Howard Jacobson - J

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.’