Viktor did not keep Shabbes, took no notice of any of Jewish festivals and ate whatever took his fancy. Because lapwing was high on the list of foods proscribed in Leviticus, he would have tucked into lapwing with gusto had he known where to buy it. Food was scarce in Kiev, so it was difficult enough to find ossifrage, let alone lapwing. Snails, however, were a delicacy he indulged. Hare, whether grilled or in a pie, likewise. And as for the bacon he fried in butter every morning, as an accompaniment to blood pudding – so many slices, fried for just the right number of minutes, a little salt, a little pepper, a dash of oyster sauce – why it was almost a religious ritual to him.
But he was troubled by an inconsistency. If he could dine on bacon without a qualm, and pork sausage, and ham hock, and chitterlings – and there was even one dish he adored of which the chief ingredient was pig’s rectum – why couldn’t he ever eat pork belly? If he saw pork belly on a menu, he needed to drink a glass of water. If he sat next to someone eating pork belly, he had to fight himself from retching. Once, when one of his colleagues ordered pork belly, Viktor announced he would have to leave the table while the food was being consumed.
‘Viktor, you must be able to explain this inconsistency,’ his colleague demanded. But Viktor was unable to. It wasn’t what the pork belly looked or tasted like that was the problem. It was the pairing of the words, the concatenation of sounds – pork and belly. Pork on its own – fine. He loved a pork sandwich with apple sauce. Belly, too, as a discrete entity, presented no problems. He had once eaten yak’s belly on a visit to Moldavia and loved it. But put pork and belly together and he was disgusted. It was a foreignness – a transgression even – too far.
So what was it a transgression against? Viktor was damned if he knew.
And thus it was, inversely, with Yom Kippur, that’s to say thus it was when it came to ignoring it. Hanukkah, Pesach, Purim – Viktor respected none of them. He saw his co-religionists – except that he was no longer a religionist himself – spruced up for synagogue and shook his head over them. Slaves to custom and superstition! Drones of blind faith! On festivals where it was necessary to be solemn, Viktor took pains to be seen laughing. Where it was necessary to laugh, Viktor wore his longest face. On Yom Kippur, however, he kept out of the way. He saw no reason to apologise for his sins since he was always apologising for his sins. Why set aside a single day to atone for your guilt when you’ve been atoning for it all year? Indeed, if he had a besetting sin it was being over-conscious of sinning. So he certainly wasn’t going to fast. But – and this he knew to be illogical – he wasn’t going to be seen not fasting either. No ostentatious banquets at his favourite restaurants on this day. No public retching over another diner’s pork belly.
On the Day of Atonement the sun happened to be shining and Viktor decided on a walk. He nodded at some of the Jews he knew – more pallid than ever on account of doing without food – and suddenly, despite having enjoyed a hearty breakfast, he felt hungry. A snack was all he needed. A biscuit or chocolate. He wandered down a side street and found a tobacconist and confectioner’s. Here he bought a bar of chocolate. But he hesitated before breaking into it. On this day of all others, he thought, couldn’t I at least have done without chocolate?
But that was a superstitious thought and he put it from him. He ate a piece of chocolate, was disappointed in the taste and decided to throw the rest away. What made him decide to throw it in the Dnieper when he could have tossed it over any fence he didn’t know. But when he got to the river, he realised he couldn’t do it. It looked too much like tashlich, or casting your sins upon the water, a ritual Viktor scorned. As though you could drown a sin! He walked on but knew he had to get rid of the remaining chocolate. Why? Did he think he could half atone for half a sin? Did he think he might be half forgiven?
It would seem, he admitted to himself, that I am half superstitious.
Once he got back to his department offices he confessed his recidivism and offered to half resign. At a hurriedly convened meeting of councillors he was fired altogether. You have to make your mind up in this institution, they told him.
There is no moral to this story. But as someone who recently bought a bar of chocolate on Yom Kippur I can vouch for its essential truth.
A pocket manual of blame
‘Auntie Jenny, why are the horses’ eyes covered?’ The questioner was a little girl my wife had taken to the Lord Mayor’s Show. ‘They are wearing blinkers,’ my wife explained, ‘so that they can see straight ahead without being distracted by whatever else is happening on either side of them.’
‘Like Jeremy Corbyn, you mean,’ the little girl didn’t think of saying. But I thought it for her later that day while listening to Sami Ramadani address the lessons of the Paris massacres on LBC radio. Just to fill in the blanks: Sami Ramadani is an Iraqi-born senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan University and a leading member of the Stop the War Coalition; the Stop the War Coalition – of which Jeremy Corbyn was chair before accepting the less influential job of leader of the Labour Party – is an organisation dedicated to peace, anti-Western Imperialism and anti-Zionism, though not necessarily in that order; and LBC is a radio station, of especial help to people who can’t sleep at night, and therefore of no use at all to Stop the War, whose members sleep the deep untroubled sleep of certitude.
To make it plain where Ramadani is ethically as well as politically, let me tell you that in the immediate aftermath of the Paris atrocities, he tweeted the following: ‘ISIS psychopathic terrorists have blood of people in Paris on their hands. Same goes for French govt for backing terrorists in Syria.’
Call anything to mind? That’s right, the post-9/11 ‘butters’ informing victims, even as they were leaping from the burning towers, that they were reaping what they’d sowed. That went down so badly at the time you’d think no one would be heartless or foolhardy enough to try it again. The decencies, Mr Ramadani. Observe the decencies. First bury the dead before you start blaming them. The chance to palter with guilt and innocence will come tomorrow. Though I know tomorrow is always too late if you’re in the game of playing tit-for-tat with terror.
In fact, Ramadani’s tweet is an advance in grossness on that of the 9/11 ‘butters’. Their ‘butting’ asked that we acknowledge a chain of consequences leading back from the atrocity to the wrongdoing of the West. Ramadani’s ‘same goes for the French govt’ asks that we see no difference. Same. Linger a little on that word. Not even similar, but the same. Tweeted no doubt in righteous haste, it is a headlong elision of cause and effect, deflecting blame from the terrorists, minimising their crime, and turning the French into their own murderers.
Take a moment off from being revolted by this tweet, and note a logical flaw in it. If the French are ‘backing’ terrorists, then how come the terrorists are butchering instead of thanking them? Shurely shome mishtake. Unless ingratitude is to be added to the list of ISIS’s crimes.
Here I, and anyone else who heard Sami Ramadani on LBC, enjoy an advantage which others – excluding his students at London Metropolitan University – don’t. We lucky few were granted privileged access to the labyrinthine nature of the Grand Conspiracy Theory which, like others in Stop the War, Ramadani espouses. Complicated in the treacherous loyalties it traces, this theory is otherwise simple to describe. The imperialist West is in the wrong whoever it supports, and by this logic is to be blamed for whatever is done against those it opposes. Thus, because they don’t back Assad, the French must be assumed to support ISIS, no matter that they’re bombing it. And thus, by the same contortion, must Stop the War support the butcher Assad simply because America doesn’t.
Imagine being an impressionable student and hearing this. I’m beyond the age of impressionability myself, yet I listened to Ramadani spellbound. He lets loose with fearful gunfire fluency his all-encompassing narrative of alliances that are really enmities, enmities that are really alliances, and evil emanating from a single source, never pausing to think or reconsider
, never surprised by a question, never wondering how night can be day or day can be night, because when you know the causes of everything, even the planets dance in terror to your bidding.
The other side of a conspiracy theory is a prelapsarian fantasy of innocence. Those who hold themselves to be aggrieved have just cause for all they do because grievance, in our time, is sacrosanct; the idea that cultures can self-generate rage is not countenanced because it spoils the story.
From Ramadani’s history lesson you would never know that Muslim nations were ever imperialists on their own account, ever brawled among themselves or made life hard for others. The bombing of synagogues in Baghdad in the early 1950s? The work of Zionists, you fools. The long campaign of terror carried out by Islamists in Syria in the 1970s and 80s, Syria’s support for Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood’s uprising in Hama? All a lie because, as Ramadani told Russian television, ‘neither Syria nor Iraq had any terrorist organisations before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003’.
A system of thought that accepts no inconsistencies is a frightful thing. Whoever believes he knows why everything is as it is has hold of nothing. But nothing can play havoc. When we look for radicalising narratives, we must ask if Ramadani’s is one of them. To the dispossessed and embittered he provides a perfect pocket manual of blame. Simply agree that wherever America goes, you won’t, and that whatever the West believes, you shouldn’t. Just play follow my leader. Step into line, put on your blinkers, keep pace with the horse in front, and lo! the Lotus Land of absolute conviction is yours without your having ever to think a dissenting thought again. You couldn’t enjoy a simpler view of human existence if you went over to ISIS yourself.
Death is Venice
In Venice with George Clooney. All right, not ‘with’ exactly; more ‘at the same time as’. And even that is coincidental. The first inkling I had that something more than usually hyperbolic was happening here was an overheard conversation on a vaporetto about the city being struck by ‘Rooneymania’.
Funny, I thought. Had Wayne abruptly given up on Manchester United – for which no one could blame him, God knows – and signed for Unione Venezia? The phrase ‘the handsomest man on the planet’ gave me pause, but who was I to judge Italian taste in men? And as for his marrying a beautiful human rights lawyer, wouldn’t Coleen have something to say about that?
Even when my ear corrected ‘Rooneymania’ to ‘Clooneymania’ I remained at a loss. Clooney is not a name I encounter much in my line of work and I do what I can not to keep up with the doings of the rich and famous. No Hello! falls through my letter box. And all invitations to red-carpet events are returned unanswered. They can beg all they like. This is the cultural equivalent of living as a hermit lives, but without having to relinquish soft mattresses, filet mignon or red wine.
I’m not saying I don’t know who George Clooney is. I’ve seen two or three pleasantly unremarkable films with him in them, and quite like the air of firm-jawed reliability he gives off. He would make someone, I imagine, a nice uncle. And for the same reason – though not of course at the same time – a nice husband. I also have the impression he’s short, and shortness is another quality I admire in men, famous or not. So a reliable and avuncular-looking short man had chosen to get married in Venice – excuse my Internet Italian, but cosi che cosa cazzo?
The paparazzi clearly do, though in Venice it’s hard to tell paparazzi from your ordinary avid tourist. Here, everyone is in a permanently excited state, taking photographs of themselves taking photographs, not quite able to trust the veracity of their own eyes and needing records of their experiences to be sure they’ve had them. The fake Gucci-bag street sellers have a new line – infinitely extendable selfie sticks which you attach to your phone so that you can stand on one side of the Grand Canal and photograph yourself from the other. Soon, the mobile phone whose virtue used to be its compactness won’t be complete without a tripod, a reflection kit and a camera assistant. But at least in Venice the object justifies the labour. Yes, there is too much here for the senses alone to apprehend.
But its virtues are its undoing. Venice has always been a city dying of its own beauty. Death in Venice is a tautology. Death is Venice. That’s what brings visitors back again and again: the allure of putrescence, whether in the creeping damp, the restless church facades – and every church proclaims the majesty of death – the jeering sensuality of Carnival, the disdainful gondoliers, or just the contemptuously atrocious food – an insult so deep that you can only suppose it to be an expression of the city’s unconscious desire to kill its visitors.
And maybe not so unconscious. There is only one response here to the proposition that the short man’s wedding will draw the world’s attention to Venice, and that’s a fervent hope it won’t. There are already more tourists here than Venice can cope with. Many of them disgorged from giant cruise ships which dwarf the city, pollute the lagoon and lower the tone. Of all tourists, those held in the lowest esteem are tourists let out of cruise ships for an hour in order to satisfy their unaccountable lust for tasteless objects. And the more of them there are, the more tasteless-object shops there have to be. Take away the tourists and Venice’s population has been dropping dramatically for decades. ‘We are not a city. We are a museum,’ one Venetian tells me. A mausoleum would be another word; a charnel house of imported tat.
As the son of someone who sold tat on northern markets – ‘swag’ we called it – I have mixed emotions about this. There can be a vitality in tat, however cynically produced. We fell in love with much of what we sold, relished its ingenious ugliness as a sort of triumph of the human spirit, and never felt we were taking our customers for a ride. If anything, it bonded us, soulmates in swag. Years later, when assisting at a craft (and semi-swag) centre in Cornwall, I had a confrontation with the National Trust, which ran our village like an occupying army and wanted to control what sort of visitors came through.
‘I’m not prepared to see these beautiful cliffs worn away by people who buy witches on broomsticks,’ one snooty Trust official told me. ‘But you don’t mind them being worn away by people who buy National Trust tea cosies,’ was my reply.
Tat’s tat. Take the long view and what isn’t tat? Ruskin thought the Doge’s Palace perfection; Goethe couldn’t be much bothered with it.
Sitting listening to a Palm Court orchestra playing Andrew Lloyd Webber favourites in St Mark’s Square – a square in which I would gladly expire some days, and some days not – I agree with them both. Depends on the light, on what else angles for one’s eye, and on one’s mood. Depends on whether the inane, idolatrous cries of ‘George, George!’ come floating in from the canal where Clooney is promenading – if you can promenade on water – with his new wife and their glittering guests.
Gaudy or not, the place continues to die from its foundations up; exquisite and rotten, in the best and worst of taste – like its visitors.
I don’t know whether George is thinking about death this minute, but I can’t believe he isn’t. In the presence of beauty, what other subject is there?
How not to be a knob
Spoiler alert: some of what I am about to say I intend ironically. And that includes the previous sentence. Then again, some of what I say I don’t intend ironically. And between these extremes of meaning it and not meaning it are likely to be utterances whose status as to truth and sincerity I am unsure of myself.
Here is the joy of writing an essay, as opposed to a manifesto or even an opinion piece. An essay is a process of trying or testing. An experiment in words and thought. Hence those who throng to the armed wing of social media in the hope of destroying what an essayist essays are behaving exactly as Basil Fawlty did when he thrashed his stalled Austin 1100 with a limp branch: they are taking the wrong weapon to the wrong object.
We know why Basil Fawlty was so frustrated, but what ails the Twitter death squads? I leave that to psychologists of mob derangement to determine. I am concerned in this column – that’s if I am
– a) to educate the deranged in the rudiments of civilised conversation, and b) – altruistically – to prevent them wasting what’s left of their lifeblood on causes that aren’t causes at all. See a man on his knees screaming his disagreement with the scent of a rose and you want to help. That’s what I’m doing.
Sixty-nine would appear to be a fatal age if you’re a genius. Joyce Grenfell, who had more claim to being called a genius than many to whom the word is promiscuously applied, died just short of seventy in 1979, which must seem a long time ago to people whose knowledge of past events goes back no further than the launch of Instagram.
She was an actress and comedian, though her comic routines could just as fairly be called short stories. Perhaps the most famous is ‘Nursery School’ in which she teaches a class of children whose dim-witted naughtiness brings to mind the misdirected delinquency of the chat room. The most beside-the-point of the delinquents is Sidney who, when invited to be a flower of his choice, chooses a horse. ‘A horse isn’t a flower, Sidney,’ Joyce Grenfell tells him, her patience wonderfully tuned to stretch ill doomsday. Followed by, ‘No, children, that isn’t funny, it’s very silly.’
Let that, then, be lesson No. 1 for those who cling like drowning rats to the coat-tails of any writer who can swim: learn to tell the difference between a flower and a horse. Thus, when someone thinks differently from you, that doesn’t make him or her a murderer, and it therefore isn’t necessary for you to call for the death penalty. Thinking differently from you isn’t a crime. Thinking differently from you might, if anything, be a virtue.
Lesson No. 2: A horse is not a flower and Jeremy Clarkson is not a knob because you disagree with him. He might be a knob for other reasons, but he isn’t a knob because he has a bone to pick with cyclists and you’re a cyclist.
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