Authors: Howard Jacobson
Yours in fear,
R
‘Now the envelope,’ Ez said.
It was stamped, in large purple letters,
RECIPIENT UNKNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS
RETURN TO SENDER
A frog was thrown into a pan of boiling water.
‘What do you take me for?’ the frog said, jumping smartly out. ‘Some kind of a shlemiel?’
The following day the frog was lowered gently, even lovingly, into a pan of lukewarm water. As the temperature was increased, a degree at a time, the frog luxuriated, floating lethargically on his back with his eyes closed, imagining himself at an exclusive spa.
‘This is the life,’ the frog said.
Relaxed in every joint, blissfully unaware, the frog allowed himself to be boiled to death.
‘
HOW DO YOU
take it?’
The policeman Eugene Gutkind pouring morning tea for the historian Densdell Kroplik.
‘Like a man.’
‘And that would be how?’
‘Five sugars and no milk. Is this a cat or an albino dog?’
Densdell Kroplik stroking the ball of bad-breathed icing sugar rubbing up against his leg.
‘Don’t touch it. You’ll never get the stuff off your fingers.’
‘Like guilt,’ Kroplik laughed, sitting forward on the couch, his legs apart, something heavy between them.
A bolt of disgust went through Gutkind’s body. Did he really want
that
sitting on his furniture?
He had invited Kroplik round to his end-of-terrace house in St Eber to show him his great-grandfather’s collection of Wagner memorabilia. The rarely played composer had brought the two men together, the decline in the popularity of his music confirming their shared conviction that they were living in unpropitious times. Each believed in conspiracies, though not necessarily the same conspiracies.
‘Isn’t this against the law?’ Kroplik asked, leafing through the photographs and playbills and scraps of unauthenticated manuscript that Gutkind had brought out of filing boxes wrapped in old newsprint.
Gutkind wondered how many more jokes on the theme of legality his co-conspiracy theorist intended to make. ‘The law is not so small-minded,’ he said. ‘It winks at a reasonable number of personal items. It’s only when they turn out to be an archive that there’s trouble.’
Since Kroplik must have had an archive of some size in order to compile even his
Brief History
, this was meant as a friendly shot across his bows.
‘So how are you getting on finding the killer of the Whore of Ludgvennok?’ Kroplik asked, that being the context in which the name of Richard Wagner had first come up between them. Just a question. He could have been asking whether the policeman had seen any good films lately.
Gutkind put his fingers together like a preacher and lowered his head.
‘I presume you’re talking about Lowenna Morgenstern?’
Kroplik snorted. ‘How many whores do you know?’
‘How many whores are there?’
‘In these parts there’s nobbut whores, Detective Inspector.’
‘Then what makes this one different?’
‘She’s dead.’
Gutkind parted his fingers. There was no denying that Lowenna Morgenstern was dead. But was she a whore? ‘Are you telling me,’ he asked, insinuating a note of fine scruple, ‘that Lowenna Morgenstern sold her kisses?’
‘I’m telling you nothing. I’m asking. You found anyone yet? Got a suspect?’
‘The process proceeds,’ Gutkind said, rejoining his fingers.
‘Maybe I’ll have more sugar,’ Kroplik proceeded in another direction, helping himself to a sixth cube. ‘Would your albino dog like one or does he just lick himself when he’s in need of something sweet?’
He was disappointed that the detective inspector had stopped asking him who he thought might have murdered Lowenna Morgenstern, Lowenna Morgenstern’s lover and latterly Lowenna Morgenstern’s husband. He felt it undermined both his authority and his judgement.
Gutkind passed him a programme for a performance of
Götterdämmerung
at Bayreuth. It had some elegant faded handwriting on the back, a set of initials together with a phone number. Gutkind had some time ago concluded that they were the initials of the woman his great-grandfather had loved to hopeless distraction, and that the phone number was hers. They must have met in the Festspielhaus, perhaps at the bar, or maybe they had even found themselves sitting next to each other, perhaps so transported by the divine music that they rubbed knees though they were each in the company of other lovers. That the woman should have gone to Bayreuth in the first place puzzled Gutkind, all things considered, but the enigma of it made her all the more fascinating, as Clarence Worthing himself must have felt. I too would have fallen for her, Gutkind thought, conjuring the woman’s exotic appearance from the archive of his fancy. I too would have been entrapped.
The programme itself was illustrated with several artists’ interpretations of the world ablaze. These could have doubled for the state of his great-grandfather’s heart. ‘I like thinking about the end of the world,’ he said. ‘You?’
Densdell Kroplik scratched his face. ‘We’ve lived through the end of the world,’ he answered. ‘This is the aftermath. This is the post-apocalypse.’
Gutkind looked out of his leaded window at the pyramids of grey clay. The land spewing up its innards. The inside of his unloved, unlived-in terrace house no better. Apart from the dusting of clay, there was something green and sticky over everything, as though a bag of spinach had exploded in the microwave, blowing off the door and paintballing every surface – the table, the walls, the ceiling, even the photograph of Gutkind and his wife on their wedding day, she (her doing, not his) with her head scissored off, Gutkind and his headless bride. Then again, it could just have been mould. Gutkind looked between his fingers. Yes, mould. ‘You could be right,’ he said.
‘I am right. It’s the twilight of the gods.’
‘Wagner’s gods? Here? In St Eber?’
‘The gods of Ludgvennok.’
‘I don’t much care about anybody’s gods,’ Gutkind said. ‘I care more about me.’
‘Well it’s the twilight of you too, ain’t it? Look at your fucking dog, man. What are you doing here, in this whited-out shit-heap, if you’ll pardon my Latin, trying – unsuccessfully by your own account – to solve murders that never will be solved? What am I doing over at Ludgvennok, excuse me’ – here he spat, trying to avoid the cat – ‘
Port Reuben
, as I have to call it, what am I doing cutting aphids’ hair in Port Cunting Reuben for a living? We were gods once. Now look at us. The last two men on the planet to have listened to
Tristan und Isolde
.’
Eugene Gutkind fell into a melancholy trance, as though imagining the time when he trod the earth like a god, a monocle in his eye such as Clarence Worthing must have worn, in his hand a silver-topped cane, on his arm, highly perfumed . . .
In reality there was spinach on his shoes. ‘So who or what reduced us to this?’ he asked, not expecting an answer.
‘Saying sorry,’ Kroplik said. ‘Saying sorry is what did it. You never heard the gods apologise. They let loose their thunderbolts and whoever they hit, they hit. Their own stupid fault for being in the way.’
‘I’m a fair-minded man . . .’ Gutkind said.
‘For a policeman . . .’
‘I’m a fair-minded man for anyone. I don’t mind saying sorry if I’ve done something to say sorry for. But you can’t say sorry if you’ve done nothing. You can’t find a man guilty if there’s been no crime.’
‘Well look at it this way, Detective Inspector – there are plenty of unsolved crimes kicking about. And plenty of uncaught criminals. Missy Morgenstern’s murderer for one. Does it matter if you end up punishing the wrong man? Not a bit of it. The wrongfully guilty balance the wrongfully innocent. What goes around comes around. Pick yourself up an aphid. They’re all murderers by association. Hang the lot.’
Detective Inspector Gutkind felt himself growing irritated by Densdell Kroplik’s misplaced ire. It struck him as messy and unserious. His own life might have been dismal but it was ordered. It had feeling in it. He offered his guest a whisky. Maybe a whisky would concentrate his mind.
‘Let’s agree about something,’ he said.
‘We do. The genius of Richard Wagner. And the end of the world.’
‘No. Let’s agree about saying sorry. We shouldn’t be saying it – we agree about that, don’t we?’
Kroplik raised his dusty whisky glass and finished off its contents. ‘We do. We agree about most things. And about that most of all. Fuck saying sorry!’
‘Fuck saying sorry!’
The air was thick with rebellion.
‘Bloody Gutkind!’ Kroplik suddenly expostulated.
Gutkind looked alarmed.
‘Bloody Kroplik!’ Kroplik continued. ‘What kind of a name is Kroplik, for Christ’s sake? What kind of a name is Gutkind? We sound like a comedy team – Kroplik and Gutkind.’
‘Or Gutkind and Kroplik.’
The policeman Eugene Gutkind sharing the rarity of a joke with the historian Densdell Kroplik.
‘I am glad,’ said Kroplik sarcastically, shifting his weight from one thigh to another, disarranging the cushions on the detective’s sofa, ‘that you are able to find humour in this.’
‘On the contrary, I agree with you. They turn us into a pair of comedians, though our lives are essentially tragic, and for that we are the ones who have to say we’re sorry. I find no humour in it whatsoever.’
‘Good. Then enough’s enough. We are gods not clowns, and gods apologise to no one for their crimes, because what a god does can’t be called a crime.
Nicht wahr
?’
‘What?’
‘
Nicht wahr
? Wagnerian for don’t you agree. I thought you’d know that. I bet even your dog knows that.’
The cat pricked the ear nearest to Kroplik. ‘
Nicht wahr
?’ Kroplik shouted into it.
‘These days we don’t get to hear much German in St Eber,’ Gutkind said, as much in defence of the cat as himself.
‘Pity. But Gutkind’s got a bit of a German ring to it, don’t you think?
Gut
and
kinder
?
‘I suppose it has. Like
Krop
and
lik
.’
‘You see what the aphid swines have done to us? Now we’re fighting on behalf of names that don’t even belong to us. What’s your actual name? What did the whores call you in the good old days? Mr . . .? Mr What? Or did you let them call you Eugene? Take me, Eugene. Use me, Eugene.’
If Kroplik isn’t mistaken, Gutkind blushes.
‘Whatever my name was then, I was too young to give it to whores.’
‘Your father then . . . your grandfather . . . how did the whores address them?’
These were infractions too far for Detective Inspector Gutkind, Wagner or no Wagner. He was not a man who had ever visited a whore. And nor, he knew in his soul, had any of the men in his family before him. It had always been ideal love they’d longed for. A beautiful woman, smelling of Prague or Vienna, light on their arm, transported into an ecstasy of extinction – the two of them breathing their last together . . .
ertrinken
. . .
versinken
. . .
unbewußt
. . .
höchste Lust!
. . .
Kroplik couldn’t go on waiting for him to expire. ‘Well mine was Scannláin. Son of the Scannláins of Ludgvennok. And had been for two thousand bloody years. And then for a crime we didn’t commit, and not for any of the thousands we did . . . that’s the galling part—’
‘For a crime
no one
committed,’ Gutkind interjected.
Densdell Kroplik was past caring whether a crime had been committed or not. He held out his glass for another whisky. The high life – downing whisky in St Eber at 11.30 in the morning. The gods drinking to their exemption from the petty cares of mortals. Atop Valhalla, dust or no dust.
Gutkind sploshed whisky into Kroplik’s glass. He wanted him drunk and silent. He wanted him a thing of ears. Other than his cat, Eugene Gutkind had no one to talk to. His wife had left him. He had few friends in the force and no friends in St Eber. Who in St Eber did have friends? A few brawling mates and a headless wife to curse comprised happiness in St Eber, and he no longer even had the wife. So he rarely got the opportunity to pour out his heart. A detective inspector, anyway, had to measure his words. But he didn’t have to measure anything with Densdell Kroplik, least of all whisky. He wasn’t a kindred spirit. Wagner didn’t make him a kindred spirit. To Gutkind’s eye Kroplik lacked discrimination. Not knowing where to pin the blame he pinned it on everyone. A bad hater, if ever he saw one. A man lacking specificity. But he was still the nearest thing to a kindred spirit there was. ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘Drink to what we believe and know to be true.’
And when Densdell Kroplik was drunk enough not to hear what was being said to him, true or not true, and not to care either way, when he was half asleep on the couch with the icing-sugar cat sitting on his face, Detective Inspector Eugene Gutkind began his exposition . . .
There had been no crime. No
Götterdämmerung
anyway. No last encounter with the forces of evil, no burning, and no renewal of the world. Those who should have perished had been forewarned by men of tender conscience like Clarence Worthing who, though he longed to wipe the slate clean, could not betray the memory of his fragrant encounter with Ottilie or Naomi or Lieselotte, in the Bayreuth Festspielhaus. For what you have done to me, I wish you in hell, they said. But for what you have done to me I also wish you to be spared. Such are the contradictions that enter the hearts of men who know what it is to love and not be loved in return. The irony of it was not lost on Detective Inspector Gutkind. They owed their lives to a conspiracy of the inconsolable and the snubbed, these Ottilies and Lieselottes who had imbibed conspiracy with their mothers’ milk. They’d escaped betrayal, they who betrayed as soon as snap a finger.