Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  Dorothy was not there. For a moment Asher thought she might have been standing in for her mother and putting in a little fireyekelte-ing at his parents’ house. But the likelihood now was that not even her mother went there any more. Albert Beckman was short with him. ‘You cannot expect her to wait here for you for ever,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t,’ Asher said.

  ‘My daughter is very upset because she hasn’t heard from you. When you last spoke you told her you were coming to see her in an hour. We were all expecting you.’

  ‘I am sorry for that,’ Asher said. ‘And I can imagine how Dorothy must have felt. It’s been very upsetting for me too.’

  ‘We made sacrifices for you,’ Albert Beckman said, not looking at Asher.

  ‘Sacrifices?’ Asher racked his brain. What sacrifices?

  ‘We took a risk on you.’

  Asher preferred risk to sacrifice, but he wasn’t sure what the risk was either. ‘You make me sound like a danger you braved,’ he said. ‘What was dangerous about me?’

  ‘Not you in yourself. The situation.’

  Asher rolled his eyes. You think the situation has been risky for you? You should try it from my end! But he knew there was nothing to be gained from comparing risks, or from comparing sacrifices, come to that. The German owed the Jew. The Jew owed the German nothing. That was where Asher stood. That was where I make him stand. But he also knew how little was to be gained from saying that. So he simply stated what he thought – ‘The situation is between me and Dorothy.’

  ‘Yes, but it is never as simple as that.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Asher asked.

  ‘She has gone away.’ And though her father appeared to regret the words he ’d used, and even, Asher thought, wished he could take them back, he wasn’t going to tell Asher where she had gone to. Or when she would return.

  Asher walked home in tears, before realising he no longer thought of it as home and shouldn’t have been going there. His father was sewing in the window and pretended not to see him. His mother started when he entered. ‘I hope you are here to tell me it’s all finished,’ she said. No preliminaries. No other matter on their minds. Was it over or wasn’t it. Was he seeing her or wasn’t he. The spirituality of his family reduced to that. To a shtupp. Was he or wasn’t he still penetrating the German girl?

  ‘It looks like you might have your wish,’ he said.

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Dorothy can’t take any more.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that I’ve been sent packing.’

  ‘And what do you intend to do about that?’

  ‘There is nothing I can do. I have to accept it.’

  ‘Good. If that’s true, I will tell your father.’

  ‘Tell him what you like. Just don’t tell him I’m happy.’

  ‘And just don’t you tell him that you’re not. We ’ve had enough of your unhappiness, Asher. It’s been in the house with us for months.’

  ‘It will be with me for a lot longer.’

  She sucked her teeth at him. ‘I hope you’re not asking me, Asher, as your mother, to be sorry about this?’

  ‘About “this”, no. I’m asking you, as my mother, to be sorry for me.’

  She looked at him, as he thought – as he told Manny that he thought – with hatred for him in her eyes. ‘Well, I can’t be. If she doesn’t want to see you, that’s for the best. You’ll get over her. You’re a child. At your age feelings don’t run so deep.’

  Having said which, and having told her husband the good news, her hatred turned once again to love.

  But she was wrong on several points. It wasn’t for the best. At Asher’s age feelings did run deep. And he didn’t get over her.

  3

  When I reminded Manny Stroganoff that as Manny Washinsky he had once said he envied me not having a father, he claimed to have no recollection of it. But he gave no sign that he cared whether he ’d said it or not. It was as though I were describing events in another life . . .

  I would not yet reintroduce Manny in his Stroganoff incarnation were there any way of avoiding it. In this, a comic strip is preferable: you can foreshadow more suggestively when you are not at the mercy of linear narrative, you can prefigure the future in the clouds of the past, you can intimate a likeness of that which has not yet occurred. Turn to the earliest pages of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness and you will swear you can make out Hitlerian storm troopers, or at the very least a moustache suggestive of the Führer, bobbing on the waters of the Red Sea. That’s how I would prefer the older Manny to make his presence felt – not here just yet, never here just yet, but always waiting to happen.

  From which it will be evident that I didn’t want to see him again, whatever the inducements offered by Lipsync Productions and whatever the promises I’d made to the sisters Bryson-Smith. Why? Because I couldn’t imagine how you talked to someone you used to know quite well who had, since you saw him last, murdered both his parents. The comedian Tommy Cooper once performed a sketch in which he found himself sitting opposite Hitler in a railway carriage. Not knowing what else to do he buried his face in a newspaper. But his conscience would not leave him alone. Conscious of the moral inadequacy of silence, he would from time to time look up from his newspaper and hiss. Ssss! I took this to be a profound exploration of the impossibility of ever expressing outrage sufficient to a monstrous crime. Ssss! I’m not saying I equated meeting Manny with meeting Hitler, but wasn’t it required of me to demonstrate some reprobation, however feeble – Ssss, Manny, ssss! – before asking him how life otherwise had been treating him?

  There was reason to believe Manny felt as awkward about our getting together as I did. At first he denied all knowledge of me. And if he didn’t know me he couldn’t, as a matter of simple logic, want to see me again, could he? Then he said he did in fact vaguely remember my name but wouldn’t discuss his past with me for anything less than a million pounds. I stayed out of this, leaving all negotiations to Francine and Marina, the progress of which was reported to me on a regular basis by a succession of trainee PAs with improbably throaty voices, not one of whom had the most basic grasp of who Manny was and what he had done, still less of where I fitted into the picture, but who relayed the latest manoeuvre by either party as though their working and creative lives depended on it. Eventually, they found a price which they could afford and Manny was prepared to take – fifty pounds was my guess – and couriered me a train ticket.

  That a further six weeks elapsed before our meeting was my fault. I couldn’t face it. I had not supposed when I agreed to what was after all an excavation of my own past as well as Manny’s that he would have returned to Manchester on his release. Stamford Hill was where I imagined him, Stoke Newington or Hackney, in some charitable home for broken-down old Jews with a criminal past. I’m not saying that seeing him anywhere would have been easy, but in situ, so to speak, in the environs of our innocent childhood, where we played ball, drew pictures, and huddled, breath hot on each other’s necks, over The Scourge of the Swastika – that took a bit of preparing for.

  I’d made a booking in a pizza restaurant off Deansgate and had he not been at the table before me I would never have recognised him. I’d thought a lot about who I was going to find, obsessed about him even, partly I suppose because you dread marking in those you haven’t seen for so long the imperceptible changes in yourself. And not just the changes, but the emotional expenditure, the history of unachievement, the waste. On the one hand I’d imagined him as one of those neurasthenic Jews out of Otto Dix, the brains showing through the forehead, the skin white with the over-interiority of the Hebrew. On the other – and this was a conscious corrective to that expectation, considering where Manny had been for the last however many years – I was ready for a hardened lag, head shaved, shoulders widened, a man with a closed face and flattened ears, thick about the neck, much like Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall had been before Errol Tobias felled him
. Had I drawn the person I was going to meet, combining these two versions, he ’d have come out as The Mekon, Lord of the Treens, Dan Dare’s green-faced genius antagonist, on the body of the Hulk.

  Ssss!

  The one description I would never have got to on my own was dapper. Dapper-deranged. He looked like someone out of H. G. Wells, a draper’s assistant who had gone too long without advancement, or a railway clerk working in a station where the trains no longer ran. Still the boy’s skull, smooth high brow and small vulnerable neck, topped with a little hair, like an omelette, yellowish in colour, with a diminutive quiff. And a wan moustache which looked no less foreign to his face than the outcrop of baby fluff had, forty years before. Nor was he dressed as I’d imagined he would be. But that was the fault of my imagination which had stopped, like a clock after an explosion, at the sepulchral uniform – white shirt, black suit, fringes, homburg – of an Orthodox Jewish boy as seen by an un-Orthodox Jewish cartoonist. It had crossed my mind to put him in rolled-up jeans, brown suede shoes and a green polo neck pulled tight across the chest, as worn by someone Errol once introduced me to sotto voce – Merton Friedlander, at the time the only Jewish boy any of us had ever met who had been to borstal. Stealing cars. Think of that. A Jew stealing cars! A Jew in borstal! But Manny would not transliterate into clothes like Merton Friedlander’s. Now here he was in a dogstooth jacket, a Viyella shirt, a dull silvery, diamond-patterned tie and grey trousers. The clothes of a man who had never been anywhere and to whom nothing had ever happened.

  He was half the size I’d remembered. Had he always been small, or had they shrunk him in there? Had they lobotomised half his frame away?

  Normally when you meet someone you haven’t seen for a lifetime you register the shock at the beginning, then little by little become reacquainted with the familiar. With Manny it was the opposite. He had been better than I’d expected at first, but with every minute that passed he seemed worse. There was nothing of him. And what there was seemed of another place. What did he keep smiling at on the restaurant ceiling? Why did he push his jaw out as though he wanted to chin away every word I said to him? Where was he?

  We didn’t shake hands. I took my cue from him. He didn’t want to. Indeed, for the first half-hour it was difficult to discover anything he did want, other than food.

  Watching him having trouble cutting his pizza, then having to resort to biting into it directly from the plate, it occurred to me that he might never have eaten pizza before. Carrots served with potatoes where he ’d been. And maybe at weekends, or when they changed the chef because the previous one had been knifed, potatoes served with carrots. When he was last out and about there weren’t any pizza restaurants in Manchester. When Manny was last at large – that’s if one could think of Manny ever being at large – pizza hadn’t even been invented.

  ‘The place must look very different to you,’ I said.

  ‘Here?’

  I made a little world with my hands. Meaning the restaurant, Manchester, the universe. The everywhere to which, if he needed any questions answering, I was happy to be his guide and mentor. In loco parentis was how I felt; the man to his boy.

  ‘I’ve had seven years to get used to it,’ he said.

  What did he mean, seven years? Had they moved him up here from wherever he ’d been, and let him out for walkies, like a dog?

  He read my confusion. ‘I’ve been a free man’ – this, talking of dogs, accompanied by a strange, quick barking noise, as though a dog might laugh – ‘for seven years.’

  ‘Seven years!’

  ‘That’s when I came out. Seven years ago. Didn’t you know?’

  What I didn’t know was where to look. The fuckers! That fucking writer and those fucking film girls, why had they sold him to me as hot property, a man that very hour released whose story we needed to pounce on before Hollywood beat us to it? Seven years! Jesus Christ!

  But of course the fault wasn’t theirs. If I was Manny’s friend, why hadn’t I known he’d been out so long? Why hadn’t my mother or Shani, who still lived within the ghetto walls and read its newspapers – why hadn’t Tsedraiter Ike, come to that, who vibrated like an old cello with every ghetto shock or perturbation – why hadn’t any of them told me that Manny had been released? Or were they, too, in their kalooki, like me in my cartoons, happy to know nothing of this particular item of intelligence, content for it all to stay where it belonged, and where he belonged, behind bars. Whatever his original sentence, however much of it he ’d served, we’d put him away for life.

  He smiled into his fingernails, deriving satisfaction from my embarrassment. Something like mirth, or the corpse of mirth, rattled in his neck.

  ‘I’m not arguing with you,’ he said at last.

  He was a gift for a cartoonist – never still, the expression on his face never matching what he said, and what he said interrupted by so many half-coughs and clicks and other muffled ejaculations – as though he were punctuating his own lapses of concentration in his throat – that only coloured stars and broken bits of typeface exploding out of his mouth could capture the demented carnival of his conversations. One sound he made, though, I feel I have to try to render in language. It was somewhere between an exclamation of impatience and an invitation to forgetfulness or sleep – a hush almost, but more jittery, and more sibilant. And with something of Tommy Cooper’s displeasure with Adolf Hitler in it. ‘S-sssch’ is the nearest I can get to it with letters. Like someone stuttering on the word ‘shit’, and then giving up.

  I’d said nothing when he told me he wasn’t arguing with me, partly because I hadn’t understood him. So he went on without waiting for me to catch up. ‘I am of the opinion I should have stayed in longer myself.’

  ‘That’s not what I was thinking. Or think,’ I assured him.

  ‘S-sssch . . .’ he said, while I waited. ‘A life for a life.’

  ‘Nor is that what I think.’

  ‘Isn’t it? Why not? But I’m glad to hear it. It’s not what I think, either. I think they should put you away for a short time, for appearances’ sake, then let you out no matter how many lives you take. Like H-horst S-ssschumann. You couldn’t count the numbers of people he killed, but he was out and about in a year.’

  ‘Was he someone you were in with?’

  He laughed through his nose – more a bark than a laugh. ‘Horst S-ssschumann? You don’t know Horst S-ssschumann? That’s a pity. I’ve a feeling you would have liked him. Many people did.’

  I didn’t only not know who H-horst S-ssschumann was, I didn’t know how much of that was his name, how much was stutter, and how much of it was Manny’s hushing one of us either into sleep or vigilance.

  ‘Why would I have liked him?’ I asked, keeping it simple. ‘What were his qualities?’

  ‘An enquiring mind. A love of science. And a curiosity about Jews. All three took him to Au-auschwitz to run their mass sterilisation programme. There, he X-rayed the testicles and ovaries of Jewish men and women the age we were when we last met, then castrated them to make sure the X-rays had worked. Sometimes, on the assumption that they were as interested in his scientific findings as he was, he would carry out these experiments in view of the next patients. If you happened to survive the burning from the X-rays you’d die from t-terror or s-ssshock. I think that interested him scientifically as well – the amount of s-ssshock to which you could submit a Jew.’

  ‘May his name be blotted out,’ I said.

  He looked at me as though I were a moral simpleton, stuck in some childish game of expunging our enemies from human speech, a ploy which hadn’t worked when we last tried it and certainly wasn’t going to work now. He’d changed, that was what he wanted me to see. He’d had a long time to consider tactics. Now he loved the enemies of the Jewish people. And wanted them remembered evermore.

  ‘S-ssschumann’s name wasn’t blotted out, I am pleased to say. After leaving the mass sterilisation programme he worked as a doctor all over the world. No less consci
entiously than he ’d worked at Au-auschwitz by all accounts. You should be sorry you were never able to consult him yourself. We both should be. He had a good bedside manner with Jews. Finally, after twenty years of good work, the Germans found him, brought him back and put him on trial. A series of events which, as you might imagine, he found very distressing. Fortunately they discovered he had – ha! – h-high blood pressure, and released him halfway through his trial. No l-laughing matter, h-high blood pressure. So they let him go. Which I call justice.’

  My turn to bark. I would have adopted Manny’s crazy circus of verbal emissions had I dared. H-high b-blood pressure? S-ssssssch! The f-f-f-f-fucker! But I didn’t know whether they were an affliction brought on in anticipation of Nazi nomenclature or his throat’s refusal to accept his decision to love his enemies. Either way, they served the function of denying the f-f-f-fuckers decent articulation.

  ‘Well, the consolation is that they are released into the torments of hell,’ I said.

  ‘Is that what you think happens? Ha! Well, you might be right in some cases. It’s possible we will run into a few of them in hell when we get there, or at least when I do. But not any of the doctors in charge of the Nazi sterilisation and extermination programmes. After being released into a comfortable life here on earth, they will probably be in heaven now. S-ssschumann lived until he was seventy-seven, quietly in F-frankfurt. Klaus E-endruweit, accessory to the murder of thousands of the mentally ill, was still in medical practice when I was inside. S-some of them are digging their gardens or cradling their greatgrandchildren while we speak. And I’m pleased to say that those who did die enjoyed obituaries from their profession of a s-sort we are unlikely to get from ours.’