NINE

The Black Market in Memory

i

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, chilled by Ashbrittle’s faded faith, Kevern – half hoping she would say no – suggested they leave and drive to the Necropolis. The Necropolis was his father’s name for the capital.

‘Another of his jokes?’ Ailinn wondered.

‘You could say that, but he might have been in dead earnest.’

‘Well I wouldn’t know,’ Ailinn said, looking straight ahead.

She meant about jokes – since that had been Kevern’s first assessment of her: that she didn’t get them. But she meant about fathers too.

Neither had visited the Necropolis before. Singly, they wouldn’t have dared. It had a bad reputation. Outside the capital people survived the failure of the banks with surprising fortitude; they even took a grim satisfaction in returning to old frugal ways which proved their moral superiority to those who had lived the high life in the capital for so long, washing oysters down with champagne and living in mansions that had their own swimming pools. It was a sweet revenge. In time the Necropolis recovered, to a degree, but its self-esteem, as a great centre of finance and indulgence, had been damaged. WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED – or, as his father called it, THE GREAT PISSASTROPHE – for the most part happened there, and while no one was blaming anyone, a sort of slinking seediness replaced the old strutting glamour. In the Necropolis the divorce rates were higher than anywhere else. So were domestic shootings. Men urinated openly in the streets. Women brawled with one another, used the vilest language, got drunk and thought nothing of throwing up where the men had urinated. You could have your pockets picked in broad daylight. Put up too fierce a struggle and you might have your throat cut. Might. It wasn’t a daily occurrence, but people in the country were pleased to report that it wasn’t unheard of.

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.

ii

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 bathoiled family in, they now hung, grey and textureless, over rusted rails.

He went to the window and gazed out towards the park. At school he had read descriptions of the Necropolis written by post-apocalyptic fantasists of a generation before. They were published as an anthology intended as light relief for the pupils, a propaganda joke showing just how wrong people could be when they let their imaginations – and indeed their politics – run away with them. But the anthology was later withdrawn, not because the post-apocalyptics had been proved right, but because the truth was not quite the resplendent rebuttal of their vision it should have been. Kevern remembered the gleaming vistas of technological frenzy dreamed up by one of the writers, citizens of the Metropolis of Zog sitting on brightly coloured tubular benches conversing with their neighbours via bubbles of video speech transmitted faster than the speed of sound by satellite. They had given up talking to one another because talk was too cumbersome. Another envisioned the population living in cages underground, dispersing their seed by means of a carefully regulated system of electronic cartridges which travelled through translucent pipes, along with electricity and water. Otherwise they neither enjoyed nor wanted any other form of human contact. The alternative vision was of devastation – open sewers strewn with the debris of a consumer society that no longer possessed the will or the wherewithal to consume, abandoned motor vehicles with their doors pulled off, electricity pylons which seemed to have marched into the city from the country like an invading army and were now uprooted, bent double like dinosaurs in pain or flat on their backs like . . . Kevern couldn’t remember what they were like, only that everything was like something else, as though what had destroyed the city was not disease or overpopulation or an asteroid but a fatal outbreak of febrile fantasy-fiction metaphor.

One way or another the destruction wrought by electronics haunted all these writers’ imaginations. So much ingenuity and invention bringing so little happiness. In their own way, though, they were optimistic and triumphalist, no matter that they pretended otherwise, each recording the victory of the writers’ analogical fancy over nature.

What these writers gloomily and even hysterically prophesied, Kevern thought, was in fact a fulfilment of their private wishes.

Nothing gleamed in the city Kevern looked out on. The people on the streets had not turned into walking computer screens, riding translucent vehicles that sped along on tracks of spun steel. But neither was it a wasteland that could at least quicken the heart with horror.Yes, the bedecked cranes appeared melancholy, reminding him of drunks fallen asleep in doorways after a party, and after a while the brightly coloured retro clothing of the pedestrians and shoppers began to show as desperate, as though they were waiting for a carnival that was never going to start, but traffic lights worked and, though the cars looked even older than his, they still had their doors, their lights, their windscreen wipers, and – Kevern could clearly hear them from five floors up and through closed windows – their horns. There was no congestion, no sense of drivers fleeing an infected city in one direction, or rushing to join the techno-mayhem from another, so the horn-blowing must have denoted more indurated irascibility than specific impatience. Over in the park, men hooded like Eskimos – saying what things were ‘like’ went with the apocalyptic territory, Kevern realised – walked ill-tempered dogs, tugging at their leads, wanting them to do what they had come to the park to do and then be off. Every now and then a dog and his master relieved themselves in tandem. Though only the man appeared to relieve himself in anger.An occasional better-off-looking person walking a better-off-looking dog kept his distance, not afraid exactly, but routinely careful. Neither kind appeared to be taking pleasure in the outing. Kevern kept watching, expecting to see an eruption of hostilities, but nothing eventuated. A quiet moroseness prevailed, that was all. An all-pervading torpor that belied the colours, bored the dogs, and made the very light appear exhausted.

Kevern guessed that if you wanted to see blood spilled you had to wait till it got dark.

The pavements on the main roads were unswept, but they weren’t the debris-strewn sewers piled with wreckage he’d read about in his school anthology. It wasn’t the apocalypse.

There weren’t any powerful similes to be made. Nothing was like anything.

So what was it? It was a city seen through a sheet of scratched Perspex. For all the variegations of hue, it had no outlines. People blurred into one another. Kevern wondered if a wife would recognise her husband if she ran into him anywhere but in their home. Would either miss the other if they never returned home? And yet they had passed three cinemas and two theatres on the drive in, all advertising romantic musicals. Love – that was the universal subject. Love to play guitars to. Love to dance to. Love to sing about. Old and young, rich and poor, the indigenous and the children of immigrants – love!

Ailinn joined him at the window. ‘Well one thing this does do,’ she said, ‘is make you miss the Friendly Fisherman.’

He couldn’t tell if she was exaggerating.

They decided against going out to eat, ordered the Lebanese they’d promised each other – it turned out to be no more than a cold plate of aubergine mushed in a dozen different ways – and went to bed.

The mattress dipped in the middle.

‘Christ!’ Kevern said ruminatively, looking up at the flaking ceiling.

Ailinn agreed with him. ‘Christ!’

iii

They took a late breakfast – mixed mushed aubergines again – in a room that must once have suggested a pasha’s pavilion (mosaic tiled floor, mirrors on the ceiling, carpets on the walls), but now looked bored with itself – a street-corner bric-a-brac shop going out of business. Sensing that the permanent residents of the hotel weren’t looking for conversation, Kevern and Ailinn kept their eyes lowered. They were served mint tea which Kevern failed to pour from the requisite height. ‘It tastes better if you aerate it like this,’ the only other person in the breakfast room not in a keffiyeh called across from a nearby table. He was holding his own glass teapot aloft as though he meant to take a shower from it. ‘And you get more foam.’

Kevern, feeling like a country boy, thanked him.

‘Where are you two from?’ the man asked.

Kevern sneaked a look at Ailinn. How did she feel about talking to a stranger? She nodded imperceptibly. ‘Port Reuben,’ Kevern said.

The man, as broad as a door and dressed like a widely travelled photographer in khaki chinos and a cotton jacket with a thousand pockets, shook his head. ‘Never heard of it. Sorry.’

‘That’s all right,’ Kevern said. ‘We aren’t on the line about it. And you?’

‘I’m not on the line about it either.’

If the man was a comedian, Ailinn wondered, how would her thin-skinned lover deal with him.

Kevern worried for her on the same grounds.

He tried a laugh. ‘No, I meant where are you from.’

‘Me? Oh, everywhere and nowhere. Wherever I’m needed.’

‘Then you’re needed here,’ said Kevern, with a worldly flourish of his arm. ‘Should we take sugar with this?’

The man asked if he could join them and joined them without waiting for an answer. The width of him was a comfort to Kevern. You needed a wide man to advise you in a strange place. Ailinn thought the same. He would have made a good father.

It turned out that he was a doctor employed exclusively by this and a number of other nearby hotels to attend to the mental welfare of their long-term guests. ‘It keeps me busier than you would imagine,’ he said, smiling at Ailinn, as though she, having to deal with the mental welfare of Kevern, would be able to imagine only too easily what kept him busy.

There were questions Kevern wanted to ask but he wasn’t sure about the propriety of asking them while there were guests still eating. Reading Kevern’s compunction, the doctor, who had introduced himself as Ferdinand Moskowitz, but call him Ferdie, leaned across the table as though to gather his new friends into his wide embrace. ‘No one hears or cares what we’re talking about,’ he said. ‘They’re miles away. Depression can do that. It can make you indifferent to your surroundings, uninterested in yourself let alone other people.’

‘And those who are not depressed?’ Kevern asked.

Ferdie Moskowitz showed him a mouthful of white teeth. Kevern imagined him dazzling the Tuareg with them. ‘No such animal here. The only distinction to be drawn is between neurotic depression and psychotic depression, and even then those who start out with the milder form very quickly develop the more serious. Dispossession does that.’

‘We’re all dispossessed in our way,’ Ailinn said quickly. She wanted to say it before Kevern did. She could deal with her own pessimism better than she could deal with his. His slighted her. Slighted them – the love they felt for each other.

‘Yes, and we’re all depressed,’ the doctor said. ‘But in fact few of us are dispossessed as these poor souls are. You must remember that theirs is a culture that had already fallen into melancholy, long before’ – he made an imaginary loop with his hand, from which he made as if to hang himself – ‘long before you know what.’

‘Not what they told us at school,’ Kevern said. ‘Fierce warrior people,’ he quoted from memory, ‘who dispensed largesse and loved the good things in life . . .’

‘Ah, yes – Omar Khayyam via Lawrence of Arabia. Come fill the cup . . .’

Kevern closed his eyes, as though savouring something delectable, and tried to remember a line. ‘Enjoy wine and women and don’t be afraid – isn’t that how it went?’

‘We read that at school as well,’ Ailinn said, ‘only our version was Enjoy but do be afraid.’

The doctor made a sound halfway between a cough and a snort. ‘As though that was all they ever did,’ he said. ‘As though, between lying languorously on scented pillows and occasionally riding out to inconsequential battle in a sandstorm, they had nothing to do but wait for us to come and impose our values on them.’

Kevern shrugged. For himself, he wanted to impose his values on no one. He wasn’t even sure he knew what his values were.

‘Either way,’ the doctor continued, ‘that’s not the real Omar Khayyam. He was a philosopher and a mystic not a hedonist, which of course you can’t expect schoolboys – or schoolgirls – to understand. And as for the large-souled warrior of our romantic imagination – he vanished a long time ago, after believing too many lies and too many promises and losing too many wars. Read their later literature and the dominant note is that of elegy.’

‘Our dominant note is elegy, too,’ Kevern said. ‘We’ve all lost something.’

Ferdinand Moskowitz raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s an easy thing to say, but you have not lost as the poor souls I treat have lost. At least you can elegise like a good liberal in your own country.’

‘I don’t think of myself as a good liberal,’ Kevern said.

‘Well, however you think of yourself, you have the luxury of thinking it in your own home.’

Kevern exchanged glances with Ailinn. Later on they would wonder why they had done that. Other than asking them to call him Ferdie – a name that upset Kevern to an unaccountable degree – what had Moskowitz said to irritate and unite them? Weren’t they indeed, as he had described them, people who enjoyed the luxury of home? All right, Ailinn had spent her earliest years in an orphanage and had left the home made for her by her rescuers, but had she not found a new one with Kevern, huggermugger on a clifftop at the furthest extreme of the country? ‘I cling on for dear life,’ Kevern had told her once, making crampons of his fingers, but that was just his exaggerated way of talking. They had found a home in each other. So what nerve had the doctor touched?

‘Wherever we live,’ Kevern said at last – and his words sounded enigmatic to himself, as though enigma could be catching – ‘we await alike the judgement of history.’

Ferdinand Moskowitz rattled his pockets and moved his lips like a man shaping a secret. ‘We do indeed,’ he said. ‘But there are some things we don’t have to wait for history to judge.’

‘Such as?’

‘Such as our using the people you see here – our grandparents using their grandparents – as proxy martyrs. We said we were acting in their interests when all along we were acting in our own. The truth is we didn’t give a fig about their misery or dispossession. It was we who felt dispossessed. They were a handy peg to hang our fuming inferiority on, that was all. And once they’d given us our opportunity we left them to rot.’

‘This isn’t exactly rotting,’ Kevern said.

‘You haven’t seen inside their heads . . .’ He paused, then went on, ‘Look, I know what you’re thinking. These are the lucky ones, the rich and the powdered, born here to parents who were born here. The bombs didn’t fall on them, because they financed the bombs. The banks didn’t crash on them, because they owned the banks. They were spared the humiliations to which for years their poorer brothers were subjected. But that doesn’t mean they don’t feel those humiliations. Observe them at your leisure – their lives are sterile and they don’t even have the consolation of being able to hate their enemies.’

This was all getting a bit too close to the bone for Kevern. He wasn’t sure what to say. People didn’t discuss war or WHAT HAPPENED, or the aftermath of either, in Port Reuben. It was not the thing. Not banned, just not done. Like history. WHAT HAPPENED – if WHAT HAPPENED was indeed what they were talking about – was passé. Was this why his father cautioned him against the Necropolis, because in the Necropolis they were still discussing a war that was long over? Was Ferdie Moskowitz the disappointment his father wanted to save him from?

‘How so?’ was the best response Kevern could come up with.This was like arguing through cotton wool. It wasn’t that Kevern didn’t have a view on the subject, he didn’t know what the subject was.

‘How so? You can’t hate in retrospect, that’s how so. You can’t avenge yourself in retrospect.You can only smoke your pipes and count your beads and dream. And do you know what they fear most? That our history will make a mockery of events, extenuate, argue that black was white, make them the villains, ennoble by time and suffering those who made a profession out of their eternal victimhood, stealing and marauding on the back of a fiction that they’d been stolen from themselves.’

The wool descended further over Kevern’s eyes. Soon he would not be able to breathe for it.

‘They being . . . ?’ he just managed to ask.

But the doctor had lost patience. No longer a father figure to either of them, he rose, bowed in an exaggerated manner to Ailinn, and left the breakfast room.

A moment later, though, he popped his head around the door and pulled a clownish face. ‘The gone but not forgotten,’ he said.

The phrase seemed to amuse him greatly for he repeated it. ‘The gone but not forgotten.’

‘I don’t think Ferdie likes me,’ Kevern said, after he disappeared a second time.

It was to become a refrain between them whenever Kevern sniffed a predator – ‘I don’t think Ferdie likes me.’

And Ailinn would laugh.

iv

That afternoon, with a light rain pattering against the scratched Perspex, they decided they would get Ailinn’s phone fixed. The best places, the concierge told them, were in the north of the city and he didn’t advise driving.

‘Is it dangerous?’ Kevern asked.

The concierge laughed. ‘Not dangerous, just tricky.’

‘Tricky to find?’

‘Tricky to everything.’

He offered to call them a taxi but Ailinn needed a walk. They wandered aimlessly for an hour or more – Kevern preferred wandering to asking directions, because asking meant listening, and the minute someone said go straight ahead for a hundred metres then take a left and then a hundred metres after that take a right, he was lost. Occasionally a tout, dressed like a busker or a master of ceremonials at some pagan festival, stepped out of a doorway and offered them whatever their hearts desired. ‘Do you have anything black?’ Kevern asked one of them.

The tout looked offended. He was neither pimp nor racist. ‘Black?’

‘Like a black tee-shirt or jacket?’

The tout missed Kevern’s joke. ‘I could get you,’ he replied. ‘Where are you staying?’

Kevern gave him the wrong hotel. He wasn’t taking any chances.

Finding themselves in a part of town where there was actually construction going on, they went into a café to escape the dust. A beefy, furiously orange-faced builder in brightly coloured overalls, covered in plaster, raised his head from his sandwich and looked Ailinn up and down. ‘Tasty,’ Kevern thought he heard him say. But he could have been clearing his throat or referring to his sandwich. The gesture he made to a second builder who entered the café, however, slowly twirling a probing finger in Ailinn’s direction, was unambiguous.The new arrival took a look at Ailinn and fingered her impressionistically in return.

‘What’s that meant to signify?’ Kevern asked them, looking from one to the other.

The builder with the inflamed, enraged face made a creaking motion with his jaw, as though resetting the position of his teeth, and laughed.

‘Take no notice,’ Ailinn said. ‘It’s not worth it.’

‘You tell him, gorgeous,’ the second builder said, opening his mouth and showing her his tongue.

The first builder did the same.

These are the gargoyles I missed in Ashbrittle, Kevern thought.

‘Come on. Let’s leave them to dream about it,’ Ailinn said. She took Kevern by the elbow and led him out.

They were both strangers to the city, but Ailinn felt she could cope better in it than Kevern ever would.

Back on the street the rain was falling more heavily. ‘Let’s just jump in a taxi, get it sorted and then go home,’ she said. ‘I think we’ve been away long enough. I have a migraine coming on.’

It was a vicarious migraine, a migraine for him, a man who didn’t have migraines.

Kevern felt guilty. His idea to come away, his idea to mooch about looking into the windows of ill-lit shops and see where they ended up, his idea to go into the coffee shop – his idea, come to that, to ask Ailinn out in the first place, his idea to kiss Lowenna Morgenstern, everything that was making life difficult for Ailinn – his idea.

There were few taxis and those that passed were uninterested in stopping. Kevern wasn’t sure if their For Hire lights were on or off, but he thought some drivers slowed down, took a look at them, and then sped off. Could they see from their austere clothes, or their hesitant demeanour, that he and Ailinn weren’t from round here and did they therefore fear they couldn’t pay or wouldn’t tip? Or was it simply something about their faces?

Ailinn had turned white. Seeing a taxi, Kevern made a determined effort to hail it, running into the street and waving his arms. The driver slowed, peered out of his window, drove a little way past them, and then stopped. Kevern took Ailinn’s hand. ‘Come on,’ he said. But someone else had decided the taxi was for him and was racing on ahead of them. ‘Hey!’ Kevern shouted. ‘Hey, that’s ours.’

‘What makes it yours?’ the man shouted back.

He was wearing a striped grey and blue cardigan, Kevern noted with relief, as though that made him someone he felt confident he could reason with.And wore rimless spectacles.A respectable, soberly dressed person in his early thirties. With a woman at his side.

‘Come on,’ Kevern said, ‘be fair. You know I flagged it down before you did. Didn’t I, driver?’

The driver shrugged. The man in the cardigan was blazing with fury. ‘You don’t have to yell and scream,’ he said.

‘Who’s yelling and screaming? I flagged the taxi down before you, and I expect you to accept that, that’s all. This lady has a migraine. I need to get her back to our hotel.’

‘And I have a wife and tired children to get home.’

‘Then you can get the next taxi,’ Kevern said, seeing no children.

‘If it means so much to you that you have to behave in this insane manner, then take the taxi,’ the man said, raising an arm.

Kevern wondered if the arm was raised to call another taxi or aim a blow. He felt a hand on his back. Was it a punch? In his anger, Kevern wouldn’t have known if it was a knife going between his shoulder blades. ‘Take your hands off me,’ he said.

‘Calm down, you clown, you’ve got what you want. Just get yourself into the taxi and pootle off wherever you belong.’

‘Get your fucking hands off me,’ Kevern said.

‘Hey,’ the man said. ‘Don’t swear in front of my children.’

‘Then don’t you fucking lay your hands on me,’ Kevern said, still seeing no children.

What happened next he didn’t remember. Not because he was knocked unconscious but because a great sheet of rage had come down before his eyes, and behind it a deep sense of dishonour. Why was he fighting? Why was he swearing? He was not a fighting or a swearing man. And he couldn’t bear that Ailinn had seen him in the guise of either.

It was she who had pushed him into the taxi and got them back to the hotel. ‘Your hands are ice cold,’ she told him when they were back in their room. Otherwise she said nothing. She looked, Kevern thought, as though made of ice herself.

He didn’t know what time it was, but he fell into bed.

‘I don’t think Ferdie likes me,’ he said before he fell asleep.

Ailinn did not laugh.

It was her suggestion, when they woke in the early hours of the morning, that they drive home without even waiting for breakfast. It was clear she didn’t want a conversation about what had happened.

‘Do you hate me?’ he asked.

‘I don’t hate you. I’m just bewildered. And frightened for you.’

‘Frightened?’

‘Frightened of what might have happened to you. You didn’t know who that man was. He might have been anybody.’

‘He was a family man who didn’t want his children to hear foul language, that’s if there were any children. Though he didn’t mind them seeing him pushing a stranger. There was nothing to be frightened of.’

‘You don’t know that. I was also frightened about you. I didn’t like to see you like that.’

‘Do you want me to explain?’

‘No.’ She meant no, not now, but it came out more final than that.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘So am I.’

He couldn’t bear leaving right away as she proposed.The thought of driving home in this hostile silence appalled him. You don’t leave anywhere like that: it would feel too irresistibly as though they were leaving each other. Better to sit tight, with throbbing temples, and wait for the mood to change. How many marriages might have been saved if only the parties to it had waited – days, weeks, months, it didn’t matter – for the mood to change?

‘Let’s get your phone fixed and then go,’ he said.

He wanted to be back where they were before the swearing. And he was anxious to show her that her concerns were foremost in his mind. It was concern for her after all, his desperation to get her back to the hotel so she could sleep off her migraine, that made him fight for the taxi. Unless it was the responsibility he felt for her that had unhinged him. Was he not up to the job of looking after a woman? Did fear of failure unman him?

‘I don’t care about my phone,’ she said.

‘But I do. And I’d like an errand to clear my head.’

‘To clear your head!’

‘To clear both our heads.’

‘So how do you propose we do this? Go outside and hail a taxi?’

So the punch came, whoever delivered it. But he still refused to capitulate to what it could have meant had he let it.

‘I’ll get the hotel to call us one,’ he said.

He said it firmly. He was not going to allow looking after a woman to emasculate him.

v

It took an hour for a taxi to arrive but when it did the driver swung out of his cab to greet them, bowed low, introduced himself as Ranajay Margolis, looked up at the rain and produced an umbrella as a magician might produce a wand. He insisted on opening the passenger doors for them, one at a time, Ailinn’s first.

Struck by his manners, Kevern asked where he was from originally.

Ailinn dug him. He had lived too long in Port Reuben where a black or Asian face was seldom seen. No one had entered the country from anywhere else for a long time. Every person’s country of origin – regardless of whether they were a Margolis or a Gutkind – was this one. Wasn’t that what made now so much better than then?

Kevern didn’t mind the dig. So long as she was digging him they were together.

Ranajay Margolis was amused. He almost danced himself back into his seat. ‘I am from here,’ he said. ‘As for originally that depends how far back you want me to go. Where are you from originally?’

Kevern held up a hand. He took the point.

Ailinn explained that they wanted to get her phone fixed.

‘I’m just the man,’ the driver said in his quicksilver manner, turning round frequently and flashing them his snowy teeth, ‘but first I’ll give you a tour.’

‘We don’t want a tour, thank you,’ she said. ‘Just my phone fixed.’

‘There are special places for that,’ the driver said. ‘I know them all. But they aren’t easy to find and some of them aren’t very trustworthy.’

‘We know, that’s why we’re asking you to take us.’

He bowed as he was driving. ‘You sure you don’t want a tour?’

‘Certain.’

‘In that case,’ he said, raising a finger like an exclamation mark, as though to punctuate a great idea that had just come to him, ‘we will have to go to where the Cohens lived.’

‘The Cohens! I’m a Cohen,’ Kevern said. He felt a burst of excitement as he said it. Ranajay Margolis had asked him where he was from originally. What if he was from here? Would he encounter people who looked like him on the streets? Uncles, nieces, cousins? Would they be sitting on benches – so many tall, angel-haired ‘Cocos’ with long faces – minding their language and wondering what their lives amounted to?

Ranajay studied his reflection in the driver’s mirror. ‘No,’ he explained, ‘I mean real Cohens.’

Kevern offered to show him his ID.

Ranajay shook his head. ‘That changes nothing,’ he said.

They drove north for about half an hour, along tense, surly streets, past stores selling Turkish vegetables, and then stores selling Indian vegetables, and then stores selling Caribbean vegetables, until they came to a suburb of houses built in a bygone, faraway style, Greek temples, Elizabethan mansions, woodland cottages, Swiss chalets, Malibu country clubs. No film set could have suggested lavish living with so little subtlety. But whatever their original ostentation, the mansions housed more modest domestic ambitions now. Indian children played on the street or stared out at the taxi through upper-storey windows. A handful of men in open-necked shirts played cards under a portico that might once have sheltered foreign dignitaries and maybe even royalty as they drank cocktails. Perhaps because no one could afford their upkeep, some of the grandest dwellings had fallen into disuse. Colonnades crumbled. Corinthian columns that must once have glowed with the phosphorescence of fantasy were dull in the drizzle, in need of replastering and paint. Yet this was no slum. Those houses that were inhabited looked cared for, the neat gardens and net curtains, the atmosphere of quiet industry – even the card-playing was businesslike – mocking the grandeur of those who’d originally occupied them. Many of the garages, large enough to take a fleet of Hollywood limousines – one for him, one for her, and something only marginally smaller for Junior – served as electrical or mechanics workshops and even retail outlets, though it was hard to imagine any passing trade. Signs promised prompt and efficient repairs to utility phones and consoles. Black-eyed adolescent boys sat cross-legged on walls, engrossed in their electronic toys, as though to advertise the competence of their parents’ businesses.

The Cohens had lived here, Ranajay had said. What did he mean? Had it been a Cohen colony? Cohentown? He was adamant, anyway, that no Cohens lived here now, and that Kevern’s family never had. But who was he to say that? How did he know?

Kevern’s parents would never tell him where they had come from. It didn’t matter, they’d said. It wasn’t important. Don’t ask. The question itself depressed and enraged them. Maybe it reminded them of their sin in marrying. But his father had warned him off the Necropolis. ‘Don’t go there,’ he had said, ‘it will dismay and disappoint you.’ But he hadn’t said ‘Don’t go to Cohentown, it will disappoint you.’ Just don’t go anywhere. Just stay in Port Reuben which – he might have added – will also disappoint you.

He didn’t see how he could be disappointed when he had no expectations. But he had been excited when Ranajay had said Cohens had lived here. So there must have been some expectation in him somewhere, some anticipation, at least, that he had known nothing about.

Cohentown – why not?

What do I feel, he asked himself, thinking he should feel more.

What he felt was oppressed, as though there was thunder about.

He asked to be let out of the cab so he could smell the air. ‘There’s no air to smell,’ Ranajay Margolis said. ‘Just cooking.’

‘Cooking’s fine.’

Ranajay was insistent. ‘Come. I will take you to the best place to have your phone fixed. I can get you a good deal.’

‘Just give me a minute. I want to see if anything comes back to me.’

‘You were never here,’ Ranajay insisted. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘I think that’s for me to decide,’ Kevern said.

Ranajay blew out his cheeks, stopped the car, got out with his umbrella, and opened Kevern’s door. A group of children looked up, not curiously, not incuriously. He bore no resemblance to them but they weren’t amazed by his presence. He had a thought. Were they used to sentimental visitors? Did other members of his family turn up here periodically to find themselves, to smell the air and see what they could remember?

This was silly. There were countless Cohens in the world. There was no reason to suppose that the Cohens whose neighbourhood, according to Ranajay, this had been, were his Cohens. But he fancied he would know if he stood here long enough. Birds navigate vast distances to find their way home. They must be able to tell when they are getting close. They must feel a pounding in their hearts. Why shouldn’t he, navigating time, feel the same?

Most of the houses had long drives, but one had a front door on the street. He wondered if he dared look through the letter box, see if the silk runner was rumpled, see if the utility phone was winking on the hall table. But there were old newspapers stuffed into the letter box. Looking up, he saw that a number of the windows were broken. The disuse of this house suited him better than the subdued occupancy of the others. In the disuse he might reconnect to a line of used-up Cohens past. He closed his eyes. If you could hear the sea in a washed-up shell why shouldn’t he hear the past in this dereliction? You didn’t begin and end with yourself. If his family had been here he would surely know it in whatever part of himself such things are known – at his fingertips, on his tongue, in his throat, in the throbbing of his temples. Ghosts? Of course there were ghosts. What was culture but ghosts? What was memory? What was self ? But he knew the danger of indulging this. Yes, he could persuade himself that the tang of happy days, alternating with frightful event, came back to him – kisses and losses, embraces and altercations, love, heartbreak, shouting, incest . . . whatever his father and mother had concealed from him, whatever they had warned him would dismay and disappoint him were he to recover any trace of it.

His temples throbbed all right. And since he was not given to migraines they must have throbbed with something else. Recollection? The anticipation of recollection? But it was so much folly. He was no less able to imagine fondness or taste bitter loss while sitting on his bench in Port Reuben. So Cohens had lived here once. And been happy and unhappy as other families had been. So what!

And anyway, anyway for Christ’s sake! – it came as a shock to him to remember – Cohen was as much a given name as Kevern. He didn’t know what his family name had really been when Cohens who were really Cohens roamed Cohentown. Cadwallader, maybe. Or Chygwidden. What was he doing chasing a past associated with a name that wasn’t even his?

But then that precisely was the point, wasn’t it. No one was meant to know who was, or who had been, who. No one was meant to track himself or his antecedents down. Call me Ishmael. Life had begun again.

Ailinn had come out of the cab and was watching him. ‘Are you all right, my love?’ she asked.

His relief knew no bounds. She’d called him ‘my love’. Which must have meant the wretched taxi incident had been forgiven. He wanted to kiss her in the street. He took her hand instead and squeezed it.

He nodded. ‘There’s a strange atmosphere of squatting here,’ he said, noticing a mother coming out to check on her children, and maybe on him too. He was struck by how softly she padded, as though not to wake the dead. ‘They have the air of living lives on someone else’s grave.’

‘That’s a quick judgement to leap to,’ Ailinn laughed. ‘You’ve been here all of five minutes!’

‘It’s not a judgement. I’m just trying to describe what I feel. Don’t you think there’s a queer apprehensive silence out here?’

‘Well if there is, it might be caused by the way you’re staring at everyone. I’d be apprehensive if I had you outside my door, trying to describe what you feel. Let’s go now.’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ he continued. ‘It’s as though the place is not possessed by its inhabitants.’

This annoyed Ranajay. ‘These people live here quite legally,’ he said. ‘And have done for long, long times.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Kevern said, ‘I’m not claiming anything back.’

‘It was never yours,’ Ranajay said. ‘Not possible.’

Never yours, like yesterday’s taxi. Like Ailinn’s honour in the café. Did ownership of everything have to be fought for in this city?

Ailinn feared that if Kevern didn’t back off, their driver would leave them here. And then let Kevern see how unpossessed by its inhabitants it was. She lightly touched Ranajay’s arm. ‘I don’t think he means to imply it was his,’ she said.

Kevern suddenly felt faint. ‘Let’s get your phone fixed and then go back to the hotel,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of here.’

He climbed back into the taxi, not waiting for her to get in first.

He had heard his mother’s voice. ‘Kevern,’ she called. Just that. ‘Key-vern’ – coming from a long way away, not in pain or terror, but as though through a pain of glass. Then he thought he heard the glass shatter. Could she have broken it with her voice?

It made no sense that she should be calling him. She hadn’t been a Cohen except by marriage to his father, unless . . . but he wasn’t thinking along those lines today, so why should he hear her calling to him in Cohentown?

Calling him in, or warning him to turn away? Away, he thought. He could even feel her hands on his chest. Go! Leave it, your father is right, it will dismay and disappoint you.

Such a strange locution: dismay and disappoint. Like everything else they’d ever told him – distant and non-committal. As though they were discussing a life that didn’t belong to them to a son who didn’t belong to them either.

It had always been that way. Even as they sat on the train going east, looking out at the snow, there was no intimacy. When the train finally pulls into the little station other families will be counted, sent this way and that way, and where necessary ripped from one another’s arms. How does a mother say goodbye to her child for the last time? What’s the kindest thing – to hang on until you are prised apart by bayonet, or to turn on your heels and go without once looking back? What are the rules of heartbreak? What is the etiquette?

Kevern wonders which course his parents will decide on when the time comes and the soldiers subject them to their hellish calculus. Then, as though prodded by a bayonet himself, he suffers an abrupt revulsion, like a revulsion from sex or the recollection of shame, from the ghoulishness of memories that are not his to possess.

Appalled, Kevern hauls himself back from the stale monotony of dreams. Always the same places, the same faces, the same fears. Each leaking into the other as though his brain has slipped a cog. Dementia must be like this, nothing in the right place or plane, but isn’t he a bit young for that? So he climbs, so he climbed, so he will go on climbing, back into the taxi taking him away, feeling fraudulent and faint.

Now it was Ranajay’s turn to wonder if he’d caused offence. ‘I’m only meaning this for your husband’s sake,’ he said to Ailinn, starting the vehicle up again. ‘He could not ever have lived here. There is no one now existing who lived here.’

He looked as though he was going to cry.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, putting an arm around Kevern who seemed to have snapped into a sleep. He hadn’t fainted. Just gone from waking to sleeping as if at a hypnotist’s command.

Ranajay was beside himself with distress. ‘My fault, my fault. I shouldn’t have brought you to this part,’ he said.

‘There is no reason why you shouldn’t have brought us here,’ Ailinn assured him. She felt she had spent the entire day making life easier for men. ‘We asked you to.’

He inclined his head. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I am sure your husband is mistaken. There is no one left from here. They went away a long time ago. Before memory.’

Shut up, she wanted to scream. Shut up now!

But it pleased her that he had called Kevern her husband. Husband – she liked the ring of it. Husband, I come. Who was it who said that? How she would have felt to hear herself called Kevern’s wife she wasn’t sure. But OK, she thought, no matter that he had been half-crazed the entire time they’d been away. Yes, on the whole, OK. There were worse men out there.

They never did get her phone fixed. It would take three to five working days for the parts to arrive. And they weren’t intending to stay around that long. She’d buy another.

They drove home to Port Reuben later that afternoon in careful, contemplative silence, neither wanting to discomfort the other with so much as a word or a thought. Every subject seemed fraught. They were both greatly on edge, but were still unprepared for what they found on their return. Someone had been inside the cottage.

‘I knew it,’ Kevern said before he had even turned the key in the door. ‘I have known it the whole time we were away.’

‘Are you absolutely certain?’ Ailinn asked.

It was late and they were tired. The moon was full and a full moon plays tricks with people senses. He could have been mistaken.

They had to shout over the roaring of the blowhole. No, he wasn’t mistaken. He had looked through his letter box and what he had seen he had seen.

His silk runner had been interfered with.

How did he know that?

It was straight.