So when he heard that his daughter was in love with a Jewish boy, the son of a family his wife made regular expiation to on his behalf, he shaved twice, put on his best shirt, attached the double cuffs with the links his mother had given him for his fifteenth birthday, laid out an English breakfast, and waited for the hour of reckoning to arrive.
In comes Asher, not just the damson jam but the damson orchard entire, and is it any wonder Albert Beckman’s tears pour from him like waters from the rock Moses smote when the Israelites were thirsty?
I know how I would draw the scene were I making a cartoon of it – Albert Beckman, double-shaven and double-cuffed, squarejawed in the manner of Dick Tracy, but with his head bowed and his hands to his temple, standing in a cloudy puddle of his own tears, and from his lips a bubble of exclamatory remorse: ‘Forgive me, my little Judeler! I am the Auschwitz German! Can you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?’ And Asher, purple as an aubergine, opening his arms and saying . . .
An anachronism, of course. People were not calling themselves the Auschwitz German in those days. Not least as Auschwitz itself had not yet acquired its terrible symbolism, outstripping even Belsen and Buchenwald as the ne plus ultra of concentration camps. But as a cartoonist who likes the future remembered in the past, a historian of essentials not of time (Haman lives – that’s my point), it pleases me to anachronise. And once you have actually been collared by a would-be Auschwitz German, backed up against a wall by someone who wants you, as a Jew, to fumigate his country’s past for him, you don’t lightly forgo the opportunity to make an Auschwitz German of them all.
The circumstances in which the phrase was first delivered to me were these:
I was travelling with Zoë, in one of her Jew Jew phases, visiting museums and synagogues and sites of camps in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and God knows where else. Not Novoropissik, though. I’d given my father my word I would never go back there and my word to him was sacred. Had Zoë known of such an undertaking she ’d have found out where Novoropissik was and bundled me on to the first train, or the first horse and cart, that went anywhere near it. Although my father had died long before I met Zoë, she was at daggers-drawn with him. ‘I don’t think I’d have liked your father,’ she told me when she first saw his photograph. When I gave it as my opinion that he wouldn’t have liked her, she was deeply insulted. ‘He didn’t know me,’ she said. I couldn’t be bothered taking her through the rigmarole of rationality – ‘And you didn’t know him’ etc. No point. Going on his photograph, Zoë adjudged my father to have been another one of those Jews who would have rejected her affection and suggested she go to Berlin and be a prostitute. In my father’s case she couldn’t have been wider of the mark. ‘Now there ’s what I call an English rose!’ he ’d have enthused. ‘Look at the complexion! Look at the dainty shnozzle!’ (In one of his unconscious reversions to the muddy language of Novoropissik he might even have added ‘Kuk the ponim on her!’ – the ponim the face, but always a little face, a face viewed affectionately, in my father’s usage.) ‘What are you waiting for, Maxie? Go ahead and marry the girl. Then at least my grandchildren will look like choirboys.’ But I didn’t tell her any of that either. With Zoë you had to assume that both sides of any coin offended her equally.
The business of going to Berlin to be a prostitute so preyed on her mind that we took a detour from our Jewish-sites-of-horror pilgrimage to see what working as a prostitute in Berlin would be like. We stayed in a modern hotel auf dem Zoo and hung around the strip joints and video booths at night. When we couldn’t find any prostitutes we went inside to watch the porno, twin cabins with a communicating hole. Not something a man is supposed to do with the woman he cherishes, watch porno, but these were special circumstances. When aren’t the circumstances special? A few years earlier I’d persuaded Chloë to accompany me to Love Camp 7 – All the youthful beauty of Europe enslaved for the pleasure of the Third Reich – at a ratty cinema in Amsterdam. ‘I can see this is something you have to do, so let’s just go in and get it over with,’ Chloë said at the time. When we returned to England she changed the cinema into a live sex theatre and complained to her mother that I’d not only forced her into it but made her go up on to the stage and take part in unnatural sex acts, threatening to throw her into the canal if she refused.
‘But sweetling, you’re married to him,’ her mother reminded her. ‘Isn’t that enough of an unnatural sex act already?’
‘I know, Mother,’ Chloë wailed. ‘But it was that or the canal.’
‘And was the canal in question the Herengracht, dear?’ An enquiry that filled me with dread lest the Herengracht concealed some terrible jeu to plague me with.
Very clever of her. To this day I cannot hear the Herengracht mentioned without tremor cordis coming on me. The price she made me pay for debauching her daughter.
The next time I was in Amsterdam it was with Zoë. ‘No,’ she said, as I kicked my heels outside a row of video cabins. I respected her firmness. A honeymoon is a honeymoon. Besides, the most tempting vid on offer was Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS, which I took to be about you-know-who and which, on that account, I couldn’t watch with Zoë a mere fumble through a hole away. Some things you don’t mix up. Not even when all you’re mixing up is one Nazi she-wolf with another. I liked to think I had grown out of Ilse/Ilsa anyway, though it interested me to discover that others hadn’t. I made a mental note. On my ownio, and as a caricaturist of derangement, I thought I should find a spare hour to look into it.
Berlin came later, but even in the adjoining filth-boxes auf dem Zoo, Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS appeared not to be available.German delicacy.
‘You choose,’ Zoë said. Which presupposed there was choice. In fact, Aryan porno only has one subject: regression. What excites them is to see adults returned to the condition of messy childhood. You wet the bed when you shouldn’t any longer, you poop your pants when you’re in your thirties – and that’s the turn-on. The land of Dürer and Goethe. And before these people the whole world trembled! No Nazis on the bill of fare however. Just Norbert in a rubber nappy and Solvig going for her weekly enema. We plumped for Solvig, the eroticism consisting not so much of her lying with her toches in the air on a hospital bed in a field with the Bavarian Alps in the background, as the time it took the enema to kick in. They are monotonous in their appetites and patient in their perversions, the Germans. They wait and wait. Too monotonous and patient for Zoë who was out of there long before the attendant physicians, or whoever those men in leather aprons were, had finished inserting the syringes and clyster pipers necessary to the operation, all the while pleading, ‘Ja, komm, komm, oh ja, Scheisse, Scheisse, ja, komm . . .’
‘If this is what being a prostitute in Berlin is like . . .’ Zoë protested.
I stopped her, offering it as my view that a prostitute did more than watch shit-and-piss videos with her husband sitting in the adjoining cabin.
‘I know that,’ she said, ‘but if they expect me to do that to them . . .’
‘They’re Germans, what else do you expect them to expect?’
She was angry all over again with the Krystals, the Jewish family who had originally betrayed her, for thinking that pissing and shitting on Berliners was something she was cut out for. So we strolled down the Kurfurstenstrasse where prostitutes were said to work, in the hope of discovering a more noble version of the calling. But Zoë saw no one with whom, in her words, she ‘could empathise’.
I pointed out a handsome foxy-featured girl in fur coat and with feathers in her hair. Pure Kirchner, I thought. Her face a perfect triangle of bilious green.
‘Too tarty,’ Zoë said.
‘Zoë, she ’s a prostitute.’
‘Yes, well, I’m not.’
The next day we were in Theresienstadt, ‘the village which the Führer gave to the Jews’, and where more than thirty thousand, in their ingratitude, contrived to die. Zoë, as usual, more moved than I was. Anger was what I felt. Towering rage. I alread
y knew some of Malvina Schalkova’s edgy, determined-to-be-domestic drawings of existence in Theresienstadt, the sort of thing I might have done had life treated me more cruelly, had I not had the leisure to cultivate sarcasm, and I knew some of the children’s drawings of the ghetto too, executions, nightmares, apprehensions, maybe, of the next stop, which was Auschwitz. So I was in a temper to be enraged before I arrived. I take unkindly to the slaughter of artists. Futile, I accept, to be kicking stone so many years after the event – unless you happened to think (as I did) that anything under a thousand years was no time at all. That, anyway, was what I did, while Zoë watered the unholy ground with her little fairy tears.
Only give me the chance, I thought, to shit and piss on a Berliner!
The day after that we were in the Jewish cemetry in Prague. ‘Such dear sweet tombs,’ Zoë said. ‘But how close together they are. Why do Jews enjoy being piled on top of one another like that?’
We went to a nearby café and talked about the golem. She wondered what it meant that Jewish myth demanded a monster in the image of Adam, life breathed into clay. Was it a metaphor for Jewish arrogance? Or was the golem no more than the ideal Shabbes-goy, primed to do the dirty work and ask no questions? I told her what I knew, which was that the golem had been fashioned in an hour of need to apprehend mischief-makers who left deceased Gentile babies in the ghetto with the aim of getting people to believe they were victims of a Jewish blood cult.
‘Like me,’ she said.
I looked bemused.
‘Like me. I’m the victim of a Jewish blood cult. They clasped me in their embrace, they sucked me dry of blood, then they cast me aside.’
‘There is no end,’ I said, ‘to Jewish wickedness.’
She touched my hand.
An hour later we were drinking with a couple of German Lutherans she ’d picked up in a bar. Theological students, one young, one of unfathomable age. Because they were gay and she was drunk she allowed them to take liberties with her, stroke her hair, squeeze her knee, then talk about the Holocaust. She signalled me to them with a sideways motion of her eyes. Jew boy. Be careful what you say. They couldn’t believe their luck. They’d suspected as much, of course. But this was not a part of the world where you could take such things for granted. Half the world, east of Prussia, looks Jewish, until it starts to look Chinese. One more Pilsner each and they were apologising to me. The one of unfathomable age wanted to kiss me.
‘It’s all right,’ I said.
‘Oh, Maxie, let him,’ Zoë urged me. She had turned tearful, but also high-coloured. She loved it here, at the crossroads of history. She was glimmering. When she took my wrist I could feel the excitement in her fingers. It was as though a great peace treaty were on the point of being signed, and her pen was going to do the signing.
So I let him – Lukas, he was called, Lukas Kirsche or Klein, a fellow with thin hair and bad skin – I let him kiss me.
How was I to know that the kiss would turn into a collapse? One minute I was offering him my cheek, the next he was in my arms, sobbing. Outside, revellers were passing, throwing their shadows on the walls of one of those interminably baroque edifices from whose windows some Czech or other had been throwing himself for five hundred years. Two men dressed as Mozart, in cocked hats and white tights, squeezed on to the end of our bench. In the back room of the bar a fiddler was playing Janáček.
Culture. Everything that wasn’t kalooki. I should have been delighted.
Zoë was looking at me with the German in my arms as though I were her child. ‘Oh, Maxie,’ she said.
Lukas, through his blubbering, had begun to make words I recognised. ‘Oh, oh . . . I am the Auschwitz German,’ he said. And then, having at last said it, couldn’t stop. ‘I am the Auschwitz German . . . oh . . . oh . . . I am the Auschwitz German.’
I wasn’t sure what to do. Pat him, of course, but after that what? Hand him over to the authorities?
At last, his friend – Dieter, was it, or Detlev, Deadleg? – said, ‘He wants you to forgive him.’
‘Why, what’s he done?’ I asked.
‘Not what has “he” done, what have “we” done.’
‘Ah, not that,’ I said. ‘Not more of that.’
I didn’t of course mean I thought it was time we put all ‘that’ behind us. I meant I didn’t want to hear any collective-guilt shit from their mouths. Didn’t want them getting off on it. Didn’t want them thinking they could be released from it in a bout of Pilsner-fuelled remorse. In my time, in my time, when I’m good and ready you’ll be released, until then sweat, you fuckers.
Zoë threw me one of her silent pleading looks. Be kind. Be kind, Maxie, be kind.
From Lukas, indistinguishable now from my shirt, more of the Auschwitz German.
‘Forgive him,’ Zoë said.
‘Zoë, on whose behalf would I be forgiving him? He ’s done nothing to me.’
‘It’s not “he” . . .’ his friend said.
‘I know,’ I said, ‘it’s “you”.’
He smiled at me, a long, slow, sad smile, and touched my other shoulder.
‘In which case,’ I went on, ‘why aren’t you asking for my forgiveness?’
Not a wise remark, that. A second later I had the two of them crying into my neck. ‘We are the Auschwitz Germans . . . oh, we are the Auschwitz Germans.’
‘Forgive them,’ Zoë said.
‘I can’t. I don’t have the right.’
‘Make the right,’ she said. ‘Make the right for me.’
‘You aren’t Jewish, Zoë. I can’t do it for you.’
‘I would have been Jewish if they’d have let me.’
‘But you’re not Jewish, however much you’d have liked to be. You’re not the injured party.’
Now she was crying openly. ‘I am so the injured party!’
I looked into her glistening goyisher eyes, into their unfathomable grey. Sometimes you have to make the leap. The gulf is so enormous that unless someone does something reckless it will never be bestrid or overarched.
‘I forgive you,’ I said. ‘I forgive you both.’
And didn’t add, ‘Consider it wholesale, two for the price of one.’
That night Zoë sobbed in my arms and told me she’d never been more moved by anything in her life.
2
It must be assumed that Dorothy, faced with a comparably emotional scene, felt the same.
Asher’s feeling are harder to imagine. Had it been his brother Manny in his shoes – but that’s an impossible hypothesis. Manny was not a lover. Whatever else in the way of genes and religion they had in common, they did not have in common the wherewithal to make a woman lose her heart. No point wondering whether Manny would have acted differently in the face of the same temptation: the same temptation could never have come Manny’s way. And our characters are as much determined by the temptations we are able to invite, as by the principles we are taught.
Guilty, frightened, at the edge of his nerves, but sweetened by the sweetness he inspired, which is another way of saying in love with himself because he was beloved of so many, Asher must never have felt more feverishly alive. As a giver of pleasure and as a keeper of secrets, he was at the centre of more people’s universes than he could count. Whatever his Jewish loyalties, however powerfully his Jewish education worked in him, insisting on renunciation, urging the debt he owed to family, to his people, to the very principle of survival, nothing could have been louder in his ear than the sound of his own blood roaring through his veins.
‘I will not,’ he said to Dorothy, ‘say anything to my parents. Not yet.’ Or words to similar effect.
She thought he meant he would not say anything to them about her German father. But what he also meant, he explained, was that he would not say anything to them about her.
She was distressed by that. ‘Are you ashamed of me?’ she asked.
‘No, I am ashamed of myself,’ he said.
‘For what? For falling in love with me
? For allowing yourself to fall in love with me?’
‘No, for not having the courage to tell them.’
But it’s possible he was ashamed of himself for falling in love with her. There is a potency in the idea of the shikseh that is hard to throw off, no matter however many of them you fall in love with. A shikseh answers to some capacity for lowness in yourself. Not the woman, the word. But once the word has done its work, the woman herself is for ever marked by it. In this regard it is no different to the word Jew, used disparagingly. When Tsedraiter Ike cautioned me against marrying a shikseh, any shikseh, because she was certain one day to call me dirty Jew, he was acknowledging the authority vested in both words. So Jews and Gentiles are alike in this: we appoint each other to stand for a terrible tendency to moral baseness in ourselves. As a Jew, of course, I don’t hear in the word Jew what the Gentile hears. And when I do hear it for myself I become what is known as a self-hating Jew. For some reason we know less about that condition as it affects Gentiles. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Take Zoë. She was a perfect example of the self-hating shikseh.
Ashamed of his feelings for Dorothy or not, Asher cleaved to her. A man can hold more than one position when it comes to the woman he loves. And she – though she was always watching, always aware that she was watching, as if the minute she took her eyes off him he would be gone – she cleaved to him.
They went on meeting in secret. Parks, cinemas, graveyards. Boating lakes where they could row shoulder to shoulder, taking an oar each. Fairgrounds, he winning goldfish for her on the rifle range, she (the bolder of the two by miles) dragging him on to wheels and caterpillars and dodgem cars, and then the Tunnel of Love in which neither did anything to either because they were not separate but a thing indivisible. They walked a lot, where no one could see them. Saw sunsets, watched the moon come up. The streaked sky their passion, the moony chastity their devotion. They took buses to the country. Looked at horses, ran from cattle, bought postcards which they didn’t send. Visited stately homes in Derbyshire, ruined abbeys in Yorkshire. They hung over stone bridges and stared into water running over pebbles. They kissed in tea shops and on benches in little railway stations. It was like being on the run. And when that got too much for them there was the kitchen of her house. Her bedroom was of course out of the question. The regulation decency of the times determined this. There were some things an eighteen-year-old girl was not encouraged to do at home. But the moral inequality of the arrangement as it stood must also have played a part in the Beckmans’ thinking. If their daughter wasn’t good enough to be taken to meet the Washinskys, there had to be limits to how welcoming they could be of him.
Howard Jacobson Page 19