J (14 page)

I tapped my nose. ‘A
regular
girlfriend.’

To whom his intentions, they enquired, after a long, bored silence, are what? It struck me as an odd question. How did I know what his intentions were? Honourable, I guessed, given the man. I was requested, in no uncertain terms, to do better than
guess
. I happen to believe that an intention is a bit like a predisposition to cancer or dementia – essentially genetic. Honourable father, honourable son. Same the world over, even China. Honolable father, honolable son. But families, strictly speaking, are not my territory. To do parents and grandparents you have to have clearance at the very highest level. Mooching about in public records is not generally encouraged. This is a free society, so long as you don’t plan to travel – and people are only prevented from leaving the country (or indeed from entering it) for their own good – so access to everything is in principle available to everyone. But the past – especially when it is particularised: the story of you and me and how we got here, the story of Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen and whether or not he has inherited the honolable gene – is itself another country. And when it comes to such a country, the powers that be would rather we did not go there. Say sorry and have done is the wisest course, they believe, and I agree with them. Danger lurks in nostalgia. The slogans printed at the foot of the notepaper on which I write my reports – LET SLEEPING DOGS LIE, THE OVEREXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING, YESTERDAY IS A LESSON WE CAN LEARN ONLY BY LOOKING TO TOMORROW – are reminders rather than threats. So no measures are taken against anyone who does not heed them. Buildings are not barred to you. Doors are not closed in your face. ‘Yes, of course’ will be the polite rejoinder to any request you make to inspect certificates of birth or death, or voter lists, or even newspapers dating too far back. But the forms you fill in are never read by anyone. Calls are not returned, applications are lost, the person you were talking to in the morning won’t be there in the afternoon. If you decide it is easier to forget about it, you will be met with smiles all round. A bottle of champagne tied with a blue ribbon might even be sent to you in the post, together with a note saying ‘Sorry we couldn’t help. We tried.’ But even without these precautions, the consequence of
OPERATION ISHMAEL
– that great beneficent name change to which the people ultimately gave their wholehearted consent – is that tracing lineage is not only as good as impossible, it is unnecessary. We are all one big happy family now. Zermanskys, Cohens, Rosenthals (that’s the head of the academy: Eoghan Rosenthal), Feigenblats (Rozenwyn Feigenblat is the college librarian, and something of a looker I must say) – we acknowledge a kinship which we all tacitly know to be artificial but which works. Apply this simple test: when was the last time anyone was picked on for his name? Precisely. ‘We are all Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky!’ my students would shout were anyone to persecute me for whatever reason.

We are all Eoghan Rosenthal!

We are all Kevern Cohen!

We are all Lowenna Morgenstern, God save her soul – or at least we were.

If there is anyone alive who is old enough to have an inkling what his parents were called before
OPERATION ISHMAEL
he will wisely not remember it.

I have heard tell, or at least I have read, that – after an initial period of understandable reluctance, or misapprehension as I would rather think of it – the renaming turned into a month-long street party, young and old dancing with one another in the parks, strangers embracing, people saying goodbye to their old names as they waited for the official documents that would apprise them of their new. A few lucky ones won the right by televised lottery to choose their own from an approved list. But whether they chose or they were given, people entered into the spirit of the change. It was as though they’d been hypnotised. ‘You will sleep,’ they were told, ‘you will fall into a deep carnivalesque sleep wherein you will dance and make merry. At the count of ten you will awake and while you will remember who you were, you will not remember what you were called. One, two . . .’ Not literally that, but similar. A moral hypnosis. For our own good. And as with private memories, so with public records: they have been wiped clean. It is sometimes argued, in lowered voices, that if we can’t be sure about our neighbours’ antecedents, we expose ourselves to . . .

To what? Alien influences?

Well, it was precisely in order to ensure that such a phrase would never be heard again (and I confess I’m as guilty as any other red-blooded patriot when it comes to itching every now and then to use it) that
OPERATION ISHMAEL
was instituted. It granted a universal amnesty, dispensing once and for all with invidious distinctions between the doers and the done-to. Time must close over the events, and there is no better way to ensure that than to bring everyone together retroactively. Now that we are one family, and cannot remember when we were anything else, there can be no question of a repetition of whatever happened, if it did, because there is no one left to do to again whatever was or wasn’t done.

We are all Rozenwyn Feigenblat!

(We are all at least – I confide to you, dear diary – dying for a piece of her . . .)

While no one is listening, allow me to admit that it took a certain ruthlessness to bring us to this point of unanimity. I neither condemn
WHAT HAPPENED
nor condone it. Let the fact that I was not yet born prove my impartiality. But it needs to be said that we were not alone in our perplexity. What to do with those about whom something needed to be done; how to put a brake on their ambitions; how to express our displeasure with their foreign policy (bizarre that they should have had a foreign policy given that they were foreigners themselves and had what they called a country only by taking someone else’s); how to make safe again a world they’d gravely endangered with their migrations, military occupations, and finally weapons of mass destruction – this was something every other civilised country had to make up its mind about, and it is not without some backward-looking pride that I say we made up ours before anybody else. For which credit must go to my fellow professionals – vice chancellors of conscience-stricken universities and professors of the benign arts, painters, writers, actors, journalists, junior untenured academic staff, without whom the campaign to drive them from the face of the earth, to make of them vagabonds and fugitives, a pariah people cursed in every mouth, would not have been conducted in so civilised a manner.

Was there mob violence? I wasn’t there, but such a thing does not accord with the view I entertain of this most moderate of countries, home to lyric poets and painters of serene and timeless landscapes. That gross expostulatory rhetoric that has normalised brutality and supremacism in other countries has never disfigured our speech. We do not smudge our canvases in rage. We do not saw at our violins. Whether or not that class of individuals who are the first to throw stones and start fires enjoyed direct acquaintance with the lyric poetry and landscape painting to which they are heirs is immaterial. The effect filtered down to them in language and the habits of contemplation. All of which assures me that, no, there could not have been barbarity. Just the gentle pressure that civilisation itself can exert, the articulated outrage of cultivated people who would not themselves have countenanced, least of all encouraged, inhumanity. Why would they, with so many of the exalted tasks of culture to perform – paintings to finish, lines to learn, lectures to prepare – choose to whip the multitude into acts of ferocity inimical to their own temperaments? Where, apart from any other consideration would they have found the time for it?

‘Oh, there’s always time,’ Rozenwyn Feigenblat bolshily remarked once, when we happened to fall into conversation on this very subject.

I took that to mean that as librarian she knew how much sitting about staring into space we professors and painters are capable of. But then a librarian is not an artist; in her capacity as a filer and notator she will not have grasped the contribution that apparent indolence makes to the creative act.

For an artist, my dear, I wanted to say, to be unoccupied is sacred. What might look like doing nothing is in fact the long wait for beauty to find us. But I could see how that might be misinterpreted. ‘If you mean that we sometimes appear bored,’ I began instead . . .

She shook her pretty head. ‘I’m not talking about boredom,’ she said. ‘I’m talking about mischief.’

She made it sound like pranks.

‘Sexual mischief?’ I asked, not wanting to sound too curious.

‘Intellectual mischief.’

Not being sure I could trust myself longer in her alluring presence, I let it go at that. Though she left me feeling she had more to say.

What she also left me feeling was that someone should be keeping an eye on her. A position for which, were it vacant, I’d think hard about applying.

But back to Kevern Cohen. What it came down to for me, at least, was that the only reliable way of uncovering Kevern Cohen’s intentions vis-à-vis his new sweetheart – short of asking him outright, and I wasn’t prepared to do that – was to observe him at close quarters. To which end I invited the lovebirds over for dinner. It would be on his day for visiting the college and I suggested, since he’d mentioned her, that he bring Ailinn down with him, which he was wary of doing to begin with – wariness being his first response to everything – but on discussing it with her he changed his mind. No doubt she wanted to meet his friends, of whom he has few and I can just about be counted one. A half-friend, say. A well-wisher, anyway. An extravagantly beautiful woman, Ailinn, with a tumult of dark hair, like charred straw, and darting, watchful, hawk-like features. She called to mind a seirene, one of those bird women who are painted attacking Odysseus and his crew on vases I have inspected in the National Museum. I am not thinking of the most familiar image, which shows a seirene swooping head first at the ship, her talons at the ready, but rather one of the more serenely musical temptresses, striking her drum or plucking at her harp, surprised, if anything, that Odysseus should want to resist. As Kevern plainly didn’t.

‘Besotted’ was the word my wife and I hit on quite separately, though Demelza did accuse me of stealing it from her.

Ailinn brought us a delicate bouquet of her paper flowers. ‘Kitsch, I know,’ she said, ‘but I make them and could find no fresh flowers in the shops.’

I appreciated the thought and the apology. It must have been difficult for her, taste-wise, visiting the house of a professor of the Benign Visual Arts. I told her they were lovely and pretended to smell them. ‘Haven’t seen you so skittish in a long while,’ Demelza said to me as we were making coffee in the kitchen. ‘A pretty face and you go as soppy as Petroc.’

Petroc was our Labrador. Petroc Rothschild . . .

Not really, that was just our little off-colour joke . . .

‘I am happy for them in their happiness,’ was my reply. She pinched my arm. I let out a little cry. ‘What’s that for?’ ‘You know what that’s for. Being happy for
them
in
their
happiness. Liar! Why don’t you just lick her face?’ ‘Bitch!’ I said. ‘Prick!’ was her retort.

That night, over an acrimonious nightcap of Benedictine and brandy, we discussed divorce. Discussion had always been something we were good at. You could say it was the glue of our conjugality.

Before they left, Ailinn did say one thing that struck me as surprising. ‘Sometimes,’ she mused, in answer to my asking how she found it down here, ‘this part of the country seems full of eyes.’

‘Eyes?’

‘Watching eyes.’

‘Really?’ I said, opening my face to her. ‘How do you mean?’

Kevern, too, appeared taken aback by her words. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Something about the way they look at you here. It’s not disapproval exactly. It’s not even suspicion. It’s more as though they’re waiting for you to make a mistake or show your real nature.’

‘Isn’t that just because these communities were cut off from the rest of the country for so long?’ I said. ‘I feel they look at me like that too. They say you have to have lived here for ten generations before they begin to relax with you.’

‘I don’t want them to relax with me. I’m not looking for friendship,’ she said. ‘It’s the sense you get that someone’s always on your heels. Not following you – just
there
. Waiting for you to give yourself away.’

I noted that for later speculation.
Give yourself away
, eh, young lady. So what are
you
concealing?