Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  If Gittel Franks was demonstrative then Simone Kaye was cyclonic. ‘That woman!’ my father would say, hearing her from the other end of no matter how long a room, and clapping his hands to his ears. ‘She looks like a wedding,’ he once said to me in an aside. ‘Which part?’ I asked him. ‘All of it – the chuppa, the table decorations, the band, the dancing, the cake, everything.’ The secret of Simone Kaye, as I’d discovered, was to encounter her when she was not in the company of other women, to choose an hour in which you had nothing else to do, and to allow her to trap you in a corner for the whole of it. She was a woman who did everything up close. Tough, if you didn’t like the smell of wedding cake, but I did. Marzipan in particular. An extravagance of almonds and sugar and egg whites. Of all our ‘relations’, Simone Kaye was the one who took the greatest interest in my schooling. ‘And English? And history? I know I don’t need to ask you about art. And geography? Don’t talk to you about geography – why not, Maxie, tell me why not?’ With every question,her lovely, always somewhat startled face finding more and more fantastical contortions of vitality, her orange eyes seeming to start from their sockets, first one and then the other of her nearly Negroid nostrils flaring, her mouth so full and expressive that sometimes you would have sworn that in her need for volubility she had found an extra lip. When I was young enough to be petted with equanimity, Simone Kaye used to pull me to her in order to pinch my cheeks, and would keep me there by trapping me between her knees. Though her legs were not as long as Gittel Franks’s or anything like as elegant as my mother’s, Simone Kaye always wore stockings that were silkier than theirs, which meant that she whooshed like curtains when she walked. It was almost more than I could bear, as a boy in short trousers, the voluptuousness of this silkiness upon my skin.

  And of course the yellow smell of marzipan on hers.

  After giving the matter some consideration, my mother said, ‘I’ll only be able to get them if I make it a charity event.’

  ‘Me being the charity?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. It will have to be Israel.’

  Shame. I wanted it to be just me. But I bowed to the greater cause. ‘Brave little Israel.’ No moral complications in 1956. You knew who the good guys were. Other than a few families of Satmars who thought any Jewish state was illegitimate until the coming of the Messiah, the only person in Jewish Manchester who wasn’t happy to donate a tree to Israel, whether or not a tree actually meant a gun, was my father. Logically, he should have been all for Israel, or Palestine as he insisted on calling it. A new start for the Jews. A Bundist in every kibbutz. Readings from Das Kapital instead of morning prayers. But he knew what was going to happen. He knew the rabbis were going to creep back in and start erecting shtetls all over again. ‘First the bombs, then the shtetls.’ He’d tap his forehead. ‘Shtetls of the mind. You mark my words.’

  So I had my doubts about my mother throwing a charity gala kalooki night in my honour but nominally in support of the state of Israel in our front room. ‘What’s Dad going to say?’ I asked her.

  Her turn to tap her forehead. ‘Your father won’t be told.’

  It was a stark moral choice: my father or Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye. Like having to choose between the Arabs and the Jews. In other words no choice at all.

  And it worked. My mother found a night when she knew my father would be out of the house watching a fight, and Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye succumbed to Zionist blackmail and agreed to come. I was out of my skin with excitement. Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye, in our house! At night! Together! But if I was excited I was also frightened. Be careful what you ask for, Maxie Glickman. What if Gittel Franks, knowing this to be my de facto bar mitzvah, the occasion of my official entry into manhood, were actually to slide her slit Persian pussy eyes my way and mean it this time? What if Simone Kaye, forgetting how old I was, or simply in remembrance of things past, pulled me to her and trapped me between her silken knees?

  I wasn’t sure I could I handle either of these immoderacies, but what if I was confronted by both!

  I needn’t have worried. Things never turn out as you expect them to. Be careful what you ask for, but also be careful what you hope for. It wasn’t the fault of Gittel Franks or Simone Kaye, neither of whom could have looked more as I’d hoped they’d look had I set their hair, applied their make-up and poured them into their dresses myself. Gittel gilded and narrow, confined in something tight and rustling, as though to minimise the damage she might do, but laughing hoarsely and smashing glasses the minute she arrived; Simone Kaye as creamy as a Chantilly basket, everything on the point of spillage, at her lips the tiniest bubble of mirth. And me between. Sh-boom, sh-boom, as Errol Tobias sang when he was gardening. Something about paradise up above. Which this so nearly was, and would have been had my mother, fearing the competition from both sides, not gone to the trouble of making sure she would outshine them both. What was in her hair? Rubies? What shone on her skin? Gold leaf? Had my father rolled her in ochre before heading off to Belle Vue to watch two white-faced consumptives chasing each other round the ring? The consequence of her appearance, anyway, was that I was unable to take my eyes off her, when they should have been on Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye, and Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye were unable to take their eyes off her either, when they should have been on me. I also think the cards came out too soon. Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye had not squared up over the same kalooki table before. They needed time to settle down. Yet there they were, almost before the politenesses had been completed, fighting over the rules relating to the discard pile.

  ‘You can only take from there if you lay down,’ Gittel Franks said, seeing Simone Kaye’s hand hovering where it shouldn’t.

  ‘I’m laying down, I’m laying down, don’t rush me,’ Simone Kaye replied. ‘She’s such a rusher, this one.’

  ‘Kalooki!’ my mother called.

  ‘Huh,’ Simone Kaye said on the reshuffle, picking up a card she didn’t like, ‘just my luck!’

  ‘A silent game’s the best game,’ Gittel Franks told her.

  ‘Kalooki!’ my mother called.

  When Gittel Franks was the first down with her cards a look of oriental certainty passed across her face. She folded her hands across her breast in exaggerated modesty.

  ‘Who does she think she’s being,’ Simone Kaye whispered to me, ‘Twankey-Poo?’

  I wondered if she meant Nanki-Poo. She waved her hand at me, a gold ring on every finger. ‘Twankey-Poo, Shmanki-Poo – you must tell me later how your schoolwork’s going.’

  Then it was back to winning.

  No one else got a look-in. The competition grew so fierce finally, the heat coming off the three of them so tropical, that Ilse Cohen, looking quite plain in such company, had to get up and open all the windows with her good hand, against the efforts of her bad hand to close them again.

  Normally the evening was over when the cards were. But on this occasion, for some reason – I suspected my mother must have shushkied something to them about its being a special night for me – the women stayed on for a final coconut macaroon, Gittel Franks retiring to the sofa in order to show her legs, Simone Franks staying at the table, with the intention I hoped, of entrapping me between hers one last time, where nobody could see. How we got from cards to Suez to the Melbourne Olympics to Gittel Franks getting up and imitating Rosemary Clooney singing ‘This Ole House’ – ‘Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer /Ain’t a-gonna need this house no more’ – escapes me now and I suspect was beyond me at the time. Once we were there, though, it was no distance at all for Simone Franks to counter with ‘Oh Mein Papa’, the Eddie Calvert trumpet version which she was able to perform to perfection with her third lip, or for my mother (who I was pretty sure had taken Gittel Franks’s reference to this ole house personally) to insist that while she knew her taste was more classical than other people’s there was still nothing in her estimation to beat ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’.

  Taking one thing with another, I decided
I was suddenly very weary. Was Gittel Franks going to slit her eyes at me before she left? Was Simone Kaye going to whoosh me between her knees? I didn’t want to stay to find out. I couldn’t face the disappointment.

  The next time I saw either of them was in a cemetery. I haven’t seen them since. Thus do opportunities slip through your fingers.

  Considering my devotion to Jewish women of a certain age and allure, it remains surprising to me that I never married one. At least not one who whooshed her stockings or fell off her stilettos into a display cabinet of precious china. I can only suppose it had something to do with their taste in music. But that can’t tell the whole story because Chloë adored My Fair Lady, and Zoë went to Evita at least once a month, and I married them.

  3

  My father found out about my mother’s gala kalooki night in aid of Israel. In a moment of inadvertent vainglory my mother had published the amount of money it had raised in the Crumpsall Jewish Herald which, in a moment of inadvertent indolence, my father picked up and perused while he was queuing for delicatessen.

  ‘You don’t expect to have to read the Jewish papers to find out what’s going on in your own house,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t expect your atheist husband to be reading the Jewish papers,’ my mother said, laughing her most unconvincing contralto laugh.

  ‘It fell open.’

  ‘Just at the right page?’

  ‘In a Jewish paper there isn’t a right page. If it isn’t bar mitzvahs it’s Israel.’

  ‘There are the obituaries.’

  ‘Don’t be smart with me, Nora. You know my feelings on this subject. Couldn’t you have found another charity?’

  She fell silent. At last she said, ‘It wasn’t for charity, it was for Max.’

  ‘Max? What did Max have to do with it?’

  I was listening on the stairs, guilty but excited. It aroused me to hear my parents bandying around my name.

  Did my mother know I was listening? Suddenly her voice went quiet. But my father’s reply was clear enough. ‘If the kid was so upset, you should have told me.’

  ‘He wasn’t upset.’

  ‘Then what was the problem? Has the Tsedraiter been stirring it?’

  ‘No, he hasn’t. There was no problem. Maxie’s fine about it. He hasn’t been complaining, I swear to you. But I thought it would be nice to give him a little something to make up for it.’

  ‘To make up for what?’

  ‘For it. For there not being an it.’

  ‘You just said he didn’t care.’

  ‘Just in case he cared.’

  ‘Without telling me?’

  ‘If I’d told you, you’d have stopped me.’

  ‘So you went behind my back?’

  ‘Jack, you were out.’

  ‘You don’t think I’d have stayed in had I known?’

  ‘In the circumstances, no, I don’t think you would have.’

  ‘The circumstances being the arming of Israelis?’

  ‘Jack, what we raised wouldn’t have bought a bullet.’

  ‘Even half a bullet can kill,’ he said, which made so little sense that I wanted to come running down the stairs and tell him so.

  The next day he asked me if I was all right. He wanted to be certain that I understood he’d done it – that’s to say not done it – for my benefit. I would thank him when I was older. He knew people who were still ashamed of themselves, thirty, forty years after the event, for having acceded to a worn-out ritual in which they had never for a moment believed. When he’d asked them why they’d allowed themselves to be bar mitzvah’d, they all answered the same way – to please their parents. He didn’t want to place that burden on my shoulders. ‘You know how you’ll please me best, Maxie? By thinking for yourself.’

  After which I could hardly say, could I, that for myself I was thinking I’d have liked a bar mitzvah.

  He had his own doubts, anyway. Over the years I discovered that the family had put pressure on him to change his mind, both Big and Little Ike making separate attempts to shake his resolution, and even one or two of the comrades saying that he was giving religion more importance in the breach than it would ever have enjoyed in the observance. Isn’t that the great thing about Jews, Jack – that they can make room to accommodate religion without really meaning it?

  Though my mother knew better than to pressure him, the gala kalooki night was a bitter reproach. ‘He’s eaten up by it,’ my mother called to me one evening from her room. She was doing her hair for cards, I was sitting on my bed, doodling Jews in a sketchbook.

  ‘Eaten up because you didn’t tell him?’

  ‘No, not eaten up by that, eaten up by you. In case he’s done the wrong thing.’

  I understood why she was telling me this. She wanted me to make it right with him. Show him I didn’t mind. Show him I was undamaged.

  So I did. I skipped about the house whenever I thought there was a chance he might see me, like a child out of Wordsworth, oblivious to care and wearing an inane grin of what I took to be unrepining heathenishness. The boy who was happy to be un-bar mitzvah’d.

  Hard to believe it worked. If anything I probably made things worse. By not giving me a bar mitzvah he must have thought he’d robbed me of my senses.

  But it was the best I could do. Greater intimacy was beyond us. And had we achieved it I probably would have dissolved into tears. As it was, the idea that he was eaten up by what he’d done – his own deed become a devouring creature, like something out of the Inferno – distressed me unutterably.

  I was sorry to my soul for him. Jew, Jew, Jew – he was sick and tired of the whole business. It was like an illness which he thought he’d beaten suddenly eating at his bones again. And he didn’t, to my eyes, look man enough for another fight.

  As for me, it was as I’d feared: I became an oddity. The un-bar mitzvah boy. It was unheard of. Everyone had had, or was expected to have, a bar mitzvah, including Errol Tobias, though in his case the party had not been the black-tie affair that even the poorest families favoured, but was held at his home, among the washbasins and hairdryers, and without the services of an outside kosher caterer. What is more – though every Jewish boy knows this is the one thing above all others you must eschew on your bar mitzvah – he invited the inner circle of his onanist association up to his room for their own gala event long before the other guests had left. For which I then expected him, and frankly expect him still, to burn in hell.

  A funny thing about Errol, though. For all that his mind was a sewer, he was highly principled, and highly educated in matters of principle, where you would least have expected principle from him. No Jew could change his name or faith, for example, without Errol knowing about it and – in so far as schoolyard chit-chat could be called exposure – exposing him. I don’t just mean the Jew at the bottom of our street who went from Friedlander to Flanders overnight; or Montague Burton, tailor to shlemiels, who began his life as Meshe Osinsky; or even the Hollywood Jews whose original monikers everybody knew – Bernie Schwartz become Tony Curtis, Shirley Schrift preferring to be Shelley Winters, Isadore Demsky transmogrified, with the help of a goyisher cleft in his chin, into Kirk Douglas; not to mention Lilian Marks who, by that Diaghilevian changement de pieds for which she was renowned, became Alicia Markova – no, Errol had things to say about Heinrich Heine’s defections as well, and Gustav Mahler’s, and Bernard Berenson’s. When the school awarded me the third-form art prize in the shape of a leather-bound Palgrave’s Golden Treasury languidly illustrated by Robert Anning Bell, Errol put pressure on me to give it back. ‘They mean it as an insult, Max,’ he told me.

  ‘I grant you the drawings are a bit soppy,’ I said, ‘but an insult!’

  ‘I’m not talking about the illustrations, you putz. I’m talking about Palgrave. Did you know his father was a Jew? Francis Ephraim Cohen. Met a woman called Palgrave, got baptised into the Church of England, married her, and changed his name to hers. Ten years later he’s Sir Francis
Palgrave. Play your cards right, Maxie, and it could happen to you. You’re already halfway there.’

  ‘By accepting this prize? Don’t be a meshuggener. Anyway, you can’t blame this Palgrave for what his father did. It’s not his fault he was born a Palgrave.’

  ‘Yes it is, he could have changed his name back.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have sounded any good, though, would it – Ephraim Cohen’s Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language?’

  ‘That’s because they’ve brainwashed you into believing a man called Ephraim Cohen can’t be a reliable authority on the English lyric.’

  A fair point, I thought. But, ‘I’m still keeping it,’ I said.

  Which, I later discovered, Errol was going around saying was only to be expected from someone whose father wouldn’t let him have a bar mitzvah.

  As for Manny, his bar mitzvah was still to come – some dark Byzantine event in an underground synagogue I’d never heard of, was how I imagined it would be, Manny folded in shawls, invisible among the beards of holy men, and no dancing afterwards, or that ghastly men-only Hassidic jigging behind screens erected to stop the women seeing what would arouse them into sexual hysteria if they did – a whirling blur of humpbacked scholars in their long black coats making old-country Jew Jew Hari Krishna circles around the bar mitzvah boy.