Howard Jacobson: Kalooki Nights

‘I protected and protected and protected them, and then one day’ — I thought he was going to snap his fingers to show how little effort it had cost him to come to his decision, how sudden and serene that ‘one day’ was — ‘I didn’t want to protect them any longer.’

The calm that came off him, like the sudden cold in the kitchen, was preternatural. I had not before been privy to an explanation of a murder. I had no idea what happened next. Would he faint clean away? Would he turn to ashes while I looked at him? Or was it up to me to return him to humanity, to enfold him in my arms and keep him there for however long, however many hours or days or years, it took? The language of professional carers: And who was watching over you, Manny?

But that was not a language, fortunately or unfortunately, over which I possessed the slightest mastery. Who was looking after you, Manny? Who is looking after you now, Manny? Sorry, couldn’t do it. Not within my compass. Didn’t know how and to be truthful didn’t want to. Too emotionally fastidious. The only voice I trusted in myself, face to face with Jews — different with my Gentile wives, but then everything was different with my Gentile wives — was Yahweh’s, the voice of the unforgiving mountain god. Between ourselves — unserer — there were no pardons granted. Between me and the others — anderer — every sort of moral laxity was allowed a voice. But maybe that was because between me and anderer nothing counted. That was how they understood it, anyway. ‘You don’t see me,’ Zoë told me once. ‘I might as well be a ghost. You should be married to a Jew. You only really notice Jews.’ ‘But I love you,’ I told her. ‘I believe you,’ she replied, ‘but what’s that worth when you don’t value love?’

No arms around Manny, anyway. In the eerie cold, only exegetical austerity, yeshiva boy to yeshiva boy. Something did not yet add up. In the logic of events, inaction and action had been elided. ‘But actually turning on the tap, Manny. . Actually bending to the task of doing that, turning on the fucking tap for Christ’s sake. . If that was not an action in itself, but was merely desisting from an action, then you might as well be telling me it was no big deal. .’

‘You think I have been saying it was no big deal? Then you haven’t listened to a word I’ve said.’

And that was it. Spell broken.

He did not lose his temper a second time. He merely, as it were, washed his hands of me. If I wasn’t up to receiving his confidences, I wasn’t. No more to say. There was an air of bruised fatality about him. A man too accustomed to being misunderstood or misconstrued, or simply not listened to, to make a fuss of any new instance of incomprehension.

‘I think I’ll go out now,’ he said.

‘Go out where?’ So far he had never the left house without me. We hadn’t discussed it, but I had taken that to mean he was frightened to be out in London on his own. It touched me rather. He was my charge. I was responsible for him. So ought I to be allowing him out? ‘I’ll come with you,’ I suggested.

He shook his head. ‘I want to walk.’

Walk? Since when did Manny walk? Zikh arumdreying was what Manny did, going around in purposeless circles, but walking. .

‘Where will you walk?’

‘I’ll find somewhere.’

‘Do you want a map? I’ll lend you an A to Z. ’

‘No.’

‘Do you have money?’

‘I’m not your child,’ he said.

‘And I have no desire to be your parent,’ I replied. A remark which in retrospect I realise could have been misconstrued.

I left him to it anyway, taking the papers to my bedroom. There were things I needed to think about. I gave it about an hour, then went back to the kitchen, fully expecting to see him there, staring at his toast. But he was gone. He was gone from Zoë’s old room too. Something about the way he’d left it, something about the half-made bed and the empty bedside table, something suggestive of a final evacuation, made me look for his cardboard suitcase. I admit to being disappointed to discover it was still there.

But since it was, I had no choice but to go through it. He had not emptied his clothes into any of the drawers I had made available to him. Nor had he made use of the wardrobe. There they still were, the few shirts and pairs of trousers he’d come away with. Folded neatly, something he must have learned in prison, because the Washinskys had not been folders. I had never seen clothes so uninvested either with the promise or the memory of life. It wasn’t so much that they were cheap clothes — though they were that, cheap and drab and thin — as that they gave no idea of the person to whom they belonged, why he owned them, according to what principle he had chosen them. Institution clothes were what they looked, to be worn in a place of incarceration. Clothes without expectancy or anticipation. Clothes which might as well have been the cerements of a corpse.

No gun, however. Assuming I’d have known a gun when I saw one, no gun in his case, and no gun under Zoë’s mattress either. Nor anywhere else I searched. Just childish bravado, then, his gun talk.

Unless he had taken it out with him.

4

After two hours persuading myself I didn’t care where the meshuggener had got to, I thought I had better go and look for him. Manny’s well-being in the big city apart, I believed I had a duty of care to the community: it is irresponsible to let a possibly armed homicidal maniac — a person who thinks of murder simply as a cessation of responsibility — out of your sight.

If he was going to be anywhere, he was going to be in the vicinity of the British Museum. There was no other part of London he knew. And he could hardly be said to know that well. Occasionally, when I dropped into the Comic Shop, he would do some second-hand book browsing, but never more than half a block from me. When the sun shone it was understood that if I lost him I would find him again in the courtyard of the British Museum, on a concrete slab if he could grab one, or on the steps, or just standing against the railings looking at the sky. The cafés which he liked he only ever visited with me. A matter of saving money, partly, since I told him we were on expenses and that if I paid I could always claim the money back from Lipsync, but I suspected diffidence also played a part. It was my guess he would not have known how to ask for the chicken-avocado ciabatta I ordered for us when I was feeling stern, or the Nutella and banana pancake I ordered for him when I was feeling indulgent, because he didn’t know what either dish was called.

I tried all the cafés, though, when neither the bookshops nor the courtyard yielded him, going back to each of them three or four times in case he’d shuffled into the one while I was looking in the other. But he wasn’t to be found. And there wasn’t anyone I could ask. Everyone was here for the day only, and would not have remembered him anyway even had they seen him half an hour before. You don’t notice an invisible man.

My own preference, when I was in the area, was for a coffee and a biscuit inside the museum itself, under Norman Foster’s glass roof. I liked seeing the sky while listening to the babble of human voices, a noisy sky appealing to me far more than a silent one. Anthropocentric, one of my art teachers had called me. No eye for what wasn’t human. The Jewish failing. Laws, ethics, Spitzfindigkeit (or kopdreying, to employ the sweeter cartoonery of Yiddish), which means exactly what it sounds: twisting the mind in increasingly over-subtle acts of exegesis — and let nature go hang. Laws, ethics, Spitzfindigkeit , and now Manny. In one sense I was freer of him than I’d been in weeks. He had filled me in. I could stop imagining that if I kept asking I would discover he was innocent of any crime. No, Asher had not done it; Dorothy had not done it; Dorothy’s father — out of motives of fatherly concern and recrudescence of Teutonic loathing — had not done it; Errol Tobias — as an expression of unfocused malignity — had not done it; Shitworth Whitworth — out of whatever hatred governs geography teachers — had not done it; some passing anti-Semite — giving vent to passing anti-Semitism — had not done it; the Washinsksys themselves — sick of the strife and the shame — they had not done it to each other; and nor — as an act of the imagination, hating so virulently the idea of Jew which the Washinskys put into the world that I turned the tap on psychokinetically — nor had I. Manny had done it. Which should have been all right, but wasn’t.