Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  ‘But she married you.’

  ‘Yes. She hoped I might change the way she felt.’

  ‘And you didn’t?’

  ‘Oh, I did. I made her hate Jews even more virulently than she had before.’

  He was still not looking at me, still counting and sorting cutlery. ‘How did you do that?’

  ‘Long story,’ I said. ‘Look, would you stop with the knives and forks.’

  He jumped, startled. Deprived of anything to absorb his attention, he was reduced to facing me. And no sooner did so than he appeared to find me, or something I stood in the way of, interesting. I had the feeling that he was trying to look behind or beyond me. What had I said, I wondered, that he wanted to verify?

  ‘Why do we do it?’ he asked.

  ‘Why do we do what, Manny?’

  He was still deciding, still verifying. I felt he was interviewing me in some way, testing my worthiness.

  ‘Why do we make it so hard for them?’

  ‘You mean our Christian brothers and sisters?’

  ‘Everybody. Everybody who isn’t us.’

  I shrugged. What did I know other than that I was growing uncomfortable with this ‘we’ and ‘us’ business. What had Manny done to our Christian brothers and sisters? Manny’s bag was killing Jews, not Gentiles.

  Then I realised that if I shut my mouth and just stared into the vast blue incoherence of his eyes and let him talk, he would tell me at last what I had been employed to hear.

  2

  Dorothy.

  From Zoë, don’t ask me how, Manny had got to Dorothy.

  From shikseh to shikseh was the overarching logic, of course – it was the individual moves I hadn’t followed. But here we were, however we had got to her, at Dorothy.

  Dorothy and Asher met again. That much Manny had already told me. Not an arranged meeting, an accident. A happy fortuity, allowing that a happy fortuity for one (or two) people can be a catastrophe for others. A chance happening, anyway. Asher shuffling along, hollow of lung, cavernous of cheek, a ruined man, a holy tramp with a broken heart – a hero of the affections to me, even if he had capitulated to sectarianism – when suddenly, coming in the opposite direction, still beautiful, swinging her hair, but with little grey pinpricks of sadness in her alpine eyes, Dorothy!

  KERPOW!!

  What I didn’t know was that the happy fortuity had taken place in Israel. Crumpsall was where I’d pictured it, and even Crumpsall, in these circumstances, was not lacking any of the romantic associations necessary to send both their hearts skidding from their moorings. Just thinking of their meeting after so many years – ten, twelve, was it? – just imagining that first astonished convergence of their eyebeams, was enough to affect my breathing, however blank in actuality the streets. But Israel! The place where miracles happened. The place where, taking the long view – God’s covenant with the Jews, etc – all Dorothy’s and Asher’s troubles started, and yet where, as the plastic surgeon who wouldn’t work on my nose insisted, the reconciliation of every warring people would at last, in readiness for the final trumpet, be effected. If Asher and Dorothy were to be given a second chance of happiness before the world ended, Israel surely was the land to give it to them in.

  Asher, it seemed, had been living in Israel for several years. This was why, after he had parted from Dorothy, no one outside his family had seen or heard of him. As part of his continuing convalescence – because running around Lymm in a vest and gym shorts was not mending his spirits – they had packed him off to Israel. For generations of wealthy Gentiles wanting to extricate their heiress daughters from the influence of penniless ne’er-do-wells, some of whom would doubtless have been Jews (for yes, there were, there are such), the Grand Tour always did the trick: a visit to the Paris opera, the statuary of Florence, a gondola ride in Venice, the ruins and fountains of Rome, and latterly a finishing school in Switzerland, or a sojourn at the court of Herr Hitler. A change of scenery and language, it was believed, a variety of diet, would change and varify their minds. Imagine, for example, what would have happened to any anglo-Yiddler romance the Mitford sisters might have been enjoying in London once they’d strolled out across the Wilhelmplatz to lunch on pig’s knuckle with the Führer. Kaput. All forgotten, you can be sure, all wiped from the memory in one mesmeric smile. Jewish families with a son or daughter to de-Christianise, especially Jewish families with no money, had to make do with Israel. That there was danger associated with this cure never seemed to worry those who resorted to it. As a yeshiva boy, Asher was exempt from conscription, but he volunteered for the Israeli army despite that, only his lungs saving him from combat. He volunteered again at the beginning of the Six Day War, but the conflict was over before they could check his chest a second time. Poor Asher. I saw something Byronic in it myself. Very likely he wanted to be killed in a cause unrelated to his sorrow. But whether he did or he didn’t, one thing was certain – however hard his parents would have taken his death in a desert or at a border crossing, better that, a thousand times, than death by intermarriage. Irrational in the extreme, but then those Gentile heiresses had likewise to take their chances with pirates on the high seas or malaria in Rome. It is not uncommon for parents of all faiths to prefer their offspring dead than wed.

  Lonely and directionless, unable to martyr himself in the Zionist cause and unable to forget Dorothy – unable to forget how he felt when he’d been with Dorothy, that was the thing; unable to reconcile himself to feeling any other way – Asher began to turn peculiar, growing his hair, wearing flowing robes, and making a nuisance of himself at the yeshiva where he set himself to doubt every tenet of the Jewish faith, including God. There being nothing that teachers at a yeshiva love more than to argue a Jewish boy out of his erroneousness, he found himself the centre of attention. When he challenged them to prove Hashem’s existence they cleared their throats and started. Time was no consideration. If it took them seven times seven years to prove to Asher that Hashem existed, who worried? Who worried if it took them another seven times that? Proving that Hashem existed was what yeshivas were for. Dressed in a long white gown, with his hair down to his waist, and convinced of the importance of his views – so attentive were his teachers to his arguments – Asher began to wander round Jersualem, for all the world another Jesus Christ, or maybe even the old Jesus Christ come back to have a second crack at redeeming mankind.

  It was then, word having got back to the Washinskys that their son was passing himself off as the Messiah, and, worse, was not eating enough, that they sent Manny over to see what was amiss.

  Their action might have been concealing another motive. It’s not impossible they felt that Manny too would benefit from a change of air. Get out from under the stone he chose to live beneath. Feel a bit of sun on his skin. Who knows, find himself an Israeli wife.

  Then again, that could simply have been my interpretation of what he needed.

  It wasn’t kind of me to have looked so astonished at the idea of Manny travelling to Israel, but there was no hiding it – in all the years I hadn’t seen him prior to the gassing of his parents I had kept him safely, like a spider in the corner of my imagination, suspended between Crumpsall and Gateshead. Indeed, that was how I understood the gassing of his parents. He was deranged with the Orthodox uneventfulness – ritual apart – to which his life had been reduced. If it now turned out that he had been a gadabout, a citizen of the world with his own passport and airline tickets tumbling from his pockets – well, I was pleased for him, but he had more to answer for.

  The wonderful thing about having the Messiah for a brother, and for Jersualem being his address, is that you walk into him the minute you get off the plane. There is the Temple Mount, there is the Western Wall, there are the observant Jews winding themselves into their cat’s-cradle phylacteries, and there is Asher!

  Manny hadn’t seen his brother for many years. They fell into each other’s arms and wept. They were not alone. The Western Wall is a weepy place. Here, with emo
tion which can be too much to bear, Jews celebrate their unimaginable return. And here the two brothers sobbed over their unimaginable encounter. When they had last talked to each other the Wall was in the hands of the Jordanians. And Jews, as is sometimes forgotten, were not allowed to worship at it. Who could have imagined then, in Crumpsall, that the ancient Jewish hope, ‘Next year in Jersusalem’ – for so long more a velleity than a hope, the feeblest and most unanticipated of anticipations – would be realised in their lifetime and that they would be able to stand here, under the watchful eye of Israeli soldiers, but otherwise unimpeded, together? Crumpsall – was there such a place as Crumpsall? Were there even such people as their parents?

  Manny felt the sun on his neck, smelled his brother’s perspiration in his hair, and believed he would never leave.

  Asher made up a bed for him in a room no bigger than a hermit’s cell in a building so ancient that Manny believed it was only prayer that held it together. He slept for two whole days, exhausted not so much by the journey as the preparations for the journey, the instructions with which his parents had charged him (and which he had now forgotten), and by the white light which had stung his eyes from the moment he had walked off the plane. On the third day Asher shook him awake. ‘Time to see where you are,’ he said. ‘Time to see your country.’

  It seemed to trouble Manny that he could not decide what colour Jerusalem was. Was it yellow, gold, bronze, or just luminous – no colour in nature at all, because it was set apart from nature, exquisite in its separation, like the incontrovertible expression of God’s will? If you tried to imagine the colour of Elohim’s countenance when it shone upon you – what the Jews called the Shechina, the divine refulgence – this was the colour. He also could not decide whether Jerusalem was beautiful or a rubbish tip. Everywhere you looked, stones. Great hewn boulders that might once have been the walls of the Temple, but might just as easily have been the stones rejected at the time of the Temple’s construction. Discarded and left to lie where they fell for the next two thousand years. But each fragment with something to tell you. The whole city was like a whispering gallery, every atom of every stone clamouring for your attention. It made some people ill, Asher told him. It made them run from the city with their hands over their ears. But Manny feasted on the stories. He might as well have been deaf for all Crumpsall ever said to him, but he listened to Jerusalem with the attention of a long-lost friend, gorging on gossip.

  ‘You’re getting hooked,’ Asher told him. ‘Let’s take a bus.’

  From the windows, Asher pointed out the sites of learning and devotion, triumph and resistance, they both knew from the Torah. Manny sat open-mouthed as everything he had ever read about flew by. He was astounded by the variety of Israel’s geography, as though the Almighty had put the best examples of his work in this tiny wedge of land he’d reserved for the people whose seriousness and devotion to study pleased him above all others. One minute they were in the mountains, heading for Safed where the ceilings of all the synagogues were bluer than the clouds, the next they were peering into the sink of the planet, the lowest point on earth, where the very light was crystalline with salt. Asher’s preference was for the silence of the desert; Manny, to his own surprise, loved the lakes and seaside – the sight of Jews frolicking in their own water as unselfconscious as batesemeh at Morecambe Bay so astonishing him that he would stand there for hours at a time, on the beach or by the water’s edge, fully dressed, with his hands in his pockets, shaking his head. Jews running, Jews swimming, Jews fishing, Jews eating what did not to Manny look or taste like Jewish food at all. ‘That’s because you’re used to eating Polish slop,’ Asher told him. ‘This is real Jewish food. It’s got the warmth of the Mediterranean in it. Enjoy!’

  At first, Manny had been frightened by the Israeli soldiers who looked like Arabs and comported themselves like warriors, themselves afraid of no one; but he grew used to the blackness of their skin – blacker even than Asher’s – and the fierceness of their eyes and wished at last that he had not been born the colour and the constitution of cream cheese. If he stayed, would he at last look like them?

  He had been sent to see how Asher was, perhaps to persuade him to return to Crumpsall, to save him if he needed saving, but within a couple of weeks of being in Israel Manny believed it was he who had been saved.

  Once, when he was sitting by Lake Galilee eating falafel and drinking kosher beer with his brother, he noticed that his legs were extended in front of him. For a moment he wasn’t quite sure he recognised them. If those were his legs – and whose else could they have been? – then what were they doing there? Manny always sat with his legs tucked under his chair, his trunk tilted forward, no part of him allowed to wander too far from his control. If he wasn’t mistaken, what he was doing now, in Tiberias, in the shadow of the Golan, in the sunshine, in his brother’s company, was relaxing. Many more weeks of this and he too would be growing his hair long, wearing flowing robes, and – why not? – healing lunatics and walking upon water.

  Many more weeks and he might be able to leave Asher’s room without trying every light switch a dozen times, for fear that he would leave on a lamp which would burn down all Jerusalem.

  This is not to say he was not concerned for Asher’s mental health. Even when he seemed most to be enjoying showing Manny their brave new world, throwing himself into talk and explication, Asher was somewhere else: preoccupied, no matter how attentive he was to his brother’s curiosity; gaunt, no matter how well they feasted; forlorn, no matter how much they laughed. One warm Tiberias afternoon, as they were walking round the tomb of Maimonides (nicknamed The Rambam after his initials, Rabbi Moses Ben-Maimon), Asher brought up Dorothy, until then a subject strictly not alluded to between them. They were discussing, at Manny’s instigation, The Rambam’s famous demonstration of the Creator’s incorporeality and singleness, his freedom from external influence, his dissimilarity from any other being or concept. If Asher had become a sort of Christ figure who challenged his teachers to prove the existence of Hashem, where, Manny wondered, did he stand on at least the first two of those four divine attributes? But it was not Jesus or Hashem who preyed on Asher’s mind. ‘That expresses exactly how I feel about Dorothy,’ he explained. ‘There is no one else like her. There can be no one else like her. She bears no resemblance to any other being or concept. She is indivisible in that I do not diminish her in my mind by comparing her with other women, and she is incorporeal in that I do not touch or even see her, though I imagine that I see her at least twice every day. So if it is right that we should worship no other God because of His singleness, then it must be right that I should love no woman other than Dorothy because of hers. And don’t tell me that immoderate love for anyone who is not God is idolatrous. I know it is idolatrous.’

  Manny was not shocked by this. At one level his brother’s inconsolability pained and angered him. Unforgivable, he still found his parents’ brutal interference in Asher’s happiness. At another level he was relieved that his brother had not, after all, become an unbeliever or a Christian mystic.

  The Rambam, in his measured way, had written against intermarriage, but not, Asher argued with fervour, because he believed, as the anti-Semites charge the Jews with believing, that Jews were too sacred to be contaminated by union with anybody else. What the goyim never seemed to understand, Asher explained, as though he had forgotten that his brother had been educated into these things too, was that separation was a condition of holiness, not haughtiness. To give yourself to God, which is the same as giving yourself to seriousness of mind, you must sever your connection with the frivolous and worldly. That was the meaning of God’s half-promise, half-injunction, that his ‘people shall dwell alone, and shall not being reckoned among the nations’. They were to dwell alone, not because they were superior, but because aloneness was the fate for which they were best fitted. In his Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides never once argued that the Jews were special by virtue of being ‘Chosen’. His in
terpretation of the chapters of Deuteronomy that forbade marriage to the daughters of the Hittites and the Girgashites, the Amorites and the Canaanites, the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, turned upon God’s jealousy. The reason for not lusting after these women was clear: ‘For they will turn away thy son from following me, that they may serve other gods.’ ‘The ridiculous part of it being,’ Asher said, ‘that Dorothy never once tried to turn me away from Hashem, or from anything else Jewish, come to that. She did not want me to serve other Gods. She wanted to serve mine. And it was I who closed the door on that.’

  And yet The Rambam had spoken beautifully of Moses’s Torah being for all humanity, and not just the Jews. And went so far as to admonish Jews to love the convert – ‘for a convert is a child of Abraham, and whoever maligns him commits a great sin.’

  ‘Not,’ Asher went on, ‘that we ever gave her a chance to convert.’

  Perverse though it might have been to feel this, given his brother’s bitterness and distraction, Manny believed he had never before been as happy as he was that afternoon, talking to Asher of holy things among the torn books and sun-bleached dereliction of The Rambam’s grave. Several times their conversation was halted by a pilgrim, come to read Maimonides to Maimonides and pray over his thousand-year-old remains. One of them, a pale young man who wore his yarmulke like a tonsure, and actually sang his respects to The Rambam, fluting them like a boy soprano, reminded Manny of himself, that is to say of himself as he could be were he to stay with Asher in Israel and forget that Crumpsall ever existed. Perhaps the part of Asher that craved Dorothy never would be whole again, but these were precious weeks to both the brothers, Manny was convinced, and he imagined them as David and Jonathan, loving each other as they loved their own souls.