Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘That’s interesting,’ I said. Thinking as I said it that poor old Francine had employed the wrong person for this job. She was right — I did come at everything backwards.

‘I’m flattered by your interest. But I want you to explain your thinking to me. You explain what you think Dorothy had ever done to me that I should want to harm her.’

Fucked your life, was the answer I wanted to give. But what I chose to say was, ‘Caused everyone great pain. Caused you misery.’

‘How had she caused me misery?’

‘It caused you immense misery to see everyone so distressed the first time. You told me that. You told me you were having fits. I can easily understand that when she appeared from nowhere, starting the whole thing over, just as you and Asher were getting on well. . Christ, Manny, you said yourself you felt as though your life had just begun. . I can easily understand why that would have upset you.’

‘ Upset me?’ More out of distress than anger, it seemed to me, he pushed his toast away from him. A couple of pieces fell to the floor. My job to retrieve them, I thought. And maybe my job to stay down there, scrabbling about under the table, while he calmed himself.

‘S-sscch-sssch-shit!’ he said, rising from his chair. It was the first time he had ever got the word out. The first time I had ever heard him swear.

A great desolation swept over me. Now that he had sworn, the world was a sadder, meaner place. We’d been happy so long as Manny kept the s-shit inside him. We hadn’t known it, but we were.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

He went over to the sink and turned the tap on, holding his hands under the water. Not washing, just letting them get wet. ‘Sorry. That’s all right then, is it? You’re sorry.’

‘No, it isn’t all right if you don’t feel it is. But I’m still sorry.’

He was, I thought, resolutely showing me his back, not just hiding himself from me but denying me his face, excluding me from human commerce. Was that what prisoners did? I wondered. Was that how, in a confined space, you withdrew the consolation of humanity?

From behind he resembled a crippled child, twisted and shrunken, the head, on its optimistic questionmark neck, still a little boy’s; but inside the dressing gown his bones were disintegrating. Shake the dressing gown and he’d fall out of it in bits.

I could tell from the movement of his neck that he was saying something, emptying words into the sink.

‘I can’t hear you,’ I said. ‘If you want to speak to me, you’ll have to turn the water off.’

He swung round and bared his little teeth at me. Had he been holding a gun. .

‘You don’t kill people,’ he said, ‘because they “upset” you.’

It was now or never. ‘So why do you kill people?’ I said at long, long last.

3

I knew the official version by heart. On his belated arrest in 1961, the Austrian-born euthanasiast and flautist Georg Renno, deputy director of the SS gassing institution at Hartheim, declared that ‘Turning the tap on was no big deal’. According to Manny’s lawyers, it was in order to verify this claim that Manny had turned the tap on while his parents were asleep. Renno was wrong, he said in his statement. Turning the tap on was a big deal.

I wondered if, over breakfast — over what was left of breakfast — Manny was going to tell me what he’d told his lawyers.

But it was hard to get him off the subject of Dorothy. I cannot reproduce the fits and starts of what he said. Now returning to the table to discuss it all equably, as though he hadn’t thrown his toast on the floor, hadn’t turned his back on me, hadn’t bared his teeth, for all the world as though we were discussing nothing more important to him than an item in the morning’s newspapers; then rising from his chair again in what I feared could be the beginning of a fit, going over to the sink, turning on the water as though he needed not to hear himself, shouting into the water and rinsing away his words. But the gist of it was that he saw Dorothy as an opportunity not just for Asher, but for his family, for his father and his mother, and for himself. She was their second chance. In Dorothy something else had happened that wasn’t the same old story. She was a release for them. Nothing to do with forgiveness. Nothing to do with making peace with Germans. It wasn’t even about her, it was about them. Whatever the rights and wrongs of refusing her the first time, they should, for their own sakes, have accepted her a second. He could see the argument going on for ever. Again and again, round and around, for another two thousand years and another two thousand years after that. Dorothy gave them a way of breaking the chain. Accept Dorothy and it was as good, after all that darkness, as accepting light. He made her sound like a new religion.

I nodded. But my offering to know what he meant made him furious.

‘Why are you doing that?’ His voice almost became a bark. ‘Do you think I am saying this in order for you to agree with me? This was my truth, not anybody else’s. I don’t invite you to s-sssshare my truth.’

I was careful not to nod my head at that.

But he could see inside my head anyway. Although he didn’t look at me I could feel him burrowing away in there, turning his X-ray vision on me. Banality — that was what he saw. And then you snapped, Manny. And then you felt you could take it no longer. Someone had to make a change, so you did. Quick, before someone else attempted something even worse. Quick, before you had a fit. Unless it was in a fit that you did it. Boom! Hiss! Whatever noise the instruments of murder make.

Banalities.

So I was prepared for him to be at least more original. And he didn’t let me down.

‘I didn’t kill my parents,’ he said, seemingly inconsequentially, and yet very precisely too, as much as to suggest that he had all along been coming to this point, organising his answer not just to the question I had put to him minutes before, but to every question raised by our meeting up again in the first place, if only I’d been patient — ‘I didn’t kill my parents, I simply stopped protecting them.’

The kitchen, I thought, turned very cold.

I wanted to nod, but yet again I did not dare. I also had the feeling that it was important to him that I should be bemused by this; that he needed us to be a long way apart, of no moral or experiential likeness to each other whatsoever.

Ever since he was a child, he went on, he had believed his parents’ safety to be dependent on him and him alone. He could not remember when he hadn’t thought the only thing that stood between them and catastrophe was him. There were dangers all round, and it had been his responsibility to avert them for everybody. He was the reason the house did not burn down or flood. He was the reason they were not burgled and killed in their beds. If his father were to escape being put up against a wall and shot, he, Manny, had to watch over him. He knew what they did to Jewish women. What was to stop them doing it again? There was no indignity or degradation or disaster he did not imagine befalling them. He foresaw everything. Foresaw it photographically, pictured them in a picture book, though not the sort of picture books I made. I could laugh all I liked (I hardly need to point out that I was not laughing), but whatever had happened once could happen again. There was even a sense, though he didn’t expect me to understand this either, in which everything that had happened had happened again, and was happening, and happening to them, despite all his efforts to keep them safe. Asher was no use. Asher was incapable of looking out for anybody. Asher, in fact, was just another of his obligations. If Asher did not fall under a bus or forget to wake up in the morning, if Asher wasn’t found hanging from a tree in the forest with his genitals cut off, that was only because he, Manny, stood guard to see it didn’t happen. He kept them alive, every member of his family, by sheer effort of his will. And kept himself alive for them likewise, because — he didn’t expect me to understand this — these too were among the horrors he imagined on their behalf: his own death, their horror at finding him with all his bones broken at the bottom of the stairs, or drowned in the bath, the grief they would feel, the shock which would itself be enough to kill them, so that he couldn’t take a step without being conscious of his own safety and how much he owed them that, how important it was that he stayed alive for them, that he spared them the anguish of his death. .