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by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Keep your shirt on. It’s just a word. Mine ran off with a tin miner from St Abraham.’ St Abraham! – he spat the words on to the ground. ‘Used to be Laxobre. Lovely name that. Flinty. Like licking a stone. What lunatic would change Laxobre to St Poxy Abraham? Axe-wielding men lived in Laxobre. Not that that excuses them stealing my mother.’ He paused to wipe his mouth. ‘Anyway the butcher wouldn’t have been your father. I don’t as a rule do births and deaths, but for you I’d hazard a guess he came into the picture after you were born.’

  Kevern wasn’t sure it made it any better to imagine his mother – his mother! that bundle of old rags! – getting free meat from the butcher while he was at school. Did the other kids know? Did his father?

  ‘I don’t question your historiographical accuracy,’ he said, ‘but—’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Don’t play the village clown with me. You know what well enough. But this is fantastical. You must have seen my mother.’

  ‘Walking out with the butcher?’

  ‘No. You must have seen what she looked like.’

  ‘Well I only saw her when she was getting on a bit. So that tells me nothing. She might have been a good-looking woman when she was younger. Your grandmother was a beauty, everyone said. Stuck-up, but beautiful.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that. She died before my time.’

  ‘And mine. But you can take it from me she was. I saw a painting of her once. Done from photographs or memory, in my humble opinion. Too proud to pose for anybody, that one. Too private.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I don’t. But the painting was called something like So Lovely Yet So Cold, or So Near Yet So Far. Which I reckon is a clue.’

  ‘Where is this painting?’

  ‘Search me. Behind a bar some place. I might have its whereabouts written down, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Her husband now—’

  ‘Her husband what?’

  ‘No one wanted to paint him. Nothing beautiful about a hunchback.’

  Kevern needed to resume his position on the bench. Was this to be one of those mornings after which a man’s life is never the same again? Like the morning you meet the woman you love? Like the morning you forget to lock your door?

  ‘You’re going to have to slow down,’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to ease me into this more gently. You’re telling me my mother took free meat from a butcher in return for sexual favours. You’re telling me my grandmother was reputed to be a beautiful, stand-offish woman which you can confirm because you’ve seen a portrait of her hanging above a bar you can’t remember where. And now my grandfather was a hunchback. How much of this are you making up?’

  For some reason Densdell Kroplik, raincoat or no raincoat, made the decision to revert to being the evil, inconsistently incoherent genius of Port Reuben. ‘I never zeed ’im with my own eyes, Mister Master Cohen,’ he said. ‘So I can only goes on what I’ve picked up here and yonder. But yes. Nowadays they’d as like as not throw stones at your grand-daddy but in them days they’d ’ave respected him. Hellfellen, the giant, was a hunchback. Charged people to feel his hump. It was a way of taxing travellers. If you wanted to get in or out of Ludgvennok you had to pay to feel him, which you gladly did anyways ’cos a hump brings you good luck. I doubt if your grand-daddy did any of that. Kept himself to himself, I’d say. And kept his wife to himself too, if he knew what was good for him. But everyone understood it was lucky to have a hunchback in the village. He might ’ave frightened the kids, but a talisman’s a talisman. They’d ’ave given him no trouble whoever he was.’

  ‘What do you mean whoever he was?’

  This time it was Kroplik who rose from the bench.

  ‘He was an aphid,’ he said, wagging a finger. ‘Don’t you forget that. An upcountry man with no business to be here, hump or no hump. And aphids in those days had to watch their step. Not like now when they’ve got the run of the place. And then there was all that other stuff going on. All the killing. All the rumours. Eyes everywhere. But they’d not have allowed anyone to harm him here, I can tell you that. Not a hunchback. Harm a hair on the head of a hunchback and you bring curses on your own head. Villagers don’t forget a lesson like that. So they let him be. I’d say you’re lucky to be here, Mister Master Cohen.’

  ‘What the hell does that mean?’

  ‘It means whatever you wants it to mean.’

  ‘I’m lucky to be here?’

  ‘Damn lucky, I’d say.’

  ‘I was born here, Mr Kroplik.’

  ‘That’s the luck I’m talking about.’

  Saying which, he slung his raincoat over his shoulder, wished Kevern Cohen good day and made his way into the village where a taxi was waiting outside the Friendly Fisherman to take him to his appointment in St Eber with, as it happened, a mutual friend. Detective Inspector Gutkind.

  Or Eugene, as Kroplik now felt at liberty to call him.

  iv

  This conversation so disturbed Kevern’s thoughts throughout the day that he almost forgot he had an evening class to give at the academy. He considered ringing and cancelling but his professional conscientiousness wouldn’t let him do it. He called a taxi which got him there shaken but just in time. There was relief in that. It meant he wouldn’t be waylaid by Everett who had been quizzing him with more than usual insistence of late, and with more than usual intrusiveness. Why so interested in Ailinn?

  It was good to talk to his class about wood. It took his mind off policemen and hunchbacks. ‘In wood,’ he said, in conclusion, ‘is redemption.’ Which some of his students thought was taking it a bit far. But it was true for him.

  Despite the lateness of the hour he decided to sit in the library for a while. Anything rather than go back to his violated cottage and find Ailinn not there.

  Rozenwyn Feigenblat, the very model of a provincial college librarian in a white lacy blouse and long black skirt and boots – she looked, he always thought, as though she’d ridden to work from somewhere far away, side-saddle while not taking her eyes off a book – greeted him with her accustomed ironic warmth. She liked him, he thought. He liked her. There was something of the centaur’s wife about her, not half-horse, half-woman exactly, but half belonging to the world of action and half to the world of thought. A rider below the neck, she was a reader, oval-faced and small-eyed, concentrated and inquisitive, above it. She wore her fair hair in a pigtail which hung, tied with rubber bands, somehow sarcastically, over her left shoulder. He wondered if she unwound it when she rode.

  He had nearly kissed her once, not a snog, he doubted Rozenwyn Feigenblat was a snogger, but much as he had kissed Lowenna Morgenstern, out of liking, out of a passing pang of fondness, and because it seemed a shame not to. But something in the way she responded to his cautious advance – a look of near regret, as though she pitied him her unavailability – warned him off. Otherwise engaged, her look said. Would have, maybe, some other time, who knows, but just at this moment . . . can’t. And now he gave off the same message. Have Ailinn, so unavailable. Only he didn’t have Ailinn, did he?

  He sensed a moment of danger. ‘You don’t normally come in here at this time,’ she said. Her little darting eyes had fires in them. Had her circumstances suddenly changed?

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I need an hour of quiet.’

  ‘An hour I can’t give you. I close in half.’

  A moment of danger, all right.

  ‘So what can I read in half an hour?’

  ‘You want a short story?’

  ‘I am sick of stories. Can you do short and factual?’

  She put her finger to her chin, parodying thought. ‘How about . . . How about . . . Beauty and Morality . . .’

  ‘Everett’s latest? I’d hardly call that factual.’

  ‘No, but it’s short.’

  ‘Not what I’m in the mood for.’

  ‘Is it the beauty or the morality that’s putting you off?’

  ‘Beauty never puts me off.�
��

  ‘So morality does?’

  ‘No. It must be the conjunction I don’t buy.’

  ‘Then you don’t buy Everett.’

  She gave a little tug to her pigtail, as though it were a coded signal for gossip about those senior to them to begin.

  ‘Everett’s fine,’ Kevern was careful to say, ‘when not in art-exultation mode.’

  ‘You don’t believe any of that?’

  ‘I don’t believe many things about art.’

  ‘But you’re an artist . . .’ She almost crooned the word.

  Careful, Kevern thought.

  ‘I carve lovespoons,’ he said. ‘If that makes me an artist then I’m an artist. That’s the beginning and the end of it.’

  ‘You have no philosophy?’

  ‘To be an artist is to have the freedom to think anything, and that includes thinking one would rather not think.’

  ‘If you really believe an artist has the freedom to think anything, that must include the freedom to think evil.’

  Kevern laughed, as though at his own limitations. ‘In principle, yes. But not much in the way of evil thinking goes into carving lovespoons, I have to tell you.’

  ‘You’ve never made an evil lovespoon?’

  He thought about it. ‘I suppose I’ve made what you could call erotic lovespoons. But celebrating the body is hardly evil.’

  ‘What about a lovespoon that shows the erotic cruelties the body is capable of. People kill for love – are you unable to conceive a lovespoon depicting that?’

  ‘I can conceive one, yes. But I wouldn’t make it.’

  ‘Why not, if an artist is free to think anything?’

  ‘Because that freedom includes the freedom to resist evil.’

  ‘And the freedom to embrace it?’

  ‘Yes, of course. Only why would one embrace evil of the sort you describe?’

  She had been leaning against her desk, her booted ankles crossed. Now she straightened up and laughed. ‘If you don’t know that then you’re not really an artist,’ she said. ‘I’d say you’re an ethicist.’

  ‘No, that’s Everett. Beauty and morality.’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t believe that. He’s a lubricious little devil.’

  ‘Everett?’

  ‘He tried to push his hand up my skirt once, right here in the library.’

  Well it is that kind of a skirt, Kevern thought, trying not to show where his mind had wandered. ‘Expressing his freedom to think evil, do you suppose?’ he finally got around to saying.

  She laughed her dangerous librarian’s laugh. ‘You’re not wide of the mark. He likes to play with the idea of wrongdoing. It thrills him. He’d be another de Sade if he had the balls. They all would. There isn’t a painter or a potter in this place that doesn’t long to do something wicked. But none of them has the balls. In another age they’d have joined illegal organisations, worn uniforms and beaten people with their brushes. Now there’s nothing for them to do but say sorry. So they have to content themselves with screwing students and assaulting librarians.’

  Kevern thought he ought to stick up for his profession. ‘Opportunities for doing evil have always been limited in Bethesda,’ he said.

  She snorted. ‘Don’t you believe it. There was a time when this institution was happy to consort with the Devil.’

  ‘I didn’t think we went back to the Middle Ages.’

  ‘Shows how wrong you can be. Look there . . .’

  She pointed to a blown-up photograph that hung above the Local Topography shelves, alongside a couple of wishy-washy studies of St Mordechai’s Mount at low tide by Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky, FRSA. It was a famous, often-reproduced photograph showing about twenty quaintly old-fashioned ice-cream vans lined up, like elephants at a circus, looking at St Mordechai’s Mount themselves. Kevern had glanced at it several times without ever knowing what he was looking at. The photograph was renowned for the cute symmetry of its composition, he guessed, and for the idea of long-ago seaside idylls it evoked.

  He wondered what Rozenwyn wanted him to see.

  ‘That was taken before they were decommissioned,’ she said. ‘A month later those vans were going round the country painted with the slogan “Leave Now or Face Arrest”. Bethesda Academy did the artwork.’

  ‘Ice-cream vans?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Telling people to leave?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which people?’

  ‘Come on, Kevern. You know which people.’

  He shook his head, as though it were a kaleidoscope, to rearrange the patterns.

  ‘But why ice-cream vans, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Your guess is as good as mine. Not to frighten the children? Because they had macabre imaginations?’

  ‘They weren’t, I assume, selling ice cream?’

  ‘You assume right. But here’s the strangest thing . . .’

  He waited.

  ‘. . . they kept the chimes.’

  ‘Beethoven’s Fifth? “Für Elise?” “Greensleeves”?’

  ‘Exactly. And some forgotten favourites of the period. “Whistle While You Work” . . . “You Are My Sunshine”.’

  Something twitched, like curtains opening furtively, at the furthest corners of Kevern’s mind. He stared at her in perplexity. ‘When was this?’

  ‘Well it wasn’t the Middle Ages, Kevern.’

  ‘No, but when?’ He tapped his forehead.

  ‘You’re too young,’ she said, understanding his meaning.

  ‘You Are My Sunshine’ . . . He began to hum it for her. If he was too young, how come he knew it? Then he remembered the blind soul singer and his father’s final bitter laughter, directed he hadn’t known where. If I don’t sit down, he thought, I will topple over.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Rozenwyn asked.

  He nodded. ‘And you know this for sure?’ he asked stupidly, gripping the table behind him, so that his hands were close to hers.

  She patted the wrist nearer to her. ‘I’m a librarian,’ she said. ‘A librarian knows where to look.’

  But he wanted her to be exaggerating, at least. ‘Still and all,’ he said, ‘painting a few vans is not exactly a criminal act, is it? And it was just a warning. I can imagine the Everetts of the day believing they were acting humanely.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it. We always think what we’re doing is humane, even when we’re secretly relishing the evil of it. But all the warning did was soften the populace up for what came next. As did the defamations and the boycotts in which this institution also played a noble part. Let’s not be modest. We did more than paint the vans. We provided them with the fuel. There is this malignancy out there, we said. And left it to others to operate.’

  Kevern looked around. Was Rozenwyn Feigenblat at liberty, he wondered, to be talking like this? He was his father’s child. He had been brought up not to show too much expression in a public place. You never knew who was watching.

  But he was a man not a boy and needed to show Rozenwyn he had some fight in him. ‘You have to make allowances for this being an academic institution,’ he said with heavy irony.

  She rolled her eyes. ‘They wouldn’t welcome your making allowances for them,’ she said. ‘They don’t like you.’

  ‘Don’t they? I didn’t know that. Why don’t they like me?’

  ‘Uniquely malevolent.’

  ‘Uniquely malevolent! Me?’

  ‘I’m being facetious,’ she said. ‘Uniquely malevolent is a quotation from then. I use it now for anyone or anything not approved of by junior academics. The actual reason they don’t like you is that they have to dislike somebody or they have no occupation. And of course because you hold different views.’

  ‘I don’t hold views.’

  ‘There you are then. They are nothing but views. Views I have to listen to them expounding for hours at a time. They think that’s my job – answering their requests for books that an idiot would know there’s no point consu
lting, books with unacceptable arguments torn out of them, books that have already silenced argument, cult books, propaganda, justification manuals . . . and then agreeing with their ill-informed conclusions.’

  You have nothing to say on the subject, Kevern reminded himself. You are the grandson of a hunchback. You are lucky to have been born here. You Are My Sunshine.

  ‘You’re probably more Everett’s man than I realise,’ Rozenwyn said, noting Kevern’s reserve. ‘But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn’t instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist.’

  ‘You have done a lot of thinking,’ Kevern said.

  ‘For a woman, do you mean?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘For a librarian then?’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that either.’

  But he wondered if he did.

  ‘It’s a great intellectual privilege to work in a library,’ she reminded him. ‘The Argentinian writer Borges was a librarian. The English poet Philip Larkin was a librarian.’

  Kevern hadn’t heard of either of them.

  ‘All human life is here,’ she went on. ‘The best of it and the worst of it, mainly the worst. Books do that, they bring out the bad in readers if there’s bad already in them.’

  ‘And if there isn’t?’

  She smiled at him and stroked her pigtail. ‘Then they bring out the good. As in me, I hope. I’ve been able to read a lot here.’

  ‘You should write a book about it yourself,’ he said.

  ‘What for? So they can tear the pages out? I am content to know what I know.’

  ‘So why are you telling me?’

  She regarded him archly. ‘To pass the time.’

  He consulted his watch. ‘I should be going then,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you look at people when you’re talking to them?’ she asked suddenly, as though reverting to a conversation they’d been having earlier.

  ‘I didn’t know I didn’t look at people.’ He was lying. Ailinn too would comment on his apparent rudeness. ‘But if I don’t, it’s shyness.’

  ‘Your colleagues think of you as unapproachable,’ she went on. ‘They think you look down on them. They call you arrogant.’