Howard Jacobson - Pussy

Fracassus gave interviews to the world’s press gathered in Gnossia to report on Phonocrates’ funeral. The late President was a great guy, he said. He shook his head and, with a dying fall, repeated the felicitous phrase. ‘Great guy… great guy…’

Had he been frightened. No, he had no fear, no fear.

Anything else?

He raised his face to the cameras. ‘It’s been a great night, thank you, thank you.’ Then he remembered a line Professor Probrius had given him for a rainy day. ‘The fight against terror goes on.’

There being nothing further to keep them in Gnossia, the Prince’s party betook themselves to the little airport. Fracassus didn’t like flying but at least he had a row of First Class seats to himself. He settled in to watching television on the back of someone else’s seat in a language he didn’t recognize on a screen the size of a postage stamp.

Language had never been an insuperable barrier to Fracassus’s enjoyment of anything. The conversations he most enjoyed were the ones he couldn’t hear or understand and even his favourite television programmes worked best for him with the sound turned off so he could interpolate his own dialogue. Some people’s brains are crammed and noisy places; Fracassus – though he enjoyed commotion and liked imagining himself to be its cause – kept a quiet head. The word ‘Me’ pinged about in it like a bagatelle ball in a deserted basilica.

And now ‘Me’ was an emntity they had tried to kill and failed. The word suggested impregnability. ‘Me’ was armour plating.

Soon after the plane took off, he found himself quickly engrossed in a game show the essentials of which would have been plain in any tongue. Based loosely on a sketch by a once beloved comedian called Monty Python – a repeat of which Fracassus had watched a hundred times without finding it remotely funny, so there must have been nothing else on those nights – the show comprised a host wearing a faceted metallic suit, a hostess exiguously dressed in bank notes, a studio audience exceptionally collaborative in spirit, and the contestants themselves, tempted to blow the whistle on people they loved, whether by giving away their secrets to their spouses, divulging their medical histories, casting doubts on their legitimacy, or informing on them to the police. The longer they held out against betrayal, the plumper the brown paper envelope they were offered, though of course – or there would have been no point to the game – the offer might be rescinded at any time. You had to choose your moment. Those who refused to stab their friends in the back were jeered – ‘Spravnos,’ the studio audience called out, which Fracassus translated as ‘Lock ’em up!’ – while those who held out for more money and then sold their family down the river were applauded wildly. ‘Spravchik,’ the audience shouted, which Fracassus took to mean ‘We love you.’ Fracassus registered a provisional interest in the witch-queen hostess, part Lilith, part Shinigame, who handed out or held back the envelopes, dropping a curtsy either way, in order to avoid bending over. But it was the Tempter in Chief himself, brawny as a bear but soft-voiced like a serpent, who grabbed Fracassus’s attention. ‘Me,’ Fracassus thought, as the plane landed at Cholm airport.

A middlingly-stretch limousine was waiting to collect the party and transport them to their hotel. The cocktail cabinet and television were smaller than his father’s but Fracassus was, for him, too full of what he’d been watching on the flight to complain. ‘So what exactly was the principle of this game?’ Dr Cobalt asked. She would have liked to take in the scenery of a country she had never visited before, but this was not a journey for her pleasure. And besides, flushed from whatever had happened in Gnossia, Fracassus had turned voluble and peremptory.

‘You get money for shopping your friends,’ he explained. Already he had assumed the menacingly soft tones of the Master of Betrayal.

‘Is that it?’

‘And people shout Spravchik.’

‘Spravchik?’

‘Spravchik.’

On hearing this word, the driver of the limousine swung round in his seat. ‘You know Spravchik?’

Dr Cobalt looked at Professor Probrius. They were both accomplished linguists, but no, neither of them knew what Spravchik was.

‘Spravchik is not a what, he’s a who,’ the driver called over his shoulder. ‘Vozzek Spravchik is our Foreign Secretary.’

‘Why, in that case, would people have been calling out his name on a game show?’ Probrius asked.

‘Why? Why not? It his show. They were calling for him.’ Cheem, they were calling for cheem, he pronounced to the Prince’s delight. Setting aside Gnossia, where people spoke the same language he spoke, Fracassus had never left Urbs-Ludus and had not heard a foreign accent before. His genius for mimicry was tickled. Cheem , he kept saying to himself. He added it to his repertoire. Lordy, lordy; the floppy limbed spastic bedmaker, and now Cheem . A comic routine was taking shape.

Probrius did know something of the world beyond the Republic, but he was still surprised by what the driver told him. ‘Your Foreign Secretary is a game show host? Is there not a conflict of interests?’

‘What conflict? He is also Minister of Home Affairs, and Culture Secretary. Why not? No conflict.’ Confleect.

A thrill went through Fracassus. Confleect. Chwy not. Cheem . Life had become very amusing suddenly. If only he had an audience bigger than Probrius and Cobalt to amuse. An audience the size of the one that had watched him knock out the subversive singer. Spravchik!

The next morning, following a day of sightseeing in which Fracassus saw nothing, Vozzek Spravchik invited the Prince and his little party to meet him at the Ministry. The plan before they’d left home had been for Fracassus to travel this leg of the journey incognito, without the hindrance of diplomatic nicety and protocol, but he had been so insistent in his desire to see the Minister in the flesh, that messages had been hurriedly exchanged, permissions sought, and here they were.

To Fracassus’s disappointment, the Minister greeted them in an ordinary lounge suit and without his assistant from the show. He could have been a civil servant. But then he took his tie off and spiny black bristling hairs, that reminded Fracassus of a wild boar he’d seen on a natural history programme, sprang from his shirt. A pungent smell came off him. On the walls of his office were photographs of Spravchik in his swimming trunks, driving a jeep, diving, surfing and standing in an olympic pool balancing on each shoulder the two synchronised swimmers who’d won silver medals for their country in the recent games. There were also two life-size paintings in the heroic style – one of him arm-wrestling a polar bear and the other of him gently removing a thorn from a lion’s paw. ‘These are the two sides to my personality,’ he explained. Fracassus’s initial disappointment in the man dissolved in his admiration for the art.

‘Welcome, anyway, to you all,’ Spravchik proclaimed, as though to a vast gathering, extending a hand to each of the party in turn. ‘There are, I hope, no hard feelings left between our peoples. Sometimes you have to have enemies to know who your friends are.’

Though Fracassus was not aware there’d been hard feelings between the Republic of Urbs-Ludus and Cholm, he liked Spravchik’s verbal style and wanted to show he could match it. ‘And sometimes you have to be right to be wrong,’ he responded.

Spravchik appeared delighted by this and clasped Fracassus to his strong chest. ‘We should wrestle,’ he said.