POGROM

POGROM: an organised massacre of an ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people. . . 

This week I post three brief extracts from my novel J which was first published in 2014. It tells of an unnamed and undeclared event - What Happened If It Happened - that resulted in the expulsion of an entire people from an unnamed country. The extracts below are self-contained re-imaginings of Pogroms that pre-date the events of J. I hung them in the novel without comment, like paintings of memory on empty walls.

Questions, questions . . . Why so many feathers among the splintered furniture and ripped clothes, the broken toys, the smashed plates and fragments of glass, the bricks, the window frames, the pages torn from books holy and profane? Feathers from the mattresses hurled from upper windows, of course, but there are sufficient feathers in this single ruined garden to fill a mattress for every rioter in the city to enjoy the sleep of the righteous on. One feather won’t lie still. It curls, tickling itself, tries to float away but something sticky holds it to the child’s coat to which it has become attached. And where have all the hooks and crowbars appeared from? If the riots broke out spontaneously, how is it that these weapons were so plentifully to hand? Do the citizens of K sleep with crowbars by their beds? They bring them down with gusto, however they came by them, on the head of a man whom others have previously rolled in a ditch of mud and blood and feathers. A ritual bath. They rolled him and then wrung him out like a rag. The sounds of bones cracking and cries for help mingle with the furious triumphant shouts of murderers and the laughter of onlookers. Which prompts another question: when is wringing a man out like a rag funny?

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 market- place 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.

Glass shatters. They both hear it. She is at one end of the country and he is at another, yet still they hear it. The smashing mania, the shattering of every window in the land. After all the fires, all the beheadings, all the iron hooks and crowbars, the frenzy to kill has not abated. Only now it has become centralised. He is frightened, she less so. She thinks they’ve done their worst already. He thinks there’s always something further they might come up with; he has more admiration for the ingenuity of man; viewing things millennially, he thinks they haven’t even started yet. And look, he could be right. This time the mob wears uniforms, and answers to a higher authority even than God. She reads quietly, waiting for the knock. He hides his head. That is how they sit on the train heading east, looking out at the snow, not exchanging a word, she reading, he hiding his head. The train is not a surprise.They were always going to be put aboard this train. There are some among their fellow passengers for whom the train is a relief now that they are finally on it. In the snow everything will be washed away.