Zoo Time

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘You need a nice Jewish boy to care for you, is that what you’re saying?’

  It was the first time I had ever used that expression. But she’d brought the subject up, and it seemed apposite.

  Once upon a time she’d have patted my cheek and called me monkey. Today she just waved what I said away as though it were a summer fly. But I was just going through the motions anyway. I felt that my time had been and gone with her. And even that the time that had been was not the time I’d thought it was.

  Had there been no transgression to speak of at all?

  I almost felt inclined to shake her hand. No hard feelings, Poppy. That was a lot of fun we almost had.

  For the second time that afternoon she read my mind. ‘Well you are a nice Jewish boy,’ she said, rising from her deckchair, ‘whatever you say about yourself.’

  And then she kissed me, full on the mouth.

  39

  Wild One

  I had stayed the night in Wilmslow. Vee had texted at midnight to see how my first day out of bed had gone. Had I remembered how to walk. I texted back that I was fine but the family had converted. She texted me saying that if religion was the only way I could cope with her having written a novel, that was fine. Whatever worked. Though she was surprised that the whole family had needed to convert. PS – what to?

  jews, I replied.

  good, but weren’t you always?

  you knew?

  you know i knew. your nose, remember

  I went to sleep remembering. Hot nasal nights with my wife. That’s what hotels are for. Remembering. Missing.

  Vanessa was strange about religion. I picked her for a pagan when I first met her. She swore, she blasphemed, she gave blow jobs in back alleys. Anyone less godly it was hard to imagine; and yet she tolerated religious extremes in other people and at times went so far as to encourage them. I didn’t know whether she’d been to see my brother after learning of his illness, and was unaware as yet that she’d nicked his tumour as a metaphor for her mother’s state; but if she had nipped up to Wilmslow when I wasn’t looking there was every chance she’d been as instrumental as the rabbi in turning Jeffrey into Yafet. I wouldn’t even have put it past her to have suggested bal-chuva. It was the kind of thing she liked doing – showing that she knew what a person’s true self was, and instructing him how to walk in the particular path of righteousness that was best suited to his needs. Other than ask me to give her orgasms with my nose she had rarely alluded to my being Jewish. God knows what she’d asked Jeffrey to do with his. But I could well imagine her getting him to turn to Yahweh as a means of dealing with his tumour.

  I breakfasted at the hotel then took a taxi to the Dementievas where Jeffrey had agreed to meet me, though he didn’t find that name funny any more. Funny about funny, how faith regained invariably has trouble with it. You find your old religion and lose your old sense of the ridiculous.

  ‘I’d always known there was something there,’ he told me. This morning he had shed his Homburg and was wearing a knitted skullcap.

  ‘Something where, Yafet?’ He wouldn’t answer to Jeffrey. It was Yafet or it was nothing.

  I wondered if he was going to touch his head and tell me that it hadn’t been a tumour after all, just his unattended-to Jewishness trying to get out, swelling and knotting until he’d put on a skullcap and grown ringlets, and then the pain subsided. Maybe he was even going to prescribe being born again as a Jew as a cure for all cancers, not just cancer of the brain.

  But by ‘there’ he meant his heart.

  ‘You never felt it?’ he asked, tapping away at his chest.

  ‘Well, I’ve felt plenty of things in my heart. In fact, I think I’d say I’ve felt everything in my heart. But what you’re describing, no. And don’t tell me I’ve been in denial.’

  ‘You haven’t missed anything?’

  ‘No, Yafet.’

  ‘You haven’t felt that there’s always been some question waiting for an answer?’

  ‘No, Yafet.’

  Not true. There always had been some question waiting for an answer. But it wasn’t my brand-new baby Jew-boy brother’s idea of a question or an answer. The question was ‘Where has the idea of the book as prestigious object, source of wisdom, and impious disturbance gone?’ And the answer was on the five-for-four shelf at Primark.

  He smiled at me. It was strange to see the difference a skullcap and beard made to his face. His eyes looked blacker and more brilliant, his mouth sloppier, his expression more spiritual. Even his fingers looked longer, like a healer’s.

  He had a pile of ornately bound books on the floor by his feet, the kitchen table being occupied by the jigsaw. From the other rooms came the sounds of the Dementievas? – or should it now have been the Dementiovskies – stirring in their sleep.

  ‘We could study together,’ he suggested.

  ‘Why does the phrase “study together”, Jeffrey,’ I wanted to ask him, ‘always suggest books you’d rather be eaten alive by rats than read?’

  But that would have been more brutal than I believed I should be, though I believed I should be brutal. So I merely said, ‘Only if we could study a subject of my choice after.’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  ‘The novels of Henry Miller.’

  He closed his eyes, his lids heavier and darker, more Mediterranean, than I’d ever seen them. I wondered if he was using make-up.

  ‘You ever read him?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why the closed eyes?’

  ‘I’m asking myself if his books are anything like yours . . .’

  ‘I wish,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know why you’re asking yourself that. You haven’t read mine either.’

  ‘You know I’ve never been a reader.’

  ‘I do know, which makes me wonder why you’re reading what you’re reading now.’

  ‘Different.’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  I picked one up. Back-to-front writing, the script ancient, heavy and mournful, lacking the visible music of the vowel. Leopold Bloom’s shocking, unforgivable, irrefragable words, re the Holy Land, hammered in my ears – The grey sunken cunt of the world. We were similar Jews, Bloom and I. Thin-skinned, on the qui vive for insult, double-edged – a cunt, after all, is no negligible thing, a cunt is where it all begins – but otherwise enough already.

  Though apparently not.

  ‘Did you ever write a book about us?’ Yafet surprised me by asking.

  ‘Us?’

  In illustration of his meaning, he twirled a piece of hair which I suspected he was training to be a ringlet. Had I had ringlets, I thought, I’d never be able to keep my hands off them. Right now, for example, I’d be yanking them out, a hair at a time.

  ‘There is no us, Jeffrey – Yafet. And no, I never did.’

  ‘Why not? What’s wrong with us?’

  ‘I had no interest in the same way you had no interest. Just because you’ve undergone a whateveryoucallit, it doesn’t follow that I must. You have a tumour. I don’t. If this helps you, great. I’m pleased for you’ – the number of people I was suddenly having to be pleased for! – ‘but don’t insult me with it.’

  ‘You may have missed a trick.’

  ‘Might have missed a trick. What kind of trick?’

  ‘Rabbi Orlovsky told me all the best writers in America are Jewish. He said he’s never heard of you. If you’d been writing about Jews he’d have heard of you.’

  ‘That’s in America.’

  ‘He hasn’t heard of you here either.’

  ‘Kind of you to tell me that, Yafet.’

  ‘I saw an interview you did once for the Wilmslow Reporter. You told them you liked writing about wild guys.’

  ‘You’ve told me that. You told me that the time you told me you had a tumour.’

  ‘Well, I’m telling you again. You like writing about wild guys? Well, who’s wilder than a Jew?’

  I gave him a long look. Not m
uch wild about the baby ringlets and the fringes. Who’s wilder than a Jew? Who isn’t wilder than a Jew? But I could have been wrong. I’d been wrong about everything else. I’d assumed that Jeffrey had squeezed himself into Yafet in order to damp himself down, quieten the tumult in his head. But what if Jeffrey the impious disturbance was not only still in there but more impious than ever? Not a fraud or an impostor, I wouldn’t have accused him of that, but still going both ways. The religious could do that: they could jeer at belief, rail at God Himself, from the very centre of their faith. In this, they were unlike your regular conscientious humanist, who was stuck with his one-track, literal-minded rationality. No, he said. And that was that. Jeffrey-Yafet, on the other hand, grinning with his wet red mouth, could just as easily have been mocking himself as mocking me. Belief contained its own parody; disbelief did not. As a matter of principle, disbelief closed down uncertainty and ambivalence. Whereas belief, particularly Jewish belief, from what I knew of it in the novels of the wild American Jews I admired, played more games with itself than any other sort. Even the most solemn Jewish holy man was a trickster at heart.

  I didn’t know I thought any of this until I thought it then. So thank you, Yafet.

  Did that then mean that he was right? That I’d missed a trick?

  Well, I’d missed everything else.

  ‘So how does your new belief system square with the wrongs you’ve done me?’ I asked him.

  ‘Not new. Recovered. Always in there, Gershom, always in there. In you, too.’ He leaned across to touch my heart this time. But otherwise he pretended not to know what I was talking about. Wrongs? What wrongs?

  ‘My wife? Her mother?’

  ‘Oh, not that again. I’ve told you – I was winding you up.’

  Did I imagine it, or was he beginning to turn a w into a v. I vas vinding you up.

  ‘And how does bull-chava –’

  ‘Bal-chuva.’

  I couldn’t be bothered. ‘How does that square with winding me up – your own brother?’

  ‘I was ill. And yes, all right, the night of your wedding with your mother-in-law. A little bit. A nibble. Love was in the air, Gershom.’

  ‘You were the best man.’

  ‘Best man, mother-in-law – it was a wedding.’ (A vedding.)

  ‘And what you said about Vanessa?’

  ‘Well, the family has never liked Vanessa. But I do. I’ve never said a word against her.’

  ‘But you have. You said a word against her to me.’

  He straightened his skullcap. ‘You told the Wilmslow Reporter you liked wild guys.’

  ‘So I should like you?’

  ‘No, you should like her. She’s the real wild guy in the marriage.’

  ‘You’ve told me that, too.’

  ‘But you took no notice.’

  ‘How do you know what I took?’

  ‘I talk to Vanessa sometimes. She rings me. She rang me when she heard about my tumour.’

  ‘And she told you I wasn’t doing my best by her wild side? How do you treat a wild guy you’re married to?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve never been married.’

  ‘So what did she complain about?’

  ‘She didn’t complain. I could just hear it in her voice.’

  ‘Hear what? Unexpressed wildness? Did she tell you I was stopping her from being Jewish?’

  ‘You can tell when someone’s not happy, Gershom.’

  ‘Fuck off with the Gershom. And anyway – who’s happy?’

  Dumb question. ‘I am,’ he said, grinning at me with his wet mouth.

  That was as far as we got. My mother called us from the bedroom. She embraced Yafet, straightening his skullcap and pinching his cheek. ‘A good boy,’ she said, looking at me but meaning him.

  Me she shook hands with. The writer. The disappointment of the family.

  My father was sitting up in bed without his tubes, scraping out a grapefruit. He didn’t know who anybody was but appeared cheerful enough. I thought I saw him eyeing off my mother’s sparrow legs.

  ‘Look at him,’ my mother said, with a hitherto concealed tenderness, pushing what was left of his hair back from his vacant face. ‘Kayn ahora.’

  40

  Whoremaster

  So had I missed a trick?

  Would I have done better as Gershom? The Anne Frank I Never Knew by Gershom Ablestein. Mishnah Grunewald’s Choice by Gershom Ablewurt. The Boy in the Striped Dolce and Gabbana Pyjamas by Gershom Ablekunst?

  Had I missed out on my wildness by missing out on being Jewish?

  Almost as soon as I got back to London Francis rang. Or rather Poppy rang. ‘Is that Guy Ableman? I have Mr Fowles on the phone for you.’

  ‘Come off it, Poppy,’ I said.

  But the next minute Francis was on the line.

  ‘Dear boy! I hear you’ve been under the weather.’

  ‘Under the cosh, Francis, not the weather.’

  ‘Sorry to hear it. You all right now? Lunch? There’s a new brasserie opened near me.’

  ‘There’s a new brasserie opened near everyone,’ I said.

  ‘So what do you fancy instead?’

  I suggested the matchbox restaurant where I’d seen Merton for the last time.

  ‘Oh God, Guy, you can’t move there and it’s full of publishers.’

  ‘That’s what I fancy,’ I said.

  I knew why. Only a month after Merton’s suicide the buyer for books for thirteen- to fifteen-year-olds for one of the lesser-known supermarkets had keeled over here halfway through her dessert. There’d been a much publicised brawl in the toilets, too, between the husband of a foreign rights assistant and an Italian novelist widely supposed to be her lover. And a veteran book rep, describing what he’d seen to a table of colleagues, dislocated his shoulder imitating the husband throwing punches. The word was out in the trade that there was a curse on the place. Though all that did was increase the business. The appeal of it wasn’t lost on me. We all wanted to see the industry implode before our eyes.

  The other, if you like unconscious, reason I’d chosen to eat here was brought home to me when I saw Francis trying to squeeze his bulk between a table made from an old Singer sewing machine and a banquette fashioned from a pew riddled with woodworm. It pleased me no end to see him so uncomfortable.

  ‘You look the way I feel,’ I said, not waiting for the menus before starting in on him.

  I noticed that he’d cleaned his appearance up considerably – no slim-fit striped shirt hanging out over his trousers. And a tie. The tie, particularly, pained me. It looked like a gift.

  ‘Oh Lord,’ he said, pretending to shield his face. ‘We’re not going to have a set-to as well, are we?’

  ‘That’s up to you,’ I said.

  ‘Well, first of all I never thought you’d mind.’

  ‘I knew you were going to say that. Which offence are we discussing?’

  ‘Are there two?’

  ‘For all I know there might be more.’

  ‘Vanessa begged me to read her novel. She said at your suggestion. I read it and I liked it.’

  ‘Francis, there are people up and down the country waiting years to get a verdict from you on their manuscripts. Many of them will die before they hear from you. And many more will die when they do. How come Vanessa was able to jump the queue?’

  ‘She’s your wife, Guy. I was doing you a favour. What would you have said had I refused her?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean that.’

  ‘It’s a good novel.’

  ‘I believe you.’

  ‘You haven’t read it?’

  ‘No. Not allowed to until it’s published. And Poppy?’

  ‘Poppy is not allowed to either. Not ever.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I was asking, Francis. And Poppy meaning what do you have to say about Poppy?’

  ‘That I love her.’

  ‘You love her! She�
��s a woman of sixty-six. How old are you? Fifty-two? Plus she’s the mother of one of your clients and the mother-in-law of another. Plus, plus I told you I loved her.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. You told me you wanted to get into her pants and write a novel about it. I warned you strenuously against it.’

  ‘You warned me strenuously against the novel. You encouraged me strenuously to get into her pants.’

  Our conversation, speaking of strenuous, was being followed strenuously by the other diners. People urged me on silently when I caught their eye. Hit him. Go on, knock him down the stairs. No doubt they were urging on Francis likewise. They didn’t care who did what to whom. They just wanted to see blood spilt. Publisher and author, foreign rights assistant’s husband and lover, agent and client – it all gave spice to the dying days of a finished profession. I should have brought Vanessa here. Wife novelist versus husband novelist – that would have been a beauty.

  ‘You misled me,’ Francis said, our altercation having been interrupted by the arrival of charred octopus. I hated charred octopus but ordered it from every restaurant in London. It was like sea bream. Something just made one say the words – I took the compulsion to be general, given the amount of it I heard people ordering – when what I really wanted, what we all really wanted, was shank of something.

  I was distracted. ‘Say that again, Francis,’ I said. ‘Did I hear the words “misled you”?’

  ‘Yes, that was exactly what you heard and exactly what you did. You misled me.’

  ‘Into believing what?’

  ‘Into believing you were having an affair. And you weren’t. You never were.’

  ‘Poppy denied me, did she? At the crowing of the cock, was it? Don’t be so fucking melodramatic. I never claimed we were having an affair. I said I was thinking of it.’

  He banged the table. ‘But she wasn’t, Guy. Get that into your head. She wasn’t.’

  Was this worth pursuing? What had happened was so old a story it embarrassed me to be a part of it. Francis throws himself at her – a man without a wife and only a handful of years, all right two handfuls of years, younger than her, a man with whom she could look forward to some future as she most certainly could not with me (in truth what could she look forward to with me, her daughter’s husband, except the occasional company of someone who would kill spiders for her?) – whereupon, unable to believe her good fortune, she cleans out all the cupboards of her past so as not to spoil his idealisation of her. Guy! Did Guy say that, the cheeky monkey? Don’t make me laugh. And now I’m the bad one for speaking retrospectively ill of the woman he loves. Get out of having thought about getting into her pants, Guy. No matter that he had once egged me into them out of his own vicarious lubricity.