Howard Jacobson - Who's Sorry Now?

Whereas Kreitman was putting mileage, fast, between himself and the idea of a man instanced by his father, the Purse King. Sullen at work, sullen back from work, whisky from the cut-glass decanters on the solid-silver tray on the walnut sideboard, scoff without a thank-you, empty apron, count, curse, packet of Rennies, five spoons of Gaviscon, half a gallon of Andrews Liver Salts, gallstones, ulcer, cancer, heart attack, swear, snore, stroke. Maybe at first the decanters weren’t cut glass, or the tray solid silver, or the whisky single malt, but Rome wasn’t built in a day; by the time the purse empire had extended to two markets, then to three, then to the first of the shops in Streatham High Street — KREITMAN THE RIGHTMAN FOR SMALL LEATHER — nothing conducive to Bruno Kreitman’s well-being, not that he ever enjoyed any well-being, wasn’t of the best. Why did Kreitman hate his father so intensely on account of those whisky decanters? Because they bottled up curiosity. Because they denied the random mess of life. His father could have come home from the markets with funny stories, anecdotes of the pedlar’s life, traveller’s tales. Guess what happened to me today …? Who do you think I ran into …? Listen, you’ll enjoy this … But he didn’t see himself as a pedlar and therefore wasn’t able to avail himself of any of the pedlar’s consolations. The fact that it was small leather he was peddling only made it worse. You can’t distance yourself from the public when you’re flogging them small leather. Purses and wallets infect mankind with a distraction close to madness. But he could have made a virtue of that, couldn’t he? Could have come home expert in the rich insanity of his trade — ‘You should see them at my stall, like perverts loosed into a playground. Fingering, poking, probing. Sniffing the leather. Rubbing the suede against their cheeks. You’re the clever dick, Marvin, you explain to me why every woman over fifty, whether she intends to buy a new purse or not, feels she has to show you the contents of her old one.’ Marvin Kreitman, growing into a speculative boy, would have enjoyed putting his mind to that. ‘Could it be love they crave, Dad? Could purse-buying be like exhibitionism, a cry of sexual loneliness?’ Bad luck, in that case, if you happened on Kreitman Senior. Nothing doing there. He rebuffed all cries for help and told the punters not to finger his goods if they weren’t buying. Swore at them, too, if they persisted or grew tetchy or had the effrontery to haggle. Take it or fucking leave it. Sambo! Yes, Sambo as well, under his poisoned breath. Anybody call Bruno Kreitman a kike and he’d have had the Haganah in and instigated another Nuremberg. But Sambo awakened no consciousness of equivalence in him. He would still be swearing when he got home, reliving the mortifications of his day: the bleeders — curses aimed at his own chest, blows to his own heart — the bleeders! Turning Kreitman’s soul to ash. It amazed the boy that with manners as gruff as his, his father ever managed to sell anything. But there’s the mystery of the purse. In the end it will sell itself.

So if he didn’t see himself as a pedlar, what did Kreitman’s father see himself as? Simple — a man with a round stomach and a bald head who wore silver-grey waistcoats and black mourning ties and drank whisky from cut-glass decanters. A sort of maître d ’ in his own house. Everything else took from his dignity. Kreitman went buying with his father sometimes, accompanying him in silence from warehouse to warehouse in Stepney and Stamford Hill, where it upset him to see how cheerfully other purse sellers embraced the ups and downs of purse-selling, and how much they reciprocated his father’s icy loathing of them. There was always laughter in the warehouses, exaggerated comedy even when expected lines had not arrived, or returns were being dealt with, or someone was accusing someone else of pinching from his trolley. Everybody, from the smallest tuppenny-ha’penny stallholder in Brixton to the owner of the biggest bag arcade in Hammersmith, everybody including the person in the mobster suit and expensive wig whose warehouse they were in, rejoiced in the rubbish around which their lives revolved. ‘Look at this! Henry, look at what you’re asking me to buy. The clasp doesn’t fasten. The lining’s hanging out. The zip’s the wrong colour. And the dye’s coming off in my hand.’ ‘It’s fashion. It’s what the kids want.’ ‘Henry, you’ve been stocking this same bag since the Coronation. And it wasn’t in fashion then.’ ‘Morris, you know what your trouble is? You’re a short-term merchant. If I’ve been stocking this bag since the Coronation, what does it tell you?’ ‘That it’s such drek you can’t sell it.’ ‘No, that it’s such drek I can’t get enough. So how many do you want?’ ‘I’ll take a gross.’

Everybody making the best of the worst except his father, Bruno the Bagman, known to his fellow bagmen as Bruno the Broygis — that’s to say Bruno the Bad-Tempered, Bruno the Taker of Umbrage, Bruno the Bilious.

‘You’re not a bad kid,’ one of the bagmen took Marvin Kreitman aside to tell him once, ‘but if you want to know why we can’t stomach your old pot and pan, it’s because he acts as though there’s a bad smell under his nose all the time, and we get the impression that the bad smell is us. He’s a gantse k’nacker , you understand? He acts like a big shot, like he’s superior to us. But there’s something we all want to know. You tell me. What exactly is your father superior at?’

Marvin Kreitman, blushing to the roots of his hair, shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’ll have to ask somebody else that,’ he said. But he had no idea who that would be.

It also upset him to discover that his father stole from the warehouses, removing the newsprint and tissue-paper stuffing from briefcases and overnight bags when no one was looking, and filling them with key fobs and billfolds. Were they so badly off that his father needed to do that? No. His father stole as an expression of umbrage. He did it to spite. And who knows, perhaps to besmirch himself in his own eyes; to confirm his fall from a grace he hadn’t attained. And was he never found out? Years later, buying on his own account, Kreitman learned that his father’s petty thieving had been common knowledge, tolerated because he bought big — thought big, bought big — and also, it seemed, because those he stole from knew that Kreitman’s father was thereby slowly poisoning himself, and were content, for the price of a few key fobs, that his death should be as horrible and protracted as possible. Which it was. Not gallstones or ulcers or cancer that claimed him in the end. Strictly speaking there was no end. He just went on being himself until his constitution had had enough. Cause of death — if that which has never lived can the — gangrene of the personality. Unable to support it any longer, the body coughed up black bile streaked with black blood, collapsed in a bucket of Andrews Liver Salts and was gone. Six weeks after the non-event his mother took up with a man who didn’t think the world owed him deference because he looked like a Hungarian waiter, and cleared out the previous incumbent’s things. The market stalls she gave away. Washed her hands of them. The shops she sold. Kreitman got the decanters, which he donated, without unwrapping them, to Oxfam.

These were some of the reasons why Kreitman tried to remember to smile if he possibly could, did his best to memorise and tell jokes, cooked curries, never thieved a single book from the student bookshop, and became interested in Francis Place, the radical, a journeyman breeches-maker who had reason to believe he could have been better employed, but never repined, never turned his back on self-improvement, never stinted himself in a cause, never acted as though there were a bad smell under his nose and, as far as Kreitman’s searches could discover, never set much store by what he drank his whisky from.