Howard Jacobson - J

From an unwritten letter by Ailinn’s great-grandfather Wolfie Lestchinsky to his daughter Rebecca.

i

‘SO I WAS right all along to think it,’ Kevern said after a silence that seemed to Ailinn to go on for a period of dark time that could not be calculated in minutes or hours or even days. .

‘Right to think what?’ she asked at last before her own life ran out.

‘That Ferdie didn’t like me. Ferdie has never liked me.’

It was four o’clock in the morning, the time no living thing should be awake. There was not a sound from the sea where Kevern had looked for seals and not found any — drowned were they? drowned in some communal act of self-murder? — and where he imagined that even the fish, after eating well, must be now sleeping. They had tried talking in bed but Kevern needed to be able to pace about, so they had gone downstairs to the little kitchen. Ailinn sat at the table in her dressing gown, absent-mindedly banging her fists together. Kevern made tea, walked up and down, and made more tea. They had toasted all the bread they had and eaten all the biscuits. Ailinn couldn’t face sardines or pilchards so Kevern opened tins of baked beans, cherry tomatoes, tuna in olive oil, mushroom soup and sweetcorn. These he mixed in a large bowl to which he added salt, pepper and paprika. No thanks, Ailinn had said. He was not wearing any clothes. In response to Ailinn’s concern that he was cold, and then that he would scald himself, he said he wanted to be cold and wanted to scald himself. How you see me is how I feel, he told her.

Vulnerable, she could understand, but she wanted him to know he wasn’t — they weren’t — in any danger.

‘Can Ez be trusted?’ he asked.

‘To do what?’

‘To keep quiet.’

It was a difficult question to answer. ‘No one means us any harm,’ she repeated.

He laughed. ‘Don’t forget Ferdie. Never forget Ferdie.’

She was not inclined to follow him into Ferdie territory. She knew that he was preparing to go through the names of everyone he thought had ever harmed him or meant him ill — a list that could take them through many more nights like this — and still at the end of it scratch his head and say he didn’t understand what he’d done to offend them. It appeared to give him consolation to go on saying ‘I don’t think Ferdie likes me,’ and she feared he would repeat it and repeat it until she was able to direct him on to another course.

‘There is no point even trying to make light of any of this,’ she said. ‘I know that you only joke when you are at your most anxious.’

‘ oking? Who’s oking?’

He no sooner said those words than he knew he had to cross his js no longer.

Could this be called a liberation, then? It was too early to say.

He was past the point of marvelling at how much made sense to him now. He had always known. . that was to be his defence against the horrors of surprise. . he had always known really , at some level, below consciousness, beyond cognition, he had always known somewhere . . not everything, of course not everything, not the half of it, but enough, for the news to be as much confirmation as shock. . though whether that was confirmation of the worst of what he’d half known, or the best, or just something in the middle, he was yet to find out. But he hadn’t been to sleep and was wandering his kitchen naked, drinking tea and eating bean and tuna soup, so it had to be admitted he was not exactly taking it lightly.

By comparison, Ailinn, banging her fists together like cymbals, was relaxation itself.

‘Ferdie didn’t like you, either,’ he reminded her.

‘Darling, I don’t give a shit what Ferdie thought.’

‘You should. The world is full of Ferdies.’

‘ Your world is full of Ferdies.’

‘So you’re OK about all this, is that what you’re telling me?’

She had put herself in a false position. No she didn’t feel OK about all this, but then Kevern still didn’t know the full extent of it. She couldn’t hit him with more than she’d hit him with already. This was part one. Part two would come when she thought he was good and ready. Give me time, she’d told Ez. Wouldn’t it be best to strike while the iron’s hot, Ez had said, but the metaphor was too close to the literal truth. It would have been like branding and braining him. I’ll need time, she insisted. As for what she did tell Kevern about — their sudden consanguinity — then yes, the revelation did feel more a blessing than a curse to her. But however their histories had converged, their antecedent narratives were different. To put it brutally, she had none. Ez had simply filled the blanks in for her. And something was better than nothing. Whereas for Kevern, well he had to set about reconfiguring a densely peopled chronicle, reimagining not just himself but every member of his family. And pacing the kitchen with no clothes, trying for jokes that weren’t funny even by his family’s standards of deranged unfunniness, he didn’t appear so far to be making a good job of it.

‘I’ll be OK,’ she said, ‘when you’re OK.’

He stopped his pacing and leaned against the stove. ‘Be careful, for Christ’s sake,’ she warned him.

‘What did they see?’ he asked suddenly, as though addressing another matter entirely, as though he had ust strolled into the room with an incidental question in his mind. ‘I’m not asking what they thought — they thought what they’d been taught to think — but what did they see when my hunchbacked grandfather popped his nose out of this cottage to sniff the poisoned air? What did they see when my mother went shopping in her rags? Or when my father crept into the village to sell his candlesticks to the gift shops? Or when you and I, come to that, first went strolling arm in arm through Paradise Valley? What do they see when they see us now?’

‘Who’s “they”?’

He wouldn’t even bother to answer that. She knew who ‘they’ were. ‘They’ were whoever weren’t them. The Ferdies.

‘What do we look like to them, is what I’m asking. Vermin?’

‘Oh, Kevern!’

‘ Oh, Kevern what? Oh, Kevern, don’t be so extreme . Do you think I could ever outdo in extremity those who did what they did? But to understand how they could ever do it requires us to see what they saw, or at least to imagine what they saw.’

‘Maybe they didn’t see anything. Maybe they still don’t. Has it occurred to you that we just aren’t there for them?’

‘Just ! That’s a mighty big “just”, Ailinn. I think I’d rather be vermin than “just” not there. And even if you’re right, it still takes some explaining. How do you make a fellow mortal not there? What’s the trick of seeing right through someone? An indifference on that scale is nothing short of apocalyptic — or it is when it comes to getting rid of the thing you don’t see, going to pains to obliterate what isn’t there. But I don’t think you’re right anyway. I think they must see something, the embodiment of a horrible idea, the fleshing out of an evil principle that’s been talked about and written about for too long, mouldy like something that’s crawled out of its own grave.’