Kalooki Nights (37 page)

‘Mr Nasser Azam,’ he said, ‘my friend M-max.’

Mr Azam rose to shake my hand, inclining his head slightly. I did the same. He would have introduced his children, but Manny got in first. ‘This is Tamoor – am I pronouncing it right? – and this is Zahra. Tamoor and Zahra Azam. This is my friend Max.’

Great names, I wanted to remark. Tamoor and Zahra, great names for a comic-book hero and heroine from another galaxy. The other thing I wanted to remark was how beautiful they were, eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, their heads like Carmel and the hair on their heads like purple, and indeed how exquisitely they smelled – frankincense, myrrh, calamus and cinnamon, like the gardens of Lebanon – but one ethnic minority cannot marvel over the exoticism of another without offence.

‘We have been comparing notes,’ Mr Azam told me. He too was succulently beautiful, his hands – always the first thing I look at – a lustrous, ochreous brown, the fingers extraordinary in that they appeared to be flat-sided, faceted even, the crescents of his nails as thrilling in their perfected nakedness as Ilse Cohen’s used to be.

‘Notes? On the museum?’ I feigned alarm. ‘Has Manny told you that he and I have been disagreeing about the gods of ancient Egypt?’

He shook his head, laughing. ‘Well, we,’ he said, ‘have been comparing our views of Abraham.’

‘Amicably, I hope.’ Which was an asinine thing to say, but then I wasn’t versed in the etiquette of Abrahamic discussion Jew to Muslim in plein-air Bloomsbury.

He bowed. Of course amicably.

‘Presumably Zahra,’ I said, ‘is a variation of Sarah, Abraham’s wife.’

Again he inclined his head to me. If I were wrong, if Sarah and Zahra were polar opposites, he certainly wasn’t going to tell me.

My head was spinning. Where had Manny found the savoir faire to strike up conversation with the Azams? I had only been away ten minutes. How come he had hit it off so well with them, utter strangers, in that time? And how come he had dared venture, so soon, into the minefield of Torah and Koran? Was it chutzpah, or stupidity? Had all those years of being locked away dulled him to the sensitivities of Jews and Muslims in the matter of one another’s mutually confuting faiths?

I was also strangely touched that he had introduced me as his friend. ‘Friend’ had not been in the air between us much. It was on the basis of our friendship that we were doing whatever it was we were doing – making notes towards a film of Manny’s ruined life, were we really embarked on that? – but the word itself had not previously been used, at least not by him, and it made a difference. I was no less touched by Manny’s engrossment in the children. As I stood there, not quite knowing what to say to their father, Manny examined Tamoor’s and Zahra’s toys, laughed at a snowstorm on the pyramids, helped them with a metal puzzle which had baffled the holy priests of Mesopotamia. They were huddled about him, attentive, like acolytes around a senior boffin, apparently oblivious to his oddities. It seemed to me, too, from the way he bent over them – though this was only a surmise, a cartoonist’s reading of the body’s longings – that he wanted to touch them, that he would have liked to gather them to him so he could breathe in the incense of their hair, but knew he couldn’t.

They gave him their email addresses when we parted. God knows what he intended to do with those. He watched them go, dark into the great white city, waving longer than I thought was necessary.

Over a minestrone and bruschetta lunch, his eyes suddenly filled with tears. He wiped them with his serviette, but there was
no staunching the flow. I grew embarrassed. There were people at adjoining tables watching, wondering what I’d done to him.

At last he said, ‘They didn’t remind you of anybody?’

‘Tamoor and Zahra?’ I thought about it. And then I realised that yes, yes they did.

Asher.

4

Sometime in my first or second term at art school I received an invitation to dinner on
Oriana
notepaper, disappointingly postmarked Manchester, not Surabaya or Trincomalee. Chloë, whom I’d just met – though I couldn’t be certain she’d met me – would have warmed to a candlelit spread in Surabaya. ‘I like exceptional men,’ I had heard her telling a group of her friends in the refectory, and what could have been more exceptional in 1963 than a man who took his girlfriend to dinner in the South China Sea. The sender of the invitation was Shani’s Mick – Mick Kalooki, as we’d taken to calling him after Shani’s joke – and the venue to which he was inviting me was any restaurant of my choice, with a good bottle of wine thrown in. A PS requested that I make no mention of the invitation to Shani.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. After mulling it over for a few hours I decided that the invitation couldn’t possibly bode ill to Shani, not given its bon vivant spirit (by 1963 standards), and not unless the man was a bounder, which he wasn’t. More likely it presaged a desire to get to know the family better, either with a view to making Shani an offer she couldn’t refuse, or as a preliminary to moving in with us – or with
them
rather, as I had already moved out – so that he could be at the kalooki table before anybody else. Fine by me so long as it was fine by Shani and my mother. Mick was a nearly permanent fixture already. He had left his seafaring the year before, folded away his purser’s uniform to the disappointment of every woman over fifty in Crumpsall Park,
and opened up a barber’s shop right next to Radiven’s, the delicatessen he rated above all others in the world, and he was a man who could be said to know the world. Whether he could be said to know barbering was another matter, but he had barbered a bit at sea before becoming a purser, and though seamen were less fussy about their hair than dry-land Jews, barbering was, by his own admission, the nearest thing he had to a civilian profession. Eventually this would cause friction with Errol Tobias’s mother who did a little moonlighting with men’s hair when women’s business in her salon was slow, but in the beginning Mick’s transition from sailor to hairdresser, as from bird of passage to fixed star in Shani’s affections, was smooth. He snuggled up a bit close for my taste – he could make you feel there was more of him inside your skin than there was of you – but I liked him well enough at a distance of two hundred miles. My fear, on getting the invitation, was that he meant to snuggle up even closer. But for what reason, since he was already a combination of brother, son, husband and lapdog to all of us except Tsedraiter Ike, who had detested him at first sight and never wavered, I couldn’t imagine.

We met in a Jewish restaurant in Whitechapel, ate saveloys with boiled potatoes and drank a wine of no known varietal type. The restaurant wasn’t my choice. I’d suggested a nice little Italian I knew in Soho, next door to a strip joint on one side and a clip joint on the other – now I come to think of it, probably an earlier incarnation of the very place where Francine Bryson-Smith would lunch me into Jewing up the tragedy of Manny Stroganoff – but Mick didn’t think Soho was suitable given that he was my sister’s boyfriend. And besides, he wanted to eat kosher.

I quickly discovered he wanted to talk kosher too.

‘So what’s a nish?’ he asked me.

‘A nish? I don’t know of any nish.’

He pointed to the word in the menu.

‘Oh, k’nish! The
k
isn’t silent. In fact it’s noisy. You rock on it – k’nish.’

‘K’nish.’ He practised it, pushing his face forward. ‘K’nish. K’nish.’

‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘And it means dumpling.’ I didn’t tell him, for the same reason that he didn’t want to meet me in Soho, that a k’nish was also a vagina.

By this stage he had brought a pen and notebook out of his pocket. It was odd. He knew the lexicon of delicatessen nosh backwards – the bagels, the challas, the kes, the wursts, the apricot and almond rugalach, and of course the chopped herrings and chopped livers in all their subtle variations. But Jewish restaurant food was different. Nobody had taken him, that seemed to be the problem. Nobody wanted to take him. ‘If we’re going to eat out we’re not going to eat that pap,’ my father had always said, meaning we were having Indian or Chinese full stop, and that tradition had been kept alive by Shani. The only person in the house who might have been up for a kosher meal on the town was Tsedraiter Ike, but he did all his dining away from home in houses of the dead. And would not have entertained the company of Mick anyway. Thus this poor Irish sailor, thinking he had gained admittance to that penetralium of mystery, a haimisheh Jewish family, was reduced to dragging himself down to Whitechapel to dine Yiddler-wise with his girlfriend’s younger shikseh-doting brother who, to tell the truth, wasn’t all that keen on the pap either.

‘I think I know what kreplach are,’ he said, keeping with the
k
s, ‘but how are they different from kneidlach?’

‘Well, kreplach are like little ravioli, as you know, whereas kneidlach are dumplings, only rounder in general than k’nishes. But I’m not an expert.’

‘You have a lot of words for dumplings.’

And a lot of words for vagina, I thought, remembering pirgeh and peeric and pyzda and pupke – unless Errol Tobias who had taught them to me had made them up out of devilment.

‘Isn’t there something called kochleffel?’

‘Yes, but you don‘t eat it. A kochleffel is a busybody. A stirrer. You want to watch it when Shani starts to call you that.’

He beamed at me. ‘So lovely.’

‘Shani?’

‘No . . . I mean yes, of course, but I was talking about the language. Such a lovely language, Yiddish!’

Indeed. But then I hadn’t told him what k’nish meant in slang.

I was prepared, this once, for Shani’s sake, to take him through every dish on the menu, but I had to stop him when his curiosity grew more philosophical and he tried to get me on the difference between shmendrik and shmerrel and shmuck and shmegege and shmulky and shlemiel and shlimazel and shvontz and the hundreds of others – the rich roll-call of dishonour in which a people who prize intelligence above all things register the minutest distinctions between ignorance, simplicity, folly, buffoonery, ineptitude, sadness and sheer bad luck.

‘Just one thing more,’ he said, after he ‘d paid the bill. ‘If you had to choose between shmendrik, and shmerrel and shmegege—’

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I can’t. There aren’t enough hours in the day.’

He laid his hand on mine. ‘Let me finish. If you had to choose one of those to describe
me
, which would it be?’

I was horrified. ‘Mick, why are you asking me that? You are none of those things.’ For a terrible moment I wondered whether Shani or my mother had been abusing him. And then I realised. Tsedraiter Ike – himself named after a weakness of the brain that was nearly but not quite the same as that suffered by a meshuggener. Tsedraiter Ike, I felt sure, had been undermining him in Yiddish, no doubt spitting the words at him through the letter box when he arrived for kalooki. And no doubt spitting them at him again from his bedroom window when he left.

‘Take no notice of a word that wicked old bastard says,’ was my advice. ‘My father, who was a good judge of character, and
who it’s a great shame you never met, wanted to throw him out of the house.’

Mick smiled at me, not bothering to pretend he didn’t know who I meant. ‘He’s a momzer, yes?’

‘Mamzer. Momzer’s London Yiddish.’

He looked alarmed. ‘You’re telling me there’s London Yiddish
and
Manchester Yiddish?’

‘And Glasgow. And Leeds. And Dublin, too, presumably.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Oy, oy, oy – I’ll never master it.’

‘Just don’t try to rush it,’ I said. ‘It takes five thousand years.’

Though he’d paid the bill he didn’t want to leave.

‘Just a coffee.’

Fine by me, but I had to stay his hand before he could ask the waiter to bring him cream. ‘They can’t serve you dairy after meat,’ I told him.

He punched the side of his face, and took his notebook out again. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I did know that, but it didn’t feel like meat.’

‘It never does,’ I reassured him.

Funny, how protective of him I felt, though he was older than me by a dozen years or more. He was a sweet man. Much the sweetest Irishman I had ever met. I could see why Shani liked him. I’d have kissed the dimple in his chin myself had I been a woman. Shani was very lucky, I thought. We all were. He was an addition to our little family. But I was worried for him. No one should want to be that Jewish. Certainly no one who wasn’t Jewish to begin with. The shaygets who would be Jew . . . it felt self-harming, pathological in the way that explorers who’d lost their way and cheerfully ended up as tribesmen with bones through their noses seemed pathological. Had I suggested circumcision I’m sure he’d have agreed to it. That’s supposing he hadn’t taken that drastic step already.

I shook his hand warmly when we parted – a ‘you’re one of us now’ sort of shake – but he insisted on hugging me, this a
good twenty years before hugging between men had been normalised. Such goodwill, I thought on the bus home. We enjoy such goodwill from so many. Do we make it all up, this anti-Semitism? Is it a fire in us we need to feed? Could we possibly have called the Nazis down on us because we couldn’t exist without them?

For an hour or so I felt as though I had woken into a different universe, where everything was love. Had someone asked me to empty my pockets into his I’d have agreed to do it. All men were brothers. There wasn’t a person anywhere who didn’t wish me well. I was lucky I made it home in one piece. Certainly lucky I didn’t fall off the bus. These moments can rob you of your balance.

But the next night I started going out with Chloë, and I was firmly on two feet again.

5

Why I fell for Chloë Anderson when she enrolled in art college in a Chanel suit and French high heels with two cameras carried diagonally across her chest like small arms is not a question in need of an answer. You couldn’t not. You couldn’t not if you were me, anyway. The shoes had something to do with it. As the son and brother of women who between them owned every pair of shoes that had ever come off a shoemaker’s last, I understood the poetry of shoes. But Shani, at least prior to my father’s death, no sooner put something on her feet than she looked like a mill girl off for a Saturday night eating fish and chips out of a newspaper in Blackpool. She clomped, she teetered, she clickety-clacked, often not even making it down the stairs before realising she couldn’t go out in what she was wearing, returning to her room and hurling her entire wardrobe against the wall. My mother the same. Despite the
classical attenuation of her ankles – the heel narrowly incurved, the ankle bone itself a perfect sphere, and with a glisten on it, like sucked caramel – my mother had only to put on a heel higher than her thumb and she metamorphosed into a fine piece of ass, the sort of dame that gave a Chicago mobster cachet.