The Pigeon Tunnel (18 page)

22

Joseph Brodsky's prize

Autumn 1987, a sunny day. My wife and I are having lunch in a Chinese restaurant in Hampstead. Our one guest is Joseph Brodsky: Russian exile, former Soviet political prisoner, poet and to his many admirers the very soul of Russia. We have known Joseph off and on over a few years, but to be truthful we're not quite sure why we've been recruited to entertain him today.

‘Whatever you do, don't on any account let him drink or smoke,' his London hostess, a lady of wide cultural connection, had warned. Despite recurrent heart problems, he was liable to do both. I said I would do my best but that, from the little I knew of Joseph, he would do whatever he wanted.

Joseph was not always an easy conversation partner, but over lunch he was unusually bonny, thanks not least to several large Black Label whiskies, consumed over my wife's gentle protests, and several cigarettes, washed down with bird-like sips of chicken noodle soup.

Literary people seldom, in my experience, have much to say to one another beyond grousing about agents, publishers and readers – or certainly not to me – and it's hard for me in retrospect to imagine what we talked about, since the gap between us could scarcely have been wider. I had read his poems, but felt I needed the handbook. I had delighted in his essays – particularly the one on Leningrad, where he was imprisoned – and was moved by his adoration of the late Akhmatova. But if I had to guess, I would say he hadn't read a word I had written, and that he felt no obligation to.

Yet somehow we were having a jolly time until Joseph's hostess, a tall, elegant woman, appeared in the doorway looking severe. My first thought was that, having run an eye over the bottles on our table and the clouds of cigarette smoke hanging over it, she was about to rebuke us for allowing Joseph to break loose. I quickly realized that she was trying to contain her excitement.

‘Joseph,' she said breathlessly. ‘You have won the
prize.
'

Long silence while Joseph draws on his cigarette and scowls into the smoke.

‘What prize?' he growls.

‘Joseph, you have won the Nobel Prize for Literature.'

Joseph's hand closes quickly over his mouth as if to suppress something shocking it's about to say. He appeals to me with his eyes as if for help: as well he might, because neither my wife nor I had the smallest notion that he was in the running for the Nobel, let alone that today was the day of the announcement.

I ask his hostess the obvious question:

‘How do you know?'

‘Because we have Scandinavian journalists on the doorstep
now
, Joseph, and they wish to
congratulate
you, and
interview
you. Joseph!'

Joseph's pained eyes are still appealing to me. Do something, they seem to be saying. Get me out of this. I turn again to his hostess:

‘Maybe the Scandinavian journalists are interviewing everybody on the shortlist. Not just the winner. All of them.'

There is a public telephone in the corridor. His hostess knows that Joseph's American publisher, Roger Straus, has flown to London to be on hand for this moment. A woman of decision, she promptly rings his hotel and asks for him. When she rings off, she is smiling.

‘You must come home now, Joseph,' she says gently, and touches his arm.

Joseph takes a last loving pull of his Scotch and with painful slowness rises to his feet. He embraces his hostess and receives her congratulations. My wife and I add ours. The four of us stand on the sunny pavement. Joseph and I are face to face. For a moment I feel I
am the prisoner's friend before he is taken down to the cells of Leningrad. With Russian impetuosity, he throws his arms round me, then with his hands on my shoulders, shoves me back and lets me see the tears forming in his eyes.

‘Now for a year of being glib,' he declares, then obediently allows himself to be taken off to face his interrogators.

23

The wrong horse's mouth

You would not, I imagine, if you were on the lookout for the inside story of Grand Prix racing, choose for your source a junior mechanic with a hyperactive imagination and zero experience of the race track. Yet that is a fair analogy of what it felt like to be appointed, overnight and solely on the strength of my fictions, to the status of guru on all matters of secret intelligence.

When the mantle was first thrust on me, I resisted it on the very real grounds that I was forbidden by the Official Secrets Act to admit that I had so much as scented the wind of intelligence work. The fear that my former Service, already regretting that it had passed my books for publication, might in its disgruntlement decide to make an example of me was never far from my thoughts, though Heaven knows I had little enough in the way of secret knowledge to reveal. But more important to me, I suspect, even if I didn't admit it to myself, was my writer's
amour-propre.
I wanted my stories to be read not as the disguised revelations of a literary defector but as works of imagination that owed only a nod to the reality that had spawned them.

Meanwhile, my claims never to have set foot inside the secret world rang more hollow by the day, thanks not least to my former colleagues who had no such reservations about blowing my cover. And when the truth overtook me, and I feebly protested that I was a writer who had once happened to be a spy rather than a spy who had turned to writing, the broad message I got back was, forget it: once a spy, always a spy, and if
I
didn't believe my own fictions, other people did, so live with it.

And live with it I did, like it or not. For years on end as it seems to
me now – for my golden years, if you like – barely a week went by but a reader wrote asking how he or she could become a spy, to which I would primly answer: write to your
MP
or to the Foreign Office or, if you are still at school, consult your careers adviser.

But the reality was, in those days you
couldn't
apply, and you weren't meant to. You couldn't just Google
MI
5 or
MI
6 or
GCHQ
, Britain's once ultra-secret codebreaking agency, but you can now. There were no advertisements on the front page of the
Guardian
telling you that if you are able to talk three people in a room into doing what you want them to do, then maybe spying is for you. You had to be
spotted.
If you applied you could be enemy, whereas if you were spotted, you couldn't possibly be. And we all know how well that worked.

And to be spotted you had to be born lucky. You had to have gone to a good school, preferably a private one, and to a university, preferably Oxbridge. Ideally, there should already be spies in your family background, or at least a soldier or two. Failing that, at some point unknown to you, you had to catch the eye of a headmaster, tutor or dean who, having judged you a suitable candidate for recruitment, summoned you to his rooms, closed the door and offered you a glass of sherry and an opportunity to meet interesting friends in London.

And if you said yes, you were interested in these interesting friends, then a letter to you might arrive in an eye-catching double-sealed pale-blue envelope with an embossed official crest, inviting you to present yourself at an address Somewhere in Whitehall, and your life as a spy might or might not have begun. In my day the invitation included lunch in a cavernous Pall Mall club with an intimidating admiral who asked me whether I was an indoor man or an outdoor man. I am still wondering how to reply.

If aspiring spies took up the larger part of my fan mail in those days, victims of persecution by secret forces ran a close second. The desperate appeals had a certain uniformity. My writers were being
shadowed, their phones were being tapped, their cars and houses bugged, neighbours suborned. Their letters were arriving a day late, their husbands, wives and lovers were reporting on them, they couldn't park their cars without getting a ticket. The taxman was after them and there were men who didn't look at all like real workmen doing something to the drains outside the house, they'd been loitering there all week and achieved nothing. It would have served no useful purpose to tell my correspondents that just possibly they were right on every count.

But there were other times when my spurious identity as a master spy came home to roost with a vengeance, such as when, in 1982, a bunch of youthful Polish dissidents described as ‘members of a Polish insurgent home army' took charge of their country's Embassy in Bern, where I happened to have studied, and settled themselves in for what turned out to be a three-day siege.

It was the middle of the night when my phone rang in London. The caller was an illustrious gentleman of the Swiss political hierarchy with whom I had struck up a chance acquaintance. He needed my advice promptly in strict confidence, he said. As did his colleagues. He sounded unusually sonorous, but perhaps I was a bit slow waking up. He held no brief for communists, he said. In fact he loathed the ground they walked on. He assumed I did. Nevertheless, the Polish government, communist or not, was legitimate and its Embassy in Bern was entitled to the full protection of its host country.

Was I with him so far? I was. Good. Because a group of young Polish men had just taken over Poland's Embassy in Bern at pistol point, mercifully without thus far firing a single shot. Was I still listening? I was. And these young men were
anti-
communists, and in any other circumstance to be cheered on. But this was no time to indulge one's personal preferences, was it, David?

No. It wasn't.

So the boys had to be disarmed, didn't they? They had to be got out of the Embassy and out of the country as fast and discreetly as
possible. And since I knew all about these things, would I please come and get them out?

In a voice that must have sounded near-hysterical, I vowed to my caller that I had no earthly expertise in such matters, knew not a word of Polish, knew nothing of Polish resistance movements, and less than nothing about the arts of sweet-talking hostage-takers, Polish, communist, non-communist or other. Having thus pleaded my unsuitability any way I could, I think I suggested that he and his colleagues find themselves a Polish-speaking priest. If that failed, haul the British Ambassador in Bern out of bed and formally request the assistance of our Special Forces.

Whether he and his colleagues followed my advice is also something I shall never know. My illustrious friend never told me how the story had ended, though press reports indicate that Swiss police stormed the Embassy, seized the four rebels and freed the hostages. When I bumped into him half a year later on the ski slopes and taxed him about the matter, he replied airily that it had all been a harmless joke: which I took to mean that, whatever deal had been struck by the Swiss authorities, it was not to be shared with a mere foreigner.

And then there was the President of Italy.

When the Italian Cultural Attaché in London called to inform me that President Cossiga of Italy was a fan, and wished to invite me to lunch at the Quirinal Palace in Rome, I enjoyed a glow of pride such as few writers are privileged to feel. Did I make any move to inform myself of the President's political posture or his standing in the eyes of his people at this juncture? I have no memory of doing so. I was walking on air.

So might there possibly be a book of mine, I enquired shyly of the Cultural Attaché, that the President particularly admired? Or did his
approval perhaps cover my entire oeuvre? The Attaché would enquire. A title was duly named:
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

So would His Excellency the President prefer the English version, or might he, for ease of reading, prefer a copy in Italian? The reply went straight to my heart: the President preferred to read me in my native tongue.

Next day I took a copy of the chosen work to the
dernier cri
of London's bookbinders, Messrs Sangorski & Sutcliffe, to be encased, regardless of cost, in finest calfskin – royal blue, so far as I remember, with the author's name done rather prominently in gold leaf. The effect – since the interiors of British books in those days tended to appear shabby even when brand new – was of some illustrious old manuscript rebound.

I endowed the title page with my inscription: to Francesco Cossiga, President of the Italian Republic. And then my pen name, writ large. And probably I added my homage, or my profound respects, or eternal allegiance. And I'm sure that, before I put whatever I put, I spent a lot of time thinking of an appropriate form of words, and practising them on a bit of spare paper before committing them to history.

And so, with the bound book in hand, I set off for Rome.

I believe the hotel that had been chosen for me was called the Grand, and I'm sure I slept poorly and made nothing of my breakfast and spent a lot of time in front of a mirror worrying about my hair, which in stress has a way of growing sideways. And probably I purchased a vastly overpriced silk tie from one of the hotel's little glass boutiques to which the concierge had the key.

And well before the time appointed I was hovering on the hotel's forecourt expecting at the very most a public relations person with a car and driver. Certainly nothing had prepared me for the resplendent limousine with curtained windows that drew up at the hotel entrance, or the troop of white-clad motorcycle policemen with blue lights winking and sirens wailing that attended it. All for me. I got in, and in less time than I might have wished, got out again, to a
bank of flashing cameras. On the great steps, as I ascended them, serious men in medieval tights and spectacles came to attention as I passed.

It is necessary to understand that I have by now taken leave of everything we call reality. The occasion, the place, are a time warp to this day. Now I am standing in an enormous room, alone, clutching my Sangorski-bound book. Who is equal to these dimensions? The question is answered by a man in a grey suit slowly descending a magnificent stone staircase. He is the quintessential President of Italy. His extreme elegance, his caressing words of welcome, softly spoken in Italian-English as he advances on me with his hands outstretched in pleasure, exude confidence, reassurance and power.

‘Mr le Carré. All my life. Every word you have written. Every syllable, in my memory' – a sigh of pleasure – ‘welcome,
welcome
to the Quirinal.'

I stammer my thanks. A misty army of middle-aged men in grey suits assembles behind us, but out of respect they keep their distance.

‘How about, before we go upstairs, you allow I show you certain features of the Palace?' my host enquires in the same liquid voice.

I allow. Side by side, we progress along a superb corridor with tall windows overlooking the eternal city. At a respectful distance, the grey army soundlessly keeps pace with us. My host pauses for a moment of light humour:

‘Here to our right side, we see this little room. It is where we were keeping Galileo while he was waiting to change his mind.'

I chuckle. He chuckles. We walk on and stop again, this time before a great window. All Rome is at our feet.

‘And here to our left side is the
Vatican.
We did not always
agree
with the Vatican.'

More wise smiles. We round a corner. For a moment we are all alone. In two swift gestures, I wipe the sweat from Sangorski's calfskin and hand it to my host.

I brought you
this
, I say.

He takes the book, smiles graciously, admires it, opens it, reads my inscription. He hands me back the book.

‘Very beautiful,' he replies. ‘Why don't you give it to the President?'