Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Perhaps he changed his mind. He talked to my father a lot when they were in hospital together. He said he was worried for your sister. What would happen to her when he died. He wondered about Asher. My father even mentioned it to Asher, but Asher, as you know . . .’

  Yes, Asher was in love with someone else. And Manny, presumably, was at that time still in love with God. So sorry, Shani, looks like you missed out on frumkie bliss!

  I did not know what to make of any of this, except that it was profoundly insulting to my sister, my father, and to me. Which left only my mother, and who was to say that Shrager hadn’t suggested Manny or some other epileptic creep of medieval Yiddishery as a husband to her?

  But just because it was insulting didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Anything was possible. Without doubt my father had begun to entertain some strange notions in the last months of his life, and maybe finding himself in a hospital ward in a bed next to Selick Washinsky, where they were both equal in the hands of the Almighty, softened his attitudes. I had also to accept that when it came to Shani, his lifelong views about the need for Jews to shed their Jewishness were already pretty soft – vaporous, vapid, like the bubbles he blew from the clay pipe he once bought me as a Christmas present. Karl Marx, presumably, was the same with his daughter. What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world? Usury. Only not in your case, my darling daughter. From everything I say against Jews, assume that I exempt your dear self. Takes some explaining all that. But it’s what Jewish daughters do to their Jewish fathers. They make monkeys out of them. And if it tells you anything, it is that my father was mistaken on another score: Jewishness is not what you get when you lock people in a ghetto, Jewishness is what even the harshest Jewish father sees when he looks into his baby daughter’s eyes. Shmaltz.

  But then my father knew that too.

  Shmaltz! He pronounced it with the fiercest disdain. Which just goes to show that you can know the name and still not be able to resist the substance.

  6

  Whatever my father’s fears for her, Shani had not needed anyone to keep an eye on her, or to find her a nice Yiddisher beau. After my father’s death, several of the bachelors or widowers among his friends, including some whose first choice would have been my mother – let me frank about this: everyone’s first choice would have been my mother – took the early steps to wooing her. Chocolates, flowers, invitations to rambles, dances, even kalooki evenings in other people’s homes. And one or two who weren’t bachelors or widowers, I am afraid to say, essayed the same. But she kept them all at arm’s length. She was a changed person. If I were to put what was changed about her in a nutshell, other than that she now dressed every day and found shoes to fit her, I would say that she had decided to occupy my father’s place in the world. Not only to fill his social and secretarial role about the house, paying bills and looking after guests while my mother went her merry way kalooki-ing, and Tsedraiter Ike sucked at his single tooth and dribbled into histories of Israel, and I cartooned and got the clap – but actually to supplant him. There was something epic about it, something that would have reminded me of Greek tragedy had the omens been bad, but in fact no great collapse of dynasties was in the wind, no gods had been enraged other than Elohim who had never been much pleased with us anyway, and the House of Glickman felt, if anything, more secure than it had for a long time. So I suppose I meant Greek only in that it seemed archetypal, Shani moving into the space my father had vacated, as though one of us was bound by some elemental law of family to do it, and actually shouldering the burden he had dropped, thinking like him, talking like him – a touch brusque, determined to be watchful of sentimentality, the shmaltz as she had now taken to calling it – and keeping alive the principles of anti-religiosity by which he’d lived his own life and protected ours from fanaticism.

  This was what made Manny’s recollections of Dr Shrager’s matchmaking so preposterous: a Jewish man, never mind a Jewish boy, was the very last of Shani’s wants.

  It would have been neat of her to fall in love with a goyisher boxer with a broken nose and low-caste cauliflower ears, maybe a lad my father had once trained and seen a gloriously bloody future for, but she didn’t. She fell in love with a sailor. Mick.

  ‘Mick!’ Even my mother, who was the inverse of her late husband when it came to Shani and me – wanting me to have a Jewish bride if I had to have a bride at all, someone called Bathsheba or Hepzibah at the very least, and with a complexion to match the Arabian silkiness of her name, but not caring who Shani took up with provided he treated her well – even my mother drew the line at a Mick. ‘He isn’t Irish?’ she pleaded not to hear. ‘Please say he isn’t Irish.’

  ‘Mick Kalooki is his name,’ Shani said. ‘Draw your own conclusions.’

  My mother made a bouquet of her hands and thrust it at my sister. ‘Don’t toy with me, Shani. On your father’s life, tell me the truth. Is he or isn’t he?’

  ‘On my father’s life you shouldn’t be asking me that question, Ma. You know what he’d have said. A man’s man for a’ that.’

  ‘That’s Scottish,’ I put in. ‘He’s not a Scotsman, is he?’

  You can never tell who’s going to be the last straw in a family. A Hottentot, a German, a Jew as outlandish as I must have looked to the protected eyes of Chloë’s light-heartedly Jew-despising mother. In our family it was an Irishman. No idea why. Something to do with the Irish epitomising what we meant by a bates, the male equivalent to yekelte only worse, the proletarian drunkard whom we feared, in the abstract, more than any other being because we did not understand from the inside the workings of a mind befuddled by alcohol and could not calculate what it would do. If you want to understand a culture, look at how it goes about subverting itself. Carnival contains everything you need to know about Catholics, and Purim, the most carnivalesque of all Jewish festivals, renders up the Jew. At Purim even the holiest of men are required to get so drunk that they will not, for a whole day, be able to distinguish Mordechai from Haman, the friend from the enemy, the saint from the sinner. Behold then why Jews fear alcohol: in alcohol we lose the one quality that guarantees our humanity – our ability to distinguish good from evil.

  They will tell you, the anti-Semites who collect my cartoons and show them on websites much visited by extremists with too much time on their hands, that our disdain for non-Jews, measured by the size and hostility of our vocabulary for them, is proof of our belief in our inherent superiority. Bad psychology, my farbrenteh friends. Your reasoning is as flawed as your hearts. Colourful language did never yet proceed from confidence. The confident are languid in their contempt; what fuels the vivacity of our mistrust is fear. All those goyim and batesemeh, all those yekeltes and shaygetsim – what are they but characters in a recurrent nightmare, the Grand Guignol of our waking terrors? Not just our enemies, blind with drink, but that to which we might ourselves be reduced if we do not keep our wits about us. If the Jews felt easier in their chosenness they would be sweeter to get along with. As it is, they start in fright whenever an Irishman who isn’t W. B. Yeats or Oscar Wilde (and they aren’t all that sure about Oscar Wilde) approaches them with a glass in his hand.

  ‘An Irish son-in-law,’ my mother wailed. ‘What have I done to deserve an Irish son-in-law?’

  ‘And a sailor, Mother,’ Shani reminded her. ‘So the house will stink of rum as well as whiskey.’

  In fact he was purser on a luxury liner, came from a good cheese-smoking family in County Cork, had been educated in England, so didn’t sound like a tinker, and by any standards other than ours would have been counted teetotal. Although Shani had tried to keep the details of her meeting him a tight secret, and would have liked us to imagine her haunting the docks in the early hours of the morning, looking for seamen, it came out that they’d fallen into conversation in Radiven’s, the kosher delicatessen at the bottom of our street. He was in Manchester seeing relatives, and could not forgo the opportunity to buy a pound of chopped liver and a packet of
matzohs, food he had acquired a taste for as a boy when his parents took him to stay with Jewish friends in Dublin. He had already got what he wanted when Shani walked in, whereupon he realised that what he really wanted, to go with his chopped liver and matzoh, was a beautiful Jewess to serve it to him.

  He had a day in town before his train left for Southampton and persuaded Shani to spend it with him in Heaton Park. How far you can fall in love in a single afternoon in a park, depends partly on the park and partly on your physical and mental availability. In Jane Austen’s words, ‘He had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love.’ The ‘he’ in question, incidentally, also a sailor. Though the ‘she’ a long way from being a Jewish girl from Crumpsall Park with a thousand pairs of unworn stilettos in her wardrobe. It had happened that way at any rate – love in a single afternoon – for Asher and Dorothy. It had happened that way for me and Zoë, for me and Chloë, and for me and several öthers. And it happened that way for Shani and Mick. By the time they separated in body they were engaged in spirit. He wrote to her every hour from his boat, she replied with cables to Aden and Colombo and other places Shitworth Whitworth correctly supposed we could not point to on a map – Shani, this was, who had never previously sent a postcard to anybody in her life – and so we became aware that something very serious was taking place in Shani’s heart long before we met the cause of it.

  Whether she had so arranged it that when he was next on leave he would turn up at our house in his purser’s uniform just as one of my mother’s kalooki evenings was about to kick off, I can only guess. But if she hadn’t, she was damned lucky. He took the gathering by storm. Handsomish and certainly well formed, if not exactly dashing or imposing, but in naval whites, with the colour of the high seas in his cheeks, an unshaveable dimple in his chin and a proven way with red-nailed matrons, he would have made a big impression had he merely popped his head around the door, said Hello, ladies and left immediately. That he should have been a card-player, to boot, that he should have loved kalooki in particular, being expected to play it every night in the saloon of the Oriana with the wealthier version of just such women as were gathered here tonight, that he should have been able to take his place at my mother’s table as though he had never parked his trim behind in any other seat, and be expert enough to keep everyone on their toes but not so expert or indiscreet as to win every hand, and that he should have declined the peach brandy my mother kept for rabbis and alcoholics – well, an angel sent by Elohim could not have managed things better.

  ‘So you’re Mick,’ my mother trilled, when her other guests had left, while in the shadows of the hall Tsedraiter Ike rolled his shabby little fingers into fists and called upon the Almighty to intervene.

  TEN

  1

  Little by little I fancied I was getting Manny to relax. Whenever the trainee PAs at Lipsync Productions had nothing better to do, they would contact me, mentioning meaningless deadlines for outlines, citing the names of impossibly stellar directors whose windows of opportunities would soon be closing, and cut-off dates beyond which we would be plunged into the perilous uncertainties of another tax year. I told them Manny couldn’t be rushed. I explained that there was difficult, even intractable matter which could be coaxed out of him only gingerly, if he was not to take fright and bolt. The word ‘intractable’ usually got them off the phone and Francine on it. Was there anything she could do, she wondered. Had she been a man I’d have deduced from her tone that she meant like breaking both the bastard’s arms.

  ‘Time will do it,’ I said. ‘Leave him to me a little longer.’

  What was I up to, I could hear hear her thinking. What’s your little game, Maxie Glickman?

  It was always a little shivery getting Francine in person on the phone. She had a way of making you feel she was taking a moment off from tea with Henry Kissinger, or a Bellini with Berlusconi, to talk to you. If you listened hard you could hear them breathing at her elbow. The other thing you could hear if you listened hard was Francine’s beauty. It had an audible quality, like temperature. You can hear heat and you can hear cold; in Francine’s case you could hear the strained patience in her green eyes, and the challenge that was so important an element in her mellifluous looks. I could not have drawn her from her voice, but I immediately remembered how it felt to be in her company. Above all, the sensation of having let oneself down. But whether that was because I didn’t measure up to her, or disliked myself for trying, I couldn’t decide.

  As for Manny, with whom for very different reasons I felt something similar, the truth was that after four or five meetings I still hadn’t said a word to him about there being a scriptwriter at my elbow wanting to empty my mind of that of which I’d emptied his. Of course he knew the basis on which we ‘d been meeting, and wasn’t naïve enough to suppose I’d be spending this much time in his company simply for the love of it. But getting his story down on paper hadn’t come up as an issue between us. And the business Lipsync was most interested in – the gas taps, the gas taps, Max – was not proving to be as imminent as I’d first thought. My own fault. I’d got him on to theology and art. I’d made him teleologically self-aware. Now he thought twice before he mentioned God, and God, I felt, held the key to it.

  However, so long as no one rushed either of us, I saw no reason not to believe we would eventually get there.

  It might have been my imagination, but I thought he found it easier to talk when he was out of Manchester. He seemed to like coming off the train at Euston with The Times under his arm and being surprised to see me waiting for him. It must have felt to him as though he had business to attend to. And I was beginning to prefer it when he came to me. A trip north inevitably incurred family obligations which I didn’t always have the mental strength to honour. Jewishly, it didn’t feel healthy up there any longer either. The air was not bracing. There were no Jewish ramblers left. If there were still Jewish atheists in town they were lying low. The sky had darkened. People were waiting for the Messiah. My mother’s kalooki nights went on almost as before, but I noted that she suspended play on the High Holy Days and even on some of the Lower Holy Days, a respectfulness she would not have dreamed of exercising once upon a time. ‘Frummers got to you again, Ma?’ I would say when I called in and found the tables empty. But there was no teasing her. ‘Without the frummers as you call them, Maxie, we wouldn’t be here.’ See! They’d slipped into the vacancy left by my father and blackmailed her. They’d made her feel that it was they who had kept us going for five thousand years, the lungs and bellows of the Jewish people, precisely so that Jews like her could lead their frivolously irreligious lives unimpeded. Left to her, there’d be no Jews. That was the package of obligation they’d sold her. Left to her – and me – we’d have died out. Someone the spitting image of her might have persisted, paying for her hair to be sculpted, painting her nails and playing kalooki, but she wouldn’t have been Jewish. So she owed them.

  Made no sense to me, but I wasn’t living there, breathing in the tainted air.

  Made no sense to my poor father either, I’d have staked my life on that, and he was still there.

  Occasionally I’d visit his desolate grave in Failsworth, a blasted Jewish cemetery for the privilege of lying in which my mother had been paying a burial board functionary a penny per week per person by my calculation since Cromwell let us back into the country. Failsworth – it describes what happens to your heart when you get within a mile of the place. But that’s the way of it with Jewish graves and graveyards: they are of necessity sites of failing strength and failed imagination. After death, nothing.

  I hadn’t fought when my father’s grey slab went up, commemorating the bare bones of his existence in Hebrew script. I hated the look of Hebrew characters almost as much as I hated German. On a grave they reduced the inmate to nothing but an addendum to Jewish history, a mere slip of an ancient tongue which alone enjoyed eternity. But we hadn’t been able to come up with a satisfactory alternative. My mother could
not abide the idea of burning him, I knew of no country churchyard with an enclosure for amateur boxers with names like Jack ‘The Jew’ Glickman, and Shani believed that burying him in the manner his father and his father before him had been buried was, though unsatisfactory, best.

  So much for his attempt to change the course of Jewish history.

  For which failure on our part – because that was how I saw it: our failure not his – I apologised each time I went to see him.

  And each time there seemed more to apologise to him for.

  2

  It wasn’t only being out of Manchester that appeared to relax Manny’s tongue. It was being out full stop. He didn’t move well, but as long as he felt he wasn’t under pressure to get anywhere, he liked wandering around. Sightseeing. Shopping. Hanging about, or zikh arumdreying, as it pleased him to call it, laughing to himself about the expression, as though it delighted him to remember a Yiddishism he’d had no reason to employ for years. There was no zikh arumdreying where he ’d been. He ’d shlumped, but that was different. Zikh arumdreying implied active, even ingenious hanging about, whereas a shlump just quietly rotted into the earth.

  I’m not saying that he grew suddenly garrulous crossing the river on bridges that hadn’t been there when they first put him away, or hobbling along the King’s Road like a Chelsea Pensioner, but he would comment on what he saw – people ’s dress, the numbers of foreigners in the streets, everybody wired up to some item of technology or another – so that I at least became privy to his sudden negligences and parentheses. It was as though the city acted as a chaperone between us, releasing him from the fear of unwonted intimacies, while making small talk easier. Not ideal, given that it was intimacy I was after – and I could hardly seize upon the iPod as a pretext for bringing up double homicide – but as I kept telling them in Wardour Street, just give me time.