J by Howard Jacobson Page A

lesson his parents had wanted to inculcate in him? The reason you would not want it visited on you being that it was murderous.
    This then, by such a reading, was his grandmother’s lesson: Be careful not to be on disgust’s receiving end. For whoever feels disgusted by you will destroy you.
    Had he wanted to destroy the girl whose attempt to kiss him had been so upsetting that he had to pretend it turned his stomach? Maybe he had.
    Kevern ‘Coco’ Cohen got out of bed and religiously blew the dust off Ailinn’s paper flowers.

How many men were there? Six hundred, seven hundred, more? She thought she ought to count. The numbers might matter one day. One at a time the men were led, each with his hands tied behind his back, into the marketplace of Medina, and there, one at a time, each with his hands tied behind his back, they were decapitated in the most matter-of-fact way – glory be to—! – their headless bodies tipped into a great trench that had been dug specially to accommodate them. What were the dimensions of the trench? She thought she ought to estimate it as accurately as she could. The dimensions might matter one day. The women, she noted coldly, were to be spared, some for slavery, some for concubinage. She had no preference. ‘I will choose tomorrow,’ she thought, ‘when it is too late.’ Grief the same. ‘I will sorrow tomorrow,’ she thought ‘when it is too late.’ But then what did she have to grieve for? History unmade itself as she watched. Nothing unjust or untoward had happened. It was all just another fantasy, another lie, another Masada complex. As it would be in Maidenek. As it would be in Magdeburg. She looked on in indifference as the trench overflowed with the blood that was nobody’s.

FOUR
    R.I.P. Lowenna Morgenstern
    i
    A ILINN KNEW EVEN less about her family.
    Kevern thought that Ez, the fraught, angular woman with the tight frizzy hair who had brought her down to share the cottage in Paradise Valley, was her aunt, but she wasn’t.
    ‘No relative,’ Ailinn explained. ‘Not even a friend really. No, that’s unfair. She is a friend. But a very recent one. I only met her a few months before I came away, in a reading group.’
    Reading groups were licensed. Because they were allowed access to books not otherwise available (not banned, just not available), readers had to demonstrate exceptionality of need – either specific scholastic need or, if it could be well argued for (and mere curiosity wasn’t an argument), general educational need. Kevern was impressed that Ailinn had been able to demonstrate one or the other. But she told him she had simply been able to pull a few strings, her adoptive mother being a teacher.
    Books apart, this account of her relations with Ez explained to Kevern why she had made so little ceremony of introducing them. It was as though she had never been introduced to her herself. He was amazed by how anxious she could be one minute, and how devil-may-care the next. ‘And you threw in your lot with a woman you’d met in a reading group, just like that?’
    ‘Well, I’d hardly call it throwing in my lot. She offered me a room in a cottage she hadn’t ever seen herself, for as long or asshort a time as I wanted it, in return for my company, and some help painting and gardening, and I could find no reason to say no. Why not? I liked her. We had a shared interest in reading. And there was nothing up there to keep me. And I reckoned I could sell my flowers just as well down here . . . probably better, as you get more tourists than we do, and . . . and of course there was you . . .’
    ‘You knew about me?’
    ‘My heart knew about you.’
    Her arrhythmic heart.
    He couldn’t tell how deep her teasing went. Did she truly think they were destined for each other? He would once have laughed at such an idea, but not now. Now, he too (so he hoped to God she wasn’t playing with his feelings) wanted to think they had all along been on converging