Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

Before going to bed I put the tie around my neck. It fell nicely, Ammut the heart-gobbler pushing his snout into my chest. So, had I sinned? Egregiously, if promiscuous suspicion is to be called a sin. For the first time I understood what was meant by a statute of limitation. You pay your debt and that’s enough. But I had weighed down Manny with more crimes than hell had room for, imagining him capable of everything except competence, so that in the end I didn’t know whether to take him seriously or lightly, as a monster or a buffoon, or ultimately as both. And, much as with his father when we played street cricket, trying to hit an ‘eight’ through the window of the dark little room where he sewed himself blind, for no other reason than that he was a Jew of the wrong sort. Suspecting Manny of wishing harm to Dorothy — merely wishing it, no more than that, merely thinking about it — wasn’t the last straw. The last straw was not allowing him, the author of his doom, his own version of events. ‘ But turning on the tap, Manny . .’ What right did I have to insist on the appropriate language to describe a murder, or to demand a proper acknowledgement of guilt, I who sought to contain the world in the panel box of a cartoon and burst into tears the minute a woman in high heels came running at me with a knife?

But even that did not mark the extent to which my wastedisposal jaws had opened. Did he know that I had decided nothing was beyond him? That I piled abomination upon abomination on him until, in my mind, not even a child was safe in his company?

Did he know I’d been watching him at the British Museum? Did the tie imply a commentary on that offence as well? It was possible. But even if Manny hadn’t caught me spying on him, Ammut had.

And now, part crocodile, part lion, part hippopotamus, he was waiting to devour me.

5

I didn’t answer my phone for the next three weeks. I cancelled all social engagements. In another time and in another place I would have wandered into the wilderness. For my heart was withered like the grass.

You can, all on your ownio, even without the help of a Chloë or a Zoë, come to dislike your own mind. ‘Whoso privily slandereth his neighbour, him I will cut off.’ Sometimes, when you’ve steeped your neighbour in slander as high as the offended heavens, you need to cut yourself off.

I took long walks, kicking stones and shaking my head where no one could see me. Had I encountered anyone I knew I would have hidden or pretended to be someone else. Max Glickman? You’ve got the wrong person. Never heard of Max Glickman.

Every three or four days I played back my telephone messages, just in case. A number were from Francine Bryson-Smith, growing bothered that she couldn’t raise me. I detected a note of false concern, as though she expected me to believe that she feared Manny might have gassed me. ‘Everything all right, there? If you’re in, will you pick up? Mmmm. OK.’

It interested me to note that her beauty was no longer audible to me. Was that because she wasn’t speaking live? Did her beauty need an interlocutor in the same way as all beauty is said to need a beholder? I liked the idea that the beauty I normally heard when she spoke directly to me on the phone was an effect we cooked up together, a conspiracy of two. Did that mean I could make her vanish altogether in the end, just by never picking up? I’m not saying I wanted her to be gone. But it was her fault that I had ashes in my mouth, and that I did not want to see my own face in the mirror; had she not come to me out of the blue to put some flesh on her little project, I could have left Manny where I’d safely stowed him all those years before, not to be thought about, expunged, not to be Jewed up all over again in my unpleasant mind. So let her stew. She could wait till I was good and ready.

Ready, anyway.

Then, sandwiched between her messages, came one from Errol Tobias. He, on the other hand, lost nothing of his characteristic loathsomeness when he left a message. You’d have thought it would be the other way round. If the devil has no shadow or reflection, you’d expect him not to be there on an answering machine either. But he came over undiminished. So maybe it was Francine Bryson-Smith who was the devil. Which, as it happens, was exactly what Errol was ringing me to say.

Errol’s message began with a couple of new entries to his Who Is Jewishly Who. Did I know that the porn star Traci Lords was actually born Nora Louise Kuzman, and the porn performance artist Annie Sprinkle was Ellen Sternberg? Neither piece of information moved me much. Annie Sprinkle I knew of, and since she looked and behaved Jewish it was no surprise she was Jewish. Nor did the false name Sprinkle constitute a Gentilisation proper. It was a joke obscenity, even sounded vaguely like a Jewish joke obscenity, and so didn’t count as apostasy. Traci Lords, I was prepared to grant, was different, but as I didn’t know who Traci Lords was I couldn’t manufacture any anger towards her.

When I rang him back to express these views to him, he trumped me with the phallic prince of 1980s and 1990s porno, Ron Jeremy. Jewish. Born Hyatt. What did I make of that?

‘Errol, any fool can see he’s Jewish. And what is more, Jeremy as a surname sounds far more Jewish to me than Hyatt does. It even begins with the first two letters of Jew. Sorry, but I don’t think we can charge him with anything. Except filth, that is.’

‘Whatever you say. You’re the filth artist. Which is presumably why you have a soft spot for this Francine bint.’

‘ Francine bint ? If you’re talking about Francine Bryson-Smith, I don’t have a soft spot for her. But how come you know her, anyway?’

‘As always, we have a friend in common, Max.’

‘Errol, Francine’s not my friend.’

‘I don’t mean her. I mean Kennard Chitty.’

‘The nose man?’

‘As opposed to. .? How many Kennard Chittys are there?’

‘Well, I know just the one. But how do you know him?’

‘I could ask you the same thing, Max.’

‘I haemorrhage from the nostril, Errol. Chitty was my first stop before the otolaryngologist. What’s your excuse? You don’t need a nose job. You’ve barely got a nose.’

‘It isn’t strictly me that has the connection. It’s Melanie. She went to see him, just between ourselves, to get her breasts done.’

‘Melanie went to Kennard Chitty to get her breasts done! Errol, forgive me, but you can’t have bigger breasts than Melanie’s.’

‘To have them made smaller, shmuck. But that’s confidential. You aren’t to say anything when you see her—’

‘Like where have your tits gone, Melanie—’

‘I knew I could count on you.’

‘Won’t you be desolate?’

‘She didn’t go through with it. He dissuaded her.’

‘He dissuaded me too. And I don’t mean from having my breasts reduced. But this is unusual behaviour, wouldn’t you say, from a plastic surgeon.’

‘His heart’s not in it. His heart’s in Jesus.’

‘I know that. That’s why he wouldn’t touch my nose. He won’t cut into Jews because that would be like cutting into the body of Jesus. Do you think that’s why he dissuaded Melanie?’

‘Well, if he can see any trace of Jesus in Melanie, good luck to him. But, yes, he gives her a lot of literature. She burns it all when she gets home, but I think she secretly fancies him. No one’s offered her the missionary position for years.’

‘And you put up with him trying to make a Christian of your wife?’

‘Listen, it gets her out of the house. And anyway, you know my motto. Know your enemy. Which is why I’m ringing you. This Francine Bryson-Shmyson whatever the fuck she calls herself. Be careful. No, don’t be careful, be gone.’