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.’