Howard Jacobson: Pussy

‘I will talk to the Grand Duke about this,’ was the the Grand Duchess’s imperious reply. ‘But I shouldn’t have to remind you that you were hired to keep the world and its controversies out of my son’s education until he is ready for it, not thrust it upon him while he isn’t.’

Dr Strowheim would have liked to say that The Life and Loves of the Emperor Nero was hardly ‘the world and its controversies’, but he knew when to stay silent. He bowed and the Grand Duchess went off to discuss these developments with her husband.

In truth, she blamed him for the comatose state in which they found their son. Men and their gadgets! She had stood out against her husband’s digitilization of the palace, firstly on aesthetic grounds – she hated all those wires – and secondly because she believed it was a woman’s job to make the case for interpersonal relationships – too much time looking at screens, she believed, affected men’s ability to read emotions, and God knows they were bad enough at it already. But the Grand Duke had defeated her, as he always did. ‘One,’ he told her with triumphant patronage, there would be no wires; ‘These days, my dear Demanska, machines speak to one another wirelessly. It is quite marvellous, really, how technology has advanced. Which country was it that used to say it ruled the waves? I, my dear, no matter where I walk in the Palace, have only to punch a four digit password into any device I happen to be walking past, to rule the airwaves of the world. And all without a wire to be seen. That’s one. Two: reading emotions has gone far enough, in my opinion,’

He looked at her steadily and caressed her cheek. Forgive his cruelty in referring to this, but did they really want Fracassus to go in the direction of his older brother Jago, a child they no longer saw and seldom talked about but who had gone off the rails as a consequence of what the Grand Duke could only call empathy overload, reading emotions left, right and centre until he no longer knew which emotions were his own – his gender neither – and now lived they had no idea where or with whom as Joyce? No. Whatever his wife thought, he was not prepared to let that happen to Fracassus, even if it meant the boy getting fat, knowing nothing of interpersonality, and thinking he was Nero. Better Nero than Norma.

The mention of Jago always quietened Demanska Origen. Had he been her fault? Certainly he had been more her child than her husband’s, and more her child than Fracassus would ever be. Was it because she blamed herself for Jago’s defection that she had been less of a mother to his younger brother? Could it be that she had grown afraid of her power to sensitize? She tried to remember when she’d last looked Fracassus in the face. Yes, she’d praised his beauty. A mother had to do that. She had carried him in her womb. She had cried at his delivery. But had she ever truly looked deep into his eyes? Did she even know what colour his eyes were? But Jago, lovely Jago, she had known too well. How his face had lit up when she read to him of chocolate factories and magic schoolboys? His tutors had worried that he was still reading about the chocolate factories and magic schoolboys he’d loved at the age of nine or ten when he was nineteen or twenty, but Demanska Origen hadn’t minded that. She was still reading about them herself.

She brought her worries up at her reading group. Should she have encouraged Jago to read something else?

There was a long, troubled silence. They were all mothers of sons. Daughters would find their own way into literature, but the route was too thorny for boys, especially in the face of discouragement from their fathers. Jago wasn’t the only son to have lost his way. In recent years the craze for interpersonality – imported somehow from beyond the Wall, despite the strict protectionism in place – had wreaked havoc among young men. Fathers were afraid to pin medals on their son’s chests not knowing what they’d find. The reading group wasn’t clandestine exactly, but it was unclassified. The men knew of its existence and laughed among themselves. Women! Women and their feelings! But individually they feared it. What expressed itself as a feeling today expressed itself as a deviancy tomorrow.

The Grand Duke wasn’t the only one pressing for the Walls to be built even higher.

The mothers, too, knowing how suspiciously their meetings were viewed, were apprehensive. Women of supreme authority and confidence in other spheres of public life, they shook when they held a book and read to one another from it in quiet, childish voices. Demanska Origen’s question hardly did anything to settle their nerves. Something else! They shifted in their seats, rearranged their skirts, and exchanged anxious glances. Chocolate factories and magic schoolboys constituted a monotheistic faith. To wonder if there was something else to read about was like asking a Christian to take up worshipping the devil.

At last the Duchess of Oblaxa found the the courage to ask, ‘Such as?’

The next silence lasted until the end of the session.

Demanska Origen went home to some degree consoled. She had nothing to blame herself for. She could not have done other than she’d done. Sometimes you can over-excite a child’s imagination with literature. It’s a risk you have to take. If she’d done anything wrong it was only that.

Renzo Origen was more concerned about Fracassus than he had let on to his wife. But for different reasons. If the boy had grown indolent and self-satisfied while he’d been away it was no great matter; a few rounds of golf now he was back would out that right. The off-handedness, similarly, didn’t much matter. He saw it as as a sort of teething, his son practising the incivility he’d need in later life. But there was such a thing as overdoing it. The Grand Duke was not himself a discourteous man. He tipped his caddy well and pretended to listen when his chauffeur told him of his troubles. But he knew that those at the bottom of an empire expected disrespect from those at the top and even loved them for it. It proved the efficacy of a system of which they were part. And since few people intended to remain where birth had placed them, it gave them something to look forward to. In the meantime, they connived in their own humiliation as though the longing to be returned to the condition of a slave was a given of their natures. What was a tyrant, when all was said and done, but the embodied will of the people? If Fracassus’s ambitions tended to the tyrannical, his father had no objection. But there were subtleties to be discerned in the early careers of even the most monstrous of despots. The people craved disrespect but you had to creep into their hearts first. Fracassus lacked finesse. He made enemies too quickly.

And then there was what his wife had reported to be the boy’s inclination towards the pornographic.

‘It is classical pornography, he’s been watching, Your Highness,’ Dr Strowheim had been at pains to point out.

‘Pornography’s pornography,’ the Grand Duke replied. ‘It has no place in the making of the sort of leader I intend Fracassus to be.’

This wasn’t primness speaking. It was what the Grand Duke called Fun-Politik. Pornography threatened innocent soft-core sexploitation. It handed the enemies of harmless good times a weapon.

To the boy himself, sitting him down in his office on the 180th floor and turning off every televison in the building, he set out his position.

‘I assume you know why I’ve brought you here,’ he said.

Fracassus pouted.

‘Is that a yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’

‘Yes I do.’