Pussy

by Howard Jacobson

  The Grand Duke wasn’t the only one pressing for the Walls to be built even higher.

  The mothers, too, knowing how suspiciously their meetings were viewed, were apprehensive. Women of supreme authority and confidence in other spheres of public life, they shook when they held a book and read to one another from it in quiet, childish voices. Demanska Origen’s question hardly did anything to settle their nerves. Something else! They shifted in their seats, rearranged their skirts, and exchanged anxious glances. Chocolate factories and magic schoolboys constituted a monotheistic faith. To wonder if there was something else to read about was like asking a Christian to take up worshipping the Devil.

  At last the Duchess of Oblaxa found the courage to ask, ‘Such as?’

  The next silence lasted until the end of the session.

  Demanska Origen went home to some degree consoled. She had nothing to blame herself for. She could not have done other than she’d done. Sometimes you can overexcite a child’s imagination with literature. It’s a risk you have to take. If she’d done anything wrong it was only that.

  CHAPTER 5

  A painful chapter containing matters it were better to remain silent about

  Renzo Origen was more concerned about Fracassus than he had let on to his wife. But for different reasons. If the boy had grown indolent and self-satisfied while he’d been away it was no great matter; a few rounds of golf now he was back would put that right. The off-handedness, similarly, didn’t much matter. He saw it as a sort of teething, his son practising the incivility he’d need in later life. But there was such a thing as overdoing it. The Grand Duke was not himself a discourteous man. He tipped his caddy well and pretended to listen when his chauffeur told him of his troubles. But he knew that those at the bottom of an empire expected disrespect from those at the top and even loved them for it. It proved the efficacy of a system of which they were part. And since few people intended to remain where birth had placed them, it gave them something to look forward to. In the meantime, they connived in their own humiliation as though the longing to be returned to the condition of a slave was a given of their natures. What was a tyrant, when all was said and done, but the embodied will of the people? If Fracassus’s ambitions tended to the tyrannical, his father had no objection. But there were subtleties to be discerned in the early careers of even the most monstrous of despots. The people craved disrespect but you had to creep into their hearts first. Fracassus lacked finesse. He made enemies too quickly.

  And then there was what his wife had reported to be the boy’s inclination towards the pornographic.

  ‘It is classical pornography, he’s been watching, Your Highness,’ Dr Strowheim had been at pains to point out.

  ‘Pornography’s pornography,’ the Grand Duke replied. ‘It has no place in the making of the sort of leader I intend Fracassus to be.’

  This wasn’t primness speaking. It was what the Grand Duke called Fun-Politik. Pornography threatened innocent soft-core sexploitation. It handed the enemies of harmless good times a weapon.

  To the boy himself, sitting him down in his office on the 180th floor and turning off every television in the building, he set out his position.

  ‘I assume you know why I’ve brought you here,’ he said.

  Fracassus pouted.

  ‘Is that a yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘Yes I do.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘Yes, Father.’

  ‘So why have I brought you here?’

  ‘To whip my ass.’

  ‘I could have done that in your room.’

  ‘Then why did you bring me here?’

  ‘It’s because I don’t want your mother to overhear this conversation. You respect your mother, don’t you?’

  ‘When I see her.’

  ‘Are you missing her? Is that why you’re watching men doing filthy things to women?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘So what are you watching?’

  ‘Nero.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I like him. He makes people do what he wants.’

  ‘And do you think it’s right to make people do what you want?’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘Allowable? Kind? Fair?’

  ‘If you’re the boss.’

  ‘Do you ever feel sorry for these people?’

  ‘Why should I? They get what’s coming to them. It’s fun, seeing people scared.’

  ‘By people do you mean women?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘And does this Nero make them do sexual things?’

  ‘Dad!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Some of them.’

  ‘And that turns you on?’

  Fracassus buried his face on his father’s desk.

  ‘Listen,’ Renzo Origen went on. ‘It isn’t easy being a man. Especially a rich man. Women come on to you. They come on to me all the time. But you have to show them respect. You’ll be able to have all the women you like, but you don’t have to hurt them. Think of them as collectables rather than conquests. I’m not saying you shouldn’t let them know who’s boss occasionally. Woman like to be mastered. They say they don’t but take my word for it – they do. Nobody will mind that you’re red-blooded. Men will envy you and even militant women won’t hate you in their hearts. I’ve slapped many a feminist’s bottom, I can tell you. And been thanked for it. But don’t get into weird shit – you know what I mean?’

  Fracassus raised his pinhole eyes and shook his head. It suddenly occurred to Renzo Origen, looking into his son’s plump vacancy, that he hadn’t understood a word that had been said to him.

  ‘Describe to me,’ he said, ‘what you think of when you see a woman.’

  ‘On television?’

  ‘In the flesh.’

  ‘I don’t see any women.’

  ‘You see your mother.’

  ‘Not often.’

  ‘What about Dr Cobalt? You see her.’

  Fracassus was finding it hard to swallow.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘What do you think of when you see her?’

  Nothing from Fracassus.

  ‘In one word.’

  Fracassus scratched his head with one hand and patted his hair with the other.

  ‘You can tell me. I’m not going to be angry.’

  ‘Pussy,’ Fracassus said.

  That was when the Grand Duke of Origen decided it was time to rethink the direction his son’s education was taking and call in outside help.

  CHAPTER 6

  In which it is agreed not to scare the horses

  ‘So that, not to conceal anything from you, Professor, is our problem,’ the Grand Duke declared, opening his hands as though to show his cabinet of painful secrets was now empty. ‘Our son is an original. He is the coming man. But it is hard to imagine him, as he is, soothing shareholders or buying off interest groups. Soon he will have media pouncing on his every word. He has to have words for them to pounce on. You may wonder why we are not sending him to college. I mean no disrespect to your profession, Professor, but the academy is not for everyone. It does not teach what we would wish him to learn, and what it does teach we would wish him not to. You wear your erudition lightly, Professor, but there are some it incapacitates for any job but incapacitating others. Fracassus’s fulfilment will lie in giving pleasure not in causing pain.’

  Professor Probrius smiled and made a pyramid of cogitation with his fingers. This had been one of the gestures that had cost him his job. ‘It would seem to me, Your Highnesses,’ he opined, ‘that you are of two minds about your son’s vocabulary. On the one hand you would like him to be capable of more sophisticated discourse, such as will flatter those who are of his party and persuade those who are not; on the other you fear, as any parent might, what infections he will pick up from language as it is commonly deployed by people aggressively unsympathetic to your way of life.’


  ‘You put it well,’ the Grand Duke replied, ‘though we are not backward-looking. A benign commercial plutocracy of play cannot be run on democratic lines, but where the people’s wants don’t run counter to our own, we indulge them. I am not their nanny, but in the matter of the few precious rights left to them after generations of liberal interference – the right to smoke wherever they choose, the right to consume cheap fuel, the right to live in single-colour communities, the right to drink sugary drinks, the right not to have wind farms in their back gardens, the right to fritter away their life savings at my gaming tables – I am their champion. I don’t scorn their tastes. They enjoy reality TV. So do I. So, I suspect, in your secret heart of hearts, do you, Professor. And if Fracassus is likewise entertained, where’s the harm? It keeps him on a level footing with those whose lives will one day be his to play with. It can only be a bonus if he speaks to them in words small enough for them to understand—’

  ‘Without,’ his wife interrupted, ‘meaning to imply that the people are deficient in understanding—’

  ‘Exactly,’ the Grand Duke continued. ‘Without meaning to imply any such thing. But when they discover how alike they are despite apparent differences, they will love him.’

  ‘But—’ interposed his wife again

  Professor Probrius showed he was all attention.

  ‘But – but, he will not be loved by anyone, however small his words, unless he can express himself more sympathetically. He must at least learn to conceal the indifference he feels towards everybody but himself.’

  ‘My dear—’

  ‘No, Renzo, we must be honest. We have nurtured a brute.’

  ‘Not a brute.’

  ‘A brute!’

  ‘Because he doesn’t read, my dear …’

  ‘He does read. He reads the comics you buy him.’

  ‘Because he doesn’t read what you think he should read …’

  ‘I am his mother. I have a right to an opinion on his reading.’

  The Grand Duke commended himself for not saying, in public, ‘And we know where that leads.’

  ‘What it comes to,’ he said instead, ‘is that the Grand Duchess and I want Fracassus to be brought up to speed, not just as a speaker but as a man, but not so up to speed – I’m sure you understand me – that he acquires concepts that are destroying our society. You should know that Fracassus has an older brother—’

  ‘No!’ cried the Grand Duchess.

  ‘Then maybe you should not know that Fracassus has an older brother. Forget I’ve said anything. But let us at the very least agree on this – personal experience has taught us that you can have too many words.’

  The Professor nodded. He was familiar with the argument. ‘It is strange,’ he said, ‘that we have a derogatory term – pleonasm – for the use of more words than are strictly necessary, yet don’t have a laudatory term for the use of fewer words than are strictly necessary. But the truth is, it isn’t quantity that’s the issue. What we need to find for the Prince are the right words. And these we must select with sensitivity. There’s a saying in the teaching profession: don’t scare the horses. Of late we have been scaring them half to death. You tell me Fracassus doesn’t often, for security reasons, leave the 170th floor of the Palace; I fear the spirit of the times would reach him were he to live sealed up on the 1,000th. He, too, we must treat as we would a frightened horse.’

  Professor Probrius could not have answered more felicitously had he tried. For the Grand Duke and Duchess, the Prince’s employment of the wrong words was as much the problem as his having no words at all. Only recently, after the most minor altercation with his parents, Fracassus had pushed his face out, curled his lips back, and aimed at them, as though they were bullets, the words ‘Fuck, nigger, cunt.’

  They had called the royal physician who examined him over a period of weeks. ‘He has, Your Highness,’ the physician reported, ‘what I’d call Tourette’s, only without the Tourette’s.’

  ‘Will he get better?’ the Grand Duchess asked.

  ‘In the sense of will he extend his range of pejoratives? He might, Your Majesty.’

  So Probrius’s proposal that they select the right words for the Prince with sensitivity was warmly welcomed.

  ‘And we think that you, Professor,’ the Grand Duke said, looking across to his wife for confirmation, ‘are just the person to sneak the right words in. I hope you won’t mind if I am kept abreast of the situation. I might have a few words of my own to suggest. And occasionally one or two I would like to see withdrawn.’

  ‘I too,’ the Grand Duchess said. There was a great sadness about her, Professor Probrius noticed. He wondered if she were homesick.

  Or was there simply – given that the most sorrowful of spirit are the first to notice sorrow in others – a great sadness about him?

  He bowed, all three shook on the arrangement, and the Grand Duchess took another selfie.

  Professor Probrius was given a free hand with the disposal of Fracassus’s existing tutors. He dismissed them all with the exception of Dr Cobalt.

  CHAPTER 7

  A wind blows through the Republic of Urbs-Ludus

  Of the many perversities to which our species is subject, wanting the worst to happen is perhaps the strangest. Only wanting to be looked down on by the powerful comes close to it. Kolskeggur Probrius, though he personally wanted to be looked down on by nobody, did hope for the worst for everybody else. The violence visited on his Phonoethics course had left him embittered and vengeful. So the signs which he read in the wind that the university that had expelled him was a spent force – not just his university but every university – gave him a wicked pleasure. In its demise he espied his vindication. Anything he could do to speed the process up, he would.

  He was a man who wet his finger and held it out to the wind. He liked to know which direction it was blowing from and relished being the first to warn of the damage it would do. In the ancient world he’d have been respected as a wind-prophet, but to moderns he was just a desponder. He had tried to prepare his university for what was coming – beware the people! – predicting that everything educators had ever meant by education – example, elucidation, emancipation, deliverance – would soon be scattered like dead leaves. He had proclaimed this at his Trial by Thumb. He might as soon have slit his throat on the steps of the Student Union. He pronounced ‘people’ without respect and down went half the thumbs. He pronounced ‘education’ with reverence and down went the other half.

  He descended from his post in a waterfall of blood.

  Well, none of it mattered any longer. The Republic wasn’t listening to its universities. They were beyond a joke. Even the most second-hand of the Republic’s comedians had stopped looking to safe rooms and trigger warnings for comic material. The universities were abandoned cities. Single-identity tribes wandered the corridors, speaking words the rest of the Republic didn’t recognise. They might as well have put bones through their noses, and some of them did.

  Professor Probrius put his finger to the wind and read what it was saying. Soon, the purgers would be purged in a carnivalesque revolt against protected attitudes, correct ideas, all the things you were not supposed to say, all the things you were not supposed to feel, all the hard-won decencies and easily enunciated pieties, all the sanctimony, all that was holier than thou, and with it all that was civilised. Gone – the victim of its own provocations – gone, on a day not far removed from this one, maybe in a year, maybe in ten years, but gone without a doubt, in one great gust of wind.

  The sooner, Professor Probrius thought, the better.

  He wasted no time settling into his new post. Before meeting Fracassus he thought it wise to exchange ideas with Dr Cobalt.

  ‘Yoni,’ she said, giving him her cheek.

  ‘Kolskeggur,’ he responded.

  ‘I gather from your sanguinity,’ she said, ‘that you haven’t yet had the pleasure of seeing the Prince with your own eyes.’

  ‘I hav
en’t. But his distraught parents have described him to me with some vividness.’

  ‘Nothing beats the real thing.’

  ‘I’m sure it doesn’t. You, I understand, have been here a number of years.’

  ‘Five. He was ten when I first had the pleasure. He hasn’t disappointed.’

  They were in a coffee shop by the Eastern Wall and so had nothing to fear, they felt, from cameras or microphones. But even so – perhaps the precaution was a leftover from his university days – the Professor scanned the ceiling. ‘I gather,’ he said, ‘that you don’t exactly feel in loco parentis to the boy.’

  Dr Cobalt screwed up her arctic eyes. ‘Even his parents don’t feel in loco parentis to the boy.’

  ‘Let me play the devil’s advocate. Aren’t we, in that case, obliged to feel sorry for him?’

  ‘Normally I would respect your advocacy. Empathy was one of my degree subjects. But there are times when the usual rules of pity don’t apply. I too once subscribed to the philosophy that a child is a blank canvas on which parents and society write their own messages. Before that, I even believed in the sacredness of the infant, trailing clouds of glory in the moment of his delivery into a harsh and godless world. The Prince, I have to tell you, trailed a cloud of shit.’

  Professor Probrius smiled and looked around him again, just to be sure. He couldn’t remember ever having liked a woman so much on first acquaintance. ‘I take it, then, that you don’t much …’ he began. They both knew the joke.