Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

I couldn’t let him alone. In some way I could not explain or give any reason for, I wanted to call him to my account. The State had completed its business with him. For all I knew God had completed His business with him. Now I needed us to settle our affairs. But what on earth did Manny have to answer to me for?

I drank more coffee, wondering what I would do if I didn’t find him, then saw him, much as if he’d been there all along and I hadn’t known how to look, sitting at a strange angle, half on, half off a swivel stool, at a table with a group of six or seven children, Asians or Arabs or Israelis. I wasn’t sure, from the distance between us, whether the Azams were among them. Assuming that they didn’t visit the British Museum every day, it was hardly a reasonable expectation that they should have been. Unless Manny had been in secret communication with them, which was surely impossible. But he looked at home with them, whoever they were, examining with minute interest what they’d bought from the museum shop, joining them in winding thongs around his wrists, opening books as they did, in that violent way of children, as though they meant to throw away the page now that they had finished with it. And they, in turn, appeared to be enchanted with him, light flashing from the fishpools of their Heshbon eyes when he played the fool, laughing like the children of gods when he pretended to a panic because he could not free his finger from a Chinese finger-trap in which one of them had trapped him. That’s if he was pretending.

Nutters get on with children, I had observed that before. Maybe their size is right. Maybe they don’t notice the nuttiness. I won’t go down the route of claiming that they share visionary qualities. They looked as at ease with him as they were with one another, anyway. So much so that I found myself wondering whether he had a paternal gift which, tragically, he had never found the opportunity to exercise. He was up against uncommonly good opposition. At every other table a father was demonstrating the art of modern parenting: holding his child to his chest so he could plug in to the soothing beating of Daddy’s heart, kneeling to point out a detail of architecture or sculpture — ‘You see that statue, there, of a man on a horse’ — showing infinite patience in the face of a display of blank unreasonableness for which a father of my father’s generation would have sent us to our rooms without dinner. Finished, all that. No more patriarchs. The boy-father of today, mindful of every psychological scar in the catalogue, strews rose petals before his offspring’s baby feet. Which doesn’t augur well for circumcision. Or any other of the Primal Father’s cruel exactions, come to that. We are falling out of moral fashion. Once upon a time, confusing circumcision with castration, the Gentiles saw us as an effeminised people. They even believed we menstruated. The men, I mean. So degenerate were we, we bled like women. Hence our unquenchable thirst for Gentile babies’ blood: we had to replenish our own exhausted stocks. Chloë — speaking of my having been effeminised — took me to see an S&M allleather Salomé in Hamburg once, partly for the satisfaction of drawing my attention to the dramatis personae — Jew One, Jew Two, Jew Three, Jew Four, Jew Five. ‘You’re all essentially so alike,’ she said, ‘I think calling you by numbers is as satisfactory a system as any. From now on I’ll know you as Jew Thirteen.’ But chiefly she wanted me to hear what peevish, caterwauling eunuchs Richard Strauss had made us. The squeaking Jew, without a sinew in his body.

Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we were too harsh.

Watching Manny with the children, you might have picked him for our saviour. Thanks to Manny, unselfconsciously engrossed with kids, as restless and awkward at the table as they were, without any pretence to Old Testament authority — Manny shy, Manny gentle, Manny wriggling about — we had a future. I caught myself smiling watching him, as though he were a child of mine. I had sent him out to play — Go on, swap comics with them — and he had found himself some little friends. I won’t pretend I wasn’t even upset by the sight, as though I knew I would eventually have to let him go. It was only when I saw him reach along to touch the hair of the boy sitting next door but one to him — so it wasn’t anybody’s hair; it was specifically this child’s hair he wanted to touch, hair as gleaming dark as damson jam — that I took fright. The man had spent half his life behind bars, his mind impaired by abnormality. Of what he had done or become in prison, of how he had solaced himself, or imagined solacing himself, I knew nothing. It wasn’t completely out of the question that he had a gun on him. And I was smiling benevolently on the easy way he had with children. Had I taken leave of my senses?

Out of the question to go over and haul him out. And I certainly wasn’t going to call someone in British Museum uniform and tell him my suspicions. If he needed watching, I would watch him. He wouldn’t be there all day. Children don’t have long attention spans. Neither did he. It wouldn’t be hard for me to sit him out, and so little notice did he pay his surroundings, so uninterested was he in anyone but his coal-eyed Lilliputian company, that there was no danger he would see me, or guess my purpose, however intense my scrutiny.

The party stayed together another half an hour. In that time I did not see Manny do anything untoward, unless the simply being with them was untoward enough. He did not again touch anyone’s hair. And even that touch, as I replayed my memory of it, was the merest brush; however deliberate, as innocent as we can these days allow any touching by an adult of a child to be. A man might put his palm up against a slab of stone or run a piece of material between his fingers and be suspected of more devious intention. When they got up to leave, Manny with them, I followed at a distance. I watched them walk down the steps into the sunlight, and then disperse, callously in the way of children, barely pausing to say goodbye to him, one group skipping off purposefully through the main gate, the other apparently going in search of someone they were expecting — a parent, a teacher, another friend. Manny stood in the courtyard and looked at the sky. He had not exchanged anything you could call a familiarity with a single one of them. He had not even shaken their hands. Just a brief unanswered wave, and then the sky.

I couldn’t see his face. But from the tilt of his head I wondered if he was yammering. You can always tell, even from behind, when a person is grieving. There is some ravage in the posture. And something in the air about them that tells you that your being there, observing or not observing, is a profanity.

I didn’t call his name. Nor did I follow him. He had got here on his own. He could get back. I was not his keeper.

I stayed out late, sitting in cafés, sketching. Nothing malicious. Where I didn’t see anything I liked, I didn’t draw it. When I returned I found a little package waiting for me in a British Museum plastic bag. It contained a tie. A silk British Museum tie illustrated with a scene from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. An elegant little card, explanatory of the scene, came with the tie. Ani and his wife Tutu watch as Ani’s heart is weighed in the balance against an ostrich feather representative of Maat, goddess of truth and justice. Anubis, the canine god of the dead, affirms the accuracy of the scales. Ammut, the obscene waste-disposer of the netherworld, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, stands ready to devour any heart made heavy by sin.

There was no message with the package. But then what was there to say?

When I looked into Manny’s room this time I was certain his cardboard case would be gone. And it was.