But then that precisely was the point, wasn’t it. No one was meant to know who was, or who had been, who. No one was meant to track himself or his antecedents down. Call me Ishmael. Life had begun again.
Ailinn had come out of the cab and was watching him. ‘Are you all right, my love?’ she asked.
His relief knew no bounds. She’d called him ‘my love’. Which must have meant the wretched taxi incident had been forgiven. He wanted to kiss her in the street. He took her hand instead and squeezed it.
He nodded. ‘There’s a strange atmosphere of squatting here,’ he said, noticing a mother coming out to check on her children, and maybe on him too. He was struck by how softly she padded, as though not to wake the dead. ‘They have the air of living lives on someone else’s grave.’
‘That’s a quick judgement to leap to,’ Ailinn laughed. ‘You’ve been here all of five minutes!’
‘It’s not a judgement. I’m just trying to describe what I feel. Don’t you think there’s a queer apprehensive silence out here?’
‘Well if there is, it might be caused by the way you’re staring at everyone. I’d be apprehensive if I had you outside my door, trying to describe what you feel. Let’s go now.’
‘I don’t know what it is,’ he continued. ‘It’s as though the place is not possessed by its inhabitants.’
This annoyed Ranajay. ‘These people live here quite legally,’ he said. ‘And have done for long, long times.’
‘Don’t worry,’ Kevern said, ‘I’m not claiming anything back.’
‘It was never yours,’ Ranajay said. ‘Not possible.’
Never yours, like yesterday’s taxi. Like Ailinn’s honour in the café. Did ownership of everything have to be fought for in this city?
Ailinn feared that if Kevern didn’t back off, their driver would leave them here. And then let Kevern see how unpossessed by its inhabitants it was. She lightly touched Ranajay’s arm. ‘I don’t think he means to imply it was his,’ she said.
Kevern suddenly felt faint. ‘Let’s get your phone fixed and then go back to the hotel,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of here.’
He climbed back into the taxi, not waiting for her to get in first.
He had heard his mother’s voice. ‘Kevern,’ she called. Just that. ‘Key-vern’ – coming from a long way away, not in pain or terror, but as though through a pain of glass. Then he thought he heard the glass shatter. Could she have broken it with her voice?
It made no sense that she should be calling him. She hadn’t been a Cohen except by marriage to his father, unless . . . but he wasn’t thinking along those lines today, so why should he hear her calling to him in Cohentown?
Calling him in, or warning him to turn away? Away, he thought. He could even feel her hands on his chest. Go! Leave it, your father is right, it will dismay and disappoint you.
Such a strange locution: dismay and disappoint. Like everything else they’d ever told him – distant and non-committal. As though they were discussing a life that didn’t belong to them to a son who didn’t belong to them either.
It had always been that way. Even as they sat on the train going east, looking out at the snow, there was no intimacy. When the train finally pulls into the little station other families will be counted, sent this way and that way, and where necessary ripped from one another’s arms. How does a mother say goodbye to her child for the last time? What’s the kindest thing – to hang on until you are prised apart by bayonet, or to turn on your heels and go without once looking back? What are the rules of heartbreak? What is the etiquette?
Kevern wonders which course his parents will decide on when the time comes and the soldiers subject them to their hellish calculus. Then, as though prodded by a bayonet himself, he suffers an abrupt revulsion, like a revulsion from sex or the recollection of shame, from the ghoulishness of memories that are not his to possess.
Appalled, Kevern hauls himself back from the stale monotony of dreams. Always the same places, the same faces, the same fears. Each leaking into the other as though his brain has slipped a cog. Dementia must be like this, nothing in the right place or plane, but isn’t he a bit young for that? So he climbs, so he climbed, so he will go on climbing, back into the taxi taking him away, feeling fraudulent and faint.
Now it was Ranajay’s turn to wonder if he’d caused offence. ‘I’m only meaning this for your husband’s sake,’ he said to Ailinn, starting the vehicle up again. ‘He could not ever have lived here. There is no one now existing who lived here.’
He looked as though he was going to cry.
‘It’s all right,’ she said, putting an arm around Kevern who seemed to have snapped into a sleep. He hadn’t fainted. Just gone from waking to sleeping as if at a hypnotist’s command.
Ranajay was beside himself with distress. ‘My fault, my fault. I shouldn’t have brought you to this part,’ he said.
‘There is no reason why you shouldn’t have brought us here,’ Ailinn assured him. She felt she had spent the entire day making life easier for men. ‘We asked you to.’
He inclined his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I am sure your husband is mistaken. There is no one left from here. They went away a long time ago. Before memory.’
Shut up, she wanted to scream. Shut up now!
But it pleased her that he had called Kevern her husband. Husband – she liked the ring of it. Husband, I come. Who was it who said that? How she would have felt to hear herself called Kevern’s wife she wasn’t sure. But OK, she thought, no matter that he had been half-crazed the entire time they’d been away. Yes, on the whole, OK. There were worse men out there.
They never did get her phone fixed. It would take three to five working days for the parts to arrive. And they weren’t intending to stay around that long. She’d buy another.
They drove home to Port Reuben later that afternoon in careful, contemplative silence, neither wanting to discomfort the other with so much as a word or a thought. Every subject seemed fraught. They were both greatly on edge, but were still unprepared for what they found on their return. Someone had been inside the cottage.
‘I knew it,’ Kevern said before he had even turned the key in the door. ‘I have known it the whole time we were away.’
‘Are you absolutely certain?’ Ailinn asked.
It was late and they were tired. The moon was full and a full moon plays tricks with people’s senses. He could have been mistaken.
They had to shout over the roaring of the blowhole. No, he wasn’t mistaken. He had looked through his letter box and what he had seen he had seen.
His silk runner had been interfered with.
How did he know that?
It was straight.
BOOK TWO
All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonism of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick.
Herman Melville
ONE
A Crazy Person’s History of Defilement, for Use in Schools
i
HAD WHOEVER IT was who straightened Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen’s silk runner been looking for something in particular, something corroborative of Kevern’s guilt – no matter, for the time being, what the crime – it was unlikely to have been a little book written by his maternal grandmother, Jenna Hannaford, about which Kevern himself knew nothing. It would not anyway have been found. Jenna’s daughter, Kevern’s mother, destroyed it when she read it, recognising it to be the work of a crazy person. In that she would have met no resistance from its author. A Crazy Person’s History of Defilement, for Use in Schools was Jenna Hannaford’s own title.
‘If you think any school is going to teach that, you’re crazy,’ her husband told her.
She smiled sweetly at him. She was an elegant woman with a long neck and a mass of yellow hair which she put up carelessly, piling it on
top of her head like a bird’s nest. He was short, suffered from over-curvature of the thoracic vertebrae and had no hair at all. But it wasn’t all beauty and beast. She suffered from depression, had trouble buttoning her clothes because her fingers trembled, and dyed her hair. ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ she asked.
‘Then why are you writing it?’
‘Because I’m crazy.’
‘Just don’t let anyone see it.’
‘Of course I won’t. Do you think I’m crazy?’
Just don’t let anyone was her husband’s perpetual refrain. Just don’t let anyone see, just don’t let anyone hear, just don’t let anyone know. He told her not to go out. It was just better that nobody knew she was there, or at least, since everybody did know she was there, just better that nobody saw her. He wasn’t afraid she’d run off with someone with a straight back. He was just afraid.
‘You worry too much about me, Myron,’ she told him.
‘I can’t worry too much about you.’
‘What will be will be,’ she said.
She never finished her Crazy Person’s History of Defilement. Work in progress was how she described it to herself. By that she meant she never expected it to be finished because the subject she was addressing would never be finished. But the other reason she didn’t finish it was that she disappeared. Walked out one blowy September afternoon with her head held high, after warning her daughter Sibella not to expect too much happiness and telling her husband to cut down on his smoking, and was never seen again.
Off the cliffs into the sea? An accident? A leap?
Who knew?
Myron Hannaford never forgave himself. He believed in God but only to have someone to castigate himself to. ‘I should have worried about her more,’ he told Him.
Sibella kept her mother’s papers in a little suitcase under her bed, not daring to read through them in case her mother returned and discovered they’d been tampered with. After her father died she was cared for by the boy she’d been brought up with – a relation ten years her senior, she wasn’t sure from which side of the family, who longer ago than she could remember had come to live with them by the sea for his health’s sake (though he wasn’t allowed to go out and breathe the sea air), a gangling, morose, pale-faced fellow with a talent for woodwork (he took over Sibella’s father’s lathe as automatically as he took over her) and a secret love of syncopated music. When she was old enough, they married. It was never really discussed; it was simply assumed that that was what they would do. Who else was there for either of them?
And in most regards it made no material difference to the life they’d been living before they married.
She had already, in line with ISHMAEL, changed her name from Hannaford to Cronfeld, and as her cousin Howel had changed his to Cohen she didn’t feel she had to make too big a change a second time.
On the eve of the wedding Sibella crept out of the cottage with her crazy mother’s papers and threw them into the sea.
Because she was a little crazy herself she no sooner threw them into the sea than she knew she shouldn’t have. What if a page was washed back up into the village on the tide and found by a fisherman? What if it was swept up into the blowhole and spewed out, paragraph by paragraph, for walkers to find? She scrambled down the rocks to see what she could rescue, then remembered she couldn’t swim. There was nothing she could do but hope. As far as she knew, no page ever was recovered from the water in Port Reuben. But from that time forward she lived in a sort of half-absent dread of something turning up, still just about legible, on a roller heading for the West Australian coast or on an ice floe in the South Atlantic, the precise consequences of which for her family could not be foreseen, but without question they would be disastrous.
If you want something to be destroyed for ever, her mother had warned her when she was small, you have to set fire to it and watch it burn away to nothing. It was a frightening time, the little girl knew, though she didn’t understand what made it so. Her father had never been more agitated. He wouldn’t allow the radio to be played and if anyone knocked on their door they didn’t open it. Once, when they heard people coming, he held her to him and put his hand over her mouth. ‘If you aren’t quiet,’ he told her, when the visitors had gone, ‘we’ll have to put you in a drawer.’
She thought she heard her parents crying in the night.
Her mother’s words about the finality of fire stayed in her mind. She asked her if fire burned everything.
‘Almost everything.’
‘So what doesn’t it burn?’
Her mother never took time to deliberate. She had an answer to every question ready, as though she knew it was going to be asked. ‘Love and hatred,’ she said. ‘But I might be wrong about love.’
‘How can you burn love?’ Sibella wanted to know.
‘By burning the people who feel it.’
‘So why can’t you burn hatred?’
‘Because hatred exists outside of people. I liken it to a virus. People catch it. Disgust the same. That’s another thing that’s flameproof. It lives for ever. So my advice to you is never to inspire it.’
‘Love or disgust?’
‘Ha! The cynical answer is “both”. But I am not a cynic. Just a pessimist. So my prayer for you is that you will inspire love, but not disgust.’
‘How do I do make sure I don’t?’
Her mother looked at her and this time thought a while before answering. Then she laughed her crazy woman’s laugh. ‘You can’t!’
It was because she feared her mother was right and that hatred and disgust were indestructible by flame that Sibella threw the book into the sea. It had disgusted her father, it disgusted her mother even as she was writing it, and in so far as she could understand its ravings, it disgusted Sibella. So the bottom of the sea, where it could disgust the fish, was the best place for it.
As for what her mother told her about fire, she tried to live by it thereafter. She sat on the cliffs above the cottage and burned things – papers, letters, photographs, handkerchiefs, wild flowers. Sometimes, after she was married, she thought she would have burned her jewellery had it been flammable.
She had a lot of time, while her husband worked on his lathe and Kevern was at school, in which to worry and remember, though she couldn’t remember ever coming to Port Reuben which was not, her mother had once inadvertently let slip, her place of birth.
‘So where was my place of birth?’ she asked.
‘Somewhere else.’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere far.’
‘Was it nice?’
‘Nowhere’s nice.’
‘Why did we leave?’
Her mother ran her fingers through her distracted hair. ‘It seemed a good idea at the time.’
Her father overheard. ‘It was a good idea at the time,’ he said. ‘It still is a good idea. We’re alive, aren’t we? Just don’t answer any questions.’
‘What questions?’
‘And don’t ask so many questions either.’
And that was all they told her. Her mother kissed her on the head and returned to the kitchen table to go on writing the book that never could and never would be finished. There wasn’t much talking in the house. Her father, too, preferred silence to conversation and work to pleasure. Both her parents seemed never to want to finish what they were doing, as though the moment they finished they’d be finished themselves.
She remembered how her mother worked, with a bright light to ease her depression always shining in her face, surrounded by books (which to Sibella’s sense only made the depression more intense), twisting loops of her hair around her forefinger, her head propped between two fists when she was thinking, and then her mouth opening and closing as she wrote, occasionally laughing like a hyena, though whether at something she had read or something she had written, something that amused her or something that made her angry – because crazy people laughed when they were angry as well as when they were amused �
� Sibella was never sure.
‘Don’t read over my shoulder, Sibella,’ her mother would tell her when she tried to find out, ‘you’re blocking my light,’ but in so absent-minded a manner that Sibella felt it was all right to stay where she was and go on reading. She understood little of it at the time, not even the drawings and photographs her mother glued into the book, and wouldn’t have sworn that she understood it later when she had all the time in the world to absorb its meanings. But a few elusive phrases lodged in her mind – ‘when they saw a moneylender they saw a bloodsucker, for those two defiled substances, money and blood, circulate alike’; ‘whoever cleans bodies is hated irrationally for doing what needs to be done’; ‘let my child be brought up to the highest level of civilisation, she will still always be thought of as a divine executioner, the child of divine executioners, and must always live in expectation of execution herself’ – and they were sufficient to persuade her that it had to be destroyed.
ii
Aged forty-five, and appearing older – while not growing crooked like her father, she had never possessed an iota of her mother’s looks – she tried to inspire love, as her mother had hoped she would, and had an almost affair with Madron Shmukler the village butcher. ‘You are nothing to write home about yourself,’ she told him when he expressed surprise that she attracted him given that she wasn’t at all pretty and not remotely his type. He too was forty-five and looked older. They didn’t bother to go through the routine of discussing their otherwise-engaged spouses, it was all so predictable. He would deliver meat to the cottage and when the coast was clear they would climb the cliffs separately, as though going in different directions – though there was nowhere for either of them to go – and then meet on Port Reuben Head, which gave them a good view of anyone approaching. Here they would sit on the grass, surprised to be attracted to each other, and half-heartedly – no, quarter-heartedly, she thought – make companionable if perfunctory contact. He would put his hands on her breasts, which were still surprisingly soft under an item of clothing he was unable to name, and she would put her hands inside his trousers. What she found was surprisingly soft too.
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