Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  Twice a week they get him to sign for his suitcase. His signature is an acceptance that they are holding it for him with his permission.

  ‘What’s changed since the last time I signed?’ he asks.

  ‘You have,’ they tell him.

  ‘But what bearing does that have on my suitcase?’

  ‘We want your signature before you forget.’

  ‘Forget what?’

  ‘Forget that you have a suitcase.’

  ‘But if I forget, then it doesn’t matter, does it?’

  They accuse him of solipsism. Just because he doesn’t apprehend his suitcase with his mind doesn’t mean his suitcase doesn’t exist. ‘The suitcase is still there, even if you aren’t,’ they say.

  ‘And why is that important?’

  ‘It’s important for our records. We need to know who the suitcase belongs to.’

  ‘It belongs to me.’

  ‘Not if you suddenly decide to deny it.’

  ‘And why would I do that?’

  ‘It’s something people do who have lost their minds.’

  ‘I don’t know why that would worry you.’

  ‘Because then we’d have a suitcase on our hands we couldn’t account for.’

  ‘Destroy it.’

  They make a tutting noise in harmony, like a glee club. ‘We couldn’t do that. Too much paperwork.’

  And how, I asked, was that the same as the postcards?

  He was surprised I didn’t see it. Because in both instances the efficiency of the system was on the line. And in the end that was all that mattered – the efficient working of the s-system. How well organised everything was, right down to the smallest detail, how much care they took, how much pride they showed in their work. And how hurt they would be when that was not appreciated.

  It’s when they come in with an iron and ironing board, get him to strip off his uniform and then order him to press the yellow star which adorns it, taking particular care with the six points, each of which must be smooth, and then when they begin beating him with their rifle butts because one of the points is not smooth, that I decide to say something.

  ‘Why are you messing with my head, Manny?’

  ‘People don’t know how beautifully made those stars were—’

  ‘Stop it, Manny.’

  He looked away, up at the broken ceiling rose I was always promising Zoë I’d get fixed. His eyes were bluer than cornflowers. Confronted with such an expression, Shitworth Whitworth would have clobbered him for dumb insolence.

  Had he been deliberately messing with my head, or was his own head so messed up that he no longer distinguished between what he’d read and what he’d experienced, where he’d been and where he had always feared they would take him?

  ‘Do you want to know what actually happened?’ he asked me, an hour later.

  I made no reply.

  ‘I lay on my bed and tried to find a justification for every crime that had ever been committed against Jews.’

  ‘For twenty years?’

  ‘Why not? I could have taken longer.’

  ‘And did you succeed?’

  ‘Yes. We deserved everything that had been done to us.’

  ‘And did it make you feel better to think that?’

  ‘Yes, it did. It’s always better to feel you’ve played your part. Anything’s better than being a victim.’

  ‘And what do you think now?’

  ‘I think anything’s better than being a victim.’

  ‘So you don’t ever think of yourself as one?’

  ‘As a victim? Me? How could I be? I broke the Ten Commandments.’

  ‘Only one of them, Manny.’

  ‘You can’t break only one of them. Break one, break them all.’

  ‘You told me that when we were kids.’

  ‘Well, it’s not going to change, is it?’

  ‘So you reckon you got your desserts?’

  He thought about it. Then he did something unexpected. He took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve. He wanted me to see the numbers tattooed upon his arm.

  TWELVE

  Once he has served her, that’s the end of him as man.

  Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS

  1

  Round about the time they were hauling Manny off to Belsen or Buchenwald or wherever he believed they were taking him, a young American film director, Don Edmunds, was handed the script of Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS. ‘This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever read,’ he said. When the producer peeled off $2,000, Edmunds relented. Maybe I can find something socially significant in it, he conceded. He shot the film in nine days on the abandoned set of Hogan’s Heroes. Waste not, want not.

  Errol Tobias must have told me this. Otherwise there’s no explaining how I come to know it.

  The film itself – more cartoonery than porno: hence my interest – I first happened upon in Amsterdam as I have already explained. That being my honeymoon, I never went to see it. We observe the decencies, we Jewish husbands, whatever else there is to say against us. But the memorandum I made to myself on a small folded-down corner of that honeymoon, to look into Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS when I had a spare and more seemly hour on my ownio, turned out to be unnecessary. Before such an hour could be found, the she-wolf looked into me. The circumstances take a bit of unravelling. Errol had something to do with this as well. When did Errol not have something to do with the underbelly of my life? Zoë too. Errol and Zoë. Two people who could not have loathed each other more.

  Why I didn’t keep them apart is a question I have often asked myself. But it’s possible that without Errol, Zoë and I would have never met. Or at least never got together. And there’s also an argument – though it’s a trifle far-fetched – that without Zoë, Errol and I would never have resumed our friendship.

  We differed, Zoë and I, as we differed over most things, in the matter of how and where we made each other’s acquaintance. She said it was in a crowd on Oxford Street watching a young Chinese man threatening to throw himself off the roof of Selfridges. I said it was when she was a kissogram at a party at Errol’s. I remembered the person threatening to throwing himself off a roof, only I remembered him as African. She remembered Errol – finally, and with a little coaxing, oh yes, she remembered Errol – but had no recollection of being a kissogram.

  It was a disagreement, partly, about the nature of the word ‘met’.

  ‘I saw you that day in the crowd,’ I admitted. ‘I could hardly not have seen you. But we didn’t meet.’

  ‘You stared at me, appraised me with your eyes, like a length of cloth you fancied for a suit, then asked me what I was doing afterwards.’

  ‘Actually asked you, or appeared to ask you?’

  ‘I don’t accept the distinction.’

  ‘And when you say I asked you what you were doing afterwards . . . did I mean after the African jumped?’

  ‘Chinese. After he jumped or after he didn’t jump. You didn’t specify. But there was a growing feeling in the crowd that they’d been cheated of their time and that he wasn’t going to jump, so you could have meant after they’d dispersed.’

  ‘I remember the disappointment. The impatience even, as though he was letting us all down by not carrying out his threat. You would have thought we’d paid good money for front-row tickets. If you’re going to fucking jump, fucking jump, I remember hearing someone say.’

  ’That was me.’

  ‘Before or after I asked you what you were doing afterwards?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I said I didn’t need another Jew in my life.’

  ‘Did you say that actually, or did you appear to say it?’

  ‘I don’t accept the distinction.’

  ‘Well, listening to your argument, it seems to me we didn’t meet.’

  ‘No. We met, I just didn’t go to bed with you.’

  ‘A pretty unsatisfactory meeting, then. You’re lucky I didn’t threaten to thr
ow myself off Selfridges’ roof in the African’s place.’

  She had nothing to say to that except, ‘Chinese.’

  The other version of our meeting, my version, begins in a pub out in the sticks somewhere near Borehamwood. I was lost. Trying to find Errol Tobias’s new house. We had stayed in loose contact with each other, chiefly by virtue of Errol’s needing to drop me a postcard once or twice a year to tell me what so-and-so’s real name had been before he or she had changed it. ‘Just a quick line to let you know that Mike Nichols was born Michael Peschkowsky, the mamzer. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t. Errol.’ Or ‘Long time no see, you meshuggener. Bet you didn’t know Jane Seymour was Joyce Penelope Frankenburg. Worth a shtupp whatever her name. Go in health. E.’ And once he surprised me as it were on my own doorstep. ‘Here ‘s one for you, Max. Max Gaines, publisher of the first ever comic books . . . Maxie Ginzberg. But then you probably knew that. All Maxies are Yiddlers.’ This time, though, he had rung to invite me to a party. It was his fortieth birthday and he wanted old friends around him. The Bishops Blackburn Onanists reunited. To see how many – his joke – had gone blind. Kätchen, my girlfriend at the time, was reading me directions. Kätchen the blind navigator – my joke. It was when we drove past this pub for the third time, Kätchen by now upside down in her seat trying to orient herself on the map, and I turning left when she said right, and right when she said left, on the assumption that every instruction she gave needed to be reversed, that we accepted our relationship was at an end.

  ‘I’ll drive you home,’ I said.

  ‘You aren’t capable of finding my home,’ was her reply.

  ‘I’m just the driver,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Drop me at the pub,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll pick someone up.’

  ‘Ask me before you do and I’ll describe him to you,’ I suggested.

  As it turned out, we both picked someone up. Zoë was dressed as Marlene Dietrich, sitting on a small round table, drunk, in a top hat and with her skirts up, showing suspenders and frilly French knickers. Not a sight you expect to see in a Hertfordshire pub. And the surprise for me was doubled because I recognised her at once. Where I recognised her from I had no idea. But I knew the fraught oval of her face as well as if it had haunted me in a dream. Once I placed her – and that was much later in the evening – I wondered if the agitation she caused me could simply be ascribed to the memory of a man throwing himself off a roof. The chances were, however, that it pre-dated that. I’d been waiting for her.

  She was causing a bit of a sensation, titillating the drinkers and deliberately embarrassing the man she appeared to be with, a bit of a sensation in his own right, I gathered, on account of his being a twopenny-halfpenny actor in a onepenny-halfpenny television soap. No person of sound mind, seeing what she was up to, would have gone near her. But she was in lewd and angry spirits, her brittle body giving off sparks, the demureness of her countenance belied by or belying the promise she was holding out. And since when was a sound mind any defence against the Blue Angel?

  She heard me asking for an address. ‘What do you know? That’s where I’m going,’ she called over.

  So, it turned out, were most of the people at the bar. It wasn’t the fault of Kätchen’s navigating that we were lost. Everyone was lost. In fact Errol’s house was just a hop and a step away, but set back in a field that was invisible from the road, so that in the end a visitor had no choice but to go into the pub and ask the way. What had kept them, as it would surely have kept me, was the sight of Zoë in her underwear.

  ‘It’s not a fancy-dress party, is it?’ I’d asked her.

  She looked me over. ‘Well, you obviously think it is,’ she said.

  I explained that I was an old Crumpsall friend of Errol’s, and that in old Crumpsall we dressed for parties exactly as I was dressed, as though to carry a coffin. What was her excuse?

  A good one, as it happened. She did not know Errol from Adam but had been hired to be a kissogram.

  ‘Then let me deliver you,’ I said.

  I waited at the bar while she put on a coat and shook her actor friend’s hand. ‘Goodbye, Bollocky Bill,’ or something similar. Zoë’s heartbreak shake.

  She wouldn’t kiss me in the car.

  ‘What kind of girl do you think I am?’ she asked.

  ‘A kissogram,’ I replied.

  ‘An actress,’ she corrected me.

  ‘Got it,’ I said. ‘An actress.’

  ‘Yes, well, don’t forget it.’ Meaning don’t go mistaking artifice for reality. Don’t go thinking a naked thigh entitles you to naked thoughts. But also meaning, I thought I detected, don’t go losing your heart. But it was a bit late for that. I already had.

  Fifteen minutes later she was sitting on Errol Tobias’s knee, under a sticky oil painting studded with Eilat opals of a holy man from Safed, singing – Zoë, not the holy man – ‘Falling in love again, what am I to do . . .’

  ‘Well, you could suck my dick for starters,’ Errol laughed.

  From the other end of the room came the sound of Errol’s wife putting her fingers down her mouth and pretending to throw up. ‘Yuk, Errol!’ Melanie Kushner as was. Melanie Kushner, the girl with the woman’s breasts, whose friend Tillie Guttmacher had given me the clap. Now a matron with a matron’s breasts, three children to bring up, a shrine to Jewish shlock buried in the English countryside to maintain, and the moral decencies to uphold. ‘Yuk, Errol!’

  ‘Be fair,’ Errol shouted back. ‘It’s my birthday.’

  The disconcerting thing was that for a moment or two it looked as though Zoë might just take Errol at his word. She had that air – a woman who, by the paradoxes of a nihilistic intelligence, believing in nothing, was capable of anything.

  In the end, the chance to show off her gift for cabaret – wasn’t that what Leila Krystal had spotted in her as a girl, the licentious liebeslieder strumpet with tragic eyes? – overcame all other temptations. ‘See what the boys in the back room will have,’ she sang, and though I was later to be her husband and must therefore be accounted biased, I have to say I had never heard it sung, and never will hear it sung, with more sexual challenge.

  I believe she did the Weimar lingerie with more vitality and wit than the original as well. It doesn’t fall to every woman to pull off suspenders and frilly knickers. In order not to look desolate in that haberdasher’s nightmare of ruffled silk and taut elastic, or not too trussed up in it, come to that, you need to give a suggestion of aloofness. But then again not too much. You have to show that you can do irony and corruption, funny and sad. A skill Zoë had off to a tee.

  The rest of the evening was, for me at least, as a brief descent into hell. Devils clutched at me from every side. First Errol, asking how come I knew the kissogram and what about a swap. And when I asked him who the fuck with he said with Melanie who the fuck did I think with and did I have any objection to that. To which the answer was, well, any number, Errol, of which the fact of her being your wife, the fact of her unattractiveness, the fact that her friend had once given me clap (all right, crabs), the detail of her consent to a swap not yet having been asked for or given, to say nothing of my not being in a position to swap Zoë even had I wanted to, having only just met her, were but the first that sprang to mind. Then Melanie herself, arriving in the nick of time, for I couldn’t of course say any of the above to Errol, with the kind offer of showing me around (as I hadn’t yet seen it) the sick fantasy of ormolu and alabaster they called their house – a house which Zoë, collaring me next, referred to – with commendable restraint I thought – as a palais de drek of a sort that only a Jew could want to live in, before dragging me into one of the bathrooms, the one with a Venus rising from the Dead Sea painted on the door, and giving me my kiss at last. Only we hadn’t properly locked the door – this being Errol’s house, it was likely there were no proper locks on bathroom doors – and were discovered in embrace in the Romano-Israelite bath by Kätchen and Zoë’s actor boyfriend who had hitched
up in the pub, decided they would come along to the party since that was where their partners had headed off to and they were so far from anywhere else, and were looking for a Roman bath to embrace in of their own. Fuck you, Zoë’s boyfriend said, I wasn’t sure to whom; fuck you, Zoë said in return; fuck you, Kätchen said to Zoë, and before I could say fuck you to anybody, Errol burst in, utterly unsurprised to see any of us there, but mouthing to me with an exaggerated roll of his Mephistophelian lips the question WELL?

  Should I have told Zoë of Errol’s proposal? Hell or no hell, did I owe her the truth? My friend wants me to swap you for his wife. I hate his wife, I hate him, I hate it here, I’ve only just met you but I love you – so what do you think?

  No, was the answer. No I should not have told her. But I did tell her.

  ‘Why?’ she asked me.

  ‘Why does he want to swap?’

  ‘Why are you telling me?’

  ‘Because . . .’ Why was I telling her? ‘Because I was afraid you’d think me a coward if I didn’t. Because if I didn’t tell you there would be an untruth between us from the start. Because it’s funny.’

  ‘If it’s funny, why aren’t you laughing?’

  ‘Because it’s not only funny. Because it’s horribly depressing as well.’

  ‘Try being more courageous, Max. That is your name, isn’t it? Max? I always like to know a man’s name before he trades me for his best friend’s wife. You should have the balls to come clean. Either say you want it or you don’t.’

  ‘Want what? The swap? I want the plague more.’

  ‘Then why did you bring it up?’

  ‘I told you.’

  She showed me the full sadness of her perfectly defined face, knowing she had nothing to fear from the closest scrutiny, knowing that wherever my eye lit, it would be pleased with the clarity of what it saw. Had I ever before seen a face less blurred, or one in which the relations of part to part were so chaste? Yes, as a matter of fact I had, in a crowd in the moment before a man fell from a roof. But that wasn’t the first time either. The first time was in Siena, five hundred years or so before. A Sano di Pietro Madonna, that’s who she was, without a baby to feed but otherwise with all the cares of Christianity on her shoulders. As for the sadness, it adhered to her face as an immutable law, as though perfect beauty must always expect an impossible perfection of appreciation, and so must always be disappointed.