(‘Put the glasses away, he doesn’t drink,’ I remember Chloë hissing to her mother.
‘What, not ever?’
‘Not ever, Mother. None of them do.’
‘Afraid that they’ll forget which pocket they keep their wallet in, is that it?’
‘Shush, Mother! Promise me you’ll shush.’ But laughing as she said it.
‘Crack you a bottle of something, or will I be having fun on my ownio?’ was how Chloë’s mother greeted me, notwithstanding her daughter’s pantomime objurations.
So I asked if she had a Château Latour 1949 already open – which started our relationship off on the wrong foot. Unless what started our relationship off on the wrong foot was my adding that if she didn’t have a Château Latour, a bottle of communion wine would do as well – any vintage that took her fancy, as long as it was genuinely the blood of You Know Who.)
It was a Saturday morning, of course, for Asher, whereas my introduction into Chloë’s poisonous little family occurred on an evening in the week, but even so Asher was always going to receive a more sensitive welcome into Dorothy’s family. They were charming people. They deferred to what was unfamiliar. On the table tea and toast and little coconut cakes, with no cream or butter in sight, Dorothy and her father having heard that Jews had to be careful when and where and with what and with whom they ate dairy.
Among the many domestic details that struck Asher as alien and not at all what he had expected was the wallpaper, which was in a better condition than his parents’ wallpaper, and the carpets, which were far less threadbare than his parents’ carpets, and the bookcases, which contained far more books of a non-religious nature than his parents possessed, and the record collection which was more substantial in the Brahms and Beethoven department than his parents’ collection, which wouldn’t have been difficult as his parents didn’t have any Brahms or Beethoven, only Mantovani and Sophie Tucker; but above all he was struck by the atmosphere of cheerful sufficiency in shortage, of which there was not a semblance where he lived, a consciousness of material deficiency seeping through his parents’ house like damp.
Dorothy held on to him, not knowing what he thought. Was he missing sanctity? Did he think her family morally trivial for keeping a clean house? Did he judge them as wanting in spiritual values?
She could never have guessed that Asher would be confused by the discovery that the woman who made the fires for his parents on a Shabbes kept a cleaner and pleasanter home than they did. What else, when all was said and done, would he have expected? Wasn’t that precisely why her mother was employed – to do for the Washinskys a little of what she did for her own family? That the quid pro quo of fire-yekelte-ing entailed a deeper hierarchical gulf between the chosen and the not, would no more have occurred to her than it did to Elvis Presley, compliantly skivvying for the Fruchters in Memphis.
(And perhaps would not have occurred to me were I not the son of a father who held fire-yekelte-ing to be a species of social condescension, akin to slavery, of which every Jew should be ashamed.)
Dorothy saw Asher heat up the moment her father addressed him. A shy boy. She loved him for that. Well mannered. He bowed slightly when her father offered him his hand. And she thought she saw a movement suggestive of his wanting to cover his head. Respect. She loved him for that too.
As for Asher, he was surprised and even a little daunted by the fastidious manners of Dorothy’s father, the precise way he greeted him, the elaborately courteous, not to say old-fashioned gestures with which he ushered Asher into a chair and made a ceremony – no, more than a ceremony, a demonstration, as though it was a skill he had only recently acquired – of tea.
But what struck him even more forcibly than this was the fact that Dorothy’s father was foreign. To be more precise, German.
End of the Washinskys’ world.
SIX
Doctor: How’s the world of funny books?
Cartoonist/patient: They’re actually not funny anymore.
People who read comics now want drama and adventure more than laughs.
Steven T. Seagle & Teddy Christiansen, It’s a Bird
1
At the time I would not have seen the relevance of the enquiry, but it must have been hereabouts in our Jewed-over adolescence that Manny, the young Manny, asked me, ‘When you see German script, what do you feel?’
The question came without any context or preparation. But that itself was not unusual. Most of what Manny said he said out of the blue.
‘Queasy,’ I told him. ‘The same way I feel about the Katzenjammer Kids. Queasy and depressed. And the paper it’s always printed on makes me feel queasy and depressed as well. And the covers remind me of coffins. When I see a German book I see death. Next question.’
‘No, you haven’t properly answered this one yet. I wasn’t asking you about German books. I asked how you feel when you see German writing in a letter. Not the Gothic script, just the handwriting, just the words.’
I thought about it. ‘I’ve never seen German writing in a letter,’ I answered. ‘I don’t correspond with Germans. I don’t have German pen pals. Why are you asking?’
He was in his swimming phase. His arms thrashing as we walked along the street, his cheeks puffed. Turning his head from side to side. And practising holding his breath under water. I’d never met anybody so interested in seeing if he could live without breathing. So I had to hang on for a reply until he came back up. ‘No reason,’ he said at last. Which seemed to me not worth the wait.
‘Course there’s a reason. You wouldn’t have asked otherwise. Are you getting letters from a German? Who?’
Who’s the girl, I would have asked anybody else. Who’s the lucky Fräulein? But you didn’t make those jokes with Manny. Besides, what chance was there of him of all people corresponding with a German of either sex. All schoolkids had pen pals then. Something your French or Spanish teacher organised. I had a Manuel in Barcelona and a Julie in Aix-les-Bains whose letters arrived liked gifts of the heart in envelopes lined with susurrating tissue paper. But Manny was at a school for Jews. I couldn’t see his teachers opening up lines of communication with Hildegarde in Baden-Baden.
He went under again, still in the yarmulke which since going to his new school he now wore at all times. I imagined him floating on the surface, his head down, the silken fringes of his tzitzis trailing behind him as though they had issued from his body, like spawn.
‘No one,’ he said, when he came back up a second time, his cheeks bulging.
‘You just mentioned the matter of German handwriting for no reason?’
He was red and panting. Looking away. Did he always look away? When I try to picture him as he was then I cannot see him ever looking at me. I cannot remember what his eyes looked like. What colour or how big they were.
‘I found a letter,’ he said, ‘that’s all.’
‘What do you mean you “found a letter”? Where did you find a letter?’
‘In the street.’
He was lying. You don’t find letters written in German on the streets of Manchester. Or you didn’t then. Not in Crumpsall Park. But something always told me to lay off him. So far with Manny, and no further. Not because I was afraid of what he would say or do to me – though there was always his rabid bite to be on the lookout for – but because I was afraid of what I could do to him.
‘And what did this letter make you feel when you found it?’
‘Upset,’ he said.
Which it’s possible I was meant to follow up on. Be supportive, be a friend. Possible that there was something serious he needed to get off his chest. But I was frightened and a little bit ashamed of intimacy with him. We were going to change the world with our illustrated history of Jewish bitterness, and we spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust together, but when he said he was upset I shied away.
‘Know what you mean,’ I said.
2
Upset. The very word my father had used on his return from a trip to Col
ogne with the Maccabeans boxing team, the first leg of what was intended to be a sequence of exchange visits. Much publicised in the local Jewish press, and much inveighed against by many leading members of the Manchester Jewish community who believed it was too early, the boxing trip had originally been envisaged, by my father and Bunny Silverman who were its originators, as a goodwill gesture. It was time to forget the iniquities of the past. It was time to mend some fences. It was time to go and punch the Nazi bastards’ faces in.
But there wasn’t much goodwill coming off him when we met him in the hall.
‘Well, I won’t be doing that again,’ he told us, no sooner than he’d put his cases down.
He was puffing, fragile-looking, not himself. He could see what we were thinking. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I didn’t get into the ring. I’m just upset.’
He didn’t look himself and didn’t sound himself either. Upset? My father?
‘Did you lose?’ my mother asked.
‘We drew. We should have won, but we drew. But that’s not what upset me.’
Of course it wasn’t. I knew what had upset him. Germans had upset him. I’m not saying I shared the views of those who’d written to the papers arguing that the boxing friendly desecrated the memory of the dead, but I was surprised that he had gone. I was surprised, even knowing what I knew about him, that he could face it. Germans weren’t for seeing yet. Not for another five thousand years.
‘Was it seeing the old ones and wondering?’ I wondered.
Myself I blamed the young ones as well. Sins of the fathers and all that. From an early age I took responsibility for what my forebears had done, and burned with shame still for some of the crimes recounted of my people in Deuteronomy. So there was no innocent generation in Germany to my mind. But seeing the old ones would obviously be worse. Scrutinising every face. And where were you and where were you . . . ?
‘No.’ He shook his head. He wasn’t having any of that ‘and how many Jews did you gas?’ business. ‘Nothing to do with the people. The people are just people. They’re like us.’
My sister snorted. Hard now to remember what she was doing out of her room. Did she hope to hear about the boxing? Who had flattened whom? Or was it because she had missed my father and knew in her bones she wasn’t going to see much more of him?
‘People are the same the world over,’ he said. He looked tired. ‘How many times have I told you that? It’s what’s done to the people.’
’So what upset you, then?’ she asked. Angry. Always angry. Everything an affront. Always in a party dress or a sheet and always angry. ‘The fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road?’
She had already refused to show gratitude for the present he’d made a ceremony (too courtly a ceremony?) of handing her – cologne from Cologne, prettily wrapped and ribboned. ‘Yours will probably be Belsen Water,’ she hissed to me out of the corner of her mouth.
Always angry, always sarcastic, and always made up for a ball. Maybe had they just let her go to a ball once in a while, she would have been sweeter of temperament. But had they let her go to a ball, at her age, they’d have fretted every minute she was out of the house, and been less sweet of temperament themselves.
I say ‘they’, but it was my father who drove all this fretting and fearing. For her part my mother (the real pagan in the family) wouldn’t have minded what Shani got up to, so long as she wore something my mother approved of to get up to it in.
So what was it my father feared?
The same all Jew Jew Jew fathers were afraid of – goy, goy, goy.
What, even my entirely irreligious God-hating top-to-bottom secularised new-Jew-seeking dad who would have doubled my pocket money had I told him I was going out with shikseh triplets? Well, there’s the funny thing . . .
But doubtless I do him an injustice. He deserved better than a caricaturist for a son. Had he been luckier he’d have sired a moral philosopher capable of grasping the subtleties of his position. That’s if there is a school of moral philosophy capable of grasping why a man who could imagine no greater future for the Jews than that they should be indistinguishable from non-Jews was unable to bear the thought of a non-Jew fondling his daughter.
He didn’t fear what the Washinskys feared, that much was certain. He didn’t fear depletion of the Jewish stock or obliteration of the Jewish memory. So what was it?
Only recently has it occurred to me that the answer to the question is in the word ‘fondling’ itself. What he actually couldn’t bear was anybody doing it. A disappointingly banal explanation for someone committed to understanding human history as a battle between the Jews and everybody else.
He made a face at her as though he were someone her own age. Then reached out to draw her closer. For a moment we all thought he was going to take her on his knee. Nothing unusual in that for some fathers, but Jack ‘The Jew’ Glickman only pulled a person to him when he wanted to rough them up in the ring. A cold premonition seized me. And I could see that it seized my mother as well.
‘No, clever clogs,’ he said, running his hands through her hair – something else he didn’t normally do – ‘it’s bugger all to do with them driving on the wrong side of the road, which as an internationalist I am prepared to believe is the right side of the road anyway. What I didn’t like was the fact that they spoke German. Laugh all you like, but that’s the fact of it. I didn’t like hearing the words. I didn’t like seeing the words. It was the look of the letters. The letters upset me.’
So there you are. If the look of the German language could upset my internationalist, non-grudge-bearing father, a man naïve enough to suppose that people were only what was done to them and whose sins were therefore not indelible, who wouldn’t it upset?
But then he was a dying man.
3
Was it to upset me that Chloë kept nagging for a Mercedes? I don’t mean for herself. I mean for us. She, me, her mother – if not exactly in that order. A family car.
I was in my middle twenties at the time, barely out of art school. Not only was I not making enough money from my cartoons at the time, I didn’t think a Mercedes was seemly for someone my age.
‘Too flash,’ I told her.
‘You mean too foreign.’
‘No, I don’t. I mean too bourgeois.’
‘There you are, you’ve agreed with me. Too foreign. Too bürgerlich.’
‘Nothing to do with foreign. We could have a Renault.’
‘So we can have French but not German.’
‘What’s Germany got to do with it, Chloë?’
‘With “it”, nothing. With you, everything. Why can’t you let the subject drop, Maxie?’
‘Let the subject drop? I never mention the subject.’
‘Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, Five Thousand Years of Bitterness . . .’
‘That’s not exclusively Germany.’
‘No, just the last five hundred years of it.’
So to prove Germany wasn’t a problem I relented, or she relented, and we bought a Volkswagen Beetle.
Had a Mercedes been a problem for me on German grounds, then a Volkswagen would surely have been a greater one. Linguistics, partly. But also something Errol Tobias had told me once when we were having to lower the tennis net across the street to allow a Volkswagen to pass. ‘If you look at the hubcaps on a Volkswagen,’ he whispered from the side of his face, ‘you’ll see that the VW makes a swastika.’ Since we had a Volkswagen there, waiting for the net to go down, I was well positioned to check.
‘No it doesn’t,’ I said. All I could see was VW.
‘It’s got to be travelling, shmuck.’
So I waited for it to move off. Nothing. Just VW.
‘No, it’s got to be travelling at exactly fifteen miles per hour. Fourteen miles per hour, you won’t see it. Sixteen miles per hour, you won’t see it. It’s got to be fifteen. German efficiency for you.’
I believed him. But it wasn’t easy finding a Volkswagen travelling at exactly fif
teen miles per hour. Fifteen miles per hour was a damnably smart speed to pick. Too slow for the main road, too fast for our street. Those Nazis! You have to hand it to them.
But I have managed to find a Volkswagen doing fifteen miles per hour. Once. In Berlin. And the V and the W did embrace into a swastika. I think.
When I made the mistake of mentioning this phenomenon to Chloë she said, ‘Right, we’re having one.’
As I understood it, the Volk in Volkswagen didn’t carry an umlaut. Völkchen and Völkerschaft, yes. Volkswagen, no. But Chloë inserted one regardless. To be precise about it, she inserted two, yodelling the spaces between the v and the l, and then the l and the k for good measure, as though a double valley of umlauting divided them. On occasions she even threw one over the a in wagen, which made three umlauts in all.
Because she knew it annoyed me, we carted her mother around in the Beetle whenever we were up with her or she was down with us; and because she knew it annoyed me, her mother sang cod-German songs in the back seat. No sooner did I put us into top gear than Chloë would wind open the little aperture in the roof, which was the signal for her mother to begin. ‘I Love to Go a Wandering’ was her favourite, especially the line about ‘a knapsack on my back’ which she interpreted as ‘ein k-näpsäck ön mein bërk’. Carols, too, she liked, in particular ‘O Tannenbaum’ and ‘Stille Nacht’, employing German noises, nothing more than gargles, where she didn’t know or couldn’t remember the words.
‘Christ the what-is-it again, darling?’ I remember her asking Chloë one clammy afternoon as we powered through the Cheshire dales.
‘Der Retter, Mother.’
‘Retter meaning?’
‘Saviour, Mother.’
‘Shh – not in front of Maxie, darling’ – this in a stage whisper– ‘it might upset his sensibilities . . . Christ, the saviour was bororn, Chri-ist the saviour was born . . . Do you people accept the idea of a saviour, Max, or are you above saving?’
Howard Jacobson Page 16