Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  If you’re going to ban anything it should be the person likely to be susceptible. As they did with Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and as they subsequently did with Manny Washinsky. Too late, of course.

  But then isn’t it always too late?

  Impossible to say whether Manny’s new school intensified his interest in the leading lights, in particular the leading ladies, of the Third Reich, or whether he was making progress simply by dint of lonely scholarship. It was handy for me all right, the numbers of new enemies of the Jews he was unearthing. Good for our project, Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, whether or not he still saw himself as part of it. But you could argue that it wasn’t particularly good for him.

  Couldn’t have been healthy, a school just for Jews, all calling on God in the lavatory. Not that he ever told me what it was like, or talked about the other Jewish boys he met there, any more, I suspected, than he talked to them about me. We were both each other’s secret. I liked to believe that I was his sole confidant, but of course it’s possible he spent every spare second between classes telling other kids called Emanuel and Eli about Irma Grese and Ilse Koch, unless it was they who were telling him. I have a lurid conception of what happens in a Jewish school – for which I suppose I must thank my father who as an atheist thought religious education was the devil’s work. Maybe the headmaster addressed them on the subject of Irma and Ilse at every school assembly. Fringes out, tefillin on, and now, boys, let’s dilate upon these most recent torturers of the Jewish people. Not all that different from my mornings if you leave out the tzitzis and tefillin.

  He was my education, that much has to be said, no matter how he came by what he educated me in. Errol Tobias would rather that privilege had fallen to him. But Errol was merely the snake in the garden, whispering of fruit. Manny was the tree.

  On my own I wouldn’t have remembered all their names or ever have been able to tell them apart – Vera Salvequart the poisoner, Dorothea Binz the dog-woman, Carmen Mory otherwise known as ‘The Monster’, let alone Ilse Koch and Irma Grese.

  I catch myself out in a disingenuousness there. Ilse Koch I was always able to tell apart. Ilse Koch came to me via Errol Tobias as well as Manny, though I didn’t let on to Manny that I supped from a second fountain of Koch corruption, or that hers was a name which bound Errol and me in a knowingness of a sort of which Manny surely had no comprehension. Ilse Koch was a secret I shared with each of them separately.

  ‘You’ll have to remind me,’ was the usual way one of our induction sessions would begin – I inviting it, I the empty vessel, I offering myself to Manny like a flower opening up its countenance to the sun – ‘which is Dorothea Binz again?’

  ‘May her name be wiped out . . .’

  That was what I had to say before he’d tell me about any of them. He was my tree of knowledge but he was also my angel of oblivion. Not an easy task for him to be both at once –illuminator and expunger. But I suppose that’s what we’re all doing, making people remember what we would wish them to forget.

  In our air-raid shelter it felt queerly ritualistic, as though the voices of the old rabbis were inhabiting the brickwork. ‘Dorothea Binz, may her name be wiped out,’ I’d say, ‘what did she do again?’

  God knows what my father would have said had he caught me chanting one of those ancient curses. A boy, however, must get his education whichever way he can, and my father hadn’t interested himself in Dorothea Binz.

  Once, when I was asking about her for what must have been the hundredth time, Manny answered by biting me. Not a feral leap at my throat, but not exactly what you could call a playful nip either. Without any warning, without even any show of temper, he dipped his head and sunk his teeth into my wrist. An uncanny action by virtue of its silence, as much as anything else.

  I cried out. Not from the pain but from the shock. And also out of fear. A terror amounting to phobia attached to bites in Jewish Crumpsall. There had been an alarming incident in the neighbourhood, not many years before, when someone’s pet bulldog turned savage for no reason – as though a bulldog needs a reason – and chewed off a baby’s ear. An event which it was impossible to forget on account of that terrible twist of flesh, like an end of burnt vegetable, which the child was doomed to carry on the side of his face for all time. So we were all more than routinely conscious of mad dogs, especially Tsedraiter Ike who froze and lost his inky colour whenever a dog of any sort approached. ‘Look confident,’ he would warn me, flattening himself against a wall if he could find one, or failing that, flattening himself against me, ‘they can smell fear.’ But even Tsedraiter Ike never warned me about Manny Washinsky.

  ‘If it’s making you so angry I’ll stop asking,’ I said, looking at the marks at the base of my thumb. ‘Christ!’

  How the Gentile world felt about the thumb, or to be more specific the skin between the thumb and forefinger, I had no idea, but in Jewish Crumpsall we were almost as phobic about the thumb as we were about mad dogs. In some households bread knifes were kept under lock and key and kids my age were not allowed to use them without at least two adults being present. My mother was less strict but she still filled my head with the terrible things that could happen to you if you took a cut anywhere near the thumb. Lockjaw for one. Bread knife, not looking what you were doing, slip, break skin, blood – lockjaw. Simple as that. Face set in rictus of horror. Dead in an hour. And that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was when our two phobias came together and a mad dog bit us between our thumb and forefinger. Then it was lockjaw followed by foaming at the mouth. Rabies. With rabies you had a chance, medically, of living longer than an hour, but they had to shoot you in case you went on to bite someone else.

  I was relieved, after Manny’s bite, to discover that my jaw still moved, and that my lips, when I wiped them, were free of foam. But I still snarled at him.

  ‘Now you won’t forget who Dorothea Binz is,’ he said. The lunatic that he was.

  ‘So what are you going to do to make me remember Vera Salvequart . . .’

  ‘. . . may her name be wiped out . . .’

  ‘. . . may her name be wiped out . . . Chop my head off?’

  ‘No. To be consistent I’d have to poison you. What I just did to you, Dorothea Binz did to her prisoners. Only she did it harder.’

  ‘She bit them?’

  ‘Not personally, as far as I know. But her dogs did. They tore Jewish women’s arms off. She was taught to do it when she was at Belsen.’

  ‘They had a school at Belsen?’

  ‘I don’t know if they had a school, but they had a teacher. Irma Grese, may her name be wiped out. While they were in Belsen together she showed Dorothea Binz what you could do with a dog.’

  (May its name be wiped out, I thought.)

  This was the hard part – not the names so much as the family connections, this one knowing that one, that one receiving tuition from the other. Listen to Manny Washinsky and you could never believe there’d been a German who hadn’t known what was happening. Not only did they know what was being done, they personally knew or were related to every person who was doing it. Manny’s genealogy of guilt. It didn’t surprise me to learn that when he was in prison he compiled lists and tables. No good at maps, but if ever anyone could have drawn the tree that showed the interconnectedness of German responsibility, from Martin Luther to the trump of time, Manny was that person. As it happened he was drawing lists of a very different sort.

  ‘Irma Grese,’ I said, wanting to be sure I had this right, ‘may her name be wiped out, being the one who poisoned her patients . . .’

  ‘I’ve just told you – Vera Salvequart, may her name be wiped out, was the poisoner. The one who’d been imprisoned herself at Theresienstadt, for being in love with a Jew. Then they moved her to Ravensbrück and put her in “The Tent for Pigs”. After that she took up poisoning fellow prisoners.’

  ‘What, as a hobby?’

  ‘No one knows why. Maybe the Jew she was in love with had left her.’


  I nodded. Dangerous for a Jew to leave a woman. There could be grave consequences. The women lost their wits. I’d heard many stories to that effect. Lose a Jew and you lose your mind. That was what a prize we were. ‘So Irma Grese was . . .’

  ‘Senior SS Supervisor at Auschwitz and Belsen. They called her “The Grey Mouse”.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound very frightening.’

  ‘Might not sound very frightening to you, but at Auschwitz she killed on average thirty people a day.’

  ‘And at Belsen?’

  ‘The same.’

  ‘By the dog method?’

  ‘Some. Others she shot. She carried a revolver that was always cocked. She was also a bisexual.’

  Did I know what a bisexual was at that age? Did Manny? I doubt it. But if it happened in Auschwitz or Belsen I assumed it wasn’t a good thing.

  ‘So she taught Dorothea Binz, may her name be wiped out, that as well.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘To be a bisexual.’

  He thought about it. He had turned very red in the face. There was an experiment he was conducting, which he only partially allowed conversation to disrupt, to see how long he could go without breathing. First he was trying it in the open air. Later he would continue the experiment underwater. He was anxious to discover how much privation he could suffer. You never knew when it would come in handy, being able to stay alive without the benefit of oxygen. Over a number of years I saw him put all manner of objects over his head – paper bags, tallis bags, the tallis itself, pillowcases, his mother’s tablecloths, his satchel, my satchel, the cushion covers from a three-piece suite. On one occasion he invited me to tighten his school tie round his throat like a noose, making me promise not to loosen it until he told me to. In the event, I stopped long before he was ready. ‘Hanging’s too good for me,’ he once said, apropos of absolutely nothing. When I asked him what he meant he told me he just liked the sound of the sentence.

  His thoughts, in between choking, must have been following the same direction as mine. ‘Hanging would have been too good for her,’ he said, rather dodging, I thought, the question of bisexuality.

  ‘So what did they do to her?’ I wondered.

  ‘They hanged her.’

  ‘And what would you have preferred?’

  From what appeared to be a number of suggestions he could have made, he chose ‘Pickaxing?’

  ‘Is that a question?’

  He thought about it. His mind seemingly somewhere else. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  It occurred to me that I had now lost track of who we were talking about. ‘Is that Irma Grese or Dorothea Binz, may both their names be wiped out?’

  ‘Binz. Gas chamber for Grese. Pickaxe for Binz because she pickaxed Jewish women to death. She also rode her bicycle into them. And got them to stand to attention all day long while she slapped their faces.’

  How did he remember these details? How was he able to go on attaching atrocities to names?

  ‘They had to stand to attention all day?’

  ‘All day and all night.’

  ‘And she slapped them with her hand? Wouldn’t that have hurt her? Wouldn’t her hand have got tired?’

  ‘Hand, whip, belt, stick, whatever was lying around. One prisoner she slapped unconscious with the blotting pad on her desk.’

  ‘Blotting paper! Sheesh!’

  ‘Not the paper, the pad.’

  ‘The pad? Double-sheesh!’

  I feigned some of my surprise. It oils the wheels of sociability to act the ignoramus. Especially when the other party might up and bite you should the whim to do so take him, or when he happens to be a religious fanatic and you happen to be the sort of Jew who humours religious fanatics, perhaps because you’re hiding one in your own heart. Though I knew nothing like as much as Manny knew about these flowers of German womanhood, I had garnered odd items of information about them on my ownio, from war comics which other kids brought to school, from odd articles in Jewish newspapers which Tsedraiter Ike passed on to me when no one was looking – for in our house the Jewish Chronicle was underground literature – and of course from Errol Tobias, though he was inclined rather to harp on the one string. But the minutiae didn’t stick for me the way they did for Manny. I would like to think that was because I had other things to think about. I suspect, however, the real reason I lumped these Morys and Binzes and Greses together was that their cruelty was all expressed against women. If I understood what I was hearing correctly, it was women prisoners Aufseherin Binz rode her bicycle into. Women to whom Schwester Vera Salvequart administered her little white powder potions of death. Women at whom ‘The Grey Mouse’, otherwise known as ‘The Beast of Belsen’, widened her Asiatic eyes and aimed her revolver or her whip. Many years later I read some of Irma Grese’s own descriptions of herself at her trial in Belsen in 1945 and was struck by how prettily she remembered that whip, like a girl recalling her first toy. ‘Cellophane paper plaited like a pigtail – it was translucent like white glass.’ But she never, as far as I was able to deduce, brought it down on a man. There was nothing inhumane about my preference; I wasn’t indifferent to the sufferings of women prisoners in the death camps, some of whom might well have been distant relatives of mine, women who would have married an Ike had they lived, or even a me had I been so lucky, nor was it that I felt more keenly, man to man, the indignities visited on my own sex. It was simply that there was a terrible inversion of the nature of things in the idea of a woman beating a man, of power and cruelty being deflected so perversely from their usual course. And if that inversion happened to be your bag, then Ilse Koch was the person to go to.

  It was to her I went, anyway. Visiting her, not in reverie or fantasy – I have never been a great fantasiser (no need of it) – and not even in those unprotected moments between waking and dream, but as one might visit a sick person in hospital, not always certain which is the reality – the world of the healthy, or the world of the dying.

  3

  Ilse Koch. The Bitch of Buchenwald. My Ilse!

  All our Ilses.

  Was it a camp injunction, on pain of a beating or a bullet, never to look, never to see her, never to notice the shadow she cast, high in the saddle of her subjugated horse? Or was the prohibition biblical, all in Mendel’s head? It didn’t matter. He who looked was lost, and Mendel looked.

  Through his closed eyes he could see her. Smell her through the smell of the horse she rode. Did it denote fear or love, that dungy smell? How would Mendel know? But her touch was lighter in fact than he would always imagine it later, lying on his bed, his knees drawn up to his chest. The faintest inflection of her heels, that was all it took, and the horse would understand what was required of him. Love. After the fear, the love. You became the perfect instrument of her will, for which you loved her.

  She knew he was looking. They all looked, contrived to see without being seen to see, frightened, fascinated. The Camp Commandant’s wife, out for her first ride of the day, her cherry-red hair aureoled about her, the thin dress Mendel conjured her to wear, even on the coldest mornings, folding back upon her, into her, like the wrapping on a sticky sweet. And the beaten stallion steaming.

  Mendel shuffled in line across the yard and kept his shaven head down. She was on the other side of the fence, alone today. Some mornings she rode in company, with three or four of the wives of officers, openly staring at the prisoners. On his first day, Mendel had crossed the yard naked, to be deloused and disinfected – filthy Jew – shaven of every hair on his body, and they had seen him then. He heard their laughter and decided it was appreciative. His long penis. An animal in a cage, yes, but a fierce, refined, procreative animal. They could laugh all they liked at his unprotectedness: he knew appreciation when he heard it. But that was months ago. Today there was less of him to appreciate. Less flesh, less sway, less confidence. He was hers for the taking now. Which was why, he believed, she rode past alone more often than she used to.

  Through his l
owered head he saw her. The lozenge pattern on her dress, like involuted diamonds, similar to one his mother used to wear, for casual but smart, a shopping, striding dress. Filmy for a mother, Mendel had always thought. It was a source of awkwardness for him, the little pained mother-loving Jew-boy with a long refined penis, seeing her coming towards him, or being out with her by her side, her dress fluttering away from her legs then closing in on them again, clinging and then peeling loose. He remembers the sound it made when she increased her pace, a soft sucking, like a kiss in reverse, lips coming away from skin. On Frau Koch it falls differently; because her hips are wider, her thighs thicker and coarser, it pleats less ambiguously around her. It is of course impossible that she would ride in this dress. But Mendel has seen her in it, striding on the arm of the Commandant, and this is how he prefers to picture her astride her horse.

  She must know its effect on men of education and conscience. Later she will wear the same dress before her prosecutors at the American Military Tribunals in Dachau. Not that Mendel will ever know anything about that.

  She is a version of his mother in other ways. On both the skin hangs heavy, their mouths turned down, a pendulousness in both their jaws, as though oppressed. For his mother, wherever she is now, this gravity made him weep; he would have saved her from its cause, had he known it. Strange, then, that in the Commandant’s wife the same downward cast of feature arouses him only to a consciousness of his own oppression, and to his desire for it to be increased. Whatever it is that troubles her, let her take it out on him.

  For some men there has to be sadness in voluptuousness, and Mendel is one such man.

  There has been talk among the inmates for weeks that the Commandant is planning an arena for his wife to ride in, outside the camp, and will be looking for prisoners to help build it. The thought that she will soon no longer ride where he can see or fancy that he sees her upsets Mendel disproportionately. It is because I have concentrated all my thoughts on her, he decides, rather than on my situation. If I lose her, I return to being nothing but a prisoner, and I will act like everybody else, mundanely imagining food, weighing out potatoes before I go to sleep, fantasising about freedom, and then dreading my death by diarrhoea or a beating. To stay alive I must empty everything from my mind except Ilse. To stay my own man I must become – or at least communicate to her that I am willing to become – hers. In my annihilation is my salvation.