Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  So no, if you’re wondering, they didn’t like my cartoon contribution to Jewish art, my lot. Neither did anyone else, much. Not in this country, not in America, not in Israel, not even in Germany where no publisher for it could be found. I like to think the timing was unfortunate. Winter 1976 was when Five Thousand Years of Bitterness saw the light of day here and in America, the warm pro-Yiddler glow of the Entebbe Raid not yet faded. If you were Jewish you were proud again, just as you had been after the Six Day War in 1967, no longer finding your reflection in the furrowed brows of rabbis and philosophers, but in fighter pilots and one-eyed generals. So the last thing you wanted to be reminded of was five thousand years of loss and jeering. Jeer at a Jew post-1967 and you risked a strafing from the Israeli Air Force. Now, post-Entebbe, anyone stealing a Jew could expect to wake to see commandos in his garden. We took no shit. And people who take no shit don’t have to go round making jokes about themselves. Jokes are the refuge of the Untermenschen. Hadn’t that been one of the declared aims of Zionism – the creation of a people who would no longer value themselves only for the wit they brought to bear on their misfortunes? A people, maybe, who would never have to make a joke again. Least of all against themselves.

  The fucked-over Jew – who was he? We don’t remember any such animal. And anyone who does won’t want to see him commemorated in a comic.

  We’re a country, we’re a nation again. We don’t do funny and we don’t do fucked.

  As for those who didn’t care for Zionism rampant, whose world collapsed if the Jews weren’t at the bottom of it, well, they too were having trouble remembering any fucked-over Jews. A fortnight of ascendancy and the Jews were back at the top of the pile, once again pulling all the strings that mattered.

  Embitterment was out of style. No one wanted to know. Not even the Jewish Chronicle liked it. Nor, judging from the silence, did my own mother.

  I did, though, receive a card from Tsedraiter Ike, addressing me as ‘My Dear Nephew Mendel’, and accusing me of nestbeschmutzing – not just doing my dirty washing in public, but befouling the nest in which I’d been raised. ‘I simply ask you to consider,’ it went on in letters only a spider which had fallen in an inkwell could have formed, ‘who this is likely to help. Us, or them?’

  Well, what else should I have expected? Adorno famously said that, after the Holocaust, poetry wasn’t a good idea. He never thought there was need to include cartoons in that proscription.

  Now, of course, there is no sooner a catastrophe than there’s a comic strip to tell of it. Everything allowable so long as it’s tremulous. Cartoon? Fine, just keep the cartoonery out. Just keep it sweet, and substitute a watercolour wash for any angry lines of satire. Wan is how they like it today, pastel-genteel, or comical in the cute sense, faux naif – look, I can barely draw at all! – with an eye to the children’s market, which is where the bulk of the buyers are.

  Having watercoloured to order myself in recent years, I know whereof I speak. Kosovo, Afghanistan, Rwanda – when their hour came I did them all. Under an assumed name, of course. In fact under two. Alice and Thomas Christiansen, Alice being an anglicisation of . . . but I’ll come to Alice when the time is right, and Christiansen being what it sounded. The nearest I have known to what the verdant call a partnership, Alice looking after the story, I the watercolour wash, or the heart-on-sleeve, don’t disturb-the-horses draughtsmanship. I am not entirely ashamed of what we produced. They go on selling by virtue of being pretty and unthreatening, but not so pretty as to hurt my own heart or misdirect the hearts of others. There’s even a sense (I’m quoting Alice now) in which they more honestly reflected the melancholy of my nature, the artist I might have been had this or that turned out differently. Had I been born to goyim, for example. But it’s hard to abjure your first ambitions, whatever knocks they take. I have gone on polishing Five Thousand Years of Bitterness for my own satisfaction, the new fifty-first chapter of which, ‘The Jew Royally Fucked’, I like to think contains some of the best of my mature work, highly personal much of it, highly symbolical, and, technically, highly sophisticated, as for example, to speak merely of adroitness with the pencil, my sketch of Errol Tobias’s devil fingers, and the damage they wrought to poor Manny’s self-esteem. A far cry in subject matter from Tom of Finland, but indicative of the mastery I have achieved at last, I fancy, of that explosive tension between the glans penis and everything the rabbis teach of chastity.

  In the next panel a beautiful woman of Aryan complexion, with meteors crashing in her eyes.

  6

  In through the gate, and out through the chimney.

  Buchenwald saying

  ‘Frau Koch . . . ?’

  She shook her head. ‘Gnädige Frau, to you.’

  ‘Gnädige Frau . . . ?’

  He had been brought to her. He did not know why. Perhaps she had heard he was an illustrator and wanted murals after all.

  ‘Who told you,’ she said, ‘that you could look at me?’

  He had not dared to lift his head since they came for him. ‘I am not looking at you, Gnädige Frau.’

  ‘Not now. Before. When I was on my horse.’

  Should he tell her? Should he chance everything and tell her that her beauty was more than he could bear and that like Lot’s wife on pain of petrification or worse, he had no choice but to turn and look, and let the fireballs in her eyes destroy him. Or should he deny he had ever raised his face to her? Which was the greater rudeness? To know that, he needed to know her. Otherwise it was all on the roll of the dice. And it might have been decided anyway. Look at her, not look at her, what difference if she already meant to skin him where he stood?

  She takes his silence for a confession, and laughs a little laugh. ‘So tell me about yourself . . .’

  What will he tell her? That he is an artist from Prague or Vienna. That his mother is/was a free-thinking, rationalistic, bohemian Jew from Kovna or Odessa, his father is/was a God-fearing Kabbalistic solicitor from a village outside Warsaw or Budapest. She will be interested in the subtle differences, Frau Koch, will she not? ‘Tell me what it means to be Kabbalistic, Mendel. My husband the Commandant and I have always been so curious about your holy books and your little Jewish ways.’

  So does he only want her to mother him, after all? He is disappointed in himself. Still without raising his face to hers, he drops to his knees and seizes her hand, putting it fervently to his lips.

  That’s when he feels the kiss of the whip she carries. The scourge.

  ‘A Jew cannot touch the flesh of a member of the master race,’ she tells him.

  ‘No, Gnädige Frau.’

  Again she strikes him.

  Mendel’s heart soars. I am her equal, he thinks. We are in this together.

  She orders him to undress.

  ‘Yes, Gnädige Frau.’

  She is wearing a glove now, and with her glove she reaches down and takes contemptuous hold of him. He understands what this means. Just as he cannot touch the flesh of a member of the master race, so the flesh of the master race cannot touch the member of a Jew.

  Disdained, it rises.

  And that is that, for one day.

  Back on their bunk, Pinchas wonders what has happened. ‘I am her little Yid,’ Mendel says.

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘What does it matter? For as long as the hobby amuses her.’

  ‘And when it doesn’t, what will she do with you?’

  Mendel shrugged. ‘Crush me between her teeth,’ he said. ‘If I am lucky.’

  ‘So you are an artist,’ she says the next day, for yes, there is a next day.

  Naked, pale in his nakedness, he nods.

  ‘And what sort of artist are you?’

  He draws, he tells her, to reconcile his two backgrounds, his rationalist mother and his God-smitten father. Drawing is itself, he explains, a godlike act – making something out of nothing, dispelling the darkness of the original void, letting there be light, and in that sense, yes, can be
said to usurp God’s function. But the mother in him scorns such nonsense, so he draws satirically, to spite himself. But as a satiric artist is a contradiction – at one and the same time making something of nothing and nothing of something – you could say it perpetuates the ambiguity of his situation.

  He hopes she will love him for these paradoxes, but also beat him for them – another contradiction.

  It is wonderful standing without his clothes, discussing art with Ilse Koch.

  ‘I have brought you pencils,’ she says, the day following, ‘so that you may draw me.’

  ‘Gnädige Frau, if I am to draw you I will have to look at you.’

  ‘I will remove a garment a day,’ she said. ‘You will look only at the part I have exposed. Some days I will put a garment back on. You will never know whether I am going to take a garment off or put one on. Nor will you ever see all of me naked altogether, as I now see you. If you try to assemble me naked in your imagination I will know of it because this will rise. And every time it rises I will beat it, Jew. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand, Gnädige Frau.’

  ‘Do you have any questions?’

  ‘How do I finish the drawing, Gnädige Frau?’

  ‘You do not. You erase it every night and start again every morning.’

  He has another question, if he dare ask it. What if this, his penis, does not rise? Will she not consider it . . . ?

  ‘An insult? Yes. No Jew dare look upon German womanhood limp.’

  ‘But day after day, Gnädige Frau, and while I am concentrating on my drawing . . .’

  ‘Treat me with disrespect and I will shoot you, nicht?’

  Discontentment courses through his body. If they could distil melancholy and inject it into you with a syringe, this is how you would feel. Or if you finally came face to face with Elohim and found him to be common. A Northern German with a snub nose.

  It is prosaic to be threatened, and doubly prosaic to be threatened with death by shooting. Is that all?

  Will Ilse Koch, too, prove to be an anticlimax? In general the Germans have been a terrible disappointment to the Jews. They have not lived up to Jewish expectation. Such music! Such writing! Such an elaboration of myth! All for this! The great bathos of National Socialism. You would expect that where there is art there is refined imagination. But maybe the imagination is all on the side of those who love the art, not those who make it. So am I, Mendel wonders, going to be Frau Koch’s superior in the refinements of cruelty as well?

  His charge is not banality. It is not banal to do what they are doing. This camp is not banal. It is supremely ambitious. The end magnificent in its completeness, outdoing all previous attempts to bend creation to man’s will. No wonder the nation is so enthralled. Forget not knowing. They all know. They can smell exhilaration in the wind. And that isn’t all they can smell.

  But the means!

  Shoot him, indeed! And then what? A lampshade. Well, that too smacks of grand conception. Take human skin and do so little with it. As insults go, it is magniloquent. But why shoot him when she can have him, as she has her horse, as a live instrument of her desire? Own him, still living, as she owns her property. Make a household object, a utensil, of the living man, not the dead skin. But then he already is her property, is he not? Every Jew in the camp, every gypsy, every communist, is her property. So he must mean something else. Something which demeans with more exactness. He does. He would like to be tiny in her grasp. He would like her to lift him to her lips, like Goya’s Saturn devouring his own progeny, her hands become his ribcage, her eyes wide with forbidden knowledge. He would like her to laugh at his smallness, and then, like the giant, to close her mouth around him. He would like to be her food. Jewish food. He would like to give her kosher pleasure as she rolls him around her mouth, and himself unkosher pleasure as he is swallowed and disappears into her stomach. He would like to hear her moan a little from the inside, first with pleasure, then with grief at what she’s lost.

  A voluptuousness that has not occurred to her, and would no doubt shock and appal her, deviant as she is said to be.

  He would enjoy that. He would enjoy taking Frau Koch’s breath away.

  And he has barely started yet. Hardly put his foot on the first rung of the ladder downwards into hell. Because where everything is permissible . . .

  Shoot him, indeed!

  In a flash, as the melancholy sluices through his body, he understands that she is conventional, a child of a conventional people, and will be bound to disappoint him. Through the blank clouds, Elohim with his snub Schleswig-Holstein nose regards him incuriously. This is no person-to-person accident. It would not have been otherwise had Ilse Koch been a different German woman, and he, Mendel, a different Jewish man. It is a fact of history. Another Jew let down by another German.

  His penis falls limp. She strikes him with her whip and he cries out. Not from the pain but from the never-to-besatisfied longing.

  SEVEN

  Chinese Husband: Honollable wife, I have heard you are

  having affair with Jewish man.

  Chinese Wife: Honollable husband, I cannot think where

  you are getting these bobby meises from.

  1

  And beyond staring into the end of the world, what did Asher Washinsky do when he realised that Dorothy’s father was German?

  He cried.

  But he cried only because Dorothy’s father cried first.

  And Dorothy?

  She of course cried at the sight of them both crying.

  Manchester has enjoyed long and noble relations with Germany, both commercial and cultural. Not counting the signed photograph of Frankie Vaughan which stood on Shani’s bedside table, and Geraldo & His Orchestra’s version of ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’ which it was my mother’s custom to put on the gramophone and play at low volume when people turned up for kalooki, ours wasn’t a musical family; but even we took pride in the Hallé Orchestra without knowing that its founder was born in Hagen, Westphalia, and had briefly been a friend of Wagner’s, before moving to comfier accommodation in Greenheys Lane, in the south of the city, not at all far from where today stands Hillel House, the hall of residence for Jewish students attending Manchester University. That Charles Hallé was able to start and fund an orchestra of the Hallé’s quality was due largely to the enthusiasm, munificence and artistry of the German community with whom he mixed, some of it German Jewish, some of it just German. A similar consideration – the presence of family, good business connections, articulate and convivial company from the homeland (though the city’s Schiller Institute with its skittle alleys and billiard room and gymnasium and male-voice choir was not yet established) – brought Engels to Manchester.

  Dorothy’s father was related neither to the Hallés nor the Engels. But he was a Beckman – poorly and distantly related to the Manchester Beckmans, a discreetly high-bourgeois family originally from Düsseldorf which had owned a small engineering factory in Salford since about the time the Hallé played its first Beethoven symphony. A very poor and distant relation, for when he was sent over to meet his Manchester mishpocheh it was in the capacity of driver for one of the junior directors. A hundred years earlier and he would have risen in the firm and looked forward to a still more distant Beckman being sent over from Düsseldorf to drive his car. But this was 1937. Not a good time for a German with little English to be making his way in the world – not this part of the world anyway. When war broke out he was interned in Huyton, a camp on the outskirts of Liverpool, where he learned philosophy and Bible history and a few words of Yiddish from the other internees, most of whom were Jews. It’s feasible, though it was never discussed, that he did a bit of fire-yekelte-ing himself while he was there, in return for Hebrew lessons. Whether or not, he grew proficient in compassion, and by the time he was released in 1944 was a confirmed Judaeophile. Had he been acceptable to a Jewish girl he would have married one. Any one. As an act of atonement partly, for he was ashamed of his country
’s crimes and believed that fewer of them would have been committed had he not left it when he did, but also from inclination. He liked how Jewesses looked. When he imagined kissing a Jewess he imagined licking out a jar of damson jam. In the event, all Jewesses being closed to him, he married lime marmalade. The daughter of the respectable working-class family with whom he lodged, who had their own doubts about him as a German, but learned to judge him, in that English way, on his individual merits. Of those, industriousness and honesty – as evidenced by the little notebook he carried to write down every expenditure and debt – and the fact that his trousers always had a perfect crease in them, and that he liked double cuffs on his shirts, and that his fine gold cufflinks had his initials engraved on them – AB – struck them as adequate guarantees that their daughter would be well looked after. And she was. Not provided for to any high degree – Albert Beckman’s Germanness counting against him when it came to driving for anyone not a German, and for anyone who was, come to that, since there were some things, if you were German, you didn’t want to advertise – but cherished and indeed improved. The work he encouraged her to do for Jewish people, for example, was without doubt helpful in balancing their weekly budget, but it was also something he taught her to think of as a mitzvah – not just a good deed but an opportunity for them both to employ a word he ’d originally picked up in Huyton and liked the sound of.

  ‘See it as a mitzvah!’

  Mitzvah. No sooner did he shape the letters with his mouth, and with his mind shape the concepts of commandment, meritoriousness and charity which a mitzvah encompassed, than he felt he’d made a small recompense for a wickedness of which it was not finally for him to say that he was entirely innocent.