Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  Whatever problem she poses for the cartoonist, Channa Washinsky posed even greater problems for her son. Not the least of these being that he was all at once smitten by her. It’s often at this time that men fall in love with their mothers all over again, whether or not their mothers make a tinkling with their feet. Maybe the mothers have been waiting patiently for this very opportunity. Wheel out the opposition and watch me chop her into tiny pieces. Sometimes they do it with exaggerated vitality, as my mother did. You bring another woman into your life and suddenly your mother is a Busby Berkeley Musical Extravaganza. But sometimes they do it by being exquisite in their reserve. This was Channa Washinsky’s method.

  And it worked. Worked in the sense of making Asher appreciate her, anyway. He didn’t know she could be so self-possessed. He didn’t know that she could vest such authority in herself. As for working in the other sense . . .

  A week later she raised her eyes to him. Not beseeching. Beyond beseeching. Well?

  He hadn’t done it. It would take him longer. It wasn’t as easy . . .

  Then her words came. ‘I don’t blame the girl. I don’t blame her mother or her father. I blame you. I’m not saying I don’t understand you. I’m saying I blame you. I don’t wish to argue the rights and wrongs of it with you. In your eyes what you are doing might appear right. But had you stopped to think for a single minute how this was going to affect us, you wouldn’t have done it. There are a hundred things you could have done to hurt us, Asher. There are hundred things I have imagined you doing. But this was never one of them.’

  This. How much did she know?

  Could he ask her? Could he go though his transgressions, counting them out on the fingers of both hands, until he came to one she hadn’t heard about?

  Imagining the worst, that she still wasn’t in possession of everything, he took the coward’s option and said, ‘It will blow over, Ma.’

  ‘If it will blow over why did you let it start?’

  ‘Oh, Ma, start . . .’

  ‘If it’s so unimportant to you that you think it will blow over, it can’t be important enough to let it kill us.’

  Us. Kill us. He was responsible for them both now. This was more how he thought it was going to be. She’d be screaming soon. Tearing gouges out of her flesh. The week before, he ’d been close to sacrificing Dorothy to her. What was Dorothy with her stretched-forth neck and wanton eyes compared to the dignified woman who’d given birth to him? Now that his mother threatened melodrama, he was once again besotted with Dorothy – the sweet, the calm, the melodious Dorothy.

  Is this cynical of me, to suppose that Asher could operate only dialectically – one woman rising in his estimation as the other one descended? I don’t mean it to be. This, as I recall, is how it feels to be a boy in the throes of his first big passion. Especially if he’s a Jewish boy with dialectic in his soul. This or that. Meat or milk. Jew or Gentile. Wife or lover. Your life or your father’s. Choose.

  ‘All I ask,’ he said, ‘is that you don’t say anything to Dad yet.’

  ‘Until it blows over – is that what you’re asking me?’

  ‘Or until I decide to tell him myself.’

  She put her hand out to him, as though the ghost she ’d been seeing were his now.

  ‘You are not to do that,’ she said. ‘Promise me you won’t do that.’

  So he promised.

  But later that same week his father got to hear about it anyway, and had what was diagnosed in our community as a double stroke. One on discovering his son was sleeping with a shikseh. One on discovering that the shikseh was a German. By our understanding of medicine, it was the second stroke that saved him from the worst effects of the first. Sometimes the news can be so bad that you go on living. Especially when going on living is worse than death.

  The doctors said that Selick Washinsky had suffered a minor stroke. There you are! That was how terrible things were.

  I remember the ambulance coming for Manny’s dad. How could I not? Twenty minutes later another one was coming for mine.

  6

  Under the body of his father, a boy lies.

  It is hot. The boy can hear flies buzzing and dying. He thinks he can smell them too – decomposing flies. He doesn’t know how late in the day it is, or even whether it is the same day. His father is lying on him, his chest on his face. The boy understands the intentionality of this. His father doesn’t want him to see, but more than that he doesn’t want him to be seen. Nor does he want his breath to be heard. No word was spoken between them but he is lying as he knows his father wants him to lie, in utter silence, seeing nothing, barely breathing.

  They are in a pit, in a clearing in a forest, in the shtetl of Butrimantz in the south-west of Lithuania. When the shooting started his father pushed him into the pit and then fell on top of him. When the shooting stops, the sounds in his father’s chest stop as well.

  The boy listens but can hear nothing. Only the flies. He listens for so long that if there were other boys lying, breathing silently beneath their fathers, he would hear them. He is the only boy alive in the pit, maybe the only boy alive in the whole of Lithuania – who knows, he may be the only boy alive in the whole world.

  He hasn’t got the strength for what is required. He is overcome by sadness. To what end must he exert himself? To what purpose?

  A contradiction, as terrible as the pit, assails him. He owes it to the love he bears his father not to live. He owes his father death. But his father gave his own life so that he, the son, should live on. So he owes his father life as well.

  Someone explain to the boy how he can repay his father by living and not living at the same time.

  No one can explain this to him. There is nobody who knows. There is nobody alive.

  When they start throwing soil into the pit, he makes a decision for life. Thus it happens: we want what we cannot have. He pushes his face into his father’s neck, takes one deep breath, then closes his throat and nose. Everything goes black. This must mean that there was light before and he was seeing it. The light perhaps of the same day. Perhaps of the same hour. It’s conceivable he has been lying here no time at all, a matter of minutes, no more, seeing light he did not recognise as light. But he sees nothing now.

  The boy is Manny Washinsky.

  Living on the pockets of air in his father’s jacket and shirt, he survives his own burial, escapes the pit in the dead of night, hides in the forest for weeks on end, criss-crosses the Lithuanian/Polish border, and finally finds his way to Kaliningrad where partisans smuggle him on to a boat bound for Hull. Subsequent to that he has lived with his uncle Selick in Crumpsall Park.

  This was the story Manny began to put about soon after his father was released from hospital.

  ‘I’m glad your father’s better, Manny,’ I said.

  ‘He’s not my father,’ he replied.

  ‘Who is he then?’

  ‘My uncle. My father’s dead.’

  And that was when I got to hear about the pit in Lithuania.

  Out of some motive too base to investigate, I told Errol Tobias what Manny had been saying about himself. ‘It’s bullshit,’ Errol said. ‘The Nazis cleaned out Lithuania in 1941. Your meshuggeneh friend wasn’t born yet.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘How do I know when your meshuggeneh friend was born?’

  ‘How do you know about Lithuania?’

  He tapped his forehead. ‘By fucking reading. Probably the same fucking books as your meshuggeneh friend’s been reading. Ask him. Ask him about the Einsatzgruppen. Ask him when they’d finished.’

  They were all reading. Every Jew I knew. All swallowing bile. Even Errol Tobias who could have passed as a member of the Einsatzgruppen himself. All storing up their rage. The only person I knew who wasn’t by his fourteenth birthday an expert on the Holocaust (whether or not we called it by that name yet) was me. But I had enough bile in me already. And what I didn’t know I could imagine.

  And wha
t I could imagine I could draw.

  Errol had one other point to make about the miracle of Manny’s escape from the pit before leaving the subject. ‘I bet the creep got the idea for that from the time I beat him up in that air-raid shelter of yours,’ he said. ‘His father lying on top of him, me sitting on his face stopping him from breathing. I bet he wanks about me being a Nazi, the freak.’

  ‘Or about you being his father,’ I said. Which caused Errol to pretend to beat me up.

  Of course I knew that every word Manny had said about Lithuania was preposterous, but the fact of his bothering to lie at all made me suspect that some essential aspect of it could be true, that while he was too young to be a survivor of the war, he was just possibly someone other than we thought he was, and certainly not the brother of Asher, for example, whom he resembled in absolutely no particular.

  But then the rows between his brother and his parents (real or imaginary) began in earnest, terrible screaming contests, some of them so blood-curdling that on a couple of occasions Tsedraiter Ike had to go over and hammer on their door to make certain Selick Washinsky was not having another and this time more serious stroke. At which time it occurred to me that Manny’s pit story wasn’t a description of the past at all, but of the future.

  7

  The reason it was Tsedraiter Ike who did the neighbourly thing and not my father was that my father wasn’t up to it. He had gone into hospital on the same day as Selick Washinsky, and even shared a ward with him for forty-eight hours, before they let him out with a warning: ‘Take it easy.’ In those days that was all they could do for a worn-out heart, before bypasses and transplants – prescribe rest and quiet and as many pills as he was prepared to swallow.

  ‘What about boxing?’ he ’d asked the doctor.

  Not quite a family friend, Dr Shrager. Though he chose to act like one. ‘Over my dead body,’ he said.

  ‘What about being Jewish, speaking of dead bodies?’ This to needle Shrager, who did Jewish in a bigger way than my father thought a doctor of medicine should.

  ‘What about being Jewish?’

  ‘Do I have to die Jewish?’

  ‘No one’s talking about dying, Jack.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t, but you are.’

  ‘Just take the pills.’

  ‘And if they don’t work they’ll bury me the same afternoon and have some rabbi mutter mumbo-jumbo over me.’

  Similar mumbo-jumbo to that from which he ’d preserved me on my thirteenth birthday.

  How much all that thirteenth-birthday stuff had contributed to the breakdown in his health I cannot say with any certainty. But I do recall, in the period after his discovering the real reason behind my mother’s gala kalooki night, a strange passage in which, around me particularly, he alternated needless irritation with an unaccustomed, not to say uncomfortable, solicitousness. One occasion stands out above the others. I had been in the habit, when it was too cold to go on drawing in the air-raid shelter, of bringing my sketchbook back home, being careful always to keep it out of the way. All discussion of Manny’s and my cartoon history of the anguish of the Jewish people had stopped the day my father recommended I get another interest – boxing, say – a year or so before. Just how serious his objections would be if he learned I was still at it, I didn’t know, but it seemed prudent not to put him to the test. He asked no questions, I told no lies. So I shouldn’t have been such a fool as to leave it where he could see it – Freudian? well, I accept it sounds Freudian – a caricature of Ilse Koch à la Hank Jansen in full riding gear and with swastikas on her saddle inspecting a line of naked Jewish prisoners with hard-ons. (Unless that should be, as Errol always insisted, hards-on.)

  ‘I don’t mind the sexual fantasy,’ my father said. ‘You like a big toches on a woman – that’s your business. At your age I was no better. But I’ll tell you what I do mind . . .’

  I was covered with embarrassment. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know – the swastikas. And the private parts.’

  He looked at me in astonishment. ‘Why should I mind the swastikas or the private parts? The only time I’d mind a swastika is if you came home wearing one. And we’ve all got private parts. What I mind, Maxie, is the look on the faces of those Jews. Why have they got no fight in them?’

  Well, I couldn’t tell him, could I, that in my book acquiescence, when you knew what you were acquiescing to, was a sort of fighting.

  He shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you’re going to be an artist, be an artist. But do me a favour’ – and here he reached across and grabbed my wrists, a restraining officer, handcuffing me with his fingers – ‘just don’t make every Jew you draw synonymous with suffering.’

  I wanted to protest that he hadn’t taken adequate cognisance of their hard-ons/hards-on; that their hard-ons/hards-on, artistically speaking, stood for the virility of the Jewish people in the face of adversity. You know, a cartoonist’s way of saying you cannot keep us down. But there are some conversations you don’t have with your father, particularly when he’s taken you into custody. And even more particularly when he’s unwell.

  It must have been about a fortnight after this conversation that he complained of pains in his chest and the same ambulance which had earlier in the day come for Manny’s father, came for mine.

  Back home, gulping tablets, he became a chair person, falling asleep in the middle of a conversation, or begging to be excused from taking an interest in anything that wasn’t happening in his chest. ‘My ticker,’ he ’d say, apologetically, touching it and looking somewhere else.

  Eventually it became another member of the family – Jack’s ticker. The person other people came to see. His old communist pals visited most days, determined to cheer him up, to get him back to the firebrand he’d been, but they were themselves down in the mouth, not to say shamefaced, after the invasion of Hungary. Elmore Finkel took me into the garden to ask whether I thought it could have been that act of betrayal that had made my father ill. ‘Disillusionment is a terrible depressive,’ he told me. I shook my head. My father had never been under any illusions about Russia. Russia for my father was Novoropissik. The past, not the future. I was proud of him. Only moral and political infants do disillusionment. Only people foolish enough to have illusions. And my father was not one of those.

  But he was tired. Soon, to our great consternation, he didn’t even want to see his chums. We noticed him begin to wince when he heard them on the path. I suggested that we lock the door like other people, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Our door had always been open to everybody and he wasn’t going to close it now. Increasingly, though, he treated them as though they belonged to another existence, pointing to his chest, saying, ‘My ticker,’ and signalling them to leave almost before they’d arrived.

  Three months later it stopped ticking altogether.

  ‘You know, I envy you,’ Manny said, not long after. ‘I wish I didn’t have a father.’

  EIGHT

  Man has the right and the privilege to declare himself

  to be in disagreement with every natural occurrence,

  including the biological healing that time brings about.

  Jean Améry

  1

  The revelation was my sister. In the last weeks of my father’s life she was never out of his sight. Following my mother’s lead, I was acting as though everything were as normal. We ate at the same time, made the usual amount of noise, and dropped in to see my father propped up in his bed the way we would on an ordinary Sunday morning. He was lying in, that was all. He was taking a breather. But not to Shani, he wasn’t. To Shani he was dying and she didn’t want to lose a moment of whatever time was left to her to be with him.

  She wept openly in his company, sitting by his bedside, stroking his hand. Once when I went in to see him he was holding her in his arms the way he must have held her when she was baby, kissing and smelling her hair, crooning over her. His shaineh maidel he called her – his lovely girl. I couldn’t believe my ears. Shai
neh maidel was grandparent Yiddish, maybe even great-grandparent Yiddish. When I drew shtetl Yiddlers that was what I had bubbling out of their mouths – shaineh-maidel talk. No one used that expression any more, except in self-parody, least of all my father. So was that why they’d named her Shani? Had my father crooned into her baby scalp and called her his shaineh maidel the moment he first saw her, his lovely girl, his beautiful daughter – and was she therefore the child of his Jewish sentimentality, Shani because he had never clapped his eyes on anything prettier in his life, and there was no other word to describe her?

  You howl when you hear your dying father remembering when he first held his baby in his arms, regardless of whether that baby was you or someone else. And that was what I did, I ran out of the house and howled the rest of the day away in the air-raid shelter. Was I jealous of Shani? I’m not sure the question is even worth asking. Jealousy and envy are so constituent to our natures we might as well factor them into every consideration of our dealings with one another and not refer to them again. But beyond that, beyond that mole of inwrought meanness, I don’t believe I was put out. My father hadn’t named me after anything beautiful, but I did bear the name of a boxer he admired, and boxing had certainly been as important in his life as beauty. Yes, I howled for me because I would soon be fatherless, but otherwise I howled for him, and, though it goes against the grain professionally for me to say this, for the love he bore his daughter. Call that my Jewish sentimentality. He adored her. She was his shaineh maidel, which meant that he adored her with some part of himself that was mysterious to me, and must have been equally mysterious to him. Was it his father who was talking through him, or his father’s father before him? I had never known either, but I howled for them as well.