J (40 page)

‘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.

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

‘
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 that 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.

‘I’ll be OK,’ she said, ‘when you’re OK.’

He stopped his pacing and leaned against the stove. ‘Be careful, for Christ’s sake,’ she warned him.

‘What did they see?’ he asked suddenly, as though addressing another matter entirely, as though he had
ust strolled into the room with an incidental question in his mind. ‘I’m not asking what they thought – they thought what they’d been taught to think – but what did they
see
when my hunchbacked grandfather popped his nose out of this cottage to sniff the poisoned air? What did they see when my mother went shopping in her rags? Or when my father crept into the village to sell his candlesticks to the gift shops? Or when you and I, come to that, first went strolling arm in arm through Paradise Valley? What do they see when they see us now?’

‘Who’s “they”?’

He wouldn’t even bother to answer that. She knew who ‘they’ were. ‘They’ were whoever weren’t them. The Ferdies.

‘What do we look like to them, is what I’m asking. Vermin?’