Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  His one hope is that he might be employed in the building of the arena. He does not know as what. He has no building skills. He can draw, that’s all. He could do equestrian murals for her if she would like them, but she does not look to him like a woman who much appreciates murals. And he isn’t sure, anyway, he can draw a horse. Humans are Mendel’s only subject. Human desire and disappointment, human perversity, human contradiction. He draws abstractions in the grotesque manner.

  On the other side of the fence, riding alone, she surveys him. Don’t ask him how he knows, just leave it that he knows. She is thinking about him. As a muralist for her arena? He doubts that. As what then?

  Or has she come one last time because she cannot use him, in any capacity, after all?

  Is she capable of the poetry of regret?

  Goodbye my little long-nosed Yid,

  I could have torn your skin off

  with my teeth

  and you not raise a finger to stop me.

  But it is not to be.

  Does she have such lyricism in her soul?

  He confides his fears to the only friend he has made in the hut. He would get a better hearing, he knows, from any of the communists he has seen being led out of the camp to work in the quarry. Communists understand the ways in which what respectable society calls deviancy liberates the mind. But the Jews and the communists, though they are held to be the great twin threat to the Reich, are not permitted to mix. The guards prefer to have some grasp, moment by moment, of which degeneracy they are dealing with, and Mendel is not such a fool as to protest that you can be a Jew and a communist, which would only end in his being kicked twice. So he has no other recourse but Pinchas, the moon-faced rabbi-to-be – that’s if anything is any longer to be – with whom he shares a bunk. Little point, when you are Mendel’s age, trying to keep a secret from someone with whom you share a bunk. Besides, you need a friend. That’s the one thing every prisoner knows – you cannot get through on your own. You have to pair off, make a marriage. In fact there is a third person in Mendel’s bunk, an old Jew from Dhalem, one of the camp’s very first inmates, brought here the morning after Kristallnacht, but he won’t speak. No one expects him to last very long. Don’t speak, don’t live. But he has outlasted many. The bunk is a whole foot shorter than Mendel and Pinchas, who are not tall men. To sleep you must lie foetally pressed into the back of the other person; to talk, with your faces almost joined together and your knees drawn up and touching, like children, or like lovers. How the old Jew from Dhalem has been able to construct a silent, inviolable universe for himself in one third of this nursery bunk, Mendel is unable to comprehend. By being old, perhaps. Mendel, though, is young, and has to get the verdant concupiscence of youth off his chest. ‘If I stop thinking about her I will die,’ he whispers to Pinchas in the dark.

  ‘Unless you stop thinking about her, you deserve to die.’

  ‘Are you telling me you don’t think about her?’

  ‘The difference between us is that I try not to.’

  ‘And you think that’s a significant difference? The difference between a good man and a bad? Trying?’

  ‘That’s a distinction for you to draw if you wish to.’

  ‘And during those moments when you fail to stop yourself thinking of her, do you too deserve to die?’

  ‘We will all die anyway. It makes no difference.’

  ‘Then it makes no difference whether or not I go on thinking about her.’

  ‘Mendel, she is a foul, evil creature. That riding whip she carries, she uses. And not only on her horse.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘There are men here, Mendel, who have been ordered to parade naked before her.’

  ‘I know that.’

  ‘Jewish men.’

  Mendel guffaws. ‘Does the Jewishness make a difference? Are you telling me that a Jew is more vulnerable in his nakedness than anyone else? Am I the more shamed because they see my genitals than is Branko the gypsy?’

  ‘What you feel, you feel.’

  ‘And shame is shame, Pinchas.’

  ‘You have been taught the story of the uncovering of Noah’s nakedness and the cursing of Canaan. You are a Jew. I don’t have to tell you. Adam hid himself from the Almighty, saying “I was afraid, because I was naked.”’

  ‘Adam wasn’t Jewish, Pinchas. There were no Jews in Adam’s garden. Jews hadn’t been invented yet. We do ourselves no favours by insisting that we feel the humiliations of the flesh more keenly than others.’

  ‘So you agree it is humiliation?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Explain to me then why others do not in fact feel it as that. You mentioned Branko the gypsy. I have seen him naked a hundred times. He does not care who sees him. Ask him how often he has seen me naked? Just once, Mendel. And that was not my doing. Branko prances in his nakedness, while I hide myself, afraid. Tell me why that is.’

  ‘I will prance in my nakedness if she demands it.’

  ‘And be beaten?’

  ‘If it’s her wish.’

  ‘You know how she will beat you? You know where she will beat you?’

  ‘A beating’s a beating. What’s one more?’

  ‘She will beat you where you are a man, Mendel.’

  ‘Where I am a man! What does that mean? Why are you talking to me as though you are one of the Five Books of Moses?’

  ‘If you get an erection while she looks at you – God forgive me – she will beat you there. It has happened. Ask Uri.’

  ‘Uri the gardener from Ostrava? Uri the simpleton? He has an erection every second of the day. Having someone beat it down will have been good for him. It’s just a pity it didn’t work.’

  ‘I don’t believe in your flippancy.’

  ‘Who is being flippant? This is life and death, I know it. If I have to stop thinking about her I will die. Whereas if she strikes me – to borrow your quaint locution – where I am a man, I will live. You’re a scholar versed in the subtle paradoxes of the Talmud: that shouldn’t be too difficult for you to understand.’

  ‘You’re mad.’

  ‘You mean I’m filthy.’

  ‘Mad and filthy. You want that loathsome pig of a woman – she is even the colour of pig, Mendel, she even smells like a pig – to raise her whip to you there, the site of every Jewish man’s covenant with God. Don’t you understand how loathsome that makes you? You should keep your voice down. There are men here old enough to be your grandfather who would raise their hand to kill you if they heard you. You are a degraded Jew.’

  ‘We are all degraded Jews.’

  ‘You want it to be worse.’

  ‘Pinchas, there is no worse. And I have no covenant with God. He broke it.’

  ‘That’s a blasphemy.’

  ‘And what? I will die from it?’

  ‘There are worse things than death.’

  ‘Ah yes, I know. Ignominy. Well, maybe it is ignominious, Pinchas, to lie to yourself about your desires.’

  ‘There are worse things than death, ignominy apart. You have heard it rumoured, Mendel, just as I have, that of those she orders to parade unclothed before her she selects some who have unusual markings on their bodies, disfigurements of the skin or tattoos, to do abominations with.’

  ’Not abominations – lampshades. I have, as you say, “heard it rumoured”. I have also heard it rumoured that she shrinks heads. And that she can take a hundred lovers in a day like Messalina. And that she couples with her horse. There is nothing I have not heard rumoured in this camp.’

  ‘Then expose yourself to the object of these rumours, Mendel, and find out for yourself.’

  ‘I have no unusual markings on my skin. Nor do I have tattoos. She won’t be interested. More’s the pity.’

  ‘But you will have an erection at least.’

  ‘I can’t even promise that, but by God I will try.’

  ‘Don’t bring God’s name into this. It’s a sacrilege.’

  ‘Sacrilege?
Here? Don’t make me laugh, Pinchas. There is nothing left to defile here.’

  That night, Mendel was sure, Pinchas dreamed of Ilse Koch. For which, in silence, Mendel begged his friend’s pardon.

  4

  ‘Hard to accept a woman being hanged,’ my father said the night before Ruth Ellis was executed in 1955.

  ‘Hard to believe a woman could have done what she is being hanged for having done,’ my mother replied.

  My father nodded without conviction. Was it hard to believe Ruth Ellis could have done what she was charged with doing? Hanging was hard – that much he did know. As to her innocence or guilt, I’m not sure he had a view. He was simply against the death penalty in all instances. That he wasn’t standing outside Holloway Prison holding a placard right that minute takes some explaining. He had been at the forefront of the agitation, organising demonstrations, getting up petitions, lobbying MPs. Though London was further from Manchester in those days than it is now, he seemed to be going there every other weekend on missions of mercy, at least once that I knew of to an anti-capital-punishment meeting chaired by Sydney Silverman, at which such notable champions of conscience as Victor Gollancz and Arthur Koestler spoke, and at which I have a feeling that my father, as a Manchester delegate – observer, stirrer? – spoke himself. ‘Ha! All Jews I notice,’ I recall Tsedraiter Ike saying when he read about this colloquium in a Jewish Chronicle he’d secreted into the house. ‘Doesn’t anybody else care?’ ‘Nothing to do with it,’ my father said. ‘It’s not a Jewish issue, it’s a human issue.’ By which he was bound to have meant that Ruth Ellis wasn’t a Jewish issue and that hanging in general wasn’t a Jewish issue either. But I had a feeling that Tsedraiter Ike harboured a specific Ruth Ellis-centred grudge. He was proud in a general way that Jews stood up for her, because that reflected well on our sense of social responsibility (whatever Beatrice Potter and my grandmother’s silks had said to the contrary), but he seemed to think my father had overinterested himself in the case, Ruth Ellis being the sort of woman, when all was said and done, you didn’t want Jewish men running after. ‘Hm, Ruth Ellis,’ he said to me once, ‘not the girl for you, eh, my old palomino? Watch those. Peroxide blondes. Crooked seams in their stockings. Red mouths. Always be careful to watch those, hm.’

  Which of course – for all that peroxide ever afterwards put me in mind of the single rotten tooth Tsedraiter Ike couldn’t get the word around – I haven’t been.

  After all the work he’d put in, not to be outside Holloway Prison upset my father deeply. He believed in expressing solidarity. A Jew should always show his face where Jewish issues were not. Which didn’t mean he was against showing his face where Jewish issues were as well. Let Oswald Mosley dare show his face in Manchester and my father was the first on the scene,blowing hard, as I imagine him, shadow-boxing in the early dawn, looking to land a left. A feat which he had famously performed during Mosley’s 1939 visit to Belle Vue. I knew the story as well as if I’d been there. Expecting trouble, Mosley had erected wooden fences for his protection, this as well as a line of police and several phalanxes of black-shirted bodyguards. Between him and the gallery from which he intended to address his supporters there was also an open-air dance floor and a lake. Which meant, as my father put it, that to get to him you had to swim, foxtrot and body-tackle half of Manchester City’s police force. But if he couldn’t be reached at least he could be shouted down. And he was spectacularly shouted down. ‘You should have heard it,’ my father used to tell me, grinning like a schoolboy – but then he couldn’t have been much more than a schoolboy himself at the time of the events he was describing – ‘there were hundreds of us – that’s those of us who got inside Belle Vue, I’m not counting the thousands demonstrating outside – all chanting, “Down with fascism!” and, “One, two, three, four, five, we want Mosley dead or alive!” And then the best bit – listen to this, Maxie – we began to sing, I don’t even know who started it, “Pack up all your cares and woe, here we go, singing low, byebye blackshirt!”’ At which point in the story I was always required to say, ‘So you won that one, Dad, you silenced him, you waved him on his way,’ whereupon my father would put a finger to my lips and say, ‘Not yet, I haven’t finished,’ and then tell me how he alone, as the meeting was breaking up, swam, foxtrotted, got past the police, and then the blackshirts, leapt over the barrier, shinned up to the balcony, dodged the personal bodyguards, looked Mosley point-blank in the eye, saw his lip tremble, and landed a humdinger on the point of his jaw. ‘Crack! And down the mamzer went!’ My only trouble with this anecdote being that it bore a worrying resemblance to another my father had often told me relating to Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis. Not realising his politics – ‘What would a boxer know?’ – Lewis had worked for Mosley in the early 1930s, and had even recruited a band of toughs from the East End for him – ‘Biff Boys’ they were called – but once he twigged what was going on he confronted Mosley in his office, told him he was an anti-Semitic bastard, told him he (Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis) was through running his dirty errands, and landed a humdinger on the point of the mamzer’s jaw. But then I’m the hyperbolist in the family and had there been exaggeration in my father’s account of his own humdinger, or even plagiarism, he would surely not have told me the original? Maybe there were just a hell of a lot of pugilistic Jews out there in the great years of secular and muscularist Judaism, queuing up to take a swing at Mosley.

  The fact remains, anyway, that the next time my father tried to bop a fascist, they were prepared for him and got the bop in first, the news of it only reaching us when a hospital in Notting Hill Gate called – in the middle of one of my mother’s kalooki nights, of course – wondering whether we would like to collect a Mr Glickman, residing at our address, who had been ambulanced into their care with a bloody nose and in a condition they could only describe as ‘confused’.

  ‘Look at your shirt!’ were my mother’s first words when she saw him the following afternoon. ‘I’m not surprised you’re confused. What the hell are you doing in Notting Hill Gate?’ were the second.

  Had my father been given a nosebleed in the course of trying to disrupt a Mosley rally, my mother might have looked more tolerantly on him, even if it would still have meant her having to go all the way to Kensington to clean him up. But Mosley was living quietly in Paris at the time. Nursing the humiliation of the time he’d been socked in Manchester, we liked to think. So what had my father been up to? Well – he scratched his head. What had he been up to? Oh yes, he’d been to an anti-capital-punishment meeting chaired by Sydney Silverman and attended by Victor Gollancz and Arthur Koestler, for one thing. ‘For one thing! And what, pray, was the other?’ Well – he scratched his head again. Later, we would date the deterioration in his health from this incident. But at the time my mother thought he was merely prevaricating, a bit ashamed of himself for getting into a fight at his age, and for putting her to all this trouble.

  What she was able to piece together, finally, was that he’d taken the opportunity while he was down there to join a few of his old communist friends in breaking up the headquarters of a Nazi organisation which had recently opened for business in Notting Hill. Jews weren’t the problem at the time, blacks were. But a Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi.

  My mother knew that. A Nazi is a Nazi is a Nazi – yes, Jack. But what about his old communist friends – did they too have bloody noses? What about ‘Long John’ Silverman and Elmore Finkel? Were their womenfolk catching trains from every corner of the country and having to miss kalooki?

  As it happened, no, because when they were discovered climbing into the windows they ran for it, whereas my father, well, he didn’t get to London very often did he – be fair now, indulge him a little – and he felt like staying. If we thought he looked a mess, we should have seen the other guys . . .

  This undignified event had taken place only a week or so before Ruth Ellis was hanged and explains why my father wasn’t holding a candle outside Holloway Prison. London was out of bounds. He’d
been grounded by my mother who didn’t want him in another fight, nursing another bloody nose, and maybe worse.

  No surprise, then, that he was more than usually tetchy with Tsedraiter Ike who had been pacing the living-room floor for hours, humming to himself, and driving us all to distraction.

  ‘Do everybody a favour and sit down or go to bed, Ike,’ he said. ‘Anybody would think it was you who was going to the gallows.’

  ‘Yes, well, we all know you’d like that,’ Tsedraiter Ike said. ‘And you wouldn’t be in any hurry to sign petitions to get me off either.’

  My father pointed to his chest, protesting his innocence of any desire to see Tsedraiter Ike swing. Although for a moment, I suspect, that was all any of us could picture and long for.

  ‘The thing is,’ Tsedraiter Ike went on, ‘women are not always what we think they are. They’re supposed to be the weaker sex, but they can surprise you.’

  We all looked up. Had any woman surprised Tsedraiter Ike? Was it a woman who had driven him tsedrait in the first place?

  ‘Take that Ilse Koch,’ he said.

  My parents exchanged glances. Ilse Koch? Did Tsedraiter Ike have a girlfriend called Ilse Koch all of the sudden?

  ‘I hope you aren’t talking about my friend Ilse Cohen,’ my mother said. ‘I hope she hasn’t been surprising you.’

  I could see what Tsedraiter Ike could see – that my parents had never heard of Ilse Koch in their lives. They were of the inbetween generation: too old to want to know the gory details, not old enough to know they had to. What had happened in Germany made a lie of the Jewish modernity they’d been cultivating in Manchester and Liverpool; threw them back, if they attended too closely, to a world from which it was essential they could believe they had escaped, woke them to anxieties it was part of their very survival plan never again to acknowledge. Here they had been, the brash, very nearly Gentile inabitants of the middle of the twentieth century – dancing, hiking, sitting out in deckchairs in all weathers, debating, trade-unionising, speechifying, playing billiards, playing cards, swinging punches, buying televisions, having children you couldn’t tell apart from the goyim, giving them goyisher names and even persuading them to cohabit with goys – while all along, only a few hours across the Channel, it was still the Middle Ages.