Kalooki Nights

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Why would anyone want to do anything? Why would anyone want to do something sinister with the photograph the waiter took of us?’

  I tried meeting her gaze. Then asked her, ‘Why are you so interested in Jews?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ’What was it you wanted me to get from Manny? How did it feel? How did it feel to be a Jew, of all people, turning on the gas taps? Did your fingers tremble? What was it like for a Jew who is enjoined above all things to honour his father and his mother to murder them in their beds? Were you glad? Was it a relief to you? Did you hate them as you did it? I want to ask the same of you, Francine. Does it give you an unholy thrill to imagine the Jew not the victim, but the author of atrocities? Is it the same as accusing Israelis of being Nazis – are you exacting a sort of retrospective justice?’

  ‘You’re raving, Max. There are no thrills in this for me, holy or unholy. And honouring his father and his mother isn’t what a Jew is enjoined to do above all things. Above all things a Jew is enjoined to have no other God. Not to bow down himself unto them, nor to serve them. Genesis 20.’

  ‘For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God. Why are you so interested in Jews, Francine? Are you jealous of our jealous God?’

  ‘Why would I be?’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you be? Perhaps you feel excluded from His love.’

  ‘Aren’t I meant to be excluded from His love?’

  ‘As a Gentile?’

  ‘As a goy.’

  ‘Ah, it’s the goy thing.’

  ‘Ye shall destoy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves – For thou art an holy people unto the Lord. Deuteronomy 7. How do you deal with that, Max?’

  ‘As something in a book, Francine. As a founding myth. All religions have them.’

  ‘And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven . . . Yes, it’s a goy thing.’

  She smiled at me, loosing her silvery aura about me like a net. We were in a small restaurant. Had they chosen to, every diner at every table could have been privy to our conversation. It was a necessary gift, given the places she liked to eat, her ability to throw a bubble of confidentiality around herself and the company she kept. Infinitely soothing I had found it in the past, when I was in the mood for it. As though a goddess had stretched down her hand and scooped you away in it to another realm, into another layer of reality even.

  This time, though, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I smiled back, without the aura. ‘Get a life, Francine,’ I said. ‘Get another life. Go somewhere where there aren’t any Jews. Give yourself a break from us. It isn’t healthy to be doing what you’re doing. You wallow in us. You seem not to be able to know or get enough of us or our religion. You have more knowledge of us than we have about ourselves. Which of course means that who you know is not in fact who we are. But that aside, how do you explain this infatuation? It resembles the behaviour of a rejected lover, now showing us how little we matter to you, now unable to do anything but dog our footsteps. How did we let you down? What did we promise you that we didn’t deliver? Did we unrequite you? Whence the hurt, Francine?’

  I was banging my chest for emphasis. Did we hurt you here? Here? An action which Francine took to be too demonstrative in this crowded space. ‘I would ask you to keep your voice down,’ she said. ‘This is a favourite restaurant of mine.’

  ‘And mine,’ I reminded her.

  ‘And I would ask you not to menace me.’

  ‘Francine, I have not menaced you.’

  But I was not able to say that with the force it required without throwing open my arms – another action too demonstrative for this crowded place. Unable to confine our conversation within her silvery net, she was beginning to look around her in alarm.

  All at once I realised I didn’t want to go on with this. It had been uncouth of me, in breach of the laws governing social intercourse. Your heart did not have an entitlement to speak through your mouth on all occasions. The comedian Tommy Cooper was right in his assessment of what you say when you find yourself sharing a train compartment with Adolf Hitler. Sssss! Anything further wants decorum. And Francine Bryson-Smith wasn’t Hitler, whether or not she would have taken roses to him in his bunker.

  Sssss! Anything more you must deny yourself. That used to be where God came in. Anything more He would take care of for you.

  Sssss!

  ‘It’s not happening,’ I repeated, rising from my seat, remembering to leave sufficient money on the table to clear the bill.

  7

  Through his lowered head he sees her. The lozenge pattern on her dress, like involuted diamonds, similar to one his mother used to wear, for casual but smart, a shopping, striding dress. He remembers the sound it made when she increased her pace, a soft sucking, like a kiss in reverse, lips coming away from the skin.

  TTSSSSSSSSKKK!

  He stands behind her in the queue for the ticket machine, then follows her down the escalator. Her hair is grey now. His too, what there is of it. But he is more distressed by hers. Grey hair on a woman measures loss more poignantly than on a man. But on this woman it also measures injustice. She should have died aforetime, when her hair was gold. That she has grey hair means she has got away with it.

  BOOO!

  He doesn’t like the Underground. It upsets him to be dependent on artificial lighting. If the lights fuse it will be as black as unfathomed space down here. And then the rats will come out. The idea of tunnelling upsets him too. In a way he can’t explain, it feels contrary to God’s will. God made the earth and now man in his ingratitude tunnels underneath it. Underearth is where the dead only belong.

  It is always either too busy or too quiet. Tonight it is too quiet. There are only the two of them on the escalator, he nine or ten steps behind her, looking down into the greyness of her hair, imagining that she is descending into hell.

  It is hot enough for hell. This is the other reason he never travels on the Underground if he can help it. The stuffiness and the heat. The smell of fuel and smoky rubber in the stations, and on the trains the smell of flesh going quickly off.

  She doesn’t like it either. He can tell she doesn’t like it. She holds herself as though every outside sensation assails and hurts her. Good. He will gladly suffer any inconvenience or perturbation, any anxiety or alarm, in the knowledge that she is suffering them as well. He always wanted there to be a certain harmony of pain between them, and now they have it. She doesn’t know they have it, but he does, and that’s all that counts. She wouldn’t recognise it anyway. She is too stupid to understand the concept. The disappointment to him she always was. Except that debasement is never more refined than when the human cause of it is stupid. Any man can be the slave of a countess. It takes a sort of genius to understand why it’s better to be answerable to a scullery maid, skivvy, servant girl, bedmaker, fireyekelte, dogsbody, femme de chambre . . .

  SLAVER! DROOL!

  Not that there will be any more of that. He is long past that. She too, what she ever understood of it.

  There is no one on the platform. Just the two of them. A fat rat crosses the rails.

  He sits, she doesn’t. She paces. Good. Pacing is good. People who pace have active minds. ‘Mind’ is too flattering a word for what she has, but however you describe the space between her ears, it is evidently busy with something. Torment, he hopes. Demons, he hopes. Or if none of those, at least that existential nausea to which even the wicked and the stupid are susceptible. Mental disgust with one’s fleshly condition. Unless she is of another species altogether – and some would say she is – she will wake every morning wishing that she hadn’t. The revulsion that comes with waking – this is what he wishes on her. The horror of being alive. Or Weltschmerz as she will know it, only Weltschmerz is a touch self-pleasing for what he has in store for her. Too Sorrows of Young Werther-ish. The monsters brought forth by Goya’s Sleep of Reason are more like it. A sky blackened with birds with hum
an faces, batwinged and jeering.

  YIPES!

  The train pulls into the station.

  JEW JEW! JEW JEW!

  Only it isn’t that sort of train. Except that every train is that sort of train. Which might be why she comes down here.

  She gets into the train. He gets into the train.

  She stares out of the window. Where is she? Is she remembering? Is she back there?

  The train pulls out of the station. He gets up to open a window. Nobody in the compartment but the two of them, and a drunk asleep. ZZZZZZZZ! The sound of shikkered shaygets sleeping.

  When he returns to his seat she sees him. ‘You!’ she says.

  CHOKE!

  He could expose himself to her. He has thought of that a thousand times. Look. Remember? Remember me?

  AARGH!

  But what would he achieve by exposing himself to her? And what if he exposed himself erect? How would that serve his cause? Still weird after all these years, is that what he wishes her to see? Still fucked in the head?

  She clasps her hands together.

  GULP!

  Should he ask why she hates Jews? Or will she tell him he’s raving. I don’t hate Jews. You’re raving.

  So what should he say to her? SSSSS! You are a very bad person. SSSSS!

  The train SCREECHES! to a halt. The doors SSSSSLIDE! open. This is her chance. Run for it.

  RUN! as you ran the last time. RUN! as you ran from those who allowed you to run because they didn’t know what else to do with you. RUN! from yourself.

  She is in front of him again, RUNNING! The lozengepattern dress is tight across her back. It is a young mother’s dress, not an old lady’s. She looks ludicrous in a dress that clings, and then makes a soft sucking sound when it comes away from her thighs. Something more becoming would be more becoming. And a stick. If she had a stick he could attack her with it. An eye for an eye, a stick for a stick.

  THWAAAACK!

  The platform is deserted. Not even a rat wants to be down here.

  ‘HAVE PITY!’ she cries as he pursues her. ‘PLEASE!’

  You dream that they will beg you to HAVE PITY! You promise that if you ever again meet them and they beg you to HAVE PITY! you will devote the rest of your days to the service of Elohim. Not a lot to ask. Just sit them next to me in a JEW JEW! train, have them beg me to show PITY! and I am yours, O Lord.

  He is gaining on her, which isn’t difficult, given her age, given her dress, given her fear, when she loses her footing. It is all in slow motion, all happening in high, narrow incontrovertible frames, the wicked falling from the height of their wrongdoing, the good almost static in their icy vengefulness, never to be satisfied, inconsolable.

  She falls, frame by frame she goes over, just as another train is coming into the station.

  JEW JEW! JEW JEW!

  He stands stiller than justice, and watches. The train, the woman, the train, the woman, the train SPLAAAAT! the train.

  And then the faces in the window, each as blank and pitiless as his own.

  Thank you, Elohim. Have pity? NO!

  ‘What happened?’ people gather from nowhere to ask. ‘Ever see her before?’

  ‘No,’ he answers, averting a head which is blackened, however the shadows fall on him. ‘No, she . . .’

  Then as to no one, his back turned, impassive, sepulchral, denied, as the impenetrable dark swallows him – it’s the number of shades of darkness he has found that you admire the cartoonist for, that and the elegant chasteness of the overall design – ‘She was a perfect stranger.’

  SIXTEEN

  A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished.

  Rembrandt

  Yisgadal veyiskadash . . .

  For my mother this time. They all leave you. One by one, they all depart. Yisgadal veyiskadash shemey rabo, Be’olmo di’vero chir’usey. May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified in the world He created as He willed. Amen.

  I had not been expecting it. She had been growing forgetful, but she had lost little of her slender youthfulness, even her ankles still worth stealing a glance at had any of her old admirers been alive. And I had thought that kalooki, if nothing else, would keep her immortal. You live to a riper age, they say, if you stay mentally agile. The more you perplex your mind, the longer it works for you. Kalooki wasn’t quantum mechanics but it did engage her in calculations that needed a bit of knotting out. Not just computing what you could do with the cards you held yourself, but what everyone else could be expected to do with theirs. Likelihood theory. What must Ilsa Cohen have in her hand for her to have discarded the jack of spades. How would Gittel Franks respond, knowing Gittel Franks, if you held on to your cards for one round more. The trouble was that Ilsa Cohen, though nominally alive in defiance of her own rogue hand’s attempts to do away with her, had lost her mind and was languishing in an old persons’ home where at least, Shani told me, the staff continued to paint her fingernails with hearts and diamonds, spades and clubs. And Gittel Franks had collapsed and died while being Shirley Bassey at a karaoke night thrown to celebrate her great-granddaughter’s sixteenth birthday. Not all at once, though the shock of realisation was sudden enough, my mother woke up to the fact that they were leaving her. And you can’t play kalooki on your own.

  They stopped coming and that was the end of it. She barely had what you could call an illness. Her heart failed. It was as simple as that.

  Shani rang me and I flew back up. You can’t hang around when it comes to Jewish burial. Blink and they’ve put your mother in the ground. Habdalah. Keep the quick from the dead.

  Shani and I hugged for a long time. We weren’t hugging siblings but we were on our own now. We said the usual things, that it was good she hadn’t suffered, that she went as she would have chosen to go, that she had loved Dad and stayed faithful to him, and how touching it was that she had viewed that – though she could easily have had another nibble, another bite even, at romance – as the one and only important relationship of her life. I began to say I wished her time had not been given over so exclusively to a simple card game; that it was a pity she never went to the theatre or the opera, a tragedy that she didn’t read, that she didn’t listen to good music, that she didn’t welcome abstract thought, that she hadn’t, as a Jew, availed herself of Jewish seriousness – but Shani reminded me that that could just as easily have been her life I was describing. ‘It’s not a sin to be a philistine,’ she told me. And I didn’t tell her that for a Jew I thought it was.

  Mick Kalooki tried hard, for Shani’s sake, not to go to pieces. But it wasn’t easy. Only in the nick of time was Shani able to stop him ordering a wreath for the coffin in the shape of a deck of cards. He couldn’t understand why not. Why shouldn’t Leonora be buried surrounded not only by those she loved but in the company, so to speak, of what she loved? It was tough, without hurting his feelings as an honorary Jew, trying to explain to him that Jews didn’t as a general rule do flowers in a big way at funerals, and never at all on the coffin itself. Flowers at funerals were common and showy. The word MOM made of pink roses was unthinkable to a Jew. POP done with red geraniums the same. Simplicity was the thing. An austere simplicity before the great democracy of death. Start having flowers on your coffins and soon the rich man will be buried in greater pomp than the pauper.

  ‘It’s a very beautiful religion,’ Mick said. He was unable to keep the tears back.

  He loved my mother. But I also knew it upset him to realise there were elements of Judaism he was never going to master. All those hours put into k’nish and kreplach, and still flowers for the dead could floor him.

  I lost all control of myself at the cemetery. When it came to the shovelling of soil on to my mother’s coffin – a mitzvah for a Jew, a sacred duty of love – I staggered back from the grave and let the shovel fall from my hand. I couldn’t throw dirt on her. I couldn’t accept her returned to dust. If it had to be, it had to be, but I didn’t have to be party to it. Shani took me by the ha
nd, like a mother with her child, and helped me. We held the shovel together, but I was unable to look. Just hearing it was bad enough. Gravel on wood. The end of us.

  As I was leaving the cemetery I saw Manny. He was wearing a long black coat and a yarmulke. Had he not been standing at a distance from most of the other mourners, as though he believed he had no real right to be there, he could have been mistaken for the officiating rabbi. A little old rabbi flown in from Novoropissik to do the business as they used to do it in the old country. I went over to him and held out my hand. He wished me ‘long life’. I inclined my head. I hoped he was not going to say he envied me not having a mother.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ was what did he say. ‘I remember your mother. She was a very nice person. My parents always spoke highly of her.’

  For the second time that afternoon I wondered if I was going to faint. ‘It’s nice of you to have come,’ I said.

  I was surprised to see he was not on his own. A woman who had been standing even more removed from the proceedings than he was, brought herself forward, also to wish me ‘long life’. She was not anyone I knew. A woman a little older than me, I estimated, a touch heavy in the torso, with a strong square face and a fiercely vulnerable expression. Pretty still, or maybe pretty, as sometimes happens, only since she’d aged. Some issue of age, over and above the usual ones of regret and apprehension, hung over her. The prettiness spoke of it, the unnaturally piercing blue eyes spoke of it, and the long hair, worn down her back like a girl’s, proclaimed it – notwithstanding everything else I had to sorrow over – to a degree I found painful. From the way she positioned herself by Manny I surmised that she was in some caring or even custodial relation to him. Could Manny have been rearrested and reincarcerated? I wondered. Had they let him out, just for the afternoon, on humanitarian grounds, and could this woman have been his nurse or his prison guard? Were they even, for the duration of my mother’s funeral, manacled together?

  I thanked them both for their attendance and was about to walk away to join Shani and Mick when Manny suddenly said, ‘Max, this is Dorothy.’