J (19 page)

Not allowed to remember the glory that had been, the Necropolis put up a cocksure front, belied by the failure of the once great stores and hotels to live up to the past sumptuousness which their premises still evoked. The shops with the grandest windows were not bursting with expensive items. You could get tables at the best restaurants on the day you wanted them. And there was a thriving black-market trade in memorabilia of better times – even, one might say, in memory itself.

Had they not been in love and on an adventure, each emboldening the other, Ailinn and Kevern would not have gone there.

Kevern’s father must have warned him against going to the Necropolis a hundred times over the years, but when he tried to recall his actual words Kevern couldn’t find any; he could only see the prematurely old man opening and closing his mouth, dressed in his oriental brocade dressing gown, arthritic and embittered, his back to the fire – a fire that was lit in all weathers – angrily smoking a cigarette through a long amber Bakelite cigarette holder, listening with one ear to the footsteps of walkers (snoopers, he called them) passing the cottage to get to the cliffs. Except for when he wore a carpenter’s apron in his workshop, he dressed, in Kevern’s recollection of him, no other way. Always his brocade dressing gown. Had he just arrived and was waiting for the rest of his clothes to follow, or was everything packed in readiness for departure? Had he for the space of one day in all the years he’d lived in the cottage made peace with the idea that it was his home?

His mother the same, though she didn’t dress as though to face down a firing squad. They could have been master and servant, so fatalistically elegant was he, so like an item of her own luggage, a bundle of rags – the bare necessity to keep out the cold – was she.

Whether she had formed an independent view of the Necropolis, or ever been there herself, Kevern didn’t know. She didn’t talk to him about things like that. The past wasn’t only another country, it was another life. But he thought he recalled her seconding her husband, saying, in her weary voice, as though to herself – because who else listened – ‘Your father is right, don’t go there.’

Kevern suddenly felt guilty realising that he too left his mother out of everything. He put his hand on Ailinn’s knee as though in that way, from one woman to another, he could make it up to her – the mother he had trouble remembering.

Ailinn took her hand off the wheel and put it on his. ‘Use both hands,’ he said, frightened she meant to play pat-a-cake with him while she was driving. ‘Please.’

‘Well I’m looking forward to this,’ she said, hiding her apprehension.

‘Me too. I’m looking forward to my first Lebanese.’

‘Or an Indian.’

‘Or a Chinese.’

‘And I can see if I can get my phone fixed,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know anything was wrong with your phone.’

‘It rings sometimes and when I answer there’s no one there. And occasionally I hear an odd clicking when I’m on the phone to you.’

‘How come you’ve only just mentioned this?’

‘I didn’t want to worry you.’

‘You think someone’s listening in?’

‘Who would want to do that?’

‘Search me . . . Gutkind?’

‘Why would he want to listen in to my conversations?’

‘Who knows? Maybe he wants to be sure you’re not in any danger from me – the lady killer.’

They both laughed.

Kevern didn’t mention his crazy thought. That the person bugging her phone might have been his dead father, making sure she was the right woman for his son.

‘Is there such a thing as retinal hysteria?’ Kevern asked as they approached the city.

Ailinn remembered an old English novel she’d read about a newly and unhappily married Puritan girl visiting Rome for the first time, the stupendous fragmentariness of the pagan/papal city – they were one and the same thing for her – passing in fleshly and yet funereal procession across her vision, throbbing and glowing, as though her retina were afflicted. So yes, Ailinn thought, a person’s excited emotional state could affect the way he saw. But why was Kevern’s emotional state excited or, more to the point, what did he think he was seeing?

‘Zebra stripes,’ he said. ‘And leopard spots. And peacock feathers. Have we taken a wrong turn and driven into the jungle?’

‘You don’t think you could be hung-over?’

‘You were with me last night. What did I drink?’

‘A migraine then?’

‘I don’t get them. I feel fine. I am just blinded by colour.’

She had been too busy concentrating on the roads, which she feared would be more frightening than any she was used to, to notice what he had begun to notice as they approached the Necropolis. But he was right. The Necropolitans were dressed as though for a children’s garden party. The moratorium on the wearing of black clothes, declared in the aftermath of
THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE
in order to discourage all outward show of national mourning (for who was there to mourn?) was honoured now only in the breach, they thought. Neither Ailinn nor Kevern thought twice about wearing black. But the Necropolis appeared to be obeying it to the letter still, as though seeing in the prohibition an opportunity for making or at least for seeming merry. What neither Kevern nor Ailinn had anticipated was the difference this abjuration of black would make to the look of everything. It was as though the spirit of serious industry itself had been syphoned out of the city.

But it wasn’t just the vibrant colours of the clothes people wore that struck them, but the outlandishness of the designs. The further in they drove the more vintage-clothes stalls they passed, until the city began to resemble a medieval funfair or tourney, on either side of the road stalls and pavilions under flapping striped tarpaulins piled high with fancy dress. Kevern rubbed his eyes. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a policeman snooping around my house in the hope of uncovering a single family keepsake, and here they go about in their great-grandparents’ underthings as bold as brass.’

Ailinn laughed at him. ‘I doubt the stuff is genuinely old,’ she said.

He thought he could smell the mustiness of antiquity on the streets. Mothballs, rotting shawls, old shoes, greasy hats, the forbidding odour of people long forgotten and garments that should have been thrown away. ‘What do you mean not
genuinely
old?’

‘Like your Kildromy-Biedermeier. I’d say they’re fake vintage.’

‘What’s the point of that?’

‘What’s the point of your Kildromy-Biedermeier? It’s a way of eating your cake and having it. This way they can cock a snook at the authorities without actually doing anything wrong. I think it’s fun. Why don’t we stop so you can buy me a crinoline and some cowboy boots? And I’ll buy you a Prussian officer’s outfit.’

‘To do what in?’

‘Ask me to dance. Take me into the woods. Whatever Prussian officers do.’

‘
Did
,’ he corrected her. ‘There are no more Prussian officers. I hate this playing with everything.’

‘Oh, Kevern, where’s your sense of fun?’

He smiled at her. It pleased him when she bested him. ‘Not everything is amenable to fun.’

‘You think we should be solemn about the past?’

‘I think we should let it go. What’s past is past.’

Had she not been driving she’d have rolled her eyes at him.

But she knew now he did not always say what he believed.

Only as they approached the Necropolis proper did the stalls begin to thin out, though even then they did not vanish altogether. And where stores selling better clothes should have been there were mainly holes in the ground and cranes. Had there been more workmen about, the cranes could have been taken as evidence that massive development was under way, but these too had a vintage air, mementoes of busier days. In accordance with the city’s musty festivity, the cranes were festooned with tattered bunting and faded decorations from Christmases or other festivals long past.

At Kevern’s instigation – he didn’t want to be in the car a moment longer – they checked into a hotel in the part of the city once referred to in the fashion and travel magazines as Luxor, in deference to the opulence of the shopping. Luxor was where most of the grand hotels had been, though there was little of the old glamorous traffic in their lobbies or on the streets outside today. Foreign tourism fell off dramatically after
WHAT HAPPENED
and had never fully recovered. Who wanted to holiday in the environs of Babi Yar? That this was a reciprocal reluctance it suited the authorities to insist. If visitors didn’t want to come and holiday in our backyard, we sure as hell didn’t want to holiday in theirs. Where hadn’t things been done the stench of which remained abhorrent to the misinformed or oversensitive tourist? Nowhere was safe, when you really thought about it. Nowhere was pleasant. What country wasn’t a charnel house of its own history? You were better staying home, if you cared about that sort of thing, with your eyes closed and a cold compress on your forehead. You were better advised to keep to your individual fortress, shuttered and bolted against the movement, in or out, of people, infection and ideas. You contained your own conflagrations, that was the international wisdom, or at least that was the international wisdom as explained by Ofnow. Eventually, we’d all grow less nice in our expectations and things would get back to how they’d been.

In the meantime Luxor retained a little of its old exoticism thanks to the convergence of two accidents of history. Many of the oil rich who had been in the Necropolis, feasting on the decline of the banks (which, by some logic that only the most sophisticated economists understood, made them still richer), and gorging on the best of the new season’s fashions, found themselves, when
WHAT HAPPENED
happened, between the devil of abroad and the deep blue sea of home. They were conscious, even without the advice of their embassies, that
WHAT HAPPENED
, no matter that they’d welcomed and in some cases been instrumental in it, might easily happen to them next; but equally aware that the revolutionary fervour sweeping their own countries was an even greater danger to them, as a hated elite who could afford to spend half their lives in foreign hotels. What was spring to some was winter to them. Anxious about staying but terrified to leave, they spent what was left of their lives in fretful uncertainty, and now their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s children resided where they had been marooned, in a sort of melancholy but pampered limbo, some in the very hotels their grandparents had been staying in when the world convulsed. In the absence of anything else to do, they continued to shop, went on raiding the best stores when the seasons and the windows changed, as it was in their blood to do, but the city had ceased to be a centre of fashion, the clothes were shoddier, the jewellery cheaper, and there was nowhere now for them to return to show off their purchases.

It was a new, rare sight to Kevern and to Ailinn – these idly perambulating gold-ringed men in keffiyehs, paler-skinned, Kevern imagined, than their grandparents must have been, but still with those stern, warrior profiles he had been educated to idealise. The noble generosity of the Arab was as much a given in the citizenship classes Kevern had taken at school, as the free spontaneity of the Afro-Caribbean and the honest industriousness of the Asian. As for the chaste obedience of the women, that was still evident in the modesty of their dress.

‘Nice,’ Kevern commented, ‘to see some black.’

Ailinn said nothing.

As black as ravens, they seemed to her, but nothing like so purposeful, covered from head to foot, only their slow eyes and the gold heels of their shoes visible. She noted with amazement the docility of their bearing as they trailed a step or two behind their men, talking among themselves. Some wheeled perambulators, but in general there were few children. Where was the point in children? And where, anyway, were the nannies? How did it feel, she wondered, to live this privileged life of no design, like a protected species which could forage unimpeded for whatever it liked but with no nest to take its findings back to.

Some of the men smoked hookahs in the lounge of the hotel, morose, looking occasionally at their watches but never at their women who sat staring at their jewelled utility phones, bemused, waiting for them to ring or perform some other once sacred but now forgotten function – totems that had lost their potency. The women allowed their fingers idly to play across the decommissioned keypads. The men too were fidgety, their fingers never far from their prayer beads.

‘You should get a set of those, they could calm your nerves,’ Ailinn whispered, as they waited for a porter to take their luggage to their rooms. They were travelling light and could have carried their own, but the porters needed employment and where, anyway, was the hurry?

‘Are you implying I’m a fretter?’

‘You? A fretter!’ she laughed, holding on to his arm, then wondering whether, in such a place, it was disrespectful of her to stand so close to a man.

After he’d shown them to their room the porter took Kevern to one side and asked him if there were gramophone records, CDs or videos he was looking for. Bootleg blues bands, rock and roll, comedy – he knew where to lay his hands on anything. Kevern shook his head. What about books that had fallen out of print, bootleg tickets to underground cabarets, souvenir passports of those who hadn’t got away before
WHAT HAPPENED
,
IF IT HAPPENED
happened, belts and badges worn by the hate gangs of the time, incitement posters, pennants, cartoons, signed confessions . . .?

Kevern wanted to know who would want such things. The porter shrugged. ‘Collectors,’ he said.

‘No,’ Kevern said. ‘No, thank you,’ remembering the amount of contraband music and words belonging to his father that was hidden away in his loft. It hadn’t occurred to him any of it could be worth money.

The bedroom was, or at least had been, ornate. The bed was a four-poster. The carpet vermilion and gold, the drapes similar, sentimental photographs of famous department stores with queues outside adorned the wall. A large bath sat in the middle of the bathroom on gilded griffin’s claws, now broken and discoloured. It will topple, Kevern thought, if we get into it together. He didn’t like the look of the towels either: though they must once have been sumptuous, each one large enough to wrap an entire bath-oiled family in, they now hung, grey and textureless, over rusted rails.