J

by Howard Jacobson

  It was a new, rare sight to Kevern and to Ailinn – these idly perambulating gold-ringed men in keffiyehs, paler-skinned, Kevern imagined, than their grandparents must have been, but still with those stern, warrior profiles he had been educated to idealise. The noble generosity of the Arab was as much a given in the citizenship classes Kevern had taken at school, as the free spontaneity of the Afro-Caribbean and the honest industriousness of the Asian. As for the chaste obedience of the women, that was still evident in the modesty of their dress.

  ‘Nice,’ Kevern commented, ‘to see some black.’

  Ailinn said nothing.

  As black as ravens, they seemed to her, but nothing like so purposeful, covered from head to foot, only their slow eyes and the gold heels of their shoes visible. She noted with amazement the docility of their bearing as they trailed a step or two behind their men, talking among themselves. Some wheeled perambulators, but in general there were few children. Where was the point in children? And where, anyway, were the nannies? How did it feel, she wondered, to live this privileged life of no design, like a protected species which could forage unimpeded for whatever it liked but with no nest to take its findings back to.

  Some of the men smoked hookahs in the lounge of the hotel, morose, looking occasionally at their watches but never at their women who sat staring at their jewelled utility phones, bemused, waiting for them to ring or perform some other once sacred but now forgotten function – totems that had lost their potency. The women allowed their fingers idly to play across the decommissioned keypads. The men too were fidgety, their fingers never far from their prayer beads.

  ‘You should get a set of those, they could calm your nerves,’ Ailinn whispered, as they waited for a porter to take their luggage to their rooms. They were travelling light and could have carried their own, but the porters needed employment and where, anyway, was the hurry?

  ‘Are you implying I’m a fretter?’

  ‘You? A fretter!’ she laughed, holding on to his arm, then wondering whether, in such a place, it was disrespectful of her to stand so close to a man.

  After he’d shown them to their room the porter took Kevern to one side and asked him if there were gramophone records, CDs or videos he was looking for. Bootleg blues bands, rock and roll, comedy – he knew where to lay his hands on anything. Kevern shook his head. What about books that had fallen out of print, bootleg tickets to underground cabarets, souvenir passports of those who hadn’t got away before WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED happened, belts and badges worn by the hate gangs of the time, incitement posters, pennants, cartoons, signed confessions . . .?

  Kevern wanted to know who would want such things. The porter shrugged. ‘Collectors,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ Kevern said. ‘No, thank you,’ remembering the amount of contraband music and words belonging to his father that was hidden away in his loft. It hadn’t occurred to him any of it could be worth money.

  The bedroom was, or at least had been, ornate. The bed was a four-poster. The carpet vermilion and gold, the drapes similar, sentimental photographs of famous department stores with queues outside adorned the wall. A large bath sat in the middle of the bathroom on gilded griffin’s claws, now broken and discoloured. It will topple, Kevern thought, if we get into it together. He didn’t like the look of the towels either: though they must once have been sumptuous, each one large enough to wrap an entire bath-oiled family in, they now hung, grey and textureless, over rusted rails.

  He went to the window and gazed out towards the park. At school he had read descriptions of the Necropolis written by post-apocalyptic fantasists of a generation before. They were published as an anthology intended as light relief for the pupils, a propaganda joke showing just how wrong people could be when they let their imaginations – and indeed their politics – run away with them. But the anthology was later withdrawn, not because the post-apocalyptics had been proved right, but because the truth was not quite the resplendent rebuttal of their vision it should have been. Kevern remembered the gleaming vistas of technological frenzy dreamed up by one of the writers, citizens of the Metropolis of Zog sitting on brightly coloured tubular benches conversing with their neighbours via bubbles of video speech transmitted faster than the speed of sound by satellite. They had given up talking to one another because talk was too cumbersome. Another envisioned the population living in cages underground, dispersing their seed by means of a carefully regulated system of electronic cartridges which travelled through translucent pipes, along with electricity and water. Otherwise they neither enjoyed nor wanted any other form of human contact. The alternative vision was of devastation – open sewers strewn with the debris of a consumer society that no longer possessed the will or the wherewithal to consume, abandoned motor vehicles with their doors pulled off, electricity pylons which seemed to have marched into the city from the country like an invading army and were now uprooted, bent double like dinosaurs in pain or flat on their backs like . . . Kevern couldn’t remember what they were like, only that everything was like something else, as though what had destroyed the city was not disease or overpopulation or an asteroid but a fatal outbreak of febrile fantasy-fiction metaphor.

  One way or another the destruction wrought by electronics haunted all these writers’ imaginations. So much ingenuity and invention bringing so little happiness. In their own way, though, they were optimistic and triumphalist, no matter that they pretended otherwise, each recording the victory of the writers’ analogical fancy over nature.

  What these writers gloomily and even hysterically prophesied, Kevern thought, was in fact a fulfilment of their private wishes.

  Nothing gleamed in the city Kevern looked out on. The people on the streets had not turned into walking computer screens, riding translucent vehicles that sped along on tracks of spun steel. But neither was it a wasteland that could at least quicken the heart with horror. Yes, the bedecked cranes appeared melancholy, reminding him of drunks fallen asleep in doorways after a party, and after a while the brightly coloured retro clothing of the pedestrians and shoppers began to show as desperate, as though they were waiting for a carnival that was never going to start, but traffic lights worked and, though the cars looked even older than his, they still had their doors, their lights, their windscreen wipers, and – Kevern could clearly hear them from five floors up and through closed windows – their horns. There was no congestion, no sense of drivers fleeing an infected city in one direction, or rushing to join the techno-mayhem from another, so the horn-blowing must have denoted more indurated irascibility than specific impatience. Over in the park, men hooded like Eskimos – saying what things were ‘like’ went with the apocalyptic territory, Kevern realised – walked ill-tempered dogs, tugging at their leads, wanting them to do what they had come to the park to do and then be off. Every now and then a dog and his master relieved themselves in tandem. Though only the man appeared to relieve himself in anger. An occasional better-off-looking person walking a better-off-looking dog kept his distance, not afraid exactly, but routinely careful. Neither kind appeared to be taking pleasure in the outing. Kevern kept watching, expecting to see an eruption of hostilities, but nothing eventuated. A quiet moroseness prevailed, that was all. An all-pervading torpor that belied the colours, bored the dogs, and made the very light appear exhausted.

  Kevern guessed that if you wanted to see blood spilled you had to wait till it got dark.

  The pavements on the main roads were unswept, but they weren’t the debris-strewn sewers piled with wreckage he’d read about in his school anthology. It wasn’t the apocalypse.

  There weren’t any powerful similes to be made. Nothing was like anything.

  So what was it? It was a city seen through a sheet of scratched Perspex. For all the variegations of hue, it had no outlines. People blurred into one another. Kevern wondered if a wife would recognise her husband if she ran into him anywhere but in their home. Would either miss the other if they never returned home? And yet they had passed
three cinemas and two theatres on the drive in, all advertising romantic musicals. Love – that was the universal subject. Love to play guitars to. Love to dance to. Love to sing about. Old and young, rich and poor, the indigenous and the children of immigrants – love!

  Ailinn joined him at the window. ‘Well one thing this does do,’ she said, ‘is make you miss the Friendly Fisherman.’

  He couldn’t tell if she was exaggerating.

  They decided against going out to eat, ordered the Lebanese they’d promised each other – it turned out to be no more than a cold plate of aubergine mushed in a dozen different ways – and went to bed.

  The mattress dipped in the middle.

  ‘Christ!’ Kevern said ruminatively, looking up at the flaking ceiling.

  Ailinn agreed with him. ‘Christ!’

  iii

  They took a late breakfast – mixed mushed aubergines again – in a room that must once have suggested a pasha’s pavilion (mosaic tiled floor, mirrors on the ceiling, carpets on the walls), but now looked bored with itself – a street-corner bric-a-brac shop going out of business. Sensing that the permanent residents of the hotel weren’t looking for conversation, Kevern and Ailinn kept their eyes lowered. They were served mint tea which Kevern failed to pour from the requisite height. ‘It tastes better if you aerate it like this,’ the only other person in the breakfast room not in a keffiyeh called across from a nearby table. He was holding his own glass teapot aloft as though he meant to take a shower from it. ‘And you get more foam.’

  Kevern, feeling like a country boy, thanked him.

  ‘Where are you two from?’ the man asked.

  Kevern sneaked a look at Ailinn. How did she feel about talking to a stranger? She nodded imperceptibly. ‘Port Reuben,’ Kevern said.

  The man, as broad as a door and dressed like a widely travelled photographer in khaki chinos and a cotton jacket with a thousand pockets, shook his head. ‘Never heard of it. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Kevern said. ‘We aren’t on the line about it. And you?’

  ‘I’m not on the line about it either.’

  If the man was a comedian, Ailinn wondered, how would her thin-skinned lover deal with him.

  Kevern worried for her on the same grounds.

  He tried a laugh. ‘No, I meant where are you from.’

  ‘Me? Oh, everywhere and nowhere. Wherever I’m needed.’

  ‘Then you’re needed here,’ said Kevern, with a worldly flourish of his arm. ‘Should we take sugar with this?’

  The man asked if he could join them and joined them without waiting for an answer. The width of him was a comfort to Kevern. You needed a wide man to advise you in a strange place. Ailinn thought the same. He would have made a good father.

  It turned out that he was a doctor employed exclusively by this and a number of other nearby hotels to attend to the mental welfare of their long-term guests. ‘It keeps me busier than you would imagine,’ he said, smiling at Ailinn, as though she, having to deal with the mental welfare of Kevern, would be able to imagine only too easily what kept him busy.

  There were questions Kevern wanted to ask but he wasn’t sure about the propriety of asking them while there were guests still eating. Reading Kevern’s compunction, the doctor, who had introduced himself as Ferdinand Moskowitz, but call him Ferdie, leaned across the table as though to gather his new friends into his wide embrace. ‘No one hears or cares what we’re talking about,’ he said. ‘They’re miles away. Depression can do that. It can make you indifferent to your surroundings, uninterested in yourself let alone other people.’

  ‘And those who are not depressed?’ Kevern asked.

  Ferdie Moskowitz showed him a mouthful of white teeth. Kevern imagined him dazzling the Tuareg with them. ‘No such animal here. The only distinction to be drawn is between neurotic depression and psychotic depression, and even then those who start out with the milder form very quickly develop the more serious. Dispossession does that.’

  ‘We’re all dispossessed in our way,’ Ailinn said quickly. She wanted to say it before Kevern did. She could deal with her own pessimism better than she could deal with his. His slighted her. Slighted them – the love they felt for each other.

  ‘Yes, and we’re all depressed,’ the doctor said. ‘But in fact few of us are dispossessed as these poor souls are. You must remember that theirs is a culture that had already fallen into melancholy, long before’ – he made an imaginary loop with his hand, from which he made as if to hang himself – ‘long before you know what.’

  ‘Not what they told us at school,’ Kevern said. ‘Fierce warrior people,’ he quoted from memory, ‘who dispensed largesse and loved the good things in life . . .’

  ‘Ah, yes – Omar Khayyam via Lawrence of Arabia. Come fill the cup . . .’

  Kevern closed his eyes, as though savouring something delectable, and tried to remember a line. ‘Enjoy wine and women and don’t be afraid – isn’t that how it went?’

  ‘We read that at school as well,’ Ailinn said, ‘only our version was Enjoy but do be afraid.’

  The doctor made a sound halfway between a cough and a snort. ‘As though that was all they ever did,’ he said. ‘As though, between lying languorously on scented pillows and occasionally riding out to inconsequential battle in a sandstorm, they had nothing to do but wait for us to come and impose our values on them.’

  Kevern shrugged. For himself, he wanted to impose his values on no one. He wasn’t even sure he knew what his values were.

  ‘Either way,’ the doctor continued, ‘that’s not the real Omar Khayyam. He was a philosopher and a mystic not a hedonist, which of course you can’t expect schoolboys – or schoolgirls – to understand. And as for the large-souled warrior of our romantic imagination – he vanished a long time ago, after believing too many lies and too many promises and losing too many wars. Read their later literature and the dominant note is that of elegy.’

  ‘Our dominant note is elegy, too,’ Kevern said. ‘We’ve all lost something.’

  Ferdinand Moskowitz raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s an easy thing to say, but you have not lost as the poor souls I treat have lost. At least you can elegise like a good liberal in your own country.’

  ‘I don’t think of myself as a good liberal,’ Kevern said.

  ‘Well, however you think of yourself, you have the luxury of thinking it in your own home.’

  Kevern exchanged glances with Ailinn. Later on they would wonder why they had done that. Other than asking them to call him Ferdie – a name that upset Kevern to an unaccountable degree – what had Moskowitz said to irritate and unite them? Weren’t they indeed, as he had described them, people who enjoyed the luxury of home? All right, Ailinn had spent her earliest years in an orphanage and had left the home made for her by her rescuers, but had she not found a new one with Kevern, hugger-mugger on a clifftop at the furthest extreme of the country? ‘I cling on for dear life,’ Kevern had told her once, making crampons of his fingers, but that was just his exaggerated way of talking. They had found a home in each other. So what nerve had the doctor touched?

  ‘Wherever we live,’ Kevern said at last – and his words sounded enigmatic to himself, as though enigma could be catching – ‘we await alike the judgement of history.’

  Ferdinand Moskowitz rattled his pockets and moved his lips like a man shaping a secret. ‘We do indeed,’ he said. ‘But there are some things we don’t have to wait for history to judge.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Such as our using the people you see here – our grandparents using their grandparents – as proxy martyrs. We said we were acting in their interests when all along we were acting in our own. The truth is we didn’t give a fig about their misery or dispossession. It was we who felt dispossessed. They were a handy peg to hang our fuming inferiority on, that was all. And once they’d given us our opportunity we left them to rot.’

  ‘This isn’t exactly rotting,’ Kevern said.

  �
�You haven’t seen inside their heads . . .’ He paused, then went on, ‘Look, I know what you’re thinking. These are the lucky ones, the rich and the powdered, born here to parents who were born here. The bombs didn’t fall on them, because they financed the bombs. The banks didn’t crash on them, because they owned the banks. They were spared the humiliations to which for years their poorer brothers were subjected. But that doesn’t mean they don’t feel those humiliations. Observe them at your leisure – their lives are sterile and they don’t even have the consolation of being able to hate their enemies.’

  This was all getting a bit too close to the bone for Kevern. He wasn’t sure what to say. People didn’t discuss war or WHAT HAPPENED, or the aftermath of either, in Port Reuben. It was not the thing. Not banned, just not done. Like history. WHAT HAPPENED – if WHAT HAPPENED was indeed what they were talking about – was passé. Was this why his father cautioned him against the Necropolis, because in the Necropolis they were still discussing a war that was long over? Was Ferdie Moskowitz the disappointment his father wanted to save him from?

  ‘How so?’ was the best response Kevern could come up with. This was like arguing through cotton wool. It wasn’t that Kevern didn’t have a view on the subject, he didn’t know what the subject was.

  ‘How so? You can’t hate in retrospect, that’s how so. You can’t avenge yourself in retrospect. You can only smoke your pipes and count your beads and dream. And do you know what they fear most? That our history will make a mockery of events, extenuate, argue that black was white, make them the villains, ennoble by time and suffering those who made a profession out of their eternal victimhood, stealing and marauding on the back of a fiction that they’d been stolen from themselves.’

  The wool descended further over Kevern’s eyes. Soon he would not be able to breathe for it.