J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘That’s cruel, Ailinn.’

  ‘Yes it is. But what you’ve been doing is cruel. Did you think I’d be grateful when I discovered you’d been digging the dirt on me?’

  ‘It isn’t dirt.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion. But you can hardly deny you’ve been digging.’

  ‘I stumbled upon you, Ailinn, that’s all.’

  ‘Stumbled?’

  For a horrible moment Esme wondered if Ailinn intended to jeer at the way she walked. But that wasn’t what had struck the girl. ‘Stumbled upon me in the course of what line of work, Ez?’

  ‘You could say I’ve been trying to right the wrongs done to your family.’

  ‘Was that your ambition after you met me or before? It makes a difference. Did you know of me before you knew of my “family”, as you laughingly call it, or were you aware of “family” before you’d heard of me?’

  Esme Nussbaum made a gesture suggestive of weighing with her hands. On the one hand this, on the other hand that . . .

  It was not a gesture that satisfied Ailinn. ‘There is something you aren’t telling me. You aren’t my mother, by any chance, are you?’

  Esme experienced a momentary pang. It would have been no terrible thing, would it, being Ailinn’s mother? ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not your mother. I would not have abandoned you had I been.’

  Ailinn was not going to show she’d heard that. ‘Did you know my mother?’

  ‘I did not. I know none of your family. I only know of them. And what I know I’ve passed on to you. There’s nothing else.’

  She felt a fraud as she said these words. It wasn’t that she knew more so much as that she knew less – next to nothing if truth were told. What had she exhumed other than the dry bones of a story of desperation and deceit that Ailinn might with reason have preferred to leave buried? It wasn’t all that long ago she’d been scrutinising the girl’s features for telltale signs of genetic depravity. Viewed from one angle she was no better than a specimen collector. Ailinn had reason to be angry without knowing the half of what Esme was about.

  ‘So the point of all this is what?’ Ailinn asked. ‘Am I the inheritor of a fortune of which you believe yourself entitled to a sizeable percentage? Are you some sort of bounty hunter?’

  Esme wondered if she dared risk saying, ‘In a manner of speaking, yes.’ But while she thought about it Ailinn read her silence. She was on the edge of the bed, swinging her ugly feet. ‘Does this have to do with Kevern?’ she asked. ‘Is there something you require of both of us?’

  ‘Oh, require . . .’

  ‘Expect, hope for, want . . . Choose the verb that best applies. You brought us together, didn’t you? That’s the short of it. You promoted his cause with me from the very start. You looked worried every time we were on the point of breaking up. OK, I accept you’re not my mother. I think I’d know if you were. But it wouldn’t surprise me, given your concern for his welfare – I assume it was because you wanted him to be happy that you did your best to keep us together – it really wouldn’t surprise me now if you turned out to be his.’

  Esme did not this time experience a momentary maternal pang. ‘It’s a funny idea,’ she said, ‘but no, I am not Kevern’s mother. I am of the wrong – how can I best put this: persuasion, denomination, credo? – to be Kevern’s mother.’

  Ailinn stared.

  ‘So you knew Kevern’s mother?’

  ‘Trust me. I did not.’

  ‘But you know her “persuasion”? Does that mean you know something about Kevern’s that he doesn’t?’

  ‘Trust me,’ Esme repeated, taking the girl’s hands between hers. ‘Trust me on the generalities. The details I’ll give you later. Kevern’s mother was who he thought she was. Maybe not “what” he thought she was, but certainly “who”. And I don’t qualify. I’m not his fairy godmother, either, though I think fairy godmothers are not bound by the laws of matrilineality. But you’re right that I wanted you for him. I wanted you for each other. I still want you for each other.’

  ‘Why? Would you like us to have a baby for you or something?’

  The question surprised Esme into giving an answer that surprised her even more. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘as a matter of fact I would.’

  She was always going to have to come out with it, but not in that way, not quite so abruptly and callously. Not yet.

  Ailinn caught her breath. ‘If you’ve been wanting Kevern’s baby so badly you could always have slept with him, you know. I’m not saying I wouldn’t have minded but I think I’d have preferred it to this.’

  ‘I haven’t been wanting Kevern’s baby.’

  ‘So it’s mine you want?’

  Whereupon, because she had nowhere else conversationally to go, and it had to be told sometime, Esme told her that she wanted Ailinn and Kevern to renew the future of their people.

  iv

  ‘How would you feel,’ Ailinn asked him, ‘if you found out we are not together by an act of our wills alone?’

  ‘Is anybody?’

  She didn’t want him to go philosophical on her. ‘What if you didn’t choose me?’ she said. ‘What if I didn’t choose you?’

  ‘I did choose you.’

  ‘You’ve forgotten. The pig auctioneer chose me for you.’

  ‘No, he didn’t. He pointed you out, that was all. An entirely redundant act, as it transpired. I didn’t need you pointing out. I was already well aware of your presence. I was irradiated by it. The fact that his judgement coincided with mine didn’t make it material to mine. If anything, he could have put me off you.’

  ‘In which case his judgement was material to yours.’

  ‘Negatively, but even then not quite.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had nearly been put off me.’

  ‘Isn’t there always a moment of hovering? Is this her or isn’t it? Do I leap or do I wait?’

  ‘I didn’t hover. I leapt.’

  ‘But then you leapt back when I told you your feet were too big.’

  ‘Not for long, though. I was on the phone to you almost immediately, though it took you an eternity to pick up.’ She remembered Ez, telling her to ring him. Ez sitting on her bed. Ez getting in too close and getting on her nerves. Ez playing with their lives.

  ‘Then there you are,’ he said, encircling her with his arms. ‘We chose each other. But what’s this about?’

  ‘Ez.’

  ‘Ez brought us together?’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Well I do now. I guess it makes perfect sense. Ez had something about your past she needed to tell you and feared how you would take it. As she saw it, you needed someone capable of supporting you, someone physically strong, unwavering and emotionally resolute, so she hired the pig man to look out for a likely candidate, and he found me.’

  ‘Someone physically strong, unwavering and emotionally resolute?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This the pig man saw in the middle of a field?’

  ‘Why not? I saw who you were in the middle of a field.’

  He’s going to need all his unwavering emotional resolution now, Ailinn thought.

  ‘There was something about me you didn’t see,’ she said.

  He waved the idea away. There was nothing he hadn’t seen.

  ‘You didn’t see what Ez saw.’

  ‘Ez, Ez . . . why is there so much talk of Ez?’

  They’d been lying down, looking at the ceiling, but now she swung her legs out of bed and went to stand by the window. It was quiet out there, no wind, no gulls, even the blowhole subdued. The sky was low, without colour or promise. ‘God, it can feel dead down here sometimes,’ she said.

  He remembered his mother saying the same. ‘It’s like being in a coffin,’ she said once. ‘With the lid down.’

  Was that before or after the free meat, he wondered.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ his father had answered. ‘At least there’ll be no surprises when they screw you in.’

&
nbsp; His light-touched father.

  He liked watching Ailinn naked at the window. He’d often thought of carving her, not just in miniature on a lovespoon, but as a candlestick maybe. Would he be able to render the responsiveness of her flesh, the reserves of life that were in her flanks, the strength of her legs? The springiness of her that made him believe in life?

  ‘While we’re laying cards on the table,’ he blurted out, ‘my grandfather was a hunchback.’

  She didn’t turn around.

  ‘You never told me that before.’

  ‘I never knew before.’

  ‘So how come you know now?’

  ‘Kroplik told me.’

  ‘How does he know?’

  ‘He knows everything. Like your beloved Ez.’

  ‘Does it bother you?’

  ‘To know I’m from crooked stock? Yes. But Kroplik reckons I should be grateful. It was the hunchback who kept us safe.’

  ‘Safe from what?’

  ‘I don’t know. Whatever.’

  ‘And how does Kroplik say he managed that?’

  ‘By scaring people and being lucky. Apparently you don’t mess with a hunchback. Or at least you don’t in these parts.’

  ‘Do you ever wonder . . .’ she started to say, then relented.

  ‘Do I ever wonder what?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Yes it does. Do I ever wonder what?’

  ‘What you’re doing here.’

  ‘On earth?’

  ‘In Port Reuben.’

  ‘All the time.’

  ‘Would you want to find out?’

  He got up from the bed and moved towards her. He wanted to feel her nakedness pressed into his, the lovely resilience of her buttocks.

  ‘There’s a lot I want to find out,’ he said. ‘But then again there isn’t. Mysteries are always so banal when they’re solved. You’re better off living in uncertainty.’

  ‘You say that, but you couldn’t bear not knowing who broke in here and straightened your rug.’

  ‘No. And now I never will find out.’ This was a silent allusion, that Ailinn was quick to pick up, to the murder of Detective Inspector Gutkind, the gory details of which were the talk of Port Reuben and beyond. Neither spoke about it. Kevern was happy to have him out of their lives, but he didn’t want to put that relief in so many words to Ailinn. He didn’t suppose she’d wonder if he’d done it, but then again there was no reason to plant further anxiety. Who knows what anyone will do in the end? Who would have thought he’d kiss Lowenna Morgenstern? Who would have thought his mother had a secret life? And now Ailinn . . .

  ‘Certainty might be banal, but better that, any time, than the immeasurable stress of uncertainty,’ Ailinn said, reading his mind.

  ‘So you’re pleased to know now how you came to be in an orphanage? You don’t wish that Ez had never told you?’

  ‘Hardly “pleased”, but yes, I believe I am better off for knowing, banal though you consider it all to be.’

  ‘I didn’t say that what happened to you was banal.’

  ‘Don’t apologise. I’m not offended. It is banal. But I would rather know it than not.’

  ‘And you’d rather know that Ez was instrumental in our meeting?’

  ‘Rather it had happened some other way, but rather know than not know that it happened the way it did.’

  ‘We should drink to Ez, then.’

  Was he being sarcastic, or just slow to take the measure of what she was trying to tell him?

  He went downstairs to open a bottle and returned with two full glasses.

  ‘To Ez,’ he said.

  She still couldn’t decide. Sarcastic, or unfeeling, or stupid?

  And then he noticed that Ailinn’s eyes were red. Not with weeping, more with the strain of looking.

  ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.

  And that was when she told him.

  What will it take? The same as it has always taken. The application of a scriptural calumny (in this instance the convergence of two scriptural calumnies) to economic instability, inflamed nationalism, an unemployed and malleable populace in whom the propensity to hero-worship is pronounced, supine government, tedium vitae, a self-righteous and ill-informed élite, the pertinaciousness of old libels – the most consoling of which being that they’d had their chance, these objects of immemorial detestation, chance after chance (to choose love over law, flexibility over intransigence, community over exclusiveness, and to learn compassion from suffering) . . . chance after chance, and – as witness their moving in scarcely more than a generation from objects of immolation to proponents of it – they’d blown them all. Plus zealotry. Never forget zealotry – that torch to the easily inflamed passions of the benighted and the cultured alike. What it won’t take, because it won’t need – because it never needs – is an evil genius to conceive and direct the operation. We have been lulled by the great autocrat-driven genocides of the recent past into thinking that nothing of that enormity of madness can ever happen again – not anywhere, least of all here. And it’s true – nothing on such a scale probably ever will. But lower down the order of horrors, and answering a far more modest ambition, carnage can still be connived at – lesser bloodbaths, minor murders, butchery of more modest proportions.

  From an unwritten letter by Ailinn’s great-grandfather Wolfie Lestchinsky to his daughter Rebecca.

  BOOK THREE

  Meet . . .

  Merowitz, Berowitz, Handelman, Schandelman

  Sperber and Gerber and Steiner and Stone

  Boskowitz, Lubowitz, Aaronson, Baronson,

  Kleinman and Feinman and Freidman and Cohen

  Smallowitz, Wallowitz, Tidelbaum, Mandelbaum

  Levin, Levinsky, Levine and Levi

  Brumburger, Schlumburger, Minkus and Pinkus

  And Stein with an ‘e-i’ and Styne with a ‘y’

  Allan Sherman, Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max

  ONE

  The Least Little Bit of Umbrage

  i

  ‘SO I WAS right all along to think it,’ Kevern said after a silence that seemed to Ailinn to go on for a period of dark time that could not be calculated in minutes or hours or even days . . .

  ‘Right to think what?’ she asked at last before her own life ran out.

  ‘That Ferdie didn’t like me. Ferdie has never liked me.’

  It was four o’clock in the morning, the time no living thing should be awake. There was not a sound from the sea where Kevern had looked for seals and not found any – drowned were they? drowned in some communal act of self-murder? – and where he imagined that even the fish, after eating well, must be now sleeping. They had tried talking in bed but Kevern needed to be able to pace about, so they had gone downstairs to the little kitchen. Ailinn sat at the table in her dressing gown, absent-mindedly banging her fists together. Kevern made tea, walked up and down, and made more tea. They had toasted all the bread they had and eaten all the biscuits. Ailinn couldn’t face sardines or pilchards so Kevern opened tins of baked beans, cherry tomatoes, tuna in olive oil, mushroom soup and sweetcorn. These he mixed in a large bowl to which he added salt, pepper and paprika. No thanks, Ailinn had said. He was not wearing any clothes. In response to Ailinn’s concern that he was cold, and then that he would scald himself, he said he wanted to be cold and wanted to scald himself. How you see me is how I feel, he told her.

  Vulnerable, she could understand, but she wanted him to know he wasn’t – they weren’t – in any danger.

  ‘Can Ez be trusted?’ he asked.

  ‘To do what?’

  ‘To keep quiet.’

  It was a difficult question to answer. ‘No one means us any harm,’ she repeated.

  He laughed. ‘Don’t forget Ferdie. Never forget Ferdie.’

  She was not inclined to follow him into Ferdie territory. She knew that he was preparing to go through the names of everyone he thought had ever harmed him or meant him ill – a list th
at could take them through many more nights like this – and still at the end of it scratch his head and say he didn’t understand what he’d done to offend them. It appeared to give him consolation to go on saying ‘I don’t think Ferdie likes me,’ and she feared he would repeat it and repeat it until she was able to direct him on to another course.

  ‘There is no point even trying to make light of any of this,’ she said. ‘I know that you only joke when you are at your most anxious.’

  ‘oking? Who’s oking?’

  He no sooner said those words than he knew he had to cross his js no longer.

  Could this be called a liberation, then? It was too early to say.

  He was past the point of marvelling at how much made sense to him now. He had always known . . . that was to be his defence against the horrors of surprise . . . he had always known really, at some level, below consciousness, beyond cognition, he had always known somewhere . . . not everything, of course not everything, not the half of it, but enough, for the news to be as much confirmation as shock . . . though whether that was confirmation of the worst of what he’d half known, or the best, or just something in the middle, he was yet to find out. But he hadn’t been to sleep and was wandering his kitchen naked, drinking tea and eating bean and tuna soup, so it had to be admitted he was not exactly taking it lightly.

  By comparison, Ailinn, banging her fists together like cymbals, was relaxation itself.

  ‘Ferdie didn’t like you, either,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Darling, I don’t give a shit what Ferdie thought.’

  ‘You should. The world is full of Ferdies.’

  ‘Your world is full of Ferdies.’

  ‘So you’re OK about all this, is that what you’re telling me?’

  She had put herself in a false position. No she didn’t feel OK about all this, but then Kevern still didn’t know the full extent of it. She couldn’t hit him with more than she’d hit him with already. This was part one. Part two would come when she thought he was good and ready. Give me time, she’d told Ez. Wouldn’t it be best to strike while the iron’s hot, Ez had said, but the metaphor was too close to the literal truth. It would have been like branding and braining him. I’ll need time, she insisted. As for what she did tell Kevern about – their sudden consanguinity – then yes, the revelation did feel more a blessing than a curse to her. But however their histories had converged, their antecedent narratives were different. To put it brutally, she had none. Ez had simply filled the blanks in for her. And something was better than nothing. Whereas for Kevern, well he had to set about reconfiguring a densely peopled chronicle, reimagining not just himself but every member of his family. And pacing the kitchen with no clothes, trying for jokes that weren’t funny even by his family’s standards of deranged unfunniness, he didn’t appear so far to be making a good job of it.