throwing a large bash to celebrate his fortieth birthday. Zach had quickly become bored with the people there, hotshots who worked in the financial industry and their vacuous girlfriends, so had begun to drink his host’s whisky a bit more quickly than was wise. He had got separated from Julia after a while, but was quite sloshed by then so he hadn’t really noticed she was no longer around. Finding the living room (where he had stationed himself for the past three or four drinks) claustrophobic, he had wandered out onto a balcony with a rather splendid array of potted plants. Two or three people were standing around, smoking and drinking. He knew none of them but they all seemed to be very friendly, and he was beginning to have a good time. The apartment was seven or eight floors up, and at some point in the conversation one of his new friends, a tall brunette, had wondered whether they would be able to hear the sound of something that fell from this height and smashed against the pavement, over the noise of the traffic and the background hum of the city. It was but the work of a moment for him to hoist a largish pot with a flowering shrub in it (the blooms were purplish, he recalls)
over the wall and send it sailing into space. For a moment everyone froze but then they began clapping and cheering him on. Another flowerpot hit the pavement. They all thought they could hear the sound of the impact faintly, but just to be sure they weren’t imagining it he was getting ready to tip another pot over when Julia was by his side, restraining him, leading him away over his protestations, getting him out of the apartment. Her tiny frame was almost bent over with the effort of supporting his body, which refused to stay upright, into the lift and into a cab. To this day he does not know how or if she squared things with the host, but when she brings up flowerpots it is his cue to go easy on the booze.

She gets up, wearily slings her bag onto her shoulder, and says, “Come on, let’s get that drink, probably mineral water for you, and then I must go. We will have time enough to discuss our relationship back in London.”

He rarely stays for all five days of the fair but he has to this year because of details surrounding the upcoming publication of
Storm of Angels
. The plan is to have a single lay-down date of 21 December 2009 for all the English-language editions, the Italian edition, possibly the German edition if Dieter is able to swing it and any other translated editions that might be ready by then. It’s almost three in the afternoon before he finishes with his last appointment. Everywhere in the giant fairground, only a skeletal staff remain, watching as the public, who are let in on the final day, denude the stalls of sample
copies of books, posters, leftover goody bags, whatever they can lay their hands on.

Gabrijela comes up to the Litmus stall. Like everyone at Frankfurt by now, she has pouches under her eyes, her lips are cracked, and she’s moving as though she were underwater.

“How are you?” she asks.

“Bone tired but it was a great fair. May the spirit of Seppi rejoice among the angelic hosts, it was all because of him,” he says, casting his eyes upward to the less than inspirational steel beams and roof of Halle 8.

Gabrijela smiles, then walks across to a locker and pulls out a bottle of champagne and a couple of plastic glasses. “Cristal,” she says, pops the cork, and fills the glasses, hands one to him, and is about to take a sip when she pauses, puts her glass down, gets up, and fills a couple more glasses and takes them across to the two young women who have been manning reception. She fills another one for their international sales manager, who will be supervising the shipping of their remaining books and other fair-related paraphernalia back to London. She spends a few moments with him, returns, and raises her glass in a toast.

“To Litmus,” she says.

“To Litmus.”

“When do you get back?”

“Early tomorrow.”

They sit in silence for a while, the sounds of the dying fair rustling around them. A few people are still walking around, the proprietors of the stall across the aisle are packing up, but for the most part tired exhibitors are putting up their feet
and relaxing as the 2009 edition of the Frankfurt Book Fair winds down.

“When did you last read a book, Zach?” Gabrijela asks, breaking the silence.

“Don’t know, two days ago, finished the proof copy of
The Arc
, Julian’s book for the spring, great new talent –”

She interrupts him. “Did you enjoy it?”

He turns the question around in his head. “I suppose I did. I think we could have done a little bit more work on it, the ending is a bit flat, but schedules being what they are …”

“You know, I was thinking there are over a hundred thousand of us here, all of us focused on nothing but books, all of us living, breathing, exhaling books, but what I find sad is that so very little of it has to do with what brought us to books in the first place.”

She is not looking at him but down at her drink, at the bubbles rising and exploding against the plastic sides of the glass. “How old were you when you first read a book all by yourself?”

“Oh, I don’t know, six or seven?”

“What was it?”

“Probably an Enid Blyton or something like that.”

“Umm … I guess we all have favourite kid’s books but, you know, the first book that made a real impression on me, a book that I can recite passages from to this day, was something my father gave me to read when I was fifteen maybe, an extraordinary collection of stories entitled
The Encyclopedia of the Dead
by a writer called Danilo Kiš, known as the Serbian Kafka. There was one passage that stuck in my mind,
it described a train pulling into Belgrade, and I related to it so fervently I suppose that I blame it for my addiction to this business – the words were so simple, so mesmerizing: ‘The train wheels clatter as they pass over the metal trestles, the Sava flows mud-green, the locomotive blows its whistle and loses speed.’ It was exactly as I remembered it from train journeys I took as a little girl. What about you?”

Her reminiscing illuminates a long forgotten corner of his memory. “I was in college, and I’d just finished wading through a monumental tome by Lawrence Durrell,
The Alexandria Quartet
. I tried to reread it recently but gave up. I found it too ponderous and dated, but if there is one fragment of prose I’ll remember all my life, it was something I read in that novel, in which he describes a scene in Alexandria: ‘A basket of quail burst open in the bazaar. They did not try to escape but spread out slowly like spilt honey.’ ”

He wonders where this conversation is going, he doesn’t have a good feeling about it; the last time he and Gabrijela had had a conversation like this in the coffee bar in London he’d thought it was the end. Fortunately things had turned out otherwise.

“I’m sad that every one of us reads books without actually
reading
them, savouring them as we once used to,” she says. “We read books for work, we read books to fix them, we read the books of our competitors; if we are good at what we do we take the time to read the books of the day, the books of tomorrow, the books of yesterday. Books, books, and more books – but when was the last time we really immersed ourselves in them?”

“On vacation?” he ventures.

“Yes, of course, now and again by accident we might slip out of our professional personae and actually sink into a book. But what of it? There’s so much we lose.”

“We’re better off,” he says, “than all those others who have even less to be thankful for.”

“Fair enough,” she concedes. She sits up straighter in her chair. “I’m getting out, Zach.”

“What?”
The import of what she has just said kicks in; he tries to keep it at bay, but Gabrijela is carrying on inexorably.

“I wanted you to know well in advance. I am not going to disappear tomorrow,” she assures him, “but I’m going. As you know we’ve been talking for a while about getting Litmus to firm ground and our dear departed friend Seppi has ensured that will take place, God rest his soul.

“But I hadn’t realized how determined Morty was to get his hands on Litmus, he needs a presence in the UK desperately if he is to be a player of any consequence. His own small company here has not made a go of it, so acquisition is the only route open to him. I thought
Storm of Angels
would frighten him off, make us too expensive to acquire, but he has simply raised his price, and it was way too much for William to turn down. He phoned me last night to say he was going to accept Globish’s offer, and that three of the other directors were also inclined to accept. That leaves just Andrew and me and it’s just a matter of time before he folds as well. There’s no way I can fend off Morty.”