Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  And if you’re a Madonna, the people who disappoint you the most, of course, are Jews.

  ‘But what you told me was not the truth,’ she said.

  ‘You think I have a secret agenda? You think I want to roll between Melanie Tobias’s fat breasts?’

  ‘Well, who am I to say? But no, since you ask me, no, I don’t think that. I think you want to disparage me.’

  ‘Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘You tell me. You’re the pervert. Because you’d like me to do a turn with you and your friend – how does that sound? Because you fancy a gang bang. But because you’re ashamed of saying that’s what you want, you plant the suggestion and then run away from it, hoping I will do the rest. You can’t help yourself. You see a Gentile and you see sex.’

  ‘Let me stop you there,’ I said, gesturing at her naked Berlin thighs.

  ‘Oh, don’t be so fucking gross! At whose behest do you suppose I am dolled up in these ludicrous clothes? I play the slut you pay me to play. You aren’t the first and you won’t be the last. I seem to excite something in you people.’

  ‘We people?’

  ‘What – is it supposed to be a secret? Look around you, Mister Max. We’re in a bordello designed by a rabbi who’s lost his faith or his reason. It’s like a whorehouse in Tel Aviv in here. If you were thinking that this was a good way of keeping a low profile, think again.’

  ‘It’s not my house, Miss Dietrich. And I didn’t pay you.’

  ‘You might not have paid me but you’re happy enough to get an eyeful. And whether it’s your house or not, you sure as hell don’t look out of place in it.’

  ‘That’s because it’s you who’s doing the looking. You people only see what you want to see. You think we look at you and see a prostitute, but it’s you who look at us and see a pimp. You aren’t the first. And you sure as hell won’t be the last.’

  She appeared sorry for me, suddenly. She put her hand up to my nose. The merest touch at first, perhaps in fear that I might pull away, but gradually a more exploratory caress, ascertaining the soundness of the bone, the thickness of the cartilage, then feathery again, the movement of her finger tips almost trancelike, slowly tracing every contour, as though we both might find peace in it.

  ‘Nice,’ I said. ‘Very nice.’

  She seemed surprised by my docility. ‘Would you let anyone do this?’

  ‘Explore my nose? Only you.’

  Finally she pinched my nostrils together and stepped back.

  ‘It’s very fine,’ she said, ‘but it will have to go.’

  2

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

  Interesting that in the movie none of the She-Wolf ’s victims is specifically Jewish. Why would that be? Good taste?

  For months after that party Errol never left me alone. He was on the phone to me almost daily. What had happened to our friendship? Why were we seeing so little of each other? Was I aware that Yves Montand’s real name was Ivo Levi and Simone Signoret’s Simone-Henriette Kaminker? How long had I known the kissogram?

  Eventually, because I couldn’t face the hike to Hertfordshire, I invited him to lunch at my place in Belsize Park, the house I had once shared with Chloë, the house outside which we had parked our Völökswägen with the rabbi swinging in the rear window. He turned up in powder-blue pants and canary-yellow sweater with a flamingo-pink suede blouson hanging loosely on his shoulders. The warmth of the day explained his outfit partly. But I knew what explained the rest of it. Desire.

  You could smell it on him. The thin, needling fetor of cold semen.

  He was disappointed that it was only him and me for lunch. I watched him counting the cutlery and weighing up the salad. At every noise he started, hoping it was her. The kissogram.

  ‘You live here on your own now then?’ he asked me more times than was polite.

  ‘Since my divorce, yes.’

  ‘Did I meet that one?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Would I have liked her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would she have liked me?’

  I looked him over. The devil, presumably, doesn’t change. As he was when an infant imp, so as a hundred-thousand-year-old demon. No healthy principle of growth. Errol the same. The bones still as cruel as ever, the skin still so fine a purple light seemed to shine through it. There is a sort of thinness that denotes abhorrence. An extremity of distaste which we expect to find in puritans and ascetics. The mystery of Errol Tobias was that he was capable of such fastidiousness of expression even while he rolled in shit. ‘No,’ I said – though he alone of all the Jews I knew was not particular from which direction he took a woman, which versatility Chloë might well have smelled on him – ‘no, she wouldn’t have liked you one bit.’

  He laughed through his nose, pleased at the effect he might have had on my ex-wife, had he only met her. ‘What’s happened to us, Max?’ he said, his face wrinkled into sentimentality. ‘Why have we seen so little of each other?’

  ‘London. London’s like that. And anyway, look at us. You live in a palace . . .’

  ‘Well, this isn’t exactly a shit-heap. Belsize Park, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘There ’s Belsize Park and there ’s Belsize Park,’ I reminded him. ‘And neither is Borehamwood. I live on a main road, I’ve got squatters dossing either side of me, I don’t have two acres of garden, I don’t have a tennis court, or a marble-pillared porch—’

  ‘—or a swimming pool.’

  ‘Exactly. Or a swimming pool.’

  ‘But so what? You draw cartoons, I import wine. Sometimes I have a good year, sometimes I have a bad year. It must be the same for you. Maybe next year will be a good year.’

  ‘Errol, this year is a good year.’

  He wiped his mouth and took a look around. There was something in the way he examined my work that told me he was putting his mind to how I could run my business better. First there’d be an exposition of the problem as he saw it. Then there’d be a game plan for the future. Then he’d present me with the bill for his services which he’d waive for a night with the kissogram.

  ‘How much do you get for one of these?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Errol, we’re not doing this. Sit down and I’ll bring you cheesecake.’

  ‘Could you do my family?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t do portraits.

  ‘Could you do the house?’

  I shook my head again. Ditto houses.

  I did cartoons, full stop. And he wouldn’t want anyone or anything he loved – not that there was anyone or anything he loved – in one of those.

  He was frantic. There had to be something he could give me. In return for which . . .

  ‘What wine do you drink?’ he asked me.

  ‘Errol, how can you ask me that? I drink whatever wine’s put in front of me. So long as it’s sweet. We drank Mateus Rosé with our curries, don’t you remember that? And we found that somewhat on the dry side. We were wonderfully above wine. That’s something I’ve been meaning to ask – where did it all go wrong for you? How come you became such a gantse wine-macher?’

  ‘To tell you the truth it was a piece of mazel. First I met Melanie who had an uncle in the business. Then the Israelis captured the Golan and planted vines on it. Plus, you know me, I read a few books on the subject. And this is the result.’ He opened his arms wide to show me the fruits, then remembered he was in my shabby sitting room/studio, not his palais de drek in Borehamrigid. Zoë’s joke.

  ‘How’s your mother?’ he suddenly asked me.

  ‘She’s fine. She has her kalooki, and of course her grandchildren. How’s yours?’

  ‘Fine, too. She’s still working. She must be the oldest hairdresser in the country. I’ve offered to buy them something down here, but they say they know no one. I tell them they know me and Melanie and their grandchildren, but they say they can’t come and stare at us all day. So they stay in Crumpsall. How’s your
sister? Did she marry that yok?’

  I clicked my tongue at him. Of all the Jewish fear words for the Gentile, yok is the most hateful. There are contested derivations of the term. Some say it denoted a citizen of York, where an angry and unlettered mob chose to believe the usual rumours and in the year 1190 massacred 150 Jews. Others see it simply as goy spelled backwards, with the final consonant unvoiced. I favour the former explanation. Goy is too neutral ever to have mutated into yok. A Jew can feel affectionately to a goy. But in yok you hear the baying mob. The lowest form of humankind. It expresses an indelible loathing. And that before it suffered comminglement with Errol’s noxious spit.

  ‘Do me a favour, Errol,’ I said. ‘Don’t call him that.’

  He backed off. ‘OK. But we had a little quarrel with him in our family, don’t forget. He moved in on my mother’s business.’

  ‘Errol, he cut about fifteen people’s hair in a year. All men. I’d hardly call that moving in.’

  Fine. He wasn’t arguing. Not to meet my eye he began circling the room again, scrutinising my cartoons as though conscious that he hadn’t done his best by them the first time round.

  ‘Tell me something,’ he said at last, ‘do you ever worry what the goyim think?’

  ‘In what sense? Do I worry that they miss the joke? Of course they miss the joke. They’re goyim.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. I mean do you ever worry that you’re telling them too much about us?’

  ‘What, by blowing the lid on what we’re like? You think they don’t know? My position, Errol, is that they managed to detest and fear us well enough before I came along.’

  ‘Don’t you think they’d show us more respect if we showed ourselves more respect? For example, look at this . . .’

  He extended his hand to a small drawing – one of a series illustrating Jewish jokes which I’d unsuccessfully pitched, when I was hard up, first to a publisher of greetings cards and then to a Christmas cracker company. It showed two stereotypical old Yiddlers sheltering under a tree and looking up at a bird which had defecated on them. ‘And for the goyim they sing,’ one of the men was saying.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m looking.’

  ‘Well, why’s that funny, Max? What’s amusing about Jews always seeing themselves as being shat on? Isn’t it time we outgrew that?’

  ‘It’s time we outgrew making lists of Jews who change their names, but some of us do it, Errol.’

  ‘I don’t publish those lists for all and sundry to read, Max.’

  ‘Ah, so it’s not my shitting on those poor old Jews that bothers you, it’s my doing it for the entertainment of the Christians. The accusation is not Masochismus but Nestbeschmutzing. Well, as far as charging me with nestbeschmutzing is concerned, let me tell you that others have got there before you. There isn’t a Jew living who isn’t guilty, in the opinion of some other Jew, of fouling the nest. Unless you take a vow of silence or wire your jaw you’re a nestbeschmutzer. And if you do take a vow of silence or wire your jaw you’re suffering from Judische Selbsthass. We either love ourselves too much or hate ourselves too much. To a Jew there is no acceptable way of being Jewish. Every other Jew does it wrong. And I can’t say that aloud either in case a Christian hears. Which is the best joke about us of the lot. I must remember to find a Christmas card company to send it to.’

  He made a placatory gesture with his hand, almost, but not quite, patting me on the back. Even though he hadn’t touched me I could feel the skeletal outline of his fingers on my spine.

  ‘Make fun of what I’m saying all you like,’ he said, ‘but there are people out there ready to seize on everything we say against ourselves. Have you read Did Six Million Really Die? ? ’

  ‘Why would I? I can tell there are no laughs in it. And anyway, I don’t read books that have questions for titles. I like authors who know the answers.’

  ‘This author knows the answers, believe me. No, Six Million Did Not Die.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Five million, was it?’

  ‘Too few to count, Max. And of those that did, most were victims of the Russians, illness, or an unwillingness to accept emigration. We’re a pestilence on the face of the earth, and in a well-regulated world six million of us would die every afternoon, but as it happened, and in this particular instance, they didn’t harm a hair of our heads.’

  ‘Yep. I know. And this is the thanks we give them – inventing the chambers and the ovens.’

  ‘Exactly. And claiming compensation for Jews who couldn’t possibly have died or there wouldn’t be so many of us left controlling the media, bankrupting the planet and stealing land from poor Arabs.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be reading it, Errol, it will make you ill.’

  ‘Someone has to.’

  ‘I agree with you. And better it’s you than me. But I don’t see what this has to do with my shitting bird.’

  ‘They make their history by seizing on every instance of one Jew differing from another. They’d see you dead tomorrow, but if they can quote you against your own people they will make you a hero for a page. They’ll even invite you to one of their conferences and be photographed with their arms around you. “Look – they’re such liars these Jews that even Jews don’t believe them!” They’re besotted with us, Max. If you state that 260,000 Jews lived in the Baltic States before the German invasion, and I put the figure at 260,001, they’ll use us to confute each other. They monitor everything we say and do.’

  ‘Then they’ll be monitoring this. Are you sure you’re not becoming paranoid, Errol?’

  ‘From you! Five Thousand Years of Fucking Bitterness!’

  ‘That’s not paranoia. It’s history.’

  ‘Well, they deny it, Max.’

  ‘Well, let them. It will work in our favour in the end. If they’re so determined to disprove all our complaints about the past, they have a stake in giving us nothing to complain about in the future. Think of them as the guarantee of our children’s future. See it as having free bodyguards.’

  He fell into an armchair and grinned at me. ‘It’s good to see you again, you meshuggeneh Yid,’ he said.

  I fell into an armchair opposite. ‘Good to see you, too,’ I lied.

  ‘So?’ he said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So tell me about the kissogram.’

  3

  Did I want to defile Zoë as she claimed? Was it the case that I no sooner looked at her than I saw the whore of Babylon? And could it really have been my buried wish to have her get it on with me and Errol both – a stubby shikseh passed like a roach from Jewish hand to Jewish hand?

  Honesty demands I be scrupulous about my dark unconscious, whether or not I thereby give ammunition to Gentiles on twentyfour-hour Jew-degeneracy watch. Beholding her bare-thighed on Errol’s knee, outlola’ing Lola Lola – a joke she didn’t quite get herself – did I not wonder how far, for veracity’s sake, she might go? And when Errol put it to her that she might go so far as to suck his dick, did I post-date my dread that she might into an expectancy, an assumption – all right, all right, into a longing – that she would?

  No. Yes. No.

  But dreads do have a way of fulfilling themselves. And the time came when yes, God forgive me, yes, I did behold Zoë, or at least when I with good reason imagined I beheld Zoë – by then become my wife, a woman I had undertaken to honour and protect, Zoë Glickman, the mother-to-be of my children, except that we would have no children – yes, when I came as close to beholding as you can come to beholding without actually beholding, whatever it was I thought that I beheld.

  Which answered, all things considered, to that longing I did not dare acknowledge?

  Yes.

  No.

  Yes.

  But yes or no it didn’t happen all at once. And that it did happen at all (if it did happen at all) was so contrary to any desires I recognised on the upper levels of my person that I reject as wicked libel Zoë’s assertion that it was just another act of Jewish machination practi
sed upon her innocence. First Leila Krystal, now me – no sooner did we see her trusting beauty, Zoë the unspotted, golden as the corn she came through, than the need was on us to befoul it.

  Reason not the need, Zoë. Need never entered into it. Any befouling came as surplus to desire. And its object was me, not you.

  Self-befouling, nestbeschmutzing, all the cunning cartoonery of the heart – we are too busy with ourselves, Zoë, to have time to worry about demeaning you.

  Despite Errol’s continuing curiosity, I didn’t bring him and Zoë into each other’s company again for several years. Our friendship had been rekindled and we kept it up à deux, meeting each other halfway, as it were, in East Finchley, or Hendon, or other last outposts of the city where we had heard rumours of a new salt-beef bar or similar having opened. I am not sure why either of us persisted. It certainly wasn’t for the food. Nor was it for the company, come to that. I always groaned when the time came to get ready and do the trek, and I never doubted that Errol felt the same. But we must have felt we were honouring something in our past, even if we couldn’t have given it a name.

  Though he never failed, the minute we met, to ask after the kissogram, and I never failed, the minute we parted, to send my love to Melanie, we otherwise avoided home talk. That way I didn’t have to tell him I was getting married or invite him to the wedding, and he didn’t have to involve me in whatever ceremonies of the hearth clicked off the years in Borehamrigid. Mainly we talked the emotional politics of being Jewish as we individually saw it: the philistinism of Hertfordshire and Crumpsall Jews (me), the shrinkage of the Jewish population due to intermarriage and name-change (Errol), the continuing silence of English Jewish intellectuals on Jewish matters (me), the refusal of Jewish readers to take Jewish cartoonists to their hearts (me), and of course Israel, about which there was good and bad to say, though Errol – again bearing remarkable similarities to Tsedraiter Ike who, after the Six Day War, had succeeded in getting half of Crumpsall to boycott the Guardian – never ceased wondering how as a Jew I could submit cartoons to papers which only saw the bad.