I Am Max Lamm (18 page)

Here in this synagogue, come back!

Be the girl that enraptured me! Whom I love endlessly, unconditionally
.

For one day!

Soon you’ll be in that box. The barbeque hole is a rehearsal for your grave. If Malik’s avengers don’t hunt you down, if the police don’t get you, if the
Daily Mail
doesn’t publicly castrate you, if a tattooed Neanderthal in prison doesn’t strangle you because you won’t suck him off, then you’ll die from the memories of her. This bottomless serpentine haze of anchorless voices, fragments of embraces, fimbriae of long-gone encounters, merciless sleeplessness, black wet grass, unimaginably distant stars mocking you through the barbeque’s grille, all beaten into the enlivened nightmarish pulp of your crime, your failure, your disgrace, your life, your death and what’s the difference anyway?

Enough
. Do it. Jump off the gherkin-shaped tower on St Mary Axe. It’s foolproof, there’s a nice view at the end. The Americans have the stiff Washington monument for fucking the world, the Brits have an unerect cucumber. The tabloids will love it.
Racist Jewish Murderer Jumps to Death off Gherkin
. They’ll throw cucumbers on your gravestone.

Following
kaddish
, the cantor sang a Hebrew psalm in his magnificent rich voice. A psalm written by King David three thousand years ago. The congregation chatted about the weather, the business, the family, the race riots, the upcoming holiday to Majorca or the Great Barrier Reef. The mourner’s prayer had concluded so swiftly and Lamm had missed most of it! Too hypnotized by Rachel’s spectre, he hadn’t even opened the prayer book!

Her ghost was in the synagogue. Thirteen years old, Rachel stood on the
bima
in her Mount Scopus College uniform. Eyes unforgettably aqua-green, hair shimmering shoulder-length, a thumb poking through the hole in the right sleeve of her sweater. In the moonlit schoolyard, she smiled shyly as Lamm brought his lips to hers. Never had her cherubic face appeared this excruciatingly perfect. The girl that obsessed him the instant they met eighteen years ago.

Like Mr Lewski in the park, Rachel was silent. Not a word.

Talk to me!

Rachel!

Lamm blinked. She was gone.

Lamm’s under-15s doubles partner, Joshua Berkoff, told him the story of his Uncle Solly who went to the madhouse. For decades a force of efficiency: a
macher
in the community, a champion in the Maccabi squash league, the owner of a successful chain of jewellery stores. Then Solly’s life came apart like a necklace in two. A nervous breakdown was the official line but, Berkoff confided, in truth his uncle admitted to have seen the ghost of his dead mother hovering above the bed whenever he fucked the
shiksa
mistress.

Our ghosts drop in for our mistakes. Madness, sin, catastrophe. Then – like Mr Lewski in Hyde Park or Rachel Samuels in the Western Marble Arch synagogue – they suddenly depart, doing French kicks in a conga line through the invisible curtain between life and death. Dancing off-stage without saying a thing.

Rachel’s ghost – Lamm’s hallucination? – had departed. So had everybody. The synagogue empty, the crowd was in the adjacent hall for the bar mitzvah boy’s celebratory
Kiddush
. Hungry, Lamm followed the marble corridor into a large carpeted room adorned by a watercolour canvas of Moses gazing wistfully across the border of Canaan at the Promised Land forbidden to him. Probably a hundred people in here; the regular congregants in white shirts or sensible blouses, the bar mitzvah invitees overdressed in pinstriped suits or their finest dresses. Nobody noticed Lamm’s dusty shoes and greasy pants, or they pretended not to. At the door, the guests were greeted by a slim grey man wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

‘First time at our synagogue?’ he inquired in clipped Oxford vowels.

‘It is.’

‘My name’s Arnold. Dr Arnold Fraid. Perhaps we’ll see you during the week? We always need an extra
minyan
man. Do enjoy the food, it appears that you need it.’

Lamm waited by the curtains as the rabbi made the
Hamotzi
blessing over the challah. The bar mitzvah boy was a fat little maths whiz named Robbie Zerman, who had read his Hebrew
parsha
in a high-pitched lilt suggesting that puberty was still a few months off. His beaming parents had stood beside him, white knuckles clasped together. Similarly chubby, the mother a psychologist at the LSE and the father a computer hotshot who, the rabbi informed the congregation, was working on the next Google. The rabbi, Baum, was a fortysomething beanpole with a sideshow salesman’s voice, a thin beard and a newsreader’s mat of black hair. Had he not elected to serve the faith, he would’ve excelled as a radio-miked salesman in a shopping mall. Would’ve sold a hundred vacuum cleaners a week to bored housewives in Staines, but Baum passed up Amway’s bonuses to bury elderly congregants and put rocks on their gravestones, to lecture bar mitzvah boys on how not to sound ungrateful in their big speech, to teach first-timers at the communal Seder the hows and whys of Passover. The rabbi shook Lamm’s hand like a bottle of ketchup.

‘
Good Shabbos!
Wonderful to see you today!’

Good for him, Lamm decided. A grip like a plumber’s wrench, hair like a yak, he’s hawking Maimonides’ wisdom instead of a free set of steak knives. We should all be so lucky.

And look at this spread! A kosher deli sponsored by the bar mitzvah boy’s parents. Half a bowl of thick hummus and pickles lathered upon crackers, and Lamm started to feel better. Between mouthfuls, he checked out the congregation. The guests flocked to Robbie Zerman, the little hero. The usual avalanche of royal blue ties, bouffant perms, tallit clips, Manchester United yarmulkes, handshakes, hugs, kisses. Not so interested in the food. The overdressed guests nibbled a carrot stick, dipped a biscuit, but what they liked was talking. Shiny women hugging, airkissing, comparing hats, laughing about their love handles and their beautiful smart daughters holidaying on a Spanish beach.

Lamm hadn’t ever felt so at home, so far away from home. Yet to these people, he was the invader from another world: Planet Disorder. Look at these Jews. Lawyers, dentists, physicians, brokers, bigwigs in the rag trade. A few academics and writers at the shallower end of the income ramp. Sixty years ago their parents, famished behind barbed wire, would have jumped from their skin at a spread like this! Would’ve thanked Hashem as they wolfed down the fish balls. And, true to form, only the guests old enough to be survivors – the grey-haired, liver-spotted eaters tough as tough
alte kockers
are – were the ones eating with gusto. Lamm observed the quintessential habit of Jews who had evaded starvation in the ghettos or Hitler’s camps, as he watched an elderly man carefully wrap two fillets of fried fish into a napkin, then stuff the oily bundle into his jacket packet.

The buffet was keenly attended by octogenarian men wearing fifty-year-old herringbone suits, polishing off the herring as their wives consumed fish balls, cheesy blintzes and garlic eggplant dip, then kissed the gagging bar mitzvah boy. Multiple generations of hard-working Jewish families and the murderer Max Lamm, in the one room. This
Yiddishkeit
universe that you’re missing! The bar mitzvah boy’s school friends wearing bands on their teeth and nice new suits, so dull yet respectable compared to a force of degenerate cumhappy excess like yourself. Look at their older brothers, halfway through university. Can these Jewish boys be any different? Why join the Pakistanis rioting in Bethnal Green? Why organize sit-ins against an unjust war, as their parents did, and risk getting expelled? These days, you won’t get back in. The young men have what they’re told they need: a commerce degree at King’s College or Cambridge, nice shoes, fresh sushi, cable TV, a cute Citrôen hatchback.

Fuck risking it!
say the silk ties, the easy smiles of these Jewish boys five years younger than you, who have jobs lined up building the houses of cards at Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch. Fuck dropping out to ride with Abbie Hoffman, fuck Allen Ginsberg, fuck the Mahavishnu Orchestra, fuck acid parties and ashrams. Fuck whatever their parents did before law school beckoned. Fuck Paris in May ’68, fuck demonstrating against the mini-My Lai that’s perpetrated every other day in Iraq. Fuck taking to the streets with homemade banners. That’s for Muslims in the East End or the French who don’t know better. Who dodges Molotov cocktails in a good suit? Let Hollywood stars make political protests, they can afford to. Not the smiley Jewish twentysomethings here, talking business at a buffet they’re too content to eat. They’re making deals, meeting the right girl, working towards a Lexus or else a BMW if they don’t object to driving a German car, and they don’t. The Shoah was sixty years ago. An eternity! On the twenty-fifth floor of a Fortune 500 skyscraper, their
goyishe
friends have barely heard of Auschwitz.

Decrepit, doomed Lamm! No, he wasn’t hateful watching these Nice Jewish Boys – merely mystified by their unanimous grins, their relaxation, their apparent absence of guilt, desperation, sexual dysfunction, madness . . . all the things that make life interesting. What obsesses these eligible Jewish men, if not your silent ghosts and dead voices? Italian loafers, tennis on Sundays, showers twice a day, exams for the Bar, two-storey homes overlooking Hampstead Heath. A golden retriever and a pretty girl just like them.

A ghost. At the buffet table sat Lamm’s grandfather, Abram Moshinsky. Deceased three years ago aged eighty-nine, he wore his tweed hat, mothballed Brooks Brothers suit and a cream-coloured
tallit
with its fringes dangling to the floor. He studied the grey slivers of herring, like a jeweller examining gems, picking the best ones and piling them upon a slice of challa. Staring at Lamm, Abram Moshinsky’s face eroded beneath his white beard. A Flinders Lane shirtmaker for thirty-seven years, from the week he arrived from Poland in 1946 until his retirement, he was nevertheless a learned man who had learnt the Tanakh, the Talmud, some Kaballah, the books of Prophets. In Buchenwald he shared a bare bunk with a genius of a yeshivah student who knew entire tracts of Talmud by heart, who recited
tehillim
from memory until the black moment, only a month before liberation, when he succumbed to typhus while whispering the
Shema Yisrael
into the night.

His grandfather’s favourite passages of the Tanakh, Lamm remembered from long-ago discussions at the Friday-night dinner table, wasn’t the salvation joyfully celebrated in the Book of Esther or the Song of Songs. Instead, Abram Moshinsky loved those verses evoking his own slavery under the German pharaohs. The lyrical evocation of destruction, desolation and doom recounted in
Eikhah
, the book of Lamentations. That ancient book read on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av, when observant Jews don’t eat or drink for twenty-five hours, don’t shower or wash their hands past the knuckles, and sit on the bare floor reading Jeremiah’s account of Jerusalem’s rape, pillage, downfall. A mourning not only of the holy Temple’s devastation by the Babylonians in 589
BC
, but the litany of genocidal sorrows that have afflicted the Jewish people ever since.

Lamm’s grandfather pushed aside his plate, gathering his
tallit
fringes in his shaking right hand. His face craggy and hard, he shouted above the noisy guests.

‘Max, you listen to me! For three and a half thousand years we have been punished! Again and again and again! Punished for disrespecting each other, for being arrogant before our Maker, for speaking
loshon hora
about our fellow Jews, for caring more about wealth and luxury than each other, for spending our pay on
tchotchkes
instead of the hungry family on the street!
That
is why we lost Yerushalem!
That
is why our Temple fell, may it be rebuilt! We punish ourselves!’

Lamm blinked. The platter of herring was identical as before.

The Jewish twentysomethings chatted, laughed, removed their yarmulkes and checked their mobile phones. Lamm asked himself: do these young Jewish supermen realize the historical singularity of their good fortune? The welldressed bachelors gossiping at the buffet, itching to escape this stuffy hall and go shopping on Oxford Street, will be successes in a Europe curiously devoid of genocidal Romans, Cossacks and Nazis, a Europe devoid of crusaders massacring barnfuls of Jews, of popes demanding conversion or death for the Christ-killers, of pogrom propagandists proclaiming that the Jews use Christian children’s blood for making the Passover matzah, of Polish peasants burning synagogues and two hundred years later the
Einsatzgruppen
behind the Eastern Front . . . the incredible horrors that were, until recently, the mainstay of Jewish existence upon this scorched continent. Lamm noticed a brass plaque set above the front door, proclaiming that the Western Marble Arch synagogue was founded in 1761. When Europe’s guilds and universities demanded that the ambitious Jew be baptized or else grow turnips his entire life. Listen to these privileged Jewish boys who ignore the buffet. Discussing their cars, their clothes, their exciting financial jobs in the City.

‘What good is contentment without hunger?’

Max Lamm whispered to himself, to the vanished ghost of his grandfather who for fifty-seven years lit
Yartzheit
candles for his sisters who starved to death at Bergen-Belsen. Finally the fugitive awoke to his senses. Embrace the bonanza! Falafel balls, four kinds of sponge cake, tahini, potato latkes with olive relish . . . no wonder the guards questioned you. Lamm was wrapping five blintzes into a napkin when somebody tapped his shoulder.

‘
Hoongry this morningk?
’

An Eastern European accent. Czech, or Hungarian? The voice of a dastardly TV spy from behind the Iron Curtain.

Staring at Lamm was the
shammas
, the synagogue volunteer who guides mourners to the ark, locates seats for latecomers, helps disabled visitors, packs away the prayer books. A gaunt bearded stick with white fluff up-top, a prickly snow beard and thick glasses. Looked seventy-five from his thousands of hours studying Torah in
a Kolel
, but probably twenty years younger than that.