MOST OF US never get over our childhoods. While I had acquired Canadian citizenship and a fully formed Canadian identity, those Hungarian phantoms continued to haunt me. My experiences with the Communist criminal justice system, what I had seen of the ’56 Revolution, my memory of the young Russian soldier who died while I was holding his hand, as much as my grandfather’s stories have remained part of who I am. There was no room for those memories in my publishing life, or in the life I had built with Julian and our children, though there was one strange event when Catherine was eight years old.
She had started to sleepwalk. Most nights I would find her wandering along the passageway to the stairs, or trying to open the back door toward the ravine. Julian and I read up on the dangers of waking someone when she or he was sleepwalking; instead we walked with her, making calming noises, and trying to gently steer her back to her bed.
After a few months of sleepless nights, I made an appointment with a child psychiatrist. He was a big, soft-spoken guy with a sunny disposition. Catherine, apprehensive, sat on my lap and watched him intently. About five minutes after we settled in, he got a pile of white paper and an assortment of colouring pencils and told her he would love it if she would draw him some pictures. She got down on the carpet and began to draw. As she was attacking the sheets of paper, he began to ask me about my childhood. He was particularly interested in the times I spent in jail, about the mangled bodies I had seen on the streets of Budapest, and how my mother and I had managed to escape. I kept telling him that the reason we had come was Catherine’s sleepwalking.
An hour later, he told me our session was over, took Catherine’s drawings, and complimented her on her choice of colours and her compositions. “Let me know if you have any more problems,” he said to me.
“Is this it for today?” I asked.
“This should be the end of it,” he said. “You have a very sensitive daughter. And don’t forget she listens even when you are not talking.”
He was right and Catherine never sleepwalked again.
The reason I tell this story is that I had assumed my childhood memories had receded over the years in New Zealand and Canada. They hadn’t and they had a strange way of showing up. There is a mysterious, malevolent figure in Hidden Agenda who is probably Hungarian, and the central figure in Mortal Sins is clearly Hungarian, hiding a terrible secret under a false identity in Canada. The novel turns on how far he and his family are willing to go to hide his true identity and how he had come by it. Both books are also satirical inside stories of the publishing world in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
With my third mystery, The Bookfair Murders, I had a chance to make fun of that Grand Guignol of book events, the annual Bertelsmann party at the Intercontinental Hotel during the Frankfurt International Book Fair. There were five hundred carefully selected guests. The picture I presented with the Bertelsmann wives at one end of the room, and the mistresses at the other, was only a little bit fictional. They actually mingled at the packed buffet tables. The novel’s central story of an author continuing to write her novels after her death because the company publishing her can’t afford to let her be buried was then a bit unusual, but true. Nowadays, the bestselling dead keep producing their books, unapologetically, and the public keeps buying them, as long as they are pretty much the same as the previous books.
I have kept one of the giant red banners List Verlag, German publishers of The Bookfair Murders, displayed over the wide avenue leading to the convention grounds: Mord auf der Buchmesse: Nur List kennt der Tater (Murder at the Bookfair: Only List knows who did it). It’s now the backdrop to one end of our tennis court in Georgian Bay and does a grand job of keeping the wind out.
I dedicated The Bookfair Murders to my eclectic group of book fair friends, a.k.a. the Quasimodo dinner group. It included British agent extraordinaire Clare Alexander, Penguin Australia’s Bob Sessions, Transworld’s Patrick Janson-Smith, Workman’s Carolan Workman, St. Martins’s Tom Dunne, and the inimitable, brilliant wit Les Pockell. Though we were scattered all over the world, we had all grown up in the book business. Frankfurt was our annual reunion. The dinner had one unbreakable tradition. Bob Sessions, at some point, would stand up and tell a long, hilarious, shaggy dog version of a Quasimodo joke. We all knew it so well, we’d call out our beloved turning points or howl with outrage if Bob left out a bit.
It was Les Pockell who, having spent several years in Japan working for Kodansha, was able to initiate me into interpreting Japanese reactions to seeing book projects. They ranged from the mild “very interesting,” meaning “no thank you,” to the more determined “hmm, very, very interesting,” meaning “stop showing me this piece of Western trash,” and the final “hmm,” meaning “I would sooner die than waste one more minute looking at this dreck.” “One more thing,” he instructed. “Do try to look shorter.”
Les’s invaluable advice saved Key Porter’s Polly Manguel and me a great deal of time during selling trips to Japan. One day in Tokyo, there was an earthquake during Polly’s rather spirited presentation. The table and our chairs moved, the chandelier swung, the windows rattled, and Polly and I followed our hosts’ example in pretending not to notice. She mentioned later that it would have been an ignominious way to die.
Polly, who was with Key Porter for a number of years, was a funny and brilliant salesperson. On our international travels we always shared rooms to save money, laughed a lot, listened to each other’s phone calls, and bought each other wine when we felt discouraged or wanted to celebrate. Polly had been married to writer Alberto Manguel. They divorced when he announced that he was gay. Polly liked to talk to all three of their children every day, timing her calls so that they would be home from school.
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TO MY ASTONISHMENT, Catherine announced in 1989 that she wanted to be presented as a debutante at the Helicon Ball in Toronto. Not everyone has heard of the Helicon Ball, and if you are neither a dignitary nor Hungarian, chances are you would not have been invited. It is a somewhat anachronistic old-world ball with long gowns for the women, dinner jackets or traditional Hungarian evening wear for the gents. There is an introductory dance called palotas, performed by energetic young people in colourful embroidered costumes. As far as I could determine, Catherine’s interest in things Hungarian was negligible. She spoke five or six words of the language, hated the couple of times I tried to interest her in Hungarian school (they did folk dancing), and when I took my two daughters to Hungary, she was eager to get home to her friends. Hardly surprising, since she was about eleven at the time, and one of the highlights of my childhood, tiny Lake Balaton, was a huge disappointment after Lake Huron and Lake Ontario.
But now she was seventeen and determined. Julian took waltzing lessons from an abrasive German woman who thought he lacked talent for dancing. Catherine looked spectacular in her white, layered lace gown (I wish we had kept it). I have a photograph of her practicing her curtsy for her presentation to Lieutenant-Governor Lincoln Alexander, her father grinning sheepishly at her side.
As the psychiatrist said, Catherine had listened even when she seemed not to be listening—and even when I wasn’t talking.