Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  ‘Maxie, darling, was the monster one of yours?’

  ‘Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, Helène,’ I told her.

  She rolled one eye to heaven and another to her daughter. Was there no end to the over-subtilising of these people? ‘The scientist, then, darling. Was he one?’

  ‘I am not sure there is any evidence to suggest such a thing.’

  ‘No, but what do you think in that great big whirling brainbox of yours? What’s your conclusion, Maxie? Yea or nay?’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that he made any money out of his creation, Helène. Does that help?’

  She smiled sweetly at me. ‘Well, money, I have to say, darling, was the last thing on our minds, wasn’t it, Chlo?’

  Leaving me to curse myself for falling on her chintzy fist and knocking myself out yet again.

  There it was, anyway. Mercantilism and mentalism – if they couldn’t catch me with the one they’d nail me with the other.

  As for what Chloë was doing going near someone in whom both found their personification – and when I protested my innocence of materialism at least, she pointed to the photographs she’d taken of me in a voluptuous Arabia of the senses – only the science of perverseness explains it. No doubt we both had problems in the area of what popular psychologists call self-worth. We corroborated each other’s damaged self-esteem. We stayed together for the time we did because, Jew to Gentile, Gentile to Jew, we were a confirmatory insult to each other.

  As the years roll by I understand more and more why Tsedraiter Ike sang, ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor.’ It’s only me. A phrase my mother has also started to employ when she telephones me. Only me. Not anyone of worth.

  6

  In the light of that song, Tsedraiter Ike’s resistance to Shani’s fiancé, a one-time sailor, takes on an interesting aspect. Of course Tsedraiter Ike was always going to oppose an Irishman on religious grounds, whether or not Mick now knew the difference between a kreplach and a kneidlach and could rock the k in k’nish. But I too was gone among the Gentiles – gone among the anti-Semites in fact – and though he berated me for it, tutting when he saw me, and dropping the ‘old palomino’ from his conversation, he didn’t turn on me as ferociously as he turned on Shani. So the sea could have had something to do with it.

  But it takes a bit of winkling out.

  We had no sailors in our family. No Bills, no Barnacles. My father did once say that in another life he wouldn’t have minded sailing single-handedly around the world, but he got a nosebleed the one time he took us rowing. And neither Ike nor my mother had what you could call a strong stomach. A short car ride and both of them turned the colour of mould. So a heaving deck in the middle of the Atlantic was no place for any of us.

  But we hadn’t just sprouted in Crumpsall Park like mushrooms. Our origins were elsewhere and we had to have got from there to here somehow. And since we came before there were planes, it stood to reason that at least one of us had been on a boat. Was that why Tsedraiter Ike sang ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor’ – because he remembered being shipped over from one of those shit-heap Eastern European shtetls in his mother’s belly? I don’t find it hard to believe you can remember how things were for you before you were born. Myself, I go back four, five thousand years. Part of it’s fake memory, I grant you, prompted by old photographs and stories handed down from one generation to the next. But some of it I remember as though I’d been there. Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Esther. And if I remember it as though I’d been there that’s because I was. It’s not only the sins that are visited upon you if you take the details of your antecedence seriously. Start admitting guilt from five millennia back and you’ll be privy to the good times too. The golden calf, for example, no matter what Manny insisted it was made of and stood for – what a hoot of a fucking night that was!

  Tsedraiter Ike knew about the sea foetally, that’s my view. The wind howled, the rain spat, my grandmother sat huddled in a lifeboat in case any of those bastard Cossacks had slipped aboard at Arsopol or Voznosenski Isnosenski, and Tsedraiter Ike, lurching in her watery belly, learned about Barnacle Bill. There’s even a chance my grandmother herself conversed with Barnacle Bill in hiding. According to my mother, who would open the door on the subject about an inch every ten years, her mother was a flirtatious, not to say highly sexed woman, with little or no erotic respect for her husband, from whom I therefore imagine Tsedraiter Ike to have got his looks and personality. And something of a sexually unpleasant nature definitely happened on the crossing – or if not on the crossing itself then in the period they had been housed in Brody, trying to find whoever had sold them and then robbed them of their tickets – because immediately on landing my grandfather vowed that for decency’s sake he would see the child born and then have nothing again to do with either of them.

  ‘You are refusing to have anything to do with your own child?’

  ‘How do I know it’s mine?’

  ‘How does any man know his child is his?’

  ‘By not marrying a slut, that’s how.’ Only he wouldn’t have said slut. He’d have said kurveh or zoineh.

  ‘I talk to a sailor and you call me a slut?’

  He pointed to her belly. ‘You call that talking?’

  She threw her head back and laughed, showing him throat. No woman should ever show a Jew her throat unless she wants him for a slave for life or an enemy for longer. Midianite women showed the Israelites their throats whenever the two peoples encountered one another in the desert, and short of wholesale massacre the Jews have had no defence against the gesture ever since. It was witnessing my grandmother’s throat that got my grandfather into this mess in the first place. ‘Did he fondle your breasts like this?’ my grandfather wanted to know. ‘Did he put his hand up your skirt, so?’

  ‘Did who?’

  ‘The sailor.’

  ‘I talked to the sailor for five minutes. You were there.’

  ‘I wasn’t there the whole time. I had to be sick overboard. Twice I left you to empty my kishkies into the North Sea. And what about in Brody? You weren’t even carrying a child when we first arrived in Brody.’

  ‘Then I admit it. In the time you were emptying your kishkies I let him fondle my breasts, then I let him put his hand up my skirt where he encountered no resistance to speak of, and here I am, twenty-four hours later, big with his child.’

  ‘I could kill you,’ my grandfather cried. ‘I could hack you into a thousand tiny pieces, you trollop.’ Only he wouldn’t, not having any English prior to this, and having landed in Hull only that morning, have said trollop.

  In the end – and I tell the story exactly as my mother told me her mother told it to her – it took an immigration officer to separate them. ‘Not a promising start,’ he said, eyeing each of them in turn, then leading them out of the queue. He was a lean Englishman with no colour in his face but for the two stains of grey which marked the whereabouts of his cheekbones. Such men, cruel with the unhurried coldness of the English, have been turning back my people for centuries, and had my grandmother not shown him her throat, on the off chance that it might work as well on anti-Semites as on Jews, we might all of us have been turned back for ever.

  ‘You’re going to have to do better than this,’ he told my grandfather while he fondled my grandmother’s breasts. ‘Name?’

  My grandfather answered him in whatever Eastern European mishmash he spoke. ‘I am Igor ben Whateverov. I am from Novoropissik. But I have spent the last thousand years in Brody trying to find the thief who stole our tickets.’

  ‘Do you know the Axelroths?’ the immigration man asked my grandmother. ‘They’re from Brody.’

  She shook her head, letting the hair fall from her turban.

  ‘They are very nice people,’ he said. ‘They sell vegetables near me. Would you like to come into this country as an Axelroth?’

  ‘Was?’ My grandfather cupped his ear. Was, pronounce
d vas. The sound old deaf Jews made throughout my childhood. Vas? For that habit alone he deserved to lose my grandmother. ‘The Axelroths? A finster auf the Axelroths!’ A curse on anyone from Brody.

  Apparently my maternal grandfather in full curse was a comic spectacle.

  The official laughed, his colour high suddenly, my grandmother laughing with him. ‘That’s what we’ll call you,’ he said, taking out a pen. ‘Finster. But not Igor. You wouldn’t want to be called Igor in this country. Let’s agree to Ivor, yes? Ivor Finster it is then.’ And with that he stamped their papers and slipped his address into my grandmother’s burning little hand.

  Six months later my grandmother was living in the village of Swine in the East Riding of Yorkshire with John Skinner, Immigration Officer, as his wife, and Ivor Finster was training to be a cabinetmaker in Crumpsall Park.

  Ten or eleven years down the line my grandmother miraculously conceived again. This time there was no argument who the father was. John Skinner. He did not live to see the baby born. Not wanting to spend what was left of her life bringing up an afterthought child alone in Swine, she contacted Ivor Finster, who was now relatively comfortably off, and offered a deal. For the sake of the children she would resume relations with him in Crumpsall, bringing up the boy – his boy, Isaac – as a Finster, but Leonora – my mother – as a Skinner. She owed that to the man who’d given her a new life in Swine. My grandfather – except that it was now looking as though he was my great-uncle, not my grandfather – agreed in all particulars but the last. He could accept no Skinner as a child of his. He suggested reverting to their old name. What about Whateverov? My mother offered a compromise. Axelroth. A finster auf anyone called Axelroth, my great-uncle said. But he was lazy and lonely and they shook on the deal. Maybe they even slept together on it. And let people say whatever they chose to say.

  It took me some time to digest what my mother was telling me, that’s if I have digested it yet. ‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘just hang on a minute.’ I was so confused I had to count relations backwards on my fingers. But whichever way I counted, it came out the same. One of my grandparents was a Skinner. A Gentile. Which meant, assuming that my poor father had no skeletons in his cupboards – though those assuredly were buried with his own skeleton now – that I was only three-quarters Jewish.

  ‘If any of it’s true.’

  ‘What do you mean if any of it’s true? How can you not know if any of it’s true?’

  ‘My mother was a colourful woman with a vivid imagination. And my father kept things to himself. You didn’t always know where you were with either of them.’

  ‘Is that your actual father you’re talking about now?’

  ‘Well, I only knew one, Max.’

  ‘And you never asked him about the other? You never asked why you had a different name? You never talked to your mother about him? You never thought of visiting his grave in Swine?’

  ‘I think you’ve forgotten, Maxie, how young I was when they all died. I was the child of old parents, Max. We made our own way in those days. There wasn’t anybody to ask.’

  ‘But you’ve had time to do a bit of checking since. Weren’t you curious?’

  ‘Time?’ She regarded me with wide-eyed astonishment. ‘What time have I had?’

  ‘Ma, you’ve done nothing but play kalooki for the past half-century.’

  ‘You, too,’ she said, ‘have a vivid imagination.’

  ‘Are you saying I’ve imagined the kalooki?’

  ‘I’m saying that I’m rather hurt you think that’s all I’ve done with my time. How do you think you and your sister got brought up?’

  ‘Under the kalooki table.’

  ‘That’s not amusing, Max. I don’t appreciate you making a cartoon of your family.’

  ‘Ma, how long is it since you finished bringing us up?’ I didn’t add the further question, ‘So how do you explain what you’ve been doing with your fucking life since?’

  Which was where we left it until the next time I made the journey up to see her. Our conversation must have been preying on her mind because she reopened it almost the moment I arrived.

  ‘It’s not as though you’re made any less Jewish by all that,’ she said – looking rather exquisite, I thought, in the lugubriousness she’d adopted for the conversation – ‘though God knows why any of it should matter to you, given your record of marrying out. But you’re still playing with the full deck, if that was what worried you. My mother was Jewish. I’m Jewish. End of story – you’re Jewish. How much more Jewish do you need to be?’

  ‘It’s not need we’re talking, Ma. It’s curiosity. If it happened we should know about it. I’ve never understood all this secrecy. Who we are, where we come from, what we were really called. All this starting again, always starting again, for what – to hide a quarter of Gentile blood?’

  ‘Well, they do it, Max. They’ve all got some old Jew in the background they’re desperate to keep hidden.’

  ‘The worse for them if you’re right. But you’re not right. Not any more. Now they can’t wait to brag about it. Now you’re no one if you can’t produce a pedlar called Shmuel who inseminated Aunt Harriet on his way through Harrogate. Time we got our own back. You think you’re exotic? Look who inseminated our aunty – a shaygets called Skinner from the Humber! It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Ma, a quarter of Gentile blood. Or a half, in your own case.’

  ‘Who’s ashamed, Max?’

  I took a moment to think about that. Who was ashamed?

  ‘Did Dad know about it?’ I asked, changing tack.

  ‘Of course. That’s to say he knew my mother’s version of events. I’m not sure he believed it all. As I’ve told you, your grandma liked to spin a yarn.’

  ‘Ah, so it’s Grandma suddenly. Hardly ever heard a word about her, almost never seen a photograph, no word until now about where she came from – Russia, somewhere, Novoropissik, who knows, who cares, fargess es – and now she’s my bobbeh, my bubbeleh. How come neither of you ever mentioned it before?’

  ‘Me and your grandmother?’

  ‘You and Dad.’

  ‘We didn’t want you unsettled.’

  I thought about it. Was I unsettled? Yes, a bit. A quarter unsettled.

  ‘So where does that leave Ike?’ I asked, still working people out on my fingers.

  ‘Oh, he’s completely Jewish too. Even more completely Jewish than us.’

  ‘No, I meant, who is he to you by the latest calculation?’

  ‘My half-brother. Same mother, different fathers. It’s not all that weird, Max.’

  ‘And he knows?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you don’t think that’s what sent him tsedrait?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The secrets, the shame, the dread of anyone seeing the inside of our lapels.’

  ‘No one’s ashamed, Max. There are just some things it isn’t necessary to talk about in front of the whole world.’

  ‘As I do, you mean?’

  ‘Well, you haven’t exactly been a private man, Max, splashing ink everywhere.’

  ‘Ma, I’m a cartoonist.’

  ‘The world’s full of cartoonists. They don’t all spill their kishkies for the world to see every five minutes.’

  It was the same phrase my venerable ancestor had used on the crossing from the old country. Was it something in the family genes, then, spilling our kishkies in public places? – allowing that to be a fair description of what I did, which it categorically wasn’t. But I’d had this out with my mother and Shani too many times to go through it all again. They had their thoughts, I had mine. I believed Five Thousand Years of Bitterness was a story I couldn’t tell enough. They thought there were other subjects.

  So I returned us to Tsedraiter Ike. ‘And being the son of a sailor – wouldn’t that send you tsedrait?’

  ‘What sailor?’

  ‘Barnacle Bill.’

  ‘You’re the tsedrait one,’ she said, waving away the ludicrous id
ea, before wondering if I’d stay for a hand or two of kalooki later.

  But it would explain Tsedraiter Ike’s otherwise irrational aversion to Shani’s fiancé, wouldn’t it?

  And the apologetic song he sang. Only me, from over the sea.

  ELEVEN

  1

  Asher.

  So how was Asher?

  Gross of me, to pounce on Manny’s tears? Perhaps. But he’d been leading me a merry dance. Now inviting me in, now pushing me away. His right, of course. His ruined life. But he did know what we were about. He had agreed the deal.

  And Asher was not a forbidden subject. Not even his late mother and father were forbidden subjects. Manny had alluded freely to them all in the course of our ‘reunions’. It was just that I felt he was teasing me with them, punishing me with them even, bringing them out of his own volition on to the open stage of our conversation, then fading them, turning the lights down on them, the moment I let my curiosity show.

  ‘So how is Asher?’

  A risk. I did not know whether he was in communication with Asher or even whether Asher was still alive. Of Asher alive or dead since Manny made an orphan of him I had not heard a word. But sometimes you have to take a risk. And there was something about the intimacy of the tiny restaurant, serving home-made Italian soups and bruschettas to museum types, that emboldened me.

  ‘In love is how I imagine him,’ he said, as if speaking from a long way away. ‘Always in love.’

  ‘So he fell in love again, then, after Dorothy?’

  ‘Asher was never out of love.’

  ‘Were there many?’ I asked, smiling. My appreciation was genuine. I like incorrigible romanticism in ageing men.

  ‘You misunderstand. Asher was always in love with the same woman.’

  ‘With Dorothy?’

  ‘Always with Dorothy.’

  Such statements break your heart. The flame that never dies. For a moment I wondered whether Lymm and all the rest of it had been a blind, a family subterfuge, a bit like Tsedraiter Ike, to hide from the Jewish community the fact that the great rabbinic hope had been living embowered in bliss with the fire-yekelte’s half-Germanic daughter in a little goyisher cottage in rural Cheshire. And if that were the case, had they been bowered together in bliss all the time poor Manny had been banged up, and were they bowered in bliss still, this very minute, a little grey-haired couple with eyes only for each other, while Manny and I, neither of us remotely blissful, traipsed the streets of London in half-silence?