'It's not to his shame that you stamp on him.'
'I disagree with you. It is his shame, his fault, for being an ant. We have to take responsibility for our fate. Even an ant. What happens to him is his disgrace.'
She was shocked to hear him speak like this. It felt like a blasphemy to her. Perhaps he needed to blaspheme. Perhaps that was his way of working the shock of it all out of his system. Nonetheless she couldn't let his blasphemies go unchecked. 'You aren't saying what you really mean,' she said. 'You can't honestly think that your mother's and father's life was a disgrace.'
'They were in hiding for the whole of it. Yes, it was a disgrace.'
'And what about those who had nowhere to hide? Their parents and grandparents? Mine?'
'The trodden generations? A disgrace.'
'Then it's up to you to restore respect.'
'Me? I am the greatest disgrace of all.'
ii Esme Nussbaum sits at the window of her room and watches rain drip from the ferns. Even when it's not raining anywhere else it rains in Paradise Valley and even when it doesn't rain in Paradise Valley the ferns go on dripping.
There is nothing more I can do, she tells herself. It's no longer in my hands. But it's in her brain, and with that she wills them on, the harbingers of her bright new equilibrium of hate.
Senior officials from Ofnow are on the phone to her every day. They want to know how it's proceeding. The population is still tearing itself apart a why, in her very neck of the woods there has been another brutal murder, a double murder, a policeman and his cat, for God's sake: what maniac would kill a cat? a so they need good news. She tells them this thing must run its course. Yes, she has other irons in the fire, but this is the best bet and, trust her, she won't take her eye off it for a moment. But she has to remind them that the complex structure of conflict that was Rome wasn't built in a day and that there'll be no immediate visible effect even if all does go well. They don't agree with her. They think the country will feel a different place the minute it learns that WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED was only, after all, a partial solution. They don't expect a uniformity of response. After years of saying sorry there's no knowing how the public will react but, by Esme's own analysis, the news itself a a few well-judged publicity photographs, the odd teaser interview, not giving too much away, in celebrity and gossip magazines a should begin to restore the necessary balance of societal antagonism. 'Just give us some tidbits we can definitively leak,' they tell her, meaning that the wedding, the conception, and the birth can wait. The child of course is crucial a For unto us a child is given a but even the promise of it should suffice for the moment.
I'm on it, Esme tells them.
There is one among the importunates whose excitement at the prospect of a cultural rebirth a musicals with wit, reject-rock, hellishly sardonic comedies, an end to ballads a is so intense he can barely express it in coherent sentences. So frequently does he call her that Esme is beginning to wonder whether he isn't himself one her scouts had missed. I have to tell you, she tells him, that reigniting popular culture is not high among my objectives. He baulks at 'popular'. The serious theatre, too, needs a shot in the arm, he reminds her. Imagine hearing complex, warring sentences on the stage again. Imagine paradox and bitterness and laceration. Art as endless disputation, bravura blasphemy a Oh, the bliss of it, Ms Nussbaum! Alternatively, imagine the Herzschmerz of a violin and piano sonata, played as only they can play it, as though for the final time. She warns him against premature recidivism. You know about things you shouldn't know about, she says sternly, and you make unwarrantable assumptions about my politics. I have no desire to restore a status quo from which so many suffered. To regret WHAT HAPPENED is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Something needed to happen, even if what did exceeded decency and proportionality. But nor must we force those who have been providentially spared back into demeaning stereotypical patterns. Herzschmerz indeed! I repeat, I am indifferent to the entertainment implications of this project. Not dismissive, just not engaged. My concern is not bebop but the physics of societal mistrust. You cannot have a one-sided coin. If what I am seeking comes about, we will once again enjoy the stability of knowing who we're not.
Her importuner laughs, optimistic despite what she has said to him, imagining he has heard irony. But he is wrong. Irony is not something Esme Nussbaum does.
It has occurred to her, of course, to worry for Ailinn should things not come about as she intends or, indeed, should it come about too well. What if the years of saying sorry have bred an antagonism even deeper than before? Could Ailinn find herself the object of violent suspicion long before the desired equilibrium has time to take hold?
But Esme is in the grip of a passion to do good, and all other concerns, including Ailinn's safety, are subjugated to the more immediate task of bringing that good about.
There is still some way to go. The problem is Kevern. Not the facts about the bloodline. The facts are fine. So easy of confirmation, in fact, it is a wonder the Cohens were able to go on living for so long in Port Reuben unmolested. The problem is the flakiness. She isn't any longer sure that he is suitable. She puts this down to poor preparation. Those who have been making him their study have not done their job well. They have not adequately assessed his character. They have been looking through him, or past him, not at him. But it's her fault too. When she came down to Paradise Valley it was with a view to scrutinising them both. So what went wrong? Ailinn went wrong. Or rather Ailinn went too right. Esme wonders if her vile father had her number after all. Was she indeed a lesbian? She didn't think so, but without question she'd found the girl engrossing. And while she was engrossed in the one she failed to keep tabs on the other. Perhaps Kevern had been exercising the same magic. Perhaps he too had blinded those charged exclusively with watching him. Is that their inherited gift, Esme catches herself asking. Are they charmers? Do they beguile? She stills her thoughts. If she's not careful she'll be understanding too well why WHAT HAPPENED happened.
Kevern is not her last throw of the dice. Neither, come to that, is Ailinn. Little by little, fragile shoots of hopefulness have shown themselves in remote corners of the country. Nothing showy, naturally, no salt-rose or topaz, but here and there, a violet by a mossy stone, a dark thing between the shadow and the soul, wasting its sweetness on the desert air. And these will certainly be significant when it comes to procreative negotiations further down the line. But they are not her first choice. Ailinn and Kevern remain her first choice.
There is another consideration when it comes to Kevern. Esme has given voice to this more than once, in private while watching the ferns drip and when irked by all the problems associated with his character. Who needs the little prick, she has wondered, surprised by her own violence. Expletives came to her often when she lay in her coma, but they haven't visited her much since.
What she means by this is that while Ailinn must be the real McCoy, and must, short of a miracle, have a father for the child, it might not be absolutely essential to that child's being the real McCoy that the father is the real McCoy as well. She has been hampered by having no one to ask and very few intact books to consult but she has beavered away and believes she can now confirm Ailinn's grandmother's understanding of the law of matrilineality: yes, it is indeed the case, as Rebecca thought when she defied her husband, that the McCoys, as it amuses her to call them while she bites her fingernails, look only to the mother for transmission of authenticity. Thus, though there's no knowing who Ailinn's father was, and though her grandfather Fridleif was unacceptable in every possible regard, the fact that she is in direct, unbroken line of matrilineal descent from her grandmother, who appears to have ticked all the boxes herself, is sufficient to make her what Esme wants her to be. That being the case, who needs that little prick Kevern Cohen?
No, no one needs him. That's the point to which Esme's rough scholarship has brought her. But still and all it will be better in every way if he can be roped in. His presence as Ailinn's agitated, unsmiling consort will help Esme to the composite effect she is looking for. Kevern does not, she is confident, photograph well. There are many aspects of character the camera can lie about, but stand-offishness is not one of them. A man so aloof that he accepts no kinship with the human race looks exactly that when he's photographed a an unquiet thing, displaced and determined to stay that way. Furthermore, if she can sell him the whole box of tricks, or at least keep the pairing to the degree that he will buy into engagement, marriage and the rest of it, she will be able to arrange them a traditional wedding a she will officiate herself if she has to a whose antiquated self-absorption will enrage as many as it pleases. Including, she has no doubt, Kevern Cohen. He will not behave well at his own wedding. She has come across the ritual of the bridegroom breaking a glass. Kevern, she is confident, will stamp it to smithereens. He will make a sardonic speech, compromising his love for Ailinn (she doesn't doubt its genuineness) with savage jokes that no one will enjoy. Yes, the more she thinks about his studied prickliness, the more she wants to keep him. Ailinn is a woman of immense charm. What no one wants is for people to fall in love with her to the degree that no equilibrium of hate is re-established. Kevern, on the other hand, even should he somehow succeed in not being wholly detestable, will not inspire devotion. In Kevern the people will have no difficulty recognising their own antithesis.
iii Black Friday Demelza has left me. My mistake a though in the course of our final argument she told me I had made more mistakes than she could count a was to leave my diary where she could find it. Unless my mistake was to confide quite so many sexual secrets to its pages.
Wrong again, she said, when I confessed to that. Your mistake was to have had so many sexual secrets.
She says there's no other man. Do I believe her? No, I do not. My money's on Kevern 'Coco' Cohen. I can't say I ever did care much for him but now I know him for what he is I suspect he has been scheming to squirm his way between Demelza's legs all along. The metaphor of the reptile, by the way, is not mine. There was man, there was woman and then there was the all-knowing snake. I can't be blamed for the theology of that parable when it was they who told it about themselves. Enter knowledge into the paradisal world of love and innocence a in other words enter them with their obscene obsession for knowing everything a and that's happiness gone for ever. No wonder they shunned the human form and painted abstract robotical horrors.
Well, we thought we'd scorched that particular snake, but here it is again writhing between my wife's legs. And the crazy thing is that I've been instrumental in its rebirth. Had I seen what he was about years ago, before the Wise Ones rewrote the manual, I could have penned a damning report and that would have been that. There were enough clues, God knows. The never saying sorry. The never being out of the library. The furtive tap-turning and hand washing a what was he trying to wash off, I'd ask Demelza. Now it's clear: his own snake slime. Slime that is now inside my wife. No wonder she was evasive when I tried to talk to her about him. And no wonder, come to think of it, she suffered Credibility Fatigue. I know now just what was fatiguing her.
It's a good job I am civilised. I count to a hundred. I pat Petroc, pat a couple of students in the same spirit, take out my sketches of St Mordechai's Mount and remember when my mind was last given over to the contemplation of unsullied loveliness. I have an idea for a new series of watercolours a Eden. The Garden before the introduction of the snake. Just Demelza and I doing as we are told, unaware of our nakedness, alone under the trees, except maybe for Petroc. Speaking of whom, should I not have smelt a rat when he was snarling around Kevern 'Coco' Cohen's feet smelling something worse? 'Petroc!' Demelza used to cry, calling him off. 'Down, Petroc. Naughty boy. Down! I'm so sorry, Mr Cohen.' Mr Cohen! I'm so sorry, Mr Cohen. I bet she was. Poor Petroc. Disparaged for expressing his nature and keeping us safe from harm.
I wouldn't put it past him a the snake, not the dog a to have made her offerings of lovespoons. Portraits. Full-length. Top to toe. The pair of them entwined in lime wood. Not exactly likenesses. He doesn't do likenesses. A likeness is not primitive enough for his depraved aesthetic. They prefer a touch of the ape to show through. But likeness enough to be compromisingly recognisable. Probably shown them to our students, too, while lecturing on the intricacy of their carving a intricate all right! a hoping they would make out Demelza despite the monkey features and scoff at me. Where did they do it? Here, when I was teaching? Or did she go over there on days when she said she needed to do some shopping? On the floor of his workshop, would it have been? On a bed of sawdust? If only I'd been less trusting. I should have smelt her hair when she returned. Should have gone searching for shavings in her underwear drawer. Or better still should have had my way with that wild-haired piece of his while he was otherwise engaged. It must be assumed a forgive the fancy talk: I'm preparing my defence a I must assume that she too is to be numbered among the degenerates, though the flowers she made were beautiful enough. Veering on the odd, as you'd expect, even the macabre, but still close enough to nature to be lovely. So what would she have been like, that bird-woman of his with the hawk face? Sharp claws she'll have, I bet. A tongue wet with blood and little nibbly teeth. Mandibles a is that the word? Rotten juice and mandibles a who said that? The shitty magma of rotten juice and mandibles . . . blah, blah, blah . . . ring a bell? . . . the passion of the termite . . .
. . . it must, methinks, have been one of those resurrected samizdat pamphlets from before WHAT HAPPENED that did the rounds of the country's common rooms not all that long ago, probably as a medical corrective to our periodic recrudescences of unseemly guilt. All very well saying sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry a I have always been at the forefront of the apologising party myself, so long as we aren't apologising for anything we have actually done a but a little puncturing of the windpipe of our dutifulness is no bad thing, as many of us felt, hence the reappearance of these short samizdatty things, if that's the right expression, inflammatory trifles, anyway, from those on the front line and who knew the problem of termite infestation for themselves, that brightened our lives for a while before we grew dutiful again.
When a thing is heartfelt it stays with you. 'Ich hab' im Traum geweinet' . . . 'Ou sont les neiges d'antan' . . . You don't forget sentiments like those. They express the quintessence of regret. But quintessence of scorn can melt your bones as well. Like those lines about shitty magma . . . the termites being everywhere, selling everything, keeping everything, destroying everything, weaving their web, was it, yes, weaving their web in the shadows . . . then eliminating, dissuading, pursuing whoever might cause them the least little bit of umbrage a that's the phrase a to a final bloody course of reckoning, tee-dum tee-dum . . . The least little bit of umbrage. Can there be a more telling description of the disproportionality of Kevern 'Co-co-cocksucking' Cohen and his kind, can there be a better atomisation of their crazed thin-skinned sensitivity, than that? The least little bit of umbrage. That imagined sliver of a slight in retaliation for which they'd have shaken the whole planet to its foundations . . . if we'd let them.
It would come as no surprise to learn the snake believes he's been caused the least little bit of umbrage by me, though where and how I can't imagine, and deny all charge and knowledge, but believes it anyway, I bet he does, in return for which he deposits his slime in my sweet, gullible and far too forgiving, not to say slime-receptive, Demelza. He will treat you as he's treated me, I tell her. They are incapable of gratitude . . . But she denies all knowledge of him. You think I'd want to be with another man after you, she says. You think I'm that big a fool? But my mind races with suspicions of them both and that's enough for me. On my hands and knees I pursue the spattered trail of rotten juices to my bed.
That I have no recourse, short of a private feud which, as the older and more easily hurt party, I am sure to lose, has been made plain to me in a communication from up there. They don't exactly confirm my suspicions as to Demelza (though they blaze them forth as to everything else), but the warning is unequivocal: stay away. It's actually even blunter than that. You have made a balls-up, move aside. No mention of Mrs Snake but I take the injunction to include her. Stay well clear of them both. Pretty much what I told Detective Inspector Gutkind. So you could say that in death he must be enjoying his revenge. As for when I will be enjoying mine, God alone knows. I am not, anyway, to have the consolation of confronting either of them. Not a cold word into his ear, not a warm whisper into hers; no bite from those mandala mandibles; no last sniff of her paper flowers.
My hand is forced. I will away to beauty . . .
No, not Rozenwyn Feigenblat. The beauty of natural things a tidal flats, sunsets, unsullied by all the subtle demonism of life and thought . . .
iv Ailinn Solomons, looking at the moon, and listening to her jumping heart, wondered at what was happening to her. She had returned, briefly a she didn't want to leave Kevern on his own for too long a to Paradise Valley where there were still things to find out, sort out, have out, and was sitting on a cold mossy bench, hugging herself against the chill damp, listening to Ez clattering about rather obviously in the kitchen. 'Do I feel any different?' she asked herself. Ez had been lending her books relevant to that question, or at least fragments of books, dog-eared, singed, defaced, some of them crayoned over as if by a class of three-year-old delinquents. Although they purported to have been written a whenever it was they were written a from the inside, by those in the know, or at least by those who knew others in the know, each work, no matter how little of it there was, contradicted the one before. It was her forebears' austerity of conscience, according to one writer, that had always troubled humanity and explained the hostility they encountered wherever they went. They demanded too much. They set too high a standard. A second writer understood their defining characteristic as a near irresponsible love of the material world, and it was this that had landed them in hot water. Offered the spirit, they chose matter. Offered emotion, they chose reason. This one said they were deeply pious; that one found them profoundly sacrilegious. They were devoted to charity, yet they amassed wealth regardless of how they came by it. When they weren't consumed by self-regard they suffered a bruising sense of worthlessness. They saw the universe as a reflection of the God that loved them above all people, but moved through it like strangers. When she came to the alienation they felt in nature she recognised herself at last. She had never been comfortable on a garden seat in her life. She disliked the damp newsprint smell of vegetation, detested snails and worms, felt threatened by the icy indifference of the moon, and feared the irregular rhythm of her heart which also, surely, was a thing of nature. So while she didn't feel any different after reading all Esme had given her to read, she at least understood why she felt the same.
Esme called out to her from the kitchen. She had, since morning, been making chicken soup to an ancient recipe she'd found in a cookery book that must have been as old as creation and wondered whether Ailinn wanted to eat it inside or out. Ailinn didn't want to eat it at all, so reverentially had Esme prepared it, with so much sacrificial ardour had she dismembered the chicken, so full of spiritual intention was her dicing of the carrots, so soulfully did she look at her through the steam rising from the pan, but decided that as she had to eat it somewhere she would eat it out. Compound the discomfort.
They ate silently for a short while, balancing the soup plates on their knees. Esme sneaked looks at her.
'Are you enjoying it, my love?
My love!
'Am I meant to?'
'Well I've made it for you in the hope you will.'
'No, I mean is it part of my preparation?'
Esme winced.
'Will it count against me,' Ailinn continued, 'if I don't? Will it prove I'm a fake?'
'Well I won't tell,' Esme said.
'Forgive me, I am not able to finish it,' Ailinn said at last, putting the plate on the ground between her ugly feet. 'There is something more pressing than soup.'
Esme started in alarm. It irritated Ailinn how easily she could worry her. She had only to express the slightest disquiet for Esme's entire system of defences to be activated. She's too close to me, she thought. There's more of her inside my skin than there is of me.
'What is it that's more pressing?' Esme asked. She could have been asking how long Ailinn had known she only had an hour to live.
'Matrilineality,' Ailinn said.
'Could you explain that?'
'Matrilineality? After all you've said to me on the subject! My love' a take that, Ailinn thought a 'it's you who are the authority.'
'No, I meant could you explain what bothers you about it.'
So, Ailinn, shivering under the cold moon, did.
If fathers bore so little responsibility for the defining characteristics of their progeny, as Esme said they did, in what sense were they their progeny at all? There seemed to be a carelessness here that belied the otherwise strict code of kinship into which Ailinn had now been drawn. Had it really mattered not at all what sort of seed her father had put into her mother, and her grandfather into her grandmother? Was it merely incidental? She felt the pull of contradictory impulses: pleased to be incontrovertibly what she was, but disappointed she had got there, so to speak, so easily, with so few caveats as to fathers. In an odd way it devalued her new-found affiliation. 'I would want a child of mine to be validated on both sides,' she told Esme.
'I want that for you too,' Esme assured her.
Fearing that Esme intended to embrace her, Ailinn moved her chair away, pretending she was trying to make herself more comfortable.
'But . . .?'
'But we don't always get what we want.'
'You moved heaven and earth to keep us together, Ez,' she reminded her. 'You wouldn't let me walk away from him. "Ring him, ring him," you urged me. My soulmate, you had the nerve to call him when you knew nothing of my soul. And when I told you he was walking away from me you turned as white as your blouse. What's changed?'
Esme Nussbaum was relieved that Ailinn couldn't see her blush. 'Nothing's changed. I care about your happiness as much as I ever did. More. But you've taken what I've had to tell you remarkably well a far better, truly, than I dared to hope you would. I couldn't imagine you ever dealing with this on your own, yet you have.'
'Not have, am . . . I'm a work in progress, Ez.'
'I understand . . .'
'And I'm not on my own.'
'Are you saying that Kevern is with you on this every inch of the way?'
'I never said I was with me on this every inch of the way. I haven't chosen this, remember. And I haven't seen through to the end of all it means. You have to face the fact that I probably never will. I can't give you a guarantee for life.'
'I know that and I'm not pressuring you. If you and Kevern can work this out together there's nothing I'd like more.'
'Matrilineality notwithstanding?'
'Matrilineality is not my invention. It just happens to be the way it works.'
'And the way it works makes Kevern redundant?'
'Not at all. The future I envisage requires mothers and fathers.'
'For the look of the thing.'
This time Esme would not be denied. She leaned across and stroked the girl's arm. 'Ailinn, this is all about the "look" of the thing. You are no different today from who you were a year ago, a month ago even. What's changed is how you appear. How you appear to yourself and how you will appear to the world. It's all illusion. Identity is nothing but illusion.'
'I shouldn't worry in that case that I don't like chicken soup?'
'I'd like you not to worry about anything.'
Ailinn wondered why she'd made a joke. Was it Kevern's doing? 'If it's all illusion,' she continued in a different vein, 'why has it caused so much misery?'
'I've had a long time to think about this,' Esme said, pausing . . .
'And?'
Ailinn marvelled at her own impatience. She had lived in ignorance of just about everything for a quarter of a century; now she needed answers to questions she could never have imagined she would ask, and she needed them at once. The pity of it was that the person in the best position to answer those questions seemed to have all the time in the world. In fact Ailinn was wrong about this. Esme, too, was a cauldron of impatience, but did not want to frighten Ailinn off with her intensity. So both women sat with frayed nerves, listening to the clocks furiously ticking in their brains.
'We are dead matter,' Esme continued at last, 'indeed I was very nearly dead matter myself when I realised this a we are dead matter until we distinguish ourselves from what's not dead. I was alive, I told myself as I was lying there. Very nearly dead, but alive. And it made me more alive to realise that. I wasn't the me I'd been, but nor was I the me they wanted me to be, which was no me at all. Only when we have a different state to strive against do we have reason to strive at all. And different people the same. I am me because I am not her, or you. If we were all red earthworms there'd be no point in life. Identity is just the name we give to the act of making ourselves distinct.'
'So you're saying it's irrelevant what our identities really are? As long as we assume one and fight against someone else's.'
'I'd say so, yes. Pretty much.'
'Isn't that a bit arbitrary?'
'Perhaps. But isn't everything? It's just chance that we're born to who we're born to. There's no design.'
'So why fight for who we are?'
'For the sake of the fight itself.'
'Then isn't that a bit violent, as well as arbitrary?'
'Life is violent. I had to fight death to be alive.'
'But if "who we are" is arbitrary, and if we fight for whatever cause we just happen to be to born to, for no other reason than the fight itself, then it didn't have to be me you picked for this . . .'
'I didn't pick you, Ailinn.'
'All right. Describe it how you like. But if there is no identifiable me then it doesn't matter whether I am it or not. I don't have to be the real deal because there is no real deal. You could have hit on anyone.'
Esme bit her lip. 'You'll do it better,' she said.
They fell silent. Something crawled across Ailinn's feet. She wondered if it was Esme's red earthworm, that made life meaningless. She shuddered. Esme offered to go inside and fetch her a shawl. Ailinn shook her head. She could have been shaking Esme off her.
'If you're asking me to do this without Kevern,' she said suddenly, 'I'm afraid I can't. No, it's feeble of me to put it like that. If you're asking me to do this without Kevern, I'm afraid I won't.'
Esme felt as though all her splintered bones had been crushed a second time. She remembered what it took to distinguish herself from the dead.
'In that case we will have to make sure you do it with him,' she said.
TWO.
Shake Hands With Your Uncle Max i IT WAS HEDRA Deitch who was the first to congratulate him.