J

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘They being . . .?’ he just managed to ask.

  But the doctor had lost patience. No longer a father figure to either of them, he rose, bowed in an exaggerated manner to Ailinn, and left the breakfast room.

  A moment later, though, he popped his head around the door and pulled a clownish face. ‘The gone but not forgotten,’ he said.

  The phrase seemed to amuse him greatly for he repeated it. ‘The gone but not forgotten.’

  ‘I don’t think Ferdie likes me,’ Kevern said, after he disappeared a second time.

  It was to become a refrain between them whenever Kevern sniffed a predator – ‘I don’t think Ferdie likes me.’

  And Ailinn would laugh.

  iv

  That afternoon, with a light rain pattering against the scratched Perspex, they decided they would get Ailinn’s phone fixed. The best places, the concierge told them, were in the north of the city and he didn’t advise driving.

  ‘Is it dangerous?’ Kevern asked.

  The concierge laughed. ‘Not dangerous, just tricky.’

  ‘Tricky to find?’

  ‘Tricky to everything.’

  He offered to call them a taxi but Ailinn needed a walk. They wandered aimlessly for an hour or more – Kevern preferred wandering to asking directions, because asking meant listening, and the minute someone said go straight ahead for a hundred metres then take a left and then a hundred metres after that take a right, he was lost. Occasionally a tout, dressed like a busker or a master of ceremonials at some pagan festival, stepped out of a doorway and offered them whatever their hearts desired. ‘Do you have anything black?’ Kevern asked one of them.

  The tout looked offended. He was neither pimp nor racist. ‘Black?’

  ‘Like a black tee-shirt or jacket?’

  The tout missed Kevern’s joke. ‘I could get you,’ he replied. ‘Where are you staying?’

  Kevern gave him the wrong hotel. He wasn’t taking any chances.

  Finding themselves in a part of town where there was actually construction going on, they went into a café to escape the dust. A beefy, furiously orange-faced builder in brightly coloured overalls, covered in plaster, raised his head from his sandwich and looked Ailinn up and down. ‘Tasty,’ Kevern thought he heard him say. But he could have been clearing his throat or referring to his sandwich. The gesture he made to a second builder who entered the café, however, slowly twirling a probing finger in Ailinn’s direction, was unambiguous. The new arrival took a look at Ailinn and fingered her impressionistically in return.

  ‘What’s that meant to signify?’ Kevern asked them, looking from one to the other.

  The builder with the inflamed, enraged face made a creaking motion with his jaw, as though resetting the position of his teeth, and laughed.

  ‘Take no notice,’ Ailinn said. ‘It’s not worth it.’

  ‘You tell him, gorgeous,’ the second builder said, opening his mouth and showing her his tongue.

  The first builder did the same.

  These are the gargoyles I missed in Ashbrittle, Kevern thought.

  ‘Come on. Let’s leave them to dream about it,’ Ailinn said. She took Kevern by the elbow and led him out.

  They were both strangers to the city, but Ailinn felt she could cope better in it than Kevern ever would.

  Back on the street the rain was falling more heavily. ‘Let’s just jump in a taxi, get it sorted and then go home,’ she said. ‘I think we’ve been away long enough. I have a migraine coming on.’

  It was a vicarious migraine, a migraine for him, a man who didn’t have migraines.

  Kevern felt guilty. His idea to come away, his idea to mooch about looking into the windows of ill-lit shops and see where they ended up, his idea to go into the coffee shop – his idea, come to that, to ask Ailinn out in the first place, his idea to kiss Lowenna Morgenstern, everything that was making life difficult for Ailinn – his idea.

  There were few taxis and those that passed were uninterested in stopping. Kevern wasn’t sure if their For Hire lights were on or off, but he thought some drivers slowed down, took a look at them, and then sped off. Could they see from their austere clothes, or their hesitant demeanour, that he and Ailinn weren’t from round here and did they therefore fear they couldn’t pay or wouldn’t tip? Or was it simply something about their faces?

  Ailinn had turned white. Seeing a taxi, Kevern made a determined effort to hail it, running into the street and waving his arms. The driver slowed, peered out of his window, drove a little way past them, and then stopped. Kevern took Ailinn’s hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. But someone else had decided the taxi was for him and was racing on ahead of them. ‘Hey!’ Kevern shouted. ‘Hey, that’s ours.’

  ‘What makes it yours?’ the man shouted back.

  He was wearing a striped grey and blue cardigan, Kevern noted with relief, as though that made him someone he felt confident he could reason with. And wore rimless spectacles. A respectable, soberly dressed person in his early thirties. With a woman at his side.

  ‘Come on,’ Kevern said, ‘be fair. You know I flagged it down before you did. Didn’t I, driver?’

  The driver shrugged. The man in the cardigan was blazing with fury. ‘You don’t have to yell and scream,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s yelling and screaming? I flagged the taxi down before you, and I expect you to accept that, that’s all. This lady has a migraine. I need to get her back to our hotel.’

  ‘And I have a wife and tired children to get home.’

  ‘Then you can get the next taxi,’ Kevern said, seeing no children.

  ‘If it means so much to you that you have to behave in this insane manner, then take the taxi,’ the man said, raising an arm.

  Kevern wondered if the arm was raised to call another taxi or aim a blow. He felt a hand on his back. Was it a punch? In his anger, Kevern wouldn’t have known if it was a knife going between his shoulder blades. ‘Take your hands off me,’ he said.

  ‘Calm down, you clown, you’ve got what you want. Just get yourself into the taxi and pootle off wherever you belong.’

  ‘Get your fucking hands off me,’ Kevern said.

  ‘Hey,’ the man said. ‘Don’t swear in front of my children.’

  ‘Then don’t you fucking lay your hands on me,’ Kevern said, still seeing no children.

  What happened next he didn’t remember. Not because he was knocked unconscious but because a great sheet of rage had come down before his eyes, and behind it a deep sense of dishonour. Why was he fighting? Why was he swearing? He was not a fighting or a swearing man. And he couldn’t bear that Ailinn had seen him in the guise of either.

  It was she who had pushed him into the taxi and got them back to the hotel. ‘Your hands are ice cold,’ she told him when they were back in their room. Otherwise she said nothing. She looked, Kevern thought, as though made of ice herself.

  He didn’t know what time it was, but he fell into bed.

  ‘I don’t think Ferdie likes me,’ he said before he fell asleep.

  Ailinn did not laugh.

  It was her suggestion, when they woke in the early hours of the morning, that they drive home without even waiting for breakfast. It was clear she didn’t want a conversation about what had happened.

  ‘Do you hate me?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t hate you. I’m just bewildered. And frightened for you.’

  ‘Frightened?’

  ‘Frightened of what might have happened to you. You didn’t know who that man was. He might have been anybody.’

  ‘He was a family man who didn’t want his children to hear foul language, that’s if there were any children. Though he didn’t mind them seeing him pushing a stranger. There was nothing to be frightened of.’

  ‘You don’t know that. I was also frightened about you. I didn’t like to see you like that.’

  ‘Do you want me to explain?’

  ‘No.’ She meant no, not now, but it came out more final than that.


  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘So am I.’

  He couldn’t bear leaving right away as she proposed. The thought of driving home in this hostile silence appalled him. You don’t leave anywhere like that: it would feel too irresistibly as though they were leaving each other. Better to sit tight, with throbbing temples, and wait for the mood to change. How many marriages might have been saved if only the parties to it had waited – days, weeks, months, it didn’t matter – for the mood to change?

  ‘Let’s get your phone fixed and then go,’ he said.

  He wanted to be back where they were before the swearing. And he was anxious to show her that her concerns were foremost in his mind. It was concern for her after all, his desperation to get her back to the hotel so she could sleep off her migraine, that made him fight for the taxi. Unless it was the responsibility he felt for her that had unhinged him. Was he not up to the job of looking after a woman? Did fear of failure unman him?

  ‘I don’t care about my phone,’ she said.

  ‘But I do. And I’d like an errand to clear my head.’

  ‘To clear your head!’

  ‘To clear both our heads.’

  ‘So how do you propose we do this? Go outside and hail a taxi?’

  So the punch came, whoever delivered it. But he still refused to capitulate to what it could have meant had he let it.

  ‘I’ll get the hotel to call us one,’ he said.

  He said it firmly. He was not going to allow looking after a woman to emasculate him.

  v

  It took an hour for a taxi to arrive but when it did the driver swung out of his cab to greet them, bowed low, introduced himself as Ranajay Margolis, looked up at the rain and produced an umbrella as a magician might produce a wand. He insisted on opening the passenger doors for them, one at a time, Ailinn’s first.

  Struck by his manners, Kevern asked where he was from originally.

  Ailinn dug him. He had lived too long in Port Reuben where a black or Asian face was seldom seen. No one had entered the country from anywhere else for a long time. Every person’s country of origin – regardless of whether they were a Margolis or a Gutkind – was this one. Wasn’t that what made now so much better than then?

  Kevern didn’t mind the dig. So long as she was digging him they were together.

  Ranajay Margolis was amused. He almost danced himself back into his seat. ‘I am from here,’ he said. ‘As for originally that depends how far back you want me to go. Where are you from originally?’

  Kevern held up a hand. He took the point.

  Ailinn explained that they wanted to get her phone fixed.

  ‘I’m just the man,’ the driver said in his quicksilver manner, turning round frequently and flashing them his snowy teeth, ‘but first I’ll give you a tour.’

  ‘We don’t want a tour, thank you,’ she said. ‘Just my phone fixed.’

  ‘There are special places for that,’ the driver said. ‘I know them all. But they aren’t easy to find and some of them aren’t very trustworthy.’

  ‘We know, that’s why we’re asking you to take us.’

  He bowed as he was driving. ‘You sure you don’t want a tour?’

  ‘Certain.’

  ‘In that case,’ he said, raising a finger like an exclamation mark, as though to punctuate a great idea that had just come to him, ‘we will have to go to where the Cohens lived.’

  ‘The Cohens! I’m a Cohen,’ Kevern said. He felt a burst of excitement as he said it. Ranajay Margolis had asked him where he was from originally. What if he was from here? Would he encounter people who looked like him on the streets? Uncles, nieces, cousins? Would they be sitting on benches – so many tall, angel-haired ‘Cocos’ with long faces – minding their language and wondering what their lives amounted to?

  Ranajay studied his reflection in the driver’s mirror. ‘No,’ he explained, ‘I mean real Cohens.’

  Kevern offered to show him his ID.

  Ranajay shook his head. ‘That changes nothing,’ he said.

  They drove north for about half an hour, along tense, surly streets, past stores selling Turkish vegetables, and then stores selling Indian vegetables, and then stores selling Caribbean vegetables, until they came to a suburb of houses built in a bygone, faraway style, Greek temples, Elizabethan mansions, woodland cottages, Swiss chalets, Malibu country clubs. No film set could have suggested lavish living with so little subtlety. But whatever their original ostentation, the mansions housed more modest domestic ambitions now. Indian children played on the street or stared out at the taxi through upper-storey windows. A handful of men in open-necked shirts played cards under a portico that might once have sheltered foreign dignitaries and maybe even royalty as they drank cocktails. Perhaps because no one could afford their upkeep, some of the grandest dwellings had fallen into disuse. Colonnades crumbled. Corinthian columns that must once have glowed with the phosphorescence of fantasy were dull in the drizzle, in need of replastering and paint. Yet this was no slum. Those houses that were inhabited looked cared for, the neat gardens and net curtains, the atmosphere of quiet industry – even the card-playing was businesslike – mocking the grandeur of those who’d originally occupied them. Many of the garages, large enough to take a fleet of Hollywood limousines – one for him, one for her, and something only marginally smaller for Junior – served as electrical or mechanics workshops and even retail outlets, though it was hard to imagine any passing trade. Signs promised prompt and efficient repairs to utility phones and consoles. Black-eyed adolescent boys sat cross-legged on walls, engrossed in their electronic toys, as though to advertise the competence of their parents’ businesses.

  The Cohens had lived here, Ranajay had said. What did he mean? Had it been a Cohen colony? Cohentown? He was adamant, anyway, that no Cohens lived here now, and that Kevern’s family never had. But who was he to say that? How did he know?

  Kevern’s parents would never tell him where they had come from. It didn’t matter, they’d said. It wasn’t important. Don’t ask. The question itself depressed and enraged them. Maybe it reminded them of their sin in marrying. But his father had warned him off the Necropolis. ‘Don’t go there,’ he had said, ‘it will dismay and disappoint you.’ But he hadn’t said ‘Don’t go to Cohentown, it will disappoint you.’ Just don’t go anywhere. Just stay in Port Reuben which – he might have added – will also disappoint you.

  He didn’t see how he could be disappointed when he had no expectations. But he had been excited when Ranajay had said Cohens had lived here. So there must have been some expectation in him somewhere, some anticipation, at least, that he had known nothing about.

  Cohentown – why not?

  What do I feel, he asked himself, thinking he should feel more.

  What he felt was oppressed, as though there was thunder about.

  He asked to be let out of the cab so he could smell the air. ‘There’s no air to smell,’ Ranajay Margolis said. ‘Just cooking.’

  ‘Cooking’s fine.’

  Ranajay was insistent. ‘Come. I will take you to the best place to have your phone fixed. I can get you a good deal.’

  ‘Just give me a minute. I want to see if anything comes back to me.’

  ‘You were never here,’ Ranajay insisted. ‘It’s not possible.’

  ‘I think that’s for me to decide,’ Kevern said.

  Ranajay blew out his cheeks, stopped the car, got out with his umbrella, and opened Kevern’s door. A group of children looked up, not curiously, not incuriously. He bore no resemblance to them but they weren’t amazed by his presence. He had a thought. Were they used to sentimental visitors? Did other members of his family turn up here periodically to find themselves, to smell the air and see what they could remember?

  This was silly. There were countless Cohens in the world. There was no reason to suppose that the Cohens whose neighbourhood, according to Ranajay, this had been, were his Cohens. But he fancied he would know if he stood here long e
nough. Birds navigate vast distances to find their way home. They must be able to tell when they are getting close. They must feel a pounding in their hearts. Why shouldn’t he, navigating time, feel the same?

  Most of the houses had long drives, but one had a front door on the street. He wondered if he dared look through the letter box, see if the silk runner was rumpled, see if the utility phone was winking on the hall table. But there were old newspapers stuffed into the letter box. Looking up, he saw that a number of the windows were broken. The disuse of this house suited him better than the subdued occupancy of the others. In the disuse he might reconnect to a line of used-up Cohens past. He closed his eyes. If you could hear the sea in a washed-up shell why shouldn’t he hear the past in this dereliction? You didn’t begin and end with yourself. If his family had been here he would surely know it in whatever part of himself such things are known – at his fingertips, on his tongue, in his throat, in the throbbing of his temples. Ghosts? Of course there were ghosts. What was culture but ghosts? What was memory? What was self? But he knew the danger of indulging this. Yes, he could persuade himself that the tang of happy days, alternating with frightful event, came back to him – kisses and losses, embraces and altercations, love, heartbreak, shouting, incest . . . whatever his father and mother had concealed from him, whatever they had warned him would dismay and disappoint him were he to recover any trace of it.

  His temples throbbed all right. And since he was not given to migraines they must have throbbed with something else. Recollection? The anticipation of recollection? But it was so much folly. He was no less able to imagine fondness or taste bitter loss while sitting on his bench in Port Reuben. So Cohens had lived here once. And been happy and unhappy as other families had been. So what!

  And anyway, anyway for Christ’s sake! – it came as a shock to him to remember – Cohen was as much a given name as Kevern. He didn’t know what his family name had really been when Cohens who were really Cohens roamed Cohentown. Cadwallader, maybe. Or Chygwidden. What was he doing chasing a past associated with a name that wasn’t even his?