Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  When they weren’t able to be together they wrote. He could post his letters directly to the Beckman house, whereas for him to receive hers he had to have a poste restante address in the city centre. Few things in life are more exciting than waiting in a queue at the post office to collect illicit mail. Asher loved it. Sometimes he wondered if it wasn’t more fun getting Dorothy’s mail than seeing Dorothy. She was a clever girl and missed nothing. She kept her letters hot. One day she wrote to him in German. Basic German of the sort she had been teaching him in return for Hebrew, but still German. She knew the effect that would have and enjoyed imagining him opening the envelope, seeing ‘Liebling’ and going up in flames.

  He read the letter in a coffee bar, then threw it in a waste-paper bin, then retrieved it, then folded it into his wallet, then took it out of his wallet and threw it into a bin again, then realised someone might find it and see to whom it was addressed, then retrieved it, then stuffed it into his shirt, then tore it up and threw the several pieces into several bins. After which he felt so guilty about Dorothy that he begged her to write to him in German again, whereupon he felt so guilty about everybody else that he thought his heart would stop.

  ‘God will strike me down,’ he said to his own reflection in the mirror of the public toilets to which he ’d gone to flush away the second letter. ‘God help me,’ he muttered to himself when he queued at the post office, waiting for the third.

  Was he the luckiest boy in the whole wide world, he wondered, or was he the most accurst?

  Lucky at least, as Manny reflected long afterwards, to be offered the choice.

  ‘Now it’s your turn to write to me in Hebrew,’ Dorothy suggested.

  But he couldn’t. He could talk Hebrew to her but he couldn’t write it. ‘It’s a sacred script,’ he explained.

  ‘And cannot be employed upon a profane object?’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ he told her.

  But what if he did?

  ‘You know what the problem is,’ she told him. ‘Reciprocity. Gegenseitigkeit. You can’t even play at being together.’

  Once he took her on a train to Birmingham where he was in part-time religious employ – so it was true, he did teach at a Midlands Talmud Torah! – and hid her in a commercial travellers’ hotel on the edge of the city. She had hoped that she would be able to watch him at the blackboard, but he explained to her that that was out of the question.

  ‘Because I’m not Jewish?’

  ‘Because it’s not allowed.’

  ‘Well, at least let me walk with you to the school. I can’t picture it. I can’t imagine what your pupils look like.’

  He shrugged. ‘They look like me. When I was younger.’

  ‘All the more reason I’d like to see them.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s not allowed.’

  ‘It’s not allowed for me to walk you to your school? That’s rubbish. You just don’t want them to see me. You’re ashamed of me – the fire-yekelte ’s daughter.’

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with your being the fire-yekelte ’s daughter.’

  ‘Just with my being not Jewish.’

  Jew, Jew, Jew. Not Jew, not Jew, not Jew.

  ‘We get caught up in your interminable fucking drama, whether we are or we aren’t,’ as Zoë once said to me.

  I didn’t reply that there were some women who got themselves caught up in our interminable fucking drama, probably for fear of inciting her to get herself fucking out of it again.

  You might not always want to be with them, but they beat being on your own.

  3

  ‘It’s making me ill,’ she told him.

  He melted before her. ‘But I love you.’

  ‘And I love you. But it’s making me ill. So long as you’re in front of my eyes I feel I’m with you. But the minute you’re not there I feel I don’t exist for you.’

  ‘You never don’t exist for me. I think about you every minute.’

  ‘That’s not the same. You might be thinking about me, but when you’re elsewhere you become a person who isn’t with me and doesn’t know me. It’s not being your secret I mind – at least as your secret I’m an important part of you – it’s being of no account. Never to be mentioned, always to come second to your family.’

  ‘You don’t come second.’

  ‘No, I come third. Or even fourth. How can I feel I know you unless I know your family?’

  He told her that it would kill them. That he would have to tell them slowly. First his brother. Then, his father . . .

  ‘Then?’

  Could he tell his mother? His father he imagined storming and raging. He could accept that. But his mother? He imagined her in tears, on her knees, clinging to his legs. Don’t do it, Asherla, don’t bring this shame upon us.

  ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s a bit primordial.’

  ‘A bit?’

  He shrugged. ‘She ’s my mother.’

  ‘Oh yes, Jewish boys and their mothers!’

  Unless that was Chloë or Zoë speaking. ‘Oh, yes, Jewish boys and their mothers!’ They both hated my mother.

  Also a bit primordial. Of them, I mean.

  He would have looked helpless, hands by his side, a little boy lost. Standing on the railway station with his suitcase by his side, waiting for the Auschwitz Express – Jew Jew, Jew Jew. ‘Please don’t take me from my mother!’ Whatever your religion, you’re born knowing the day will come, born wondering if it will be today or if it will be tomorrow – the separation, the choice, her or her, your mother or your mother’s mortal enemy, the other woman. But if you’re born Jewish, the other woman is your people’s mortal enemy as well; as in this instance, not just a Gentile woman, not just the daughter of the woman who makes your fires on a Shabbes, but – is he mad or what is he? – a German! How many sins? Go on, Asher, add up the offences.

  The poor girl. How could she know how many offences she amounted to?

  ‘I want their approval,’ she told him. ‘I want your mother and your father to love me for loving you.’

  He pointed to his chest. Made a dagger of his hand and plunged it between his ribs. ‘It doesn’t feel right for me, either,’ he said. ‘Here! It doesn’t feel right, here, without their approval.’

  ‘What doesn’t feel right? You mean you don’t feel right about me?’

  ‘Everything. Nothing. None of it feels right.’

  She stared at him, a chill about her heart.

  ‘My mother and father loom very large in my life,’ he told her, as though she didn’t already know.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s why I want them to loom very large in mine. And why, so long as they don’t know about me, I feel I don’t loom very large for you. Take me to meet them, Asher.’

  Did she want the brutal truth? Did she want to hear him say Not a hope in hell, Dorothy ?

  And so it descended into the usual. ‘You’re not the only one with feelings because you’re Jewish, Asher.’

  Tears in his eyes. He the more emotional of the two. But silent. The silence a goad.

  ‘I’m not nobody, Asher. I’m not a nobody because I’m not Jewish.’

  A movement of his shoulders. Meaning what? That he knew she wasn’t nobody but there was nothing he could do about it?

  Until finally – ‘You people!’

  Whereupon Asher could empty his conscience of its guilt, accuse her of being an anti-Semite, and go home to his family.

  4

  ‘I bet you didn’t know,’ Manny said to me on one of his rare visits to my house, ‘that Germans iron their underwear.’

  He had just visited the bathroom, which seemed to explain the association. But it was also clear that he was looking for something to say to cover his embarrassment. Not easy for Manny, going to someone else ’s bathroom. His own bathroom was trial enough, what with the number of times he had to test that the wash taps were really off before he left, and the amount of flushing of the lavatory he had to do, but someone else ’s impos
ed a near-intolerable burden of conscientiousness on him. I was not a tap-twiddler myself. I did not believe that if I was not super vigilant, and then doubly vigilant of the effects of my vigilance, the sink or cistern would overflow, flooding the house or drowning its inhabitants in ordure. But I was similarly delicate. It was how we’d been brought up. For a people refined in the matter of the body’s exigencies, and respectful of others’ privacies, a visit to an alien bathroom constituted a transgression. In my case it was often (and still is often) accompanied by extreme sadness, as though the neatly folded towels and the scented tissues, the new soap in the soap dish, the eau de cologne, the considerate rows of scissors, tweezers, nail files, represented an innocence of which I was the defiler.

  Whether I am describing a philosophical dismay which is peculiarly Jewish I can’t be sure. But though we never discussed it, I knew that Manny was beset by it no less than I was. So if it is Jewish, it isn’t specifically Orthodox or liberal Jewish. It is of a Jewishness which predates theological finessing.

  Either way, it has to be said that Errol Tobias didn’t share it. Errol would have set up a branch of the Crumpsall Park Onanists in any bathroom that had a door to it, and even the door was optional. Years later, when I stayed with him for one night in Mill Hill – this was prior to his move to Borehamwood – I was shown into a guest bathroom papered with photographs torn from pornographic magazines of women with their legs open. ‘I like a bog to be a bog,’ he told me. ‘Enjoy!’

  But then Errol was the exception that proved every rule.

  As for Germans ironing their underwear, that’s one of those things you aren’t sure whether you know or not. It seemed of a piece with everything else I’d read about their methodical cruelty, but whether it had cropped up in The Scourge of the Swastika I couldn’t remember.

  ‘So how do you know this?’ I asked him. ‘Did Ilse Koch – may her name be wiped out – iron hers?’

  He threw me a strange look. ‘I just know it,’ he said, rubbing his fist in his hair. He had been reading about the importance of getting blood to the brain and reckoned that massaging his scalp with his knuckles would facilitate this. Then he suddenly asked me, ‘Can you keep a secret?’

  ‘Depends on the secret. If it doesn’t threaten the safety of my family I will keep it.’

  ‘It threatens the safety of my family.’

  ‘Then I’ll keep it.’

  ‘It’s someone Asher knows,’ he said, lowering his voice. Not counting the German letter he claimed he’d found in the street, this was the first allusion Manny had made, in my hearing, to Asher’s troubles.

  ‘Asher knows a German?’

  ‘He knows a girl who knows a German.’

  ‘Asher knows a girl?’

  Disingenuous of me. Everyone knew that Asher knew a girl. And everyone knew a lot more than that as well. But I didn’t want my knowledge to upset him.

  ‘It’s her father. Asher says he irons underwear in the kitchen, in front of him.’

  I pulled a face. The same face, apparently, that Asher pulled.

  We are finicky, we Jews. We no more want to see other people ‘s underwear or bathrooms than we want them to see ours. It was a matter of honour in our house not to leave even the most innocent item of underclothing lying about. It is possible I idealise, but I do not recall once coming upon a slip of my mother’s where it should not have been, nor my father’s vest, if he ever wore a vest. The same principle operated at the Washinskys’ which was in every other regard a rubbish dump. The first time Manny took me home he asked me not to look at anything. ‘My mother isn’t well,’ he told me. ‘That’s why nothing has been done today.’ But ‘doing’ wasn’t the problem. From the way the place appeared you could only guess that when the Washinskys ripped their clothes off at night they threw them on the floor in rage and left them there. Shirts, shoes, trousers, dresses, hats, keys, loose change, books, pens, pieces of paper – whatever had been about their persons was spilled and forgotten as though God had advised them the very moment they were naked to clear their minds of everything else and make ready to appear before Him. Yet even here, God or no God, not a single item private to the Washinskys’ wardrobe was left where you could find it. If I close my eyes I can picture their house as though I had been in it only this morning, the dumps of bed linen, the piles of towels, the tangles of disregarded clothing, the torn siddurim, but no articles of underwear do I espy. It’s possible they stuffed them into pillowcases. It’s possible they burnt them. It’s possible God took them. It’s conceivable they wore none. Whatever the explanation, the same fastidiousness that operated in the gleaming godless palace that was our house operated in the sad site of superstition and neglect that was theirs.

  And this applied to discussing the subject as well. So other than pull the same face as Asher, there wasn’t much of a response I was able to make. Germans ironing their underwear in front of you – ugh!

  If Manny had wanted to confide in me about his brother, or about the girl, I didn’t exactly make it easy for him. It’s possible I was too similar to him to be much use as a friend. There I was, lost inside the refined unspokennesses of my own head at a time Manny might have wanted me to help him get out of his.

  5

  It finally fell out as it was bound to.

  They were seen. The irony of it is that they were probably arguing at the time. As they thought, hid in hugger-mugger, each accusing the other of being a racist. Maybe even deciding to call it a day. No matter. They were seen and they were reported. Whether with diabolic intent, or with inside knowledge of the relative mental strengths of the Washinskys, whoever was the bearer of the news bore it to Mrs Washinsky first.

  And Mrs Washinsky’s initial impulse was interesting. She decided to keep it from her husband.

  ‘This will kill him,’ she told Asher, who had always thought it would kill her.

  They were sitting in the kitchen – as I conceive it, the debris of a dozen meals around them. Which you can be certain is me cartoonifying them again. The house was as one of the rubbish dumps of hell, but they were particular about food. They had to be. The Lord had ordered it. Merely to separate what was flaishikeh from what was milchikeh – not just the meat but the meat-associated from not just the dairy but the dairy-associated – occupied half a day. And that’s not to mention the amount of salting that went on. ‘I’d get nothing else done if I had to keep a home that was even ten per cent kosher,’ my mother used to say. By ‘nothing else ’, she was thinking of kalooki. And Channa Washinky kept a home 110 per cent kosher. Hence the rest of the house looking the way it did. Kosher ruled the roost. Kosher was king. Separating this from this – habdalah, keeping apart what didn’t belong together, the great act of discrimination at the centre of Jewish thought as well as Jewish diet – made it virtually impossible for the poor woman to lift a finger to anything else.

  Couldn’t the fire-yekelte have helped? Couldn’t the fire-yekelte have done a bit of general cleaning up – making the beds, dusting the furniture, taking the towels off the bathroom floor – after she ’d swept the grate? She did, she tried, but a fire-yekelte, too, was a thing apart, and besides, this was not a good time to be bringing up the fire-yekelte.

  Eerily, to Asher, his mother brought up nothing. She didn’t charge him. She didn’t ask how much of what she’d heard was true. She didn’t take him through the sacrifices both she and countless generations of Jewish mothers before her had made so that he, Asher, could with impunity find a Jewish woman who would in turn be mother to generations of Jews to come. She simply conjured her husband’s presence – his ghost in advance of his dying, as it were – and told Asher who would be held responsible.

  It was good psychology. A boy mindful of the sacredness of his father’s life cannot prevaricate, cannot lie or make excuses, when the ghost-to-be is in the room. It was also – depending where you’re coming from – good morality. It asserted the primacy of his father’s life over everything. Asher would be a fathe
r himself one day, all being well. And would expect to receive the same respect from his son. Thus, without saying much, without even having recourse to the J-, let alone the G-word, did she play the continuity card.

  She was a problem for the cartoonist, Channa Washinsky. I keep wanting to put her in a sheitel, the wig that every Orthodox Jewish wife is supposed to wear in order to prevent a man not her husband from lusting after her in his heart; but in all honesty, although they are usually easy enough to pick, on account of their making the wearer look tipsy and slow of wit, like some catatonic Netherlandish doll, I am not able to say whether she wore one or not. I want to make her pallid as well, but again without justification. I saw a photograph of her not long ago, and not only was her hair her own – it was too fine and lifeless to be anything else – but her complexion was halfway to being swarthy. Which shouldn’t be at all surprising, given Asher’s Levantine colouring. So why can’t I, why couldn’t I, see her as she was? Caricature is a methodology for telling a greater truth – that’s where I stand – but even I accept that what the artist caricatures, the ordinary eye must recognise as just. So why couldn’t I be just to Channa Washinsky? Why couldn’t I, to cite another example of my determination to distort her, not see that she had rather fine dark eyes, a little sleepy it is true, but poignant in their thwarted lustre? A sentence of Zoë’s returns to me. ‘Unless a woman is made up to the nines, dressed to kill, smelling like the perfume counter in Harrods and beckoning you with her little finger which must have gold on it, you don’t notice her – do you know that?’ ‘I noticed you,’ I reminded her. ‘Of course you noticed me – I was spotlit, fuckwit, standing on a stage, imitating Marlene Dietrich, in six-inch heels and a see-through gown that was slit to my vagina . . . I’m speaking metaphorically.’ Point taken. I didn’t notice Manny’s mother because she wasn’t anybody I wanted to see. She wasn’t immodest.