Howard Jacobson - J

Bloody Gutkind!

Looking on the bright side, as it is my nature to do, the decline of Gutkind’s fortunes, following his most recent act of lumbering zealotry, must herald an improvement in mine. Funny how fate — the divine juggler — balances the fortunes of men with such precision, so that with each rise or fall we vacate space, not just for any old rival, but for someone we have a particular reason for hating. It was to yours truly, anyway, that the powers that be turned to minimise the damage Gutkind was causing. First of all the clown needed to be called off Kevern Cohen, and who better than me, given that I’d taught him briefly (Gutkind, that is) as a mature student, impossible as it is to believe that so unimaginative a man could ever have flirted with the idea of a second career in the Benign Visual Arts, though the Benign Visual Arts, I have to say, did not flirt back — who better, I repeat, than someone with my authority to remind him of the limits of his? Nothing too heavy-handed, just a quiet, entre nous suggestion — implicating no one higher up — that he back off. Why break a butterfly on a wheel and all that. Since you’re acquainted with him, Professor, you can intimate our disfavour, was the flavour (the flavour of their disfavour is nice, don’t you think?) of their communication to me. My knowing Kevern as well, of course, gave me extra ammunition. ‘I’ve been watching Cohen for some time,’ I could get away with saying to Detective Inspector Gutkind, ‘and nothing I have seen suggests he would harm a hair of a woman’s head, let alone do what was done to poor Lowenna Morgenstern, so please don’t bother your own pretty little head about him any further. Kevern Cohen? Mr Lovespoon himself! Are you joking? A policeman of all people should know there are some men who are incapable of committing a murder because they know they’d never get the blood off their hands. Can you imagine our friend Kevern “Coco” Cohen scrubbing underneath his fingernails? He’d be there, crouched over himself, washing until Doomsday. Don’t make me laugh, Detective Inspector. The country’s crawling with ruffians. Go bag yourself one of those.’

How it was that Gutkind became first an acquaintance and subsequently a student of mine is a story in itself. We met through our wives, is the short of it. They had become friends in the course of attending Credibility Fatigue classes together. And that, too, is a story in itself. It’s always the women who go a little wobbly in the matter of WHAT HAPPENED — probably as a consequence of giving or anticipating giving birth, unless it’s a more generally diffused hormonal agitation — whereupon some stiffening of their resolve is called for. I can’t speak for Mrs Gutkind, who has since left her husband — for which, I have to say, no sane person could blame her — but my wife, Demelza, fell a while back into terribly depressed spirits, questioning the point of saying sorry all the time when by all official accounts (as indeed by mine) there was nothing really to say sorry for, questioning the way we lived our lives, questioning the powers that be, even questioning me, the person who puts food on her table. ‘Nothing makes any sense to me,’ she’d complain. ‘I feel a pall over everything, I feel the children are fed lies at school, I feel I was fed lies at school, I suspect you’re feeding lies to your students, we are supposed to have mended what went wrong, except that we are told nothing went wrong, but if it’s not safe to go out on to the streets — not safe here, in fucking sleepy Bethesda! — it’s as though we’re all in a trance, like zombies, pretending, what are we pretending Phinny, what aren’t we saying, what aren’t you saying, what are these little jobs you say you have to do, other women. . are you seeing other women? Except I don’t feel here’ — her hands upon her lovely breasts — ‘that you are seeing other women, it feels more as if you’ve taken to religion or are going out to drink with aliens or someone, is that what you’re doing, or are we the aliens, are we from another planet, Phinny, because increasingly I don’t feel I’m from this one. .’ And more along such loopy lines.

The doctor, at my instigation, prescribed antidepressants.

Credibility Fatigue classes were my idea too. Between ourselves, dear diary, I’d had a minor professional fling — our both being professors of illusions of sorts — with Megan Abrahamson, the woman who ran the classes in Bethesda, a stern, blue-eyed beauty who’d fallen into a terrible depression herself when she was giving birth to her first child and so knew from the inside exactly what Demelza and others like her were going through. ‘What we fear as mothers-to-be,’ she explained to me, ‘is bringing our child into a dangerous, deceitful world. We see a threat whenever anyone approaches us and we hear a lie in everything that’s said. It’s the protective instinct gone haywire. So when you learn about WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED you are of a mind to say no ifs or buts about it, it happened, and obviously shouldn’t have happened, or we wouldn’t all still be so cagey about it, saying sorry while insisting there’s nothing to say sorry for. You want, you see, the truth and nothing but the truth for your baby. It isn’t you who isn’t seeing straight, you think, it’s everybody else. In your own eyes you are getting to the bottom of a truth that has been obfuscated, no matter that the person doing the obfuscating is you. It’s at this point that I find some straight-talking history, painful as it is, is what’s required. “OK, you asked for it,” I say. I show them classified documents and photographs: this is what those whom you fear were the innocent victims of what happened were responsible for, I say; this is the damage they wrought, this is the weaponry they unloosed on defenceless peoples, these are the countries they laid waste in their baseless, neurotic, opportunistic fear of being laid waste themselves, these are the bitter fruits of their egoistic policy of “never again”, this is how they justified it here, in our parliament and in our newspapers, this is the misery of which they were the authors, these are their faces, these are their words, this is their history, repeated and repeated again wherever they set foot, sorrowful to themselves but a thousand times more sorrowful to those whose necks they trod on and who, when they could finally take no more, trod back, that’s if they did, and these are their confessions, the expressions of self-loathing, the acts of self-immolation, the orgy of introverted hate they unleashed on one another as a last expression of an ancient culpability for which they knew, better than anyone else, there could be no redemption. Yes, it breaks the heart, but WHAT HAPPENED, if indeed it happened, was at the last visited by them upon themselves. .’

I could have kissed her.

In fact I did kiss her.

To what degree these classes put Demelza’s concerns to rest I have no idea. She has always been an obstinate, at times even a hysterical, woman. But she certainly turned more placid and glazed-eyed once she’d completed the course. Could have been the antidepressants, I accept, but I like to think that demonstrable truth played its part.

Gutkind and I shared a drink at the bar close to the Credibility Fatigue Centre from time to time while waiting for our wives. He was more angry with his than I was with mine. ‘Some bleeding heart has got to her,’ he said.

I wondered — de haut en bas , professor to police constable, which was all he was in those days — in what way someone had ‘got’ to her.

He was needled by my asking. ‘Women talk to each other,’ he said.

His eyes could be too fierce for his complexion. When they blazed, as they were blazing now, they burned out the little natural colour he possessed. In fairness to him I should say that most of the men in the pub we were drinking in looked the same. Coals of fire burning in every face. Just possibly they too were waiting for their wives, though they had the air of frequenting such places as this, as indeed did Gutkind, whereas for me pub-going was an exceptional circumstance. Regulars or not, they knew in their bones I wasn’t Bethesda born, they could smell the outsider on me. I came once with Kevern Cohen and I feared there was going to be a lynch party. Two aphids! Why did that make them so angry? If they had to mark their awareness of our difference why didn’t they just laugh at us? Or come over to touch our skin? ‘Jesus God Almighty, it’s skin remarkably similar to ours! Let’s be friends.’ But no, they snarled and ground their knuckles into the bar, exchanging glances with one another as though each felt it was his neighbour’s place to raise an arm against us, and the fact that no one did was a species of betrayal and ultimately shame. Was the impotence they felt another reason for mistrusting us the more? ‘Those you don’t kill when you should, you end up hating with a fury that is beyond murderousness,’ Kevern said as we were urinating in adjoining booths. In fact I was urinating and Kevern was waiting for me to finish. He found it impossible, he confided, to pass water in the presence of another man. ‘What about a woman?’ I enquired. ‘Can any man pass water in the presence of a woman?’ he asked, in what was not, I believe, a feigned astonishment. ‘Demelza and I do it all the time,’ I told him.