Authors: Howard Jacobson
She was relieved when he stepped back out into the bedroom, dripping like a seal. He appeared exhausted.
‘There will be more, you know,’ she said.
‘More what?’
‘More showers.’
He expected her to say ‘More life’.
‘You never know what there will be more of,’ he said, ‘but that’s certainly more than enough about me and who
I
am and what
I’m
in flight from. We began this conversation discussing whales and you – the least whale-like creature I have ever seen.’
‘Despite my thick ankles?’
‘Whales don’t have thick ankles. As didn’t Ahab, as I recall.’
‘Well he certainly didn’t have two.’
If he hadn’t loved her before . . .
Best to leave it at that, anyway, they both thought. But he wanted to be sure that she felt safe with him. Still dripping, he pulled her down into the bed and drew the duvet over them.
Gently, protectively.
But were they overdoing this, he wondered.
She’d have answered yes had he asked her.
iii
It was in his lampoon-fearing nature to wonder whether they would be the talk of the village – the slightly odd woodturner
who by and large kept himself to himself, and the tangle-haired flower girl from up north who was several years his junior. But the village wasn’t exercised by pairings-off, even when the parties weren’t as free to do as they pleased as these two were. People who have lived for aeons within sound of crashing seas, and sight of screaming seabirds spearing mackerel, take sex for granted. It’s townspeople who find it disarranging.
And besides, the village had something else to yack about: a double murder. Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock found lying side by side in the back of Ythel Weinstock’s caravan in pools of each other’s blood. By itself, the blood of one would not have found its way, in such quantities, on to the body of the other. So there’d been doubly foul play: not just the murders but this ghoulish intermixing of bodily fluids which was taken by the police to be a commentary on the other sort of fluidal intermingling in which Morgenstern and Weinstock had no doubt been frenetically engaged at the moment their assailant struck.
‘Caught in the act’ was the phrase going round the village. And no one doubted that it was Lowenna’s husband, Ade, who’d caught them. But where was Ade Morgenstern? He hadn’t been seen in the village for months, having stormed out of the surgery to which he’d accompanied his wife to have a minor ailment looked at, which ailment, in his view, didn’t necessitate the removal of her brassiere. He hadn’t seen the brassiere coming off, he had only heard the doctor unhooking it. But his wife had beautiful breasts, as many in the village could testify, and he was a jealous man.
‘Breathe in,’ he heard the doctor order her. ‘And out.’ And a moment later, ‘Open.’
He was not in the waiting room when his wife emerged fully clothed from her consultation.
Hedra Deitch was less bothered by the question of who was guilty of the crime than its timing. ‘If you gotta go, that’s as good a moment as any, if you want my view, and that Ythel was a bit of all right,’ she told drinkers at the bar of the Friendly Fisherman.
‘Rumpy pumpy feels like dying anyway when you’ve got a husband like mine.’
Pascoe Deitch ignored the insult. ‘She always was a screamer,’ he put in.
His wife kicked his shin. ‘How come you’re an expert?’
‘When it comes to Lowenna Morgenstern everyone’s an expert.’
Hedra kicked his other shin. ‘
Was
an expert. Who you going to be expert about next?’
Pascoe’s expertise, universal or not, caught the attention of the police. Not that he was a suspect. He lacked the energy to be a criminal just as, for all his bravado, his wife believed him to lack the energy to be unfaithful. He masturbated in corners, in front of her, thinking, he told her, about other women – that was the sum of his disloyalty.
‘You could feel this one comin’,’ he told Detective Inspector Gutkind.
‘You knew there were family troubles?’
‘Everybody knew. But no more than usual. We all have family troubles.’
‘So in what sense did you feel this one coming?’
‘Something had to give. It was like before a storm. It gave you a headache.’
‘Was it something in the marriage that had to give? Did the murdered woman have a lover?’
‘Well who else was that lying with her in those pools of blood?’
‘You tell me.’
Pascoe shrugged the shrug of popular surmise.
‘And did the husband know as much as you know?’ Gutkind asked.
‘He knew she put it about.’
‘Was he a violent man?’
‘Ythel?’
‘Ade.’
‘The place is full of violent men. Violent women, too.’
‘Are you saying there are many people who might have done this?’
‘When a storm’s comin’ a storm’s comin’.’
‘But what motive would anyone else have had?’
‘What motive do you need? What motive does the thunder have?’
The policeman scratched his head.‘If this murder was as motiveless as thunder I’m left with a long list of suspects.’
Pascoe nodded. ‘That’s pretty much the way of it.’
That night he went alone to a barn dance in Port Abraham. His wife was wrong in assuming he was too lazy to be unfaithful to her.
iv
Densdell Kroplik generously offered to sell the police multiple copies of his
Brief History of Port Reuben
at half price on the assumption that it would help with their enquiries. Yes, he told Detective Inspector Gutkind, there were violent undercurrents in their society, but these appeared exceptional only in the context of that unwonted and, quite frankly, inappropriate gentleness that had descended on Port Reuben after
WHAT HAPPENED
,
IF IT
HAPPENED
– see pp.
35
–
37
of his
Brief History
. Why Port Reuben had had to pay the price – bowing and scraping and saying sorry – for an event in which it had played no significant role, Densdell Kroplik didn’t see. Nothing had happened, if it happened,
here
.
WHAT HAPPENED
,
IF IT HAPPENED
, happened in the cities. And yet the villagers and their children and their children’s children were expected to share in the universal hand-wringing and namechanging. In his view, if anyone was interested in hearing it, the Lowenna Morgenstern case came as a welcome return to form. In a village with Port Reuben’s proud warrior history, people
were supposed to kill one another . . . Where there was a compelling argument to do so, he added, in response to Detective Inspector Gutkind’s raised eyebrow.
‘And what, in your view, constitutes a compelling argument?’ the policeman asked.
‘Well there you’ll have to ask the murderer,’ Densdell Kroplik replied.
‘And what’s this about a proud warrior history?’ Gutkind pressed. ‘There haven’t been warriors in these parts for many a year.’
Densdell Kroplik wasn’t going to argue with that.‘The Passing of the Warrior’ was the title of his first chapter. But that didn’t mean the village didn’t have a more recent reputation to live up to. It was its touchy individualism, its fierce wariness, that had gone on lending the place its character and kept it inviolate. Densdell Kroplik’s position when it came to outsiders, the hated aphids, was more than a little paradoxical. He needed visitors to buy his pamphlet but on balance he would rather there were no visitors. He wanted to sing to them of the glories of Port Reuben, in its glory days called Ludgvennok, but didn’t want them to be so far entranced by his account that they never left. The exhilaration of living in Ludgvennok, which it pained him to call Port Reuben, walled in by cliffs and protected by the sea, enjoying the company of rough-mannered men and wild women, lay, the way he saw it, in its chaste unapproachability. This quality forcibly struck the composer Richard Wagner – if you’ve heard of him, Detective Inspector – in the course of a short visit he made to Ludgvennok as it was then. In those days husbands and lovers, farmers and fishermen, wreckers and smugglers, settled their grievances, eye to eye, as they had done for time immemorial, without recourse to the law or any other outside interference. Sitting at a window in a hostelry on this very spot, Wagner watched the men of Ludgvennok front up to one another like stags, heard the bacchante women wail, saw the blood flow, and composed until
his fingers ached. ‘I feel more alive here than I have felt anywhere,’ he wrote in a letter to Mathilde Wesendonck. ‘I wish you could be with me.’
*
Der Strandryuber von Ludgvennok
, the opera Wagner subsequently wrote about the village (and dedicated to Mathilde, who had by that time given him his marching orders), was rarely performed; this Densdell Kroplik ascribed not to any fault in the composition but to the lily-livered hypocrisy of the age.
‘All very laudable,’ Detective Inspector Gutkind conceded. As it happened, he had not only heard of Wagner, a composer beloved of his great-grandfather, but kept a small cache of Wagner memorabilia secreted in his wardrobe in fealty to that passion. He could even hum some of the tunes from his operas and went so far as to hum a few bars of the
Siegfried Idyll
to show Kroplik that he too was a man of culture. Nonetheless, ‘All very laudable but I have a particularly savage double murder on my hands, not a few high-spirited drunks kicking nine bells out of another,’ was what he said.
*
Liebling,
The days go by without my hearing from you and I wonder what I have done to deserve your cruelty. Everything I see, I see only that I might relate it to you. Had I only known how wonderful I was going to find Ludgvennok I would not have allowed you to persuade me to come on my own. When I think of all I have written about the regeneration of the human race, and all I have done to further its ennoblement, it cheers me to find a people here who live up to everything I have ever understood by nobility of character. It can sometimes, of course, be as much a matter of what one doesn’t find as what one does, that renders a place and a people congenial. Whether by deliberate intention or some lucky chance, Ludgvennok appears to have been released from the influence of those whose rapacity of ambition and disagreeableness of appearance has made life such a trial in the European cities where I have spent my life. Even the ear declares itself to be in a paradise to be free, from the moment one wakes to the moment one lies down – without you, alas, my darling – of that repulsive jumbled blabber, that yodelling cackle, in which elsewhere the ----s make the insistence of their presence felt. Here it is almost as though one has returned to a time of purity, when mankind was able to rejoice in its connection with its natural soil, unspoiled by the jargon of a race that has no passion – no
Leidenschaft
, there is no other word – for the land, for art, for the heroical, or for the rest of humanity.
My darling, I do so wish you could be here with me.
Your R
‘Your point being?’ Densdell Kroplik wanted to know. He was irked that the detective inspector had heard of Wagner, let alone that he could hum him. He wanted Wagner for himself.
He was sitting in his favourite chair by the fire. In all weathers a fire burned in the Friendly Fisherman. And on most evenings Densdell Kroplik, steam rising from his thighs, sat by it in a heavy seaman’s sweater warming and rubbing his hands. He cultivated a take it or leave it air. He knew what was what. It was up to you whether you wanted to learn from him or not.
‘My point being that it gets me nowhere to be told Port Reuben is back to doing what it has always done best.’
Densdell Kroplik shrugged. ‘It might,’ he said, ‘if you understood more about the passion for justice and honour that has always burned in the hearts of the men of these parts.’
‘I doubt that a passion for justice and honour had anything to do with the murder of Lowenna Morgenstern andYthel Weinstock.’
Densdell Kroplik pointed a red, fire-warmed finger at the policeman. ‘Is that something you can be sure of ?’ he said. ‘There was a famous five-way murder here about a hundred years ago. Two local women, their husbands, and a lover. Whose lover was he? No one was quite sure. Am I hinting at pederasty? I might be. All that was certain was that he was an aphid – which makes pederasty the more likely. Buggers, the lot of them. From the north or the east of the country, it doesn’t matter which. Somewhere that wasn’t here. A pact was what the coroner decided it had been, a love pact born of hopeless entanglement. They’d gone up on to the cliff, taken off their clothes, watched the sun go down and swallowed pills. What do you think of that?’
‘What I think is that it doesn’t help me with my case,’ Gutkind said. ‘A pact is suicide, not murder.’
‘Unless,’ Kroplik went on, ‘unless the villagers, motivated by
justifiable disapproval and an understandable hatred of outsiders, had taken it upon themselves to do away with all five offenders. In which case it wasn’t a mass suicide but a mob attack in the name of justice and honour.’
‘And it’s your theory that the whole village could have done away with Lowenna Morgenstern and Ythel Weinstock?’
‘Did I say that? I’m just a barber with an interest in local history. All I know, from reading what I have read and from using these’ – he made a two-pronged fork of his fingers and pointed to his all-seeing eyes – ‘is that people have been subdued here for a long time. They have a proud history of torrid engagement with one another which has been denied expression. There’s no knowing what people might do – singly or in a group – when their natures rebel against repression.’
‘Well you might call it torrid engagement, I call it crime.’
‘Then that’s the difference between us,’ Densdell Kroplik laughed.
After which, to show he was a man who could be trusted, he gave the policeman a free haircut, humming all the while Brünnhilde’s final plea to Wotan to let her sleep protected by flame from the attentions of any old mortal aphid.
v
Kevern Cohen stayed aloof from the malicious speculations. He had flirted with Lowenna Morgenstern occasionally, when they had both had too much to drink, and more recently he had kissed her in the village car park on bonfire night. He was no snogger. If he kissed a woman it was because he was aroused by the softness of her lips, not because he wanted to wound them. Breaking skin was not, for Kevern, the way he expressed desire.