Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘While they’re at it . . .’ she began.

  But I had to explain to her that it was surgery from the inside not the out, and that if she thought I’d be coming home from the otolaryngologist retroussé, she’d do well to think again.

  Here’s the irony I talked about. In the end the otolaryngologist advised against ligation in my case – some issue with the septum nasi which I was not capable of grasping – and put me on a regimen of what can only be called ‘packing’, all manner of materials being stuffed into my nose over a long period, the eventual effect being that it took on the appearance of being larger rather than smaller, even if Manny’s description of it spreading all over my face was exaggerated. I did bleed less frequently, as a result, and I snored less too. But it was a cruel blow to Zoë who found it harder than ever to look at me.

  2

  My memory draws a blank when I try to picture Manny and me after my father died. I see no air-raid shelter, recall no further talk of the Brothers Stroganoff, retain nothing of any conversations we might have had about the Nazis. He came to my father’s funeral with his father, that much I know. I see them standing together, to one side, both in long black coats. But no Asher. Shortly afterwards Manny delivered himself of that sick nonsense about his envying me not having a father, but I cannot see the place or remember the circumstances in which he delivered it. Then there was his crisis of faith or whatever it was which I spitefully threw back in his face; though that, too, will not locate or define itself. Otherwise a black hole. We didn’t fight, we didn’t in any of the usual ways fall out, we simply stopped.

  Sex stopped it partly. At fifteen, Errol Tobias started going out with Melanie Kushner, a South Manchester girl with a woman’s breasts, and that was that – goodbye to the carefreeness of childhood. No more Scourge of the Swastika, no more breaking a religious man’s windows, no more spluttering circle of onanists. ‘Won’t be needing you now,’ Errol had announced at a sort of extraordinary general meeting of the latter, called, as it were, to wind up the company’s affairs. All over. We were in business for real, suddenly. Or at least Errol was. For the rest of us there was some serious catching up to be done and we weren’t going to manage that with meshuggeners like Manny Washinsky hanging around. I became one of the boys, that’s why I lost touch with him. I hit the town.

  And Manny? No idea. He didn’t exist.

  Not entirely true. Something comes back to me, dimly, in the reluctant half-light of shame. Me and a girl, hand in hand, leaving the Library Theatre, an Arthur Miller, I think, always Arthur Millers at the the Library Theatre, me and Märike it must have been, stepping into the wintry dark, stopping for a kiss on the steps of the Central Library itself, this is how we kiss in Kobenhavn, this is how we kiss in Manchester, and then there, sitting in an old raincoat, on the cold stone, scratching his face, giving the air of waiting for somebody, but obviously not, Manny Washinsky, not looking my way. How old would I have been? Nineteen? I was already at art college, I am sure of that, because I had met Märike, if indeed it was Märike, at a college dance and was bringing her home to meet my mother. So this was probably me showing off the sights of Manchester to her. Theatre, Library, Mother, Art Gallery – now will you put your hand inside my trousers? Showing off the sights of Manchester to her, but also showing off her to Manchester. Oh, to have been able to show her off to Errol Tobias, but he was married already, a child bridegroom, and living in the South with pictures of women exposing their vaginas on his toilet door. So poor Manny, sitting there, thinking his own thoughts, had to suffice. There were losses and gains to this. No points for showing her I knew Manny. But points aplenty for showing Manny how intimately I knew her. Why that should be, when Manny was now as nothing to me, and no measure of anything I any longer valued, I cannot explain. Some imp of malice or uncertainty, though, some hunger for validation, explain it how you will, made me make him notice us. See what you’re missing, Manny. See what I’ve got and you haven’t. I even effected a cursory introduction – Manny, Märike; Märike, Manny. He didn’t get up from where he was sitting. Just nodded his head, then looked away again. Whether he was feigning indifference, or genuinely didn’t care who I was with, I am unable to say for sure, but at the time I feared the latter. He was otherwise absorbed, as incurious about me as I had been about him, but more self-sufficient than I was, it appeared, since I had set about attracting his attention, whereas he hadn’t shown the remotest interest in attracting mine. Elohim? Was that the explanation? Was Manny back on friendly terms with Him? I decided yes. He had the look: not transfigured with light – that had never been his way – more as though returned to antiquity, in the process of turning back into the mud out of which the first man was fashioned. In which case, fine. I could live with losing to Elohim. But just between me and myself, I felt a clown.

  Consistent with his appearance at the time, Manny had no recollection of the encounter when I mentioned it to him in the course of our second attempt to get reacquainted. Steps of the Central Library, night-time, I with a very lanky Danish woman, bit like a giraffe? Ring no bells? No. Not a tinkle. And he thought he would have remembered the giraffe. As for whether he had indeed returned to God whenever that was, 1961 . . .1962 – that was like asking a man when he had stopped beating his wife.

  ‘And now?’

  He put his lips together as though he were going to whistle a tune. But no sound issued from them.

  I waited. Had he forgotten what he was going to say? Had he forgotten what his thoughts were on the subject? That could easily happen, I imagined, when you were locked away. Your mind could just empty.

  But he hadn’t lost his thoughts, he was just organising them. ‘If you’re asking me whether I believe in God,’ he said at last, ‘you’re asking the wrong question.’

  ‘So what’s the right question?’

  ‘There might not be one. But belief isn’t optional. You can’t choose it.’

  ‘It chooses you, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Not exactly, no. People think they can believe if they feel like it. They can’t. It’s a privilege, not an entitlement. Yes, I think God probably does exist. But I have lost the right to believe in Him.’

  3

  The effect of Errol Tobias’s betrothal to Melanie Kushner, the girl with woman’s breasts, was to helter-skelter me through my teenage years. Long before I was ready for it, Errol fixed me up with one of Melanie’s friends – Tillie Guttmacher, a super-Jewess with wrestler’s shoulders, a furry upper lip (not all that unlike Manny’s) and Cleopatra eyes. The idea was a foursome, then we’d pair off.

  We met at a cheap curry restaurant in Rusholme, Errol believing in the aphrodisiacal qualities of vindaloo. ‘Maxie’s an artist,’ was how he introduced me; then, after a stage pause – ‘a dick-artist.’

  The girls laughed. At a nearby table a man whose face I thought I recognised paused from apportioning rice to his two female companions to stare our way. He had prim yet fleshy lips, a lisper’s lips I thought, which he shaped into a little prune of disapproval. He appeared to be making a mental note, so as to avoid having any contact with one in the future, of what a dick-artist looked like.

  I have to say dick-artist was new to me as well. It’s my belief that there was no such existing expression, that in the late 1950s we weren’t even talking bullshit-artists yet, and that Errol, who had a genius for this sort of thing, had coined it. I can’t pretend I was grateful. It bore so little resemblabnce to reality that I took it to be a sarcasm. I didn’t believe that Tillie Guttmacher was much enamoured of it as a description of her date for the night either, for all that she had shaken her head and laughed, the gypsy hoops ringing at her ears. Perhaps because my mother never allowed a coarse word to pass her lips, and Shani had only ever cursed her wardrobe in nursery profanities, I entertained a rarefied idea of what constituted the sensibility of a Jewess. It even crossed my mind that Tillie Guttmacher had laughed her big laugh only to conceal the fact that she didn’t have the
first idea what a dick, let alone an artist, was.

  It is sometimes said of Jewish men that they go to Gentile women for sex so as not to disrespect their own women. This was never the case with me. I would willingly have disrespected a Jewess had I thought there was the remotest chance she’d have understood my intentions. The shock of finally discovering that Jewish women put out for Gentile men with even more alacrity than Jewish men put out for Gentile women was what precipitated a series of irritably lewd cartoons I once drew, a sort of Rake’s Progress set in Stamford Hill, where every strumpet was a Jewess in a sheitel, but which no reputable publication was prepared to take, not even Playboy, despite my offering to redraw the location to make it look like Crown Heights.

  Tillie Guttmacher apart, I had a further reason for being angry with Errol. I had suddenly worked out who the man at the next table was. Isaiah Berlin. Sir Isaiah Berlin, for I had recently seen a photograph of him in the newspaper receiving his knighthood.

  I nudged Errol. ‘Isaiah Berlin,’ I whispered.

  ‘Geezer!’ Errol said. ‘Why would Isaiah Berlin be eating a curry in Rusholme?’

  ‘Shush,’ I said. ‘He can hear you. He’s already heard you call me a dick-artist, thanks very much.’

  ‘Who’s Isaiah Berlin?’ Melanie Kushner wanted to know.

  I waited to see if Tillie Guttmacher might be able to help her out, but no.

  Errol screwed his eyes at me disgustingly. Birds! they said. What else do you expect from Jewish birds?

  He was loathsome but you had to hand it to him, he was educated. Had I told him Freddie Ayer was sitting next to us, or Karl Popper, he ‘d have known who I was talking about. ‘Philosopher,’ he told the girls, who seemed offended by the word.

  ‘Otherwise known as an ideas-artist,’ I helped out.

  ‘Except,’ Errol said, ‘that that isn’t him. You’re confusing him with someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  He thought about it. ‘Bronowski.’

  I looked again. The big spectacles, the half-benign, half-disapproving face, the slightly angelic but ironic mouth, the lugubriousness. ‘That’s not Bronowski. It’s Isaiah Berlin.’

  ‘In Rusholme?’

  ‘Well, if Bronowski could be in Rusholme, why can’t Isaiah Berlin? He’ll be visiting the university.’

  ‘And having a curry while he’s here?’

  ‘Why not? He’s got to eat, hasn’t he?’

  ‘A fucking biriani?’

  ‘Errol, do me a favour, keep your voice down.’

  ‘I can’t stand this. We’re here to have a nobbel and you’ve gone all ungelumpert. Go and ask him if you think it’s him. Then we can all relax.’

  ‘What’s “ungelumpert”?’ Melanie asked.

  ‘What it sounds like – acting like an awkward lump.’

  ‘Excuse me, I’m not ungelumpert.’

  ‘What are you then?’

  What was I? ‘Curious, that’s all.’

  ‘So satisfy your curiosity. Go and ask him.’

  ‘Errol, are you mad!’

  ‘Then I will.’ And he would have – Are you Sir Isaiah Berlin? I thought as much. Then let me introduce you to my friend Maxie Glickman, dick-artist – had the vindaloos not arrived to save me.

  Whether or not vindaloos were aphrodisiacs as Errol claimed, they did have the effect of making women go hot around the neck, which had the further effect of making them undo at least one of the buttons on their blouses. Tillie Guttmacher, who had as much reason to be proud of her chest as Melanie Kushner did of hers, undid two. Already red with the make-up of the Nile when she arrived, she had begun to glow like a volcano. After every forkful of vindaloo she took her napkin and fanned her face and throat with it, but that only made the volcano burn the brighter. At the moment it became apparent that she was about to fall off her chair, Errol dug me in the ribs. ‘Blow on her, Max,’ he urged me.

  I had never blown on a woman before. But an emergency was an emergency. I made a bellows of my lungs, puffed out my cheeks, and sent such a crosswind Tillie Guttmacher’s way that I stirred a maelstrom in her plate – rice, sauce, pickles, bits of pappadom, all swirling in a hurricane that blew itself out finally on and down her unbuttoned blouse. At which moment Sir Isaiah Berlin raised his heavy head and pruned his lips in my direction for the final time.

  I had not read any Isaiah Berlin. I was a bit young for his urbanity of thought. But I knew two things about him. One was that he had written a book on Marx, and I knew that because I’d heard ‘Long John’ Silverman speaking to my mother about it in unflattering terms. According to ‘Long John’ Silverman, Isaiah Berlin was the wrong person to write that book because he lacked instinctive sympathy with Marx’s view of history. ‘I’d like to write a book one day,’ had been my mother’s response to that. ‘And I would like to read it,’ had been ‘Long John’ Silverman’s response to her. The other thing I knew about Isaiah Berlin was that he’d written about Tolstoy. So profound an impression had his description of the aged Tolstoy at Astapovo made on one of my English teachers, David Brennan, that he would recite it to us at the close of almost every lesson, his eyes brimming with tears – ‘At once insanely proud and filled with hatred, omniscient and doubting everything, cold and violently passionate, contemptuous and selfabasing, tormented and detached . . . he is the most tragic of the great writers, a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus.’ The passage had the identical effect on me. I couldn’t breathe while David Brennan was reading it. The sound of my swallowing filled the classroom. Had Brennan asked me to comment on it I’d have collapsed into sobs. Me, of course – it was me Berlin was writing about, me as I would be at the end, the most tragic of the great cartoonists, omniscient and doubting everything, Jewish and yet not, a torment to myself, beyond human aid.

  On the strength of that sentence, if nothing else – and I couldn’t care less whether or not he lacked instinctive sympathy for Marx’s view of history – Isaiah Berlin was a hero to me. But by virtue, as I understood it, of his being a well-connected Jew, he frightened and bewildered me as well. How could you be a well-connected Jew? Who could you be connected to? No Jew was well connected where I came from. It was a contradiction in terms. For this I both hated Isaiah Berlin and craved his approval. By ‘his’ I meant that of people like him. Other well-connected Jews. Win their approval – I say nothing of admiration or friendship – and you would thereby, magically, become well connected yourself. But what chance of that after Errol, in his hearing, had introduced me as a dick-artist and got me to blow on Tillie Guttmacher’s chest? Of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s connections, how many were dick-artists?

  In fact, as the smallest amount of research into his circle reveals, quite a number of them were. But they didn’t call themselves that, there was the difference. And what you call yourself determines how people see you. A. J. Ayer couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, but he called himself an iconoclast and libertarian. Just as Goya, the greatest of cartoonists, knew to present himself to posterity as a painter, satirist and historian. The secret of reputation: call it big and they’ll think it big.

  Whether or not Isaiah Berlin in later life remembered me from the curry restaurant in Rusholme I have no way of knowing. But he never responded to my publishers when they sent him an advance copy of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, a work which, given what he wrote about Tolstoy, you’d have expected him, if not to endorse or even like, at the very least to understand. Other well-connected Jews of his calibre the same. Not a peep. Mine was not, that was all I could deduce – since not every one of them had come to hear of me first as a dick-artist – their idea of serious discourse on a Jewish theme.

  4

  The clap!

  We went back to Errol Tobias’s house, ostensibly to remove the curry stains from Tillie Guttmacher’s blouse, crept about among the washbasins and the hairdryers, made free with the reclining chairs, and she gave me the clap. A carelessness to repay a carelessness.
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  My first sexual encounter with a Jewess, which also happened to be my first sexual encounter of any kind, and it poisoned me. Hard to square this with my going on imagining Jewish women as sexually inaccessible, I know, but I was somehow able to delude myself that the sex I’d had with Tillie Guttmacher I hadn’t, and that the clap she gave me I contracted through some other agency. It didn’t much feel like sex, in the dark and the discomfort of the salon, with Tillie complaining about her blouse, and Melanie laughing, and Errol egging us on and quite possibly, for all I could see or recognise to the contrary, manually busying himself between us. And what didn’t feel like sex surely couldn’t give you any of the diseases that were the punishment for sex. I’d caught the clap off Errol, I decided. Off Errol’s hands, off the seats of Errol’s mother’s salon chairs, off the words Errol spoke, off the air Errol breathed, off Errol’s pestilential contiguity.

  Alvin Shrager, the doctor who had attended my mother in both her pregnancies and my father in his final illness, and who therefore saw me as a sort of ward of his practice, reprimanded me for bringing an infection into his surgery that was not of a kind either of us had any business with – ‘A boy like you shouldn’t be coming to me with this,’ were his exact words, which made me wonder what a boy like me should be coming to him with – and confirmed that it couldn’t have been a Jewish girl who infected me. ‘What you get for going to prostitutes,’ he told me.