J (26 page)

The things you fear are all inside your own heads. And I sometimes think such fears make life not worth living. Is it a life to be in terror every day? To start whenever anyone knocks at the door? To recoil in shock from every thoughtless insult? If those are the conditions on which we hold our freedom to be ourselves, marry, bring up our children, worship, then it is no freedom at all. You cannot live a life forever waiting for it to end.

And it is such a waste when we could be so happy. Heaven knows we were happy as a family for so long. If I was with you now we would be happy again. But I can’t be with you again without you accepting Fridleif. And what possible reason do you have not to accept him? He is not the Devil. He is not the end of us. Can’t we stop all this sectarianism and just live in peace? All you are doing by rejecting me is making what you dread come true.

Your ever loving daughter,

Becky

PS You are also about to be grandparents.

‘This is not going to end well,’ Ailinn said.

‘Just read.’

September
17
,
201
-

Dearest Mummy and Daddy,

I will not upset you by sending you a photograph of your grandchild. I accept now, with great sorrow, that there will be no peace between us. But I do owe it to you – and to myself – to explain why I have done what I have done one last time.

Your generation is not my generation. I say that with the deepest respect. I never was and am not now a rebellious child. I understand why you think as you do. But the ship has sailed. My generation refuses to jump at every murmur of imagined hostility. We love our lives. We love this country. We relish being here. And to go on relishing being here we don’t have to be as we were before. That’s why I have decided to convert. Not as a rejection of the way you brought me up but as a step forward from it. We were always a preparatory people, Fridleif says. And we have done what we were put on earth to do. We have completed our mission and shown the way. We stood out against every manner of oppression, and having conquered it there is no need for all the morbid remembering and re-remembering. I don’t say we should forget, I say we have been given the chance to progress and we should take it. It’s time to live for the future, not the past. It’s time to be a people that looks forward not back.

So why have I decided to embrace my husband’s faith? For the beauty of it, Mummy. For the music of it, Daddy. As an expression of the loveliness of life that our grandparents suffered for us to enjoy.

Trust me, I have never been more what you brought me up to be than when I submit to what our people, in their understandably and even necessary touchy sense of separateness, have abjured for centuries – the incense, the iconography, the fragmented light of stained-glass windows, the rapture. We have been accepted and we are ready to join everybody else now. I am, anyway.

Be happy for me.

Your ever loving daughter in Christ,

Rebecca

‘I know,’ Ailinn said, when Ez told her that Rebecca was her grandmother.

‘How did you know?’

‘I’ve been expecting the letter.’

‘Is that meant to be funny?’

‘No, not at all.’

‘So what do you mean?’

Ailinn made a ‘leave it’ gesture with her hand, wafting whatever she meant away. Wafting it out of the room, wafting it out into Paradise Valley.

‘I can tell she was my grandmother, that’s all. I can read myself in her. Was there a reconciliation?’

‘I’d like you to read the final letter,’ Ez said.

Ailinn was reluctant. She couldn’t have said why. Maybe it was the word ‘final’. But she read it.

May
202
-

My Darling Parents,

I am very alarmed by what I have heard is happening where you are. Please write and tell me you are all right. That’s all I ask.

Yours in fear,

R

‘Now the envelope,’ Ez said.

It was stamped, in large purple letters,

RECIPIENT UNKNOWN AT THIS ADDRESS RETURN TO SENDER

*The Allegory of the Frog

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.

SIX

Gutkind and Kroplik

i

‘H
OW 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
.’