Kalooki Nights (4 page)

Not true that. We did give a shit about treating Gentiles as skivvies. Particularly we gave a shit – or at least my father did – about calling someone a fire-yekelte, a yekelte being a coarse non-Jewish woman of the lower orders, in other words a person with whom we, having been worse than beasts of burden in Novoropissik, should have felt some affiliation. That the fire-yekelte in question didn’t mind making the fires, and considered herself fairly remunerated for it – just as Elvis Presley was said to have performed a similar service for Rabbi Fruchter and his wife in Alabama Avenue, Memphis, refusing to take a penny in recompense, just so long as no spark from the fire landed on his blue suede shoes – was neither here nor there. What did it do to
us
to demean in the name of our religion – that was the issue. ‘Social relations come first, remember that,’ my father used to lecture me. ‘Man and man will always be a more sacred connection than man and God.’ So what kind of God, Manny, would hand us out a code of conduct which of necessity entailed condescension to people of another faith, neighbours who had carved crucifixes on the bricks of this very shelter when the bombs were falling, even as our parents, who shared their terror, were carving Stars of David? A God of Love, a God of Contempt, or a God who didn’t give a shit?

He had a way of closing down his face – Manny, I mean, not God – as though he could make himself deaf by sheer force of will. He ought to have repudiated the condescension charge with a flick of his fingers. ‘What’s demeaning to either party in a favour asked for and delivered? Show me the injured Gentile. Did Elvis mind? No. The King was only too pleased to be of service. All you have to show on your side of the argument is yourself – a Jew injured by all things Jewish. It’s not we who are guilty of fanaticism, it’s you, the fanatics of disavowal and self-revulsion.’

But that, for Manny (leaving aside what could reasonably be expected of a twelve-year-old boy), would have been to enter the
lists on behalf of a God who needed no defending. Not for him to interrogate, or to hear another interrogate, the laws of Elohim. He was not called Emanuel – meaning ‘God is our protector, God is ever with us’ – for nothing. Emanuel Eli Washinsky, Eli also meaning God, as in
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?
So I should have known something was wrong when, three or four years later he suddenly began to worry at that very question.
Eli, Eli, lama
sabachthani?
Where were you, Elohim, in our hour of calamity?

An unmistakable cry for help, that, wouldn’t you say, from someone with two Gods in his name?

But a cartoonist isn’t there to help. Not in the conventional sense, at any rate. A cartoonist is there to make the complacent quake and the uncomfortable more uncomfortable still. So to Manny, who had been the one and was now the other, I said, ‘You don’t ask Elohim to explain Himself.’ And was mightily pleased with the echo. I felt it was a blow struck for my poor father whose memory I feared that I traduced whenever I talked God with Manny.

It also pleased me, in some disreputably aesthetic way, to see my friend’s certainties under pressure. The refuser of all questions returned to questioning. It was shapely.

But then of the two of us, I was the artist.

And I was forever looking for an excuse not to be his friend.

2

‘Why do you have to look so Jewish all the time?’

Zoë talking. Zoë, catching me with my people’s woes on my shoulders. Zoë, my flaxen
Übermadchen
Gentile second wife in our itchy seventh year of marriage.

Zoë, Chloë, Björk, Märike, Alÿs, and Kätchen, little Kate . . .what does it say about me that the only people with whom I am able to enjoy intimacy must have diaereses or umlauts in their names?

That I’m a Shmoë – that’s what Zoë said it says.

Good job I never met Der Führer at an impressionable age.

With Zoë I wasn’t ever unimpressionable. I bore the impress, visibly, of her harrying. And because I lowered my head and shouldered it, there was no inducement for her to stop. Grow a moustache, shave your moustache; wear a tie, don’t wear a tie; try being sweeter to people, try having the courage of your own belligerence; come live with me in the country, why can’t we have a flat in town; get a mistress, how dare you even look at another woman; fuck me hard, fuck me gently, and finally don’t fuck me at fucking all.

But it was about Jews that she harried me the most. She had been badly treated in her life by Jews. Only the once, not counting her treatment by me, but once can be enough. She had grown up next to a family of them on one of those high-blown scraps of wood and coppice you find between cemeteries and golf clubs in North London, taking ‘growing up’ to mean from the age of nine or thereabouts, that crucial hormonal period when, as Zoë herself fancifully explained it, she was poised to ‘change from a plant into a person’, a period not to be confused with that she spent in my company, during which she changed, again in her own words, ‘back into a plant’. The horticulture was more than a figure of speech. Jews interfered with the natural growing process, were not themselves natural – that was what she intended by it. When Zoë was depressed she sat under a tree. When we fought she gardened. In soil she found the antithesis to me. And presumably, also, to the Krystals, the family who had stunted her. I knew the drama of their treachery by heart, she told it me so often. They came and she adored them, in her innocence drawing no distinction between the love she bore the senior Krystals, Leslie and Leila, and the love she bore the two boys, Selwyn and Seymour. Important I understood that: she loved them
all
, and loved them without design – played with them, ate with them, learned with them, progressed from late infancy to adolescence with them, then out of an unclouded powder-blue sky received her marching orders from them. When Zoë turned fifteen – ‘the very next day, she couldn’t even wait a week’ – Leila Krystal took her to one side and told her that with her looks and figure she’d make a fine living as a whore in the cafés of Berlin. Wanted her out of the way, you see. Wanted her far from where she could light any fires (some fire-yekeltes we want, some we don’t) in the hearts of either Selwyn or Seymour or both. At fifteen – so Zoë sobbed to me in my bed – she overnight became an anathema. ‘They looked at me as though they’d never seen me before. The minute I became a woman, in their eyes I became filth. A prostitute. Nothing else. That’s why,’ she explained, ‘I am in love with you.’

‘Because you have reason to hate Jews?’

‘Because they deprived me of my right to love Jews.’

It seemed a fair enough deal to me. Thank you, Leila Krystal. I’d get Zoë and in return be the Jew whom Zoë could love.

But it seemed I’d overdone it. Now Zoë was wondering why I had to look quite so Jewish quite so much of the time.

‘Because I
am
fucking Jewish,’ I reminded her.

‘All the time?’

‘Every fucking minute.’ ‘Stop swearing,’ she said.

‘I’ll stop fucking swearing when you stop asking me why I look so fucking Jewish.’

‘Why is everything a negotiation with you? Why can’t you stop swearing
and
stop looking Jewish?’

‘What do you want me to do, have a fucking nose job?’

She thought about it. Showed me her impertinently undemonstrative Gentile profile, every feature segregated from the other. My features, whatever else you thought about them, were on good terms, enjoyed a warm confabulation, each with each. Zoë’s face was a species of apartheid.

‘Good idea,’ she said at last. ‘Have it off.’

‘You used to like my nose.’

‘I used to like you.’

‘Then why do you want me to stop at the nose? Why don’t I have everything off?’

She pushed her mouth at me approvingly, one lip at a time, making little stars of fucking Bethlehem (nothing I could or can do about the swearing when proximate to Zoë) dance in her frosty fucking eyes. Always Christmas, always the birth of her saviour when she looked at me. Never a minute when a theological squabble two thousand years old was not present between us. Just as my mother and Tsedraiter Ike – though separately and of course unbeknown to my father while he was living – had predicted. ‘She ’ll call you dirty Jew,’ Tsedraiter Ike had warned me, whistling the prognostication around his single tooth. ‘She ’ll accuse you of killing Christ,’ my mother said. ‘They always do in the end.’ They didn’t get that last part right. Zoë never did accuse me of killing Christ. Only of behaving as though I
were
Christ, which is a subtly different charge. But ‘dirty Jew’, yes, or at least ‘Jew’ with the dirty – meaning heated, meaning tumultuous, meaning unrefreshed and unrefreshable – implied. And now she wanted me to have my nose cropped.

Why did I so far entertain the idea as to get in touch with a plastic surgeon – who, incidentally, wouldn’t touch my nose, but tried to make me a Christian by the theological route, pushing smudgy pamphlets onto me about Christ’s mission to the Jews? Why didn’t I gather myself to my full height, push out my profile, and leave the marriage?

The sex partly. One-time fuck me fuck me women who lie there straight as toy soldiers when their ardour cools, eyes squeezed, mouths puckered like dried figs, wondering How long O Lord, How long, exercise a fatal fascination on men of my sort. You go on labouring in the hope that one day, like a princess in a fairy story, they will become reanimated in your arms. In the fairy stories which Jewish men tell themselves, the princesses are always Gentile. So that’s your task when your mother releases you into the world: to warm back into life the chilly universe of shiksehs.

Beyond that, I was sorry for her. Partly because of the Krystals who had treated her so contemptuously. But also because I’d been brought up to be sorry for any woman (this is, of course, the shadow-image of the previous fairy story) who was married to me: a Jew with the stinking waters of Novoropissik in his veins. And this regardless of whether she accused me of killing or appropriating Christ.

The other reason I didn’t walk out on her when she suggested plastic surgery was that the idea answered to some extremity of exasperation in myself. You can get sick of looking like a Jew. And you can get sick of being looked at like a Jew as well. It would be interesting to see how it felt not to be forever earmarked for something or other. They regard you oddly, the Gentiles, whether they mean you harm or not. You give rise to some expectancy in them. As though, for good or ill, you’ve got the answer about your person to a question they can’t quite find. It would be nice not to be the cause of that any longer. And – because whatever the question, you don’t ever have the answer – nice not to be regarded as a disappointment. What would it be like, I wondered, not to feel I’d raised a curiosity I couldn’t satisfy? Maybe I’d wake up happy instead of fucked off. Maybe I’d find a wider market for my cartoons. Maybe I’d get on better with my lozenge-stiff Hitlerian wife. With a smaller nose they say you give better cunnilingus. In fact Jews give the best cunnilingus in the world precisely because they have the nasal cartilage to give it with; though I grant you that in that case what they’re giving isn’t strictly cunnilingus. So maybe, pedantry aside, I’d give worse cunnilingus. That too was a consideration. Cut off my nose to spite the bitch.

3

The truth is, not everybody needs a white supremacist superwoman, or a missionary plastic surgeon, come to that, to do the prompting. You can wish away being Jewish, looking Jewish, thinking Jewish, talking Jewish, all on your ownio, to borrow one of Zoë’s mother’s, no, Chloë’s mother’s, cute locutions.

(As in ‘Well,
there
, I have to say, you’re on your ownio, Sonny Jim’ – whenever she disagreed with something someone said to her. Which was most of the time.
All
of the time, if the someone happened to be me.)

But we each bail out according to our characters and circumstances. Some just let it discreetly lapse for professional reasons, claiming never to have noticed it was there much anyway. Some drop the subject after a long engagement with it, and think of themselves as enjoying a well-earned retirement. Others can’t be goyim soon enough. In the case of Manny Washinsky, it was a matter of needing to keep his head down. The first thing he did when they let him back out into the world was change his name to Stroganoff. Hardly going to get him a job in the Vatican golf club, but then he wasn’t so much not wanting to be Jewish any more, as not wanting to be the Jew he’d been. I could relate to that, as Chloë’s mother also said (Chloë’s mother who could relate to nothing). He had suffered great notoriety in Manchester in the early 1970s. Whatever the anti-Semites tell you, Jewish murderers are few and far between. At least they were in Crumpsall Park. And even by the standards of your average Jewish murderer, were such a personage imaginable, Emanuel Eli Washinsky – Talmud scholar and yeshiva boy – was exceptional. He’d been locked away a long time, but there were still people around, like me, who could remember him and what an unnatural thing he ’d done.

I’d lost contact with Manny by the time he was incarcerated, let alone released, and probably wouldn’t have seen him again or even learned that he ’d come out and changed his name to Stroganoff, had not a pink-eyed, pug-nosed writer of no distinction or imagination – one Christopher Christmas, for Christ’s sake – interested a small production company in a possible drama, something for television, something for twopence, based on Manny’s life, the only Jewish double homicide in the history of Crumpsall Park.

In the course of his vulturous researches into someone else he thought he could interest a producer in making a film about for twopence – based on real life, that was the line he threw out: these things actually
happened
! – Christmas had come across Manny Washinsky, and in the course of his researches into Manny, he had come across me. Grist to his mill, whatever he unearthed. A shilling here, a shilling there. It no doubt helped that my name was rustily familiar. Maxie Glickman, isn’t he—?

I say no more than
helped
. They weren’t offering gold dust, they were quick to make that clear. And Christmas himself was already on another project. Grub, grub. But there was a little something in it for me if indeed I was the same Maxie Glickman who’d been Manny Washinsky’s friend, and if I was prepared to meet up with him again and get him to talk.