Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  Why Shitworth couldn’t have let it go at that, since no one was asking more of him than a grovelling apology, I will never understand. Instead, the next time an ill-executed Jewish map of maize fields in the Americas provided him with the opportunity, he held it up by one corner, screwed it into a ball again, threw it at me, because it was mine, but missed and hit Manny Washinsky again, for which he also did not apologise, and said, ‘It has recently been brought to my attention that the Twelve Tribes of Israel have not sat still long enough to find the time to consult an atlas or otherwise acquaint themselves with the lineaments of the physical world. Wouldn’t you have thought, boys, that the opposite would be true, and that our Hebrew brethren’s love of foreign travel would have encouraged curiosity in them as to the contours of every country they have visited?’

  ‘Not exactly “visited” sir,’ I found the courage to pipe up, since my map was the cause of this.

  Watching Shitworth Whitworth trying to swallow under the constriction of his collars was one of the few consolations our twice-weekly hour of geography afforded. Would his stud fly off, or would his Adam’s apple burst? This time it looked as though his whole chest was about to explode, like the Incredible Hulk’s coming out of his shirt.

  He had advanced upon me, isolating me from the class. The whole of him compressed into the two fists he placed with great deliberation upon my desk, first one, and then the other, like grenades.

  ‘Not exactly visiting, weren’t you, Glickman? So what exactly were you doing?’

  ‘Running away, sir.’

  ‘Ah, running away. And now, here? Struggling against persecution, are you?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Are you saying you are a prisoner here, Glickman? Are you here under duress?’

  I didn’t have the language – you never have the language when you need it – to talk spatiality to him, to tell him that I thought it unreasonable of Gentiles to complain that Jews were always in constant motion, incapable of the arts of repose, when it was they, the Gentiles, who were forever moving Jews on. ‘No, sir,’ was all I could find to say, instead.

  He closed his eyes, as though praying to God (his, not ours) to give him strength. Then he opened them and sniffed.

  ‘You’re a cartoonist, aren’t you, Glickman?’

  ‘I hope to be one, sir, yes.’

  A cartoonist, you see, not a landscape painter or gardener or cartographer. Agitation, satire, distortion, not the beauty of the visible world humming exquisitely on its axis.

  ‘You hope to be one? Good. I hope you to be one too. And no doubt as part of your education to that end you will be studying other examples of the art. I assume you are familiar, Glickman, with the Katzenjammer Kids?’

  I was. Though not exactly an enthusiast. Brilliantly drawn though they were, they made me feel queasy. Something to do with the undigested immigrant nature of the knockabout. Hans and Fritz the kids were called, and something about those names made me feel queasy too.

  I nodded.

  ‘Zen in ze immortal vords of ze Katzenjammers, Glickman, let me put zis proposition to you. Could it be zat ze reason you and your fellow Chews feel so unvelcome in country after country is zat you do not do your hosts ze courtesy of noticing vere you are? As for example, Glickman – and you, Vashinsky – by consulting a map?’

  I knew a rhetorical question when I heard one. As did Shitworth Whitworth. ‘And now I suppose you will all go home and get your parents to write me another letter?’ he said, rather sadly suddenly, like a man reading out his resignation speech.

  8

  He was gone by the end of the week. Put over someone’s knee and thrashed, it was fun to think, like the Katzenjammer Kids receiving their leitmotif beating from Mama Katzenjammer. Manny and I drew a map of hell and posted it to him care of the school. But whether he received it or not we were never to discover.

  A term later Manny was gone too, removed to a Jewish school at the other side of town, where it didn’t matter how bad you were at cartography so long as you put your tefillin on every morning. So there are deficiencies in all systems of education.

  I can’t pretend I was sorry to see Manny leave. Having him as a friend in our air-raid shelter was one thing. He was my private life. But as such he no more belonged in my class than my mother did. Besides, I felt that my association with him was doing me no good. He was too odd. Four, five, six times a day he put his hand up and asked to be excused. No boy at Bishops Blackburn – maybe no boy in the history of Bishops Blackburn – needed to go to the lavatory as often as Manny Washinsky. And once he was there he wouldn’t return. Mainly we would all forget about him, but occasionally his absence would rile a teacher who would then send one of us, occasionally even a party of us, to search for him and bring him back. Reports of Manny-sightings in the lavatories varied. Some told of Manny sitting in a cubicle with his trousers fastened, reciting Jewish prayers. Others heard him swearing, though I never did. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck . . . just that, over and over. One person said he’d watched from a distance while for fifteen minutes Manny washed and rewashed his hands, sometimes no sooner drying them than going back and washing them again, pulling back the skin at the tip of his fingers so that the scalding water could get under his nails. Another said he saw Manny winding toilet paper from a roll and stuffing his pockets with it. Thieving toilet paper, could you believe that? Jewing it. The one time I was sent to get him I found him sitting on the toilet with his jacket covering his head – this, as he explained to me later, to stop anyone who was standing on a seat in another cubicle from looking down and recognising him. ‘But who’d bother to do that?’ I asked him. ‘Well, you just have,’ he reminded me.

  To be absolutely candid, I didn’t consider Manny’s behaviour around his ablutions to be anything like as bizarre as others did. Far more peculiar, in my view, was the casual attitude the Gentile pupils of Bishops Blackburn adopted to the inconveniences of the body, their carelessness as to privacy and hygiene, the small circumstantial, not to say spiritual difference pissing and shitting seemed to make to them. That they didn’t understand why a person might take precautions as regards taps and switches, etc, I also attributed to the absence in them of any imagination of disaster. As for praying or cursing in the lavatory, while I would not have been able to explain why Manny did it, that he did it surprised me not at all. I cursed or otherwise called on God whenever I visited the lavatory myself. The relief of finding sanctuary? The fear of loneliness? Sheer existential astonishment? Who knows. But it was second nature to me to say ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ the moment I undid my trousers, or, when I had finished and was looking at my reflection in the mirror, ‘God fucking help me!’ Half the time I did not not even know I was saying anything, and only confronted the phenomenon years later when Zoë overheard me and made me promise on my life never to swear or call on God in the toilet so long as we shared one. It was also her belief that I should accompany her to a clinical psychologist that minute.

  For her sake, because of the love I bore her, I refused the psychologist, but forswore the swearing. Only on the night she left me did I revert, looking long at my reflection in the mirror, little by little recognising someone I thought I had seen the last of, and hearing him cry out ‘God fucking help me!’

  At school, though, and in the glare of classroom publicity, I found Manny as weird as everybody did and disowned him. I wanted to be with the more normal kids, like Errol Tobias, who famously Chinese-burned the neck of the school bully –Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall – leaving him with orange-coloured striations visible above the collar of his shirt for the rest of his days at Bishops Blackburn. It was Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall who used to order any stray Jew he found in the playground at the end of break to stand with his hands on his head for forty minutes, and not move until Broderick released him hypnotically with the words, ‘Jew, Jew, run away, till Broderick gets you another day.’ It is mortifying to recall how many of us did what Broderick
told us to do, standing in the rain and freezing cold, trying to count the 2,400 seconds in forty minutes in case we missed the hypnotic release. Because for us to be found by Broderick still standing there after the expiry of the forty minutes was no less serious an offence than to be caught trying to escape before it. Broderick would probably have tyrannised us without detection, or without anyone much caring even had he been detected – for ours was a school which believed in the manly virtues of bullying and being bullied – had he not tried it on with Errol Tobias. Though he was half Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall in height and weight, Errol had the beating of him in the beserk department. It was over in seconds, like one of those filmed encounters between an anaconda and a field mouse. Broderick made as though to touch Errol’s arm and the next thing he was lying on the playground the colour of jam roly-poly with Errol twisting his head off. I later drew the encounter to please Errol, with Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall walking in one direction and his head facing in the other. A bit Disney for me, and probably for Broderick, but Errol liked it.

  The other advantage Errol enjoyed over Manny as a friend was his sexual precocity. By our third year at Bishops Blackburn Errol was the organiser of a ring of onanists who, on his instructions, kept diaries in which they listed times, whereabouts, details of ministering images or narratives, duration, outcome, etc, which they exchanged at the far end of the football field every lunch time to ejaculations of merriment or disgust. Though I counted it an honour to be friendly with the boss, I stayed aloof from the organisation. Some things I felt better about doing on my own. This was a disappointment to Errol who wanted me to be the official artist not only of what conduced to my arousal but to everybody else’s. He chased me for a whole term, even offering to waive the joining fee of one and six. Not wanting to appear stuck up, I agreed, but backed out again after about a fortnight. When I told him it wasn’t working, that none of it was working, that the minute I shared a fantasy it became public and therefore no longer a fantasy, he said, ‘What about Ilse Koch?’

  FOUR

  Each time Herman read such news, it awakened in him fantasies of vengeance in which . . . he managed to bring to trial all those who had been involved in the annihilation of the Jews.

  Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies: A Love Story

  1

  Strange to tell, there was an Ilse in my mother’s kalooki group, but a Cohen not a Koch. Ilse Cohen, an intense woman with tragic brown eyes, whom I took on that account to be intelligent. No umlaut or diaeresis in her name, so I was never in any danger of falling in love with her, but she had a fleshy face which I liked, and short agitated fingers with blood-red nails which it was impossible not to imagine taking gouges out of your back. In retrospect, I now realise that for erotic purposes I divided women, and had from a very early age, into vegetarians and meat-eaters. Ilse was a meat-eater. Vegetarians I took no interest in.

  Though I seldom played kalooki myself, agreeing with my father that of all card games it was the most womanly, a form of sedentary shopping or hoarding, I looked on sometimes, not least because of the opportunity it gave me to study hands. Fascinating, the human hand, both as a piece of engineering in itself (of particular expressive value to a cartoonist) and on account of its wilfulness, the independence it enjoys from the rest of the body. And from the rest of the personality, come to that. You never know – I defy anyone to predict – what sort of hands a person is going to have. Where you would expect tapering artistic fingers, you find five amputated stumps, barely more than carpals, like broken bits of chalk. Where you imagine you are going to encounter a gorilla’s fist, you come instead upon a little rolled-up ball of pads and creases, as heartbreaking as a newborn baby’s. Zoë, for example, though more delicate than a Byzantine madonna, had hands that would not have shamed a wrestler. Björk, who was a wrestler, from her wrists up could have made it as a Cambodian temple dancer. Only Chloë, of the women I lost my heart to, was manually consistent: she was an anti-Semite in her soul and she had anti-Semitic hands. The phalanges preternaturally straight, the knuckles pale and taut, the lunulae fastidiously cleared of cuticle, as perfect in their crescents as any moon over Arabia. Get her to turn her hands over and show you her palms and there was nothing to see – no warm accommodating pouches of skin, no comfortable adjustment of one finger to another, no life or love lines, just a vexed crisscross of Judaephobia like the railway tracks going in and out of Auschwitz, and (though you will have to take my word for this, since it was never put to the test – Chloë, unlike Ilse Koch, never being tried for war crimes) no fingerprints.

  Whatever the surprises of the human hand, the one thing you could be sure of on kalooki nights was that every one of my mother’s friends would arrive with freshly painted fingernails. In later years, when the technology of nail painting had grown more advanced, they would turn up in silvers and magentas, tangerines and blacks, sometimes a different colour on each nail, and more latterly with the extremities painted the colour of white emulsion. Many years after these of which I speak, when I was in Manchester for Tsedraiter Ike’s funeral – an august enough event, but one which did not call a halt to kalooki – I saw that Ilse, a great-grandmother by then, maybe even a great-great-grandmother, sported nails which had the suits painted on them, a heart, a spade, a diamond, a club, and a joker on the thumbnail. But then it was Ilse who had gone further than the others in the early days, sometimes leaving the crescents of her nails unpainted, as though to grant whoever cared to look a shockingly precise sliver of nudity. Otherwise, a velvet rich incarnadine prevailed on every hand. Which satisfied me. Little pools of blood bejewelling the pastoral green of the card tables.

  That poor woman, by the by, who had a stroke and then fell victim to Alien Hand syndrome, that friend of my mother’s who had to fight with her own hand to stop it strangling her, was Ilse Cohen. That she still continued to lavish attention on the hand that hated her, rubbing cream into its joints, putting jewels upon its fingers, showing no favouritism whatsoever to the other hand, as far as I could tell, in the matter of buffing and decorating the nails, is evidence of a remarkable capacity for forgiveness.

  Now if I could feel that way about those Jews – servants of a syndrome no less unnatural or anarchic – who by silence or connivance have gone for the throats of fellow Jews, meaning to strangle them themselves, or permit them to be strangled by others, the apostates, the name-changers, the crawlers to the cross, the Taufjuden (who sound like DevilJews, but that would be Teufel, whereas taufen means merely ‘to baptise’ – as though between taufen and the Teufel in this context there might be said to be a difference) . . .

  But then if I were able to show the Taufjuden anything like the compassion Ilse Cohen lavished on her renegade hand, I would be out of a job, wouldn’t I? Or at least out of half a job since that too is what I’m paid for – excoriating my people when I’m not shielding them from harm.

  2

  Charming, silky names women had in those day. Ilse, Irma . . . The Irma who played kalooki at my mother’s table was not a regular as Ilse was, and not a meat-eater either, but she was handsome enough if you had a taste for women who piled their hair like German sausages and looked as though they were on the point of coming apart. Not loose-limbed or loose-jointed so much as loose-nerved. Explicable in Irma’s case on account of her parents having sent her to Manchester from Munich at the first sniff of National Socialism. She was a slip of a girl at the time, but old enough not to mistake the uncle and aunt who looked after her in Cheetham Hill for the mother and father she had left behind. She exchanged letters with them every week until, early in 1940, they fell silent. She went on writing, hoping for a reply, for a further five years. Some 250 letters, all of them unanswered. And even ten years after that, I recall my mother telling me, she had not given up hoping to hear from them.

  Was that why she piled her hair away from her face, so that she could keep her ears clear for news? That’s how I like to draw my victim-Jews in Five Thousand Years of
Bitterness anyway, always with an ear cocked, always listening for something – a hoofbeat, a train approaching (Jew Jew, Jew Jew), a word from home.

  An Ilse and an Irma, turning up together to play kalooki in my house – what’s the chance of that? Ilse and Irma, both lovely women, mirroring that other Ilse and Irma, Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, two of the least lovely women (speaking ethically now) who ever lived. Maybe it wasn’t such a coincidence as I thought. Maybe Ilse and Irma were common enough names in those days, at least if you happened to be the children of parents who had once loved the sound of German. And maybe they fell out of favour because of Ilse Koch and Irma Grese.

  There is no photograph of Irma Grese in The Scourge of the Swastika, and only the briefest mention of her as the person who tutored Dorothea Binz in depravity during the time they were at Belsen together, Binz later graduating to Ravensbrück, the women’s camp, while Grese stayed on at Belsen, liking it where she was. I owe what I know about these women to Manny Washinsky, though not the photograph of Irma Grese which I happened upon, all on my ownio, a little later. Striking, you would have to say – eyes wide apart like a Tartar’s, an incongruous woolly cardigan tucked into an equally incongruous tartan skirt which she wore over boots, but too high on the waist, foreshortening her torso in a way that Chloë for some reason favoured too. Probably the same photograph which Myra Hindley was said to have carried around in her handbag.

  An extravagantly beautiful woman, Irma Grese, yes, in the tragic Slavic-Chloë mode. Of a sort of beauty whose influence one can never calculate.

  You could argue that they ought to ban photographs of monsters likely to be seen as role models by monsters-in-waiting; but then Ian Brady was an avid reader of Dostoevsky, and you can’t start banning Russian classics as well. It’s all grist to the deranged, that’s what it comes to. There is no such thing as an innocuous image. Or idea.