Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  Impossible, of course. This wasn’t that sort of story. Families who put their children’s happiness before everything else don’t end up getting gassed in their own beds by one of them.

  ‘What happened to Asher?’ I asked. ‘What happened after he was sent away?’

  He looked at me evenly – for him. A little surprised, I thought – as indeed was I – by the directness of my question.

  ‘There’s a rabbinic saying,’ he said, ‘“Happy is the man whom God chastens . . .”’

  I waited. Here we go, I thought. Here we go again. But I made my face into a question mark. Yes? Happy is the man whom God chastens . . .

  ‘“. . . so he can study God’s law.”’

  ‘Study is a punishment?’

  ‘No, it’s a mitzvah.’

  ‘Then why the talk of chastisement?’

  ‘You have to think of it as a chastisement filled with love. God tries the righteous. There is no point trying the wicked. They would not endure it. There’s another saying – God’s rod comes only upon those whose heart is soft like the lily.’

  ‘So God broke Asher’s heart to make a better student of him, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘God breaks all our hearts. Asher wasn’t the only one man whose heart was soft like the lily.’

  Amen to that, I thought. But I wasn’t meant to be thinking of me. Asher, remember Asher.

  ‘I take it from what you’re saying, then, that he returned to the yeshiva?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Where he pined for Dorothy?’

  He rocked in his chair, his attention beginning to drift away. ‘He did and he didn’t.’

  What was that supposed to mean? Did study blot up the pain? Did Asher find a more suitable woman to love, one with her dress down to her ankles and babies round her feet? One in whose fetid embrace he would try without success to forget the silvery loveliness of Dorothy’s? But before I could frame the question a little more nicely than that, Manny surprised me with a show of what sounded like irritation. ‘They met again,’ he said.

  ‘Asher and Dorothy?’

  ‘Yes – s-sssch – they met again . . .’

  ‘Asher and Dorothy met again!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And . . . ? And . . . ? And . . . ?’

  But he couldn’t continue. His tears were back, a weeping of a sort I’d never seen before, more a saturation around his eyes than a shedding, almost an inundation from without, as though the tears were falling not from his eyes but into them.

  2

  They met again.

  Which could have been something or could have been nothing. But if nothing, why the tears?

  And if something, how big a something?

  A week or so later, over an early-evening catch-up drink in Francine Bryson-Smith’s club – another overcrowded joint at the end of a disreputable West End lane – we discussed progress.

  ‘Well and not well,’ I said. ‘There was an upsetting morning recently when he saw Asher—’

  ‘Where?’ She was excited. Whatever the state of Asher’s heart, he had gone to ground, eluding even the appetence of Christopher Christmas’s researches. Dorothy the same. Apart or together, alive or dead, they had vanished. So any sighting of either of them was, to Francine, a promise of a storyline.

  ‘Oh, not in a real place. It was more Asher’s ghost – My brother, methinks I see my brother – which he actually beheld in the faces of a couple of beautiful children.’

  I could see that she found it hard to associate any brother of Manny’s with the idea of beauty. She even wrinkled the tip of her nose, which I’d noticed when I kissed her was cold, like Chloë’s.

  Angry women have cold noses – that is just something I happen to know.

  ‘How do you read that?’ she wondered.

  ‘I read it that he was upset.’

  ‘No, but did you get the impression he knew where his brother was?’

  Plot. All anyone was interested in – fucking plot! Who cared where Asher was? How did Asher feel to Asher – that was the only story that interested me. How fractured was his heart? How many scorpions feasted on his mind? Could he still believe in a God who chastened him for his studies’ sake? And Manny, the tears that had appeared on Manny’s face like a flood rising from a multitudinous sea beneath – what did they denote?

  Careful. If I wasn’t careful, plot hunger would be gnawing at my innards next. But it made a difference, suddenly, knowing that Asher and Dorothy had met again. I could see a sequence of events. That Asher’s doomed affair with Dorothy had been somehow instrumental in the turning of Manny’s mind, and thus instrumental at the last in the dooming of them all, I had always known. The whole community had known that. Thus do seemingly long-buried events wreak their havoc in the end. Oedipus Rex. But now effect appeared to be more intimately related to its cause. They met again and something happened. They met again, told Manny about it, said be happy for us, rejoice, our love is born again, and Manny in his happiness for them gassed the rest of the family . . .

  Why not? Hence Manny’s tears. He knew his actions had ruined Asher and Dorothy’s second chance?

  But I wasn’t ready to spill any of this to Francine yet. Don’t ask me why. A feeling of propriety, I think. Propriety in both senses of the word. It wasn’t seemly to tell her. And it was my business, not hers.

  ‘He said nothing to suggest he knew anything of Asher’s whereabouts,’ I said, ‘but that could have been because I wasn’t thinking along those lines. I was struck by his tears. So far he hasn’t shown anything you could really call emotion, unless catatonic schizophrenia is an emotion—’

  ‘You think he’s schizophrenic?’

  She looked worried, as though schizophrenia wasn’t a subject Lipsync Productions touched.

  ‘I don’t know. I just use these terms irresponsibly. They’re all poetically interchangeable to me. Scientifically I’ve no idea what he is. He barks, he twitches, he spits out broken letters, he stutters over the names of Nazis—’

  ‘Why do you think he does that?’

  ‘It might be like not pronouncing the name of God. Some names are too holy for language, some are too foul. That’s my guess. But all I meant was that he’s been dead-batting me and suddenly the sight of him in tears made me wonder if he was gearing himself up to talk candidly.’

  She agitated the ice cubes in her drink. ‘And was he?’

  What are you keeping from me, Maxie Glickman? What’s your little game?

  ‘Yes. Except that he seems to have jumped a stage since. He hasn’t told me anything about what he did. Only what they did to him for doing it.’

  ‘Well, we want that.’

  ‘Of course we do. My only worry is whether it means he’s blotted out the crime in favour of remembering the punishment.’

  ‘Maybe he’s one of those who have to come at things backwards.’

  ‘Are there such people?’

  She threw me a ravishingly intelligent smile. Miss Margate, DLitt. ‘Aren’t you one?’

  ‘Me? Well, sideways perhaps, speaking as a cartoonist now. But I don’t know about backwards.’

  She was still smiling. ‘Thought it was a trait,’ she said, then seeing I wasn’t up to speed, blew the thought away with a cuff of her hand. Blue-red fingernails, I noticed, even as I was wondering about the word ‘trait’. A trait of mine? A trait of cartoonists, a trait of my people’s?

  ‘But anyway,’ she continued, ‘he’s talking?’

  ‘Yes. Beginning to. In fact I’m thinking of moving him into my place for a few weeks so as not to lose the flow.’

  She ignored that, presumably afraid I was going to ask her to contribute to his keep. ‘And what he’s saying to you is interesting?’ she went on.

  ‘Well . . . Incarceration stories have never grabbed me much, I have to say. The mind has always been prison enough for me. But yes, I’d say interesting . . .’

  ‘Such as?’

  She was bringing
our drinks session to an end, signalling the waiter, scratching impatiently at the air with her blue-red fingernails. Which was also a sign to me to make my ‘such as’ briefer even than brief.

  I felt rushed. ‘Such as’ – now I was scratching at air – ‘such as the metal missionary pot . . .’

  3

  They slide a pot across the cell floor to him.

  Eat, they say.

  The pot is black, made of metal, the sort cannibals stew missionaries in. It contains potatoes and carrots in a watery gravy.

  He eats.

  After he has eaten from the pot he is told to defecate into it.

  She has her coat on, we are in the street, and she is flagging down a taxi, so I can’t elaborate much on this.

  When they next bring him food it is in a pot he recognises. The missionary pot. It has been emptied but it has not been cleaned.

  Eat, they say.

  She makes no comment until she is in the taxi. Then, giving me the glimmer, she says, ‘Did you ask him if the food was kosher?’

  Ways of Saying Kosher When You’re Not Jewish – an idea I had once for a cartoon series. Needless to say, no takers. Surely that would need to be a verbal joke, if a joke at all, was the universal view. Not so. The inclination of the head important, the size of o the lips form, the knowing aftermath on the face, the movement of the hands, the invitation to collusion and of course the interrogative glimmer. A veritable challenge to the caricaturist and the historian. How would Luther have said the word kosher? How would Haman? How would Hitler?

  I can’t say I held out much hope for a positive response from the New Yorker, but I’m still at a loss to understand why Private Eye or the New Statesman didn’t bite.

  4

  They slide a pot across the cell floor to him, towards his bed.

  Eat, they say. No other word. It isn’t an order. It is barely a suggestion. It’s just a sound. He can eat or not. The decision is his. It’s his stomach.

  The pot is black, made of metal, the sort cannibals stew missionaries in. It contains potatoes and carrots in a watery gravy. He eats.

  Now shit, they say.

  This is the fuller version.

  It is also the cell version. Another time he tells it to me he is in a sort of ward, and he is lying on a shelf.

  A shelf ! Well, what do I know?

  In this version, because the room is populous, they say his name. Eat, Scooby-Doo. Shit, Scooby-Doo.

  It sounds affectionate. Could they have liked him?

  ‘Why “Scooby-Doo”?’

  ‘He’s a dog. A cartoon dog. You should know that.’

  ‘I do know that. I’m asking you why they called you Scooby-Doo?’

  ‘Rhyming slang. Scooby-Doo, Jew.’

  ‘Did they all call you that?’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘The other prisoners.’

  ‘Patients.’

  ‘Forgive me – the other patients.’

  Had I said patients to begin with he’d have corrected the word to inmates. When I pick up on inmates he changes them to victims.

  ‘Yes. Scooby-Doo was their invention. The g-guards learn it from them.’

  ‘Guards?’

  ‘Wardens.’

  On another occasion they are nurses.

  Does he mind being called Scooby-Doo?

  ‘It’s not the worst of my worries,’ he tells me.

  The worst of his worries, in this version at least, is that they will not feed him again until he defecates and defecating in these circumstances is beyond him. He has never before – at least not since he was an infant – had to defecate into anything that isn’t a lavatory bowl. He doesn’t know how he is going to manage a pot. Nor has he ever defecated in the hearing, let alone the sight, of other people. At school he would have to go to the lavatories at odd hours to be reasonably certain no one else was there. Or wait behind until everyone had gone home. The activity of voiding his bowels within a hundred miles of another living person was and always had been a torture to him. So defecating into the pot in the company of other men is not going to be easy.

  My own view is that it would be impossible. That one would sooner explode. But then I have so far been spared extremity. More than that, I have gone to great lengths to avoid extremity. Not to find myself in an extreme circumstance – Chloë and Zoë excluded – has been the principal study of my life. It has kept me quiet. And law-abiding. It would have stopped me turning the taps on my parents, for example. But not everybody remembers how terrible the lavatories are going to be before they commit a crime.

  After he finally succeeds in filling the pot he is instructed to empty it. I don’t ask how long this has taken him. A week? A month? A year? Nor do I ask him where he empties it. Ask a question and you might just get an answer. Shortly after his success, they – the guards, the wardens, the nurses – return with his food in a pot he recognises. His pot. It has not been washed. The next time he tells me the story they don’t bring him food, they bring him back his faeces. But what they say in all instances is the same.

  Eat.

  Not for me to have an attitude but I find it hard not to express surprise that things are quite so primitive in Her Majesty’s mental hospitals.

  Once, when I do raise a question along those lines, he turns on me in irritation and tells me he is not describing life inside any kind of hospital I might have encountered.

  Well, what do I know? For all my experience to the contrary he could be remembering what it’s like inside a yeshiva.

  Or wherever it was in Lymm that tubercular Jewish boys were sent to.

  And I am taking him to be exercising a degree of poetic licence, anyway, ordering his recollections in a fashion that can only be called metaphorical.

  If I’d had the appropriate psychological language – something a touch more nuanced for him than catatonic schizophrenic, or frumkie – I might have been better positioned to decide whether he was actually meting out to himself, in memory, the punishment he thought he deserved. A life for a life, but with what do you pay for two lives?

  5

  I had offered him the use of a granny flat I’d had built as an extension just before Zoë left. Part of our trial separation. Got all you need, I’d told him – private entrance, galley kitchen, tiny living room, your own lavatory, no reason for you ever to come out. I hadn’t expected him to accept. Just because he was talking didn’t mean he’d turned sociable all of a sudden. Any more than it meant he had decided to like me. Nor, to be, honest, had I wanted him to accept. But if he was meting out punishment to himself, then maybe it was time I meted out punishment to myself. My punishment was him. This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, etc etc.

  He turned up with a few things in a cardboard suitcase of a sort I hadn’t clapped eyes on since the 1950s. I didn’t doubt it was the same suitcase that bore his belongings when they put him behind bars. Something in the sentimental way he carried it.

  He took the keys from me without meeting my eyes. Then he asked whether he would need change for the gas meter.

  Could that have been a hellish joke?

  I decided probably not. He was simply pointing out the difference, I decided, between his circumstances and mine. But if it was a joke then I wished Zoë had been around to hear it. She enjoyed that sort of humour.

  No one had slept in the granny flat since Zoë left. We exchanged farewells there. ‘Goodbye, Bollocky Bill,’ she said, extending her hand. Every time we reached the point of breaking up Zoë would offer me her hand, an action so piteous in its finality – reduced to this, a mere formal handshake, we who had rolled all our sweetness up into one ball – that we both dissolved into tears and fell in love with each other again. Not this time, though. This time we meant it.

  ‘Bollocky Bill’ was what she had called me, despite my scant resemblance to a Bill, bollocky or otherwise, in the early days of our marriage, before the romance went out of it. ‘Bollocky Bill from over the hill.’

>   No relation, that I knew of, to Barnacle Bill, although Barnacle Bill does become Bollocky Bill in saltier versions of the ditty. Mere coincidence. ‘Bollocky Bill from over the hill’ was pure Zoë coinage. The charm of nonsense had eluded her as a child, and the discovery in her maturer years that she could make rhymes and limericks and doggerel of her own – actually and of her own volition put nonsense into the world – gave her enormous pleasure. If the nonsense could at the same time comprehend an insult or two to me, her happiness was complete. Another man might have begrudged her this, I could not. The more particularly as she viewed these forays into verbal play as proof that we had not entirely destroyed in her the creative genius she could have been. ‘We’ being the Jews.

  But this is not to say that Bollocky Bill didn’t proceed from an impulse even deeper in my Jew-besotted wife. I would not have put it past her, for example, to have detected my Bollocky/Barnacle Gentile ancestry long before I knew of it myself, discerning, in that uncanny way of hers, the Bill closeted behind the mask of Max. Yes, she married me to reconnect herself to that Jewishry from which, as a girl, she had been so brutally repulsed, but she also looked forward to a time when I’d have my nose off and look the goy I had it in me to look.

  With Zoë, prognostication waited upon the iron of her will. What she foresaw was what she would make happen. She espied a moustache on my face and she made me grow one. Ditto the beard. Ditto the long hair. Ditto the rainforest eyebrows.

  ‘I’m not able to see out of here,’ I complained in the early days.

  ‘What do you want to see?’

  ‘The world.’

  ‘You’ve seen the world.’

  ‘Zoë, I’m a fucking artist. If I don’t see the world, we starve.’

  ‘An artist! You! Don’t make me laugh, Max. If anyone’s an artist in this relationship, I am. You’re just a cartoonist. Which means you don’t see the world at all. You only see your own sick view of it. What you do, you can just as well do blind.’