J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it. I carve lovespoons. I have nothing to be arrogant about.’

  ‘There you go . . . the simple carpenter. That’s the arrogance they mistrust.’

  ‘I can’t do anything about it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if they hate me . . .’

  ‘I didn’t say “hate”. I said they mistrusted you.’

  ‘For being “uniquely malevolent” . . .’

  She laughed. ‘No, for being uniquely arrogant.’

  He smiled at her. ‘That’s all right then. As long I’m uniquely something.’

  ‘Well you could do worse. You could be like them. You could read books with pages torn out of them and think you’ve stumbled upon truth. You could subscribe to a belief system . . .’

  ‘Beliefs kill,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, like beauty.’

  Their eyes met. She tossed her pigtail from her shoulder – as she must do when she mounts her horse, he thought, or when she climbs into bed. She put a hand out as though to touch his shirt. He thought she meant to move in to kiss him.

  ‘This is the wrong thing to do,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she said in a soft, mocking voice. ‘That’s why I’m doing it.’

  But she was only seeing what sort of an ethicist he was.

  ‘He’s more naive than he ought to be,’ she wrote the following morning in her report, ‘and more fragile. We ought to get a move on.’

  They arrived to music, laboured to music, trooped to the crematoria to music. ‘Brüder! zur Sonne, zur Freiheit,’ they were made to sing. ‘Brothers! to the sun, to freedom.’ ‘Brüder! zum Lichte empor’ – ‘Brothers! to the light.’ Followed, maybe, by the Blue Danube in all its loveliness, or a song from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, not that any of them cared where he was from. Music that ennobles the spirit revealing its ultimate sardonic nature, its knowledge of its own untruth, because ultimately there is no ennobled nature. What was the logic? To pacify or to jeer? Why ice-cream vans, the arrival of which, playing the ‘Marseillaise’ or ‘Für Elise’ or ‘Whistle While You Work’, excited the eager anticipation of the children? To pacify or to jeer? Or both? Between themselves, the parents cannot agree on the function or the message. The vans, for now, are better than the trains, some say. Shame there isn’t actually any ice cream for the children, but be grateful and sing along. Others believe the vans are just the start of it. We have heard the chimes at midnight, they believe.

  FIVE

  Lost Letters

  i

  July 8, 201-

  Darling Mummy and Daddy,

  It was so lovely to be with you last weekend. I am only sorry that you didn’t feel the same way about seeing me. I didn’t, and don’t ever, mean to cause you vexation. What I said came from my heart. And you have always encouraged me to follow my heart. You will say that the opinions of others, especially Fridleif, have made that heart no longer mine, but believe me – that is not true. My decision to take up a secretarial appointment at the Congregational Federation of the Islands is mine alone. It is a purely administrative post and therefore purely secular. I have not left you. Of course I have been influenced by people I have met up here. Isn’t that bound to be the effect of an education? Isn’t that precisely what an education is for? You, Mummy, said you should never have let me leave home – ‘wandering to the furthest ends of the earth like some gypsy’, as you chose to put it, though I haven’t left the country and am no more than four hours away, even at the speed you drive – but what’s happened isn’t your fault just as it wouldn’t have been your fault had I gone to New Guinea and become a headhunter. I just wish you could consider what I’m doing as a tribute to the open-minded spirit in which you brought me up. My thinking is a continuation of yours, that’s all. And I am still your daughter wherever I live and whoever I work with.

  Your ever loving

  Rebecca

  THIS WAS THE first of a small bundle of letters Ailinn’s companion gave her to peruse. ‘Don’t for the moment ask me how I came by them,’ she said, ‘just read them.’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Now.’

  The second letter was dated four months later.

  November 12, 201-

  Dearest Mummy and Daddy,

  Up until the final minute I hoped you would turn up. Fridleif had tried to warn me against disappointment – not in a hostile way, I assure you, but quite the opposite. (You would love him if you would only give yourself the chance.) ‘You must understand how hard it must be for them,’ he said. But I hoped against hope nonetheless. Even as we exchanged our vows I still expected to see you materialise at the church door and come walking down the aisle.

  There, it’s said. The church door.

  How did that ever get to be such a terrible word in our family? What did the church ever do to us? Yes, yes, I know, but that was like a thousand years ago. Is there nothing we can’t forgive? Is there nothing we can’t forget?

  Try saying it to each other when you go to bed at night. Church, church, church . . . You’ll be surprised how easy it gets. Do you remember the finger rhyme we used to play together? ‘Here’s the church, and here’s the steeple, open the door and see all the people!’ The word seemed innocent enough then. No one sent a thunderbolt out of the sky to punish us for saying it.

  But if it can’t be innocent to you now I’m a big girl couldn’t you at least learn to hate it a little less for my sake?

  Open the door and see all the people!

  Let’s get it all over and done with, anyway. I married the man I love in a church. In the presence of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit we exchanged vows. And I am now Mrs Macshuibhne, the wife of the Reverend Fridleif Macshuibhne. A bit of a mouthful, I agree, but you’d get used to it if you only tried.

  Please be happy for me, at least.

  Rebecca

  ‘How did you come by this?’ Ailinn wanted to know.

  ‘We agreed you wouldn’t ask.’

  ‘No, you agreed I wouldn’t ask.’

  ‘Just go on reading.’

  March 24, 201-

  Dear Mummy and Daddy,

  Still no word from you. Must I accept that you have abandoned me?

  What have I done that is so terrible? What shame have I brought on you?

  I accept that there was a time when we needed to show solidarity with one another. We were depleted and demoralised. I knew that. Every defection was interpreted as a sign of weakness and exploited – how could I not know that given the number of times I heard it. If they don’t even love one another, people said – or we feared people would say, which isn’t quite the same thing – why should we love them. But that was a long time ago. No one is trying to exploit us any more. No one even notices us. We are accepted now. We have never been more safe. I know what you will say. You will say what you always said. ‘Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security. Remember the Allegory of the Frog.’* Daddy, if I remembered the Allegory of the Frog I would never stay anywhere for five minutes at a time. If I remembered the Allegory of the Frog I would never know a moment’s peace. And the water isn’t hot here any more. It isn’t even lukewarm. Yes, I know you’ve heard that before. I know it was what our grandparents said the last time. ‘Here? Don’t make us laugh. Anywhere but here.’ Until the eleventh hour, until eleven seconds before the eleventh minute before the clocks stopped for us, as you’ve told me a thousand times, they ignored the warning signs, laughed at those who told them it was now or never, refused what stared them in the face. Here? Not here! ‘And you know their fate, Becky.’ Yes, Daddy, I know their fate, and I owe it to the memory of all those who suffered that fate – whom you speak of as though they were family though none of our family perished, I remind you – never to forget it. But that was then and now is now. And that was there and here is here. You used to laugh at me when I came home from university – ‘Here she is, our daughter, life president of the It Couldn’t Happen Here Society.’ And I called you, Daddy, ‘honorary chair of the Ne
ver Again League’. Well, I don’t disrespect you for believing what you believe. It is right to worry. But you cannot compare like with unlike. If you could only see how I am treated up here. The kindness! The consideration!

  The things you fear are all inside your own heads. And I sometimes think such fears make life not worth living. Is it a life to be in terror every day? To start whenever anyone knocks at the door? To recoil in shock from every thoughtless insult? If those are the conditions on which we hold our freedom to be ourselves, marry, bring up our children, worship, then it is no freedom at all. You cannot live a life forever waiting for it to end.

  And it is such a waste when we could be so happy. Heaven knows we were happy as a family for so long. If I was with you now we would be happy again. But I can’t be with you again without you accepting Fridleif. And what possible reason do you have not to accept him? He is not the Devil. He is not the end of us. Can’t we stop all this sectarianism and just live in peace? All you are doing by rejecting me is making what you dread come true.

  Your ever loving daughter,

  Becky

  PS You are also about to be grandparents.

  ‘This is not going to end well,’ Ailinn said.

  ‘Just read.’

  September 17, 201-

  Dearest Mummy and Daddy,

  I will not upset you by sending you a photograph of your grandchild. I accept now, with great sorrow, that there will be no peace between us. But I do owe it to you – and to myself – to explain why I have done what I have done one last time.

  Your generation is not my generation. I say that with the deepest respect. I never was and am not now a rebellious child. I understand why you think as you do. But the ship has sailed. My generation refuses to jump at every murmur of imagined hostility. We love our lives. We love this country. We relish being here. And to go on relishing being here we don’t have to be as we were before. That’s why I have decided to convert. Not as a rejection of the way you brought me up but as a step forward from it. We were always a preparatory people, Fridleif says. And we have done what we were put on earth to do. We have completed our mission and shown the way. We stood out against every manner of oppression, and having conquered it there is no need for all the morbid remembering and re-remembering. I don’t say we should forget, I say we have been given the chance to progress and we should take it. It’s time to live for the future, not the past. It’s time to be a people that looks forward not back.

  So why have I decided to embrace my husband’s faith? For the beauty of it, Mummy. For the music of it, Daddy. As an expression of the loveliness of life that our grandparents suffered for us to enjoy.

  Trust me, I have never been more what you brought me up to be than when I submit to what our people, in their understandably and even necessary touchy sense of separateness, have abjured for centuries – the incense, the iconography, the fragmented light of stained-glass windows, the rapture. We have been accepted and we are ready to join everybody else now. I am, anyway.

  Be happy for me.

  Your ever loving daughter in Christ,

  Rebecca

  ‘I know,’ Ailinn said, when Ez told her that Rebecca was her grandmother.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I’ve been expecting the letter.’

  ‘Is that meant to be funny?’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘So what do you mean?’

  Ailinn made a ‘leave it’ gesture with her hand, wafting whatever she meant away. Wafting it out of the room, wafting it out into Paradise Valley.

  ‘I can tell she was my grandmother, that’s all. I can read myself in her. Was there a reconciliation?’

  ‘I’d like you to read the final letter,’ Ez said.

  Ailinn was reluctant. She couldn’t have said why. Maybe it was the word ‘final’. But she read it.

  May 202-

  My Darling Parents,

  I am very alarmed by what I have heard is happening where you are. Please write and tell me you are all right. That’s all I ask.

  Yours in fear,

  R

  ‘Now the envelope,’ Ez said.

  It was stamped, in large purple letters,

  RECIPIENT UNKNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS

  RETURN TO SENDER

  *The Allegory of the Frog

  A frog was thrown into a pan of boiling water.

  ‘What do you take me for?’ the frog said, jumping smartly out. ‘Some kind of a shlemiel?’

  The following day the frog was lowered gently, even lovingly, into a pan of lukewarm water. As the temperature was increased, a degree at a time, the frog luxuriated, floating lethargically on his back with his eyes closed, imagining himself at an exclusive spa.

  ‘This is the life,’ the frog said.

  Relaxed in every joint, blissfully unaware, the frog allowed himself to be boiled to death.

  SIX

  Gutkind and Kroplik

  i

  ‘HOW DO YOU take it?’

  The policeman Eugene Gutkind pouring morning tea for the historian Densdell Kroplik.

  ‘Like a man.’

  ‘And that would be how?’

  ‘Five sugars and no milk. Is this a cat or an albino dog?’

  Densdell Kroplik stroking the ball of bad-breathed icing sugar rubbing up against his leg.

  ‘Don’t touch it. You’ll never get the stuff off your fingers.’

  ‘Like guilt,’ Kroplik laughed, sitting forward on the couch, his legs apart, something heavy between them.

  A bolt of disgust went through Gutkind’s body. Did he really want that sitting on his furniture?

  He had invited Kroplik round to his end-of-terrace house in St Eber to show him his great-grandfather’s collection of Wagner memorabilia. The rarely played composer had brought the two men together, the decline in the popularity of his music confirming their shared conviction that they were living in unpropitious times. Each believed in conspiracies, though not necessarily the same conspiracies.

  ‘Isn’t this against the law?’ Kroplik asked, leafing through the photographs and playbills and scraps of unauthenticated manuscript that Gutkind had brought out of filing boxes wrapped in old newsprint.

  Gutkind wondered how many more jokes on the theme of legality his co-conspiracy theorist intended to make. ‘The law is not so small-minded,’ he said. ‘It winks at a reasonable number of personal items. It’s only when they turn out to be an archive that there’s trouble.’

  Since Kroplik must have had an archive of some size in order to compile even his Brief History, this was meant as a friendly shot across his bows.

  ‘So how are you getting on finding the killer of the Whore of Ludgvennok?’ Kroplik asked, that being the context in which the name of Richard Wagner had first come up between them. Just a question. He could have been asking whether the policeman had seen any good films lately.

  Gutkind put his fingers together like a preacher and lowered his head.

  ‘I presume you’re talking about Lowenna Morgenstern?’

  Kroplik snorted. ‘How many whores do you know?’

  ‘How many whores are there?’

  ‘In these parts there’s nobbut whores, Detective Inspector.’

  ‘Then what makes this one different?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  Gutkind parted his fingers. There was no denying that Lowenna Morgenstern was dead. But was she a whore? ‘Are you telling me,’ he asked, insinuating a note of fine scruple, ‘that Lowenna Morgenstern sold her kisses?’

  ‘I’m telling you nothing. I’m asking. You found anyone yet? Got a suspect?’

  ‘The process proceeds,’ Gutkind said, rejoining his fingers.

  ‘Maybe I’ll have more sugar,’ Kroplik proceeded in another direction, helping himself to a sixth cube. ‘Would your albino dog like one or does he just lick himself when he’s in need of something sweet?’

  He was disappointed that the detective inspector had stopped asking him who he th
ought might have murdered Lowenna Morgenstern, Lowenna Morgenstern’s lover and latterly Lowenna Morgenstern’s husband. He felt it undermined both his authority and his judgement.

  Gutkind passed him a programme for a performance of Götterdämmerung at Bayreuth. It had some elegant faded handwriting on the back, a set of initials together with a phone number. Gutkind had some time ago concluded that they were the initials of the woman his great-grandfather had loved to hopeless distraction, and that the phone number was hers. They must have met in the Festspielhaus, perhaps at the bar, or maybe they had even found themselves sitting next to each other, perhaps so transported by the divine music that they rubbed knees though they were each in the company of other lovers. That the woman should have gone to Bayreuth in the first place puzzled Gutkind, all things considered, but the enigma of it made her all the more fascinating, as Clarence Worthing himself must have felt. I too would have fallen for her, Gutkind thought, conjuring the woman’s exotic appearance from the archive of his fancy. I too would have been entrapped.

  The programme itself was illustrated with several artists’ interpretations of the world ablaze. These could have doubled for the state of his great-grandfather’s heart. ‘I like thinking about the end of the world,’ he said. ‘You?’