Howard Jacobson - J

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 enough. 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?

But then that precisely was the point, wasn’t it. No one was meant to know who was, or who had been, who. No one was meant to track himself or his antecedents down. Call me Ishmael. Life had begun again.

Ailinn had come out of the cab and was watching him. ‘Are you all right, my love?’ she asked.

His relief knew no bounds. She’d called him ‘my love’. Which must have meant the wretched taxi incident had been forgiven. He wanted to kiss her in the street. He took her hand instead and squeezed it.

He nodded. ‘There’s a strange atmosphere of squatting here,’ he said, noticing a mother coming out to check on her children, and maybe on him too. He was struck by how softly she padded, as though not to wake the dead. ‘They have the air of living lives on someone else’s grave.’

‘That’s a quick judgement to leap to,’ Ailinn laughed. ‘You’ve been here all of five minutes!’

‘It’s not a judgement. I’m just trying to describe what I feel. Don’t you think there’s a queer apprehensive silence out here?’

‘Well if there is, it might be caused by the way you’re staring at everyone. I’d be apprehensive if I had you outside my door, trying to describe what you feel. Let’s go now.’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ he continued. ‘It’s as though the place is not possessed by its inhabitants.’

This annoyed Ranajay. ‘These people live here quite legally,’ he said. ‘And have done for long, long times.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Kevern said, ‘I’m not claiming anything back.’

‘It was never yours,’ Ranajay said. ‘Not possible.’

Never yours , like yesterday’s taxi. Like Ailinn’s honour in the café. Did ownership of everything have to be fought for in this city?

Ailinn feared that if Kevern didn’t back off, their driver would leave them here. And then let Kevern see how unpossessed by its inhabitants it was. She lightly touched Ranajay’s arm. ‘I don’t think he means to imply it was his,’ she said.

Kevern suddenly felt faint. ‘Let’s get your phone fixed and then go back to the hotel,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of here.’

He climbed back into the taxi, not waiting for her to get in first.

He had heard his mother’s voice. ‘Kevern,’ she called. Just that. ‘Key-vern’ — coming from a long way away, not in pain or terror, but as though through a pain of glass. Then he thought he heard the glass shatter. Could she have broken it with her voice?

It made no sense that she should be calling him. She hadn’t been a Cohen except by marriage to his father, unless. . but he wasn’t thinking along those lines today, so why should he hear her calling to him in Cohentown?

Calling him in, or warning him to turn away? Away, he thought. He could even feel her hands on his chest. Go! Leave it, your father is right, it will dismay and disappoint you.

Such a strange locution: dismay and disappoint . Like everything else they’d ever told him — distant and non-committal. As though they were discussing a life that didn’t belong to them to a son who didn’t belong to them either.

It had always been that way. Even as they sat on the train going east, looking out at the snow, there was no intimacy. When the train finally pulls into the little station other families will be counted, sent this way and that way, and where necessary ripped from one another’s arms. How does a mother say goodbye to her child for the last time? What’s the kindest thing — to hang on until you are prised apart by bayonet, or to turn on your heels and go without once looking back? What are the rules of heartbreak? What is the etiquette?

Kevern wonders which course his parents will decide on when the time comes and the soldiers subject them to their hellish calculus. Then, as though prodded by a bayonet himself, he suffers an abrupt revulsion, like a revulsion from sex or the recollection of shame, from the ghoulishness of memories that are not his to possess.

Appalled, Kevern hauls himself back from the stale monotony of dreams. Always the same places, the same faces, the same fears. Each leaking into the other as though his brain has slipped a cog. Dementia must be like this, nothing in the right place or plane, but isn’t he a bit young for that? So he climbs, so he climbed, so he will go on climbing, back into the taxi taking him away, feeling fraudulent and faint.

Now it was Ranajay’s turn to wonder if he’d caused offence. ‘I’m only meaning this for your husband’s sake,’ he said to Ailinn, starting the vehicle up again. ‘He could not ever have lived here. There is no one now existing who lived here.’

He looked as though he was going to cry.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, putting an arm around Kevern who seemed to have snapped into a sleep. He hadn’t fainted. Just gone from waking to sleeping as if at a hypnotist’s command.