Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  ‘Isn’t there something called kochleffel?’

  ‘Yes, but you don‘t eat it. A kochleffel is a busybody. A stirrer. You want to watch it when Shani starts to call you that.’

  He beamed at me. ‘So lovely.’

  ‘Shani?’

  ‘No . . . I mean yes, of course, but I was talking about the language. Such a lovely language, Yiddish!’

  Indeed. But then I hadn’t told him what k’nish meant in slang.

  I was prepared, this once, for Shani’s sake, to take him through every dish on the menu, but I had to stop him when his curiosity grew more philosophical and he tried to get me on the difference between shmendrik and shmerrel and shmuck and shmegege and shmulky and shlemiel and shlimazel and shvontz and the hundreds of others – the rich roll-call of dishonour in which a people who prize intelligence above all things register the minutest distinctions between ignorance, simplicity, folly, buffoonery, ineptitude, sadness and sheer bad luck.

  ‘Just one thing more,’ he said, after he ‘d paid the bill. ‘If you had to choose between shmendrik, and shmerrel and shmegege—’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I can’t. There aren’t enough hours in the day.’

  He laid his hand on mine. ‘Let me finish. If you had to choose one of those to describe me, which would it be?’

  I was horrified. ‘Mick, why are you asking me that? You are none of those things.’ For a terrible moment I wondered whether Shani or my mother had been abusing him. And then I realised. Tsedraiter Ike – himself named after a weakness of the brain that was nearly but not quite the same as that suffered by a meshuggener. Tsedraiter Ike, I felt sure, had been undermining him in Yiddish, no doubt spitting the words at him through the letter box when he arrived for kalooki. And no doubt spitting them at him again from his bedroom window when he left.

  ‘Take no notice of a word that wicked old bastard says,’ was my advice. ‘My father, who was a good judge of character, and who it’s a great shame you never met, wanted to throw him out of the house.’

  Mick smiled at me, not bothering to pretend he didn’t know who I meant. ‘He’s a momzer, yes?’

  ‘Mamzer. Momzer’s London Yiddish.’

  He looked alarmed. ‘You’re telling me there’s London Yiddish and Manchester Yiddish?’

  ‘And Glasgow. And Leeds. And Dublin, too, presumably.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Oy, oy, oy – I’ll never master it.’

  ‘Just don’t try to rush it,’ I said. ‘It takes five thousand years.’

  Though he’d paid the bill he didn’t want to leave.

  ‘Just a coffee.’

  Fine by me, but I had to stay his hand before he could ask the waiter to bring him cream. ‘They can’t serve you dairy after meat,’ I told him.

  He punched the side of his face, and took his notebook out again. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I did know that, but it didn’t feel like meat.’

  ‘It never does,’ I reassured him.

  Funny, how protective of him I felt, though he was older than me by a dozen years or more. He was a sweet man. Much the sweetest Irishman I had ever met. I could see why Shani liked him. I’d have kissed the dimple in his chin myself had I been a woman. Shani was very lucky, I thought. We all were. He was an addition to our little family. But I was worried for him. No one should want to be that Jewish. Certainly no one who wasn’t Jewish to begin with. The shaygets who would be Jew . . . it felt self-harming, pathological in the way that explorers who’d lost their way and cheerfully ended up as tribesmen with bones through their noses seemed pathological. Had I suggested circumcision I’m sure he’d have agreed to it. That’s supposing he hadn’t taken that drastic step already.

  I shook his hand warmly when we parted – a ‘you’re one of us now’ sort of shake – but he insisted on hugging me, this a good twenty years before hugging between men had been normalised. Such goodwill, I thought on the bus home. We enjoy such goodwill from so many. Do we make it all up, this anti-Semitism? Is it a fire in us we need to feed? Could we possibly have called the Nazis down on us because we couldn’t exist without them?

  For an hour or so I felt as though I had woken into a different universe, where everything was love. Had someone asked me to empty my pockets into his I’d have agreed to do it. All men were brothers. There wasn’t a person anywhere who didn’t wish me well. I was lucky I made it home in one piece. Certainly lucky I didn’t fall off the bus. These moments can rob you of your balance.

  But the next night I started going out with Chloë, and I was firmly on two feet again.

  5

  Why I fell for Chloë Anderson when she enrolled in art college in a Chanel suit and French high heels with two cameras carried diagonally across her chest like small arms is not a question in need of an answer. You couldn’t not. You couldn’t not if you were me, anyway. The shoes had something to do with it. As the son and brother of women who between them owned every pair of shoes that had ever come off a shoemaker’s last, I understood the poetry of shoes. But Shani, at least prior to my father’s death, no sooner put something on her feet than she looked like a mill girl off for a Saturday night eating fish and chips out of a newspaper in Blackpool. She clomped, she teetered, she clickety-clacked, often not even making it down the stairs before realising she couldn’t go out in what she was wearing, returning to her room and hurling her entire wardrobe against the wall. My mother the same. Despite the classical attenuation of her ankles – the heel narrowly incurved, the ankle bone itself a perfect sphere, and with a glisten on it, like sucked caramel – my mother had only to put on a heel higher than her thumb and she metamorphosed into a fine piece of ass, the sort of dame that gave a Chicago mobster cachet.

  Whereas Chloë . . . Chloë in shoes was all paradox. Austere and yet with daggers for feet, the convent girl and the streetwalker, slightly scuffed and yet somehow scuffed to plan – how did she do that?

  She made me sorry for Shani and my mother even as I fell for her. Sorry for all Jewish women if I am to tell the truth. No instinct for ambivalence, you see. No double meanings.

  When the daughters of Israel tinkled their feet for their menfolk, their intention was solely to give pleasure. Chloë too was in the pleasure business, but at the depriving of it end.

  She was the first of the conceptualists, possessed of no manual dexterity, no sense of the ridiculous, and no patience to make art. So out of place among us did she look that everything she said and wore were taken to be ironic statements. Only a highly sarcastic and anarchic individual – that was the reasoning – would dare turn up at an art school looking like someone answering an advertisement in the Lady. In fact she was a deeply, even anarchically conservative woman. I like to think I was the only one who understood that. But that was just about all I understood.

  She was furious when I met her. Her mouth in a perpetual arctic downturn, no matter that she was engaged in convivial conversation; a quiet, simmering rage narrowing her grey eyes, and issuing in a sniffle which never quite became a cold but which never left her in the all the years I knew her. That I wasn’t the object – the sole object – of this ferocious froideur, I now accept. It felt pretty personal the first time I encountered it, however. An icy blast directed at the softest chamber of my pulpy Jewish heart. But I wasn’t just in it for the insult. Or at least not just for the insult to me. What doubly attracted me the first time I clapped eyes on her – along with the armed cameras and equivocating shoes – was the look she had of having been insulted herself. There was something smutty, or do I mean smutted, about her. Someone had demeaned her. Why it is necessary, in order for me to fall in love, for one or other of us to feel slighted, I don’t know. My instinct is to put the question the other way round: how do people manage romantic attachment where there is not some history of disdain, some evidence of ignominy to stimulate the passions? I suppose none of this is necessary where sex is perceived as a natural activity, continuous with civility and good manners and all the other arts of social re
finement and consideration. But that doesn’t sound like very satisfactory sex to me. Sex, surely, once we’ve put the animal state behind us, is an aberration, and therefore, for it to be sex at all, must thrive on imbalance and reversal, on usurpation of the decencies, on disregard for what is usually owing. As civilised beings we cannot do without respect; as sexual beings we cannot do without the opposite. All of which might not tell you anything except that The Scourge of the Swastika fell into my hands too early.

  Fell into my hands too early, too.

  As I was later to discover, there was an immediate occasion for Chloë’s rage. Someone had demeaned her. A short time before I met her, on the eve of her applying for a place at art college, the man with whom she had been living since she was a schoolgirl pushed her head into the kitchen sink and anally ravaged her. ‘Took her cherry’ was how she put it, her other cherry having been taken long ago. But the pretended lightness of expression did not belie the gravity of the crime. Nothing stayed light for long in Chloë’s mouth. In this instance she made you think of every sinister nursery rhyme you had ever heard. Cherry evoked merry but there was murder in the rhyme. She would kill him for it. Or if not him, someone.

  She was two or three years older than the rest of us, having left home and gone to live with this man – a painter of people ‘s pets by trade and a rugby player by inclination – instead of pursuing her education. Her mother had not stood in her way. It sounded to me as though she had been sweet on him herself. He was her type. Hazily blue-eyed, square-necked, Cheshireborn, and tickled when she said she would be saying goodnight now, goodnight. James. Jim. Which would also have been her idea of a good name for a man. None of your Maxie-Shmaxie nonsense. James, Jim – whatever Chloë’s mother thought of him – had anally ravaged Chloë as a way of expressing his discontent with her decision to go to art college. Goyim do that. They get upset, see red, hit the roof and take it out on you anally. Prior to that, their life together had been unmarked by violence – unless you call rugby violence, which I do. But importantly he hadn’t raised a hand to her. In return for which she did his washing, removed pieces of other players’ bodies from his teeth, photographed the team in action and repose, and, because he had an ambition to paint flesh as well as fur, took her clothes off for him. None of these being activities she could regard as ‘hers’, she informed him at last of her intention to study photography, ‘for herself’, whereupon he told her that was retrograde to his desire, filled the sink and had his way with her from behind.

  ‘The mongrel didn’t even have the balls to look me in the eyes,’ she told me in due course.

  ‘Well, he hardly could, could he?’ was my response.

  ‘And what would you know?’ was hers. Meaning I wasn’t man enough to anally ravage her myself. Which indeed, as a Jew, I wasn’t. I’m not saying that the sodomising of women is unknown among Jews. But it’s not a favourite. Hygiene partly. Also the obstacles it places in the way of conversation. You can grunt your satisfaction but you can’t quietly discuss things, and Jews, who are a verbal people, like to talk during coitus. (For me, oral sex still means conversation.) But above all it’s the superfluity that bugs us, nature having already provided a vagina.

  We have earlier discussed Habdalah, the keeping apart of that which should not be confused. But in this case it’s the aesthetics rather than the morality of Habdalah that’s decisive: the laws governing art and form, giving due place to this or that, honouring the beauty of things in their separateness and season. Aesthetics. It’s all aesthetics with Jews.

  These are considerations to which violence, of course, is blind, and if Chloë when I met her was in flight from violence, she was also still, in some essential part of herself, in thrall to it. She admired strength, almost in the Nietzschean sense, until she was the victim of it. That’s the catch with Übermenschen. They’re fine until they start giving it to you from the rear. But she was backed into a corner of her own psychological making. She chose me because of all the people she encountered at art college, I (along with Aaron Blaiwais and Arnie Rosenfield) reminded her least of the brute she no longer wanted to be with, but precisely because I (we) reminded her least of the brute she no longer wanted to be with she was unable to feel good about herself in my (our) company.

  Was it to turn me into somebody else, or to make me see who I really was that she showered me with gold in the first years of our marriage? A gold signet ring to go with the gold marriage band, two gold watches, gold cufflinks, gold studs for my dress shirt, a gold bracelet with my initials engraved, and nearly – had I let her – a gold necklace. ‘I can’t believe how little it takes to release the Arab in you,’ she told me, and photographed me in the attitude of a pasha, or what she took to be the attitude of a pasha, cross-legged on a Persian rug with my hand stroking a stuffed saluki and all my gold glinting.

  Coming back from a shooting assignment in the Middle East she bought me a jubbah and had me wear it around the house without underwear. The scarf of the Palestine Liberation Army which she picked up on the same trip she had the sense not to give me until our relationship was already in tatters. But more than once she snapped me with a towel on my head, marvelling at how masculine it made me look.

  This wasn’t a passing photographic fancy. She believed she was possessed of a sort of moral X-ray vision in relation to me, seeing behind the merely incidental Novoropissik sojourn of however many hundreds of years, to my origins in sun and sand. In this, her ambition bore a striking resemblance to my father’s. He wanted me out of the shtetl one end, she wanted me out of it the other. For both of them, the enemy was the life-fearing Ashkenazi Milquetoast who buried himself in holy books and mumbo-jumbo to escape the notice of marauding Cossacks. As indeed he was the enemy for me. So if Chloë was prepared to forgive me the last couple of thousand years and return me to my desert setting – as a sultan, a caliph, a sheikh, whatever she wanted to call me – provided it didn’t entail my actual living in a desert, I was up for it. And yet no sooner did I embrace the part, padding about in my jubbah and Ali Baba slippers, sipping mint tea, jingling my jewellery and letting my belly grow, than she accused me of being a crass vulgarian, an Oriental souk Jew with the taste for trumpery of a market-trader from Walthamstow.

  ‘A bit rich,’ I complained, ‘considering that I didn’t own an article of jewellery until I met you. The way I look is how you’ve made me look.’

  ‘Made you.’ She sniffled her contemptuous sniffle. ‘The victim is always willing, Max.’

  I knew the reference. I’d heard it enough times. Cartier-Bresson, her hero, on the photographer seeking to capture the inner silence of the willing victim. The reason, as a cartoonist, I hated photography. All that silence shit. Not that I cared much for the willing victim as a concept either. None of my victims was willing.

  ‘My willingness,’ I said, ‘is just marital courtesy.’

  She had, as I have said, no sense of the ridiculous. She couldn’t bat a joke back. ‘You should be fucking grateful to me,’ she said, ‘You should be on your knees.’

  ‘I’m on my knees. I’m always on my knees. I’m just not sure, in this context, why.’

  ‘Because I’ve made you look how you were always intended to look, that’s why.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Preposterously vain.’

  ‘Which I thought you liked.’

  ‘Well, you’re better than you were.’

  ‘And how was I?’

  She struck a pose, feet pointing outwards, tongue lolling, Catherine wheels spinning at her ears, suggestive of a Novoropissik simpleton with sidelocks.

  Suggestive, in fact, of Manny Washinsky.

  Had the parody not been so inaccurate – I was the art school goyisher housepainter when she met me, more like Hitler as a boy than Manny Washinsky – I might have turned nasty. There are parts of Cheshire where a woman can get herself sodomised on a smaller provocation. Even by a man who’s on his knees.

  But that was
our contract. She jeered at me for not being what she was in hiding from – a cherry plucker – and I took her jeering as evidence of my superiority to it. A superiority, I don’t deny, which looked at from another angle wasn’t much of a superiority at all. I wasn’t a bully, but didn’t that, by the merest switch of logic, imply I was a coward, a man of intellect and introspection only because it wasn’t open to me to be anything else, all mental cunning because mentality was my sole possession?

  ‘But then again,’ I recall Chloë’s mother saying to me one scratchy Sunday Cheshire afternoon, after I’d cleaned them both up at Monopoly and Scrabble and most other games besides, and then apologised for myself by making slighting reference to my lack of muscularity – ‘but then again’ – Chloë’s mother’s favourite expression – ‘you are such brainboxes, darling. It really is no cost to you, admitting you’re all coward-cowardy-custards in your bodies when it’s really only the brainbox you value. What say you to that, Chlo?’

  ‘Agree with every word, Mumsy. Do you know what they’re calling it now?’

  ‘What’s that, my precious?’

  ‘Reading books and things . . . Being brainboxes . . .’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Hermeneutics.’

  ‘Never!’

  ‘I tell you truly, Mamma.’

  ‘Sounds so . . . you know what, doesn’t it? Hymie Neutics. Shall we call him Hymie Neutics?’

  ‘It would serve him right for always making it so plain.’

  ‘Making what so plain? His origins?’

  ‘Well, those too. But I was thinking of the contempt he shows us.’

  ‘For not having a brainbox the size of his?’

  ‘And for not being Freud or Einstein ourselves, Mamma.’

  Helène wrinkled up her nose. ‘Do you think Frankenstein was one, Chlo?’

  ‘One what, Mamma?’

  She tapped her nose. ‘You know.’

  ‘Could be, Mamma. Why don’t you ask him?’