Howard Jacobson: Pussy

Professor Probrius could not have answered more felicitously had he tried. For the Grand Duke and Duchess, the Prince’s employment of the wrong words was as much the problem as his having no words at all. Only recently, after the most minor altercation with his parents, Fracassus had pushed his face out, curled his lips back, and aimed at them, as though they were bullets, the words ‘Fuck, nigger, cunt.’

They had called the Royal physician who examined him over a period of weeks. ‘He has, Your Highness,’ the physician reported, ‘what I’d call Tourettes, only without the Tourettes.’

‘Will he get better?’ the Grand Duchess asked.

‘In the sense of will he extend his range of pejoratives? He might, Your Majesty.’

So Probrius’s proposal that they select the right words for the Prince with sensitivity was warmly welcomed.

‘And we think that you, Professor,’ the Grand Duke said, looking across to his wife for confirmation, ‘are just the person to sneak the right words in. I hope you won’t mind if I am kept abreast of the situation. I might have a few words of my own to suggest. And occasionally one or two I would like to see withdrawn.’

‘I too,’ the Grand Duchess said. There was a great sadness about her, Professor Probrius noticed. He wondered if she were homesick.

Or was there simply – given that the most sorrowful of spirit are the first to notice sorrow in others – a great sadness about him?

He bowed, all three shook on the arrangement, and the Grand Duchess took another selfie.

Professor Probrius was given a free hand with the disposal of Fracassus’s existing tutors. He dismissed them all with the exception of Dr Cobalt.

Of the many perversities to which our species is subject, wanting the worst to happen is perhaps the strangest. Only wanting to be looked down on by the powerful comes close to it. Kolskeggur Probrius, though he personally wanted to be looked down on by nobody, did hope for the worst for everybody else. The violence visited on his Phonoethics course had left him embittered and vengeful. So the signs which he read in the wind that the university that had expelled him was a spent force – not just his university but every university – gave him a wicked pleasure. In its demise he espied his vindication. Anything he could do to speed the process up, he would.

He was a man who wet his finger and held it out to the wind. He liked to know which direction it was blowing from and relished being the first to warn of the damage it would do. In the ancient world he’d have been respected as a wind-prophet, but to moderns he was just a desponder. He had tried to prepare his university for what was coming – beware the people! – predicting that everything educators had ever meant by education – example, elucidation, emancipation, deliverance – would soon be scattered like dead leaves. He had proclaimed this at his Trial by Thumb. He might as soon have slit his throat on the steps of the Student Union. He pronounced ‘people’ without respect and down went half the thumbs. He pronounced ‘education’ with reverence and down went the other half.

He descended from his post in a waterfall of blood.

Well, none of it mattered any longer. The Republic wasn’t listening to its universities. They were beyond a joke. Even the most second-hand of the Republic’s comedians had stopped looking to safe-rooms and trigger warnings for comic material. The universities were abandoned cities. Single identity tribes wandered the corridors, speaking words the rest of the Republic didn’t recognize. They might as well have put bones through their noses, and some of them did.

Professor Probrius put his finger to the wind and read what it was saying. Soon, the purgers would be purged in a carnivalesque revolt against protected attitudes, correct ideas, all the things you were not supposed to say, all the things you were not supposed to feel, all the hard won decencies and easily enunciated pieties, all the sanctimony, all that was holier than thou, and with it all that was civilized. Gone – the victim of its own provocations – gone, on a day not far removed from this one, maybe in a year, maybe in ten years, but gone without a doubt, in one great gust of wind.

The sooner, Professor Probrius thought, the better.

He wasted no time settling into his new post. Before meeting Fracassus he thought it wise to exchange ideas with Dr Cobalt.

‘Yoni,’ she said, giving him her cheek.

‘Kolskeggur,’ he responded.

‘I gather from your sanguinity,’ she said, ‘that you haven’t yet had the pleasure of seeing the Prince with your own eyes.’

‘I haven’t. But his distraught parents have described him to me with some vividness.’

‘Nothing beats the real thing.’

‘I’m sure it doesn’t. You, I understand, have been here a number of years.’

‘Five. He was ten when I first had the pleasure. He hasn’t disappointed.’

They were in a coffee shop by the Eastern Wall and so had nothing to fear, they felt, from cameras or microphones. But even so – perhaps the precaution was a leftover from his university days – the Professor scanned the ceiling. ‘I gather,’ he said, ‘that you don’t exactly feel in loco parentis to the boy.’

Dr Cobalt screwed up her arctic eyes. ‘Even his parents don’t feel in loco parentis to the boy.’

‘Let me play the devil’s advocate. Aren’t we, in that case, obliged to feel sorry for him?’

‘Normally I would respect your advocacy. Empathy was one of my degree subjects. But there are times when the usual rules of pity don’t apply. I too once subscribed to the philosophy that a child is a blank canvass on which parents and society write their own messages. Before that, I even believed in the sacredness of the infant, trailing clouds of glory in the moment of his delivery into a harsh and Godless world. The Prince, I have to tell you, trailed a cloud of shit.’

Professor Probrius smiled and looked around him again, just to be sure. He couldn’t remember ever having liked a woman so much on first acquaintance. ‘I take it, then, that you don’t much…’ he began. They both knew the joke.

For her part she was surprised the Professor was not more affronted by what she had to say. She’d decided she would not hold back, though candour could easily cost her her job. She did not know what loyalties the Professor was bringing to his appointment. She had read some of the papers he had written, from which it was impossible to deduce what kind of man he was personally. Pedantic, of course. But then so was she. A teacher who wasn’t pedantic wasn’t a teacher. So she had hopes for him. But she was taken aback, nonetheless, by the alacrity with which he embraced her view of the task before them. He even appeared to be energized by how much they would have to do to make a human out of a monster for whom not a shred of pity could be found.

That said, he was evidently not himself prepared to be as outpoken as she was. How could he be, given that he was yet to meet the boy? But she felt that reserving judgement was and would go on being his modus operandi. Fine with her, so long as her modus operandi could go on being revulsion.

‘I should warn you before you meet him,’ she said, ‘to be prepared for how ugly he is.’

‘I think you’ve already conveyed that.’

Was he being stern with her after all? Her tongue, she knew, could run away with her. Especially when she was out of the Palace of the Golden Gates.

‘I don’t mean morally ugly. I mean facially ugly. One can escape a person’s ugliness by looking in to their eyes. There at least there might be beauty. Bu Fracassus has no eyes to speak of. It could be because he sees imperfectly that he juts his jaw out. His natural movement is a forward projection of a sort I’ve only even seen on a bewildered primate. And if his jaw’s too big for his head, his head’s too big for the rest of him, which is ironic considering how little is in it.’