Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  Anyone watching the three of them together would have been touched by the spectacle. A loving Jewish son, purple as the seeds of a pomegranate, leading around parents whose every gesture exuded love for him. Too late for them, in all reality, the Israel he was showing them, just as it had been too late for Moses, but they could at least stand on a mountaintop with their boy between them and look out. As far as the eye could see, the Jewish future, covenanted thousands of years ago but now at last, thanks to men like Asher, on the point of being realised.

  What you would not have been able to tell just from looking at the three of them together was that the son had thoughts only for the woman he loved, the fire-yekelte’s daughter who, at this very moment, was setting up home for the two of them in a Land no less Promised – Higher Blackley.

  Was that a cruel deception on Asher’s part, or was it a kindness?

  ‘I was being considerate,’ was how Asher explained it to Manny when he got home. ‘I didn’t want to spoil their holiday,’

  ‘Dad says you would have shown more consideration had you given them poison to drink,’ Manny told him.

  ‘Dad would. Dad has a taste for overstatement. He’s a typical diaspora Jew – he thinks the Jewish world is always on the point of coming to an end. That’s what I like about Israel – because they live in a real and not an imaginary Jewish world they don’t spend every hour thinking it’s going to disappear.’

  ‘That’s because they have an army to see it doesn’t,’ Manny reminded him.

  Asher laughed. He was laughing again. Aflame and festive. ‘I could do with an army myself,’ he said.

  ‘An army won’t help. What you need is a team of doctors. Dad’s going round clutching his heart again.’

  ‘He’s bluffing. Don’t worry about it. He’ll get over it. They’ll both get over it this time. They’re used to me not being here. If they don’t want to see me they can pretend I’m back in Israel.’

  ‘With a German?’

  ‘The world has changed. You’ll see.’

  Asher had told them the truth on the plane back. Just before they landed at Manchester Airport. He hadn’t wanted to spoil the flight for them either. And just possibly he wanted them both to be confined in seat belts when he told them.

  He genuinely believed what he had said. So much time had gone by, everyone was so many years older, the arguments had been gone through so often they were threadbare by now, not even arguments, just rags of prejudice and dogma, and Dorothy had become proficient in Hebrew, was doing a PhD that had been ratified by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, knew more about Jewish history than they did, for God’s sake – surely, in the face of all this, what remained of his parents’ objections would melt away.

  Manny thought otherwise. Manny had not been out of the country, breathing in other ideas. Being Jewish might have looked different to Asher in Jerusalem, but in Crumpsall it was still the same, maybe even worse. In Israel, as Manny had seen with his own eyes, Jews got a bit of air around themselves. In Crumpsall, excepting those who had opted out of being Jewish altogether, they had begun to return to the bad old ways of the shtetl, retreating behind the defences of an ancient faith, living and breathing it as they’d done in Novoropissik, as though the practice of their religion was the only activity open to them. That or kalooki.

  ‘And today Crumpsall even looks like Novoropissik,’ I said, putting in my twopenneth. ‘Whenever I go back I expect to see chickens running down the streets. Even my mother’s got the old religion now. Once upon a time the only night she didn’t play cards was Yom Kippur. Now she won’t play on Shevuos, she won’t play on Purim, she won’t even play on Lag B’Omer. Ask her what any of these festivals are about and she’ll admit she doesn’t have a clue, she just thinks it’s inappropriate to play kalooki while they’re happening.’

  Manny sailed his vacant blue eyes in my direction. ‘You’re lucky your family played cards. I never saw a pack of cards. We played with dreidels on Chanukah, that was all. My father used to say that the letters on the four sides of the dreidel – that’s a spinning top—’

  ‘I know what a dreidel is, Manny.’

  ‘My father used to say the letters contained the whole history of the Jewish people. Nes, Gadol, Haya, Sham – spelling out “A Great Miracle Happened There”– but also standing for the four kingdoms to which we’d been dispersed: Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome.’

  ‘What about Crumpsall?’

  He wasn’t listening. ‘Everything was the history of the Jewish people. Even when I came out to play with you it was the history of the Jewish people, and you weren’t even Jewish.’

  ‘What do you mean I wasn’t even Jewish? Do you think we didn’t play with dreidels too?’

  ‘In the eyes of my family you weren’t Jewish. Not properly Jewish.’

  ‘But Jewish enough for the vile Shrager to try and make a shiddach between Shani and your brother?’

  ‘And you don’t think my parents would have objected to that too? Maybe not as much, it’s true. There’s not Jewish and not Jewish . . .’

  ‘And poor old half-Kraut Dorothy remained as not-Jewish as it was possible for a not-Jew to be? Did it really change nothing that she’d made a success of her life? Weren’t they impressed that she had become a student of Hebrew? Was she still out of the question, even though she had become an authority on the elimination of the blood sacrifice in Judaism?’

  ‘Out of the question. Just as out of the question as she had ever been. More. Because this time Asher had spent all those years in Israel – they’d given him that chance – and if he couldn’t find himself an acceptable wife there, he was either doing this to spite them or Dorothy had some power over him. As far as they were concerned her Hebrew studies might just as well have been black magic. She had bewitched him. They went crazy. They knew there was no point their reasoning with him this time. They knew he would close his ears to them. So they called in rabbis and begged Asher to talk to them, but he wouldn’t. They appealed to the social services. They wrote to a hypnotist. They tried to find a way of sending Asher back to Israel and getting her passport stopped. What right did she have to be in Israel anyway? When that failed, they made moves to get Asher committed. I think they even hired a private detective . . .’

  He was going too fast for me. ‘They made moves to get Asher committed? What do you mean they made moves? They took him to a lunatic asylum?’

  ‘Not directly. They couldn’t get that far. But they talked to doctors and psychologists.’

  ‘And did the doctors explain that falling in love with a shikseh isn’t certifiable?’ I wanted to adduce my own history with shiksehs as proof of that, but then again . . .

  ‘Well, Shrager was dead by then, otherwise they might have got their way. But the others weren’t very helpful, no. Unless Asher was prepared to go along of his own free will and discuss his problems, there was nothing they could do.’

  ‘And what about the private detective? What was he for?’

  ‘What private detectives are always for. To investigate Dorothy’s private life. To find things out about her that would bring Asher to his senses. To prove to him she had been sleeping with other men. Do you know, I believe that if my father could have been convinced it would do any good, he would have slept with Dorothy himself and shown Asher the photographs.’

  Gorges rise less often in life than they do in comics and fiction. But my gorge rose at this. Rose like a monster from the deep. I could taste it in my mouth. I still can.

  ‘And what would your mother have said?’

  ‘Had it worked, “Well done, Selick.”’

  ‘And had it failed?’

  ‘“Thank you for trying.”’

  No wonder he killed them. I’d have killed them had they been mine.

  And yet you had to admire it in a way. Nothing was of no consequence, everything was epic, no act of wrongdoing was ever less than an abomination, each event still bore upon the future well-being of the race. It
was as though we were back in Genesis, among the sons of Noah and the daughters of Lot, all that breeding and begetting and lying with those you had no business lying with. And then, because there was no other way you could answer like with like, all that slaying.

  4

  A few weeks after Shani got engaged to Mick Kalooki, she rang me at art college. The secretary who took the call and came to collect me from my class couldn’t decide whether to be cross or comforting. Students were not rung at college unless something very serious had happened. She closed her office door on me, so that I should have privacy, and touched my arm before she left.

  ‘There is nothing wrong,’ Shani told me at once, though of course there was. But at least no one had died. Not yet, anyway. She was highly agitated and had trouble breathing. Mick believed he was being followed. Couldn’t prove it, couldn’t identify anybody, couldn’t even, with his hand on his heart, say that he knew he was being followed or be any more definite about why he thought he was being followed. Just a feeling. Hairs on the back of the neck, a trembling about the heart – that sort of feeling. And he wasn’t a man to give into either fear or fancy.

  Though I couldn’t see what I could do that the police couldn’t, I volunteered to catch the train to Crumpsall right away. But that wasn’t what Shani wanted. What Shani wanted was for me to contact Errol Tobias.

  ‘You think Errol’s following Mick? Why would Errol follow Mick? He doesn’t even know Mick, does he? He’s living in London now, anyway.’

  ‘I’m not saying we think it’s Errol. But Errol might know something about it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Errol’s mother once warned Mick that if he didn’t close his business she would burn it down.’

  ‘Christ! The Crumpsall Park Hairdressing Wars.’

  ‘Don’t make jokes, Max. It’s serious. The Tobiases are very ugly people.’

  ‘I know that. But they haven’t so far attacked Mick’s business, have they?’

  ‘This might be their way of warning him.’

  ‘So what do you want me to say to Errol?’

  ‘Just tell him our suspicions. If they think we know it’s them, they might stop.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier for Mick to open a business somewhere else? Otherwise they might stop just tailing him and go straight ahead with the paraffin.’

  ‘You can’t be bullied like that, Max. What would Dad have done?’

  ‘Gone round and punched Mrs Tobias in the face. Why doesn’t Mick try that?’

  ‘Just speak to Errol for me.’

  Easier said than done. I had seen what violence Errol was capable of. He had never come close to threatening me, but who was to say how he would feel were I to accuse him or his family of fingering Shani’s Mick. He was highly sentimental about his mother and father, as evil bastards always are. Merely to intimate a suspicion could be enough to send him on a spree of arson that would see not just Mick’s shop but my mother’s house and maybe even my college razed to the ground.

  Two days later, Shani rang again. This time catching me in my digs. ‘Have you talked to Errol Tobias yet?’ she asked me.

  ‘I haven’t been able to contact him,’ I lied.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Don’t. Just come straight up here instead.’

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘Just come. No one’s been hurt. Not yet anyway. But they might be if you don’t get here quick.’

  Tsedraiter Ike.

  Mick Kalooki hadn’t been imagining things. He was being followed. But it wasn’t a Tobias or a Tobias henchman who was following him. It was Tsedraiter Ike.

  He was cowering in his room when I arrived. My job was to try to coax him out. Or at least get him to take some food. For her part Shani didn’t care whether the mamzer starved himself to death, but my mother couldn’t allow her own brother, or whatever his relation was to her, to die under her roof.

  My other job was to stand in witness. ‘I want you to hear this,’ Shani said. As though I were my uncle’s keeper, or as though I in some way seconded, if not his repulsive behaviour, then his repulsive beliefs. An imputation that went all the way back to my having said Jew Jew, Jew Jew, Jew Jew, that day my mother was bringing me back from New Brighton.

  From the other side of his bedroom door, Tsedraiter Ike denied that he had been following Mick Kalooki. What he had in fact been doing was waiting for an opportunity.

  ‘Ask him to do what,’ Shani said. ‘Ask him to tell you what he was waiting for an opportunity for.’

  I didn’t need to ask. What Tsedraiter Ike was waiting for was the opportunity to tell Mick Kalooki, in a dark and secluded place – as though that was going to make a difference – that we didn’t want a shaygets in the family, thank you very much, even one who knew a kreplach from a k’nish.

  I only had it half right. ‘Tell him,’ Shani shouted, ‘tell him what else you did.’

  There was silence for a while. Though whether it was angry or abashed silence I couldn’t be sure. For a moment I even wondered whether I could detect a sound like sobbing. But it might just as easily have been ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor’. Then at last, defiantly, what Shani wanted me to hear. ‘I offered to make it right with him,’ he said.

  I stared at Shani. ‘Make it right with him?’

  ’Money. By making it right with him he means money. Five thousand pounds. He offered Mick five thousand pounds, cash, to skedaddle.’

  My mouth fell open. I didn’t live in a world where people tailed people in the dead of night, and then offered them dough to beat it out of town. I’d read a million comic books where such things happened, but I wasn’t living in a comic book and this was my uncle, Tsedraiter Ike not Ming the Merciless or Pruneface. I can’t pretend that along with everything else I felt, I didn’t also feel impressed. That took some doing! Yes, it was obscene, of course it was obscene, and it made a nonsense of the moral high ground in whose name Tsedraiter Ike believed that he was acting, to offer a bribe, to put money on the table in the sacred name of Elohim. But by Christ it took some chutzpah!

  And then there was the size of the bribe itself. Five thousand pounds! Where the fuck had Tsedraiter Ike found five thousand pounds?

  ‘Give it me,’ I said. ‘I’ll skedaddle.’

  Shani grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t make a joke of it, Max. Don’t let him think there’s a funny side. There is no funny side. He offered Mick five thousand pounds to leave me. Apart from anything else, do you not see how insulting of him that was, to suppose there would be any amount of money in the world that Mick would be prepared to leave me for? How insulting to me, and how insulting to Mick? And what does it tell you about his feelings for me, his only niece, that he would go to such lengths as actually to spend money to make me unhappy?’

  From behind his door Tsedraiter Ike was insisting that Shani’s happiness was all he cared about. Didn’t she see? It was precisely to spare her unhappiness that he had done what he had done.

  ‘Fuck you,’ Shani shouted at him, which was the only time the F-word – in my hearing anyway – had fallen from her lips.

  Which Tsedraiter Ike was just smart enough not to adduce as evidence that the shiksefying of his niece had already begun.

  That evening, as a peace-offering to Tsedraiter Ike, Mick Kalooki cooked a kosher chicken with tsimmes and latkes – the first kosher dinner ever cooked on my mother’s stove. In his naïveté, Mick believed friendship with Tsedraiter Ike was still possible if only Tsedraiter Ike would sit down and shmooze with him. Despite the smells, which must have reminded Tsedraiter Ike of Shabbes nights in Novoropissik, and would have been too much for a man of less obdurate principle, he refused to budge from his room.

  ‘What’s your view?’ Mick asked me. ‘How can such a Godfearing man be acting in this way. Didn’t Ruth say to Naomi, thy people shall be my people, and thy God shall be my God, and wasn’t she, though a Moabite, the progenitor of David, King of the Jews? If your Uncle Isaac
wasn’t a knowledgeable Jewish man, I’d say he was ignorant of Jewish history. But that cannot be, Max, can it? I’d even go so far as to say his attitude to me was racist, but that cannot be either, am I right?’

  Sweet. He was a sweet man, Mick Kalooki. He went on to be a good husband to Shani and a good father to their five children, the sons among whom were circumcised in the proper manner, though not without some misgivings on the part of Shani herself. Thirty years later she would have found it hard to meet a Gentile with such a benign attitude to Jews. A Jew can’t be a racist? Don’t make me laugh!

  But even for his times he was naïve. ‘A Jew is as likely to be a racist as the next man,’ I told him. ‘Not because of what has or hasn’t happened to him, or what he has or hasn’t been taught, but because he is a person with a personal psychology. And no God, however kind or cruel, can save you from your psychology.’

  I was hot on psychology that year. It was a liberal studies option at art college, one that Chloë was taking, and I wanted to be close to her. Why I wanted to be close to Chloë, who in those days either ignored me or confused me with some other Israelite, was itself a question I thought doing the psychology option might help me answer. Masochism, as far as I could tell from the little reading I had done – masochism was the key to everything. I tried putting it to Mick Kalooki that masochism was the engine that drove Tsedraiter Ike as well. Not racism but – to employ the language proper to the discipline – Masochismus.

  The way to look at it was this:

  What was the proven consequence of any positive assertion by a Jew of his own sense of worth – whether as a man of moral excellence, prestige, or intellectual superiority? Hostility. If any single lesson has been learned by the Jew it is that his apparent arrogance or conceit will land him in deep trouble. Why then does he persist? There can be only one answer to that. He persists because appearing arrogant serves the psychic function of satisfying an unconscious masochistic need to be landed in deep trouble. Tsedraiter Ike’s offer of money to Shani’s Mick was an assertion of religious and moral superiority. Not only was Mick not fit to be Shani’s husband, Tsedraiter Ike’s behaviour declared, his unfitness would be demonstrated by his acceptance of filthy lucre (never mind, for the moment, that he refused it). But by acting as he had, and who was to say not in full awareness of Mick’s steadfast unwillingness to be corrupted, however large the sum, Tsedraiter Ike had drawn down, and at some level anticipated, a greater obloquy upon himself. Behold, yet again, the Jew laid low. ‘And there he is, even as we speak, whimpering in his room.’