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
‘HOW 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.