Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  ‘Who’s he warning?’ Shani asked, but by then my mother had shown him, with her exaggerated courtesy, out of the house.

  The following day my father repaired Washinsky’s window then came home and handed me a good hiding.

  ‘We don’t do persecution, Max,’ he told me.

  After which our street games went on as before, with this exception: I felt sheepish about lobbing balls into Washinsky’s garden or hitting eights through his window while he was sewing lining into a stole, and managed to avoid doing either – I think without being rumbled by the others – for what remained of the summer.

  Manny Washinsky was not, of course, party to these games. Mainly we didn’t play together, mainly we talked God, the death camps, and Five Thousand Years of Bitterness; but when games were called for and it was just him and me, we’d throw a tennis ball at a penny, trying to get it to flip over, or flick cigarette cards against the wall. The moment anything more communal was afoot he hung back and I did not encourage him to join in. He was weird, I wasn’t. He wouldn’t stand on lines in the pavement. He never left the house without ringing his own door bell to be sure it still worked, and then ringing it again to be sure he hadn’t broken it the last time. Then he would have to try the door, pushing at it with all his might in case he had left it open in his anxiety about the bell. He even did the same with our air-raid shelter though it had no door; he would have to go back every time we left it, once, twice, three times sometimes, to make certain everything was where he’d meant to leave it, the torches pointing in the right direction, our pencils lying as he believed they should lie: his where he sat, mine where I did. Weird! And I didn’t want to be thought of as weird by association. Especially by Errol Tobias who bossed the street, who had taken a particular fancy to me as a smart but still naïve kid whom he could educate in the ways of the world, and who treated Manny as someone so beneath him he was invisible.

  It was Errol Tobias who had first shown me the photographs that were missing from Manny’s copy of The Scourge of the Swastika, turning the pages one by one, all the while staring at me and not saying a word, as though he did not want to miss a flicker of my facial reactions or the faintest tremor of my soul.

  5

  Errol Tobias was the street gardener. He had no skills, he simply ripped stuff out. Weeds, if weeds were specifically what troubled you, but anything and everything was his speciality. Few people did much with their gardens in our street. No feeling for it. Occasionally someone laid off from work essayed a bumpy lawn bordered with lupins; now and then a few geraniums in primary colours appeared; otherwise all our gardens were tangles of privet hedge and ivy which twice a year, during school holidays, Errol Tobias would pull out by the roots for you. He had his own shears, his own barrow, and his own staff. The year he initiated me into The Scourge of the Swastika illustrated I was his staff.

  As for my salary, it was never discussed. Tacitly, I settled for The Scourge of the Swastika, unexpurgated.

  Did I say Errol Tobias ‘showed’ me the missing photographs? Too feeble a verb, ‘showed’. He divulged them to me, rather. Like Moses coming down from Sinai with the tablets, he made them manifest to me, inducting me in them, one revelation succeeding another, as though the photographs weren’t merely in his possession but had somehow been divinely vouchsafed him, and were now his by metaphysical right.

  We were in the long grass of somebody or other’s garden. Mrs Margalit’s. Mrs Getzler’s. They were all the same. The overgrown gardens of people forever on the run. You garden when you can be sure you’re staying and the Margalits and Getzlers had not been here long enough to know whether they were staying or not. This was why each generation of Jewish immigrants was scornful of the next, why the German-born Jews who had been here since 1820 looked down their noses at those of us who came from Novoropissik a half-century later, and why we looked down on those who came from places even worse a half-century after that. Every influx reminded us of our antecedents and threatened the fantasy of permanence we’d erected around ourselves like a stockade. In the new arrivals the Gentiles would see who we really were.

  Fools, the fools we’ve been, to suppose they have ever needed reminding.

  How long the Tobiases had been here I didn’t know. They were hard to pick. By virtue of something in their pigmentation, they could have passed for non-Jews of a lower, somewhat rural station. Not quite pig farmers, more a pig farmer’s chauffeur and maidof-all-work. In fact, Mrs Tobias ran a hairdressing salon in the back room of her house, and other than sneer at her clients in their curlers, Mr Tobias did nothing. Errol, too, had the lewd, obscenely confidential air of a gentleman’s gentleman. That moral fastidiousness which is itself indecent. But in the long grass I didn’t scruple to be inducted by him into the illustrated Scourge of the Swastika. He must have made a good job of it, because not only am I able to remember in considerable detail all the photographs I saw, I am able to remember the order in which I saw them . . .

  The charred bodies found in the church at Oradour.

  The slaughter at Autun.

  The village of Lidice, quiet in the snow, like a Brueghel winterscape.

  Then Lidice after the massacre, the buildings ripped apart, the bodies lined up on their backs for all the world as though they are schoolkids on the gym floor, waiting for permission to get up again.

  The photograph of a mass execution found on a German prisoner.

  Birkenau before the crematorium was built, the naked bodies smoking in pits.

  Patriots hanged at Tulle, the German officers smiling.

  Arbeit Macht Frei – the gateway to Auschwitz.

  A crematorium oven at Buchenwald, with a charred skull inside.

  The disfigured limbs of human guinea pigs at Auschwitz.

  The pile of discarded artificial limbs taken from victims of the gas chambers.

  Ilse Koch. Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of Buchenwald, not looking as enticing after her capture (this a judgement made with the benefit of hindsight) as she did before it.

  Below, a couple of the shrunken heads said to have been commissioned by her for her collection.

  Josef Kramer’s driving licence.

  The confession of Rudolf Hess – ‘I personally arranged on orders received from Himmler in May 1941 the gassing of two million persons . . .’

  A mass grave at Belsen – the bodies almost beautiful in their abstraction, that’s if you dare let your eye abstract in such a place.

  The British soldier with a kerchief over his nose, bulldozing those abstractions to clear the camp.

  Corpses by the wagonload at Buchenwald – boots, feet, faces, the inspiration for Philip Guston’s distracted cartoons of ignominy and death (there is, you see, a place for great cartoonery, even here).

  And finally and most famously and shamelessly, the one we looked at longest, the naked Jewish women being paraded for medical inspection, running across the prison yard while the German guards, some with their hands in the pockets of their uniforms, look on. My first sighting, God forgive me, of pubic hair in print.

  If I am not mistaken this last photograph is among those which Orthodox Jews in Israel, following the earlier example of Manny Washinsky’s parents, have petitioned to be removed from public display. Not to be shown anywhere, not for whatever educative purpose, not even in Yad Vashem. It affronts, they say, the modesty of the women, thereby implying that modesty is something that might live after you. A woman’s immortal modesty. I agree with them. The photograph should not be shown. It certainly should not have been shown to me or to any other boy my age. I would rather not have been aroused by it. Yes, even in the most careful household, a boy is always in with a chance of seeing more of flesh and bone and hair than is good for him to see, but an actual sighting, at speed and in confusion, is not the same as a photograph on which one can rest one ’s eyes for all eternity. It was unwelcomely arousing, too, without a doubt, to share the experience with Errol in the long grass. Whatever else we knew, we
knew we should not have been looking. Because what might just have been most arousing of all was our knowledge that the women were petrified, perhaps about to be subjected to all the degradations a boy’s imagination can invent, death being among the kinder of them.

  And if you think that denotes derangement you should have heard what Errol had to tell me about Buchenwald in the days of Ilse Koch, the cock-shrinker.

  Don’t I mean the head-shrinker?

  Yes, that too.

  6

  Ach Buchenwald ich kann dich nicht vergessen

  Weil du mein Schicksal bist.

  O Buchenwald, I can’t forget you,

  Because you are my fate.

  ‘Buchenwaldlied ’

  They sang songs in Buchenwald. Figure that.

  A mystery to me, who found it hard enough to sing in Crumpsall Park. True they were ironic songs about Schicksal, but a song’s still a song.

  Schicksal – meaning fate or destiny.

  Shikse – meaning floozie. From which shikseh – meaning Gentile girl. Otherwise, wife to Maxie Glickman.

  They used to say that character was destiny, but now they know that language is.

  So shiksehs were my destiny.

  ‘I am not,’ Chloë said, the day she left me, ‘your floozie.’

  ‘My daughter is not—’ Chloë’s mother said.

  ‘I know what she is not,’ I interrupted, ‘she is not my floozie.’

  ‘That she certainly is not.’

  ‘Say goodbye, then,’ I said.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  I was sorry to part from her. Leaving women’s mothers was always harder for me than leaving the women themselves. Somehow more final when you leave the mothers. And I’d grown attached to Chloë’s mother, Helène, in an equilibrium-of-detestation sort of way. I hated the way she would say, when we were staying with her, or she was staying with us, ‘I will be saying goodnight now – goodnight.’ And she hated everything about me.

  After she had said she would be saying goodnight, and saying it, she would add that she was going ‘up the little wooden hill to Bedfordshire’. Should that have annoyed me to the extent it did? She came from Cheshire, naturally from Cheshire I mean, not as a newly moneyed import. People just talked like that there. Genteel Southern-Northern cute. It was what you signed up for when you fell in love with cutesie genteel Gentile girls from the Southern North – their cutesie genteel Gentile mums. Part of the appeal of the daughter, a mother who wore knitted frocks to show off her ‘figure’, white or knitted stockings, sometimes white and knitted stockings, nipped-in waist, little perky acorn tits in padded bras, the smell of the racecourse in her hair, and a cutesie country turn of phrase. Exactly what a shikseh-loving Yiddler from the inner city should have thanked the Almighty for giving him as a ma-in-law, you’d have thought. ‘Gott tsu danken. Now equip me with the male equivalent of cutesie country Gentile tits and I will think that I am an English person born.’ But I didn’t have it in me to accept my good fortune and make peace with it. I couldn’t rest – night after night I got no sleep – until I was able to match my motherin-law’s little wooden hill to Bedfordshire with some odious genteel Gentile punning cosiness of my own. I ransacked the English counties. Sussex, Essex, Cornwall, Devon, Leicestershire, Cheshire itself. Nothing. What I needed was a county called Hell. ‘Why don’t you be off down the little wooden hill to Hellshire, Helène?’ Or a town called Blazes. ‘Hey, Helène, how about going to Blazes for the weekend?’ Though neither of those, I grant you, would have been a patch on the inspired inanity of Bedfordshire.

  Then, at the sleepy-byes end of one particularly irksome evening à trois, to employ another Helènism – I was doomed in this marriage either to be à trois or on my ownio – I believed I’d hit the jackpot. We’d been playing fish, the card game where you have to remember the whereabouts of downturned cards, and then match them with upturned cards, a game at which I happen to excel, something Helène and Chloë put down to Semitic deviance of the brain.

  ‘So clever in all the small things of life, your husband, Chlo.’

  ‘It’s in the genes, Mama. Terminal triviality to genius level. It’s why they make such good accountants.’

  ‘Too true, I wouldn’t trust my stockings and shares to anyone else. Ho-hum, well, I’ll be saying goodnight now, goodnight.’

  At which moment, espying her heading in the direction of retirement with a volume of G. K. Chesterton in her hand (if it wasn’t Chesterton it was Belloc, and don’t ask me what stopped her taking the annotated English countrywoman’s Letters of Heinrich Himmler up to Bedfordshire), something induced me to call out, ‘Off up the little wooden hill to Buchenwald, are we?’

  Chloë was outraged. ‘Max!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How dare you talk to my mother like that!’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘How dare you wish my mother in a concentration camp!’

  ‘Book,’ I said. ‘Bookenwald, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Leave it,’ Helène shouted down. ‘He spent his formative years in Dewsbury, remember.’

  ‘Jewsbury!’ I shouted back. ‘Did you just say Jewsbury?’

  But she’d won again. I knew that. She was mistress of the gazetteer of the British Isles, to whatever end of phobia and whimsy, and that was that. A man must know when he is beaten. A man must accept his Schicksal.

  And I accepted mine.

  7

  We like a thread in my business. We like a leitmotif. Strip cartoonists more than one-offers of the sort I am, but then Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, when you come to think of it, was a strip cartoon of sorts.

  So let’s run with maps and gazetteers, a recurrent theme in my life, anyway, considering that I met Björk (who later introduced me to Kätchen) in a map shop in Covent Garden, and wouldn’t have got to know Zoë had Kätchen not walked out on me after a row about her navigation skills.

  And then there was Shitworth Whitworth MA, senior geography master at Bishops Blackburn Grammar School . . .

  For one year Manny and I were at Bishops Blackburn together. After which his parents took him away. He did well, I reckon, to last a year, given how ill they accommodated even a Jew of my milk-and-water sort, let alone one who held to Manny’s rigid and irrational system of beliefs. I am not accusing the staff at Bishops Blackburn of being anti-Semitic. They simply had us on the brain. When they beheld us, and in fairness there were quite a lot of us to behold for a school with strong Church of England associations, they could see nothing but the Jew in us. I am the same. But then I’m a caricaturist: I am meant to concentrate only on what’s salient. Whereas our teachers were meant to see us all round. They tried. I sincerely believe they had the best intentions. But when they looked at us all round they saw even more Jew than when they looked at us on one plane.

  ‘Can someone tell me how come a Jew can’t draw a map?’ was the question that precipitated the row that finally precipitated Manny Washinsky from the school. The question issuing from Shitworth Whitworth MA, a sarcastic man who appeared to have been overwound, whose skin vibrated like a percussion instrument when he was upset, and who owned the biggest collection of detachable stiff white collars, always worn with blue and pink striped shirts, and always half a size too tight, any of us had ever seen.

  Geography. Most ethnic troubles in most schools originate in geography or PE. They do for Jews, anyway, who can neither draw a map nor hang upside down from a wall bar. The two deficiencies are not entirely unrelated. Jews cannot draw a map nor negotiate a wall bar because they have seldom had any use for either.

  To that degree, Shitworth had said nothing that wasn’t just. True, he should not have held up Manny’s suppurating map of Canada by one corner as though it were something one of us had brought in on his shoe. Nor should he have declared that a spider with a pen in each leg could have drawn it better, nor rolled it into an inky ball and thrown it into Manny’s distorted face. Nor should he have eared Manny out of his seat and dem
anded what he was grinning about, boy, when it ought to have been obvious to a teacher of his years and competence that Manny grinned out of some strange reflexive instinct, the alternative being a total collapse of his facial musculature, followed by annihilation of his personality and maybe even cessation of his or someone else’s heartbeat. Teacherly ineptitudes, those. You are meant to know when you have a homicidal maniac in your class. But fair’s fair – it was the case that none of us who were Jewish could draw a map. Even I couldn’t draw a map and I had already been picked out as the school’s star drawer. It’s possible that we’d have fared better had the maps Shitworth asked us to draw contained matter more germane to our interests and experience. Of the atlases I presently own, a good 90 per cent of them are atlases of Jewish migrations, expulsions, marches, pogroms, ghettos, shtetls with names like Kalooki and Kalush, ruined synagogues, graveyards, inquisitions, executions, massacres, gas chambers, concentration camps. We know whereby we are engaged. ‘Do me a map showing the most recent liquidation of your people, Glickman,’ might have elicited a positive response. The corn belts of Manitoba on the other hand . . .

  Fair or not fair, Shitworth Whitworth was the recipient by 9 a.m. the following morning of a letter from the parents of every Jewish boy in the school, even mine – something I admired in my father; his utter inconsistency in all matters relating to criticism of Jews – the sum content of which was as follows:

  Mr Shitworth sir dear sticks in the gullet insensitive not to say offensive not to say ignorant of catastrophic Jewish history otherwise would understand inability to draw map tragic consequence of being homeless people without choice as to domicile for almost as long as you you anti-Semitic bastard have been teaching geography proof of Jewish genius otherwise in arts Chagall Sigmund Freud Sammy Davis Jr [not to forget, in my parent’s letter, Maxie Glickman] whose shoes you not fit to lick you telling me Chagall couldn’t have drawn Canada had he been so minded yours faithfully.