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by Howard Jacobson

  ‘And how do you propose doing that, young lady?’ someone dares to ask.

  Ah, she will say. Now you’re asking.

  iii

  At the very moment Esme Nussbaum was knocked down outside her place of work, her mother fell off a chair on which she’d been standing to dust the bookshelves. Mothers and daughters, especially when no man beloved of either is around to break the current, can be attuned like this.

  In the time her daughter was in hospital Rhoda Nussbaum never gave up hope of her coming out of her coma because she could hear her thinking live thoughts. And now that Esme was home, back in the room that had been her nursery, back in her care, her mother heard even more of what was going on inside her head. Planets, marriages, collisions, commotion – she heard all that. Some of her daughter’s thoughts and phrases she even recognised as her own. How could it be otherwise? If she was attuned to Esme, then Esme was attuned to her. Even in the womb the baby hears its mother’s music. And as an essentially companionless woman, with a rich store of anger in her, Rhoda had confided in her daughter, sometimes in words, sometimes silently, earlier and more frequently than was common or even desirable. Necessary Opposites, for example, was the name of a two-girl, two-boy rock band Rhoda had danced to when she was a teenager. She was pretty certain the band vanished at about the time most hard-rock bands were consensually driven underground, and that would have been a few years before Esme was born. How extraordinary that a phrase that had been lying there in pieces in Rhoda Nussbaum’s mind, unused and unreferred to, should suddenly reassemble itself in Esme’s. But then again, maybe not. Rhoda had tried to dance her brains out to Necessary Opposites because she didn’t like what her brains contained. Was it coincidence? The evil thing she wanted to dance out was all trace of a man in pain – or pretending to be in pain – declaring over and over I am who I am because I am not them as though it were an incantation, and begging her to kiss him, forgive him, enfold him, make him better. As though he had a better self she could release.

  Hearing the words returned to her in Esme’s thoughts did not bring back a long-forgotten event because she had never forgotten it – where she was when she heard them, how they made her feel, the feebleness of her response . . .

  EIGHT

  Götterdämmerung

  i

  A BLOOMING, STRONG-JAWED girl of just sixteen, still to meet the husband she can’t bear, Rhoda Nussbaum (to be) had a brief affair with a man more than three times her age. Though she called it an affair, there was not much sex in it. Nor much love. It was an affair of curiosity. She was inexperienced, but with a fierce sense of the ridiculous that made her courageous, and he was her schoolteacher. An unattractive man physically, but you don’t say no to your teacher. Especially when he wants you to know he’s emotionally damaged and you might just be the one to heal him.

  ‘I’m in bits,’ he told her when she put her face up to be kissed.

  The hands with which he held her shook. At first she thought it was she who was shaking, but she saw the light dancing in his wedding ring like sun on choppy water. ‘Make me whole again,’ he said, his scraggy beard moving independently of his lips, as though it too was bouncing on a wild, wild sea.

  ‘That’s a lot to ask of a pupil you’ve only ever given B+ to,’ she said.

  He had no sense of the ridiculous and didn’t laugh. He was a folk singer in his spare time and, though they were a long way from any wild, wild sea, sang about fishermen bringing in herrings. The fact that he sometimes brought his guitar to school was another reason Rhoda allowed him to try it on with her. The other girls would be jealous if they found out and Rhoda had every intention of their finding out.

  ‘I just want you to be yourself,’ he said.

  She swivelled her jaw at him. ‘What if I don’t know which of my selves to be?’

  ‘You don’t have to worry. You’re being the self I care best about now.’

  Care best about! But what she said was, ‘And which self is that?’

  ‘The good and innocent one.’

  ‘Ha!’ she snorted. Lacking experience she might have been, but they were in a hotel room drinking cider on the edge of the bed, on the outside of the locked door a frolicsome sign saying LEAVE US ALONE: WE’RE PLAYING, and she knew that while there were many words for what she was being not a one of them was ‘innocent’.

  ‘Oh yes you are,’ he said, unbuttoning her school shirt. ‘Where there’s no blood, there’s no guilt.’

  ‘There might be blood,’ she warned him.

  He overcame his surprise to smile his saddest folkie’s smile at her. ‘That’s different. Blood shed in the name of love is not like blood shed in the name of hate.’

  She wasn’t having any love talk, but she could hardly not ask, ‘How do you know? Have you shed blood in the name of hate?’

  He let his long horse face droop lower even than usual. ‘All in good time,’ he said.

  He was teasing her, she thought. This was his sexual come-on. I have done such things . . . Boys did that but she didn’t expect it of a grown man. She liked him less for it and she hadn’t liked him much to start with. He shouldn’t have supposed she needed him to have terrible secrets. This was terrible secret enough. He was married, her teacher, older than her parents, undressing her, describing the shape of her breasts with his fingers, his touch so intrusively naked he might have been describing them in four-letter words. They were offending against every decency she had been taught.

  He thought he guessed what she was thinking. He thought the mention of hate had startled her. But he had guessed wrong. She wanted him to finish a conversation he had started, that was all.

  He told her in the end, some three or four visits to the hotel bedroom later. Very suddenly and brutally.

  ‘You’d have been about ten,’ he said. They were still dressed, looking out of the window on to a bank of air conditioners. Two pigeons were fighting over a crumb of bread that must have been thrown out of a window above theirs. The room had a worn, padded reproduction of the Rokeby Venus for a bedhead. In the days when the economy boomed and nothing yet had HAPPENED this had been an expensively raffish hotel, softly carpeted for high-heeled assignations. It still spoke knowingly of indulgence and love, but with only half a heart. So great a change in only six or seven years! Now a schoolteacher could afford to bring his pupil here.

  A scented candle burned. His guitar case stood unopened in a corner. Was he going to sing to her, she wondered. The sign announcing that they were playing so leave them alone was swinging on the door.

  She knew what he was referring to. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED was the thing that happened when she was about ten. She hadn’t known much about it, living too far from any of the centres of conflagration to see anything with her own eyes or hear anything with her own ears. One or two school acquaintances must have been caught up in it because they never showed their faces again, but they hadn’t been close friends so their absence didn’t impinge on her. Otherwise, apart from her form teacher once bursting into tears, and the headmaster banning all mobile phones and personal computers from the school premises, nothing occurred at school to suggest anything was wrong, and at home her parents remained tight-lipped. There was a blackout imposed by her father, no papers allowed into the house and no serious radio or television, but that had hardly bothered Rhoda aged ten. OPERATION ISHMAEL, however, in which she went, in a single bound, from Hinchcliffe to Behrens, could not be accounted for without reference to the turbulence it was devised to quiet, and so, one way or another, Rhoda learnt what she had never been taught. Namely that something unspeakably terrible had happened, if it had.

  For me to think about when I’m older, she’d decided.

  And now older was what she was.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And . . .’

  He gathered her into his arms. She didn’t feel as safe there as she imagined she would when it all started. There was something ghostly about him – he was eerily elongated in body a
s well as face, as though he had grown too much as a consequence of a childhood illness equivalent to those that stopped people growing at all, bony, with a big wet vertical mouth that hung open despite the attempted camouflage of the beard, showing tombstone teeth. It wasn’t difficult to imagine him with the skin stripped from his bones.

  Why am I doing this, she asked herself. Why am I here? I don’t even like him.

  ‘She would have been about the age you are now, had she lived,’ he said.

  ‘She?’

  ‘The girl . . .’

  She waited.

  ‘The girl I killed.’

  ‘You killed a girl?’

  ‘Come to bed,’ he said.

  She shook her head. She wasn’t afraid. She just thought he was trying to impress her again. And maybe frighten or arouse her into doing something she didn’t want to do.

  ‘How do you mean you killed a girl?’

  ‘How did I do it?’

  That wasn’t really her question, but all right, how did he do it?

  ‘Not with my bare hands if that’s what you think. I left it to others. I stood by and let it happen.’

  She released herself. ‘What others?’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  She pulled the face she and all her girlfriends pulled to denote they were talking to a moron. ‘Hello!’ she said. ‘Does that matter?’

  He reached for her cheek. ‘What matters is that I loved and killed for the same reason.’ He paused, waiting for a reaction. Was he expecting her to tell him it was all right. There, there – I forgive you. ‘What attracted me,’ he went on, as though he was working out his motives for the first time, ‘repelled me.’

  ‘You killed because you were repelled?’

  ‘No, I killed because I was attracted.’

  She wanted to go home now.

  ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Please stay.’

  Rhoda stared into his ugly wet mouth and remembered a skull that had gone round the class during an anatomy lesson. Its mouth, too, though it had once been wired, fell open when the skull was passed from girl to girl.

  ‘You mustn’t think I’m going to be violent with you,’ he said.

  ‘She probably didn’t think you were going to be violent with her.’

  ‘I had no choice with her.’

  She might only have been a schoolgirl but she knew everyone had a choice. ‘That’s your excuse,’ she said, knotting her tie.

  ‘No, I’m not making an excuse. It just is what it is. Sometimes you have to do something – you can’t help yourself – you are drawn into it. You will understand when you’re older. You have to destroy to survive. While they live, you can’t. Most times it doesn’t come to that, but when the opportunity presents itself . . .’

  ‘The opportunity?’

  ‘That’s what it was.’

  ‘And she was how old?’

  ‘The girl? I’ve told you. She’d be about your age now, so then she would have been nine or ten.’

  ‘You went with a girl of nine?’

  He had the shakes again, she noticed. ‘No, I didn’t “go” with her. She was the daughter.’

  ‘Whose daughter?’

  ‘The daughter of the woman I was “going” with. It was the mother who attracted me.’

  This was getting worse by the second, Rhoda thought. At sixteen, if the words you like to use don’t express contempt, they express disgust. Rhoda allowed her teacher to see her rehearsing all of them in her head.

  ‘Wait a minute. Just listen. Let me tell you how it was before you judge me. The mother went for me, not the other way round. I met her at a print shop where I’d gone to get an invitation printed. She was doing the same, only she was arguing over the invitations they’d done for her. They were for the private view of a painter at a gallery I assumed was hers. She wanted me to agree that they’d botched the job. “Look at the colours!” she said. “Did you ever see a woman’s breasts that colour?” They looked all right to me, but I agreed because I thought she was genuinely upset—’

  ‘And because you hoped you’d get a look at the colour of hers.’

  ‘No, yes, maybe. That’s cheeky of you, but I deserve it. But that’s not the point. I was being supportive, that’s all. I didn’t know then that dissatisfaction was her hallmark, that arguing with tradespeople was just something she did. Like throwing parties. There was a gallery opening or an engagement party or a ruby wedding every week in her world and she paid for most of them. All lavish affairs. Champagne and lobster canapés. She had money to burn. She had everything to burn. She would have burned me had I let her. So it was poetic justice in the end. If you think I lost my mind you’d be right. I lost my mind from the moment I saw her shouting about her invitations. I’d never been with anybody like her. She was older and knew more of the world than I did. A woman with her own art gallery. She was my opposite in every way – unreserved, voluptuous, selfish, faithless, as wild as a cat. She laughed more than anybody I’d ever met, too, but when she wasn’t laughing her face would become a mask of tragedy. She had these great, dark, over-painted, sorrowful eyes, as though they told the whole mournful history of her people. That was her explanation, anyway. “We have experienced too much,” she would tell me, holding me to her breast, and ten minutes later she was doing a seating plan. “Does nothing mean anything to you for long?” I’d ask her, and she’d say, “Yes, you,” or “Yes, my daughter,” and once she even said, “Yes, God.” She told me she prayed but when I asked her what she prayed for it was always something material – good weather for the opening, the continued absence of her husband (“So that I can have my way with you all weekend” – as though God would help with that), a lightning bolt to destroy the boycotters who milled outside her gallery, chanting against the country whose best painters she represented – though in their presence she merely guffawed her contempt and called them sanctimonious ghouls. “They’ll go when they find some other no-hope cause,” she told me in front of their faces. There was no guilt or conscience in her. No beauty or inspiration. Don’t get me wrong, she was beautiful to look at herself. Dark and soft. Bewitching. Sometimes when I held her I thought she had no bones, her body was so yielding. Though she was obstinate in all our conversations and fought me over everything, in bed she would be anything I wanted her to be. But there was no spiritual beauty. She gave money to charity but the impulse never seemed charitable to me. It was too easy, too automatic. Before my parents ever gave money they would sit around and discuss it for weeks. Should we make a donation here or would it be better spent there? She just wrote a cheque and never thought about it again. She would go to concerts and openings of shows at other art galleries but I never saw her moved. My music she hated. “Caterwauling about fishermen and bumpkins,” she called it. I doubt she’d ever eaten a fish. I doubt she’d ever seen the sea, come to that. Or been out into the country. She looked down on people, imitated the accents of the poor, jeered at me even, sometimes, for not having her advantages. And that included a dinner jacket. “You can’t come to one of my family events looking like that,” she said the first time she saw me in my corduroy suit.

  ‘I wished I didn’t have to go to her “family events” or meet her “people” – I never felt at home with them. Was that because they looked down on me? I didn’t know. But I always felt they tolerated me, that was all. And if I dared to say a word against them she’d fly at me in a rage. Once she broke two of my teeth. Yet for all the specialness of her “people”, for all the superiority of their suffering over anyone else’s, she would still affect the airs and graces of a woman who had just taken tea with royalty. These attempts to hide who she was and where she’d come from – her family had sold hats on a street market! – shocked me. And she did it so badly. People laughed at her behind their hands and she didn’t notice. No doubt they were laughing at me too. I know what you must be thinking – why did I stay? I was obsessed by her, that’s why. The more I hated her the more fascinated I became. I can’t e
xplain that. Was she my cruel mistress or my lapdog? I tell you, though you are too young to understand obsession, I was obsessed by the oily sallowness of her skin, her heavy breasts, her swampy lips, the little panting cries she made when I entered her – forgive me – the extravagant way she moved her hands, making up stories, telling lies, transparent fantasies, trying to impress whoever she needed to impress – a room of thirty people or just me, it didn’t matter – but it sickened me too.’

  He paused as though remembering his manners. Was there perhaps something she wanted to say at this point?

  There wasn’t. Rhoda thought he was probably right – she didn’t have quite the years yet for this.

  He took that to be permission to go on.

  ‘There was something ancient about her. I don’t mean in appearance. I mean in what she represented. She went too far back. History should have finished with the likes of her by now. Sometimes when I was making love to her – forgive me, please forgive me, but I have to explain – I felt I was in a sarcophagus making love to a mummy. I thought she would come apart in my hands, under my kisses and caresses, like parchment. Can you be oily and dry? Can you be soft and brittle? Well she could. That was her power over me. And then she would stir, sit up like someone risen from the dead – Cleopatra herself – and shake her jewellery in my face. That jewellery! She would put those hands up to my cheeks and look at me with longing – or was it loathing? – and I’d hear the jewellery clinking and I wanted to tear it off her. Christ, how badly I wanted to do that! Rip it from her throat and drag it out of her ears. All that false beauty, the impossible way she spoke, her contempt for her marriage, her raving about her precious daughters, her people’s tragic past, her pseudo-religiousness, the art she didn’t care about – it’s a miracle I never did strangle her.’