J

by Howard Jacobson

  Towards the early years of Coira’s education she made what she hoped was a fair contribution. She would collect the child at a later date when, God willing, she would be in better health, but, if she failed to return, a more substantial donation would automatically be made. She left a parcel of letters with the child’s belongings. These, were she not to return, were to be opened only on Coira’s majority.

  She wasn’t sure, at the moment of leaving her, that she could go through with it, but her grief reminded her of what her parents must have felt when she left them, and she knew she had to find them if she could.

  She removed the label from Coira’s neck and wrote a further message on it. ‘Protect her for me. See how small she is – she is more shawl than baby. Pray for her. Pray, if you can, for me. Pray that this has a safe and happy outcome.’

  But like many other prayers uttered in these days, the nuns’ prayers, if they remembered to say them, were not listened to. Rebecca did not locate her parents nor did she ever return, in safety and happiness, for Coira.

  Not counting the letters, all she bequeathed to her bereft daughter was her own sense of being between the devil and the deep blue sea. And the terrible conundrum of not knowing which was which.

  iii

  In the days he’d been without Ailinn, Kevern had gone again through his parents’ papers. He had been tempted to open the box intended for a grandchild, should one materialise, but couldn’t bring himself to disobey instructions he had long considered sacred. For a non-believer, Kevern had a highly developed sense of the sacramental. Duty, to the living and the dead, hemmed him in. His life, from the moment he opened his eyes – and whether he found Ailinn beside him or not – was a chain of rituals he could no more break than he could go without food or self-reprobation. Without obligation and repetition he was as chaff in the wind. If religion meant anything he could understand, it was this: doing again what had worked when you did it the last time, doing it because you believed you had to, remonstrating against the random, refusing to be tossed about the universe as though the universe had no use for you. That was the beginning and the end of religious devotion to him, anyway. Not what you owed to a god but what you owed to the idea that you weren’t arbitrary or accidental. And whatever you did more than three times a week, at the same time and with the same reverence, was another blow struck against the haphazard.

  Densdell Kroplik had told him, the last time they met, that he was lucky to have been born in Port Reuben. Lucky? The thought that he owed anything to chance disheartened him. If he was only here by chance then he was indeed chaff in the wind and might as easily have been blown somewhere else. So where? Absolutely anywhere, was the answer, but how do you live a life that isn’t random when the circumstances of your living it are? There had to be something between him and Port Reuben that was more than fortuitous; each had to have needed the other. All right, he accepted Kroplik’s view of him as a child of aphids who were themselves children of aphids. No one can go all the way back to the beginning. Invaders, migrants, vagrants, came and went. He’d settle for ten generations. If he had to, he’d make do with even fewer. Soil was all he was after. Not real soil, God forbid, but the idea of soil. If not native soil then soil that at least was congenial to his growing. Bodies rejected implanted organs; some took but others the body found too alien. Why did he feel that the village of Port Reuben, in which his papers certified he’d been born, had always been rejecting him like an organ it didn’t need or want?

  This rummaging through his parents’ papers was not going to help him find an answer. It never had before. Yet each time he did it he came upon something he hadn’t paid attention to previously. A oke so acidic that it had burned through the paper on which his father had written it. The names of azz records he intended to buy. Titles of books still to be read. A manila folder containing a few watery sketches, none of them remarkable, done by his mother presumably, of him as a baby, of his father as a younger but no less rancid-looking man, of a beautiful dreaming woman he didn’t recognise but whom now, after Kroplik’s description, he took to be his grandmother, of the cliffs, of a sunset, and of hands – just hands – drawn so tenderly they had to belong to her butcher-lover. So they’d lived here at least, his mother and father – because bitterness and infidelity constitute lives.

  He missed their lives for them, missed what he didn’t remember, yearned for what he hadn’t known. Can you be nostalgic for nostalgia, he wondered. His answer was yes, yes you could.

  It was while he was again, ritualistically, going through drawers in his father’s workshop that he came again upon a foolscap black notebook with scribbled entries in his mother’s hand. It hadn’t interested him the first time he’d found it, because it seemed to contain no more than lists of non-essentials his father must have asked for, sacks for rubbish, a new coffee mug, a fan heater, antiseptic cream. But he realised he should have wondered why it was here, in his father’s space, among his father’s things. After the first half-dozen pages the book became something else. Sketches again, but not at all watery this time: strong charcoal portraits, in the manner of woodcuts – had she been thinking of actually doing woodcuts with her husband’s help? – of people he didn’t recognise, squatting careworn women in turbans, angular men in long beards, carcasses of slaughtered animals, executioners in bloody aprons standing over them, a child looking out of the barred window of a train, figures huddled in fear, and one of herself, he was sure it was her, with her mouth open and a hand, not hers, over it, pressing hard into her face. And then, at the back of the book, half a dozen small crayoned studies in a style so different he marvelled the same person could have done them – what they depicted he couldn’t say for sure, cityscapes a couple of them seemed to be, whores, or were they birds, cranes or storks, standing under phosphorescent yellow lamp posts, their scarves or feathers blowing about their necks, their bodies rendered in patches of the most vivid colour, purple shoulders and breasts, vermilion bellies, attenuated lime-green legs, the stones they stood on as black as night. Two were more abstract still, mere blobs of violent colour, like pools of blood, and one a nude, somehow African in conception, primitive certainly, painted freely, her eyes orange, her skin a throbbing pink, her hands stretched out towards . . . towards whom?

  Could his mother really have done these? They were signed, simply but deliberately, in upright letters, as though she wanted there to be no mistake about it, Sibella.

  He had always discounted his mother. Other than when he heard her calling to him on the cliffs, he rarely thought about her. It was his father he had grieved over, not out of love but out of sorrow. His father had made small beautiful things. Miniature ring bowls whose rims fell away like lace around wrists, mahogany trinket boxes with secret compartments so finely concealed that people who hid things in them sometimes never found them again, slender swaying single-rose vases carved out of ‘whispering walnut’ – his father’s phrase, whispering this, whispering that, their whole lives lived in a whisper. How could such delicacy of work proceed from so frightened, unhappy and lumpen a temper? His mother too had been unhappy, but she was no artist and Kevern Cohen was sentimental about art. Now he had to revise his thinking.

  His father had kept this folio of hers. Why? Did he secretly admire her gift? Did he ever tell her, Kevern wondered.

  It even crossed his mind, for the very first time, that his father and mother might have loved one another. The idea, at least, of his father being proud of her, made him tremble with the realisation that he’d known as little about his family as he knew about the earth he trod on.

  How good an artist was she? He couldn’t tell. Her hand was strong and sure, the colours piercing, but were the images hers? He felt he had seen some of them before, or at least that they gave off an atmosphere he had breathed before. Even had they been copies, they were good, for copies too are distinguishable by the feeling they show. But where had she seen such work to copy? He couldn’t recall her ever having left the villa
ge. Nor did he remember her poring over art books. And if they were hers entirely, out of what depths of visionary dread had she drawn them?

  He knew someone he could ask. Ailinn. But if he suddenly rang her to say he had unearthed remarkable art made by his mother she would smell a rat. If you want to talk to me, just talk to me, Kevern, she would say. You don’t need a pretext. Besides, what if she didn’t value the work? She wouldn’t be able to say so. And thereafter there’d be a dishonesty between them. It wasn’t fair to ask her.

  Then he remembered someone else. Everett. Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky.

  iv

  ‘And these were done by whom again?’ the eminent professor asked.

  He was nervous. Only nerves could explain such a question, given how clear Kevern had been about finding the notebook in a drawer in his father’s workshop, how he recognized other entries in her hand, and how sure he was of her signature. Did Zermansky feel he’d been compromised by Kevern’s excitement because it showed that he wasn’t only illegitimately hoarding heirlooms but hankering inordinately for something in the past? Surely not. Everyone knew that everyone else kept more than they should. Curiosity had not been altogether stifled anywhere.

  ‘My mother. I told you.’

  ‘And you never knew?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Never saw her do these?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘So they might not be hers?’

  ‘Believe me, that’s her signature.’

  Zermansky shrugged. In the world of art a signature was nothing.

  ‘I can’t imagine her signing what she hadn’t done,’ Kevern continued. ‘Nor can I think of who else could have done them.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Why would I be passing them off as hers?’

  Zermansky scratched his head. Good question.

  They were standing in Zermansky’s studio, on his easel the beginnings of another golden sun setting like liquid gold behind St Mordechai’s Mount. ‘I am perhaps the wrong person to ask,’ he said, nodding at the unfinished painting and laughing uncomfortably.

  ‘You must be able to udge the quality of work even when it’s unlike your own,’ Kevern said. ‘Your students’ work, for example.’

  ‘Oh, if any of my students were to do what your mother did . . .’

  His voice trailed off.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, they just wouldn’t. Couldn’t.’

  ‘Are you saying what my mother did would be beyond them?’

  ‘Not beyond them technically. Not beyond the best of them technically, anyway. But beyond them – how can I best put this – emotionally and volitionally. They wouldn’t know where in themselves to find such thoughts. And it wouldn’t occur to them to try. Why would it?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Because that isn’t how we see any more. To be frank with you, Kevern, that isn’t how I’d like them to see any more.’

  ‘That sounds prescriptive, Everett.’

  ‘No. I don’t mean it to. I don’t run a dictatorship of the arts here. My students paint what they feel. But some things are no longer felt, and I am glad of that.’

  ‘What is it that my mother felt that you are glad your students don’t?’

  ‘Kevern, I never knew your mother.’

  ‘Neither, it seems, did I. But we aren’t talking about her personally, are we. What is it in the work—’

  ‘Kevern, look. I don’t know when your mother did these. But they are of another time. Art has changed. We have returned to the primordial celebration of the loveliness of the natural world. You can see there is none of that in what your mother did. See how fractured her images are. There is no harmony here. The colours are brutal – forgive me, but you have asked me and I must tell you. I feel jittery just turning the pages. Even the human body, that most beautiful of forms, is made jagged and frightful. The human eye cannot rest for long on these, Kevern. There is too much mind here. They are disruptive of the peace we go to art to find.’

  ‘You make me proud of her.’

  Zermansky took a moment to process a thought. Like mother, like son – I bet she too had difficulty apologising.

  But he was quick to reassure Kevern of his motives. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘because it’s not my aim to make you ashamed of her. She was certainly gifted – primitively gifted, I’d say, in the way that a particular period of art was cerebral and primitive at the same time – but not every gift needs to see the light of day.’

  ‘I wasn’t proposing to mount an exhibition of her work.’

  ‘Excellent, excellent. You enjoy looking at them, that’s sufficient. I’d keep them as something between you and her.’

  ‘Keep them hidden, is what you’re saying?’

  Zermansky made a pair of scales with his hands, weighing ‘hiding’ against . . . well, whatever he was weighing it against. Keeping them as something between a son and his mother.

  Kevern was irked and puzzled. ‘Anyone would think,’ he said, ‘that these little sketches could get me into trouble.’

  Professor Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky threw him a weak smile. For the first time he understood to a certainty why he’d been asked to keep an eye on Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen.

  v

  Coira grew up in St Brigid’s Convent and Orphanage, ignorant of how she’d got there and knowing nothing of her mother and father. It was thought by many of the nuns that she had the ideal temperament to be a nun herself. She loved the ceremonials of the place – the sweet companionship, the daily round of repeated activity, the quiet of the church, the statuary, the incense, the music, the rhapsody. Convent orphanages were good for this. Over the years, as in many countries that had seen civil strife, children of other, not to say competing, faiths were secreted with the nuns of St Brigid’s and countless convents like it, and there, without theological turbulence, willingly embraced beliefs alien to their own – that’s when they knew what their own were. Occasionally some were delivered into the care of the nuns at an advanced enough age to notice the difference between the rituals of worship here and at home, but practised a gentle and compliant apostasy, relieved to be somewhere peaceful, away from rage and oppression, and grateful to feel accepted into a community. It could be confusing sometimes: the kind consideration they encountered from the nuns contrasting with the violence of the sermons to which they were subjected, in which many couldn’t fail to recognise themselves as the children of Satan, doomed to be swallowed by the fires of hell for all eternity. But at least in St Brigid’s no one tried to beat the wickedness out of those orphans who had been born into evil – the worst they did was to pray for their deliverance – and in Coira’s case they had no knowledge of what she had been born into anyway. Whether she would finally take vows herself she wasn’t sure, but she worked contentedly with the nuns she loved in a lay capacity until her sixteenth birthday when, with understandable reluctance, they handed over the letters her mother had left her. She locked herself away with them for many weeks, asked questions to which no one had an answer, requested the key for the convent library but found nothing there that helped shed light on why she had been abandoned, or what had happened to her mother or her grandparents. Her father she traced to his island parish, but decided, on the strength of sitting unknown through a sermon he gave on the subject of family love, that she had nothing to love him for. As she understood it, he had been instrumental in having her baptised and since, had she not been baptised, her mother would never have deposited her like unwanted luggage, he alone bore the blame. She had the wrong end of the stick, but her mistake was perfectly explicable. There was no one at the convent orphanage able to explain the ins and outs of matrilineality to her.

  It was only after this that she became difficult to control, suffering bouts of anger and depression, making unconvincing attempts to end her life, resorting to petty thieving, staying away for days at a time and sleeping with local boys. Her natural sweetness of temper always won th
e nuns round in the end, however, and no moral disaster ensued. Soon she was back to her old self, not quite as cheerful as before, and no longer talking of taking vows, but reconciled, it seemed, to a life of only occasionally fractious usefulness. But in her thirty-ninth year, just as her hair began to turn grey and her existence seemed to be moving into a blessedly placid phase, she fell pregnant with a child whose father she either wouldn’t or couldn’t name. The nuns didn’t judge her. Some felt that her failings were their failings, others that her mother’s sins, whatever they had been, were bound to be visited on her in the end. She went away to have the baby and then returned with it, one early morning, as her gift to the nuns. They found the bundled child before morning prayers, in a basket outside the chapel with an identifying label tied around her wrist. This, Sister Agatha, who was old enough to remember the depositing of Coira herself, took to be a bitterly ironic reference to that event, a perpetuation of rejection. A bundle of letters tied with pink ribbon was in the basket together with a note asking that they keep them for the girl and give them to her only in the event of her asking for them, but whatever happened no earlier than her twenty-fifth birthday.