The Ice-Cream Makers (28 page)

The plane bores through the night, but then encounters turbulence. We are tossed about in our seats. The woman next to me clutches her handbag, squeezing the handles like the bridles of a horse. Lightning is visible in the distance and briefly illuminates the clouds below us.

In a letter to a doleful friend, Friedrich Hölderlin wrote that there are few who are compelled to catch lightning in their bare hands.

The Night My Brother Made Grappa Ice and I Fathered My Nephew

Right after Luca asked me to get Sophia pregnant, I had to leave for Struga Poetry Evenings, an international festival in Macedonia. Larssen wasn't coming with me. He and his wife were sailing the Mediterranean, not far from where Shelley had drowned with Keats's poems in his pockets. Xenia accompanied me instead. It was the first time she came along to a festival abroad.

The director of Struga Poetry Evenings came to pick us up from the airport in Skopje. A fat man in a tight suit, the buttons of his jacket undone, he stood at the bottom of the escalator bringing down the passengers and gave me a firm handshake. ‘How many poets have died at your festival?' It was the first thing he asked me.

A poet from Nigeria got lost in the city once and didn't resurface until three days later. A Polish poet had been too drunk to read. A female poet from Chile never arrived. But no poet had ever died in Rotterdam.

In his chauffeur-driven car, the director told us that he'd had to accompany two coffins back to Russia. Poets who had disembarked too early from the boat cruising Lake Ohrid. ‘Russian poets love drinking,' he said, ‘but they're not good at swimming.' Xenia wasn't amused.

The festival's programming was peculiar, to put it mildly. Every year the director invited twenty Russian poets. Usually these were the same group of boozers, with the occasional new poet in their midst. The Russians were invited because the director received funding for it from his friends. The independence that the World Poetry Festival prided itself on was conspicuous by its absence in Struga, but there was compensation in the form of ten leading international poets invited by a programmer. His name was Clive Farrow. He taught English at the university and had been working for the festival for many, many years, a dinosaur surrounded by books. He was said to live like a hermit, but on opening night he walked up the Cultural Centre's illuminated stairs with a gorgeous woman on his arm. He had brought them all to Struga: W.H. Auden, Ginsberg, Enzensberger, Neruda, Hughes.

The twenty Russians didn't mingle with the other poets. They moved differently around the festival, like something of an autonomous element. A stray caravan of poets, battered and dirty, always thirsty.

That very first evening, Xenia got harassed. After a shower, she had come down in a long gown. It revealed little more than her ankles and a hint of her calves, but still, her legs were bare. The Russians were smitten. They closed in on her and fought for her attention.

Most of the poets had arrived in Struga in the course of the afternoon and met in the bar of Hotel Drim. One or two were due to arrive the following morning, the day of the opening ceremony. Having shaken everybody's hand, the director was now surrounded by a group of men who looked like they might be the festival sponsors: heavy-set guys who were chain-smoking cigarettes. Parked outside was a line of cars, some with tinted windows.

I got talking to the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, who was the festival's guest of honour and the recipient of the Golden Wreath, a prize first handed out in 1966. The guests of honour at Struga Poetry Evenings were also honoured with a memorial stone in the Park of Poetry and given the opportunity to plant a tree there. Yehuda Amichai had travelled here with his wife, yet another privilege not extended to the other poets: only the guest of honour's partner had their plane ticket paid for.

Amichai's wife was a head taller than, and very attentive to, her husband. She fetched his drinks and sometimes even answered a question I asked him. It's something I was familiar with from my festival. The wives of internationally renowned male poets were extremely dedicated. They did everything for their husbands, allowing them to concentrate exclusively on their poetry, on the sacred. The women paved the way, they walked in front. To the hotel reception, to the buffet, to the presenter in the room where the reading was to be held.

So it was too in Struga. At one point the guest of honour's wife started making her way to the elevator. Tomorrow would be a busy day, she said. The poet left without a word, to be swallowed up by the telescopic door a little later.

‘I told them you're my fiancé,' Xenia said to me. She had put her hand on my shoulder. I felt her upper body against mine, but more than that I felt the hot breath of twenty drunken Russian poets. They stared at me with glassy eyes. They had raised their voices, I noticed.

‘They'd give their life for you, if you ask me.'

‘You have to protect me.'

‘There's twenty of them.'

‘My boyfriend wouldn't be scared.'

The guy with the black hands, the car mechanic. Xenia had told me that when they were in the pub he had to keep the other men at bay. On one occasion he had pulled a wrench out of his overalls and threatened a man with it. All I had in my bag was a book of poetry.

‘Can't you say you'll spend the night with the strongest?'

‘I told them I'm spending the night with you.'

‘They'll lynch me.'

‘No, they won't.'

‘They're Russians,' I said. ‘And they've been drinking.'

‘I don't think Russian poets are violent. The only one that springs to mind right now is Sukhovo-Kobylin, but he was a playwright.'

‘What did he do?'

‘Murdered his mistress.'

That failed to reassure me. The Russians at the bar kept staring. Hungry like wolves. They had a view of Xenia's back, of the dress that fit snugly around her hips.

‘It's a lot more common the other way around,' Xenia said. ‘The list of murdered writers is long. The same is true for poets who committed suicide.' She raised her wine glass to her lips. ‘Only the list of Russians who step into a lake and go home in a coffin is short,' she said. ‘To date, anyway.'

By now most of the poets had gone upstairs, to their hotel room. Likewise, the director's entourage had halved.

‘Shall we go?' I suggested.

‘Oh, yes. We're spending the night together.'

We were alone in the lift, but didn't say a word. There was the silence that fills most lifts, alongside the usual phone and a mirrored back wall. The lift at Hotel Rinno in Vilnius has a vase with plastic lilies, and at the Hotel Jianguo in Beijing, saccharine music pours from invisible speakers. The lift at the Ramada Hotel in Berlin smells of apples.

Just before the doors opened with a ping, Xenia threw me a sideways glance. We walked down the corridor, which looked like any other hotel corridor. The thick carpet absorbed all sound, making Xenia's high heels inaudible. She was an elegant and fast-moving hind. The rooms in this wing overlooked Lake Ohrid. In the morning the sun would bathe the balconies in bright light and there would be ripples on the water's surface.

‘Shall we have a quick listen?' I said.

‘A listen to what?'

‘To the poets in the night.'

It was something Richard Heiman had done for years, he confessed to me once. When everybody was in bed, he would stroll up and down the long corridors of the Rotterdam Hilton and eavesdrop. With his ear to the doors, he had heard them coughing and snoring, tossing and muttering, in their sleep. Then there were the poets who lay awake half the night; the sound of the television filled their room, or else they'd be on the phone to the home front, a wife in Romania complaining about bills that needed paying and children who wouldn't get out of bed.

I pressed my ear against a door.

‘Well?' Xenia asked.

‘Nothing.'

She walked to the next room and listened. ‘An ox,' she giggled. ‘Or is it a bear?'

I stood behind her, but there was no need to press my ear against the door. ‘Jesus, listen to that.'

‘Who could it be?'

‘Perhaps it's Yehuda Amichai.'

‘Or his wife.'

Richard Heiman probably knew who slept in which room and which sounds belonged to which poets. Who received nocturnal visits.

‘Sleep well,' I said when we were both in front of our respective doors.

‘Sleep well, fiancé.'

She gave me a mischievous smile, the smile of a woman who knows she's in control. Not wanting to be rejected, I didn't respond with a countermove. But less than a minute later there was a knock on the door — not the door opening out onto the corridor, but another one, in the room's internal wall. I had to unlock it. Behind it was Xenia.

‘A secret passage,' she said, and walked straight into my room.

This wasn't the first time I had slept in connecting hotel rooms, but I had never bothered knocking on the door. I always considered the chance of a young, blonde woman who knew everything about poetry walking into my room to be nil.

‘There's a bottle of vodka in the minibar,' Xenia said.

I opened the small, square fridge and spotted a few mixers and half a litre of vodka. The glasses were on the desk beside the kettle.

Xenia slid open the balcony doors and sat down on one of the plastic chairs. She kicked off her heels and rested her feet on the balcony railing. Her long dress ended up around her knees.

We sipped from our glasses and looked at the dark lake. Over by the quay the shoreline was visible, but further down it was all one big black smudge. It was a warm August night, with music playing somewhere.

‘Nice,' Xenia said.

‘Yes.'

She wasn't really trying to get a conversation going. Perhaps she thought it was my job, or perhaps she was happy to just sit here after the long day, outside, with her bare feet on the railing and a cold glass of vodka in her hands.

‘What did the Russian poets ask you?' I said after a while.

‘Oh, the usual,' she replied. ‘The thing men always want to know when they've been drinking.'

‘Were they that brazen?'

‘First they asked me where I was from. Then, one by one, they tried to impress me with Russian poets. The big names — Pushkin, Lermontov, Tjutcev — as well as twentieth-century poets. They thought I was just a silly little girl. They cited poems and wanted me to say who'd written them. Classic lines by Blok and Bunin. You'll find them in any anthology. I hit back with a poem by Sergei Yesenin, a poet who was sober for barely an hour a day towards the end of his life, but still managed to write brilliant poetry in that one hour. He wrote his final poem with his own blood, because he'd run out of ink.'

‘Did you recite that one?'

‘I was sure they didn't know it. They carried on drinking, but I'd clearly showed them up.' She rubbed one leg against the other, calf against shin. ‘Then one of them asked how many men I'd slept with. His friends all laughed at that.'

‘What did you tell them?'

‘At first they all came up with a figure themselves. Of course several poets claimed I was still a virgin. I told them the number equalled the number of volumes Boris Pasternak published during his lifetime.'

I didn't have the faintest idea how many volumes of poetry Pasternak had written. Not many, I would have thought. Poets didn't publish a lot in those days.

‘Eight,' Xenia said. ‘But I didn't tell them that. I let them rack their brains over it first.'

We were silent. I looked at her white ankles, at the toenails which she had painted purple, the colour of her dress. She finished her drink before me and poured herself another. ‘And what do women want to know when they've been drinking?' she asked casually.

‘Everything.'

And after a large mouthful, ‘Well, how many?'

‘I don't know,' I answered.

‘Have you lost count?'

‘No, I never kept count. It's not important to me.'

‘Pushkin married his one-hundred-and-thirteenth lover. That's what he claimed, anyway.'

‘There haven't been that many, nowhere near. I'm only thirty.'

‘So was Pushkin when he got married.'

She looked at my glass and gave me a top-up.

‘I reckon you're the kind of man who'll never marry and have kids,' she said then.

‘That sounds like a disqualification.'

‘I don't mean it like that,' she clarified. ‘But it strikes me as a bit … dull.' It sounded as if she'd had to pick from a number of words —
lonely
and
superficial
among them — and had opted for the least awkward one.

It was something I often sensed. If there was no partner, people thought you had no story to your name. No life.

‘I can't really imagine you doing any of that, anyway,' Xenia said. ‘You're always travelling, and whenever you get the chance you hide behind a collection of poetry.'