J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘The gargoyles have been defaced,’ Kevern noted, looking up. ‘They have no features. No bent noses, no bulging eyes, no pendulous lips.’

  ‘Years of bad weather,’ Ailinn guessed.

  ‘Well that’s a kind interpretation. But I bet this is deliberate. They’ve been smoothed over – made to look like nothing and nobody.’

  ‘Botoxed, you reckon?’

  He laughed. ‘Morally Botoxed. Rendered inoffensive.’

  ‘Still – isn’t that better than the way they looked before?’

  ‘Maybe. But they might as well not be here in that case. If they aren’t going to remind you of evil, they have no function.’

  Ailinn reminded him that their function was to carry water away from the building.

  ‘I meant spiritual function,’ Kevern said piously.

  Inside, the light struggled to pierce the dust of the stained-glass windows. Far apart from each other, two elderly ladies, dressed in black, prayed, one with her face in her hands.

  ‘There you are,’ Ailinn whispered.

  ‘I’m not sure they count,’ Kevern whispered back. ‘They look as though they’ve been here for two hundred years.’

  ‘It can take a long time,’ Ailinn said, ‘for God to answer your prayers.’

  ‘More time than we have.’

  ‘But not more time than they have.’

  ‘And how does he adjudicate between prayers,’ Kevern wondered, ‘when they are savagely opposed? What if these two are praying for the destruction of each other? How can he satisfy the desires of them both?’

  ‘With difficulty. That’s why it takes him so long.’

  ‘I take comfort at least,’ Kevern said, ‘in there being so few people making their devotions here. It must mean that the rest of them have what they want.’

  ‘God help them,’ Ailinn said.

  ‘God help us all,’ Kevern agreed.

  They let their eyes wander absently over the crucifixes and Bible scenes, neither of them willing to make the effort to determine if any of the art was distinguished. They paused before an elaborately carved stone shrine, virtually a throne, built over a small slab, no bigger than a pillow, which announced itself as containing the blessed remains of Little St Alured of Ashbrittle, killed by—.

  Kevern took out his glasses to examine the carving. ‘Well whatever else, they were wonderful craftsmen,’ he said. ‘If I could do this with wood . . . such lightness, you think you’re looking at flowers. Don’t quote me on this, but I almost fancy I can see the poor little bugger’s soul ascending to heaven on a tracery of stone petals.’

  But Ailinn was more interested in deciphering who the poor little bugger was killed by. ‘This hasn’t been worn away by time,’ she said. ‘It’s been scratched out.’

  ‘Maybe they decided they had the wrong killer.’

  ‘Then why didn’t they replace the name with that of the right one?’

  ‘Could still be investigating. The case might be sub judice.’

  ‘After nine hundred years?’

  Kevern conceded it was unlikely. ‘But then justice, like God, grinds slowly. We should put Gutkind on to it.’

  Ailinn knew how Kevern’s mind worked. You set it a problem and when it could come up with no answer, it came up with a joke. He had lost interest now in Little St Alured and how he was murdered, and by whom, and why someone or other – an individual with an axe to grind or the depleted might of the church – didn’t want anyone to know. She was the curious one. But in the end she too had to admit there were some things that had to remain a mystery.

  They took the darkness of the cathedral out with them on to the street.

  ‘This place needs cheering up,’ Ailinn said. ‘It needs sunshine.’

  ‘It needs something. Pilgrims, I reckon. Believers. Some of the old dogmatism. You can’t have a church town without belief and you can’t have belief without intolerance.’

  ‘And you think that would liven it up?’

  ‘I do. All this penitential . . .’

  ‘All this penitential what?’

  He didn’t have the word. ‘You know . . . gargoylelessness. If you want God you’ve got to have the Devil.’

  ‘I’m for neither,’ Ailinn said.

  ‘Then this is what you get.’

  Glass shatters. They both hear it. She is at one end of the country and he is at another, yet still they hear it. The smashing mania, the shattering of every window in the land. After all the fires, all the beheadings, all the iron hooks and crowbars, the frenzy to kill has not abated. Only now it has become centralised. He is frightened, she less so. She thinks they’ve done their worst already. He thinks there’s always something further they might come up with; he has more admiration for the ingenuity of man; viewing things millennially, he thinks they haven’t even started yet. And look, he could be right. This time the mob wears uniforms, and answers to a higher authority even than God. She reads quietly, waiting for the knock. He hides his head. That is how they sit on the train heading east, looking out at the snow, not exchanging a word, she reading, he hiding his head. The train is not a surprise. They were always going to be put aboard this train. There are some among their fellow passengers for whom the train is a relief now that they are finally on it. In the snow everything will be washed away.

  NINE

  The Black Market in Memory

  i

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, chilled by Ashbrittle’s faded faith, Kevern – half hoping she would say no – suggested they leave and drive to the Necropolis. The Necropolis was his father’s name for the capital.

  ‘Another of his jokes?’ Ailinn wondered.

  ‘You could say that, but he might have been in dead earnest.’

  ‘Well I wouldn’t know,’ Ailinn said, looking straight ahead.

  She meant about jokes – since that had been Kevern’s first assessment of her: that she didn’t get them. But she meant about fathers too.

  Neither had visited the Necropolis before. Singly, they wouldn’t have dared. It had a bad reputation. Outside the capital people survived the failure of the banks with surprising fortitude; they even took a grim satisfaction in returning to old frugal ways which proved their moral superiority to those who had lived the high life in the capital for so long, washing oysters down with champagne and living in mansions that had their own swimming pools. It was a sweet revenge. In time the Necropolis recovered, to a degree, but its self-esteem, as a great centre of finance and indulgence, had been damaged. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED – or, as his father called it, THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE – for the most part happened there, and while no one was blaming anyone, a sort of slinking seediness replaced the old strutting glamour. In the Necropolis the divorce rates were higher than anywhere else. So were domestic shootings. Men urinated openly in the streets. Women brawled with one another, used the vilest language, got drunk and thought nothing of throwing up where the men had urinated. You could have your pockets picked in broad daylight. Put up too fierce a struggle and you might have your throat cut. Might. It wasn’t a daily occurrence, but people in the country were pleased to report that it wasn’t unheard of.

  Not allowed to remember the glory that had been, the Necropolis put up a cocksure front, belied by the failure of the once great stores and hotels to live up to the past sumptuousness which their premises still evoked. The shops with the grandest windows were not bursting with expensive items. You could get tables at the best restaurants on the day you wanted them. And there was a thriving black-market trade in memorabilia of better times – even, one might say, in memory itself.

  Had they not been in love and on an adventure, each emboldening the other, Ailinn and Kevern would not have gone there.

  Kevern’s father must have warned him against going to the Necropolis a hundred times over the years, but when he tried to recall his actual words Kevern couldn’t find any; he could only see the prematurely old man opening and closing his mouth, dressed in his oriental brocade dress
ing gown, arthritic and embittered, his back to the fire – a fire that was lit in all weathers – angrily smoking a cigarette through a long amber Bakelite cigarette holder, listening with one ear to the footsteps of walkers (snoopers, he called them) passing the cottage to get to the cliffs. Except for when he wore a carpenter’s apron in his workshop, he dressed, in Kevern’s recollection of him, no other way. Always his brocade dressing gown. Had he just arrived and was waiting for the rest of his clothes to follow, or was everything packed in readiness for departure? Had he for the space of one day in all the years he’d lived in the cottage made peace with the idea that it was his home?

  His mother the same, though she didn’t dress as though to face down a firing squad. They could have been master and servant, so fatalistically elegant was he, so like an item of her own luggage, a bundle of rags – the bare necessity to keep out the cold – was she.

  Whether she had formed an independent view of the Necropolis, or ever been there herself, Kevern didn’t know. She didn’t talk to him about things like that. The past wasn’t only another country, it was another life. But he thought he recalled her seconding her husband, saying, in her weary voice, as though to herself – because who else listened – ‘Your father is right, don’t go there.’

  Kevern suddenly felt guilty realising that he too left his mother out of everything. He put his hand on Ailinn’s knee as though in that way, from one woman to another, he could make it up to her – the mother he had trouble remembering.

  Ailinn took her hand off the wheel and put it on his. ‘Use both hands,’ he said, frightened she meant to play pat-a-cake with him while she was driving. ‘Please.’

  ‘Well I’m looking forward to this,’ she said, hiding her apprehension.

  ‘Me too. I’m looking forward to my first Lebanese.’

  ‘Or an Indian.’

  ‘Or a Chinese.’

  ‘And I can see if I can get my phone fixed,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know anything was wrong with your phone.’

  ‘It rings sometimes and when I answer there’s no one there. And occasionally I hear an odd clicking when I’m on the phone to you.’

  ‘How come you’ve only just mentioned this?’

  ‘I didn’t want to worry you.’

  ‘You think someone’s listening in?’

  ‘Who would want to do that?’

  ‘Search me . . . Gutkind?’

  ‘Why would he want to listen in to my conversations?’

  ‘Who knows? Maybe he wants to be sure you’re not in any danger from me – the lady killer.’

  They both laughed.

  Kevern didn’t mention his crazy thought. That the person bugging her phone might have been his dead father, making sure she was the right woman for his son.

  ‘Is there such a thing as retinal hysteria?’ Kevern asked as they approached the city.

  Ailinn remembered an old English novel she’d read about a newly and unhappily married Puritan girl visiting Rome for the first time, the stupendous fragmentariness of the pagan/papal city – they were one and the same thing for her – passing in fleshly and yet funereal procession across her vision, throbbing and glowing, as though her retina were afflicted. So yes, Ailinn thought, a person’s excited emotional state could affect the way he saw. But why was Kevern’s emotional state excited or, more to the point, what did he think he was seeing?

  ‘Zebra stripes,’ he said. ‘And leopard spots. And peacock feathers. Have we taken a wrong turn and driven into the jungle?’

  ‘You don’t think you could be hung-over?’

  ‘You were with me last night. What did I drink?’

  ‘A migraine then?’

  ‘I don’t get them. I feel fine. I am just blinded by colour.’

  She had been too busy concentrating on the roads, which she feared would be more frightening than any she was used to, to notice what he had begun to notice as they approached the Necropolis. But he was right. The Necropolitans were dressed as though for a children’s garden party. The moratorium on the wearing of black clothes, declared in the aftermath of THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE in order to discourage all outward show of national mourning (for who was there to mourn?) was honoured now only in the breach, they thought. Neither Ailinn nor Kevern thought twice about wearing black. But the Necropolis appeared to be obeying it to the letter still, as though seeing in the prohibition an opportunity for making or at least for seeming merry. What neither Kevern nor Ailinn had anticipated was the difference this abjuration of black would make to the look of everything. It was as though the spirit of serious industry itself had been syphoned out of the city.

  But it wasn’t just the vibrant colours of the clothes people wore that struck them, but the outlandishness of the designs. The further in they drove the more vintage-clothes stalls they passed, until the city began to resemble a medieval funfair or tourney, on either side of the road stalls and pavilions under flapping striped tarpaulins piled high with fancy dress. Kevern rubbed his eyes. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a policeman snooping around my house in the hope of uncovering a single family keepsake, and here they go about in their great-grandparents’ underthings as bold as brass.’

  Ailinn laughed at him. ‘I doubt the stuff is genuinely old,’ she said.

  He thought he could smell the mustiness of antiquity on the streets. Mothballs, rotting shawls, old shoes, greasy hats, the forbidding odour of people long forgotten and garments that should have been thrown away. ‘What do you mean not genuinely old?’

  ‘Like your Kildromy-Biedermeier. I’d say they’re fake vintage.’

  ‘What’s the point of that?’

  ‘What’s the point of your Kildromy-Biedermeier? It’s a way of eating your cake and having it. This way they can cock a snook at the authorities without actually doing anything wrong. I think it’s fun. Why don’t we stop so you can buy me a crinoline and some cowboy boots? And I’ll buy you a Prussian officer’s outfit.’

  ‘To do what in?’

  ‘Ask me to dance. Take me into the woods. Whatever Prussian officers do.’

  ‘Did,’ he corrected her. ‘There are no more Prussian officers. I hate this playing with everything.’

  ‘Oh, Kevern, where’s your sense of fun?’

  He smiled at her. It pleased him when she bested him. ‘Not everything is amenable to fun.’

  ‘You think we should be solemn about the past?’

  ‘I think we should let it go. What’s past is past.’

  Had she not been driving she’d have rolled her eyes at him.

  But she knew now he did not always say what he believed.

  ii

  Only as they approached the Necropolis proper did the stalls begin to thin out, though even then they did not vanish altogether. And where stores selling better clothes should have been there were mainly holes in the ground and cranes. Had there been more workmen about, the cranes could have been taken as evidence that massive development was under way, but these too had a vintage air, mementoes of busier days. In accordance with the city’s musty festivity, the cranes were festooned with tattered bunting and faded decorations from Christmases or other festivals long past.

  At Kevern’s instigation – he didn’t want to be in the car a moment longer – they checked into a hotel in the part of the city once referred to in the fashion and travel magazines as Luxor, in deference to the opulence of the shopping. Luxor was where most of the grand hotels had been, though there was little of the old glamorous traffic in their lobbies or on the streets outside today. Foreign tourism fell off dramatically after WHAT HAPPENED and had never fully recovered. Who wanted to holiday in the environs of Babi Yar? That this was a reciprocal reluctance it suited the authorities to insist. If visitors didn’t want to come and holiday in our backyard, we sure as hell didn’t want to holiday in theirs. Where hadn’t things been done the stench of which remained abhorrent to the misinformed or oversensitive tourist? Nowhere was safe, when you really though
t about it. Nowhere was pleasant. What country wasn’t a charnel house of its own history? You were better staying home, if you cared about that sort of thing, with your eyes closed and a cold compress on your forehead. You were better advised to keep to your individual fortress, shuttered and bolted against the movement, in or out, of people, infection and ideas. You contained your own conflagrations, that was the international wisdom, or at least that was the international wisdom as explained by Ofnow. Eventually, we’d all grow less nice in our expectations and things would get back to how they’d been.

  In the meantime Luxor retained a little of its old exoticism thanks to the convergence of two accidents of history. Many of the oil rich who had been in the Necropolis, feasting on the decline of the banks (which, by some logic that only the most sophisticated economists understood, made them still richer), and gorging on the best of the new season’s fashions, found themselves, when WHAT HAPPENED happened, between the devil of abroad and the deep blue sea of home. They were conscious, even without the advice of their embassies, that WHAT HAPPENED, no matter that they’d welcomed and in some cases been instrumental in it, might easily happen to them next; but equally aware that the revolutionary fervour sweeping their own countries was an even greater danger to them, as a hated elite who could afford to spend half their lives in foreign hotels. What was spring to some was winter to them. Anxious about staying but terrified to leave, they spent what was left of their lives in fretful uncertainty, and now their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s children resided where they had been marooned, in a sort of melancholy but pampered limbo, some in the very hotels their grandparents had been staying in when the world convulsed. In the absence of anything else to do, they continued to shop, went on raiding the best stores when the seasons and the windows changed, as it was in their blood to do, but the city had ceased to be a centre of fashion, the clothes were shoddier, the jewellery cheaper, and there was nowhere now for them to return to show off their purchases.