‘I bet she didn’t say don’t put your fingers down your throat,’ Kevern said, still smarting from his father’s blow.
‘I’ll tell you precisely what she said. She said, “Disgust destroys you — avoid it at all costs.”’
‘I bet you’re making that up.’
‘I am not making it up. Those were her exact words. “Disgust destroys you.”’
‘Was this your mother or dad’s?’ He didn’t know why he asked that. Maybe to catch her out in a lie.
‘Mine. But it doesn’t matter who said it.’
Already she had exceeded her normal allowance of words to him.
Kevern had never met his grandparents on either side nor seen a photograph of them. They were rarely talked about. Now, at least, he had ‘disgust’ to go on. One of his grandmothers was a woman who had strong feelings about disgust. It wasn’t much but it was better than nothing. At the time he wasn’t in the mood to be taught a lesson from beyond the grave. But later he felt it filled the family canvas out a little. Disgust destroys you — he could start to picture her.
Thinking about it as he lay in Ailinn’s arms, trying to understand why the word had popped out of his mouth unbidden, Kevern wondered whether what had disgusted his grandmother — and in all likelihood disgusted every member of the family — was the incestuous union her child had made. He saw her putting her fingers down her throat. Unless — he had no dates, dates had been expunged in his family — that union didn’t come about until after she’d died. In which case could it have been the incestuous union she had made herself?
Self-disgust, was it?
Well, she had reason.
But if his own mother’s account was accurate, his grandmother had said it was disgust that destroyed, not incest. Why inveigh against the judgement and not the crime? And why the fervency of the warning? What did she know of what disgust wrought?
Could it have been that she wasn’t a woman who felt disgust in all its destructive potency but a woman who inspired it? And who therefore knew its consequences from the standpoint of the victim?
Do not under any circumstances visit on others what you would not under any circumstances have them visit on you — was that the 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
AILINN 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 as short 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 trajectories. But no doubt, and with more reason, his parents had thought the same.
She had no memory of her parents — her actual parents — which made Kevern feel more protective of her still.
‘No letters? No photographs?’
She shook her head.
‘And you didn’t ask?’
‘Who would I have asked?’
‘Whoever was caring for you.’
She looked surprised by the idea that anyone had cared for her. He picked that up — perhaps because he wanted to think that no one had cared for her until he came along. ‘Someone must have been looking after you,’ he said.
‘Well I suppose the staff at the orphanage to begin with, though I have no memory of them either. Just a smell, like a hospital, of disinfectant. I was brought up by a smell. And after that Mairead, the local schoolteacher, and her husband Hendrie.’
‘And what did they smell of?’
She thought about it. ‘Stale Sunday afternoons.’
‘They’d been friends of your parents?’
She shook her head. ‘Didn’t know my parents. No one seems to have known them. Mairead told me when I was old enough to understand that she and Hendrie were unable to have children of their own and had been in touch with an orphanage outside Mernoc — a small town miles from anywhere except a prison and a convent — about adoption. When they were invited to visit, they saw me. They chose me like a stray puppy.’