J

by Howard Jacobson

Rhoda finally found some words. ‘So you got someone else to strangle her for you?’

  He took a moment to reply. Measuring the silence. ‘I let the gallery be burned.’

  ‘With her in it?’

  ‘With the child in it. There were living quarters there. She liked staying there sometimes. It was a treat for her. She could play at shop. Her mother even let her talk to clients sometimes, about the art. She thought it was a great joke. “Out of the mouths of babes,” she’d say.’

  Rhoda retreated into silence again. Let the gallery be burned, did he say? Let? She didn’t want to know whether that meant he had invited arsonists in or had actually started the fire himself and then failed to put it out. Whatever else, she didn’t want to picture him putting a match to the building, knowing there was a child inside. A child who, had she lived, would have been about the age she was now. She didn’t want to show her fear.

  ‘It was strange, you know,’ he went on, in a different tone altogether now, almost matter-of-fact, ‘it was as though it wasn’t me doing it. Or if it was me it was me doing it at some other time. Any time in the last, I don’t know, two, three thousand years I could have done the same – seen the flames, shaken my head and walked away.’

  Very well, he was mad. That somehow made her feel better and even, strangely, less frightened. She had her sanity to defeat him with.

  ‘What do you mean you could have done it two thousand years ago? Are you telling me you’re some sort of a vampire?’

  ‘I’m telling you my actions weren’t mine alone. I was just repeating what had been done countless times before, and I don’t doubt for the same reasons. Would you understand me if I said I’d been culturally primed to do it?’

  She brought her hand to her mouth and laughed bitterly up her sleeve, the way everyone did at school when an elder made a preposterous statement. ‘Would you understand me if I said I’d been culturally primed to refuse to do my homework?’ she gathered the boldness to ask.

  He smiled at her smartness. ‘Yes, I’d understand and say I hope that’s the worst thing you will ever be culturally primed to do.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t. You’d say I was letting myself off.’

  ‘It was a necessity,’ he said. ‘There are such things. It’s you or them. You can’t both breathe the same air. Some people are too different. I am who I am because I am not them, you tell yourself. That’s what you fall in love with at first – this clean break with yourself. Because if you are not them, they are not you. But then you realise it isn’t anything about them that you love, it’s the prospect of your own annihilation. They say before the executed die they fall in love with their executioner. Maybe had she not told me our affair was over, that she’d found a man more suitable to her needs – a financier, I supposed, or a painter, one of her own, anyway – I’d have accepted death at her hands as my consummation. But her timing was wrong. She missed her chance. The world changed while she wasn’t looking. One day the streets were quiet, the next the mob was out, shouting, burning, killing. I see from your expression that you know nothing of any mob. You were too young then and you’ve been well schooled since. But trust me, the gentlest people were suddenly behaving like animals. Was I part of it? Yes and no. I felt what they felt, they felt what I felt, though I believed then and believe now that I acted alone and for my own motives. But the violence didn’t surprise me. You’d think the sight of people behaving so unlike themselves would surprise you but it doesn’t. Violence quickly comes to look quite normal. Perhaps what I saw was a reflection of the violence in my heart. Perhaps I saw it as more violent than it was because I wanted it to be so. But I couldn’t have made up the things that happened. I didn’t join in. I even risked my own skin to get to her, to plead with her. Give me another chance. That’s what she had reduced me to. Give me another chance! I’ll do whatever you like. I’ll change. As though I could ever change into anything she wanted for more than fifteen minutes. As though I could ever be anything but a convenience to her. I ran to the house but found it closed up. Good, I thought, at least they’ve got away. But then it occurred to me that they might be at the gallery, which at least had shutters. That was two miles away. I ran the whole distance. The shutters weren’t down. The crowds had not got that far yet, though the usual boycotters were outside, noisier and more menacing than ever. With the strength that comes from desperation I pushed my way through them and hammered on the window. Little Jesse appeared. Even at that age she was her mother all over again. Same mournful eyes, same heavy cheeks, same rude flirtatiousness. Same indifference to danger. She was even wearing her mother’s high-heeled shoes. “Mum’s out,” she mouthed. I told her to let me in. I’d wait. She said, “Mum doesn’t want to see you any more.” “What about you?” I shouted. “Don’t you want to see me any more?” She shrugged. Easy come, easy go. I might as well have been a servant or the gardener. A person of no consequence though I’d petted and played with her and bought her presents she didn’t need. She eyed me sardonically. Her mother’s child. Don’t be pathetic, I could see she was thinking. I asked who was in the gallery with her. She said no one. She could have been lying but I chose to see her being left alone as proof of her mother’s callousness, and as a sign. Nine years old and left to fend for herself. What does that tell you? So should I have cared for her more than her faithless, so-called doting mother did? Whether I could have done anything I don’t know. I could have tried to spirit her away. I could have tried to reason with the crowd – There’s only a child in there. Only an insolent, superior little girl, but a child nonetheless. Unlikely to have made any difference but I could have tried. But the shouts and smell of smoke had a powerful effect on me. I don’t say they excited me, but they gave a sort of universality to what I was feeling. I am who I am because I am not them – well, I was not alone in feeling that. We were all who we were because we were not them. So why did that translate into hate? I don’t know, but when everyone’s feeling the same thing it can appear to be reasonableness. Can you understand that? What everyone’s doing becomes a common duty. Besides, it wasn’t for me to play God. These people had their own God, I thought – let Him look after her. So I did nothing when she turned her back on me. Didn’t bang on the window. Didn’t call her. Didn’t warn her. I stood outside for a short while, staring at the inflammatory words painted on the window – GALILEE GALLERIES – as though in a trance. Could have been thirty seconds, could have been thirty minutes, then I walked away.’

  He kept his eyes averted from Rhoda’s, showing her his long, brittle hands. The hands he hadn’t employed to help a child. What did he want her to do – kiss them or break them off at the wrists?

  ‘And now you think it’s my duty to let you replace her with me,’ she said. She was on her feet, dressed and ready to leave, feeling sick but strong, with her school bag under arm. ‘Well you’ve got another think coming.’

  She was relieved to make it out safely on to the street.

  ii

  She didn’t repeat a word to anyone of what she’d been told. There was no point. For one thing, to have spoken of it would have compromised her – what was she doing talking to her teacher about his murderous, obsessional love life in a hotel room? – and for another she didn’t expect to be believed. She wasn’t sure how much of it she believed herself. He could have made the whole thing up to impress her, or made the second half up to exact an imaginary revenge. You can murder in your thoughts, she knew that. And even if she’d been believed – what then? Where was the crime? What law do you break by walking away? She didn’t know much about what had gone on when she was ten, but she’d heard adults talking and knew the slate had been wiped clean. So long as you joined in the chorus of saying sorry, you were in the clear. The past was the past and brought automatic absolution.

  As for him, she hoped fervently that he would quit the school, but he didn’t. He didn’t ask her to go to a hotel with him again either. He just did what he was good at and looked away.

  If he
r presence made him anxious, he concealed it well. She, however, grew morose and began to do badly at school. No one knew why, but she lost interest in her studies and left before she had achieved what had been expected of her. Whereas he appeared, if anything, to prosper. Good divinity teachers were hard to come by.

  Not long afterwards, at a concert given by Necessary Opposites, she met Compton who repelled her. The degree to which he made her flesh creep excited her. He was opposite to everyone she cared about, opposite to everything she admired and loved. It was marry him or kill him. And, in anticipation of her daughter’s thinking, she saw that it would have been literal-minded of her to kill him.

  She didn’t tell Compton about her affair with a murderer or a liar or both. She didn’t want his hands on her experience, she didn’t want to hear him say that the murdered girl got what was owing to her. She was angry enough. Nor did she tell Esme when she was of an age to understand. In Esme’s case it wasn’t necessary; she picked up the essentials without words needing to be exchanged. There was certainly some rage in her that Rhoda proudly believed was her doing. She’d instilled an appetite for justice that was like a hunger in her own belly. Esme, she was confident, would fight the good fight for her. Esme would show courage where she hadn’t. Esme would make someone pay.

  NINE

  The Celestial Bandleader

  i

  ESME NUSSBAUM NEVER did go back to her old office. But fragments of it came to her. She hadn’t been as alone as she’d thought. They were slow and watchful, but first one and then another of her ex-colleagues took up the challenge implicit in the report she had produced before her accident. She was right. Something had to be done to curtail the quarrelsomeness that was poisoning the family, the workplace, the schoolyard, and society at large. It would be a while before they would catch up with her more recent thinking, but within five years it had become acceptable to admit there was a problem to be solved. Five years after that, though still shaky on her legs, she was leading a team charged with putting back what had been taken away.

  At the first meeting she addressed as head of the Commission for Restitution she spelled out the problems that lay ahead.

  ‘We cannot any longer go on deploying euphemisms,’ she declared. ‘We have to call a spade a spade. If we are to put back what has been taken away we must restore its human name. These were people. How do you put back people who, in whatever circumstances or for whatever motives, were annihilated?’

  She thought the question was rhetorical but a couple of hands went up.

  ‘I am not,’ she said, ‘looking for immediate answers. We have research to do. But I will take a couple of suggestions to kick us off.’

  The first was to go looking in other countries where comparable destruction had either not taken place at all, or had been partial. The second was to come up with an alternative necessary opposite – some other ethnic or religious group that could stand in as hate object for that which had been obliterated. ‘Couldn’t something be done with the Chinese?’ someone asked.

  In answer to the first, Esme doubted whether, even if such people could be found, they’d be reckless enough to quit the places of safety in which they’d settled. And supposing that some were game, they were sure to be adventurers and chancers, misfits and counterfeiters and opportunists, the last people she thought suitable to fill the void that had been left. What no one wanted were more riots within a generation.

  In answer to the second, she was firm that the mutual suspicion needed to restore the country’s equipoise of hate was not a moveable feast. Difference, which after all was easy to come by, was not in itself enough. So, with respect, ‘no’ to the Chinese who, though they had always kept themselves to themselves, and had never, for that reason, won the love of the indigenous population, were too unalike to do the job. She was undeviating on this. Alternative objects of suspicion couldn’t simply be plucked out of their fractious society at will, or appointed by diktat, on the assumption that any old hostility or incomprehension would do. She needed her auditors to mark her words and mark them well: You have to see a version of yourself – where you’ve come from or where you might, if you aren’t careful, end up – before you can do the cheek-to-cheek of hate. Family lineaments must be discerned. A reflection you cannot bear to see. An echo you cannot bear to hear. In other words, you must have chewed on the same bone of moral philosophy, subscribed to a similar spirituality and even, at some point in the not too distant past, have worshipped at the same shrines. It was difference where there was so much that was similar that accounted for the unique antipathy of which they were in search. And only one people with one set of prints fitted that bill.

  As for the question of whether they – this ‘version of ourselves’ – would reciprocate our hatred, why it was no question at all. They were the mirror image of our hostility. They too saw the family resemblance and were fascinated and appalled. True, some had been more easily assimilable than others. They fell in love with those who miscomprehended them – the miscomprehension being a fatal allure in itself. They embraced the culture that vilified and disfigured them. Melted to the music and fainted away before the fastidious beauty of the words. But they had solved their own problem and in doing so had solved the first of Esme’s. They had disappeared into the landscape, become their opposites, long before the time that concerned her and her team. For the remainder, if any could be found, the orchestra had only to start up for the dance to begin again.

  I feel like a celestial bandleader, Esme thought.

  A simple reiteration of a previously dismissed thought was what put Esme’s commission on a new track. The thought that, WHATEVER HAD HAPPENED, not everyone could have been destroyed. No operation could have been so successful. Some would of course have escaped. But some, too, would surely have hidden. Not all the country had been up in arms. There were places where feelings had not run so high and blood had not been so plentifully spilled. Out of kindness of heart, principle, godliness, or just the obduracy that flourishes away from big towns and capital cities – that dogged refusal to go along with the majority – people would have offered help, given shelter, taken at least a frightened child in. There was no point in being overly optimistic. The chance of finding entire families living peaceably on rocky outcrops where they’d been hiding out for generations was slim. But failing that, could it be that there was not a single man and single woman of pure descent to be discovered somewhere in a population of almost one hundred million people? For no more was necessary – just one single man and one single woman, subject to rigorous authentication and in reasonable health, and it could all begin again.

  I feel like Noah, Esme thought.

  ii

  Had she been in better health herself, she’d have remained in charge of the commission. But when her mother died – her poor angry mother who never got to meet a man she liked – Esme knew she had to change the circumstances of her life. She longed for clean air and her damaged limbs needed the exercise of country walks. Working in the field, in both senses, would suit her better, she decided. And by her own logic, the more far-flung that field, the more likely she was to find what she was looking for. Fossil-hunting she called it.

  She put her father in a home, reminding him that his senescence was punishment for his nature, and travelled north. The fossil-hunting did not go well at first. She laughed at her own naivety. Did she expect she would find her necessary opposite sitting up in a field, like a hare at dusk, waiting to be seen? Did she think a family of them would roll up at the public house where she liked to drink a tomato juice before going home to make herself a salad, and wonder what had taken her so long? And would she recognise them when she saw them, anyway?

  It was in the nature of the problem that she had never, of course – knowingly, at least – met any. She had done a fair amount of reading but wasn’t sure about the reliability of the sources she consulted. A children’s story from the previous century, for example, cited as distinguishing features
the puffy lips, the fleshy eyelids, the low, receding forehead, the large ears like the handles of a coffee cup – eine Kaffeetasse – the short arms, the bow-leggedness, the shuffling gait, the jabbering voice, the sickly-sweet odour – I shouldn’t have too much trouble noticing if one of those stumbles past, Esme laughed. From more recent publications she learnt about the drooping eyes and jowly faces, the thinning hair, the thick eyeglasses, the large floppy breasts (on the men as well as the women). Best of all – she read – throw a handful of coins in a pool, the person quickest to dive in is the person you’re looking for. Well she wasn’t going to do that. But then what reason was there to believe they would still look and act as they had two or three generations earlier? If any had survived was it not likely that they’d have taken care to alter their appearance and demeanour, or more likely still that, exiled from their communities, they’d have assumed the manners and lineaments of their neighbours, and not only forgotten what they were supposed to look like but who they were supposed to be? I could be living next to one and not know, Esme realised. I could be living next door to a whole family and they might not know.

  She wasn’t, of course, the only person looking, even in as remote a place as Edenhope where she had decided, in her own words, to set up camp. She debriefed agents on a regular basis, sometimes getting them to report to her in person, sometimes by utility-phone conference call. Some she felt she could rely on more than others, and many had not been told who in fact they were looking for. They were paid to keep their eyes open, that was all. For who? For what? Simply for anyone behaving strangely, out of character with the community, anyone local people thought suspicious, of dubious provenance. For a multitude of reasons, but most of all so as not to set up the wrong sort of expectations, Esme omitted all mention of slanting foreheads and shuffling gait. If these lesser agents supposed they were hunting down such minor infractions against the Present as heirloom hoarding or spending too much time in reference libraries then so much the better. Softlee softlee catchee money. Monkey, beg your pardon. She didn’t want any possibles scared off by unsubtle, overenthusiastic investigation. And a reference library, that immemorial refuge of the dispossessed, was not a bad place to be looking, little help as the limited archives available would give those wondering who they were and where they’d come from.