Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  Ours? Which profession was Manny in? I wondered.

  List-maker of murderers – did that count as a profession?

  Eerie, all this. As though time had not happened anywhere but on our faces. If I kept staring at him would the years fall away, would we be back in the air-raid shelter, I with my pencil in my mouth, making Donald Duck noises, Manny running through the names of our eternal enemies, enumerating their crimes, biting their specialities into my flesh so that I would never forget them? Not much had changed, considering all that had happened to both of us. Not much of an advance, despite Manny’s apparent conviction that by pretending to love our enemies we could achieve some sort of moral victory over them. H-horst S-ssschumann – what a great bloke! And yet it was strangely consoling to be back doing what we were doing. I was impressed that he had continued with his studies while he ’d been out of circulation. There was something wonderful about it, Manny locked away all those years still pursuing in his head those who’d persecuted us. It was what he was for. His conscientiousness was a lesson to us all. And who was to say that this wasn’t what I was for as well: to listen to what he told me, to be his pupil – no matter that I saw myself as in loco parentis to him – to study at his feet.

  One question I wanted to ask him about his cataloguing – whether he now included his own name, E-emanuel Eli W-wwashinsky, among the roll-call of unpronounceable killers of Jews?

  But there were some smaller questions to be asked, before the greater. Where he lived now, for example, what he did for money, what he did to pass the time, how he had found the courage to return to Manchester where not everybody, surely, was unaware of his existence. But even they seemed premature. ‘Pizza OK?’ was the best I could do.

  He nodded, but gravely as though in response to one of the questions I hadn’t been brave enough to put to him.

  ‘So why Stroganoff?’ I asked at last. It was my way of trying to get him to make a declaration of friendship. In memory of the old days, I wanted to hear him say. In memory of us.

  But all he said was, ‘I needed another name.’

  Why that should have distressed me as much as it did I am unable to explain. I had been careful not to think of him as a friend even in the days when he was a friend. And he had never shown me any warmth to speak of. It was a bit of a shock, nonetheless, to discover that time had no more softened him to me, than me to him.

  We both looked at our food for a while, then suddenly he asked, without a stutter or any other impediment to speech, ‘How’s your father?’

  ‘He’s dead, Manny. You know that.’

  He made a peculiar motion with his lips, half as though licking them to make them moist, half as though flicking something away.

  ‘He died years ago,’ I reminded him. ‘In your time. After the funeral you said you envied me not having a father. I have never forgotten that.’

  ‘Don’t remember,’ he said.

  He was holding his left hand tightly in his right, the thumb of the one squeezing all colour out of the knuckles of the other. He protruded his jaw – a weak man’s resolution. But again, he wasn’t arguing with me. If he said that about my father, he said it. At the time to which I was probably referring he could, frankly, have said anything. The remark would have been directed at his father, not mine. He believed he had rather liked my father. And my mother. Whereas his own parents he did not, at that time, like. He had turned against them. Grown ashamed of them. Had I lost my mother he might have said he envied me not having one of those as well.

  Strange. I had been thinking it would take us a thousand meetings for us ever to get anywhere, for me to find the form of question I felt I had any right to ask, for him to concentrate his attention long enough to answer me. Now here we were, in the very thick of things after only fifteen minutes. Manny grown ashamed of his parents. At this rate we would have the gas taps on before coffee.

  And wouldn’t Francine be pleased.

  What he told me came out haltingly, and much of it was addressed to someone who wasn’t there, and certainly wasn’t me. But what it amounted to was this:

  4

  After his outburst against Asher, he had fallen into one of those fits of despondency well known to people who act out of character. It had been exhilarating at first, losing his temper, making something happen, even if that something was Asher’s running away from home. Good. Excellent. Asher needed time to clear his head. And Manny needed not to hear his family screaming at one another. But when days went by and Asher did not return, Manny’s spirits deserted him. What if he had succeeded only in throwing his brother into the fire-yekelte ’s daughter’s arms? Worse – if anything could be worse – what if his brother had grown desperate and thrown himself under a bus? Was this to be the consequence of Manny’s single deviation from the laws of his own undemonstrative nature – the loss, one way or another, of his brother? But then, when Asher returned, Manny was exhilarated again. He had done some good after all. Asher had sorted himself out, come to his senses, and was now back where he belonged, trailing between home and the synagogue, without the girl. Wonderful, for Manny, to see before his eyes, as the very proof of his effect, the family reunited.

  Or it would have been wonderful had they – ‘they’ meaning his mother and his father and himself and maybe even Elohim – taken a little longer to pass from heartache to happiness. It was too sudden. Wounds don’t heal that quickly. Not if they are real wounds in the first place. No – I tried him with this – no, it wasn’t that he had wanted Asher to be kept longer in purgatory. Absolutely not. His eyes fluttered like trapped birds. Yes, he could see that his feelings were open to cynical interpretation. Why should Asher be rewarded with the fatted calf for going off the rails, while he, Manny, the good boy who had gone nowhere, was rewarded with nothing? Unjust, the jubilation which always awaits the return of the prodigal. But that wasn’t the cause of his depression. His mother and father were the cause of his depression. The fact that their affliction could turn to rejoicing in a second. The screaming, the emergency ambulance, the fisticuffs, a son raising his hand to his own father, Manny himself driven into an epilepsy to which he had not hitherto had any idea he was disposed – hadn’t any of it meant anything?

  What’s the worth of rage that cools so quickly? What does it tell you about the cause? As a matter of seemliness, if nothing else, Manny believed his parents should have thought twice before trumpeting their relief with such blatancy. Should have thought twice before showing it to each other, but more importantly should have thought twice before blaring it at Asher. Was there not bad taste in that? Was it not gross of them to suppose that Asher would concur quite so promptly, if at all, in their felicity? And was it not cruel of them not to wonder how things were in Asher’s heart?

  Manny talked about Asher’s heart as though it were an empty bed. Someone had lain in it beside him, and now she was gone. Manny could see the impression her body had made. He had been a lonely boy himself and was now an even lonelier man. Perhaps it was this that made him exquisitely aware of Asher’s loss. Never mind that the girl was German. It had surprised him, he told me, to catch himself not minding, because he had at first minded a great deal. A German was a German. A person you could not forgive and should not go near. But he got to the humanity of not caring what she was via the impression she had left behind her in Asher’s heart. The impression was without religion or nationality. The impression – the sad, simple indentation – humanised her.

  And by contrast dehumanised his parents who would not notice, or care, that it was there. For this, and without any prior warning signs in his theology, Manny, in his depression, blamed the faith of his fathers.

  God, good. God, I was sure, would take us where I wanted to go. Wherever that was. Talk to me about God, Manny.

  ‘It wasn’t a fully-fledged religious crisis,’ he said, a queer blue smile irradiating his face. ‘I wasn’t intelligent enough for one of those. I just started to have my doubts.’

  ‘I rem
ember,’ I said. ‘I remember you questioning the Unquestionable One. I suspect I wasn’t sympathetic.’

  He didn’t appear to care whether I’d been sympathetic or not. ‘Illogical doubts,’ he went on. ‘I didn’t have the nerve to reprove God for His brutality, so I took what some would see as the easier option of wondering where He’d gone.’

  ‘You think He should have interceded for Asher?’

  ‘Of course I didn’t. Asher had to make his own mind up.’

  ‘Which he ’d done . . .’

  ‘Not really. Asher just got pushed around. He should have been braver. But it was upsetting to see him put in that position. I had originally agreed with everything my parents felt about him. In certain moods I still do. But in the end they should have let him go. The Jewish people were not going to perish because of Asher.’

  ‘My dad would have said that the Jewish people would have been the better for Asher taking himself a Gentile wife.’

  ‘Yes, but your dad didn’t always say what he meant.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  He wasn’t going to help me. He looked bored suddenly. He had even stopped gripping his left hand with his right. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s the head. It gets tired.’

  He got up to go to the lavatory. Would he come back, I wondered, and tell me that Germans ironed their underwear?

  I was distressed to see that he shambled like an old man.

  And was then struck by the thought that he hadn’t s-ssschushed me in a while.

  5

  Before we parted, he grew more forthcoming about God, more forthcoming about Asher anyway, which by Manny’s roundabout route amounted to the same thing.

  Asher had not settled back into the life of his family. He was in torment. Manny’s word. Torment. He could not clear his mind of Dorothy.

  ‘You make her sound like an infestation.’

  ‘That’s your intepretation. But it was not her doing. Asher did not want to clear his mind of Dorothy.’

  ‘This is Asher being a free agent again. Not God’s fault.’

  He hesitated. ‘Not God’s fault that Asher wanted to go on thinking of Dorothy. But you have to ask yourself whose fault it was that he felt he shouldn’t.’

  ‘Did Elohim ever tell us, specifically, to stay away from Germans?’ I asked.

  ‘He probably thought He didn’t need to, having warned us off everybody else.’

  I don’t know how to do justice to the bitterness of that remark. It was thrown off, an aside almost, but had it been a well you could have sunk a bore a long way down before reaching bottom. Was the bitterness on his own behalf? Had Manny fallen for someone he shouldn’t, and had he too been warned off in the end? It felt unlikely. Manny sentimentally entangled with anyone, allowed or not, was beyond imagining. So was that the cause of the vexation I heard – that with him the warnings against wandering off weren’t even necessary, so good a job had his parents done on him, so love-proof had they made him, for fear the love would go in an unacceptable direction?

  Rather than have the love go in an unacceptable direction, let there be no love!

  As usual there was no clue in the expression of his face. His blue eyes – much bluer than I’d remembered – offering to be serene this time, not fluttering at the windows, just seeing beauty, perhaps angels, in the firmament. So maybe the example of Asher was explanation enough of Manny’s anger.

  Asher was in torment. He could not forgive himself for the almost accidental way in which he and Dorothy had broken up. He owed her feelings more consideration. He owed his own feelings more consideration too. He had acted like a coward, a nobody, a nishtikeit in her language and in his. How terrible, to think it would be as a nishtikeit that she would for ever think of him, if she thought of him at all. He couldn’t decide what was worse: her contempt for his memory, or her crying over it. What did goodness teach? Where was Judaism on this? Does the good Jew suffer the obloquy of one he has loved in preference to having her suffer the grief of loving him still? Whose tears are the more precious? Where does it teach you in the Talmud to weigh the emotional consequences of betraying a German girl?

  Over and above all this, he quite simply missed her. The one remedy for that – taking his chance and seeking her out again – was not to be entertained, regardless of whether she would even consider agreeing to see him. He could not start that war all over. He could not engage her affections again when he knew he would eventually have to forfeit them for the same reasons. Thus her dear face, whose image he carried in his heart like an ache, became entwined with the idea of impossibility. And when you think of a woman as impossible to you, denied you by forces in the universe over which you can exert no control, you have succumbed to romanticism in its most morbid and irresistible form.

  He wept every night for her, and Manny heard him.

  Then in the morning he would go to the post office in case she had written to him, which of course she had not. But on the way there, and on the way back, a hundred times in each direction he thought he recognised her. He grew gaunt and papery and more gouge-eyed even than he’d been before, but not once did his mother or his father think they had been wrong or wonder whether, for his sake, right or wrong, they should reconsider their ruling. They remained obdurate and relieved, and Manny saw them.

  Then, when Asher did not recover his spirits, they sent him to convalesce in a home for weak-chested Jews in Cheshire, and Manny watched him go.

  That was why Manny grew to hate his parents, and to lose his faith in G-god. The way he talked, the two were interchangeable.

  6

  Had my mother believed in God to start with, she too might have lost her faith in Him when my father died. As it was she turned to kalooki.

  Though my father had expressly asked to be spared a Jewish funeral – I don’t want any of that machareike, he had said – it turned out that he had made no provision for any other sort, so a Jewish funeral was what he got. I think his Yiddish was at fault with machareike which he employed to mean fuss, but strictly speaking means contraption. I suspect the impatiently onomatopoeic qualities of the word confused him. The sound of something being made of nothing. It still perplexes and distresses me that he should have felt that way about his own death. But this might be the paradox of heroic atheism: you rob yourself at the last of the grandeur to which you believe your freedom of mind entitles you. I have, for this reason, made no provision for a secular burial myself, even though I too can’t stand all the machareike. Insidious, the old religion, the way it bides its time with everyone, knowing that when you want the big party or the big send-off, you’ll be on the phone.

  I wept like a baby throughout my father’s funeral so didn’t notice whether the send-off was big or not. It began – this much I do remember – with my father’s comrades lining up outside the house, not sure what to do with their hands, some in hats or yarmulkes, some not, ‘Long John’ Silverman carrying a prayer shawl under his arm, Elmore Finkel bearing what looked like a gift for my mother tied in a black bow – just in case (how would he know?) a funeral gift was appropriate – all of them respectful but somehow emasculated in their blackest suits, each wishing me, as is the Jewish custom, ‘long life ’. That could have been the trigger for my tears. Their capitulation to Jewishry for this one hour hurt my head: I couldn’t decide whether it was ennobling or enfeebling. What would my father have thought? Wouldn’t he have preferred to see them in their hiking boots, grinning raffishly at the trappings of a faith they had no truck with? Wasn’t there a comradely farewell that would have become them, and honoured him, more? The rifles of the revolution, maybe? The singing of the ‘Red Flag’? A fusillade of anti-clerical jokes? Or did the death of one of their number necessitate a reversion to ancient custom? Was that, after all, the greatest respect they could show him? In which case . . .

  In which case futile. Futile all of it. My father’s life, my father’s principles, every word he’d spoken to me – futile. Not what the rabbi was s
aying, but who cared about the rabbi? He was futile too. So what did that leave? The mere brute physical fact of my father, his unthinking bulk – and I knew where that was going.

  I wouldn’t look. Where it went I know but didn’t see. That way there was – that way there remains – the possibility it went somewhere else.

  I was meant to recite Kaddish at the graveside, the great booming lamentation for the Jewish dead, but I botched it. Tsedraiter Ike had transliterated it for me. Yisgadal veyiskadash . . . Those dreaded words. Like the tolling of the final bell. You hear them in synagogue when you are young, chanted by orphans and bereaved brothers, and you wonder when your time will come and whether you will be up to it. Well, the time had come, and I wasn’t. Yisgadal veyiskadash shemey rabo, Be’olmo di’vero chir’usey. Botched, but not the time for blaming my dad for never teaching me the Hebrew or its meaning. May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified – Amen – in the world He created as He willed.Tsedraiter Ike helped me through. He was just about the only man there who had any inkling of what we were doing or saying. My father’s friends looked at the ground or moved their lips at what they hoped were the right moments. Of no use to him whatsoever now. Die and any atheist friends you have are blown away like the leaves from winter’s trees.

  As though to compensate for his shortcomings at my father’s funeral, where his sole concession to the solemnity of the occasion had been to remove his ironic spectacles and dab twice at his eyes, Rodney Silverman wrote me a sweet letter the week following, telling me how he had always admired my father, what a fine and upright man he was, and how he had thought of him recently when he saw Rembrandt’s painting of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. ‘It is a most terrifying portrait of the eternal Jewish father,’ he wrote, ‘his hand completely covering Isaac’s face, manhandling it in a way that suggests the boy’s life is his to do with as he pleases. In this way it denies the rights of the mother absolutely. But look again, Max, and you will see that Abraham’s action is in fact loving. The reason he covers his son’s face so completely is that he wishes to spare him the sight of the knife going into his heart. Your father was an Abraham. If he sometimes appeared brusque or brutal with you, it was only because he wanted to save you from the cruelty of the world. But you are the artist, so I don’t have to explain any of this to you.’