Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘She wasn’t a prostitute.’

  He made that Merchant of Venice weighing motion with his hands, as though to suggest that in the scale of things, a lapse was a lapse and a trollop was a trollop. He’d just told me I had the clap. Who was I to be making nice distinctions of morality?

  ‘I’m telling you,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t a prostitute.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because I didn’t pay her, for one thing.’

  He removed the pipe from his mouth, laid it on the desk next to his stethoscope and threw his head back. ‘There’s more than one way of paying,’ he laughed. ‘And you’ve paid all right.’

  Then he took his pipe up again and bit on it. These days doctors don’t smoke while they’re treating you, but Shrager was what was known as an old-fashioned family doctor even then. He breathed an almost solid fuel of bile and pipe tobacco into the faces of his patients.

  The need rose in me – inexplicable in the circumstances – to defend the reputation of Tillie Guttmacher. I was a snap of the fingers away from giving Shrager her name and, had I known it, her address. She’s a Guttmacher, of the Didsbury Guttmachers! Now what have you go to say? But I settled for something almost as conclusive. ‘She’s a nice Jewish girl,’ I said. ‘The nice Jewish girl every nice Jewish boy is supposed to marry.’ I would have liked to add that she could have been his daughter.

  He arched an eyebrow. He was famous, Alvin Shrager, for his shaggy eyebrows. Shani believed they were false. My mother thought he simply roughed them up every morning, before surgery. Craggy wisdom was what I thought – the mamzer wanted to give the impression of reflection seasoned in experience.

  Out of the depth of which experience he came up with a gem of unpleasantness, even by his standards. ‘Think on,’ he said, ‘where else might you have been?’ The most unpleasant part being that I had been asking myself the very same question.

  I laid out for him the topography of my uncleanness: the school lavatories with their cracked wooden seats, the school shower, a club in town where the urinals overflowed and the washbasins were green, the Temple Cinema known with good reason as the fleapit, the number 35 bus, Tsedraiter Ike’s towel, the changing rooms in Halon’s man’s shop in Withy Grove where I’d tried on a pair of trousers, the trousers themselves previously tried on by God knows who else, the chairs in Errol’s mother’s salon, Errol’s conversation, my own mind . . . Could a boy get the clap from his own imagination?

  Shrager sucked on his pipe. ‘You can’t catch what you’ve got from any of those,’ he told me. ‘Who else have you had sexual relations with?’

  I opened the palms of my hands to him. He had that effect on me. He made me feel guilty about whatever ailed me. Not just the clap, a cold as well, a sore throat, a bad stomach, an ingrowing toenail. All my fault. ‘No one,’ I said, ashamed to admit it, because that was clearly another thing I bore the fault for – being a virgin until Tillie Guttmacher had her way with me while she was waiting for her blouse to dry – that’s if she really did have her way with me.

  He pointed to a chair. Sit. While I sat he filled another pipe. At any time the ritual of pipes infuriated me. That was another of the ways I denoted cartoon villainy when I was denied a big nose – a pipe. Only a very bad man would subject others to that tyrannous time warp where all of creation must wait on the filling of a pipe. But I had further reason to be impatient. I was suffering from a debilitating disease of particular incidence to artists, a disease that had wrecked the lives of Cellini, Manet, Lautrec, Gauguin, to name only the ones who sprang to mind, and instead of beginning treatment immediately, before it wrecked my life, a life that had barely begun, Dr Alvin Shrager was sticking a thumb in his pipe bowl and preparing me a lecture.

  ‘If what you’re telling me is true, and I’ve no reason to doubt you, it sounds like you’ve been unlucky. I’ve been a doctor in this town for more than thirty years and I have never once treated an unmarried Jewish woman for what you’ve got. Very occasionally a married one who’s contracted it from her husband, and who isn’t pleased about it, I can tell you – but a single Jewish girl—’

  ‘From Didsbury,’ I put in.

  He closed his eyes so he could continue. ‘But an unmarried Jewish girl – never! Well, there’s always a first time you’ll tell me, and there’s a bad egg in every batch. And you’ll be right. Just a pity you had to find her. But this I can tell you, young man – and I’m telling it you out of the respect I bear your father, olovhasholem, and your mother who I hope is well – don’t go fancying yourself as some Lothario. What she did with you, whoever she is, this nekaiveh, she’d do with anyone.’

  ‘No one would have sex with me who didn’t want sex with everyone, is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Max, no decent woman has sex until she’s married. And there’s a joke that no decent Jewish woman has sex even then. You’ve been given a warning. Or at least part of you has been given a warning. Respect your body, and women will respect you. Yes?’

  No, I said in my heart. But I wanted my prescription. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, doctor.’

  As I was leaving he called out ‘Max!’, then when I turned he winked at me through a fog of tobacco. ‘Don’t forget,’ he said, ‘stay away from those shiksehs.’

  In fact I have exaggerated what was wrong with me. It wasn’t the clap, it was crabs. But the clap sounds better. More artistic. More Hogarthian.

  I don’t otherwise exaggerate Alvin Shrager. He was round, brown, boiled, evil-smelling, florid, smug, religiose, a disgrace to medicine, a shame on my mother and father who had stayed with him because he was ‘our doctor’, a shame on me who continued to see him for the same reason – because he was ‘our doctor’ and therefore ‘had’ something on me or owned me in some way – and an offence to Judaism. Many years later, I gave him a whole page to himself in No Bloody Wonder, my follow-up to Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, among the enemies of the Jewish people who happened to be Jewish, not with the self-haters and the apostates and the Jews who changed their names, but alongside the Jews who harmed Judaism by being overzealously Jewish where Jewishness had no business showing its face. Needless to say, this page didn’t go down any better than the others, especially with Shrager’s daughter Toyba who threatened to sue my publishers unless they promised to remove the caricature from future editions. An empty threat, but one which my publishers were of course only too delighted to take seriously, knowing there would be no future editions.

  As a satisfactory addendum to this episode – and it will explain Toyba Shrager’s hypersensitivity as to her family’s good name – Alvin Shrager’s other daughter Lipka enjoyed a period of notoriety for a while, even appearing for two weeks running on the front page of the News of the World, wearing a belted leather coat, dark glasses and a hunted look. She was denying all charges, of course, but you could tell from the leather coat, which she wore as a second skin, and from that prioressy air which women at her end of the market often carry, that she was lying. She was the one all right, she was the Mayfair call girl in the kisses-forsecrets scandal, whispering information garnered from high-ranking Arab clients into the ears of Israeli diplomats, and, I am afraid to say, vice versa.

  Some nice Jewish girls give you crabs, some croon to you of troop positions – as Dr Shrager said, it’s just a matter of luck which you fall in with.

  As a further satisfactory addendum to that episode, the public disgrace hurried Shrager into a grave nothing like as early as I’d have wanted, but certainly much earlier than he did.

  5

  I presented Manny with a signed copy of No Bloody Wonder on our second attempt at reunion. Better that, I thought, than Five Thousand Years of Bitterness which had originated in a joint endeavour, never mind that he had washed his hands of it so many years before. I had nothing to apologise to him for – not in the matter of publications anyway – but people can behave strangely in the presence of a book, especially a book they had once had a hand in but whic
h doesn’t bear their name. Fortunately, he wasn’t the publication junkie I am. He appeared indifferent to my authorship at any rate, and barely thanked me for the gift. Summarily, as though performing a duty he couldn’t himself see the point of, he looked the front cover over, licked his lips, then idly, even rudely, flicked the pages. Unimpressed is one word. Contemptuous is another. ‘I would have expected you to have moved on from this kind of thing,’ he said, without any challenge in his voice, as though I must already have come to such a verdict about myself without his help.

  ‘I’m a better drawer than I was when we sat and planned the predecessor to this in our shelter, Manny,’ I pointed out. Miffed was one word for how I felt. Fucking furious were two others.

  A better drawer was I? As a courtesy to that assertion he flicked through a few more pages, but obviously didn’t see it.

  ‘They’re still cartoons,’ he said.

  ‘You mean not realistic?’

  ‘I mean not serious. Not considered.’

  I pedalled backwards from the punch. Maxie ‘Slapsie’ Rosenbloom would have been proud of me. But where had Manny learned to hit like that?

  Don’t answer.

  ‘The lines could not be more considered,’ I said, catching my breath. ‘If you look, you’ll see that the lines are highly formal. And my intention could not be more serious. For a cartoonist I am serious to a fault.’

  ‘Then maybe you should stop being a cartoonist.’

  Oooof!

  ‘What is it you don’t like, Manny? The hyperbole? The extravagance? Surely you still don’t find this stuff blasphemous.’

  He did me the justice of thinking about it, though it was hard for him: his attention wavered, his eyes were always halfway to somewhere else. ‘You seem to have embraced ugliness,’ he said at last.

  ‘Ugliness has its way with all of us,’ I said. And let him take that how he liked.

  ‘Isn’t that all the more reason to try to find beauty? You seem to be in an argument with beauty.’

  ‘How can I not be in an argument with beauty? I’m a cartoonist. More to the point, I’m a Jewish cartoonist. As an Orthodox Jew yourself, or as a one-time Orthodox Jew – I don’t presume to know what you are now – you should approve of this. Leviticus 26, Manny, “Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image.” I happen to take that prohibition very seriously. Not in its sensuous applications but in its ethical ones. It is not good to lose oneself in art. It is idolatrous. Lose yourself in art and you end up not knowing where you begin and end. It is a mistake to fuse with the image. Well, you can’t fuse with mine, Manny. It won’t let you. It won’t allow it. If by ugliness you mean the ceaseless mockery, through a visual medium, of all the seductions of visual media, then yes, OK, have it your way, my drawings are ugly.’

  Not that I wanted him to think I was passionate about what I did . . .

  We were in a kitchen, I wasn’t sure whose and didn’t think it was appropriate to ask. He had invited me there, somewhat obstinately and with a certain degree of domestic pride, I thought, in the face of my offering an outing to any bar or restaurant he fancied. It was as though he felt that I needed to understand his needs – neither to underestimate nor to overestimate them – and to see the manner in which they were satisfied. It was a terraced house, modest, but well kept, furnished with stripped pine and inexpensive third-world rugs, situated in those heights looking out over Heaton Park, not all that far, if my Manchester geography hadn’t deserted me, from where Asher would first have met his German mishpocheh. I took it to be a small home, perhaps paid for by the social services and local Jewish charities, for Jewish men who had killed their parents and served their time in prison. A quiet act of consideration, not to be bruited abroad, at once of benefit to the men themselves and to the Jewish community they’d disgraced.

  It would have been interesting to know how many more were billeted there. And what they talked about together when their visitors had left. But I didn’t enquire. There had always been something about Manny that inhibited curiosity, and on his home turf, if you could call it that, I felt I was obliged to spare him questions of a personal kind. Gas taps yes, who his friends were now, no.

  His hands were on the pine table in front of him, the left holding the right, pressing the knuckles white. For a moment I wondered if he was another Ilse Cohen, himself a victim of Alien Hand syndrome, one more person who couldn’t control the waywardness of half his will. Another hysteric. He saw me looking at him, and changed hands.

  ‘Other Jewish artists have answered the challenge of Leviticus 26 differently,’ he said, at the very moment I was thinking of changing the subject.

  You have to be prepared, when you’re talking art to Jews who once wore fringes, and wear them surreptitiously still for all you know, for them to mean the junk you find for sale in the lobbies of the Red Sea hotels – rabbis fashioned out of silver wire, sentimental woodcuts of old Jaffa, menorahs encrusted with Eilat stone. (Coincidentally, there was an Eilat-encrusted menorah in the kitchen where we sat, in an open cupboard alongside bottles of vinegar and olive oil.) With Jews, philistinism flourishes in direct proportion to Orthodoxy. You can see it on the bookshelves of the holy. Everything is written by God or Enid Blyton. But Manny had educated himself in the years he’d been away, he had given himself back to the world, and by ‘other Jewish artists’ I at once knew that he meant Rothko. Don’t ask me how I knew, I just knew. There is a Rothko face that people pull. They go dreamy. Rothko reminds them of some long sojourn somewhere else. It’s possible Manny had a reproduction Rothko hanging on the wall of his cell, or wherever they put him, and he was recalling his days there. Where are they now, the Rothko snows of yesteryear?

  Mark Rothko. Born Marcus Rothkowitz, as Errol would have known, and once upon a time a yeshiva boy, like Asher Washinsky, and like Manny himself. So why did he change his name? And why, like Errol whom I would much rather not be like, do I hold it against him that he did?

  Or is what I hold against him that he made his equivocal Jewishness lovable to Jews and non-Jews alike by taking all the joking out of it?

  When non-Jews love a Jewish artist I’m suspicious – let’s leave it at that.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said to Manny, without mentioning any of the above. ‘As by painting exquisitely expiring spiritual abstracts. Fading even as we look at them, like the flesh which houses us. Very beautiful, I grant you, and in their own way biblical, I grant you that too. But precisely for the reason that they seduce us by their beauty, are they not any sort of riposte to Leviticus 26. They are still graven images. They might not be images of prancing gods in animal or human form, but they are idealised images of the soul. And therefore they remain idols in whose shape we worship a sentimentalisation of ourselves. Abstraction doesn’t solve it, Manny. Abstraction’s a con. Only ridicule solves it. Only mockery keeps you the right side of idolatry.’

  He quarter turned his eyes towards me, showing me something (though it was very hard to be sure) much like mockery in return. It was a queer thing for me to be doing in his or whoever’s little kitchen, haranguing him with my views on art.

  Only afterwards did it occur to me that as far as he was concerned, at least, we weren’t discussing art at all. We were discussing my fitness, as a man of comedy and exaggeration, to interpret his story.

  Given the choice, he’d have gone for Rothko.

  Tough. Given the choice, I’d have gone for Rembrandt. But you don’t get to choose who tells your story.

  At the time, feeling that the fault for the haranguing was mine, I reached out to touch him, apologetically. But he started from the contact. Not knowing what else to do he reached for the pages of my comic history again, and alighted on the caricature of Shrager.

  ‘My d-doctor,’ he said, passionlessly.

  His stutter had returned to us. Evidently doctors brought it on.

  ‘Shrager? Was there anyone whose doctor he wasn’t? But I’m flattered you recognise him’ – through the maze of
unconsidered ugly unseriousness, I was going to say, but satisfied myself with the bad-taste jest of stuttering his name instead, as though he were one of Manny’s Nazis. ‘Dr A-alvin S-sssch-shrager. Another evil man of medicine.’

  Manny didn’t respond to my needling. There’s a chance he didn’t notice it. He disagreed with my estimate of Shrager, though. ‘I’m not aware that he gassed children in order to be able to experiment on their brains.’

  He’d abandoned the lumbering pretence of loving our enemies. He was back where I preferred him, in the realm of unequivocal hate.

  ‘I grant you that,’ I said, ‘but he still played around with mine.’

  Manny fell quiet. Then suddenly he remembered something which struck him as more cheerful. ‘He tried to interest me in your sister once.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘He asked me to take your sister out. Asher told me he’d asked him as well.’

  ‘Shrager asked you and Asher to go out with Shani?’

  ‘Well, not asked, s-suggested. And not at the same time.’

  ‘I’m assuming not at the same time, Manny. But on whose say-so did he put that suggestion to either of you? What made him think . . . Christ, Manny, Shani was years older than you for starters.’ And you were a frummie freak, I wanted to add, upon whom she would not have looked had her life depended on it. Family – family first.

  ‘He said he thought it would be a good idea. He said he thought your father would approve.’

  ‘Well, that’s a joke! Hard enough – excuse me – to imagine what Shani would have said about it, but my father! In the first place my father would not under any circumstances have gone telling Shrager what he wanted for Shani – why would he for God’s sake? – and secondly what he wanted was a well-to-do left-wing atheistical goy with a double-barrelled name from some cathedral town in Hampshire.’