Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  Sweet. He was a sweet man, Mick Kalooki. He went on to be a good husband to Shani and a good father to their five children, the sons among whom were circumcised in the proper manner, though not without some misgivings on the part of Shani herself. Thirty years later she would have found it hard to meet a Gentile with such a benign attitude to Jews. A Jew can’t be a racist? Don’t make me laugh!

  But even for his times he was naïve. ‘A Jew is as likely to be a racist as the next man,’ I told him. ‘Not because of what has or hasn’t happened to him, or what he has or hasn’t been taught, but because he is a person with a personal psychology. And no God, however kind or cruel, can save you from your psychology.’

  I was hot on psychology that year. It was a liberal studies option at art college, one that Chloë was taking, and I wanted to be close to her. Why I wanted to be close to Chloë, who in those days either ignored me or confused me with some other Israelite, was itself a question I thought doing the psychology option might help me answer. Masochism, as far as I could tell from the little reading I had done – masochism was the key to everything. I tried putting it to Mick Kalooki that masochism was the engine that drove Tsedraiter Ike as well. Not racism but – to employ the language proper to the discipline – Masochismus.

  The way to look at it was this:

  What was the proven consequence of any positive assertion by a Jew of his own sense of worth – whether as a man of moral excellence, prestige, or intellectual superiority? Hostility. If any single lesson has been learned by the Jew it is that his apparent arrogance or conceit will land him in deep trouble. Why then does he persist? There can be only one answer to that. He persists because appearing arrogant serves the psychic function of satisfying an unconscious masochistic need to be landed in deep trouble. Tsedraiter Ike’s offer of money to Shani’s Mick was an assertion of religious and moral superiority. Not only was Mick not fit to be Shani’s husband, Tsedraiter Ike’s behaviour declared, his unfitness would be demonstrated by his acceptance of filthy lucre (never mind, for the moment, that he refused it). But by acting as he had, and who was to say not in full awareness of Mick’s steadfast unwillingness to be corrupted, however large the sum, Tsedraiter Ike had drawn down, and at some level anticipated, a greater obloquy upon himself. Behold, yet again, the Jew laid low. ‘And there he is, even as we speak, whimpering in his room.’

  ‘That’s total shit,’ Shani said. ‘Are you telling me that every time a Jewish parent objects to his child marrying out, what he actually wants is someone to kick him?’

  ‘In the toches,’ Mick added.

  ‘No. What he actually wants is his child not to marry out. But what he wants and what he is seeking might not be the same thing. Though it might also be the case that the kicking, if and when it comes, will ultimately harden his conviction that he is a thing apart, a victim of a brutal Jew-hating world, which he is therefore right to save his child from if he can.’

  ‘Total shit,’ Shani repeated.

  Throughout all this my mother regarded me with a prunelike expression. She didn’t like fancy explanations. You won at kalooki if you had a good knowledge of the deck and could anticipate what the other players were thinking. You worked on the straightforward assumption that they wanted to win. If you had to take on board the possibility that what they really wanted was to lose – well, frankly you wouldn’t know where you were.

  But she wasn’t going to say anything that might add fuel to the fire. She had grown to love Mick Kalooki. And her brother was her brother. She got up from the table, loped her long Ethiopian stride across the room, sat in an armchair and crossed her legs. When you saw my mother’s ankles you wanted to cry. They were the best argument for Judaism – its golden allure, its sensuality and its fragility – I had ever encountered. Why, then, I was otherwise attracted; why, when I had grown up with this rich aroma of spiced indolence around me I let my nose lead me in the direction of flesh that was by comparison odourless and colourless, I was not at that time – not having yet done ‘Introduction to Psychology II’ – in a position to understand.

  As for Tsedraiter Ike, he came out of his room at last and resumed his visits to the houses of the Jewish dead. He never addressed a word to Mick Kalooki again. Nor did Shani – against all Mick Kalooki’s attempts at conciliation – address another word to him. When Ike died, Mick attended his funeral, hung his head and even shed a tear. Shani stayed at home.

  5

  I never liked the expression ‘stiff-necked’, but yes, as I conceded to Chloë’s mother in the course of what I now realise had been planned as a goodbye and good-riddance tea, we were an implacable people. ‘I doubt we are that by nature,’ I told her. ‘Nobody is anything by nature, Helène, unless we make an exception of your Judaeophobia. But by bitter experience. Kill or be killed.’

  ‘Bit OTT, your soon to be ex-hubby, Chlo,’ she’d said, taking a scone from my plate and wiping it on the sleeve of her blouse, while I sweated to think of a county that had ‘fuck you’ in it.

  But yes. We were, by bitter experience, an implacable people. And we had with reason come to believe that it was only by being implacable that we had survived. True, some of us had had a go at being lenitive. Behold, we are an accommodating bunch. But the last time we had a serious go at that was in Germany. The Haskalah, as we called it. The Enlightenment. Our love affair with the Kraut. And you don’t go making that kind of mistake twice.

  I wanted to do my best imaginatively by Channa and Selick Washinsky, anyway. As I wanted to do my best by Manny. A moral balancing act of some complication, I accept. Of course you want to have your son sectioned when he falls in love for the second time with the same shikseh. And of course you, Manny, know that for wanting him sectioned they no longer deserve to be among the living.

  It was partly to simplify my own feelings that I said to him later that same afternoon, after we too had broken off for tea, ‘Christ, Manny, did it never occur to them just to go out and buy a gun and have done with it?’

  He had been pulling at his fingers throughout our conversation, cracking them one by one, pulling at them as though he meant systematically to take his hands apart. ‘No,’ he said, after taking his time to think about it, not looking in my direction, not looking anywhere, ‘I don’t think so. But it occurred to me.’

  I laughed. ‘I don’t see you with a gun, Manny.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just don’t see it. You don’t go together. You and guns? Forgive me – it’s too incongruous.’

  ‘You think I wouldn’t know how to use one?’

  ‘I can’t see it in your hand. I can’t picture it. If I imagine a gun in your hand it falls out. I mean that as a compliment.’

  ‘So why are you laughing?’

  ‘To express solidarity with your humanity. I can’t picture a gun in my hand either. We were brought up to carry books, not guns,’

  ‘That’s not what they say in Israel.’

  ‘Israel’s different. You don’t laugh in Israel.’

  ‘You wouldn’t laugh here if I was pointing a gun at you.’

  ‘I don’t know about that, Manny. Maybe I would.’

  ‘I bet you wouldn’t.’

  ‘I couldn’t take your money.’

  ‘Do you want to try?’

  I laughed again, though not as easily as I had the first time. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I very much don’t want to try.’

  The problem with Bernie Krigstein was that he didn’t have much of a sense of fun. In the end there are only two sorts of Jews, and I don’t mean those who went through the Holocaust and those who only thought they did. I mean Jews who see the funny side of things and those who don’t. The mistake is to suppose that those who see the funny side of things become cartoonists, and those who don’t go into law. It’s often the other way round. Krigstein made history with his comic-book story ‘Master Race’ because it wasn’t comic. Not a line of it that wasn’t sombre. ‘Krigstein didn’t understand the humor,’ said Harvey
Kurtzman, who employed him for a while on Mad. By ‘the humor’, he meant pretty well the humour of anything he was given to illustrate. ‘He did funny grimnness,’ Kurtzman went on. ‘Grimness in slapstick.’ Not that there’s anything you can call slapstick in ‘Master Race’. But then you could argue that commandants of death camps don’t as a rule give rise to slapstick much.

  I don’t know. I never knew. It could have been the house I grew up in – my father’s punchy scepticism, my mother’s deathdefying kalooki nights, or just the physical and psychological ludicrousness of Tsedraiter Ike – but for me nothing was so dreadful that I couldn’t see its essential drollery. This could explain why drawing Superman was ultimately beyond me. In my hands Superman’s X-ray vision would only have revealed the absurdity at the heart of things. And that included Manny. Here he was, implying he had it in him to be a hit man, and I was supposed to take him seriously. It was so preposterous that I momentarily forgot he was a hit man, a man accused and convicted of the murder of his mother and father.

  Guns were the problem. For me guns belonged to an inconceivable universe. Not only could I never have pulled a gun myself, I couldn’t draw one. I could no more credit a gun with presence than I could the bulge in Tom of Finland’s pants. As for whether Manny had ever owned, or, as he seemed to want to menace me into believing, still owned a gun, I didn’t know what I thought. But the idea was gathering that I ought to be thinking something.

  It’s a form of disrespect, of course, I acknowledge that, not being able to grant a person the dignity of taking him entirely seriously. But that comes with the territory. Don’t expect respect from a cartoonist.

  Historically, the laugh was on the sort of man I was. Without any doubt I would have been among those who pooh-poohed the idea that Nazism in 1930s Germany posed any personal danger to me. Housed snugly in the Berlin suburbs, penning Grosz-like satires on pig-faced bürgerlich nationalism in the daytime, and slipping out at night to perform cunnilingus on Zoë under a table at Der Blau Angel, I would have hung on until the final hour and beyond, convinced that violence was a joke at heart, that no one beyond the occasional ruffian felt any differently about guns than I did. Even on the Jew Jew train I cannot imagine myself ever really believing that the guns were made of anything but cardboard or that they were taking us anywhere but to the seaside.

  This is the price you pay for enlightenment. To be enlightened means to assume the enlightenment of others.

  Given which serious miscalculation, I ought by this time to have evolved a world view more adequate to the facts. As Manny, to do him credit, most definitely had. Little by little I was growing to envy him. It behoved a man living in the twenty-first century, as it behoved the dramatis personae of Genesis, to be acquainted with abomination. The laughter I gave vent to when he pulled his metaphorical gun on me was misplaced and false. It masked incompetence and dissatisfaction with myself. Face to face with my old farshimelt friend, a person who on paper had lived no life to speak of, I felt the incomplete one. I hadn’t killed my parents. I hadn’t held a gun. I couldn’t even draw a gun. If anyone hadn’t lived a life, I hadn’t.

  6

  Chloë came at me with a knife once. I ran into the bathroom, said ‘God fucking help me!’ into the mirror, and began to cry.

  ‘I can smell your fear,’ she triumphed. ‘It’s leaking out from under the door.’

  ‘I’m not afraid for myself,’ I answered, ‘I’m afraid for you.’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t be. It’s not me I’m going to kill.’

  She kept me in there for two hours, then swore on her mother’s life that it was all right for me to come out.

  What I hadn’t realised was that she’d nipped out of the house in that time. While I was straining my ear to gauge the dangerousness of her silence, she’d been down to the chemist to purchase a bottle of antibacterial skin-wash.

  Swearing on her mother’s life always brought a sort of peace between us. If she was lying and meant to knife me the minute I emerged, there was at least the consolation that her mother might die for it.

  ‘There,’ she said, when I did at last venture out, ‘use this.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s to take away the smell of fear.’

  I thought it was a joke. Forgetting that Chloë didn’t make jokes.

  ‘You’ve got a surprise coming if you think I’ll be using that,’ I told her.

  Whereupon she came at me with the knife again.

  For the duration of what was left of our marriage, I used the skin-wash twice a day.

  I wasn’t lying when I said I was afraid for her. A woman wielding a knife as though she means to use it is a fearful spectacle. More fearful than a man wielding a knife because the woman with the knife appears to be parted more extremely from her nature. But of course I was afraid for myself as well. Not only afraid of being mortally wounded, but afraid that the ordinary condition of my life – a life of jokes, Jews, bitterness and whys – could so easily be disrupted and made to count for nothing. A knife raised in anger made life morally not worth living, whether the blade touched you or not. A gun the same.

  And the antibacterial skin-wash couldn’t help with that.

  7

  The moment I got the opportunity I asked Manny what he would have done with a gun had he bought one.

  ‘Shot someone,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who do you think?’

  For some reason an event unrelated to any we’d been discussing flashed into my mind.

  ‘Errol,’ I said.

  ‘Errol? Who’s Errol?’

  ‘Errol Tobias. The meshuggener from our street who used to bully you.’

  ‘I don’t remember him.’

  Was he lying? I had no idea. Was he lying about the gun, come to that? Again, I had no idea.

  But I could see that it illuminated Manny’s face to learn that I could imagine more people for him to shoot than he had imagined for himself. He would have liked it, I thought, had I gone on guessing. H-horst S-ssschumann, then? Klaus Endruweit? The judge who pronounced sentence on you? Shitworth Whitworth? The people who made you eat your own faeces from the metal pot? David Irving? Me?

  Rather than embark on what might have turned out to be another list of the enemies of the Jewish people, I tried him with a teaser of my own.

  ‘Why, Manny?’

  ‘Why didn’t I shoot anyone?’

  ‘Well, that too. But I meant why did you want to.’

  His reply surprised me not only by its promptness, but by its vehemence.

  ‘It couldn’t go on for ever,’ he said. ‘In the end someone has to sort things out.’

  ‘With a gun?’

  ‘With whatever.’

  Meaning, I supposed, the gas taps. But in that case, why all the gun talk?

  ‘So are you saying you did get a gun?’ I asked him.

  He suddenly turned impatient on me. It was always the same. You asked him one innocuous little sentence – So did you get a gun or didn’t you? – and he was off.

  ‘I’m going to bed,’ he said

  An hour later he popped his head round the door. In his dismal green-and-grey-check 1950s pyjamas, he looked disembodied. Though they would have fitted an average-size schoolboy, his pyjamas hung off him. A magician might tap them with his wand and hey presto – they would fall to the floor, and nobody would be inside!

  He coughed, wanting my attention.

  ‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’ he said, when I looked up. ‘The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword. But sometimes the coward does it with a sword as well.’

  With which he wished me goodnight and retired a second time.

  So what the fuck did any of that signify?

  I found it hard to sleep. Unlike me. Even with Alÿs lying beside me like the ghost of pogroms past I had always managed to sleep. To my astonishment and self-disgust I had slept soundly the night my father died. But there was no sleeping throug
h Manny’s riddles, of which the coward and his sword were, to tell the truth, by no means the most perplexing. What about his ‘sorting things out’ with a gun? What about his daring me to face up to him with a gun? Was that metaphorical or did he actually have one in his posession, here, in my house, hidden in his suitcase or under Zoë’s old mattress?

  Present fears aside, nothing he had said to me made any sense. Whatever sorting out had needed doing he had done. He had sealed the door with a sheet – easy because there were sheets piled everywhere in the Washinsky house – turned on the gas tap, and that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was the obstacle to his brother’s union, sorted. What need of any gun? Unless, to be on the safe side, or as an act of kindness to them, he had shot them first. But I recalled no talk of bullets, and presumably the police, though inexperienced in the crime of double Jewish patricide in Crumpsall Park, would have noticed had any been discharged.

  Since my mother kept bohemian hours, playing cards until very late, or sitting up listening to talkback radio half the night, and never minded whatever time I called, I thought I’d ring and ask what she remembered.

  ‘You kalooki-ing or not?’ I enquired.

  ‘Just finished.’

  ‘Did you win?’

  ‘The game won.’

  ‘Listen, Ma, did you ever hear anything about Manny Washinsky’s parents being shot?’

  My mother was elderly now. This was cruel of me. ‘I remember something,’ she said. ‘Weren’t they killed in a road accident? Or was that their boy?’

  I hadn’t told her I had made contact with Manny again, let alone that he had become my lodger. It all felt too complicated to explain. And I feared – I can’t explain why – that it might upset her. But she was evidently past upset on the Washinskys’ account.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I won’t bother you any more.’

  ‘Why do want to know? You aren’t going to put them in a cartoon?’

  ‘Ma, why would I do that?’

  ‘You tell me. Why would you put me or your sister in a cartoon?’