So I must be careful, when I come to describe my life with Alÿs, not to box it around with over-ordered moral ironies. It makes a neat cartoon, the man who was so hooked on Gentile she-wolves he couldn’t do it with a Jewess. Or the man who was so convinced of the sanctity of Jewish women he could only get it up with shiksehs.
Neat, but wrong. We had no sexual difficulties. I did not close my eyes when I bent over her and see my mother. Nor did I wish I could open them again and see Chloë. We functioned fine. She went soft, like summer fruit, and I gathered her in. It wasn’t the case, either, that I had grown so used to strife that I missed it when it was not forthcoming. You can find other things to fall out over even when you don’t have the Resurrection as a stumbling block between you. No, if my marriage to Alÿs was different to my other marriages (Alÿs herself had not previously been married, so had no such distinctions to make), it was different only in this regard: I couldn’t take the gloomy consciousness of history I’d married her for.
She was depressed every day. We have a word for it. Dershlogn. Dershlogn is better than depressed. With depressed you have a chance of coming round. With depressed it’s not necessarily all your fault. Dershlogn is dispirited by nature. Dershlogn implies a deficiency of vital juices. At first I took her to be depressed for me. She knew my work – knew of my work would be nearer the mark – and not only, I was flattered to learn at the time, from the albums of it gathering dust in her grandmother’s house. She taught popular culture at an art college in West London, one of her specialisms being the fantasy comic, a genre to which I could not strictly be said to have made anything but the most marginal contribution, but marginalia were also her specialism, so I figured as a sort of footnote at the far reaches of a discipline that was not much more than a footnote itself. In her view I had not reconciled the artistic impulses at war within me – half wanting to be a prophet of the Jewish people (which was fantastical in itself ), and half wanting to stick it up them (which again was fantastical given my belief that enough people had stuck it up them already). This is what I mean when I say I thought I was the cause of her depression. Until I could make sense of these antinomies, as she called them, she didn’t see how my work would make the journey from what was tangential to what was central – a not entirely consistent argument since the tangential was precisely what she taught (‘Centrality is a masculinist concept,’ she told me once), but it seemed that you could be too tangential even for someone who believed in it, and for this reason she was depressed for me.
It was Alÿs who got me to change my style. I don’t mean as a man, I mean as a cartoonist. But you could argue that the one wasn’t possible without the other. Maybe that was why, contemporaneous with her changing my style as a cartoonist, she moved in with me.
She moved in soundlessly, the way a mouse moves in. This was partly to be explained by her decision to keep her own place in W6, a stone’s throw from her college. She didn’t – not all at once, anyway – have to bring in everything she owned. But I am not simply talking objects. She barely brought herself in. It is meant to be traumatic, suddenly ceding space to a new person. Your furniture is rearranged. Your favourite pictures get taken down. Photographs which are dear to you go missing. Even if your bed stays where it was, its contours change. None of this happened with Alÿs. Apart from my mind, she left everything as she found it. Shoes belonging to previous wives which I’d omitted to throw out or send on, knick-knacks whose value was obviously romantico-sentimental, even sketches of Chloë, brought out again post-Zoë, done in the manner of the old masters with a few lewd transliterations of my own thrown in – none of these things, assuming that she noticed them, did she appear to be disconcerted by. And it wasn’t as though she meant to eclipse them by the vitality of her presence. She just dwelt among them, like a visitor, someone in transit, a person passing through.
In flat shoes.
Her shoes should not have mattered to me, but I had grown up among stiletto’d women and both my wives had strode into my life, and then clip-clopped out of it again, on high heels. The heels themselves were not the issue. Had Alÿs simply favoured shoes that were flat I would eventually have accommodated myself to them. But all I ever saw her in were sandals. Cheap, roundtoed buckled sandals of the sort monks and little girls and ideologues wear.
I offered to take the car and pick up the rest of her things – meaning her high heels – from W6. But she kept no high heels in W6. Didn’t own any. Had never owned any.
Nor, even when sitting in an armchair with her feet tucked under her, earnestly watching soaps on television (soaps being another of her specialisms), did she take her sandals off. Tightly buckled was how she liked them – for all occasions. Tightly buckled so that when the call came for her release, she was ready.
‘It’s not as though I am imprisoning you here, is it?’ I remember saying to her once.
She shook her head. She was working at a coffee table, though I had freed a desk for her, and offered to buy her a new one of her own if she preferred. She angled her face to me, her eyelids droopy, her mouth tragic. ‘If it fell to human beings to be happy,’ she said, ‘I’d be happy. But I am content enough, living in my head.’
An old ghetto trick. You shut down all the ingresses to fear and go on with what you’re doing.
Another time I told her she reminded me of a refugee. ‘You look as though you are waiting for a country to let you in,’ I said.
A decent answer to that would have been My darling, you are my country. But such effusiveness was beyond her. At least with me.
Instead, she closed her eyes, as though the better to hear when her name was called.
Dershlogn.
I have said we had no sexual difficulties and I stick by that. But every once in a while she did start from me during lovemaking, actually make to shield her face as if she expected me to hit her. I had told her that my father had been a boxer, so it’s possible she feared boxing was in my genes; but I had never made any movement towards her even remotely suggestive of violence. As a lover I was gentle, possibly even apologetic, to a fault. Could she have wanted me to hit her?
‘Am I being too rough with you?’ I asked, the first time I felt her pull away.
‘You are being just right,’ she said.
‘Am I being too exquisitely tender?’ I asked the second time – meaning, ‘You wouldn’t like it à la façon du shaygets, would you?’ Just in case.
‘I am happy,’ she said.
Happy! I had seen happier faces in photographs of the . . . But to have said that would have been to play into her hands.
Why wasn’t she animated by her work? Fantasy comics, for Christ’s sake! Cyborgs, Angel Gangs, Mutants, Swamp Things, Dark Knights, Watchmen, Hellblazers, Sandmen – wouldn’t you have thought, since she’d elected to be their champion, that a bit of their pizzazz might have rubbed off on her? Planets collided, the marshes of the universe yielded up their terrible secrets, crazed scientists reversed the very logic of nature, and Alÿs Balshemennik couldn’t so much as raise a smile. Wasn’t the point of zooming out into the furthest stretches of the human imagination a certain payoff in vitality? It’s meant to turn your mind, isn’t it? There should be fireballs exploding in your eyes. FUN FUN FUN at the Hellfire Club, only Alÿs Balshemennik is staying home with her sandalled toes tucked beneath her, slumped in a depression. If this was what the margins had to offer, wouldn’t she have had a HELLUVA LOT more FUN FUN FUN at the masculinist, patriarchal, Abrahamic centre?
Unless this was precisely the reason she’d been brought so low – the spider at the centre of the centre, the spider imagining he was at the centre of the centre, otherwise known as me. Arachnidman.
I had no choice, since it was almost certainly my fault, but to marry her. If I married her she would not feel a stranger in my house. If I married her I would not go to sleep worrying whether or not she would be there in the morning. If she agreed to marry me, that would prove she believed in a future. Not just our f
uture, but any future. The bells would ring, the gates to all the camps and ghettos of Eastern Europe would fly open, and the Americans would be there with Hershey bars.
And she didn’t turn me down. Yes, she would marry me, but wished, if that was all right with me, to postpone any decision as to when.
I had the feeling she thought there was more work to be done on me before she could become my wife.
Apart from my mind. She left everything as she found it, apart from my mind.
I came home from shopping one morning – Alÿs never shopped – to find her sitting on the edge of the sofa in tears. She had been looking through a portfolio of unfinished work I had left with her to see if she thought I was heading in the right direction. Caricatures of famous Jews who were either damned in being too Jewish, or damned in being not Jewish enough. Wildly funny stuff, in my view – wildly funny not least about the state of mind of the caricaturist – but too angry or too bilious to know quite what to do with. (The title No Bloody Wonder came much later, as a riposte to the mess she had made of me.) She was wearing her inevitable caftan, some sort of Mexican cape with feathers and mirrors sewn into it, a robe designed for dancing and laughing in, but which, on Alÿs, became funereal, a covering one might wear for the Day of the Dead. Her sandals looked buckled tighter than ever.
‘So upsetting,’ she said.
‘Me doing the shopping? Well, there’s nothing to stop you doing it with me.’
‘You are so hurt,’ she said, tapping the portfolio in her agitation. ‘I didn’t know you were so hurt.’
I was taken aback. ‘Well, they are certainly meant to hurt,’ I said. ‘I grant you that.’
‘You are fooling yourself. The only person these are meant to hurt is you. You can’t go on like this. You will destroy yourself.’
Out, I should have said. Get the fuck out of here, you fucking ghoul!
But ours was not a swearing relationship. And then, what if she were right? Not about my destroying myself – that was melodrama. But the implication of her words was that the prisoner in this house was me, not her; and that I was imprisoned in some fatal solipstic engagement, my rage not finding an outlet, never mind an audience. I knew enough about the frustrations that beset cartoonists, especially Jewish cartoonists, not to suppose I could be a cheerful exception to the rule. The plight of Bernard Krigstein had been before me since I was a teenager. You pursue the Nazi of your nightmares until he falls under the wheels of a subway train, and then how happy are you? Where do you find your victory? As a cartoonist, Krigstein believed nobody recognised how good he was. As a serious painter, he believed nobody recognised how good he was. Would another dead Nazi have given him the recognition, or even just the satisfaction, he craved? Should he have gone out looking? Should he have gone out combing the subways for more enemies of the Jewish people, that’s assuming enemies of the Jewish people were truly at the heart of what was amiss with him? That way madness lay. Maybe all ways madness lay. Perhaps Alÿs was on to something. Besides, she was in a privileged position. She taught popular culture. She knew what sold. She knew what the goyim in their fucking millions bought. And they sure as hell weren’t buying me.
And thus began my re-education.
She read to me, no doubt as she read to her students on the first day of term, the cartoonist Robert Crumb’s description of his methodology or provenance or procedure, call it what you will – ‘“Doodles, scribbles, worthless foolishness, playful notions, silliness, aimless meanderings” – how much of that do you recognise, Max?’
‘Me? None of it.’
‘You never doodle?’
‘Never. If I’m drawing I’m drawing.’
‘And worthless foolishness?’
‘Well, that’s a verdict others may pass on me, and have, but as a description of my own endeavours to myself I do not recognise it, no.’
‘Aimless meanderings?’
‘I cannot conceive of such.’
‘And why do you think that is, Max?’
‘Because I’m Jewish and Jews understand art to be expressly against the wishes – no, the commandments – of Elohim. Therefore when they do it they do it solemnly and in the expectation that the fabric of the planet will be rent in two. You want to see galactic meltdown? Take a look at what’s going on in the firmament after a Jewish boy has dared to make a likeness.’
‘So why are you a cartoonist?’
‘It doesn’t say anywhere, Alÿs, what sort of likeness is forbidden. Oil painting, sculpture, caricature – they’re all serious infractions to Him. And they’re all serious infractions to Me.’
‘You’re in the wrong branch of the wrong business. You probably always have been. Don’t doodle if doodling’s not what you care to do.’
‘I don’t doodle.’
‘Exactly. You don’t doodle. So do what you do do.’
‘It’s a little late in the day for me to turn my hand to landscapes. And I won’t be making video installations.’
And that was when she introduced me to the graphic novel.
‘Five Thousand Years of Bitterness not graphic enough for you?’I wondered.
‘No narrative.’
‘Alÿs, it’s the narrative of my soul.’
‘Exactly. No narrative that anyone wishes to accompany you on. Your soul’s old hat, Max. Your soul’s had it. That particular aspect of your soul has, anyway. It went out with the Ark.’
‘It began with the Ark.’
She took my head between her hands and looked into my eyes. Not easy for Alÿs to look at me or anyone, so heavy were her eyelids.
‘Some time in your life you jumped off the train that everybody else was travelling on, Max. It was your own decision. You can make the decision to jump back on again.’
The train. Jew Jew, Jew Jew.
6
So jump back on I did.
The Wonderment Express.
Boo hoo, boo hoo! Boo hoo, boo hoo!
And for four or five years, the years before we married, I let it take me – take us, to be exact – where it was taking everybody. Africa, Cambodia, Croatia, Chernobyl, East Timor, you name them, though in plain truth they name themselves – the heartlands of our bad conscience. I’m not saying we always went there in person. In fact we almost never went there in person. But our sympathies took flight, and what we didn’t see with our own eyes Alÿs could always find a research assistant to see for us. The stories Alÿs attended to herself. Linear narratives of bad faith and lost illusions a child could have written. But then a child was meant to have written them. She was quick to seize an important truth, my Alÿs. Never again, not in our time, anyway, would a man’s voice – or a man’s hand, come to that – be acceptable. If you wanted to be heard or noticed, if you didn’t want to scratch at the margins of the margins, you changed your gender or you changed your age. From here on in the man would be allowable only in the boy. I stopped drawing and began to shmeer instead. Life as a child saw it, or as the age chose to believe a child saw it, all pastel wash and finger painting, any vibrancy or discord (and all blacker-than-hell jokes) whited out with Turpenoid. In a trice I was no longer Maxie Glickman but Thomas Christiansen, graphic novelist with heart. Co-author of Boy of Bhopal. Followed by Boy of the Balkans. Boy books begging to be loved.
They sold reasonably well. Not sensationally. We were probably too sour, Alÿs and I, to boy it as convincingly as was required. But they sold well enough to disgust me with the people who were fool enough to buy them. I knew how fatuous they were. I did them for a quiet life and to make a woman who was depressed for me, a little less so. But what was their excuse?
Having, as she believed, got me back on course, she agreed to marry me. We made no provision for a honeymoon. Her decision. We would melt somewhere appropriate when the occasion was right. We would deliquesce into history like my watery paintings.
Neither getting me back on course nor agreeing to be my wife did anything for her spirits. She still began each day with her sand
als buckled, so she would be ready when they came to bundle her away, either to the ovens or to freedom.
Wife of Sorrows, I called her.
About six months into our marriage she proposed a honeymoon. Work-related. I dreaded the worst. Ten days in the Congo? A fortnight in Chechnya? I wasn’t even warm. Palestine.
‘I beg yours?’
‘Palestine.’
‘You mean Israel.’
‘I mean Palestine.’
Now I think back to our time together I cannot recall a single Israel-related conversation. It might have been that we both knew to keep away from each other’s views on the subject. Or we might just have been lucky. On our watch, Israel simply didn’t come up.
When I say ‘views on the subject’ I do not mean to imply that I had any. My father believed that Jews bore a special responsibility not to be special, so he hated Israel for existing, then hated it for not existing well. Less bothered by such contrarieties, my mother threw the occasional charity kalooki night for our beleaguered Israeli cousins, the proceeds from which would not have bought a stamp to send what she had raised. I enjoyed a sleepy repose somewhere between their positions. But that did not mean I was prepared to put up with any moralising from the goyim. To the goyim I had one thing and one thing only I wanted to say: You threw us out, you won’t now dictate to us where we can go. A Chinaman might be entitled to express an opinion, but a Christian of French or German or even English descent, no sir. Not when the mess, if you go back far enough – and I go back far enough – is all your doing.
Alÿs, I accept, was not a goy. Nor had she, in all fairness, as yet expressed an opinion. Except that calling it Palestine expressed all the opinions it was necessary to express. I saw what was coming. Boy of Bethlehem. Maybe worse. Maybe Girl of Gaza.
I asked her if getting me on to the train was always the beginning of a process, in her mind, that would climax in her dropping me square in the middle of the shit that was the Occupied Territories. She denied any such intention vehemently. She had been thinking of me. Of the state I was in. Of my work which was bogged down in repetition, contradiction and pointless irony. Nothing else had motivated her, nothing! How dared I impute so base a motive to her! How dared I!!
Kalooki Nights Page 40