Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  She wishes to discuss art with him. She is confused by what he has told her about caricature. He has told her that art is not the rendering of what is outside art. That art sees but remakes what it sees, in that way causing something to appear that wasn’t there before. But to draw a caricature is to acknowledge dependence on something previous to the work, even to evoke something previous to the work, because it is only by recalling the original that the caricaturist can be seen to be exaggerating. In this sense, the caricaturist is the least godlike, most second-hand of all artists. But because the caricaturist is by nature a satirist, and the impulse to satire is denial, he is also the most godlike. In his act of creation, the satirist destroys.

  He is careful to keep his disquisition simple enough to maintain her interest, but at the same time abstruse enough to guarantee him a beating.

  He is drawing the fine isthmus of candle-white flesh above the Tubercle of Pubis. She has loosened her belt and infinitessimally eased her riding trousers down her hips so that he can see it well enough to draw. Three or four hairs of different lengths have strayed from her pubic triangle. He has seen a sufficient number of these hairs, now straying upwards, now straying down, now curling sideways, and now en masse, matted, like a tiny haystack, to reproduce Frau Koch’s pubic triangle in its entirety were he of a mind. But he is not of a mind even to imagine it. The three or four stray hairs are more engaging. I am a man with a soul and an intelligence, he tells himself as he draws, I am here in fulfilment of some inscrutable but divine intention, and I will not be here again; yet there is not a part of me that is not at this moment concentrated on a single one of Frau Koch’s nether hairs arbitrarily uncovered, a scratchy incidental filament which would assuredly have a sour odour if I could get my nose close enough to its smell, which resembles nothing more beautiful or significant in creation than the torn-off leg of a spider, and of itself and thus disposed fulfils no function worth putting the smallest corner of my imagination to. And yet, precisely for these reasons, and precisely because it grows from the body of a woman who fulfils no function worth putting the smallest corner of my attention to, my self-annihilating absorption in it is bliss beyond the power of dreaming.

  She catches the shadow of his satisfaction on his face. ‘Why are you smiling, Jew? You are not satirising me, I hope?’

  ‘If I were, I would not be smiling, Frau Koch.’

  ’I will make it my purpose before I am finished with you, Jew, to drive all satire from your mind.’

  ‘You already have, Frau Koch.’

  She sits very still, like a model. Not in deference to his expectations as the artist, but because she does not want him to see anything more of her than his daily allowance. A rigidity which is the nearest she will ever get to understanding the punctilios of his perversion.

  His member stirs, and she strikes it.

  ‘And now your face . . .’

  He brings his face towards her, an upward arc from below, and she strikes that.

  He closes his eyes.

  ‘Open,’ she says. ‘You cannot work if you cannot see. And you are forbidden to work from memory.’

  He likes that idea and wonders if she is getting better. With time he could make the perfect mistress of her. He will say that for the Germans. They learn.

  He is half inclined to make a satiric mark on the paper, as an encouragement to her to drive all satire from his mind.

  She is getting better. She reads what he is thinking. ‘Is it Jewish, this satire of yours, Jew?’

  ‘It is, Frau Koch. Satire is written into our natures. Nietzsche believed we invented democracy out of a satiric impulse, as a refusal of aristocrats and heroes.’

  She doesn’t, of course, know who Nietzsche is. The education of the German people, though advanced, is a long way from being complete.

  ‘So are all Jews satiric?’

  ‘Only the clever ones, Frau Koch.’

  ‘I thought you were all clever.’

  ‘We are, Frau Koch.’

  She strikes his face again, with her gloved hand. ‘Don’t be satiric with me, Jew. I have told you I will remove all satire from your mind. You have said satire is written into your natures. So if I remove the satire from the Jews, there are no Jews, nicht wahr?’

  Ja wohl, Mendel thinks.

  6

  Errol had found Zoë in The Library, examining his shelves. If I was to trust her account, he had enquired as to her favourite writers and when she told him Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt and A. A. Milne, he asked her if she had ever seen Deep Throat.

  ‘I thought this was intended to be a serious evening,’ she told him.

  ‘It is a serious evening. Deep Throat is a serious film. It’s about a disability.’

  She took two paces back from him, thought about quitting the room altogether, then decided to sit down. She needed, she told me, to compose herself.

  ‘Max said you were raising money for some sort of Holocaust Fellowship.’

  ‘We are. Are you interested in the Holocaust?’

  Zoë detected insult in that. We were a phobic, perceptually oversensitive, paranoiac couple. Or at least we were when we went out in each other’s company. If I didn’t detect an insult on my own account, Zoë detected it for me. And vice versa. But on this occasion Zoë had done all the detecting necessary for herself.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be interested in the Holocaust?’ she asked. Meaning – but it was obvious what she was meaning.

  ‘No reason. I am pleased you are. It is important that you should be.’ With which he opened a cupboard in his bookcases, brought out a bundle of what turned out to be pornographic magazines and films, and tossed them to her on the sofa. ‘Holocaust material,’ he said. ‘You choose.’

  ’So now,’ she told me when I found her, ‘I say the same to you. “You choose.”’

  I made an automatic move in the direction of Errol’s ‘material’.

  ‘Don’t be a fucking moron, Max. What you’re choosing is whether we stay or go.’

  It was one of those moments. Even at the time it felt like one of those moments. Though of course, as with all moments that are moments, the true consequences are not fully revealed until long afterwards. There it was, anyway. Maxie’s Choice. Did we go or did we stay?

  It should have been cut and dried. We should have gone. I knew what Zoë thought. Get us the hell out of here, Max. The issue waiting to be decided wasn’t what we should or shouldn’t do, what hung in the moral balance was me.

  That I ‘chose’ unwisely, I put down to several factors. I was tired, and didn’t immediately feel like driving home. Errol and Melanie Tobias were my friends, and I didn’t see how we could walk out on them just like that. What is more, if Errol had intended to treat my wife insultingly, the right thing was to get him to apologise, not to cut and run. In later conversations, Zoë would have none of these. ‘The night held out unholy promise,’ she insisted, ‘that was why you chose to stay. You chose to stay because you couldn’t bear what you would miss out on if we went.’ To which my reply never wavered. ‘It wasn’t the night that held out unholy promise, Zoë, it was you.’

  The bare facts were these. Errol had thrown a bundle of porno on the couch for her to look at. There was without doubt sexual provocation in that, though he was not to know that Zoë believed a Jew had only to look at her to see a whore. Upset or not, Zoë could have got up and walked into another room, said not a word about it to me, and that would have been the end of it. For her to have turned it into a melodrama of decision for me – ‘Your choice, Max’ – merely proves that she had made herself imaginatively complicit in a narrative which began in porn and ended in her becoming the whore she believed Errol and I took her for. Her fault then, I maintained, if I failed to make the right choice – her fault for enticing me into making the wrong one.

  But I accept that even when the charge is enticement, the enticed party, like the insulted shikseh, is free to get up and walk into another room. I coul
d have driven us both home, should have driven us both home, however much unholy promise Zoë’s frightened eyes held out to me.

  It happened, anyway, as Zoë, without a word, had warned me that it would. I am not going to relate it in any detail. One can do justice to degradation in bare outlines. Kalooki’d-out at midnight, the party broke up. Only Zoë and I remained. Errol poured us brandies and turned down the lights. Zoë, never so much as blinking in my direction, did what she had earlier and insultingly been bid to do, selecting Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS as most appropriate to the occasion – unsparing depiction of the Third Reich, in whatever form, being as requisite to her view of history as it was to ours. We watched the flickering screen, roused by the silent act of watching rather than by what we watched. The She-Wolf was the disappointment all heroines of pornography turn out to be when they walk out of your imaginations. Not only was she without interesting views on the Jewish question, she didn’t remotely look the part, her sloppy-titted blowsiness bearing more resemblance to the charitable sucklers who had just left us than the louche and lazy-eyed Ilse Koch whose acts of barbarism had scorched the gardens and backyards of Crumpsall all those years ago. I would have said as much to Errol had the opportunity arisen. I would have complained, not least, that there seemed to be no Yiddlers among those whose private parts the She-Wolf was intent on getting rid of. ‘So what gives here, Errol? More revisionism? No Jews among the howling castrati?’ But criticism of the film was moving along a different groove. Zoë’s doing. She had begun by snorting her derision. ‘Don’t tell me this crap turns you on,’ she asked, of me and Errol both. ‘Shut up, Zoë,’ I told her, not because it did turn me on but because I was trying to work out why it didn’t. ‘Sit near me,’ Errol said, ‘if he won’t talk to you.’ ‘You should be ashamed, the pair of you,’ Zoë said, ‘I’d be weeping if I wasn’t laughing.’ But she still went over to the couch on which Errol was sprawled, to punish me, I calculated, for being turned on (which I wasn’t), for not weeping (which in some part of me I was), for not choosing the option of taking her home (which I wished I had) and for being a Jew (which I couldn’t help). That there was no logic in her decision to punish one Jew with another there seemed no point in my arguing. Besides, no sooner did Zoë move to Errol’s corner of the room, than Melanie moved to mine. What Melanie then made happen was interesting to me only in so far as it might have been a mirror image of what Zoë was making happen. I will say no more. I kept my eyes on the screen until there was no torture left for Ilsa to inflict and no character left living for her to inflict it on. The camp was set alight, Ilsa got hers, the credits rolled and that was the Holocaust that was. After which we turned on the lights, rearranged our clothing (unless I imagined that), thanked our hosts and drove home in bitter silence.

  So it was Goodbye, Bollocky Bill.

  Not in one bite. I find it hard to remember now how we managed to remain married for so many years in spite of that kalooki night. By not referring to it, partly. By neither overtly charging the other with impropriety. But my failure to be the man I’d promised her I’d be was always with us. And we both knew she would finally have to pay me back for that by leaving me.

  I hadn’t done what I’d said I’d do. I hadn’t broken the chain of disparagement. I hadn’t hushed the crashing in her head. I hadn’t become the soil in which her genius for genius could flower. I’d stayed Jewish.

  She was so distressed when she shook my hand the final time she grew diaphanous. I could see into her nervous system. The Daily Express had a 1930s glass-walled factory in Manchester where you could stand in the street and watch the papers coming off the presses. My father, a transparency fanatic, used to drive us into town to look. Zoë reminded me of that building. In extremis she showed you her workings.

  I had done a cartoon of her in that condition for one of her birthdays. The Transparent Woman. She hadn’t been amused. ‘I can’t see why the joke entertains you,’ she said, ‘you being so hidden yourself.’

  ‘I’m not hidden,’ I protested. ‘I show you everything.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You are a devious little prick. You show me nothing that you haven’t calculated on showing me. You are entirely hidden. You all are. You have to be. You can’t afford to let us see what you are thinking. That’s my definition of a Jew. A person who won’t ever let you know what he thinks of you, because if you found out you would leave him. That’s how terrible the thing he’s thinking about you is.’

  And was she right? Did I keep a monstrous idea of her somewhere about my person?

  Put it this way: I should have driven her home.

  As for her transparency, well, apparently I had that wrong too. ‘Most of what you think you saw in me you didn’t,’ she told me just before she left. ‘Except of course for the blow job.’

  I didn’t rise. ‘Goodbye, Zoë,’ I said.

  ‘The blow job you thought you saw me giving your vile friend whatever-his-fucking-name-was, in that gross palais de drek in Borehamrigid . . .’

  ‘Leave it, Zoë. Just go.’

  ‘Well, you were right.’ She gave one of her tinkling little laughless laughs. ‘I did. I can even describe his prick to you. Slender and sulphurous. And scaly, like a serpent’s tail.’

  I shook my head, not wanting any of her words to lodge.

  ‘Just thought you’d be pleased to know that,’ she said.

  And was gone.

  THIRTEEN

  1

  ‘So who was living here?’ Manny asked in a rare outburst of curiosity. As he’d insisted he needed no more than a couple of hangers for his things – ‘Three, at most’ – I hadn’t thought it necessary to clear out the wardrobe.

  ‘An ex-wife. She left a few dresses and I haven’t had the heart to get rid of them.’ A reward for his rare outburst of curiosity: a rare outburst of candour.

  ‘When did she leave?’

  ‘Seven, eight, nine years ago.’

  ‘And what number wife was she?’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Two out of how many?’

  ‘Three.’ I said it sheepishly. Don’t ask me why.

  ‘And didn’t the third object to these?’

  ‘To the clothing of the second? No. She never came in here. We weren’t married long enough for her to need the refuge of a granny flat. Though long enough for me to wish she’d moved into it.’

  Manny ran the tips of his fingers through his omelette hair and made a clicking sound with his tongue which I took to be an act of judgement.

  ‘There won’t be any more,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t have to apologise to me,’ he said.

  Didn’t I?

  I believed I did. Or if not apologise, at least be careful. You don’t go around advertising the tumult of your marital life to someone who has had no marital life, tumultuous or otherwise. I had behaved badly enough all those years before, flashing him Märike on the library steps. And that was when he was still in with a chance – on paper, if nowhere else – of finding love and happiness. Now that we could definitely say goodbye to any such thing, it behoved me to proceed with even greater circumspection.

  In which case I should probably have thought twice before offering him the flat, or failing that removed the last of Zoë’s clothes from the wardrobe. But since I hadn’t, I owed it to both of us to question my motivation. It couldn’t be, could it, that I was somewhere still wanting to exult sexually over Manny?

  Ask me what I could possibly have found to exult about and you have me. But what if that precisely was the monkish function I had allotted Manny from the start – he was the measure compared to which my life was all exultation?

  A thought occurred to me. Was that the function Asher had allotted him as well? Did Asher prance before his brother?

  ‘Who was she then?’

  He startled me. I was showing him round the kitchen, thinking my thoughts, wondering if he looked at the world as the world looked at him, or whether by his own lights he didn’t remotely suffer
in the comparison with me or Asher as I feared – as I, perhaps, had no right to fear – because he attached small value to acts of love and desperation. Not everyone was a lover. Not everyone was a husband. Some people – I had constantly to remind myself of this – lived an uncompanioned life because they wanted to.

  ‘Zoë?’ I paused. Here we were again. How could I not upset him with Zoë? What version of Zoë was there that wouldn’t be unhinging to a man who’d spent his life in detention? ‘A woman driven to distraction by Jews,’ I decided to say.

  He was counting the knives in the cutlery drawer, as though fearing I would charge him with their theft when he left. ‘What did we do to her?’

  ’We made her feel disgusted with herself.’

  ‘For not being Jewish?’

  ‘You have it in one, Manny.’

  ‘It’s no more than they do to us.’

  ‘I agree, it’s no more than they do to us. But that doesn’t make it any better. Indeed it makes it worse, since we know what it’s like.’

  He fell quiet, starting on the forks. ‘That argument has got us into a lot of trouble in the past,’ he said.

  ‘And got me into a lot of trouble with Zoë,’ I agreed. ‘She thought it was another example of Jewish ethical haughtiness. All that Light Unto Other Fucking Nations Bollocks was how she alluded to it.’