Densdell Kroplik scratched his face. ‘We’ve lived through the end of the world,’ he answered. ‘This is the aftermath. This is the post-apocalypse.’
Gutkind looked out of his leaded window at the pyramids of grey clay. The land spewing up its innards. The inside of his unloved, unlived-in terrace house no better. Apart from the dusting of clay, there was something green and sticky over everything, as though a bag of spinach had exploded in the microwave, blowing off the door and paintballing every surface – the table, the walls, the ceiling, even the photograph of Gutkind and his wife on their wedding day, she (her doing, not his) with her head scissored off, Gutkind and his headless bride. Then again, it could just have been mould. Gutkind looked between his fingers. Yes, mould. ‘You could be right,’ he said.
‘I am right. It’s the twilight of the gods.’
‘Wagner’s gods? Here? In St Eber?’
‘The gods of Ludgvennok.’
‘I don’t much care about anybody’s gods,’ Gutkind said. ‘I care more about me.’
‘Well it’s the twilight of you too, ain’t it? Look at your fucking dog, man. What are you doing here, in this whited-out shit-heap, if you’ll pardon my Latin, trying – unsuccessfully by your own account – to solve murders that never will be solved? What am I doing over at Ludgvennok, excuse me’ – here he spat, trying to avoid the cat – ‘Port Reuben, as I have to call it, what am I doing cutting aphids’ hair in Port Cunting Reuben for a living? We were gods once. Now look at us. The last two men on the planet to have listened to Tristan und Isolde.’
Eugene Gutkind fell into a melancholy trance, as though imagining the time when he trod the earth like a god, a monocle in his eye such as Clarence Worthing must have worn, in his hand a silver-topped cane, on his arm, highly perfumed . . .
In reality there was spinach on his shoes. ‘So who or what reduced us to this?’ he asked, not expecting an answer.
‘Saying sorry,’ Kroplik said. ‘Saying sorry is what did it. You never heard the gods apologise. They let loose their thunderbolts and whoever they hit, they hit. Their own stupid fault for being in the way.’
‘I’m a fair-minded man . . .’ Gutkind said.
‘For a policeman . . .’
‘I’m a fair-minded man for anyone. I don’t mind saying sorry if I’ve done something to say sorry for. But you can’t say sorry if you’ve done nothing. You can’t find a man guilty if there’s been no crime.’
‘Well look at it this way, Detective Inspector – there are plenty of unsolved crimes kicking about. And plenty of uncaught criminals. Missy Morgenstern’s murderer for one. Does it matter if you end up punishing the wrong man? Not a bit of it. The wrongfully guilty balance the wrongfully innocent. What goes around comes around. Pick yourself up an aphid. They’re all murderers by association. Hang the lot.’
Detective Inspector Gutkind felt himself growing irritated by Densdell Kroplik’s misplaced ire. It struck him as messy and unserious. His own life might have been dismal but it was ordered. It had feeling in it. He offered his guest a whisky. Maybe a whisky would concentrate his mind.
‘Let’s agree about something,’ he said.
‘We do. The genius of Richard Wagner. And the end of the world.’
‘No. Let’s agree about saying sorry. We shouldn’t be saying it – we agree about that, don’t we?’
Kroplik raised his dusty whisky glass and finished off its contents. ‘We do. We agree about most things. And about that most of all. Fuck saying sorry!’
‘Fuck saying sorry!’
The air was thick with rebellion.
‘Bloody Gutkind!’ Kroplik suddenly expostulated.
Gutkind looked alarmed.
‘Bloody Kroplik!’ Kroplik continued. ‘What kind of a name is Kroplik, for Christ’s sake? What kind of a name is Gutkind? We sound like a comedy team – Kroplik and Gutkind.’
‘Or Gutkind and Kroplik.’
The policeman Eugene Gutkind sharing the rarity of a joke with the historian Densdell Kroplik.
‘I am glad,’ said Kroplik sarcastically, shifting his weight from one thigh to another, disarranging the cushions on the detective’s sofa, ‘that you are able to find humour in this.’
‘On the contrary, I agree with you. They turn us into a pair of comedians, though our lives are essentially tragic, and for that we are the ones who have to say we’re sorry. I find no humour in it whatsoever.’
‘Good. Then enough’s enough. We are gods not clowns, and gods apologise to no one for their crimes, because what a god does can’t be called a crime. Nicht wahr?’
‘What?’
‘Nicht wahr? Wagnerian for don’t you agree. I thought you’d know that. I bet even your dog knows that.’
The cat pricked the ear nearest to Kroplik. ‘Nicht wahr?’ Kroplik shouted into it.
‘These days we don’t get to hear much German in St Eber,’ Gutkind said, as much in defence of the cat as himself.
‘Pity. But Gutkind’s got a bit of a German ring to it, don’t you think? Gut and kinder?
‘I suppose it has. Like Krop and lik.’
‘You see what the aphid swines have done to us? Now we’re fighting on behalf of names that don’t even belong to us. What’s your actual name? What did the whores call you in the good old days? Mr . . .? Mr What? Or did you let them call you Eugene? Take me, Eugene. Use me, Eugene.’
If Kroplik isn’t mistaken, Gutkind blushes.
‘Whatever my name was then, I was too young to give it to whores.’
‘Your father then . . . your grandfather . . . how did the whores address them?’
These were infractions too far for Detective Inspector Gutkind, Wagner or no Wagner. He was not a man who had ever visited a whore. And nor, he knew in his soul, had any of the men in his family before him. It had always been ideal love they’d longed for. A beautiful woman, smelling of Prague or Vienna, light on their arm, transported into an ecstasy of extinction – the two of them breathing their last together . . . ertrinken . . . versinken . . . unbewußt . . . höchste Lust! . . .
Kroplik couldn’t go on waiting for him to expire. ‘Well mine was Scannláin. Son of the Scannláins of Ludgvennok. And had been for two thousand bloody years. And then for a crime we didn’t commit, and not for any of the thousands we did . . . that’s the galling part—’
‘For a crime no one committed,’ Gutkind interjected.
Densdell Kroplik was past caring whether a crime had been committed or not. He held out his glass for another whisky. The high life – downing whisky in St Eber at 11.30 in the morning. The gods drinking to their exemption from the petty cares of mortals. Atop Valhalla, dust or no dust.
Gutkind sploshed whisky into Kroplik’s glass. He wanted him drunk and silent. He wanted him a thing of ears. Other than his cat, Eugene Gutkind had no one to talk to. His wife had left him. He had few friends in the force and no friends in St Eber. Who in St Eber did have friends? A few brawling mates and a headless wife to curse comprised happiness in St Eber, and he no longer even had the wife. So he rarely got the opportunity to pour out his heart. A detective inspector, anyway, had to measure his words. But he didn’t have to measure anything with Densdell Kroplik, least of all whisky. He wasn’t a kindred spirit. Wagner didn’t make him a kindred spirit. To Gutkind’s eye Kroplik lacked discrimination. Not knowing where to pin the blame he pinned it on everyone. A bad hater, if ever he saw one. A man lacking specificity. But he was still the nearest thing to a kindred spirit there was. ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘Drink to what we believe and know to be true.’
And when Densdell Kroplik was drunk enough not to hear what was being said to him, true or not true, and not to care either way, when he was half asleep on the couch with the icing-sugar cat sitting on his face, Detective Inspector Eugene Gutkind began his exposition . . .
There had been no crime. No Götterdämmerung anyway. No last encounter with the forces of evil, no burning, and no renewal of the world. Those who should have per
ished had been forewarned by men of tender conscience like Clarence Worthing who, though he longed to wipe the slate clean, could not betray the memory of his fragrant encounter with Ottilie or Naomi or Lieselotte, in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. For what you have done to me, I wish you in hell, they said. But for what you have done to me I also wish you to be spared. Such are the contradictions that enter the hearts of men who know what it is to love and not be loved in return. The irony of it was not lost on Detective Inspector Gutkind. They owed their lives to a conspiracy of the inconsolable and the snubbed, these Ottilies and Lieselottes who had imbibed conspiracy with their mothers’ milk. They’d escaped betrayal, they who betrayed as soon as snap a finger.
So WHAT HAPPENED, in his view, was that NOT MUCH HAD. They had got out. Crept away like rats in the dark. That was not just supposition based on his cracking Clarence Worthing’s code. It was demonstrable fact. If there’d been a massacre where were the bodies? Where were the pits, where the evidence of funeral pyres and gallows trees, where the photographs or other recorded proof of burned-out houses, streets, entire suburbs? Believe the figures that had once been irresponsibly bandied about and the air should still be stinking with the destruction. They say you can smell extinction for centuries afterwards. Go to the Somme. You can see it in the soil. You can taste it in the potatoes.
He had done the maths, worked it out algebraically, done the measurements geometrically, consulted log tables – so many people killed in so many weeks in so many square metres . . . by whom? It would have taken half the population up in arms, and mightily skilled in the use of them, to have wreaked such destruction in so brief a period of time. No, there had been no Götterdämmerung.
He takes a swig from the bottle and looks at Kroplik with his head thrown back, his mouth open and his legs spread. What the hell is that inside his trousers? He regrets inviting him over. He is ashamed of his own loneliness. But there is so much to say, and no one to say it to.
He feels subtler than any man he knows. No Götterdämmerung does not mean, you fool, that there was no anything. First law of criminal investigation: everyone exaggerates. Second law of criminal investigation: just because everyone exaggerates doesn’t mean there’s nothing to investigate. In my profession, Mr Kroplik, we don’t say there is no smoke without fire. Rumour is also a crime. False accusation – you can go down for that. But that said, there is always a fire. Somewhere, something is forever burning. That’s why no accusation is ever entirely wasted. Eventually we will find a culprit for any crime. So yes, WHAT HAPPENED happened in that there was minor disturbance and insignificant destruction. To win another of their propaganda wars they did what they had done for centuries and put on another of their pantomimes of persecution. Allowed the spilling of a little blood to justify their disappearing, while no one was looking, with their accumulated loot. A sacrificial people, my great-grandfather called them, and as one of their sacrifices himself, he knew. But they also sacrifice their own. There’s a name for it but I’ve forgotten it. You’ll probably know it, Kroplik, you unedifying piss-ant. Like a caste system. You probably didn’t know they had a caste system, but my word they did. This one can’t light a candle, that one can’t go near a body. Some can’t even touch a woman unless they’re wearing surgical gloves. And some know it’s their job to die when the time comes. It’s not as unselfish as it sounds. Their children get looked after and they go straight to heaven. Not to lie with virgins, that’s someone else. This lot go straight to heaven and read books. For the honour of which they put themselves in the way of trouble, announce themselves in the street by what they wear, hang identifying objects in the windows of their houses where they wait patiently to be burned alive. Here! Over here!
The shouting doesn’t wake Kroplik who sleeps like the dead.
I, my rat-arsed friend, Gutkind continues, am a policeman. I know the difference between right and wrong. Wrong is burning someone alive in his own house, I don’t care if he invited you in and handed you the box of matches. You can always say no. Sure, you were provoked. Criminals are always provoked. An open door, a short dress, a handbag left unzipped. Don’t get me wrong – I sympathise. I’m not beyond a provocation or two myself. Right this minute I’m provoked into violent thoughts by the sight of you snoring on my sofa. But I restrain myself from cutting off your balls. That’s what makes me not a villain.
But keep wrongdoing in proportion is another of my mottos. Not everything is the greatest crime in history.
He rubs his face and drinks.
No sir!
And drinks some more.
You’ll have your own favourite greatest crime in history, Mr Historian of the Gods of Ludgvennok, but I can tell you this wasn’t it. And why wasn’t it?
Because of this! He smites his heart.
Would he have done what Clarence Worthing did had he been in his position? Would he have assisted in their escape? Tears flood his eyes. The sublime music swells in his ears . . . ertrinken . . . versinken . . . unbewußt . . . höchste Lust! . . . Yes, he and Clarence Worthing are one, made weak and strong by love.
Finishing off what is left in the bottle, he rejoins Densdell Kroplik on the couch where, exhausted by the intensity of his own emotion, he falls immediately asleep on Kroplik’s shoulder, the convulsing cat, heaving up fur balls coated in clay dust, between them.
It’s only a shame no family photographer is in attendance.
ii
It’s Kroplik who wakes first, still drunk. It takes him a moment or two to work out where he is. Though it’s only early afternoon it’s dark already in St Eber, the shabby pyramids of clay, as though each is lit from within by a small candle, the sole illumination.
Is this Egypt?
Then he notices that the cat has coughed up a puddle of china-clay slime on the lapel of his one smart suit. Or is it Gutkind’s doing? It smells as though it’s been in Gutkind’s stomach. Kroplik clutches his own. He lives on a daily diet of indignity but this is one insult he doesn’t have to bear. He has brought his razor along to give the detective inspector a close shave as a token of his friendship and regard. But he is too angry to be a friend. Slime! From Gutkind’s poisoned gut! On his one good suit!
He is aware that Gutkind has been ranting at him while he slept. The usual subject – villainy. Was he telling him he knew – teasing him, taunting him with his knowledge. I know the difference between right and wrong Kroplik is sure he heard him say through his stupor. Provocation is no defence. This time . . .
Is this why he was invited over?
It amazes him that Gutkind should have the brains to solve a crime. Yes, he’d as good as laid it out for him a hundred times, but Gutkind had struck him as too dumb to see what was in front of his face.
I’ve underestimated him, Kroplik decides. I’ve fatally underestimated the cunt. And laughs appreciatively at his own choice of words. Make a good final chapter heading for the next volume of his history – no, not ‘The Cunt’, but ‘A Fatal Underestimation’.
He thinks about taking out his razor, putting it to Gutkind’s throat, and confessing. What would the policeman do then? Throw up some more? Then he has a better idea. He staggers to his feet and closes the curtains. I’ll just cut his throat and have done, he has decided.
But it’s the cat that gets it first.
SEVEN
Nussbaum Unbound
i
ESME NUSSBAUM LAY in what the doctors called a coma for two months after the motorcyclist rode the pavement and knocked her down. To her it was a long and much-needed sleep. A chance to think things over without interruption. Regain perspective. And maybe lose a little weight.
She wasn’t joking about the weight. She was done with looking comfortable and unthreatening. It was time to show more bone. Splintered bone, she laughed to herself, causing the screen to bleep, though she didn’t doubt the bone would mend eventually. It wasn’t that she’d been incapable of causing discomfort when discomfort needed to be caused. She was known to be
a woman who sometimes asked troublesome questions. But there’d been no real spike inside her. She could annoy without quite inspiring fear. Now she fancied being someone else. No, now she was someone else. Someone with sharper edges, all spikes. Broken, she was more frightening.
Already her thoughts were unlike any she’d had before. They flew at her. In her previous, comfortable life she would reason her way to a conclusion, which meant that she could be reasoned out of it in time as well. The motorcycle hadn’t really been necessary. There were other ways of making her conformable . . .
Comfortable and Conformable – her middle names. Esme C. C. Nussbaum. Always a word-monger, an anagramatiser, a palindromaniac, she now saw words three-dimensionally in her sleep. Comfortable and Conformable cavorted lewdly on the ceiling of her unconsciousness, pressing their podgy bellies together like middle-aged lovers, blowing into each other’s ears, two becoming one. She smiled inside herself. It really was a pleasure lying here, waiting for what words would get up to next, what thoughts would come whooshing at her. She liked being the subject of their discussions. It was like listening in to gossip about herself. No, she wasn’t as Comfortable or Conformable as she blamed herself for being, was the latest revelation. If she’d been that easy to get on with, what was she doing here, lying in a coma, half dead? She must have put the wind up someone. That was one of the most persistent of her winged thoughts: people frighten easily. Another was: people – ordinary people, people you think you know and like – want to kill you.
She was not herself frightened when such thoughts flew at her. She had once watched an old horror film with her parents about a blonde woman being attacked by birds. They had been terrified as a family. They put their hands over their faces as the birds dive-bombed everyone in the blonde’s vicinity. ‘Avenging some great but never to be disclosed wrong,’ her father said. But lying flat with thoughts flying at her was not like that. She didn’t feel assailed. There was no more they could do to her – that partly explained her calm acceptance of their presence, even when they swooped so low she might justifiably have worried for her eyes. But it was more than being beyond terror. She welcomed their violence. It was Conformable with how she felt. They were thoughts, after all, which meant they originated in her. If this was herself massing above her, screeching, well then . . . she extended all the hospitality she had to offer. It was about time. A good time, yes, in that she had bags of it to give; but about time in the sense that she had wasted too much of it thinking thoughts that were less . . . less what? How nice it was having all the time in the world to find the right word. Less . . . less . . . Esme Nussbaum knew more words than was good for her. She had been the school Scrabble champion; she could finish a crossword while others were still on the first clue; she knew words even her teachers thought did not exist. Now she raided her store for a word that had bird in it, that sounded avian, an av word. Avirulent had a ring, but it meant the opposite of what she needed it to mean. She didn’t want to lose the virulence, she wanted to store it. Avile was good – to avile, as she’d had to explain to a sceptical Scrabble opponent in the quarter-finals, meaning to make vile, to debase. But there was no adjective to go with it that she knew of. No avilious. And no noun, no aviliousness. Had there been, then aviliousness was exactly the quality her previous, unwinged thoughts had lacked. They had been too moderate. Too sparing. Yes, she had presented a report, for which they’d killed her – in intention, if not in fact – that spoke of the persistent rage she’d found in the course of monitoring the nation’s mood. She had not tried to sugar that pill. We cannot, she had argued, glide over the past with an IF. We must confront WHAT HAPPENED, not to apportion blame – it was too late for that, anyway – but to know what it was and why time hadn’t healed it. Yes, she had stood her ground, said what had to be said, done her best to persuade the IFFERS with whom she worked, but that best wasn’t good enough. She hadn’t followed the logic of her own findings. She had been insufficiently avilious. She hadn’t made vile, that’s to say she hadn’t grasped, hadn’t penetrated and presented, even to herself, the vileness of what had been done. Not WHAT HAD HAPPENED but WHAT HAD BEEN DONE.
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