Howard Jacobson - J

‘I did choose you.’

‘You’ve forgotten. The pig auctioneer chose me for you.’

‘No, he didn’t. He pointed you out, that was all. An entirely redundant act, as it transpired. I didn’t need you pointing out. I was already well aware of your presence. I was irradiated by it. The fact that his judgement coincided with mine didn’t make it material to mine. If anything, he could have put me off you.’

‘In which case his judgement was material to yours.’

‘Negatively, but even then not quite.’

‘I didn’t know you had nearly been put off me.’

‘Isn’t there always a moment of hovering? Is this her or isn’t it? Do I leap or do I wait?’

‘I didn’t hover. I leapt.’

‘But then you leapt back when I told you your feet were too big.’

‘Not for long, though. I was on the phone to you almost immediately, though it took you an eternity to pick up.’ She remembered Ez, telling her to ring him. Ez sitting on her bed. Ez getting in too close and getting on her nerves. Ez playing with their lives.

‘Then there you are,’ he said, encircling her with his arms. ‘We chose each other. But what’s this about?’

‘Ez.’

‘Ez brought us together?’

‘You knew?’

‘Well I do now. I guess it makes perfect sense. Ez had something about your past she needed to tell you and feared how you would take it. As she saw it, you needed someone capable of supporting you, someone physically strong, unwavering and emotionally resolute, so she hired the pig man to look out for a likely candidate, and he found me.’

‘ Someone physically strong, unwavering and emotionally resolute ?’

‘Yes.’

‘This the pig man saw in the middle of a field?’

‘Why not? I saw who you were in the middle of a field.’

He’s going to need all his unwavering emotional resolution now, Ailinn thought.

‘There was something about me you didn’t see,’ she said.

He waved the idea away. There was nothing he hadn’t seen.

‘You didn’t see what Ez saw.’

‘Ez, Ez. . why is there so much talk of Ez?’

They’d been lying down, looking at the ceiling, but now she swung her legs out of bed and went to stand by the window. It was quiet out there, no wind, no gulls, even the blowhole subdued. The sky was low, without colour or promise. ‘God, it can feel dead down here sometimes,’ she said.

He remembered his mother saying the same. ‘It’s like being in a coffin,’ she said once. ‘With the lid down.’

Was that before or after the free meat, he wondered.

‘Look on the bright side,’ his father had answered. ‘At least there’ll be no surprises when they screw you in.’

His light-touched father.

He liked watching Ailinn naked at the window. He’d often thought of carving her, not just in miniature on a lovespoon, but as a candlestick maybe. Would he be able to render the responsiveness of her flesh, the reserves of life that were in her flanks, the strength of her legs? The springiness of her that made him believe in life?

‘While we’re laying cards on the table,’ he blurted out, ‘my grandfather was a hunchback.’

She didn’t turn around.

‘You never told me that before.’

‘I never knew before.’

‘So how come you know now?’

‘Kroplik told me.’

‘How does he know?’

‘He knows everything. Like your beloved Ez.’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘To know I’m from crooked stock? Yes. But Kroplik reckons I should be grateful. It was the hunchback who kept us safe.’

‘Safe from what?’

‘I don’t know. Whatever.’

‘And how does Kroplik say he managed that?’

‘By scaring people and being lucky. Apparently you don’t mess with a hunchback. Or at least you don’t in these parts.’

‘Do you ever wonder. .’ she started to say, then relented.

‘Do I ever wonder what?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes it does. Do I ever wonder what?’

‘What you’re doing here.’

‘On earth?’

‘In Port Reuben.’

‘All the time.’

‘Would you want to find out?’

He got up from the bed and moved towards her. He wanted to feel her nakedness pressed into his, the lovely resilience of her buttocks.

‘There’s a lot I want to find out,’ he said. ‘But then again there isn’t. Mysteries are always so banal when they’re solved. You’re better off living in uncertainty.’

‘You say that, but you couldn’t bear not knowing who broke in here and straightened your rug.’

‘No. And now I never will find out.’ This was a silent allusion, that Ailinn was quick to pick up, to the murder of Detective Inspector Gutkind, the gory details of which were the talk of Port Reuben and beyond. Neither spoke about it. Kevern was happy to have him out of their lives, but he didn’t want to put that relief in so many words to Ailinn. He didn’t suppose she’d wonder if he’d done it, but then again there was no reason to plant further anxiety. Who knows what anyone will do in the end? Who would have thought he’d kiss Lowenna Morgenstern? Who would have thought his mother had a secret life? And now Ailinn. .

‘Certainty might be banal, but better that, any time, than the immeasurable stress of uncertainty,’ Ailinn said, reading his mind.

‘So you’re pleased to know now how you came to be in an orphanage? You don’t wish that Ez had never told you?’

‘Hardly “pleased”, but yes, I believe I am better off for knowing, banal though you consider it all to be.’

‘I didn’t say that what happened to you was banal.’

‘Don’t apologise. I’m not offended. It is banal. But I would rather know it than not.’

‘And you’d rather know that Ez was instrumental in our meeting?’

‘Rather it had happened some other way, but rather know than not know that it happened the way it did.’

‘We should drink to Ez, then.’

Was he being sarcastic, or just slow to take the measure of what she was trying to tell him?

He went downstairs to open a bottle and returned with two full glasses.

‘To Ez,’ he said.

She still couldn’t decide. Sarcastic, or unfeeling, or stupid?

And then he noticed that Ailinn’s eyes were red. Not with weeping, more with the strain of looking.

‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost,’ he said.

And that was when she told him.

What will it take? The same as it has always taken. The application of a scriptural calumny (in this instance the convergence of two scriptural calumnies) to economic instability, inflamed nationalism, an unemployed and malleable populace in whom the propensity to hero-worship is pronounced, supine government, tedium vitae , a self-righteous and ill-informed élite, the pertinaciousness of old libels — the most consoling of which being that they’d had their chance, these objects of immemorial detestation, chance after chance (to choose love over law, flexibility over intransigence, community over exclusiveness, and to learn compassion from suffering). . chance after chance, and — as witness their moving in scarcely more than a generation from objects of immolation to proponents of it — they’d blown them all. Plus zealotry. Never forget zealotry — that torch to the easily inflamed passions of the benighted and the cultured alike. What it won’t take, because it won’t need — because it never needs — is an evil genius to conceive and direct the operation. We have been lulled by the great autocrat-driven genocides of the recent past into thinking that nothing of that enormity of madness can ever happen again — not anywhere, least of all here. And it’s true — nothing on such a scale probably ever will. But lower down the order of horrors, and answering a far more modest ambition, carnage can still be connived at — lesser bloodbaths, minor murders, butchery of more modest proportions.