Howard Jacobson
Page 41
About six months into our marriage she proposed a honeymoon. Work-related. I dreaded the worst. Ten days in the Congo? A fortnight in Chechnya? I wasn’t even warm. Palestine.
‘I beg yours?’
‘Palestine.’
‘You mean Israel.’
‘I mean Palestine.’
Now I think back to our time together I cannot recall a single Israel-related conversation. It might have been that we both knew to keep away from each other’s views on the subject. Or we might just have been lucky. On our watch, Israel simply didn’t come up.
When I say ‘views on the subject’ I do not mean to imply that I had any. My father believed that Jews bore a special responsibility not to be special, so he hated Israel for existing, then hated it for not existing well. Less bothered by such contrarieties, my mother threw the occasional charity kalooki night for our beleaguered Israeli cousins, the proceeds from which would not have bought a stamp to send what she had raised. I enjoyed a sleepy repose somewhere between their positions. But that did not mean I was prepared to put up with any moralising from the goyim. To the goyim I had one thing and one thing only I wanted to say: You threw us out, you won’t now dictate to us where we can go. A Chinaman might be entitled to express an opinion, but a Christian of French or German or even English descent, no sir. Not when the mess, if you go back far enough – and I go back far enough – is all your doing.
Alÿs, I accept, was not a goy. Nor had she, in all fairness, as yet expressed an opinion. Except that calling it Palestine expressed all the opinions it was necessary to express. I saw what was coming. Boy of Bethlehem. Maybe worse. Maybe Girl of Gaza.
I asked her if getting me on to the train was always the beginning of a process, in her mind, that would climax in her dropping me square in the middle of the shit that was the Occupied Territories. She denied any such intention vehemently. She had been thinking of me. Of the state I was in. Of my work which was bogged down in repetition, contradiction and pointless irony. Nothing else had motivated her, nothing! How dared I impute so base a motive to her! How dared I!!
But what was so base about her wanting me to go to Palestine, unless she meant by it that I should shmeer some paint around while I was there and rub it in the faces of my people? ‘The fact is, Alÿs,’ I told her, ‘your outrage proves my fears. You want to de-Jew me. It’s not enough you took the man. Now it’s the Jew you’re after . . . what’s fucking left of it!’
She hung her head. Not in shame, in rage. It occurred to me that if she did look up it might be preparatory to an act of murder. I had said enough to be murdered, I accepted that. When you accuse someone of taking away what is essential to your life, you are asking for them to take the life itself. Why not finish it? Why not do what you stand accused of?
The strange thing was that she could not, at this moment, have looked more archetypally Jewish herself. In her fury, Judith the beheader. In her rectitude, Deborah the judge. In her sorrow, Naomi. In her fidelity to me – oh yes, in her outraged loyalty – Rachel. In her presentiment of grief – why not say it? – that best of all Jewish mothers, the Virgin Mary herself. And this before we’d started on the martyrs of the diaspora – from the wise and fertile wives who’d kept the flame alive throughout the persecutions of the Middle Ages to those heroines of my own profession, the Malvina Schalkovas and Gela Seksztajns who didn’t make it to their middle years. It was no wonder she couldn’t lift her head, considering the amount of retroactive narrative it contained.
I hated her. All at once I realised how much and for how long I had hated her without knowing it.
The fucking lugubrious Jewess she was! Ghetto-laden, Holocaust-ridden, God-benighted, guilt-strewn, and now by that latest twist of morbid Jewish ingenuity, Jew-revolted.
The sandals told their own story. Why hadn’t I been listening to what my eyes told me? There is only ever one reason an adult person wears a sandal when it isn’t summer and they are not winkle-picking on the beach, and that is because they wish to throw their lot in with simplicity. A sandal is a symbol of poverty and, by extension, of oppression. You wear it to affirm that what is good is simple, and what is simple must be true. No doubt there were Jewish settlers who wore sandals too, as an assertion of the simple continuity they enjoyed with Abraham and Sarah. Alÿs had pulled off something spectacular. She wore her sandals Jewishly, in the name of our common ancestors, but also anti-Jewishly in the name of those she believed we had dispossessed.
Not satisfied with being ashamed of all the shame we felt, now we had to be ashamed of not being ashamed enough. You can see why the goyim resorted to the gas chambers. They wanted us to leave their heads alone. But here we still were, still ratcheting up our consciences. Jews refining their Jewishness in the act of refusing to be Jewish.
Or at least here Alÿs Glickman, née Balshemennik, still was. She made my head spin, never mind the poor goyims’. I needed to be wearing sandals myself. I needed my own simplicities back. I needed to be working in vibrant colours again, doing overt violence on the page.
We didn’t speak that night. I fully expected her to be gone in the morning. But there she lay, flattened in the bed as though history had rolled over her again while she slept. I left the house, staying out all day, giving her the chance to gather together her things which in truth she could have squeezed into a matchbox. Thirty seconds were all it would have taken her to pack and go. But I gave her a day. Not for a moment did I suppose she would be there when I returned. But she was back at her workstation, bent over the coffee table reading fantasy comics without a zap or flicker of emotion, not making a nuisance of herself, not incommoding me by the disturbance of a single atom.
‘If it’s your intention to murder me by depressive propinquity, you’re succeeding,’ I told her.
She didn’t raise her eyes. ‘It isn’t my intention to murder anyone,’ she said.
The liar!
Why did she stay? That is a question I am still unable to answer. To make me miserable is too obvious. To make herself miserable is more likely. Being miserable, after all, was the thing she did best. No doubt the true answer was to be found in her grandfather, Sydney Balshemennik, who also stayed on long after any decent man would have hopped it. But other than a smile, you couldn’t get anything out of him.
As for why I didn’t ask her to leave, I was too much the Jewish husband. Gentile men analyse their wives then toss them from the top of twenty-storey buildings. Jewish men do not. Jewish men put up with whatever it pleases God to visit on them.
Nor did I suggest she move into Zoë’s old space. Good taste, partly. You don’t have a stream of wives passing through the same granny flat. And maybe I believed she was a punishment I deserved.
We continued in this vein for the best part of a year. Like two panes of glass in the same door, each trembling to the identical vibration. You can hear glass strained to the limits of its endurance. It seemed just a matter of time. The minute one pane shattered, the other would.
Then one morning, hallelujah, she was gone. No corpse of the Jewish nation steamrollered by my side. No silent reproaches, two thousand years in the rehearsing. No little feet padding in little round-toed sandals. Not a trace of her. Not a single hair to say she had ever been here. Only the books we had done together left, slender spines up, supported by a teapot and a biscuit jar, on the coffee table that had been her desk. Bitter evidence of her wasted years in my company? Proof of the benignity of her intentions all along? Or a reminder of what I would miss without her? The chance she gave me to be a different artist, to be a different man. The chance I blew.
My first impulse was to send them flying. Fuck you, Alÿs. But I was proud of having done no violence, real or symbolic, to her so far, and wanted it to stay that way.
I could smell her absence. It was like spring. I threw open all the windows and inhaled. Ah, yes! Ah, yes, yes, yes!
Then I realised I knew what it was to be a Nazi.
FOURTEEN
1
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Asher was on fire.
Those were not Manny’s words, but I didn’t need Manny to tell me how Asher felt.
On fire. Desire piled upon desire piled upon desire, because desire rekindled and reconfirmed exceeds itself at a rate which is beyond the seemingly straightforward mathematics of reunion. Desire, too, re-enacted in a climate which suited desire better. He couldn’t stop touching her and wherever he touched her her skin sizzled. Cold was how he remembered her. Cold with the chill of Crumpsall in her veins. It had been part of their lovers’ ritual – having to go back for a cardigan for her, or a coat even in the middle of summer, and his arm always around her shoulder. His job had been to warm her through. One reason why they’d loved each other’s flesh – the disparity in their temperatures. Now, hot of her own accord, she was a novel sensation for them both. They imagined how their night would be – assuming, always assuming there would be a night – their kisses viscous, their limbs moist and indistinguishable.
On fire, but not only because the sun coming off the Jerusalem stone was fiery. He was on fire with agitation.
‘Just a minute, don’t say anything, I need to know how long you’re here, where you’re going, what your plans are, who you’re here with.’
Who you’re here with. On fire with not knowing, and on fire with needing to know in an instant what it would take an age to unravel.
She laughed.
On fire with the sound of her. The look of her. Her throat.
On fire with what was familiar, on fire with what was new.
Which was the more exciting – what he recognised or what came as a shock? Difficult choices. A new woman or the previous woman come back? Or was the way to think of it that the previous woman had been returned to him renewed?
On fire with the strange infidelity of holding an ex-lover in your arms.
Except that she wasn’t an ex-lover. He had never replaced her. And never thought of her as belonging to a time that was dead. She was his lover, had remained his lover, continued to be his lover in the present, even though he wasn’t seeing her and hadn’t seen her for so many years that they could have had a son and bar mitzvah’d him in the time.
She the same. How he felt, she felt. She had never stopped loving him.
But there was a subtle difference in how they each received this news. It saddened her and filled her with a sense of wasted years. Whereas Asher was exhilarated by the words. Better than fame, better than being fought over by a thousand women, better than coming back from the dead to find the whole world made distraught by your passing – to be told that you have been held in a single heart, thought about and thought about, missed, longed for, pictured and bodied forth day after day, month after month, year after year, and for all your failings heroised.
‘You have come back to me,’ Dorothy said when they lay side by side, without blankets, in her Moorish hotel room with its clattering air conditioning. She had discovered she could buy English roses in Jerusalem and liked to fill the room with them. Would he remember that she had talked to him about roses when they visited gardens together, gardens being the best places, he had joked, to avoid being seen by Jews? And the best places to smell flowers, she had replied. Would he smell the roses, and would the smell remind him? She had waited to be sure of him. Waited to hear what he had to say. Waited to find out whether he had married or intended to marry another woman, never mind his protestations of fidelity. Waited to see whether his effect on her would be as it had always been, to say nothing, of course, of her effect on him. But now she was satisfied. ‘My hero has returned.’
The return of the hero. He was on fire, as any man would have been on fire, with that. You could see the flames from Jericho.
He had, he would have been the first to admit it, done nothing heroic. Quite the opposite. He had taken fright and run away. But hero was a manner of speaking. When the man returns it is always as a hero. A good woman understands this. A man must live on as an idea, in his mother, in his wife, in his children, in his mistresses. This is why he leaves them. So that he will persist as a glowing abstraction for them, before he returns – if he returns – to make that abstraction flesh again. That’s the fantasy, anyway. I have it myself, in relation to Chloë, Zoë, even Alÿs. I need to know that they are thinking – if not longingly, at least exceptionally – of me. As a man it is where I exist. Not in the flesh, as a woman exists: in her children, in the home she makes, in the palpable achievements of her devotion. A man is more spiritual. A man lives in the sentimental apprehension of him that women carry around. And when a woman divulges this sentimental homunculus to the man of whom it is an ideation, his happiness can barely contain itself. Asher’s spilled over like lava, happiness enough to engulf all Jerusalem. And because Dorothy was as intelligent as she was devoted, because she was in no hurry to deliver herself of her stored-up reproaches on their first night back together – a night she had perfumed with English roses – she didn’t begrudge him his childish vanity.
‘There is only one thing,’ she said.
He was stretched out on her bed in the attitude of a god. Not Elohim. Any god but Elohim. A tracery of perspiration made the hairs on his chest glisten. It was as though dew had fallen on him, she thought.
’Anything,’ he said. ‘Just ask.’
She made a pincer of her nails and plucked at one of his chest hairs, turned grey in the time they’d been apart.
‘Leave me again and I will kill you.’
2
Back in Crumpsall, Manny barely had time to dump his bags in his room before the interrogations began. How come he had returned so suddenly when he had talked of staying on at least another month? Was he ill? Was Asher ill? Had they fallen out? Manny had written that he and Asher had never been so close – what then had occurred to make them not so close?
‘I did my best,’ Manny told me, ‘to be non-committal.’
I did my best not to laugh. Manny non-committal was impossible to conceive. Even now, so many years later, he could not conceal the agitation which having to lie for Asher caused him. He was jiggling both his knees. Much more of it and my window panes would start to shatter. It was like having Alÿs back in my life.
I put my hand out to stop him. ‘How long were you able to be non-committal for?’
‘About a minute.’
I was relieved. I didn’t want to be the only one who saw the funny side of this – Manny arrived back from Israel the colour of falafel, with the shock of walking into Dorothy still starting in his eyes, pretending that his last days in Jerusalem had been like absolutely any old person’s last days in absolutely any old place.
The surprising thing was, considering the terrible job of concealment he had obviously made, how long it took the Washinskys to come even close to the truth. Illness remained their first suspicion. Asher’s lungs had succumbed to something. Asher had been shot. Asher had been blown up. Their guilt talking, no doubt; suddenly imaging the dangers they had cheerfully exposed him to rather than let the fire-yekelte and her daughter have him.
‘If you’re preparing us for the worst, we would rather you didn’t,’ Mrs Washinsky said. ‘Just tell us what you must tell us.’
Whereupon, in recollection as no doubt at the time, Manny’s knees began to jig again.
They got to a girl before they got to the girl. The girl might not have left their consciousness entirely, but she had happened long ago. Asher had been in Israel for years, and they could not have conceived circumstances in which Dorothy would have taken herself there. There were plenty more Jewish boys left in Crumpsall if her heart was still set on one of those. As for what objection there could be to a girl Asher had met in Israel, they were hard pressed to imagine any, short of her being a Bedouin.
‘Is she an Arab, Manny?’
‘Why do you think there’s got to be a “she”?’
‘We know our son. There’s always a “she”.’
‘There isn’t a “she” and she isn’t an Arab.’
‘I came home because it was too hot there. And I didn’t want to go on being a burden to Asher.’
‘He’s your brother. How can you be a burden to your brother?’
‘I know he’s my brother. That’s why I didn’t want to be a burden to him.’
‘You didn’t want to go on being a burden to Asher when he was doing what? You didn’t want to be a burden to him and whom?’
‘Look – I’m telling you the truth. Go there yourself if you don’t believe me.’
So they did.
‘Did you warn him?’
‘Did I warn him what?’
‘Did you warn him they were coming?’
He began pulling at his fingers and whistling. Usually the sign that I had pushed him further than he could bear to go.
I made tea and served him ginger cake, which he liked. It was becoming routine. Breakfast of granola and honey, or a no less sticky lunch of Nutella and banana pancake, both in the vicinity of the British Museum which I guessed he favoured in the hope of running into the Azams again – his only friends in London, not counting me, the only people he had ever talked to – followed by tea with ginger cake back at my place, and then, if I wasn’t careful, an evening in front of the television together. It was not unlike being married. Wife Number Four – Emanuel Eli Washinsky, except that he was unsuitable by virtue of having no diaeresis.
‘No,’ he said, after a mouthful or two of tea. ‘No I didn’t warn him. I thought that would have been taking sides.’
‘But weren’t you taking sides when you got home and told your parents there was nothing wrong?’
He thought about it, looking for the answer on the ceiling. ‘No. That was different. That was me refusing to be used as a messenger boy by them.’
‘You weren’t being a sort of messenger boy for Asher? A messenger boy whose message was to stay shtum?’
‘Yes. I know. They all wanted something from me. They always had.’
It was the first intimation I had that he’d been at all put out by the great Jerusalem reunion. Stupid of me. Stupidly romantic to suppose that all the world loves a lover. All the world loves a lover when it’s got a bit of love going for itself.