Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  You howl when you hear your dying father remembering when he first held his baby in his arms, regardless of whether that baby was you or someone else. And that was what I did, I ran out of the house and howled the rest of the day away in the air-raid shelter. Was I jealous of Shani? I’m not sure the question is even worth asking. Jealousy and envy are so constituent to our natures we might as well factor them into every consideration of our dealings with one another and not refer to them again. But beyond that, beyond that mole of inwrought meanness, I don’t believe I was put out. My father hadn’t named me after anything beautiful, but I did bear the name of a boxer he admired, and boxing had certainly been as important in his life as beauty. Yes, I howled for me because I would soon be fatherless, but otherwise I howled for him, and, though it goes against the grain professionally for me to say this, for the love he bore his daughter. Call that my Jewish sentimentality. He adored her. She was his shaineh maidel, which meant that he adored her with some part of himself that was mysterious to me, and must have been equally mysterious to him. Was it his father who was talking through him, or his father’s father before him? I had never known either, but I howled for them as well.

  She never left his side. There were complications. Pneumonia? I don’t know. I couldn’t bear to take in the physical facts of his illness. Nor could my mother. We closed our ears when the doctor spoke to us. It wasn’t my father’s death we were in denial of but the truth about bodies. And not just our bodies, all bodies. We didn’t want to know how they worked. Offered the choice between ignorance and knowledge, we chose ignorance. Shani was different. Shani took in every detail of what was wrong with him, saw to the medication, told him what to expect, cleaned him up, changed his pyjamas, turned him in his bed, everything. And all without a single expression of petulance or complaint. Gone, the angry fretful girl who had locked herself away all day, unable to reconcile her eyes to her appearance, gone as though she had never existed. Unable to comprehend what we were seeing, my mother and I exchanged wide-eyed stares of astonishment when we passed on the stairs, but otherwise said nothing. It was as though we didn’t want to speak in case we broke the spell. It’s also possible we were too ashamed to speak. Ashamed of our incompetence and squeamishness, but equally ashamed of the bad opinion we ‘d had of Shani. She wasn’t who we thought she was. Not simply unlike herself, but a different person entirely.

  The only one who didn’t seem surprised by this was my father. At an hour when Shani would normally have been immured in her bedclothes, there she was, taking his temperature or delivering him his breakfast. And dressed. Dressed not in a sheet either! ‘And how’s my beautiful daughter this fine morning?’ he would say to her, as though she ’d been ministering to him with precisely this efficiency every morning of her life.

  She sponged his face, emery-boarded his nails, shaved him – though until the final days he wasn’t so weak that he couldn’t have shaved himself – even cut his hair. He behaved like a child throughout these procedures, submitting to her, as he had never submitted to the decisions of any referee, with the sweetest compliancy, smiling, gazing up at her, and sometimes laughing to himself.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ she would say, gently pinching his cheeks.

  ‘So that you will do that.’

  She could barely catch her breath. ‘You’re trying to make me cry.’

  He would smile at her, his turn now to touch her face. ‘I’m not. I wouldn’t make you cry for the whole wide world.’

  But sometimes, usually in the late afternoon when she ‘d finished her tasks, they wept openly together. And then he would call her his shaineh maidel again. Which only made her weep the more copiously.

  Whether he wept with my mother, I don’t know. That would have happened, if it happened at all, in the night. What occurred between them had always been subject to the strictest blackout. No jocularity, no ribaldry, in our house in the matter of intimate relations between man and wife. They could have been a rabbi and rebitsin, so decorous were they. Indeed, I am hard-pressed to think of any rabbi I have ever met who was as instinctively modest as my father. Never once, for example, did I see him naked. I have photographs of him in the ring, with his chest bare and his chin out and his nose about to bleed, but even in these he is wearing shorts up to his neck and down to his ankles. My mother the same, and I don’t mean with regard to the chest and the shorts. I cannot recall ever having seen her anything but dressed and made-up for the day, and certainly never in a bathrobe. I can only guess, then, at what it must have been like for them in the night, organising their goodbyes, with my father so respectful of her, and she so unwilling to approach the failing of his body. But black circles were appearing around her eyes, and she was beginning to fall absent, forgetting what she had to do, and on occasions who she was talking to.

  To me, my father was soldierly. I had to be a strong boy and look after my mother and my sister. Unfortunately I was rarely able to be soldierly in return. No sooner did he say those words – ‘You’re going to have to be a strong boy, Maxie, and look after your mother and your sister’ – than I would begin my howling again. I do no better remembering the words today.

  He asked for me one evening, gave me his hand to hold, which I hadn’t done since I was about six, and told me to fight the good fight. When I asked him what he meant he said he didn’t know but I should fight it anyway.

  I said I would.

  He released his hand from mine, then squeezed my fingers. ‘I’ve worked out what it all adds up to,’ he said. ‘It adds up to my family.’

  Howl, Maxie! Except I knew I didn’t dare.

  ‘That’s what I’ll take,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’ll settle for. A long shlof and my family.’

  ‘Gai shlofn,’ he used to say to me when I was small. Go to sleep, but also sometimes meaning put a sock in it. I loved the word. You could hear peace in it. After life ’s fitful fever, he shlofs well.

  ‘Shlof now,’ I said, ‘you look tired.’

  ‘I mean a longer shlof than that,’ he said with a little laugh. ‘A much longer shlof than that, Maxie.’

  It was almost Christian. A long sleep in the arms of the Lord. But then it’s from us the Christians learned it. The shlof that passeth understanding.

  But waiting for the Lord was becoming harrowing.

  ‘Do you know what,’ my mother said to me in the final days, ‘I think I’d have preferred it if he’d died in a road accident.’

  I tried to smile at her.

  ‘Do you think that’s terrible of me, Maxie?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I don’t. I know what you mean. It’s the saying goodbye.’

  She looked distraught. ‘But our Shani has been doing it for

  weeks.’

  This was the first mention we had made of it. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s amazing.’

  She stared at me, her eyes wild. ‘Where do you think she gets it from?’

  I’d already decided that. ‘From him,’ I said.

  Shani was with him when he died. I cannot say whether they planned it that way. I doubt it. I am sure he would have wanted all of us there, but then again he knew who the strong ones were and weren’t.

  She came out of his room, a whiter white than you would have thought a living person could be. My mother sank to her knees when she saw her.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Shani said. ‘He was very good. Very good. He asked me to comb his hair. Then he told me to say that he loved you all, then he closed his eyes.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘And that was that.’

  She seemed ever so slightly disappointed, as though there should have been more.

  In a strange way I felt there had been too much. Loved us all. That wasn’t how my father spoke. No love talk. At least not away from the blackout which was his love affair with my mother. But then I didn’t know what fathers said when they were taking leave of their families. And it was always possible that Shani had made it all up to spare us the fact that what he ’d really said was,
‘My shaineh maidel’, and taken her into his arms one final time.

  These Jewish men!

  2

  Selick Washinsky’s stroke affected Asher in ways he would not have expected. In expectation of such an event – and he had anticipated it often – he had seen himself running to the hospital and begging his father’s forgiveness. Thereafter there were alternative versions of the story. Sometimes he would promise never to see Dorothy again. Sometimes he would no sooner beg his father’s forgiveness than he would further beg him to give Dorothy a chance – ‘If you only knew her, if you would only meet her, you would love her, Dad.’ To which reasonable plea, in one version, his father would listen patiently. And in another would respond by having a second stroke.

  What Asher had not made provision for was his own intransigence. No, he would not budge. No, he would not give in to blackmail. For his part, Selick Washinsky’s mistake was to have had an insufficiently serious stroke. He didn’t look ill enough when Asher went to visit him in hospital. Jack Glickman in a neighbouring bed looked far more sick, and Jack Glickman didn’t have a son who was seeing a fire-yekelte ’s daughter – that much he knew, leaving the son out of it, from the fact that the Glickmans didn’t run a kosher house and therefore didn’t need a fire-yekelte. His father wasn’t looking well, Asher accepted that, but when had his father looked well? As soon as he saw him, Asher decided it was a trick. Jewish fathers could throw strokes the way other men could throw a switch. There was nothing wrong with him. He just didn’t want his son marrying the daughter of the woman who made their fire and who also happened to be German. Well, that was tough shit. Asher kissed his father on both cheeks and handed him a box of kosher chocolates.

  ‘What’s this,’ his father asked, ‘a mockery?’

  To which Asher replied, ‘No, Dad, the mockery is you.’

  ‘He’s faking it,’ he told Dorothy. ‘It’s not real. He made it happen.’

  ‘But he is in hospital,’ she reminded him.

  ‘He was in hospital. By now they’ll have let him out.’

  She couldn’t see how this helped them. If anything the situation was worse now. If a man could fake a stroke to stop his son being with her, it didn’t mean he was less upset than had his stroke been real. It might mean he was more upset. She could see where this would end – with Selick Washinsky dying and Asher saying it wasn’t real, even as they were throwing pebbles on his grave.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Tell them to geh in dred.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  ‘To go to hell.’

  ‘I know what the words mean, Asher. You’ve used them to me enough times. What I’m asking is what effect they will have.’

  ‘It will have the effect of making them realise that unless they want to lose me for ever they will have to accept you.’

  She puffed her cheeks out. Sometimes she thought she knew Jewish families better than he did.

  Asher didn’t tell his parents to geh in dred. They told him. Leave the girl or get out. There was nothing more to say.

  In fact there must have been plenty more to say, otherwise Tsedraiter Ike would not have gone round there to see if Selick Washinsky were having another stroke. But that was what it boiled down to. Leave the girl or never be seen by us again. Leave the girl or accept that you are an orphan. Leave the girl or be as good as dead to us.

  Asher made the mistake of saying, ‘Isn’t that a bit extreme, Dad?’

  I happen to know that because Manny, finding it harder and harder to keep what had been happening to himself, told me, some time later, a little of what ensued. They had been drawing him into it for weeks. No avoiding it. ‘You talk to him, he ’s your brother, get him to see sense,’ coming from his parents; ‘Speak up for me, they’ll listen to you, tell them it’ll blow over if they give it time, but this way . . . explain to them,’ coming from his brother. Manny hadn’t mentioned any of this while it was happening. Not a word. I’d be surprised if he said much to any of the parties either, despite what they asked of him. He was not a person who responded well to pressure. Demand anything of Manny and he’d hold his breath for half an hour. Try to get his attention and he ’d be off down the street, practising his breaststroke. He knew what he was good at. He understood his own tolerance level. When someone wanted help he swam away from them.

  But after Asher’s ‘Isn’t that a bit extreme, Dad?’ he was willynilly a participant. When your father and your brother are wrestling on the floor, you cannot just stand there holding your breath, even if you are Manny Washinsky.

  ‘A bit extreme!’ Selick Washinsky had shrei’d – shrei being a Jewish scream, something only Jews can do. ‘Me! A bit extreme! You go to bed with a German girl, a child, you take advantage of a child, the daughter of a woman who works for us and who we respect . . . You come to my hospital bed and call me a mockery . . . You spit in your mother’s face, you bring disgrace upon your family, and you call me a bit extreme!’ He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, his hands tearing at air, as though it was the word itself he wanted to attack – extreme, the word extreme, if he could only get at it, and when he did get at it he would rip it apart letter by letter.

  ‘Selick, Selick, stop it! Selick, you’ve just come out of hospital,’ his wife had cried, trying to calm him, to come him between him and that word.

  ‘Extreme! A bit extreme!’ And then, because there’s nowhere else a shrei can go, and because he had decided at last where and where only the word was to be found, he had leapt at Asher’s throat. ‘I’ll kill you. May the Almighty forgive me, I’ll kill you . . .’

  And had he been possessed of the necessary strength he would have.

  Maybe this was the fight that brought Tsedraiter Ike across, maybe it wasn’t. Apparently there were any number of scenes like these. This one, at least, was terminated when Manny piled in on top of his brother and his father, lashing out at both of them, and having what he described to me as an epileptic fit.

  ‘You are an epileptic?’

  ‘No. I just had this fit. My legs went stiff, I couldn’t stop my arms shaking, my face turned to ice and I was foaming at the mouth.’

  Rabies! So I’d been right to be worried the time he bit me. If he’d bitten me that bit closer to my thumb who knows what the consequence would have been.

  ‘Have you ever foamed at the mouth before?’

  ‘Never.’

  And no doubt he thought he would never foam at the mouth or be otherwise unrecognisable to himself again. Which just goes to show how little we know about ourselves.

  How did it happen, how did Elohim allow it to happen, that a boy as hesitant and introjective as Manny Washinsky, a boy so unprovocative and – not to be unkind – invisible, could have found himself entrammelled in so much violence? How many times was it that I’d either seen or heard about him doing battle on the floor? Here am I, the son of a boxer, by profession a scratcher-out of eyes, a brute without a heart, if Zoë was to be believed, and to date I have never found myself in anything that remotely resembles a fight, not even an upright almost shaping up to be a fight, let alone a down and dirty horizontal wrestle.

  At least not with men. And even with the women, I always ran before a blow could be landed.

  Was it simply Manny’s bad luck? Did these misadventures just befall him? Or was there something in his nature that sought them out?

  Not hard to imagine, whatever one makes of Manny’s fit, what must have been going through Asher’s mind. His father trying to kill him, his brother foaming at the mouth, his mother yelling ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ and throwing salt on the combatants, as though to kosher them into stopping. Is any woman worth all this? Asher must have asked himself. But the opposite thought, too, must have seized him: who wouldn’t run to any woman to escape all this? And with each thought the corresponding image – Dorothy, lovely but insubstantial, just a girl, to be relinquished; and Dorothy, the girl who loved him, who wouldn’t raise a fi
nger to harm him, and with whom every moment was as an eternity of peace.

  Whether or not it was the salt that did it, a kind of peace was restored here too. The parties withdrew. Nothing was said. Each waiting for the other to make the next move. Briefly, Asher gave way to the crazy fantasy that the hours of silence denoted the beginnings of a change of heart on his parents’ part. They would come to see that his happiness was paramount. Little by little they were growing to understand that he would be no less Jewish for being with the fire-yekelte ’s German daughter – who was, when all was said and done, only half-German, don’t forget that – but on the contrary that he would be the more Jewish as a consequence of being with her, for was it not a Jew’s responsibility to be happy and to glory in the variousness of the world which Elohim had made? It was possible, yes it was possible that on their own and in the quiet of their confabulations they would come to see that. For their part, his parents were less sanguine. You can’t leave a Jewish boy with a non-Jewish woman and expect him to come to his senses unaided. That is not how it happens. The Jewish boy doesn’t have the seichel, the nous, and the non-Jewish woman doesn’t have the charity. How can she have? She has laid her hands on the one thing non-Jewish women prize above all others. She has got herself a yeshiva bocher. Sidelocks, fringes, yarmulke, the lot. The prince she has been dreaming of all her life. You can’t even blame her for her cupidity. What woman wouldn’t do the same! So all the silence of Selick and Channa Washinsky denoted was a change of plan. They had tried holding him responsible for killing his father, now they would try holding him responsible for destroying their marriage.

  ‘You know what your father is saying to me,’ Channa told her son. ‘He is saying that it is my fault. That the reason you are as you are is because I have brought you up badly, that his children are a bitter disappointment to him due to my misguidance. He believes that the twenty years we’ve been together are wasted.’