Authors: Howard Jacobson
‘That was taken before they were decommissioned,’ she said. ‘A month later those vans were going round the country painted with the slogan “Leave Now or Face Arrest”. Bethesda Academy did the artwork.’
‘Ice-cream vans?’
‘Yes.’
‘Telling people to leave?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which people?’
‘Come on, Kevern. You know which people.’
He shook his head, as though it were a kaleidoscope, to rearrange the patterns.
‘But why ice-cream vans, for Christ’s sake?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine. Not to frighten the children? Because they had macabre imaginations?’
‘They weren’t, I assume, selling ice cream?’
‘You assume right. But here’s the strangest thing . . .’
He waited.
‘. . . they kept the chimes.’
‘Beethoven’s Fifth? “
Für Elise
?” “
Greensleeves”
?’
‘Exactly. And some forgotten favourites of the period. “Whistle While You Work” . . . “You Are My Sunshine”.’
Something twitched, like curtains opening furtively, at the furthest corners of Kevern’s mind. He stared at her in perplexity. ‘When was this?’
‘Well it wasn’t the Middle Ages, Kevern.’
‘No, but when?’ He tapped his forehead.
‘You’re too young,’ she said, understanding his meaning.
‘
You Are My Sunshine’ . . . He began to hum it for her. If he was too young, how come he knew it? Then he remembered the blind soul singer and his father’s final bitter laughter, directed he hadn’t known where. If I don’t sit down, he thought, I will topple over.
‘Are you all right?’ Rozenwyn asked.
He nodded. ‘And you know this for sure?’ he asked stupidly, gripping the table behind him, so that his hands were close to hers.
She patted the wrist nearer to her. ‘I’m a librarian,’ she said. ‘A librarian knows where to look.’
But he wanted her to be exaggerating, at least. ‘Still and all,’ he said, ‘painting a few vans is not exactly a criminal act, is it? And it was just a warning. I can imagine the Everetts of the day believing they were acting humanely.’
‘I don’t doubt it. We always think what we’re doing is humane,
even when we’re secretly relishing the evil of it. But all the warning did was soften the populace up for what came next. As did the defamations and the boycotts in which this institution also played a noble part. Let’s not be modest. We did more than paint the vans. We provided them with the fuel. There is this malignancy out there, we said. And left it to others to operate.’
Kevern looked around. Was Rozenwyn Feigenblat at liberty, he wondered, to be talking like this? He was his father’s child. He had been brought up not to show too much expression in a public place. You never knew who was watching.
But he was a man not a boy and needed to show Rozenwyn he had some fight in him. ‘You have to make allowances for this being an
academic
institution,’ he said with heavy irony.
She rolled her eyes. ‘They wouldn’t welcome your making allowances for them,’ she said. ‘They don’t like you.’
‘Don’t they? I didn’t know that. Why don’t they like me?’
‘Uniquely malevolent.’
‘Uniquely malevolent! Me?’
‘I’m being facetious,’ she said. ‘
Uniquely malevolent
is a quotation from then. I use it now for anyone or anything not approved of by junior academics. The actual reason they don’t like
you
is that they have to dislike somebody or they have no occupation. And of course because you hold different views.’
‘I don’t hold views.’
‘There you are then. They are nothing but views.Views I have to listen to them expounding for hours at a time. They think that’s my job – answering their requests for books that an idiot would know there’s no point consulting, books with unacceptable arguments torn out of them, books that have already silenced argument, cult books, propaganda, justification manuals . . . and then agreeing with their ill-informed conclusions.’
You have nothing to say on the subject, Kevern reminded himself. You are the grandson of a hunchback. You are lucky to have been born here. You Are My Sunshine.
‘You’re probably more Everett’s man than I realise,’ Rozenwyn said, noting Kevern’s reserve. ‘But you tell me when there has ever been a reign of terror that wasn’t instigated by intellectuals and presided over by someone possessed of the madness of the artist.’
‘You have done a lot of thinking,’ Kevern said.
‘For a woman, do you mean?’
‘Of course not.’
‘For a librarian then?’
‘No, I don’t mean that either.’
But he wondered if he did.
‘It’s a great intellectual privilege to work in a library,’ she reminded him. ‘The Argentinian writer Borges was a librarian. The English poet Philip Larkin was a librarian.’
Kevern hadn’t heard of either of them.
‘All human life is here,’ she went on. ‘The best of it and the worst of it, mainly the worst. Books do that, they bring out the bad in readers if there’s bad already in them.’
‘And if there isn’t?’
She smiled at him and stroked her pigtail. ‘Then they bring out the good. As in me, I hope. I’ve been able to read a lot here.’
‘You should write a book about it yourself,’ he said.
‘What for? So they can tear the pages out? I am content to know what I know.’
‘So why are you telling me?’
She regarded him archly. ‘To pass the time.’
He consulted his watch. ‘I should be going then,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you look at people when you’re talking to them?’ she asked suddenly, as though reverting to a conversation they’d been having earlier.
‘I didn’t know I didn’t look at people.’ He was lying. Ailinn too would comment on his apparent rudeness. ‘But if I don’t, it’s shyness.’
‘Your colleagues think of you as unapproachable,’ she went on. ‘They think you look down on them. They call you arrogant.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it. I carve lovespoons. I have nothing to be arrogant about.’
‘There you go . . . the simple carpenter. That’s the arrogance they mistrust.’
‘I can’t do anything about it,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry if they hate me . . .’
‘I didn’t say “hate”. I said they mistrusted you.’
‘For being “uniquely malevolent” . . .’
She laughed. ‘No, for being uniquely arrogant.’
He smiled at her. ‘That’s all right then. As long I’m uniquely something.’
‘Well you could do worse. You could be like them. You could read books with pages torn out of them and think you’ve stumbled upon truth. You could subscribe to a belief system . . .’
‘Beliefs kill,’ he said.
‘Yes, like beauty.’
Their eyes met. She tossed her pigtail from her shoulder – as she must do when she mounts her horse, he thought, or when she climbs into bed. She put a hand out as though to touch his shirt. He thought she meant to move in to kiss him.
‘This is the wrong thing to do,’ he said.
‘I know,’ she said in a soft, mocking voice. ‘That’s why I’m doing it.’
But she was only seeing what sort of an ethicist he was.
‘He’s more naive than he ought to be,’ she wrote the following morning in her report, ‘and more fragile. We ought to get a move on.’
They arrived to music, laboured to music, trooped to the crematoria to music. ‘
Brüder! zur Sonne, zur Freiheit
,’ they were made to sing. ‘Brothers! to the sun, to freedom.’ ‘
Brüder! zum Lichte
empor
’ – ‘Brothers! to the light.’ Followed, maybe, by the Blue Danube in all its loveliness, or a song from
Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg
, not that any of them cared where he was from. Music that ennobles the spirit revealing its ultimate sardonic nature, its knowledge of its own untruth, because ultimately there is no ennobled nature. What was the logic? To pacify or to jeer? Why ice-cream vans, the arrival of which, playing the ‘Marseillaise’ or ‘
Für Elise’
or ‘Whistle While You Work’, excited the eager anticipation of the children? To pacify or to jeer? Or both? Between themselves, the parents cannot agree on the function or the message. The vans, for now, are better than the trains, some say. Shame there isn’t actually any ice cream for the children, but be grateful and sing along. Others believe the vans are just the start of it. We have heard the chimes at midnight, they believe.
FIVE
Lost Letters
i
July
8
,
201-
Darling Mummy and Daddy,
It was so lovely to be with you last weekend. I am only sorry that you didn’t feel the same way about seeing me. I didn’t, and don’t ever, mean to cause you vexation. What I said came from my heart. And you have always encouraged me to follow my heart.You will say that the opinions of others, especially Fridleif, have made that heart no longer mine, but believe me – that is not true. My decision to take up a secretarial appointment at the Congregational Federation of the Islands is mine alone. It is a purely administrative post and therefore purely secular. I have not left you. Of course I have been influenced by people I have met up here. Isn’t that bound to be the effect of an education? Isn’t that precisely what an education is for? You, Mummy, said you should never have let me leave home – ‘wandering to the furthest ends of the earth like some gypsy’, as you chose to put it, though I haven’t left the country and am no more than four hours away, even at the speed you drive – but what’s happened isn’t your fault just as it wouldn’t have been your fault had I gone to New Guinea and become a headhunter. I just wish you could consider what I’m doing as a tribute to the open-minded spirit in which you brought me up. My thinking is a continuation of yours, that’s all. And I am still your daughter wherever I live and whoever I work with.
Your ever loving
Rebecca
This was the first of a small bundle of letters Ailinn’s companion gave her to peruse. ‘Don’t for the moment ask me how I came by them,’ she said, ‘just read them.’
‘Now?’
‘Now.’
The second letter was dated four months later.
November
12
,
201
-
Dearest Mummy and Daddy,
Up until the final minute I hoped you would turn up. Fridleif had tried to warn me against disappointment – not in a hostile way, I assure you, but quite the opposite. (You would love him if you would only give yourself the chance.) ‘You must understand how hard it must be for them,’ he said. But I hoped against hope nonetheless. Even as we exchanged our vows I still expected to see you materialise at the church door and come walking down the aisle.
There, it’s said. The
church
door.
How did that ever get to be such a terrible word in our family? What did the church ever do to us? Yes, yes, I know, but that was like a thousand years ago. Is there nothing we can’t forgive? Is there nothing we can’t forget?
Try saying it to each other when you go to bed at night. Church, church, church . . . You’ll be surprised how easy it gets. Do you remember the finger rhyme we used to play together? ‘Here’s the church, and here’s the steeple, open the door and see all the people!’ The word seemed innocent enough then. No one sent a thunderbolt out of the sky to punish us for saying it.
But if it can’t be innocent to you now I’m a big girl couldn’t you at least learn to hate it a little less for my sake?
Open the door and see all the people!
Let’s get it all over and done with, anyway. I married the man I love in a church. In the presence of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit we exchanged vows. And I am now Mrs Macshuibhne, the wife of the Reverend Fridleif Macshuibhne. A bit of a mouthful, I agree, but you’d get used to it if you only tried.
Please be happy for me, at least.
Rebecca
‘How did you come by this?’ Ailinn wanted to know.
‘We agreed you wouldn’t ask.’
‘No,
you
agreed I wouldn’t ask.’
‘Just go on reading.’
March
24
,
201
-
Dear Mummy and Daddy,
Still no word from you. Must I accept that you have abandoned me?
What have I done that is so terrible? What shame have I brought on you?
I accept that there was a time when we needed to show solidarity with one another. We were depleted and demoralised. I knew that. Every defection was interpreted as a sign of weakness and exploited – how could I not know that given the number of times I heard it. If they don’t even love one another, people said – or we feared people would say, which isn’t quite the same thing – why should we love them. But that was a long time ago. No one is trying to exploit us any more. No one even notices us. We are accepted now. We have never been more safe. I know what you will say. You will say what you always said. ‘Don’t be lulled into a false sense of security. Remember the Allegory of the Frog.’
*
Daddy, if I remembered the Allegory of the Frog I would never stay anywhere for five minutes at a time. If I remembered the Allegory of the Frog I would never know a moment’s peace. And the water isn’t hot here any more. It isn’t even lukewarm. Yes, I know you’ve heard that before. I know it was what our grandparents said the last time. ‘Here? Don’t make us laugh. Anywhere but here.’ Until the eleventh hour, until eleven seconds before the eleventh minute before the clocks stopped for us, as you’ve told me a thousand times, they ignored the warning signs, laughed at those who told them it was now or never, refused what stared them in the face. Here? Not here! ‘And you know their fate, Becky.’ Yes, Daddy, I know their fate, and I owe it to the memory of all those who suffered that fate – whom you speak of as though they were family though none of our family perished, I remind you – never to forget it. But that was then and now is now. And that was there and here is here. You used to laugh at me when I came home from university – ‘Here she is, our daughter, life president of the It Couldn’t Happen Here Society.’ And I called you, Daddy, ‘honorary chair of the Never Again League’. Well, I don’t disrespect you for believing what you believe. It is right to worry. But you cannot compare like with unlike. If you could only see how I am treated up here. The kindness! The consideration!