Kalooki Nights (35 page)

Given the choice, he’d have gone for Rothko.

Tough. Given the choice, I’d have gone for Rembrandt. But you don’t get to choose who tells your story.

At the time, feeling that the fault for the haranguing was mine, I reached out to touch him, apologetically. But he started from the contact. Not knowing what else to do he reached for the pages of my comic history again, and alighted on the caricature of Shrager.

‘My d-doctor,’ he said, passionlessly.

His stutter had returned to us. Evidently doctors brought it on.

‘Shrager? Was there anyone whose doctor he wasn’t? But I’m flattered you recognise him’ – through the maze of unconsidered ugly unseriousness, I was going to say, but satisfied myself with the bad-taste jest of stuttering his name instead, as though he were one of Manny’s Nazis. ‘Dr A-alvin S-sssch-shrager. Another evil man of medicine.’

Manny didn’t respond to my needling. There’s a chance he didn’t notice it. He disagreed with my estimate of Shrager, though. ‘I’m not aware that he gassed children in order to be able to experiment on their brains.’

He’d abandoned the lumbering pretence of loving our enemies. He was back where I preferred him, in the realm of unequivocal hate.

‘I grant you that,’ I said, ‘but he still played around with mine.’

Manny fell quiet. Then suddenly he remembered something which struck him as more cheerful. ‘He tried to interest me in your sister once.’

‘He what?’

‘He asked me to take your sister out. Asher told me he’d asked him as well.’

‘Shrager asked you and Asher to go out with Shani?’

‘Well, not
asked
, s-suggested. And not at the same time.’

‘I’m assuming not at the same time, Manny. But on whose say-so did he put that suggestion to either of you? What made him think . . . Christ, Manny, Shani was years older than you for starters.’ And you were a frummie freak, I wanted to add, upon whom she would not have looked had her life depended on it. Family – family first.

‘He said he thought it would be a good idea. He said he thought your father would approve.’

‘Well, that’s a joke! Hard enough – excuse me – to imagine what Shani would have said about it, but my father! In the first place my father would not under any circumstances have gone telling Shrager what he wanted for Shani – why would he for God’s sake? – and secondly what he wanted was a well-to-do left-wing atheistical goy with a double-barrelled name from some cathedral town in Hampshire.’

‘Perhaps he changed his mind. He talked to my father a lot when they were in hospital together. He said he was worried for your sister. What would happen to her when he died. He wondered about Asher. My father even mentioned it to Asher, but Asher, as you know . . .’

Yes, Asher was in love with someone else. And Manny, presumably, was at that time still in love with God. So sorry, Shani, looks like you missed out on frumkie bliss!

I did not know what to make of any of this, except that it was profoundly insulting to my sister, my father, and to me. Which left only my mother, and who was to say that Shrager hadn’t suggested Manny or some other epileptic creep of medieval Yiddishery as a husband to her?

But just because it was insulting didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Anything was possible. Without doubt my father had begun to entertain some strange notions in the last months of his life, and maybe finding himself in a hospital ward in a bed next to Selick Washinsky, where they were both equal in the hands of the Almighty, softened his attitudes. I had also to accept that when it came to Shani, his lifelong views about the need for Jews to shed their Jewishness were already pretty soft – vaporous, vapid, like the bubbles he blew from the clay pipe he once bought me as a Christmas present. Karl Marx, presumably, was the same with his daughter.
What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world?
Usury. Only not in your case, my darling daughter. From everything I say against Jews, assume that I exempt your dear self
. Takes some explaining all that. But it’s what Jewish daughters do to their Jewish fathers. They make monkeys out of them. And if it tells you anything, it is that my father was mistaken on another score: Jewishness is not what you get when you lock people in a ghetto, Jewishness is what even the harshest Jewish father sees when he looks into his baby daughter’s eyes. Shmaltz.

But then my father knew that too.

Shmaltz! He pronounced it with the fiercest disdain. Which just goes to show that you can know the name and still not be able to resist the substance.

6

Whatever my father’s fears for her, Shani had not needed anyone to keep an eye on her, or to find her a nice Yiddisher beau. After my father’s death, several of the bachelors or widowers among his friends, including some whose first choice would have been my mother – let me frank about this: everyone’s first choice would have been my mother – took the early steps to wooing her. Chocolates, flowers, invitations to rambles, dances, even kalooki evenings in other people’s homes. And one or two who weren’t bachelors or widowers, I am afraid to say, essayed the same. But she kept them all at arm’s length. She was a changed person. If I were to put what was changed about her in a nutshell, other than that she now dressed every day and found shoes to fit her, I would say that she had decided to occupy my father’s place in the world. Not only to fill his social and secretarial role about the house, paying bills and looking after guests while my mother went her merry way kalooki-ing, and Tsedraiter Ike sucked at his single tooth and dribbled into histories of Israel, and I cartooned and got the clap – but actually to supplant him. There was something epic about it, something that would have reminded me of Greek tragedy had the omens been bad, but in fact no great collapse of dynasties was in the wind, no gods had been enraged other than Elohim who had never been much pleased with us anyway, and the House of Glickman felt, if anything, more secure than it had for a long time. So I suppose I meant Greek only in that it seemed archetypal, Shani moving into the space my father had vacated, as though one of us was bound by some elemental law of family to do it, and actually shouldering the burden he had dropped, thinking like him, talking like him – a touch brusque, determined to be watchful of sentimentality, the shmaltz as she had now taken to calling it – and keeping alive the principles of anti-religiosity by which he’d lived his own life and protected ours from fanaticism.

This was what made Manny’s recollections of Dr Shrager’s matchmaking so preposterous: a Jewish man, never mind a Jewish boy, was the very last of Shani’s wants.

It would have been neat of her to fall in love with a goyisher boxer with a broken nose and low-caste cauliflower ears, maybe
a lad my father had once trained and seen a gloriously bloody future for, but she didn’t. She fell in love with a sailor. Mick.

‘Mick!’ Even my mother, who was the inverse of her late husband when it came to Shani and me – wanting me to have a Jewish bride if I had to have a bride at all, someone called Bathsheba or Hepzibah at the very least, and with a complexion to match the Arabian silkiness of her name, but not caring who Shani took up with provided he treated her well – even my mother drew the line at a Mick. ‘He isn’t Irish?’ she pleaded not to hear. ‘Please say he isn’t Irish.’

‘Mick Kalooki is his name,’ Shani said. ‘Draw your own conclusions.’

My mother made a bouquet of her hands and thrust it at my sister. ‘Don’t toy with me, Shani. On your father’s life, tell me the truth. Is he or isn’t he?’

‘On my father’s life you shouldn’t be asking me that question, Ma. You know what he’d have said.
A man’s man for a’ that
.’

‘That’s Scottish,’ I put in. ‘He’s not a Scotsman, is he?’

You can never tell who’s going to be the last straw in a family. A Hottentot, a German, a Jew as outlandish as I must have looked to the protected eyes of Chloë’s light-heartedly Jew-despising mother. In our family it was an Irishman. No idea why. Something to do with the Irish epitomising what we meant by a bates, the male equivalent to yekelte only worse, the proletarian drunkard whom we feared, in the abstract, more than any other being because we did not understand from the inside the workings of a mind befuddled by alcohol and could not calculate what it would do. If you want to understand a culture, look at how it goes about subverting itself. Carnival contains everything you need to know about Catholics, and Purim, the most carnivalesque of all Jewish festivals, renders up the Jew. At Purim even the holiest of men are required to get so drunk that they will not, for a whole day, be able to distinguish Mordechai from Haman, the friend from the enemy, the saint from the sinner. Behold then why Jews fear
alcohol: in alcohol we lose the one quality that guarantees our humanity – our ability to distinguish good from evil.

They will tell you, the anti-Semites who collect my cartoons and show them on websites much visited by extremists with too much time on their hands, that our disdain for non-Jews, measured by the size and hostility of our vocabulary for them, is proof of our belief in our inherent superiority. Bad psychology, my farbrenteh friends. Your reasoning is as flawed as your hearts. Colourful language did never yet proceed from confidence. The confident are languid in their contempt; what fuels the vivacity of our mistrust is fear. All those goyim and batesemeh, all those yekeltes and shaygetsim – what are they but characters in a recurrent nightmare, the Grand Guignol of our waking terrors? Not just our enemies, blind with drink, but that to which we might ourselves be reduced if we do not keep our wits about us. If the Jews felt easier in their chosenness they would be sweeter to get along with. As it is, they start in fright whenever an Irishman who isn’t W. B. Yeats or Oscar Wilde (and they aren’t all that sure about Oscar Wilde) approaches them with a glass in his hand.

‘An Irish son-in-law,’ my mother wailed. ‘What have I done to deserve an Irish son-in-law?’

‘And a sailor, Mother,’ Shani reminded her. ‘So the house will stink of rum as well as whiskey.’

In fact he was purser on a luxury liner, came from a good cheese-smoking family in County Cork, had been educated in England, so didn’t sound like a tinker, and by any standards other than ours would have been counted teetotal. Although Shani had tried to keep the details of her meeting him a tight secret, and would have liked us to imagine her haunting the docks in the early hours of the morning, looking for seamen, it came out that they’d fallen into conversation in Radiven’s, the kosher delicatessen at the bottom of our street. He was in Manchester seeing relatives, and could not forgo the opportunity to buy a pound of chopped liver and a packet of matzohs, food he had acquired a
taste for as a boy when his parents took him to stay with Jewish friends in Dublin. He had already got what he wanted when Shani walked in, whereupon he realised that what he really wanted, to go with his chopped liver and matzoh, was a beautiful Jewess to serve it to him.

He had a day in town before his train left for Southampton and persuaded Shani to spend it with him in Heaton Park. How far you can fall in love in a single afternoon in a park, depends partly on the park and partly on your physical and mental availability. In Jane Austen’s words, ‘He had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love.’ The ‘he’ in question, incidentally, also a sailor. Though the ‘she’ a long way from being a Jewish girl from Crumpsall Park with a thousand pairs of unworn stilettos in her wardrobe. It had happened that way at any rate – love in a single afternoon – for Asher and Dorothy. It had happened that way for me and Zoë, for me and Chloë, and for me and several öthers. And it happened that way for Shani and Mick. By the time they separated in body they were engaged in spirit. He wrote to her every hour from his boat, she replied with cables to Aden and Colombo and other places Shitworth Whitworth correctly supposed we could not point to on a map – Shani, this was, who had never previously sent a postcard to anybody in her life – and so we became aware that something very serious was taking place in Shani’s heart long before we met the cause of it.

Whether she had so arranged it that when he was next on leave he would turn up at our house in his purser’s uniform just as one of my mother’s kalooki evenings was about to kick off, I can only guess. But if she hadn’t, she was damned lucky. He took the gathering by storm. Handsomish and certainly well formed, if not exactly dashing or imposing, but in naval whites, with the colour of the high seas in his cheeks, an unshaveable dimple in his chin and a proven way with red-nailed matrons, he would have made a big impression had he merely popped his head around the door, said
Hello, ladies
and left immediately. That he should have been
a card-player, to boot, that he should have loved kalooki in particular, being expected to play it every night in the saloon of the
Oriana
with the wealthier version of just such women as were gathered here tonight, that he should have been able to take his place at my mother’s table as though he had never parked his trim behind in any other seat, and be expert enough to keep everyone on their toes but not so expert or indiscreet as to win every hand, and that he should have declined the peach brandy my mother kept for rabbis and alcoholics – well, an angel sent by Elohim could not have managed things better.

‘So you’re Mick,’ my mother trilled, when her other guests had left, while in the shadows of the hall Tsedraiter Ike rolled his shabby little fingers into fists and called upon the Almighty to intervene.

1

Little by little I fancied I was getting Manny to relax. Whenever the trainee PAs at Lipsync Productions had nothing better to do, they would contact me, mentioning meaningless deadlines for outlines, citing the names of impossibly stellar directors whose windows of opportunities would soon be closing, and cut-off dates beyond which we would be plunged into the perilous uncertainties of another tax year. I told them Manny couldn’t be rushed. I explained that there was difficult, even intractable matter which could be coaxed out of him only gingerly, if he was not to take fright and bolt. The word ‘intractable’ usually got them off the phone and Francine on it. Was there anything
she
could do, she wondered. Had she been a man I’d have deduced from her tone that she meant like breaking both the bastard’s arms.