Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

CHOKE!He could expose himself to her. He has thought of that a thousand times. Look. Remember? Remember me?AARGH!But what would he achieve by exposing himself to her? And what if he exposed himself erect? How would that serve his cause? Still weird after all these years, is that what he wishes her to see? Still fucked in the head?She clasps her hands together.GULP!Should he ask why she hates Jews? Or will she tell him he’s raving. I don’t hate Jews. You’re raving. So what should he say to her? SSSSS! You are a very bad person. SSSSS! The train SCREECHES! to a halt. The doors SSSSSLIDE! open. This is her chance. Run for it.RUN! as you ran the last time. RUN! as you ran from those who allowed you to run because they didn’t know what else to do with you. RUN! from yourself.She is in front of him again, RUNNING! The lozengepattern dress is tight across her back. It is a young mother’s dress, not an old lady’s. She looks ludicrous in a dress that clings, and then makes a soft sucking sound when it comes away from her thighs. Something more becoming would be more becoming. And a stick. If she had a stick he could attack her with it. An eye for an eye, a stick for a stick.THWAAAACK!The platform is deserted. Not even a rat wants to be down here.‘HAVE PITY!’ she cries as he pursues her. ‘PLEASE!’You dream that they will beg you to HAVE PITY! You promise that if you ever again meet them and they beg you to HAVE PITY! you will devote the rest of your days to the service of Elohim. Not a lot to ask. Just sit them next to me in a JEW JEW! train, have them beg me to show PITY! and I am yours, O Lord.He is gaining on her, which isn’t difficult, given her age, given her dress, given her fear, when she loses her footing. It is all in slow motion, all happening in high, narrow incontrovertible frames, the wicked falling from the height of their wrongdoing, the good almost static in their icy vengefulness, never to be satisfied, inconsolable.She falls, frame by frame she goes over, just as another train is coming into the station.JEW JEW! JEW JEW!He stands stiller than justice, and watches. The train, the woman, the train, the woman, the train SPLAAAAT! the train.And then the faces in the window, each as blank and pitiless as his own.Thank you, Elohim. Have pity? NO!‘What happened?’ people gather from nowhere to ask. ‘Ever see her before?’‘No,’ he answers, averting a head which is blackened, however the shadows fall on him. ‘No, she. .’

Then as to no one, his back turned, impassive, sepulchral, denied, as the impenetrable dark swallows him — it’s the number of shades of darkness he has found that you admire the cartoonist for, that and the elegant chasteness of the overall design — ‘She was a perfect stranger.’

Yisgadal veyiskadash. .

For my mother this time. They all leave you. One by one, they all depart. Yisgadal veyiskadash shemey rabo, Be’olmo di’vero chir’usey . May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified in the world He created as He willed. Amen.

I had not been expecting it. She had been growing forgetful, but she had lost little of her slender youthfulness, even her ankles still worth stealing a glance at had any of her old admirers been alive. And I had thought that kalooki, if nothing else, would keep her immortal. You live to a riper age, they say, if you stay mentally agile. The more you perplex your mind, the longer it works for you. Kalooki wasn’t quantum mechanics but it did engage her in calculations that needed a bit of knotting out. Not just computing what you could do with the cards you held yourself, but what everyone else could be expected to do with theirs. Likelihood theory. What must Ilsa Cohen have in her hand for her to have discarded the jack of spades. How would Gittel Franks respond, knowing Gittel Franks, if you held on to your cards for one round more. The trouble was that Ilsa Cohen, though nominally alive in defiance of her own rogue hand’s attempts to do away with her, had lost her mind and was languishing in an old persons’ home where at least, Shani told me, the staff continued to paint her fingernails with hearts and diamonds, spades and clubs. And Gittel Franks had collapsed and died while being Shirley Bassey at a karaoke night thrown to celebrate her great-granddaughter’s sixteenth birthday. Not all at once, though the shock of realisation was sudden enough, my mother woke up to the fact that they were leaving her. And you can’t play kalooki on your own.

They stopped coming and that was the end of it. She barely had what you could call an illness. Her heart failed. It was as simple as that.

Shani rang me and I flew back up. You can’t hang around when it comes to Jewish burial. Blink and they’ve put your mother in the ground. Habdalah. Keep the quick from the dead.

Shani and I hugged for a long time. We weren’t hugging siblings but we were on our own now. We said the usual things, that it was good she hadn’t suffered, that she went as she would have chosen to go, that she had loved Dad and stayed faithful to him, and how touching it was that she had viewed that — though she could easily have had another nibble, another bite even, at romance — as the one and only important relationship of her life. I began to say I wished her time had not been given over so exclusively to a simple card game; that it was a pity she never went to the theatre or the opera, a tragedy that she didn’t read, that she didn’t listen to good music, that she didn’t welcome abstract thought, that she hadn’t, as a Jew, availed herself of Jewish seriousness — but Shani reminded me that that could just as easily have been her life I was describing. ‘It’s not a sin to be a philistine,’ she told me. And I didn’t tell her that for a Jew I thought it was.

Mick Kalooki tried hard, for Shani’s sake, not to go to pieces. But it wasn’t easy. Only in the nick of time was Shani able to stop him ordering a wreath for the coffin in the shape of a deck of cards. He couldn’t understand why not. Why shouldn’t Leonora be buried surrounded not only by those she loved but in the company, so to speak, of what she loved? It was tough, without hurting his feelings as an honorary Jew, trying to explain to him that Jews didn’t as a general rule do flowers in a big way at funerals, and never at all on the coffin itself. Flowers at funerals were common and showy. The word MOM made of pink roses was unthinkable to a Jew. POP done with red geraniums the same. Simplicity was the thing. An austere simplicity before the great democracy of death. Start having flowers on your coffins and soon the rich man will be buried in greater pomp than the pauper.

‘It’s a very beautiful religion,’ Mick said. He was unable to keep the tears back.

He loved my mother. But I also knew it upset him to realise there were elements of Judaism he was never going to master. All those hours put into k’nish and kreplach, and still flowers for the dead could floor him.

I lost all control of myself at the cemetery. When it came to the shovelling of soil on to my mother’s coffin — a mitzvah for a Jew, a sacred duty of love — I staggered back from the grave and let the shovel fall from my hand. I couldn’t throw dirt on her. I couldn’t accept her returned to dust. If it had to be, it had to be, but I didn’t have to be party to it. Shani took me by the hand, like a mother with her child, and helped me. We held the shovel together, but I was unable to look. Just hearing it was bad enough. Gravel on wood. The end of us.

As I was leaving the cemetery I saw Manny. He was wearing a long black coat and a yarmulke. Had he not been standing at a distance from most of the other mourners, as though he believed he had no real right to be there, he could have been mistaken for the officiating rabbi. A little old rabbi flown in from Novoropissik to do the business as they used to do it in the old country. I went over to him and held out my hand. He wished me ‘long life’. I inclined my head. I hoped he was not going to say he envied me not having a mother.