Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  I was meant to recite Kaddish at the graveside, the great booming lamentation for the Jewish dead, but I botched it. Tsedraiter Ike had transliterated it for me. Yisgadal veyiskadash . . . Those dreaded words. Like the tolling of the final bell. You hear them in synagogue when you are young, chanted by orphans and bereaved brothers, and you wonder when your time will come and whether you will be up to it. Well, the time had come, and I wasn’t. Yisgadal veyiskadash shemey rabo, Be’olmo di’vero chir’usey. Botched, but not the time for blaming my dad for never teaching me the Hebrew or its meaning. May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified – Amen – in the world He created as He willed.Tsedraiter Ike helped me through. He was just about the only man there who had any inkling of what we were doing or saying. My father’s friends looked at the ground or moved their lips at what they hoped were the right moments. Of no use to him whatsoever now. Die and any atheist friends you have are blown away like the leaves from winter’s trees.

  As though to compensate for his shortcomings at my father’s funeral, where his sole concession to the solemnity of the occasion had been to remove his ironic spectacles and dab twice at his eyes, Rodney Silverman wrote me a sweet letter the week following, telling me how he had always admired my father, what a fine and upright man he was, and how he had thought of him recently when he saw Rembrandt’s painting of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. ‘It is a most terrifying portrait of the eternal Jewish father,’ he wrote, ‘his hand completely covering Isaac’s face, manhandling it in a way that suggests the boy’s life is his to do with as he pleases. In this way it denies the rights of the mother absolutely. But look again, Max, and you will see that Abraham’s action is in fact loving. The reason he covers his son’s face so completely is that he wishes to spare him the sight of the knife going into his heart. Your father was an Abraham. If he sometimes appeared brusque or brutal with you, it was only because he wanted to save you from the cruelty of the world. But you are the artist, so I don’t have to explain any of this to you.’

  He also sent me a gift. While on one of his many visits to America on union business he had come across a comic book called Impact #1 which contained an illustrated story he thought would interest me. ‘Master Race’ written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Bernard Krigstein. These Jews! Feldstein and Krigstein! Where would any of us be without these Jews? Rodney Silverman didn’t say that, I did. What Rodney Silverman said was that he thought ‘Master Race’ was pretty good, and he thought I would too . . .Continuing heartfelt condolences and all good wishes, Rodney.

  He was right. I did think it was pretty good. Noirish, I suppose we would call it now, futuristic in its line, the sequences of panels cold and filmic, vertiginous in their perspective and their morality, the wicked falling from the height of their wrongdoing in a series of incontrovertible frames, the good almost static in their icy vengefulness, never to be satisfied, existentially inconsolable. The story – though the story is secondary to its illustration – depicts Carl Reissman, a commandant of a Nazi death camp who somehow managed to escape before the Russians arrived, losing himself ‘among the streams of refugees that choked the roads and highways before the advancing allied armies . . .’ Also surviving the camp is one of Reissman’s victims. In a flashback he swears, ‘I’ll get you, Reissman. I’ll get you if it’s the LAST THING I DO!’ It is this nameless survivor who one day sees Reissman as he travels on the New York subway. The two men, torturer and victim, recognise each other. The survivor chases the ex-Nazi down a platform which is emptied of every other living soul. It is just one-to-one, as each of them has no doubt a thousand times imagined it one day would be. In his haste to escape, Reissman is drawn falling in slow motion, like Lucifer being hurled from heaven – or does he hurl himself? – under an approaching train. Black-hatted, black-coated, cadaverous, expressionless, the survivor is left watching the train rage past, every face in every window as blank and pitiless as his own.

  ‘What happened?’ people gather from nowhere to ask. ‘Ever see him before?’

  ’No,’ the survivor answers, averting a head which in the shadows looks almost shaven. Then, in a narrow panel of unrelieved gloom – the survivor’s coat blacker than the darkness of the Underground, his back completely turned now – he delivers his final line, as though to no one: ‘He was a perfect stranger.’

  Did Krigstein see himself as the survivor, at the mercy of the cruelty of strangers? Did I see myself as Krigstein? Perhaps because I had just lost my father I adopted him from a distance. At one and the same time I identified him with my father, with Rodney Silverman, and with the artist I aspired to be. It wasn’t hero worship. Outside of Rembrandt and Goya and Rubens and one or two others of similar stature, I didn’t do heroes. And it wasn’t as though I wanted to draw like him. There were no visual jokes in Krigstein. He was too quiet for my taste. Too stark. But something troubled in him spoke to me. So that I wasn’t too surprised to learn, years later, not only that he had been an agitator for the rights of illustrators and cartoonists – a union man, which was probably what Rodney Silverman saw in him – but that he’d grown to be desperately unhappy in what he did, and considered himself to be a serious artist who had squandered his genius on a trivial form. The eternal Jewish conundrum. Do you dedicate your talents to God, who never laughs, or do you make a clown of yourself to win the love and admiration of mere mortals? Eventually, Krigstein gave up illustrating comic books in order to return to painting. According to critics who knew what they were talking about, the serious paintings he produced in his later years were leaden compared to his comic-book illustrations.

  Hard, once the imp of high-art ambition leaps on the back of a cartoonist. Or vice versa.

  Had I ever met Krigstein I’d have told him that his expressionless survivor, surveying the emptiness of his revenge, haunted me as much as any image of moral futility I’d encountered in high art. But I doubt he would have thanked me for that.

  7

  My mother took in less of what had happened at my father’s funeral than I did. Even while my father was still alive she had begun to turn away. Shani did the looking for her. Shani did the arranging. Shani did the welcoming, the comforting and the goodbyes. I hadn’t realised, until the day my father was buried into the Jewish faith, how tall Shani was. It’s possible this was the first time I had ever seen her upright and in shoes. Very fine she looked, buttoned and veiled, having found an outfit that suited her, and an occasion on which to wear it, at last.

  We sat shiva for not quite as long as we should have done, my mother picking up the threads of my father’s testiness. ‘Enough of this machareike,’ she said, sending back the foreshortened stools and taking the coverings off the mirrors. Tsedraiter Ike was scandalised. He loved sitting shiva. ‘The only time you can ever get him to go out,’ I remember my father saying, ‘is when someone dies.’ We used to marvel at Tsedraiter Ike’s knowledge of the houses of the dead. Where did he get his information? Was there some publication that came for him in a brown, or would it have been a black, wrapper? Was he on some hellish guest list? Or did he just go out into the street and follow his nose? He was never happier, anyway, than taking chopped fish round to some grieving family and wishing them long life. Only the principal mourners rend their clothes, but Tsedraiter Ike would have sat on a low stool in a torn jacket for all eternity had it been permitted. And here was my mother curtailing an opportunity for a shiva of which he had been at the very centre.

  What I think stopped him putting up more of a fight was grief. For all that he and my father had never seen eye to eye on a single subject, my father continually reminding him that he was tolerated only out of deference to my mother, and that he couldn’t count on being tolerated for ever even then, Tsedraiter Ike was as devastated by my father’s death as any of us, and as a consequence had developed a new habit of vigorously shaking his head, as though in mortal disagreement with Somebody. When my mother shortened the shiva period, he registered his complaint by sitting it solo in his own ro
om. He knew what was owing to the sacred memory of the dead, even if we didn’t. Where we had abbreviated, he extended. Day after day we didn’t see him, just heard him davening. My mother indulged him for a while then called him down. ‘Ike, what are you doing up there? Trying to kill yourself? That won’t bring Jack back.’ She berated him for being ghoulish, and ordered him back into normal clothes and the routines of the living. He didn’t argue with her. He knew which side his bread was buttered, prayers for the dead or no prayers for the dead. ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor,’ he sang as he withdrew, nodding, from her presence.

  Thus did my mother take over from my father the responsibility of making Tsedraiter Ike feel unwanted. It suited him. He needed someone to make him feel that.

  At the same time she informed me that she was about to resume kalooki.

  I looked at her as Hamlet looks at his mother in every production of the play I have ever seen. That it should come to this: but two months dead, nay, not so much, not two . . . Not even one month in my father’s case. Not two weeks . . .

  ‘Are you upset with me?’ she wanted to know.

  ‘Ma, it’s a bit soon.’

  She sat me down at the kitchen table and stretched her hands out so that they were touching mine. Not holding, just a light rhythmic tap of her fingers on my fingers. ‘Your father asked me to promise him that I would marry again,’ she said.

  I was discomforted by the intimacy. We didn’t go in for this kind of talk in our house. None of the Jews I knew did. Whatever Gentiles surmise, sometimes enviously surmise, of the closeness of Jew to Jew, of the hothouse which is the Jewish family, the home life of Jews is in truth marbled with the finest traceries of reticence. Yes, we live in each other’s pockets, often long after the historical necessity to do so has been removed, but you can live in each other’s pockets and still be strangers. It took death to acquaint me with Shani. But since my mother had brought up the subject of her marrying again, I had no choice but to ask, ‘And will you?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well, if you’re up for cards, why not a husband?’

  ‘They’re not exactly the same thing, Maxie. Your father asked me to promise him solemnly that I would find another man – he even suggested a couple of names . . .’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Little Ike and Liverpool Ike, if you must know.’

  ‘But they’re Jewish. Surely he’d have wanted you to take a Catholic. Or at least an atheist. And if he has to be a Jew, what’s wrong with “Long John” Silverman? Dad loved “Long John” Silverman. And “Long John” Silverman has always drooled at the mouth for you.’

  She inclined her lovely head. No point denying what was undeniable, and, let’s face it, due. ‘Maxie, “Long John” Silverman has a wife of his own.’

  ‘Big deal. Get Little Ike to run away with her.’ Little Ike, for the record, being known, despite his size, as something of a runner with other men’s wives.

  My mother curled her mouth at me. ‘Very funny, darling. Marital musical chairs. But you know how bad I’d be at that. Everyone else gets a seat, I’m left standing.’ She paused, surveying herself marooned at the party, only her on her feet. Then she shook herself out of it. No self-pity. It was her great strength. She refused sadness. ‘None of it’s of any relevance just now, anyway,’ she went on. ‘I refused to make the promise your father asked for. I don’t want another husband. I cared too deeply for your father to suppose I can care deeply for someone else. I don’t intend even to try. I don’t want to care deeply, in that way, for another man. It’s foolish, I accept that, to pretend to know how I’ll feel ten or fifteen years from now, but I hope I will be saying the same to you then.’

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. ‘But just for the moment . . .’

  ‘You’d like me not to play kalooki?’

  Against the hosts of other men lined up waiting for my mother – she was a beauty, don’t forget, and the more beautiful, I thought, for being a widow, with lovely lugubrious ovals, like ashen teardrops, looped beneath her eyes – against the Little Ikes, and even the Big Ikes for all I knew, a game of kalooki, when all was said and done, did not represent the greatest of derelictions. But then it wasn’t a matter of one or the other, was it? For a little while at least, it was open to her not to take another husband and not to play kalooki. ‘Or is that,’ I asked, twisting the corners of my mouth this time, ‘too much to ask?’

  She had a way of nodding her head – not shaking it from side to side as Tsedraiter Ike had taken to doing, in apparent disagreement with Someone – but as though to concur in everything you were saying while not really listening to a word of it. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it isn’t too much to ask, and if you’d rather I didn’t, then I won’t.’

  ‘What does Shani think?’ Shani, the new arbiter of right and wrong, the new Moses Maimonides in our family. Guide us out of our perplexity, Shani.

  ‘Shani thinks I should ask myself what your father would have wanted.’

  ‘You know what my father would have wanted. He hated kalooki. He believed it was the name of a shtetl.’

  She looked hurt. ‘You’re wrong there, Max. That was just his teasing. He had no desire to play himself, I grant you, but he liked it that I played. He said he’d rather know where I was, that he’d rather have me sitting shuffling a kalooki deck at home with my friends than see me dolling myself up to go to shul, or busybodying myself in Jewish causes.’

  ’I thought kalooki was a Jewish cause.’

  ‘Only when I made it one to get you your gala night.’ No mistaking the reprimand. As though to say this was a poor way to thank someone who’d delivered me Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye.

  I inclined my head in acknowledgement of that, then scratched it. ‘So you’d really be getting back into kalooki for Dad, is that what you’re saying? You’re really doing it as a favour to him.’

  ‘You know what your father was like. No fuss. No sentimentality. Life is for the living. You could make fun of me, Maxie, if I came home tomorrow with a new prospective husband and said I was marrying him for your father. But I have no intention of doing that.’

  It was a trade-off. I can bring a Mr Murdstone back, or you can leave me to my kalooki. You choose, Maxie.

  I threw up my hands, much as my father would have done. ‘Play your cards,’ I said.

  Thereafter, though there were no further conversations on the subject, I thought a great deal about what she’d said to me. She was frightened, I could see that. She feared she would be rudderless and didn’t want to go down the usual route of finding another man to rudder her. Fair enough. More unsettling was the bold implication – for such I took it to be – that by returning to kalooki before decency allowed she was at a stroke reinstating the provocatively secular regime of my father. The unbeliever is dead, long live the unbeliever! Continuity – that was how she was selling it to me and no doubt to herself. Get kalooki back into the house, quick, and it would be as though my father had never left us.

  On the face of it, the logic was hard to follow, but once followed, hard to fault. I was even prepared to be admiring of it. My mother, the heroine of the unconventionalities. No wonder my father had loved her.

  But what if she were simply shallow?

  BOOK TWO

  NO BLOODY WONDER

  NINE

  1

  Manny had no more recognised me than I had recognised him that first time we got together again at the pizza restaurant in Manchester. But he didn’t tell me that until the second time we got together again.

  ‘You’re different,’ he’d said, without quite looking at me.

  ‘Well, it has been half a lifetime since we last saw each other,’ I’d reminded him.

  ‘We ate together last week.’

  ‘I thought we were talking about before that.’

  ‘Thirty-eight years.’

  I had no idea when he was counting from. ‘Not surprising then.’

 
This time he did half look in my direction. So blue the eye he showed me, so much bluer than I’d remembered, that for a moment or two I seriously wondered if it were glass. The consequence of a prison fight? Or of an operation to extract the patricidal section of his brain? But then he showed me the other eye, and that too was the colour of the sky. ‘No,’ he said, ‘something’s different. Your nose is different.’

  He was right. My nose was different. Not different in the way that Zoë in her time would have liked – not smaller, but then again not exactly bigger either. The adjective is hard to find. But Manny probably put his finger on it. ‘It seems to have spread across your face more,’ he said, with a cruel indifference to my feelings which I at first attributed to the hardening influence of incarceration, until I remembered that he had always been like that. Not rude, just unaware of politeness.

  Not without its ironies, what had happened to my nose. Not without ironic implications for Zoë, anyway. When Zoë wasn’t pestering me to get it shortened she was complaining about the noises I made through it when I breathed. Not much I could do about that, I told her, short of giving up breathing altogether.

  As always she gave consideration to whatever I suggested, the sweetest of quizzical expressions lighting up her impeccable and soundless features.

  My own theory was that my breathing, which I freely acknowledged could be over-audible at times, was a consequence of the same condition that gave me nosebleeds, the epistaxis which I had inherited from my late father.

  ‘And did your father also snore like an express train?’ Zoë wanted to know.

  ‘Whether he did or he didn’t,’ I answered, ‘I believe my mother slept like a normal person and therefore didn’t notice.’

  This was a reference to what I considered to be the abnormality of Zoë’s sleep patterns, a matter of some contention between us, since she believed she slept the way a person was meant to sleep, that’s to say stretched between waking and unconsciousness like piano wire, her eyes wide open and every millimetre of her flesh aquiver to the faintest rustle, let it be breath issuing from my nostril or the wind fluttering a sweet wrapper three streets away.