Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  One Saturday morning I picked him up off the early train from Manchester and took him to the British Museum. I thought he might like to mooch around the new courtyard, and otherwise wander where his fancy took him. How we got to Ancient Egypt I am not entirely sure. More by accident than design, I think, since as Jews neither of us was able to get excited by pharaohs or the mummification of their priests. I hadn’t cared for mummies even as a pre-adolescent when all that bandaging is supposed to speak to some regressive sexuality in a boy, and never warmed to them thereafter, for all that they were demonstrably a species of cartoon – panels of naturalist narrative criss-crossed with garrulous strips of hieroglyphics, not an inch of space left undevoured. Noisy, vivid, the bright colours of life refusing the monochrome of death, one hyperbolic assertion of history and nature tumbling over another. My bag, you would have thought. Done with me in mind. That they left me cold and even slightly queasy I can only ascribe to instinctual Jewish resistance to plaster and paint, to bandages and gum, to extracting the internal organs of the dead, and to what I understood of the principle of ka, the life force which was said to live on and expect feeding after the individual had died. We Jews draw more cut-and-dried distinctions than that, clear our dead away much quicker. Among Jews it is possible for you to have a heart attack after dinner and be in the ground by breakfast. Hasty but clean.

  And there’s no ka hanging around hoping for a hot meal after.

  Habdalah.

  The older I get, the more enamoured I grow of the principle of Habdalah. Keep the meat from the milk, keep the holy from the profane, keep the living from the dead.

  And the goyim from the Jews? As an incorrigible mixer, and with the bruises to show for it, I am still thinking about that.

  Seeing me holding back from the mummies, Manny shuffled to my side. ‘Ugh,’ he said, and shuddered.

  Funny, the difference an unwelcome corroboration can make to your evaluations. Who was Manny to be shuddering at a once great civilisation, for Christ’s sake, when he’d grown up in a house of rags no better than a mausoleum itself?

  ‘I suppose you don’t much care for this guy either?’ I enquired, moving him on ill-temperedly to a small painted wooden Bes, the dwarf fertility god – smirking, naked, phallic, prancing, laden with musical instruments.

  One of Zoë’s favourites, Bes, whenever we’d encountered him in a museum on our travels.

  ‘You know there is something of Bes about you, Max,’ she liked to tell me, ‘if we discount the fertile, the naked, the phallic, the prancing and the musicality.’

  She loved a joke, Zoë, as I loved her for making them. ‘So all that leaves,’ I would say . . .

  ‘. . . is the smirking dwarf. Exactly.’

  But there was a more serious point she wanted to make. ‘Don’t you wish you had a Bes in your pantheon?’ she asked me once, I think it must have been in Charlottenburg, on our seeing how she would hack it as a Berlin harlot. By ‘your’ she meant not belonging to me but belonging to the Jews.

  ‘A pointless question,’ was my answer. ‘We don’t have a pantheon. We have Elohim, full stop. I think that’s wiser myself. One God or No God. Start letting everybody in and you end up praying to a hunchback with his dick out and tambourines in his hands.’

  ‘I thought you were a musical people, Max.’

  ‘We are. But when we discover a musical gift in ourselves we don’t take all our clothes off and start dancing. We apply for a job as first viola with the Israeli Philharmonic.’

  ‘And go mad with living in your brain. You’d be healthier with more than one sort of god, Max. You’d be more various in your interests. In your case you might even get an interest. And you’d certainly look better . . . all of you.’

  Which of course was exactly what I wanted to say to Manny. Had you made a bit of room for Bes in your heart, Manny, who knows – you might not have had to play the Holocaust around and around in your head, or stutter into your fingernails, or gas your parents.

  He didn’t engage with me on Bes. Maybe he was thinking what I was thinking. But he did stop and look long into a case of bronze and limestone deities, half-animal, half-human – a squatting antelope, a leering jackal, a cat-headed goddess slinky as a nightclub singer, knowing and obscene. Irresistibly disgusting, all of them. And impossible, for a cartoonist anyway, not to admire. Easy enough to take or leave a painted sarcophagus, but I couldn’t, professionally, resist comic gods and goddesses who mocked the spiritual, could I?

  ‘Do you think this was what Moses found our people dancing around when he came down Sinai with the tablets in his hands?’ I wondered, gesturing at a ram-headed deity.

  ‘No. That was a gold calf made from women’s earrings.’

  ‘But an animal god, anyway. Something sickening and slightly wonderful like this, wouldn’t you say? I can see why they danced. He makes you swoon. Look at his obscene, wide-apart ears, and those extended arms, like a curtain opened on himself – behold, see what’s beneath, see what animality is incident to your graceful humanness. You can’t say no to it, Manny.’

  He sent his blue eyes twinkling into the ironic distance again, something he hadn’t done all morning. With a quick dart of his tongue, he wet his lips then touched his moustache as though he feared he might have licked it off. ‘What I was taught,’ he said, still looking away, ‘was that the children of Israel danced around the calf because, like children, they thought Moses had gone for ever. They were desolate and wanted to worship something they could see.’

  ‘Agreed. Something palpably indecent. Something which answered more to what they recognised as the complexity of their natures. Something that wasn’t words and interdictions.’

  Odd that I should have been playing the devil’s advocate.I knew where I stood on the question of gods. Four-square behind words and interdictions. But sometimes Zoë’s voice spoke through me. This can happen in a marriage, even long after the marriage has been dissolved. You open your mouth and lo! – your longlost spouse’s voice comes out.

  ‘That’s an interpretation,’ Manny said, also ventriloquising, I thought. ‘It isn’t the one I was taught.’

  Lost him. Lost him again to our invisible God, in whom he had forfeited the right to believe.

  He was looking at nothing now, wanting to be gone, wanting the morning to be over. To spite him I lingered longer than curiosity demanded, taking in whatever obscenities I could find – a squatting baboon with a penis the size of a cartoonist’s pencil, a jeering hippopotamus-headed god, another jackal, a turtle, a second inebriate Bes clanging his cymbals. And not a word of the Law to be heard.

  3

  It might have been something or nothing, but Manny engineered a queer encounter outside the museum. We had agreed we would have lunch together, but first I needed to visit the comic shop opposite. If it’s funnies you want, Bloomsbury’s the place to go. Since a comic shop could not possibly interest Manny and the morning was warm, we agreed that he would sit in the sun and wait for me. That’s what nutters do – they sit in the sun and wait. I left him to find his own slab of concrete, which is never easy given the busloads of foreign schoolchildren who gather here to eat their sandwiches and discuss Egyptian art. To my surprise – a surprise I cannot justify – he chose to sit himself, very deliberately it seemed to me, between a Muslim gentleman who was reading a newspaper, and two children who were surely his, busy playing with their Quetzalcóatl keyrings, Rosetta Stone mouse mats, and countless other items of swotty tat bought from the museum shop. What surprised me more when I returned was the sight of Manny, who I couldn’t trust to purchase his own bus ticket, engrossed in convivial conversation with the whole family. Not only that, he knew their names.

  ‘Mr Nasser Azam,’ he said, ‘my friend M-max.’

  Mr Azam rose to shake my hand, inclining his head slightly. I did the same. He would have introduced his children, but Manny got in first. ‘This is Tamoor – am I pronouncing it right? – and this is Zahra. Tamoor and Zahra Azam.
This is my friend Max.’

  Great names, I wanted to remark. Tamoor and Zahra, great names for a comic-book hero and heroine from another galaxy. The other thing I wanted to remark was how beautiful they were, eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, their heads like Carmel and the hair on their heads like purple, and indeed how exquisitely they smelled – frankincense, myrrh, calamus and cinnamon, like the gardens of Lebanon – but one ethnic minority cannot marvel over the exoticism of another without offence.

  ‘We have been comparing notes,’ Mr Azam told me. He too was succulently beautiful, his hands – always the first thing I look at – a lustrous, ochreous brown, the fingers extraordinary in that they appeared to be flat-sided, faceted even, the crescents of his nails as thrilling in their perfected nakedness as Ilse Cohen’s used to be.

  ‘Notes? On the museum?’ I feigned alarm. ‘Has Manny told you that he and I have been disagreeing about the gods of ancient Egypt?’

  He shook his head, laughing. ‘Well, we,’ he said, ‘have been comparing our views of Abraham.’

  ‘Amicably, I hope.’ Which was an asinine thing to say, but then I wasn’t versed in the etiquette of Abrahamic discussion Jew to Muslim in plein-air Bloomsbury.

  He bowed. Of course amicably.

  ‘Presumably Zahra,’ I said, ‘is a variation of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.’

  Again he inclined his head to me. If I were wrong, if Sarah and Zahra were polar opposites, he certainly wasn’t going to tell me.

  My head was spinning. Where had Manny found the savoir faire to strike up conversation with the Azams? I had only been away ten minutes. How come he had hit it off so well with them, utter strangers, in that time? And how come he had dared venture, so soon, into the minefield of Torah and Koran? Was it chutzpah, or stupidity? Had all those years of being locked away dulled him to the sensitivities of Jews and Muslims in the matter of one another’s mutually confuting faiths?

  I was also strangely touched that he had introduced me as his friend. ‘Friend’ had not been in the air between us much. It was on the basis of our friendship that we were doing whatever it was we were doing – making notes towards a film of Manny’s ruined life, were we really embarked on that? – but the word itself had not previously been used, at least not by him, and it made a difference. I was no less touched by Manny’s engrossment in the children. As I stood there, not quite knowing what to say to their father, Manny examined Tamoor’s and Zahra’s toys, laughed at a snowstorm on the pyramids, helped them with a metal puzzle which had baffled the holy priests of Mesopotamia. They were huddled about him, attentive, like acolytes around a senior boffin, apparently oblivious to his oddities. It seemed to me, too, from the way he bent over them – though this was only a surmise, a cartoonist’s reading of the body’s longings – that he wanted to touch them, that he would have liked to gather them to him so he could breathe in the incense of their hair, but knew he couldn’t.

  They gave him their email addresses when we parted. God knows what he intended to do with those. He watched them go, dark into the great white city, waving longer than I thought was necessary.

  Over a minestrone and bruschetta lunch, his eyes suddenly filled with tears. He wiped them with his serviette, but there was no staunching the flow. I grew embarrassed. There were people at adjoining tables watching, wondering what I’d done to him.

  At last he said, ‘They didn’t remind you of anybody?’

  ‘Tamoor and Zahra?’ I thought about it. And then I realised that yes, yes they did.

  Asher.

  4

  Sometime in my first or second term at art school I received an invitation to dinner on Oriana notepaper, disappointingly postmarked Manchester, not Surabaya or Trincomalee. Chloë, whom I’d just met – though I couldn’t be certain she’d met me – would have warmed to a candlelit spread in Surabaya. ‘I like exceptional men,’ I had heard her telling a group of her friends in the refectory, and what could have been more exceptional in 1963 than a man who took his girlfriend to dinner in the South China Sea. The sender of the invitation was Shani’s Mick – Mick Kalooki, as we’d taken to calling him after Shani’s joke – and the venue to which he was inviting me was any restaurant of my choice, with a good bottle of wine thrown in. A PS requested that I make no mention of the invitation to Shani.

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. After mulling it over for a few hours I decided that the invitation couldn’t possibly bode ill to Shani, not given its bon vivant spirit (by 1963 standards), and not unless the man was a bounder, which he wasn’t. More likely it presaged a desire to get to know the family better, either with a view to making Shani an offer she couldn’t refuse, or as a preliminary to moving in with us – or with them rather, as I had already moved out – so that he could be at the kalooki table before anybody else. Fine by me so long as it was fine by Shani and my mother. Mick was a nearly permanent fixture already. He had left his seafaring the year before, folded away his purser’s uniform to the disappointment of every woman over fifty in Crumpsall Park, and opened up a barber’s shop right next to Radiven’s, the delicatessen he rated above all others in the world, and he was a man who could be said to know the world. Whether he could be said to know barbering was another matter, but he had barbered a bit at sea before becoming a purser, and though seamen were less fussy about their hair than dry-land Jews, barbering was, by his own admission, the nearest thing he had to a civilian profession. Eventually this would cause friction with Errol Tobias’s mother who did a little moonlighting with men’s hair when women’s business in her salon was slow, but in the beginning Mick’s transition from sailor to hairdresser, as from bird of passage to fixed star in Shani’s affections, was smooth. He snuggled up a bit close for my taste – he could make you feel there was more of him inside your skin than there was of you – but I liked him well enough at a distance of two hundred miles. My fear, on getting the invitation, was that he meant to snuggle up even closer. But for what reason, since he was already a combination of brother, son, husband and lapdog to all of us except Tsedraiter Ike, who had detested him at first sight and never wavered, I couldn’t imagine.

  We met in a Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel, ate saveloys with boiled potatoes and drank a wine of no known varietal type. The restaurant wasn’t my choice. I’d suggested a nice little Italian I knew in Soho, next door to a strip joint on one side and a clip joint on the other – now I come to think of it, probably an earlier incarnation of the very place where Francine Bryson-Smith would lunch me into Jewing up the tragedy of Manny Stroganoff – but Mick didn’t think Soho was suitable given that he was my sister’s boyfriend. And besides, he wanted to eat kosher.

  I quickly discovered he wanted to talk kosher too.

  ‘So what’s a nish?’ he asked me.

  ‘A nish? I don’t know of any nish.’

  He pointed to the word in the menu.

  ‘Oh, k’nish! The k isn’t silent. In fact it’s noisy. You rock on it – k’nish.’

  ‘K’nish.’ He practised it, pushing his face forward. ‘K’nish. K’nish.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘And it means dumpling.’ I didn’t tell him, for the same reason that he didn’t want to meet me in Soho, that a k’nish was also a vagina.

  By this stage he had brought a pen and notebook out of his pocket. It was odd. He knew the lexicon of delicatessen nosh backwards – the bagels, the challas, the kes, the wursts, the apricot and almond rugalach, and of course the chopped herrings and chopped livers in all their subtle variations. But Jewish restaurant food was different. Nobody had taken him, that seemed to be the problem. Nobody wanted to take him. ‘If we’re going to eat out we’re not going to eat that pap,’ my father had always said, meaning we were having Indian or Chinese full stop, and that tradition had been kept alive by Shani. The only person in the house who might have been up for a kosher meal on the town was Tsedraiter Ike, but he did all his dining away from home in houses of the dead. And would not have entertained the compa
ny of Mick anyway. Thus this poor Irish sailor, thinking he had gained admittance to that penetralium of mystery, a haimisheh Jewish family, was reduced to dragging himself down to Whitechapel to dine Yiddler-wise with his girlfriend’s younger shikseh-doting brother who, to tell the truth, wasn’t all that keen on the pap either.

  ‘I think I know what kreplach are,’ he said, keeping with the ks, ‘but how are they different from kneidlach?’

  ‘Well, kreplach are like little ravioli, as you know, whereas kneidlach are dumplings, only rounder in general than k’nishes. But I’m not an expert.’

  ‘You have a lot of words for dumplings.’

  And a lot of words for vagina, I thought, remembering pirgeh and peeric and pyzda and pupke – unless Errol Tobias who had taught them to me had made them up out of devilment.

  ‘Isn’t there something called kochleffel?’

  ‘Yes, but you don‘t eat it. A kochleffel is a busybody. A stirrer. You want to watch it when Shani starts to call you that.’

  He beamed at me. ‘So lovely.’

  ‘Shani?’

  ‘No . . . I mean yes, of course, but I was talking about the language. Such a lovely language, Yiddish!’

  Indeed. But then I hadn’t told him what k’nish meant in slang.

  I was prepared, this once, for Shani’s sake, to take him through every dish on the menu, but I had to stop him when his curiosity grew more philosophical and he tried to get me on the difference between shmendrik and shmerrel and shmuck and shmegege and shmulky and shlemiel and shlimazel and shvontz and the hundreds of others – the rich roll-call of dishonour in which a people who prize intelligence above all things register the minutest distinctions between ignorance, simplicity, folly, buffoonery, ineptitude, sadness and sheer bad luck.

  ‘Just one thing more,’ he said, after he ‘d paid the bill. ‘If you had to choose between shmendrik, and shmerrel and shmegege—’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I can’t. There aren’t enough hours in the day.’