Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  There wasn’t much of a future for us, anybody could see that. Fucking Bollocky Bill the sailor could see that. But I’d been brought up to do what women told me. Zoë wanted to find out what the whores looked like in Berlin, I took her to see what the whores looked like in Berlin. Zoë wanted me to forgive the German people, I forgave the German people. Zoë wanted me blind, I went blind. Very nearly I acceded to the nose job.

  When she said she was an artist she was right. I’m not referring to her abusive ditties or the calligraphy which she only ever put her energy into fitfully, when friends wanted wedding invitations written for example, or she needed to inscribe some instruction to me in eyeliner on the bathroom mirror – Don’t say God fucking help me every time you take a leak, or Try imagining there isn’t something in the middle of your face stopping you from getting close enough to read this. No, Zoë’s artistry didn’t reside in anything she actually produced, any more than Chloë’s did. She was an artist by virtue of the power vested in her fancy. She was an artist in her disenchantments. It’s open to any old soul to imagine themselves hard done by, let down or disappointed; Zoë’s sense of being obstructed by the universe – personally spited, as though it were a face-off between the divinity and herself (a Jewish divinity was how she always saw him, a divinity with specifically my features) – was of an epic inventiveness. She could have been, she could have done, she could have achieved – anything! She had been set down among us for that sole purpose,to astound us with her gifts, to change the language and conception of woman, to make Zoë the very currency of intelligence and beauty the world over. Forget celebrity: Zoë pre-dated celebrity and exceeded it in ambition. Nothing short of imperishable legend could answer to her sense of destiny.

  In this, as in all things, she was encouraged by the devotion of parents to whom she had been a late and unexpected gift, a miracle almost, as Isaac was to Sarah. Together, just the three of them – her father a retired art teacher who rarely spoke, her mother an embroideress and potter who smiled at stars and squirrels – they strode the heathland heights of North London, Zoë papoosed to one or other of their chests, listening to their heartbeats and gathering intimation there, like Wordsworth’s pigmy poet, of all that nature had in store for her. They pointed out wild flowers to her, taught her the names of birds and butterflies, explained how you could tell a tree by the configuration of a single leaf, and, when she was ready, stretched out their hands so that she could see, over the rooftops, beyond the Finchley Road, the silhouetted golden city where she would make her name. As what, was immaterial. She was already a prodigy by virtue of being born to them at all. The rest would follow as surely as the wheeling night followed the deep slow satisfactions of the day. But they were careful not to leave it only to chance. For her fourth birthday they enrolled her in ballet classes. For her fifth birthday they bought her a little artist’s easel. For her sixth birthday a violin. For her seventh birthday they gave her singing lessons and sent her to acting school. And so on and so on, this showering of opportunity through the long summer afternoons in which she otherwise rowed on lakes and walked her dogs and smiled whereat her mother smiled and rolled down grassy banks laughing in her silent father’s arms, until – a genius in happiness as well as everything else – she reached the age of nine, when the Krystals moved in next door.

  At first it seemed that they too were presents from her parents. Or another Annunciation, like the one that presaged her amazing birth. Behold my child, the Krystals, the angels for whom you have been waiting, through whose supernatural agency you will be brought before the breathless courts of public notice.

  ‘You can’t imagine how much I loved them,’ she told me. ‘They shone, they glowed, they sparkled. The first time I saw them as a family they burned my eyes. It was as though a giant candelabra had been installed next door, and whenever I passed their window or looked out of mine, there it was – blazing light!’

  No mention of wings, but wings they clearly had.

  They owned a factory making plastic bowls and mop buckets, everything for the kitchen, though nothing made of plastic ever turned up in their kitchen, that’s if they even owned a kitchen, which was highly unlikely given that angels have no stomachs and as a consequence no need of food. A library, that was what Zoë remembered most vividly about their house, the rows of bookshelves holding books unlike the books her parents showered on her – the ballet books and how-to books and I-spy nature books with pictures of snails and flowers and empty pages to press flowers of your own in – no, no books of that sort on the Krystal shelves, but Freud, Kafka, Gombrich, Wittgenstein (unless she was imagining Wittgenstein because of his name’s spitefully clever-clever all-mind-no-nature Jewish resonance), books with words in, words being the only thing her all-providing parents lacked, along, of course, with that which words enabled: worldliness. Celestial worldliness.

  ‘It was as if they moved in another dimension,’ she told me. ‘Neither the inside as I knew it, nor the outside as I knew it. They inhabited somewhere else.’

  ‘It’s called Jew-space,’ I explained.

  ‘Now, to my cost, I know that. Then, what did I know? What you have to remember is that I only ever saw my father in an open-necked shirt or a windcheater with a bobble hat. One for in, one for out. Footwear the same. Carpet slippers for in, walking boots for out. What else did he need? Where else was he going? Then suddenly there appeared these other-dimensional men in suits that seemed made of silver foil, wearing shoes in whose reflection I could see my face.’

  ‘We don’t polish them,’ I wanted her to understand. ‘You buy them pre-lacquered. There are Middle Eastern shops on Bond Street that sell nothing else.’

  ‘What, with the reflection of some gullible shikseh already burned in? How many pairs do you own, Max?’

  ‘I don’t know any gullible shiksehs . . .’

  ‘Why don’t you shut the fuck up and let me tell you what I’m telling you. This is my story, not yours. It’s enough the Jews did this to me, without another Jew providing the fucking footnotes. What was I telling you?’

  ‘Shoes you could see your fucking face in—’

  ‘Don’t swear at me. Why must you always swear? And without laces, these shoes! Can you imagine how amazing that was? My father squandered his life doing up his laces, foot up on a little kitchen stool, starting again each time to be sure the ends were even, a little tug after every hook, remembering to tuck in the tongue, then twice around the ankle before being tied in a double hitch. That’s how I defined a man. A person with his head between his knees, roping up his feet. Now here was this laceless breed, who in a single movement could slip their feet into their shoes and be gone. And ties! Before the Krystals came I doubt I’d seen a tie. And certainly not silk. Wool, maybe, for when my father came to a school speech day. Or to keep his trousers up at home. But the Krystals wore ties so refulgent, Max, they danced.’

  I needed no convincing. Mine too. Once I was out of art school and no longer having to look like a goyisher housepainter, my ties leapt like Nureyev upon my chest. Never mind fringes and yarmulkes, a dancing tie is also a prescription of the Lord’s.

  But Selwyn and Seymour Krystal were scarcely older than she was when they blazed for her through their window that first time. Ten, eleven. Were they in Jewish showbiz business suits already?

  ‘They were men, Max. They shaved. They had deep voices. They had the charm and confidence of grown men.’

  ‘And you fell in love with them?’

  ‘Of course. How could I not? But I wasn’t just in love with the boys. I adored the whole family. I am not going to say they were warm – I’ve had it with warm Jews, Max. And it’s a cliché anyway. It’s how you like to see yourselves. Loving. Generous. Gemütlich. Fuck all that. What they were was hot. Hot in the words they used. Hot in the jokes they told. Hot in the hurry they were in to top one another’s stories. Conversation was like a race. They didn’t drowse away the days as we did, they consumed them, they burned time. I
t was like a mission – to grow up, to move forward, to get somewhere. I was exhilarated by them. They came through my life like a train and I had to jump on . . .’

  Until they pushed her off.

  Her breasts grew, but not too much, and Leila Krystal took fright. Poor Zoë. Of this part of the story at least, I believed every word. Oy gevalt, a gorgeous little shikseh with hand-grenade breasts and features so diminutive and precise she looked as though a fairy god had pinched them out of Plasticine. What chance of Selwyn and Seymour resisting that? She knew her boys. They weren’t rompers or wenchers. Gentile girls with rosy cheeks and udders to their ankles came and went without causing any lasting damage. But this brittle and unblemished piece with a haughty, pointed nose and icy, tragic purpose in her eyes – no, the moment they noticed what she had grown into they would not resist her. She would call to them in their brief sleep from across the river and they would plunge into the freezing waters though they knew they could not swim. They had no choice. The ancient music sang in their bones. It was a compliment to Zoë of course, but you couldn’t expect her to take it as one. Leila Krystal had been born with one foot in Berlin and another in Vienna, her mother had been born with one foot in Prague and another in Budapest, cities where beauty was understood to be a commodity you were a fool not to trade in if you had it. Telling Zoë to put on fishnet stockings and walk the Kurfurstendamm (or words to that effect) was not unappreciative advice. And who’s to say it wasn’t right, that this was not the big thing Zoë had been waiting for. Her calling. To be the whore to end all whores. After which, it was anybody’s guess . . . A royal title? The movies?

  I even put that to her once. ‘Maybe Leila Krystal was your angel after all,’ I said. ‘Maybe she was showing you your destiny. And you blew it.’

  ‘Only a Jew would have put her mind to what I had between my legs and seen a business opportunity in it,’ she said, slapping my face, ‘and only another Jew would have thought she was doing me a favour.’

  She agreed with Hitler in the matter of Jews and prostitution. Hitler believed prostitutes were a Jewish invention, and Zoë swung between believing that every Jewish wife was a sort of prostitute to her husband and every Gentile woman was a prostitute in the eyes of every Jewish man. But they had it wrong, Zoë and Hitler both. There was nothing specifically Jewish in turning sex to your advantage commercially. The practice had attained a high level of refinement in what had once been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It just so happened that in our journeying through this Gentile agglomeration of states, a number of us picked up the local way of thinking.

  Thus Zoë’s myth of exile, anyway. It was like listening to the Kabbalah. A paradisal unity shattered, the vessels broken, the holy sparks scattered far and wide. A war waged between true primordial light and its imitators. At the end of which – and this you don’t find in the Kabbalah – poor little Zoë standing outside the gates of the garden, and the angel Krystal with his flaming sword, barring her from re-entering for ever. A myth of exile which she was bound to repeat, not only with me but to me, charging me with it whenever we fell out, for the reason that I was on the continuum of Jewish treachery which had precipitated it, and was therefore, in my own person, one of its primary causes.

  Strange to say, I accepted this guilt. Just as I held every German alive or dead accountable for Germany’s misdeeds, so did I shoulder responsibility for all acts of wickedness perpetrated or still to be perpetrated by Jews on Gentiles. A hard theology, but at least consistent. Bearing Five Thousand Years of Bitterness entailed bearing Five Thousand Years of Culpability.

  Another way of putting that is to credit Zoë with the gift – oh yes, she was loaded with gifts, and not all of them went unexploited – of getting me to know what it felt like to be inside her head. I would watch her standing at the window after one of our fights, and I could hear the sea raging behind her eyes. She would try to look out of herself, notice something happening in the street, a person getting into their car, a mother wheeling a baby, but everything that wasn’t me, wasn’t her, wasn’t the Krystals, would be swept away. Although she claimed she could remember every poisoned word Leila Krystal had said to her on the afternoon of the great betrayal, and every movement of Leila Krystal’s bejewelled hands – ‘Here, child, sit here,’ patting the tapestried cushion on the deep-sprung buttercup-yellow sofa, and then two fingers on the point of Zoë’s knee, as though she couldn’t trust even herself to make more fleshly contact with the girl than that – the story never came out quite the same way twice; but that was beside the point, because the poison, like the sea, was cumulative, each dosage increased by the memory of how it was the last time she remembered. To get through today meant getting through last week, and getting through last week meant getting through the week before. It was beyond her. It stretched too far back. The sea of her shame – the multiplying shame of so many failures to throw off shame – crashed in her ears. Had Leila Krystal appeared before us and Zoë plunged a knife into her heart, the noise in Zoë’s head would have been a mitigating circumstance. Not that it would have stilled the sea. Had she been able to quell the shame she would have been left with hatred, and had she been able to quell the hatred she would have been left with pain. Go all the way back, past the week before and the week before that, and she could only hope, at best, to come upon the little girl – for that was how she saw herself, no matter how luridly Leila Krystal apprehended her and feared her, just an unsuspecting little girl – whose starry, dazzling universe of love and optimism was about to be smashed into a thousand tiny fragments.

  It had happened, could never be made not to have happened, would always go on happening – I was the living proof of that, another shatterer of stars, another stealer of Zoë’s rightful glory – and only a brute would not have wept for her. Yes, she passed it on, made herself so vivid to me that for years the sea in her head became the sea in mine, though I have to say she was not herself made any quieter by the companionship. We simply suffered it together, until finally she saw that as the latest and most diabolical Jewish trespass upon her of them all – my attempt to muscle in on her sorrow.

  After which there was only one thing she could say to me.

  ‘What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza?’

  ‘I don’t know, Zoë. What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza?’

  ‘Pizzas don’t scream when you put them in the oven.’

  6

  They give him a postcard to send to his family. On the front is a photograph of a railway line.

  ‘Here, Scooby-Doo, write to your parents.’

  ‘Do you have other ones?’ he asks.

  ‘Other ones?’

  ‘Different pictures.’

  ‘No. What’s wrong with this picture? We all like it, don’t we?’

  They all agree. They all like it. All things considered it’s their favourite.

  ‘What about stamps?’

  ‘You don’t need a stamp. We’ll post it for you.’

  ‘What about a pen?’

  They give him a pen. Roll it in through the cell door, throw it on to his shelf, pop it into the glass by his bed.

  He recalls marvelling that they would do this for him. A postcard, for God’s sake! Yesterday they were getting him to eat his own shit, today they are providing postcards. What do they mean by it? He closes his eyes and opens them again, expecting the postcard to have gone – but no, it is still there.

  An hour later they come to collect it.

  ‘Written to your parents yet, Scooby-Doo?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything to say,’ he says.

  ‘Tell them about the weather. Tell them about your friends. Describe your day. Tell them what you do. Tell them how much you think about them. Say you wish they were here.’

  But he can’t. For some reason he can’t think of anything that would interest them.

  When they come to collect his postcard the next time they see he has addressed it, but otherwise left it blank
.

  ‘I would like this to go by the next post,’ he tells them. ‘There is some urgency.’

  ‘But you haven’t written anything.’

  ‘I haven’t anything to say.’

  They scratch their heads under their caps and look at one another. ‘We are not sure that it’s allowed to send a blank postcard.’

  ‘I don’t think the post office will mind,’ he says.

  They laugh. ‘It’s not the post office that’s worrying us. It’s we who are not allowed to post a blank postcard. Who knows – it might be code. You might be conveying secret information.’

  ‘I would use words for that.’

  ‘Oh, would you!’

  ‘If I wanted to, but I don’t.’

  They scratch their heads again, then one of them has an idea. ‘We’ll have to get you another postcard,’ he says, ‘so that we can watch you leave it blank. That way we’ll know if you’re up to anything.’

  ‘Such as using invisible ink,’ a second says.

  ‘Or leaving it blank in a particularly suggestive way,’ puts in a third.

  ‘Why don’t you do it for me?’ he wonders.

  They suck their teeth. ‘Oh no. We can’t write prisoners’ postcards for them. We’ll be accused of painting too rosy a picture.’

  ‘Not if you leave it blank.’

  They think about that. ‘No,’ they say at last. ‘Then we’ll be accused of being uninformative. You’ll have to leave it blank yourself.’

  They come back with a new postcard for him and smile between themselves when he fills in the address.

  That’s the moment he realises what they are up to. The reason they have given him a postcard to write to his parents is that he has no parents. The address he writes – s-sssch – is obsolete. They don’t live there, no one lives there, any more.

  S-sssch.

  It is the same with his suitcase.