J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Your point being?’ Densdell Kroplik wanted to know. He was irked that the detective inspector had heard of Wagner, let alone that he could hum him. He wanted Wagner for himself.

  He was sitting in his favourite chair by the fire. In all weathers a fire burned in the Friendly Fisherman. And on most evenings Densdell Kroplik, steam rising from his thighs, sat by it in a heavy seaman’s sweater warming and rubbing his hands. He cultivated a take it or leave it air. He knew what was what. It was up to you whether you wanted to learn from him or not.

  ‘My point being that it gets me nowhere to be told Port Reuben is back to doing what it has always done best.’

  Densdell Kroplik shrugged. ‘It might,’ he said, ‘if you understood more about the passion for justice and honour that has always burned in the hearts of the men of these parts.’

  ‘I doubt that a passion for justice and honour had anything to do with the murder of Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock.’

  Densdell Kroplik pointed a red, fire-warmed finger at the policeman. ‘Is that something you can be sure of?’ he said. ‘There was a famous five-way murder here about a hundred years ago. Two local women, their husbands, and a lover. Whose lover was he? No one was quite sure. Am I hinting at pederasty? I might be. All that was certain was that he was an aphid – which makes pederasty the more likely. Buggers, the lot of them. From the north or the east of the country, it doesn’t matter which. Somewhere that wasn’t here. A pact was what the coroner decided it had been, a love pact born of hopeless entanglement. They’d gone up on to the cliff, taken off their clothes, watched the sun go down and swallowed pills. What do you think of that?’

  ‘What I think is that it doesn’t help me with my case,’ Gutkind said. ‘A pact is suicide, not murder.’

  ‘Unless,’ Kroplik went on, ‘unless the villagers, motivated by justifiable disapproval and an understandable hatred of outsiders, had taken it upon themselves to do away with all five offenders. In which case it wasn’t a mass suicide but a mob attack in the name of justice and honour.’

  ‘And it’s your theory that the whole village could have done away with Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock?’

  ‘Did I say that? I’m just a barber with an interest in local history. All I know, from reading what I have read and from using these’ – he made a two-pronged fork of his fingers and pointed to his all-seeing eyes – ‘is that people have been subdued here for a long time. They have a proud history of torrid engagement with one another which has been denied expression. There’s no knowing what people might do – singly or in a group – when their natures rebel against repression.’

  ‘Well you might call it torrid engagement, I call it crime.’

  ‘Then that’s the difference between us,’ Densdell Kroplik laughed.

  After which, to show he was a man who could be trusted, he gave the policeman a free haircut, humming all the while Brünnhilde’s final plea to Wotan to let her sleep protected by flame from the attentions of any old mortal aphid.

  v

  Kevern Cohen stayed aloof from the malicious speculations. He had flirted with Lowenna Morgenstern occasionally, when they had both had too much to drink, and more recently he had kissed her in the village car park on bonfire night. He was no snogger. If he kissed a woman it was because he was aroused by the softness of her lips, not because he wanted to wound them. Breaking skin was not, for Kevern, the way he expressed desire.

  Lowenna Morgenstern had a wonderful mouth for kissing, deep and mysterious, the musky taste of wood-fire on her busy tongue.

  ‘Kissing you is like kissing flame,’ he had said, bending over her. ‘You should have been a poet, you,’ she told him, biting his neck until the blood trickled on to his shirt collar.

  And now someone had killed her. The man found dead beside her could just as easily have been him.

  Ailinn picked up on his sombre mood. ‘Did you know these people well?’ she asked.

  ‘Depends what you mean by well,’ he said. ‘I knew her to say hello to. Yythel I’d heard of but never met. He was a pub singer. Not from here. Lowenna was reputed to have a taste for musical talent. Her husband Ade is the church organist. A discontented, eering man. A hundred years ago he and his brothers would have stood on the cliffs with lamps and lured ships on to the rocks. Then he’d have laughed as they looted the wreckage. If he killed his wife he was just carrying on the family tradition.’

  ‘But then if he did,’ Ailinn said, ‘he’s only wrecked himself.’

  ‘Don’t we all,’ Kevern said.

  She stopped to look at him. They were walking arm in arm in the valley in their wellingtons, splashing in puddles. The trickle of water called the River Jordan had swollen to the dimensions of a stream. The trees dripped. It would have been the height of fancy to think of it as nature weeping, but Kevern thought it anyway.

  ‘What do you mean don’t we all?’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘Then I don’t know. I suppose I was feeling the tragedy of what’s occurred.’

  ‘But it’s not your tragedy.’

  ‘Well it is in a sense. It’s my village.’

  ‘Your village! That’s not how you normally talk about it.’

  ‘No, you’re right, I don’t. Maybe I’m just being ghoulish – wanting to be part of the excitement.’

  ‘I’m surprised it still excites you. Don’t you have a lot of this sort of thing down here?’

  ‘Murders, no. Well, a few. But nothing quite as bloody as this.’

  ‘We have them too . . .’ She pointed, comically, over her shoulder as she had done the day he met her. As though she were throwing salt. ‘. . . Up there, if that’s north. People are unhappy.’

  ‘I suppose that was all I meant by saying don’t we all. That we all end up unhappy. You say yourself you walk in fear of unhappiness every hour.’

  ‘Unhappiness? I walk in fear of being hunted to my death.’

  ‘Well then . . .’

  ‘Well then nothing. It’s not the same. The whales know who’s coming after them, but they still quietly feed their young. You have to risk it. I am still determined to be happy.’

  ‘I was only quoting your own words back to you. People are unhappy.’

  She put her hands to his face and pulled at his lips, trying to force his melancholy mouth into a smile. ‘But we’re not, are we? Us? You and me?’

  He let her fashion a smile out of him. His eyes burned with love for her. Part protective love, part desire. She could look dark and fierce sometimes, like a bird of prey, a hunter herself, but at others she appeared as helpless as a little girl, the foundling picked out of a children’s home in the back of beyond.

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We’re not unhappy. Not you and me. We are different.’

  Yes, they were overdoing this.

  Later that week he was asked how well he’d known Lowenna Morgenstern.

  * * *

  1 Liebling,

  The days go by without my hearing from you and I wonder what I have done to deserve your cruelty. Everything I see, I see only that I might relate it to you. Had I only known how wonderful I was going to find Ludgvennok I would not have allowed you to persuade me to come on my own. When I think of all I have written about the regeneration of the human race, and all I have done to further its ennoblement, it cheers me to find a people here who live up to everything I have ever understood by nobility of character. It can sometimes, of course, be as much a matter of what one doesn’t find as what one does, that renders a place and a people congenial. Whether by deliberate intention or some lucky chance, Ludgvennok appears to have been released from the influence of those whose rapacity of ambition and disagreeableness of appearance has made life such a trial in the European cities where I have spent my life. Even the ear declares itself to be in a paradise to be free, from the moment one wakes to the moment one lies down – without you, alas, my darling – of that repulsive jumbled blabber, that
yodelling cackle, in which elsewhere the ----s make the insistence of their presence felt. Here it is almost as though one has returned to a time of purity, when mankind was able to rejoice in its connection with its natural soil, unspoiled by the jargon of a race that has no passion – no Leidenschaft, there is no other word – for the land, for art, for the heroical, or for the rest of humanity.

  My darling, I do so wish you could be here with me.

  Your R

  FIVE

  Call Me Ishmael

  Friday 3rd

  SUDDENLY EVERYONE, AND I mean everyone, is taking an interest in my man. Have I said that already? Suddenly everyone’s taking even more of an interest in my man, in that case. I can’t pretend I’m comfortable with this upsurge of curiosity. One guards one’s subjects jealously, as one guards one’s wife or reputation. If there was more they needed to know, why didn’t they just ask me? I have a nasty feeling I’m being superseded, which could mean one of two things: either I’m not up to it, in their estimation, or Kevern Cohen’s in trouble too deep for me to fathom. I don’t care how this impacts on my good name – I have other fish to fry, when all is said and done – but I’m concerned how Kevern will fare, given all his oddities, without a sympathetic person to keep an eye on him. I like the fellow, as I have said. Whatever is actually going on, it strikes me as cruel that someone so predisposed to paranoia should have all his delusions of persecution and incrimination confirmed. And that’s just me I’m talking about . . . Ba boom! as my grandfather would say when he made a bad joke. Back in the days when people liked to make bad jokes. Or any kind of joke, come to that. But to return to me . . . I always liked that silly joke, too, when I was small: ‘That’s enough of me, so what do you think of me?’ . . . but to return seriously to me, it’s hard to tell how I’m regarded ‘upstairs’. Certainly no one has – at least in so many words – called my work into question. But ‘something a little more definite and up to date wouldn’t go amiss’ is not exactly the remark of an examiner about to give me an A++ for effort, is it? Tell us something we don’t already know, the expressions on their faces said when I first delivered them the news that he had a girlfriend.

  I tapped my nose. ‘A regular girlfriend.’

  To whom his intentions, they enquired, after a long, bored silence, are what? It struck me as an odd question. How did I know what his intentions were? Honourable, I guessed, given the man. I was requested, in no uncertain terms, to do better than guess. I happen to believe that an intention is a bit like a predisposition to cancer or dementia – essentially genetic. Honourable father, honourable son. Same the world over, even China. Honolable father, honolable son. But families, strictly speaking, are not my territory. To do parents and grandparents you have to have clearance at the very highest level. Mooching about in public records is not generally encouraged. This is a free society, so long as you don’t plan to travel – and people are only prevented from leaving the country (or indeed from entering it) for their own good – so access to everything is in principle available to everyone. But the past – especially when it is particularised: the story of you and me and how we got here, the story of Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen and whether or not he has inherited the honolable gene – is itself another country. And when it comes to such a country, the powers that be would rather we did not go there. Say sorry and have done is the wisest course, they believe, and I agree with them. Danger lurks in nostalgia. The slogans printed at the foot of the notepaper on which I write my reports – LET SLEEPING DOGS LIE, THE OVEREXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING, YESTERDAY IS A LESSON WE CAN LEARN ONLY BY LOOKING TO TOMORROW – are reminders rather than threats. So no measures are taken against anyone who does not heed them. Buildings are not barred to you. Doors are not closed in your face. ‘Yes, of course’ will be the polite rejoinder to any request you make to inspect certificates of birth or death, or voter lists, or even newspapers dating too far back. But the forms you fill in are never read by anyone. Calls are not returned, applications are lost, the person you were talking to in the morning won’t be there in the afternoon. If you decide it is easier to forget about it, you will be met with smiles all round. A bottle of champagne tied with a blue ribbon might even be sent to you in the post, together with a note saying ‘Sorry we couldn’t help. We tried.’ But even without these precautions, the consequence of OPERATION ISHMAEL – that great beneficent name change to which the people ultimately gave their wholehearted consent – is that tracing lineage is not only as good as impossible, it is unnecessary. We are all one big happy family now. Zermanskys, Cohens, Rosenthals (that’s the head of the academy: Eoghan Rosenthal), Feigenblats (Rozenwyn Feigenblat is the college librarian, and something of a looker I must say) – we acknowledge a kinship which we all tacitly know to be artificial but which works. Apply this simple test: when was the last time anyone was picked on for his name? Precisely. ‘We are all Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky!’ my students would shout were anyone to persecute me for whatever reason.

  We are all Eoghan Rosenthal!

  We are all Kevern Cohen!

  We are all Lowenna Morgenstern, God save her soul – or at least we were.

  If there is anyone alive who is old enough to have an inkling what his parents were called before OPERATION ISHMAEL he will wisely not remember it.

  I have heard tell, or at least I have read, that – after an initial period of understandable reluctance, or misapprehension as I would rather think of it – the renaming turned into a month-long street party, young and old dancing with one another in the parks, strangers embracing, people saying goodbye to their old names as they waited for the official documents that would apprise them of their new. A few lucky ones won the right by televised lottery to choose their own from an approved list. But whether they chose or they were given, people entered into the spirit of the change. It was as though they’d been hypnotised. ‘You will sleep,’ they were told, ‘you will fall into a deep carnivalesque sleep wherein you will dance and make merry. At the count of ten you will awake and while you will remember who you were, you will not remember what you were called. One, two . . .’ Not literally that, but similar. A moral hypnosis. For our own good. And as with private memories, so with public records: they have been wiped clean. It is sometimes argued, in lowered voices, that if we can’t be sure about our neighbours’ antecedents, we expose ourselves to . . .

  To what? Alien influences?

  Well, it was precisely in order to ensure that such a phrase would never be heard again (and I confess I’m as guilty as any other red-blooded patriot when it comes to itching every now and then to use it) that OPERATION ISHMAEL was instituted. It granted a universal amnesty, dispensing once and for all with invidious distinctions between the doers and the done-to. Time must close over the events, and there is no better way to ensure that than to bring everyone together retroactively. Now that we are one family, and cannot remember when we were anything else, there can be no question of a repetition of whatever happened, if it did, because there is no one left to do to again whatever was or wasn’t done.

  We are all Rozenwyn Feigenblat!

  (We are all at least – I confide to you, dear diary – dying for a piece of her . . .)

  While no one is listening, allow me to admit that it took a certain ruthlessness to bring us to this point of unanimity. I neither condemn WHAT HAPPENED nor condone it. Let the fact that I was not yet born prove my impartiality. But it needs to be said that we were not alone in our perplexity. What to do with those about whom something needed to be done; how to put a brake on their ambitions; how to express our displeasure with their foreign policy (bizarre that they should have had a foreign policy given that they were foreigners themselves and had what they called a country only by taking someone else’s); how to make safe again a world they’d gravely endangered with their migrations, military occupations, and finally weapons of mass destruction – this was something every other civilised country had to make up its mind about, and it is not without so
me backward-looking pride that I say we made up ours before anybody else. For which credit must go to my fellow professionals – vice chancellors of conscience-stricken universities and professors of the benign arts, painters, writers, actors, journalists, junior untenured academic staff, without whom the campaign to drive them from the face of the earth, to make of them vagabonds and fugitives, a pariah people cursed in every mouth, would not have been conducted in so civilised a manner.

  Was there mob violence? I wasn’t there, but such a thing does not accord with the view I entertain of this most moderate of countries, home to lyric poets and painters of serene and timeless landscapes. That gross expostulatory rhetoric that has normalised brutality and supremacism in other countries has never disfigured our speech. We do not smudge our canvases in rage. We do not saw at our violins. Whether or not that class of individuals who are the first to throw stones and start fires enjoyed direct acquaintance with the lyric poetry and landscape painting to which they are heirs is immaterial. The effect filtered down to them in language and the habits of contemplation. All of which assures me that, no, there could not have been barbarity. Just the gentle pressure that civilisation itself can exert, the articulated outrage of cultivated people who would not themselves have countenanced, least of all encouraged, inhumanity. Why would they, with so many of the exalted tasks of culture to perform – paintings to finish, lines to learn, lectures to prepare – choose to whip the multitude into acts of ferocity inimical to their own temperaments? Where, apart from any other consideration would they have found the time for it?