J (36 page)

‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.

And that was when she told him.

What will it take? The same as it has always taken. The application of a scriptural calumny (in this instance the convergence of two scriptural calumnies) to economic instability, inflamed nationalism, an unemployed and malleable populace in whom the propensity to hero-worship is pronounced, supine government,
tedium vitae
, a self-righteous and ill-informed élite, the pertinaciousness of old libels – the most consoling of which being that they’d had their chance, these objects of immemorial detestation, chance after chance (to choose love over law, flexibility over intransigence, community over exclusiveness, and to learn compassion from suffering) . . . chance after chance, and – as witness their moving in scarcely more than a generation from objects of immolation to proponents of it – they’d blown them all. Plus zealotry. Never forget zealotry – that torch to the easily inflamed passions of the benighted and the cultured alike. What it won’t take, because it won’t need – because it never
needs
– is an evil genius to conceive and direct the operation. We have been lulled by the great autocratdriven genocides of the recent past into thinking that nothing of that enormity of madness can ever happen again – not anywhere, least of all here. And it’s true – nothing on such a scale probably ever will. But lower down the order of horrors, and answering a far more modest ambition, carnage can still be connived at – lesser bloodbaths, minor murders, butchery of more modest proportions.

From an unwritten letter by Ailinn’s great-grandfather Wolfie Lestchinsky to his daughter Rebecca.

BOOK THREE

Meet . . .

Merowitz, Berowitz, Handelman, Schandelman

Sperber and Gerber and Steiner and Stone

Boskowitz, Lubowitz, Aaronson, Baronson,

Kleinman and Feinman and Freidman and Cohen

Smallowitz, Wallowitz, Tidelbaum, Mandelbaum

Levin, Levinsky, Levine and Levi

Brumburger, Schlumburger, Minkus and Pinkus

And Stein with an ‘e-i’ and Styne with a ‘y’

Allan Sherman,
Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max

ONE

The Least Little Bit of Umbrage

i

‘S
O I WAS
right all along to think it,’ Kevern said after a silence that seemed to Ailinn to go on for a period of dark time that could not be calculated in minutes or hours or even days . . .

‘Right to think what?’ she asked at last before her own life ran out.

‘That Ferdie didn’t like me. Ferdie has never liked me.’

It was four o’clock in the morning, the time no living thing should be awake. There was not a sound from the sea where Kevern had looked for seals and not found any – drowned were they? drowned in some communal act of self-murder? – and where he imagined that even the fish, after eating well, must be now sleeping. They had tried talking in bed but Kevern needed to be able to pace about, so they had gone downstairs to the little kitchen. Ailinn sat at the table in her dressing gown, absent-mindedly banging her fists together. Kevern made tea, walked up and down, and made more tea. They had toasted all the bread they had and eaten all the biscuits. Ailinn couldn’t face sardines or pilchards so Kevern opened tins of baked beans, cherry tomatoes, tuna in olive oil, mushroom soup and sweetcorn. These he mixed in a large bowl to which he added salt, pepper and paprika. No thanks, Ailinn had said. He was not wearing any clothes. In response to Ailinn’s concern that he was cold, and then that he would scald himself, he said he
wanted to be cold and wanted to scald himself. How you see me is how I feel, he told her.

Vulnerable, she could understand, but she wanted him to know he wasn’t – they weren’t – in any danger.

‘Can Ez be trusted?’ he asked.

‘To do what?’

‘To keep quiet.’

It was a difficult question to answer. ‘No one means us any harm,’ she repeated.

He laughed. ‘Don’t forget Ferdie. Never forget Ferdie.’

She was not inclined to follow him into Ferdie territory. She knew that he was preparing to go through the names of everyone he thought had ever harmed him or meant him ill – a list that could take them through many more nights like this – and still at the end of it scratch his head and say he didn’t understand what he’d done to offend them. It appeared to give him consolation to go on saying ‘I don’t think Ferdie likes me,’ and she feared he would repeat it and repeat it until she was able to direct him on to another course.

‘There is no point even trying to make light of any of this,’ she said. ‘I know that you only joke when you are at your most anxious.’

‘Joking? Who’s joking?’

He no sooner said those words than he knew he had to cross his js no longer.

Could this be called a liberation, then? It was too early to say.

He was past the point of marvelling at how much made sense to him now. He had always known . . . that was to be his defence against the horrors of surprise . . . he had always known
really
, at some level, below consciousness, beyond cognition, he had always known
somewhere
. . . not everything, of course not everything, not the half of it, but enough, for the news to be as much confirmation as shock . . . though whether that was confirmation of the worst of what he’d half known, or the best, or just something in
the middle, he was yet to find out. But he hadn’t been to sleep and was wandering his kitchen naked, drinking tea and eating bean and tuna soup, so it had to be admitted he was not exactly taking it lightly.

By comparison, Ailinn, banging her fists together like cymbals, was relaxation itself.

‘Ferdie didn’t like you, either,’ he reminded her.

‘Darling, I don’t give a shit what Ferdie thought.’

‘You should. The world is full of Ferdies.’

‘
Your
world is full of Ferdies.’

‘So you’re OK about all this, is that what you’re telling me?’

She had put herself in a false position. No she didn’t feel OK about
all
this, but then Kevern still didn’t know the full extent of it. She couldn’t hit him with more than she’d hit him with already. This was part one. Part two would come when she thought he was good and ready. Give me time, she’d told Ez. Wouldn’t it be best to strike while the iron’s hot, Ez had said, but the metaphor was too close to the literal truth. It would have been like branding and braining him. I’ll need time, she insisted. As for what she did tell Kevern about – their sudden consanguinity – then yes, the revelation did feel more a blessing than a curse to her. But however their histories had converged, their antecedent narratives were different. To put it brutally, she had none. Ez had simply filled the blanks in for her.And something was better than nothing.Whereas for Kevern, well he had to set about reconfiguring a densely peopled chronicle, reimagining not just himself but every member of his family. And pacing the kitchen with no clothes, trying for jokes that weren’t funny even by his family’s standards of deranged unfunniness, he didn’t appear so far to be making a good job of it.

‘I’ll be OK,’ she said, ‘when you’re OK.’

He stopped his pacing and leaned against the stove. ‘Be careful, for Christ’s sake,’ she warned him.

‘What did they see?’ he asked suddenly, as though addressing another matter entirely, as though he had just strolled into the
room with an incidental question in his mind. ‘I’m not asking what they thought – they thought what they’d been taught to think – but what did they
see
when my hunchbacked grandfather popped his nose out of this cottage to sniff the poisoned air? What did they see when my mother went shopping in her rags? Or when my father crept into the village to sell his candlesticks to the gift shops? Or when you and I, come to that, first went strolling arm in arm through Paradise Valley? What do they see when they see us now?’

‘Who’s “they”?’

He wouldn’t even bother to answer that. She knew who ‘they’ were. ‘They’ were whoever weren’t them. The Ferdies.

‘What do we look like to them, is what I’m asking. Vermin?’

‘Oh, Kevern!’

‘
Oh, Kevern
what?
Oh, Kevern, don’t be so extreme
. Do you think I could ever outdo in extremity those who did what they did? But to understand how they could ever do it requires us to see what they saw, or at least to imagine what they saw.’

‘Maybe they didn’t see anything. Maybe they still don’t. Has it occurred to you that we just aren’t there for them?’

‘Just
! That’s a mighty big “just”, Ailinn. I think I’d rather be vermin than “just” not there. And even if you’re right, it still takes some explaining. How do you make a fellow mortal not there? What’s the trick of seeing right through someone? An indifference on that scale is nothing short of apocalyptic – or it is when it comes to getting rid of the thing you don’t see, going to pains to obliterate what isn’t there. But I don’t think you’re right anyway. I think they must see something, the embodiment of a horrible idea, the fleshing out of an evil principle that’s been talked about and written about for too long, mouldy like something that’s crawled out of its own grave.’

‘You are in danger,’ she said, ‘of describing the horror you see, not the horror they do.’

‘Why should I see horror?’

‘Don’t be naive.’

‘How am I being naive?’

‘When Hendrie raised his hand and told me I had been with them too long, that I didn’t belong there, that he wished they’d never rescued me from the orphanage, I saw what he saw. An outcast ingrate – with big feet – whom no one could possibly love. That’s the way it works.’

‘I’m sorry about the feet. I love your feet.’

He dropped to his knees and thrust his head under the table where her feet were, and kissed them. I could stay here, he thought. Never come back up.

But he did come back up. That was the grim rule of life, one always came back up . . . until one didn’t.

She was smiling at least. Gravely, but a smile was still a smile.

‘Take my point, Kevern,’ she said.

‘I take your point. And I don’t hate myself, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

‘That’s not what I’m getting at. I don’t hate myself either. But criticism rubs off. How could it be otherwise? Sometimes the glass through which others look at you tilts and you catch a little of what they see. It’s understandable that you wish you’d made a better impression.’

‘
Impression
! You make it sound like a children’s story –
The Little Girl Who Should Have Made a Better Impression.
I’m not that little girl, or boy. I don’t crave anybody’s respect – except yours. I’m not trying to understand what people see when they see me – when they see
us
, Ailinn – because I think I ought to improve my appearance. I’ve no desire to wear a better aspect. I want to understand what they see on the principle that one should know one’s enemies. I want to know what they see so I can hate them better.’

She fell silent – not bruised by the vehemence of his words but because she wondered whether she was wrong not to feel what he felt. Was it feeble of her to reject resentment, even on behalf of her poor great-grandparents? This queer exhilaration she
was experiencing – as though her life could be about to start at last and never mind where she’d been before – was it disloyal? Was Ez sending her on a fool’s errand whose futility was the least of it? Was it wrong? Was it treasonable?

But no. Whatever she was doing, right, wrong, feeble, gullible, treasonable, Kevern’s way was plain bad. Bad for him. Bad for his mental state. Bad for them. Bad for their future together.
Bad.
‘This is unhealthy,’ she said at last.

‘It’s a bit late for health.’

‘You are also not being honest with yourself.You say you need to understand how others see you, but your curiosity isn’t dispassionate. It isn’t divided equally between those who don’t like you and those who do. You’re only really intrigued by those who don’t.’

‘Hardly surprising is it, given what I’ve just discovered, if it’s those who don’t like me I’m interested in right now. My friends I can think about later.’

Friends? Did he have friends? His recent conversation with Rozenwyn Feigenblat – not a word of which he’d mentioned to Ailinn – came back to him. She saw him as friendless – worse than that, she saw him as courting friendlessness. And now here was Ailinn saying the same. Why was his nature quite so pervious to women?

‘It’s not right now I’m talking about,’ she persisted. ‘You’ve always paid more attention to your enemies.’

‘Ailinn, I didn’t know I had enemies until five minutes ago.’

‘That’s ridiculous. Who do you lock your door against? Who are you frightened of being invaded by? You have lived in a world of enemies all your life.’

‘You can talk, you and Ahab.’

She waved Ahab away. ‘Now he’s found me I’ll deal with him,’ she said.

‘It’s as easy as that?’

‘No. But it’s good to confront him now he’s out of the shadows.
It’s good to turn and face him. Look him in the eyes. Your point – know your enemy. OK, Ahab – do your worst. And it turns out he isn’t even called Ahab.’

‘No, he’s called Ferdie – who frankly I find more frightening.’

‘That’s because you want to go on being frightened.You know no other way.’

‘Are you calling me a coward?’

‘No. I’m sure it takes bravery to live with fear as you do.’

‘That’s patronising. I don’t “bravely” live with fear. It’s not something I choose. I have no choice.’

‘You do – you have the choice not to wallow . . .’

‘You think this is wallowing?’

She did, yes she did, but declined to answer. She dropped her head between her fists, and this time beat the cymbals against her ears.

He wondered if he ought to get dressed. The first squeeze of narrow light was showing out to sea. He wasn’t ready for day, but if it had to come he should go and greet it. The cliffs would be a good place to be, on his bench, side by side with Ailinn, looking out to the dead, consoling sea. It wouldn’t change anything but weather was preferable to the cottage, and the great sea justified his fears. The world was terrifying.