The Ringmaster

by Morris West

  This time it was she who broke the connection. I picked up the phone again and dialled Tanaka’s private number. He answered immediately.

  ‘Kenji, this is Gil. How are you feeling this morning? You looked very tired last night.’

  ‘A momentary indisposition. I am much better, thank you.’

  I told him of Marta’s telephone call. He did not seem surprised. ‘That’s a satisfactory outcome. It also speaks well for Professor Boysen’s commonsense. I regret that I disturbed your evening.’

  ‘No matter. There will be others.’

  ‘Other evenings or other women?’

  ‘I am open to all possibilities.’

  It was an old Zen phrase and he gave me the response to it.

  ‘But not all possibilities are open to you! Now I have news for you, Gil, good news. I made a number of calls last night. Our banking arrangements are promising enough for us to proceed with confidence. Nothing is signed yet. Everything depends on the final shape of the document we produce in Bangkok. However, the climate is markedly better. The best news of all is that the Russians are sending their facilitator immediately. He will arrive, with his assistant, in Tokyo on Monday morning. His name – just a moment while I look it up – his name is Vannikov.’

  ‘What’s his given name?’

  ‘Boris. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Boris Vannikov was an important man in the early nuclear programmes in the USSR. His eldest son, who was named for him, was trained as an academic economist, then moved into publishing. I sold him rights to a number of scientific works and introduced a couple of his regional authors into German and British Commonwealth lists. Then he was co-opted on to Gorbachev’s personal staff. If this is the same man, we at least begin on first name terms.’

  ‘That would be a great advantage. But as yet I have no dossier. In the normal course that would be sent to Leibig first.’

  ‘Do you want me to meet him at the airport?’

  ‘No. The protocols are already in place. He and his aide, who, I understand, is a woman, though I do not have her name, will be met at the airport by the commercial attaché for the Soviet Embassy, where they will spend twenty four hours. Then Carl has arranged to fly them to Nara. The Leibig company has an estate there. They use it for company seminars and sales promotions. It is remote, private and well-staffed. There is a helicopter pad and security is easy to maintain. By the way, have you received Leibig’s letter yet?’

  ‘It’s on my desk. I haven’t read it. I’ve been in a meeting all the morning.’

  ‘Do me a favour, Gil. Read it now and telephone him.’

  ‘As soon as we’ve finished this call. When are we scheduled for Nara?’

  ‘Wednesday and Thursday of next week. On the Sunday we must be in Bangkok. The conference begins Monday morning at nine.’

  ‘But we still don’t have the list of Russian delegates.’

  ‘Vannikov is bringing it with him.’

  ‘Let’s hope he’s brought more than that. The more ground we can cover before we get into conference the better.’

  ‘I agree. Have you made any plans for the weekend?’

  ‘I was thinking of taking Marta Boysen out into the country. And you?’

  ‘I am visiting my son and my grandchildren in Kyoto. Miko is flying back to the Coast. She will meet us in Bangkok.’

  Travel safely, my friend.’

  ‘You too, Gil. Today all the news is good. We should hope it continues so.’

  After that I read Carl Leibig’s letter.

  Please accept my apologies for the unauthorised recording of our discussions. I beg you to believe there was no malicious intent. It was, in fact, a simple oversight on my part. In the flurry of preparations Franz, my personal assistant, asked whether the proceedings should be taped. I told him I thought it would be a good idea. He made the arrangements. I completely forgot the essential courtesy of asking the consent of the meeting. I beg you to forgive the lapse and not to let it damage the co-operation upon which the success of our enterprise depends. We are all a little edgy, I think. Natural enough, is it not, since we are assisting to shape a whole new order on the vast Eurasian continent…?

  Once again I had to give him full marks for style and to revise my hasty judgments of him as an arrogant young upstart. Obviously Tanaka had put him under pressure, but he had still managed to extricate himself with dignity from a very awkward situation. I called him immediately and we had a comfortable chat during which I made an admission of my own.

  ‘I agree with you, Carl. There’s a lot at stake and we were all very edgy at the meeting. The good things are that the team is still intact and we have all blown off a little steam. By the time we get to Bangkok we should be able to present a very sound proposal.’

  He thanked me for my confidence and then told me he had just received from Moscow a faxed copy of Vannikov’s curriculum vitae. I asked him to read me a few lines of it. Ten seconds later I was able to give him the good news that Vannikov was indeed my former publishing colleague. Leibig was delighted. Then it occurred to me to ask whether the Soviets had asked for dossiers on our team.

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed. They went off weeks ago.’

  ‘But the only Soviet dossier we have is Vannikov’s.’

  ‘So far. I’m told Vannikov is bringing the others with him. But you obviously have a question.’

  ‘Not a question, just a comment. Vannikov’s presence is not a coincidence. Even after heavy doses of perestroika and glasnost, the Russian bureaucracy still works. Vannikov’s name and mine are linked in the files.’

  ‘Is that a good omen?’

  ‘I think so. We know each other’s style. That’s an advantage to both sides.’

  ‘And how would you describe him, Gil?’

  ‘He’s urbane. He’s literate. He’s fluent in French, English and German, and he also has some Latvian and Armenian. I know he doesn’t speak or read Japanese, so his aide will probably be an interpreter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has an eye for good paintings and pretty women. He’s an ardent soccer fan. He’s also a tough bargainer who can squeeze the last fraction of value out of a dollar bill and the last drop of blood and patience out of a negotiator.’

  ‘You will have hard work ahead of you. I wish you luck. I’ll call you Monday as soon as I’ve made contact with Vannikov. Maybe we could all have a drink together before we leave for Nara?’

  ‘I’m at your disposal, Carl. Have a pleasant weekend.’

  I got back to the boardroom in time to close the meeting and take Tanizaki and Oshima to lunch, along with those three executives whose departments had turned in the best performance of the week. The criteria by which Tanizaki judged them were arcane and complicated, but I asked no questions, offered the appropriate compliments and bought them an expensive meal at a place called the Silver Tower which has a Korean owner, a French chef and a reputation for serving the best fillets of Kobe beef in Tokyo. After that it was a downhill run until five, when I showered, shaved and changed in my office bathroom, picked up a manuscript and sat waiting for Marta Boysen to arrive.

  The manuscript was dull. After five minutes I tossed it aside, leaned back in my chair and tried to focus on the questions of where and how to entertain Marta Boysen at the weekend. The where was not a problem. There were half a dozen beautiful country inns within two hours of Tokyo. The autumn gardens and the temple precincts would be in full flush. There were galleries and the workshops of local craftsmen, carvers, potters, printmakers, some of whom were friends of mine. I made a couple of calls and settled on a place just outside Kamakura which offered two adjoining rooms that gave on to a private garden.

  That took care of the ‘where’. The ‘how’ was the nub of the problem. How did she want, how did I want, the weekend to develop – as a pleasant touristic interlude, as a brief affair, or a love-match such as our parents had made? Already both of us had been acting out the prelude, alternately advancing and retreating, smiling and then ras
ping at each other. The rules of the game demanded that I make the next move. Hard-won experience suggested that I ought at least to figure out how the game should develop afterwards. I had loved my wife desperately. When she died, something in me died too, not the old Adam, who could still rise up rampant and roaring to be bedded, but the sense of permanence, the belief that the experience of love which we had shared could ever be renewed with another woman. Slowly I had come to understand the lesson my father had taught me one summer evening when we strolled down the little dock on the island of Lesbos.

  We were sailing that year in a thirty footer we had chartered in Athens: to the Cyclades, the Dodecanese, the Dorian coast of Turkey and north to Ephesus. My father had a pedant’s habit of picking an English word out of the air then asking me to translate it into a series of languages, while he commented on the change in colour from one tongue to another. The word he picked this time was ‘dalliance’ and the choice was prompted by the sight of a pair of lovers perched on a bollard, kissing passionately, while the local policeman stood with his hands in his trouser pockets lusting vicariously.

  Dalliance is a very old-fashioned word. It can mean to amuse oneself, to toy amorously with someone, to be evasive, to make sport. The Germans call it tandelei or liebelei. The Italians make a mouthful of it as amoraggiamento. The Spanish call it retozo. The Japanese say it is to play at love uwaki suru. My father thought the French made the best of it. They called it badinage and he made that the burden of the lesson, which he used, I think, to explain himself to me.

  ‘You can play whatever games you like with a woman, provided you both find them agreeable; but you don’t play games with love. “On ne badine pas avec l’amour.”’

  There is a sting in the tail of that one, too. If you are past fifty and you know what love is, but you are not sure you can face the risks of finding it again, then you are in a very bad way indeed. My father always knew what he wanted but, since he could not call my mother back, he settled for what he could get – a warm welcome, a friendly goodbye and an open door if he passed that way again. What I did not know, of course, and what I was only now beginning to learn, was how much it had cost him to accept the compromise and the long stretches of solitude between the lovings.

  All my soul searching came to an abrupt end when at exactly six o’clock the telephone rang. Marta Boysen was on the line, very much the Frau Professor Doktor, offering a formal apology.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gil. I’m not going to be able to keep our dinner date. I’m really not up to it. As for the weekend in the country, it was a kind thought, but in all the circumstances it could be the wrong move, for both of us.’

  ‘Are you sick?’

  ‘No. I just feel that …’

  ‘Then shut up and listen to me. I’ll be at your hotel at seven-thirty. Be packed for a casual weekend. You’ll need something warm; the nights are cool.’

  ‘Gil, don’t you understand? I’m not coming. You can’t bully me into …’

  Suddenly, as if from a far place in another time frame, I heard myself shouting in very vulgar German. ‘Bully you? For Christ’s sake! You’re the one who sought me out, brought me the family snapshots, handed me that line of schmaltz about wanting me for a big brother. Well I’m not your brother! I’m my father’s son and I’d like to make love to your mother’s daughter on a futon in a country inn. If you don’t want that, I won’t press it. I booked two rooms anyway, so you’d have the option to say no. But you did promise to come, remember? You’re a big girl now and you’re supposed to be a sophisticated scholar. If you’re still pouting over an imagined slight – which was really an attempt to save face for you – then you’ll be boring company anyway. So, I’ll meet you at seven-thirty in the bar. You offered to buy me champagne to celebrate your kiss-and-be-friends with Carl Leibig. If you’re not coming, we’ll call it a farewell drink and afterwards we’ll stop being friends and be sober, courteous colleagues. No less, no more.’

  There was a long silence then, calm as bedamned, in her best Hochdeutsch she announced: ‘You’re right Mr Langton. I did offer champagne. I’ll expect you at seven-thirty. I’ll even give you twenty minutes’ grace in case the traffic is bad. Please drive carefully.’

  I arrived on time. She did offer champagne, but it was still in the bottle and the bottle was in her overnight bag and she was dressed and ready for the road. Defying all Japanese decencies, I took her in my arms and kissed her and we set off, singing lustily, on the highway to Kamakura.

  As the snarl of traffic enveloped us, we stopped singing and I listened as Marta Boysen began, hesitantly at first, then with increasing urgency, to talk herself out of the corner to which she had retreated.

  ‘Every so often I feel besieged, hedged about by people who refuse to let me be myself, but want to bend me by force or guile to their own purposes. Some of it dates from my marriage. Some of it goes further back still, to my childhood when I travelled with my mother … She kept me with her most of the time. I give her full credit for all the love she put into that; but there were always other people managing my life – a nurse, a nanny, a tutor-companion. I couldn’t become attached to one place. There was always a manager, a producer, stepping through the door waving a piece of paper and bidding us to move on.

  ‘You will laugh at this, but one of the things that attracted me to an academic career was the enormous authority and independence of the Herr Professor. You know how it is in Germany, even now. The professor is Jove dispensing thunder and lightning. Of course, that’s an illusion, too, as you well know, but it drove me hard enough and far enough to launch me on my career. Looking back, I suppose one of my more vivid memories of your father and you was the sense of freedom that swept into the house with you. Anything was possible. Any place in the world was only a hop and a skip away. My world was exciting enough, God knows, but yours was… oh, infinitely extended. Later, it reinforced my conviction that scholarship itself was a liberator.

  Then I threw all my freedom out the window and shackled myself to a gutsherr from Carinthia. How? Why? It’s such a damn silly story I’m almost ashamed to tell it. My mother was singing at the Burgtheater in Vienna. The management staged a reception for her. He was there, dolled up and dashing, handsome as Lucifer. I was tired and bored after a long arid year of study. We started going about together. He showed me off like one of his prize mares. I loved it. I was ripe and ready for breeding anyway. We were married before summer was out. By autumn’s end, while I was trying to cope with my courses again, the marriage was already in ruins. He wasn’t a bad man, just stupid, with a streak of childish cruelty in his nature. He was madly jealous of everything I was or wanted to be. He wouldn’t share my interests, but he wouldn’t let me be private either. I had to build a fence around my professional life so that he wouldn’t come trampling through it like an old fashioned Junker, kicking up mud, slashing about with his riding crop. Then he became cunning, setting little traps, playing games to disrupt my schedules or taint my friendships … That was a horrible time. I needed counselling to get me through it, and I still get bad dreams. What happened this morning seemed exactly like one of those dreams. I felt I’d been set up for something and you were part of the nasty prank. Even after the reconciliation with Leibig I couldn’t shake off the resentment. In the end I panicked and tried to call off our date.’

  I had no comment, because just at that moment a suicidal maniac nearly ran us into the guard-rail, trying to squeeze into the traffic ahead of us. Behind, a big transport rammed on his airbrakes and, for one dizzy moment, I thought we were going to end up as meat sandwich in the middle of the highway. My first coherent utterance was a torrent of obscenities in Japanese and outback Australian.

  We were both badly scared so, at the first opportunity, we turned off the highway and on to a side road that wound through a string of villages to our destination; a traditional Japanese ryokan secluded in its own garden, with stone lanterns dotted among the trees, a carp stream spanned by a gracef
ul bridge, and a tranquility so carefully contrived that we might have stepped back a hundred years.

  The moment we slipped off our shoes and were bowed into the magic square of our living space, our world changed and we were changed with it. Two smiling maids disposed of our meagre baggage. The screen wall was slid back to reveal a bathroom with the great wooden tub already filling with steaming water. Once it was clear that we were sleeping together – not that there had been any question asked, but I had booked two rooms – then one chamber was set for our sleeping, and the other for our eating and our contemplation of the garden when the moon rose or daylight came.

  The ceremonies of welcome and comfort seemed interminable, but finally the maid gave us a small conspirator’s smile, pointed to the handbell that would summon our dinner service, and left us to take our bath.

  And there we were at last, two very adult people, staring at each other in wonderment across two metres of tatami floor. Then we were laughing and kissing and fumbling with fastenings until we collapsed together on the futon and made love desperately as if the next moment the world might end.

  A long time afterwards we began the ritual of the bath. Marta sat naked on a pinewood stool while I ladled water over her from a wooden bucket and soaped her, head to toe, exploring her slowly, playing the love games I had dreamed in lonely nights and rehearsed sometimes in loveless rooms. Then she did the same for me, slowly and skilfully, until the tension became unbearable and we coupled again on the warm wet tiles of the floor.

  Then we were in the bath, languid and playful as seals, rapt in each other’s company, careless of the dangers that lurked in the black deeps beyond. We spoke little. What was there to utter except the small sudden words of pleasure and the long, sensuous sighs of relief and relaxation?

  Came then the comedy of trying to dry ourselves with those ridiculously tiny wash-cloths which became sodden in a moment, and must be continually squeezed to dry the next patch of skin. At last, wrapped in yukata, we rang the bell and, with surprising appetite, worked our way through a dinner which the old merchant travellers to Edo would have been happy to share.