Howard Jacobson - J

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We’re not unhappy. Not you and me. We are different.’

Yes, they were overdoing this.

Later that week he was asked how well he’d known Lowenna Morgenstern.

1Liebling,

The days go by without my hearing from you and I wonder what I have done to deserve your cruelty. Everything I see, I see only that I might relate it to you. Had I only known how wonderful I was going to find Ludgvennok I would not have allowed you to persuade me to come on my own. When I think of all I have written about the regeneration of the human race, and all I have done to further its ennoblement, it cheers me to find a people here who live up to everything I have ever understood by nobility of character. It can sometimes, of course, be as much a matter of what one doesn’t find as what one does, that renders a place and a people congenial. Whether by deliberate intention or some lucky chance, Ludgvennok appears to have been released from the influence of those whose rapacity of ambition and disagreeableness of appearance has made life such a trial in the European cities where I have spent my life. Even the ear declares itself to be in a paradise to be free, from the moment one wakes to the moment one lies down — without you, alas, my darling — of that repulsive jumbled blabber, that yodelling cackle, in which elsewhere the —-s make the insistence of their presence felt. Here it is almost as though one has returned to a time of purity, when mankind was able to rejoice in its connection with its natural soil, unspoiled by the jargon of a race that has no passion — no Leidenschaft , there is no other word — for the land, for art, for the heroical, or for the rest of humanity.

My darling, I do so wish you could be here with me.

Your R

Friday 3rd

SUDDENLY EVERYONE, AND I mean everyone , is taking an interest in my man. Have I said that already? Suddenly everyone’s taking even more of an interest in my man, in that case. I can’t pretend I’m comfortable with this upsurge of curiosity. One guards one’s subjects jealously, as one guards one’s wife or reputation. If there was more they needed to know, why didn’t they just ask me? I have a nasty feeling I’m being superseded, which could mean one of two things: either I’m not up to it, in their estimation, or Kevern Cohen’s in trouble too deep for me to fathom. I don’t care how this impacts on my good name — I have other fish to fry, when all is said and done — but I’m concerned how Kevern will fare, given all his oddities, without a sympathetic person to keep an eye on him. I like the fellow, as I have said. Whatever is actually going on, it strikes me as cruel that someone so predisposed to paranoia should have all his delusions of persecution and incrimination confirmed. And that’s just me I’m talking about. . Ba boom! as my grandfather would say when he made a bad joke. Back in the days when people liked to make bad jokes. Or any kind of joke, come to that. But to return to me. . I always liked that silly joke, too, when I was small: ‘That’s enough of me, so what do you think of me?’. . but to return seriously to me, it’s hard to tell how I’m regarded ‘upstairs’. Certainly no one has — at least in so many words — called my work into question. But ‘something a little more definite and up to date wouldn’t go amiss’ is not exactly the remark of an examiner about to give me an A++ for effort, is it? Tell us something we don’t already know, the expressions on their faces said when I first delivered them the news that he had a girlfriend.

I tapped my nose. ‘A regular girlfriend.’

To whom his intentions, they enquired, after a long, bored silence, are what? It struck me as an odd question. How did I know what his intentions were? Honourable, I guessed, given the man. I was requested, in no uncertain terms, to do better than guess . I happen to believe that an intention is a bit like a predisposition to cancer or dementia — essentially genetic. Honourable father, honourable son. Same the world over, even China. Honolable father, honolable son. But families, strictly speaking, are not my territory. To do parents and grandparents you have to have clearance at the very highest level. Mooching about in public records is not generally encouraged. This is a free society, so long as you don’t plan to travel — and people are only prevented from leaving the country (or indeed from entering it) for their own good — so access to everything is in principle available to everyone. But the past — especially when it is particularised: the story of you and me and how we got here, the story of Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen and whether or not he has inherited the honolable gene — is itself another country. And when it comes to such a country, the powers that be would rather we did not go there. Say sorry and have done is the wisest course, they believe, and I agree with them. Danger lurks in nostalgia. The slogans printed at the foot of the notepaper on which I write my reports — LET SLEEPING DOGS LIE, THE OVEREXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING, YESTERDAY IS A LESSON WE CAN LEARN ONLY BY LOOKING TO TOMORROW — are reminders rather than threats. So no measures are taken against anyone who does not heed them. Buildings are not barred to you. Doors are not closed in your face. ‘Yes, of course’ will be the polite rejoinder to any request you make to inspect certificates of birth or death, or voter lists, or even newspapers dating too far back. But the forms you fill in are never read by anyone. Calls are not returned, applications are lost, the person you were talking to in the morning won’t be there in the afternoon. If you decide it is easier to forget about it, you will be met with smiles all round. A bottle of champagne tied with a blue ribbon might even be sent to you in the post, together with a note saying ‘Sorry we couldn’t help. We tried.’ But even without these precautions, the consequence of OPERATION ISHMAEL — that great beneficent name change to which the people ultimately gave their wholehearted consent — is that tracing lineage is not only as good as impossible, it is unnecessary. We are all one big happy family now. Zermanskys, Cohens, Rosenthals (that’s the head of the academy: Eoghan Rosenthal), Feigenblats (Rozenwyn Feigenblat is the college librarian, and something of a looker I must say) — we acknowledge a kinship which we all tacitly know to be artificial but which works. Apply this simple test: when was the last time anyone was picked on for his name? Precisely. ‘We are all Edward Everett Phineas Zermansky!’ my students would shout were anyone to persecute me for whatever reason.

We are all Eoghan Rosenthal!

We are all Kevern Cohen!

We are all Lowenna Morgenstern, God save her soul — or at least we were.

If there is anyone alive who is old enough to have an inkling what his parents were called before OPERATION ISHMAEL he will wisely not remember it.

I have heard tell, or at least I have read, that — after an initial period of understandable reluctance, or misapprehension as I would rather think of it — the renaming turned into a month-long street party, young and old dancing with one another in the parks, strangers embracing, people saying goodbye to their old names as they waited for the official documents that would apprise them of their new. A few lucky ones won the right by televised lottery to choose their own from an approved list. But whether they chose or they were given, people entered into the spirit of the change. It was as though they’d been hypnotised. ‘You will sleep,’ they were told, ‘you will fall into a deep carnivalesque sleep wherein you will dance and make merry. At the count of ten you will awake and while you will remember who you were, you will not remember what you were called. One, two. .’ Not literally that, but similar. A moral hypnosis. For our own good. And as with private memories, so with public records: they have been wiped clean. It is sometimes argued, in lowered voices, that if we can’t be sure about our neighbours’ antecedents, we expose ourselves to. .