Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

That I became a cartoonist rather than that more verdant creature, a comic-book illustrator, let alone an accountant or a dentist, only goes to show that you don’t always follow your own best impulses, or even know what your impulses are. I recall my mother telling me with horror about a friend of hers who had suddenly fallen victim to a sort of science-fiction sickness known to doctors — in so far as it was known to them at all — as Anarchic (otherwise Alien) Hand syndrome. The poor woman had had a stroke, as a consequence of which the right part of her brain had become disconnected electrically from the left, leaving her right hand in a state of enmity with the rest of her. Sometimes the wayward hand merely wanted to grab on to something which she didn’t — a door, a handle, an object in a supermarket — but at others it sought postively to hinder and embarrass her, and once she woke up choking in the night, on the point of being strangled by it. We are psychologically at war with ourselves, that’s what it comes to. One half of us would destroy the other half if it could, and only the impartial intercession of the body, when it’s well ordered, saves us from self-murder. Let the body become unstrung, however, and we are once again at the mercy of our feuding psyches. So it was with my illustrator’s hand. Although it hasn’t yet attempted to throttle me or put my eyes out — and there is no saying it still won’t — it did, by wanting to draw satirically at all, act independently of me, in mischievous defiance of my nature, which was always melancholy and withdrawn, resistant to laughter and exaggeration, and not at all given to the crude and often cruel hilarity of caricature. To say that one part of me drew cartoons in order to spite the other half which abominated them, might be going too far; but I don’t doubt there was subversion in it, as though my drawing was impelled by hobgoblins or other spritely things of darkness I did not want to acknowledge mine.

‘All boys read comics,’ my mother said.

But I was right and she was wrong. Manny Washinsky had never read a comic in his life. But he, too, wanted someone to play with. So for a dozen Beanos and one Tarzan he swapped me The Scourge of the Swastika . ‘Only I’ll be wanting it back,’ he told me.

‘Then I’ll be wanting my Beanos back.’

‘You can have them back now. I won’t look at them anyway. I’m not allowed.’

‘So why are you giving me this?’

‘I’m not. I’m just lending it you.’

‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

‘The Final Solution.’

‘Is it any good?’ It looked good, if the cover was anything to go by. Blood-red lettering on a cowardy cowardy custard-yellow background. A figure in jackboots, seen from behind and below, as a trodden worm might see him; in his belt a revolver, the jackboots themselves astride the globe, like the very portals of the earth. And between his legs, viewed from a distance, cowering and hopeless, with nowhere to hide, the trodden-worm masses of the Jewish people.

More than that, it appeared well thumbed.

‘There are supposed to be photographs in it,’ Manny told me, ‘but my parents ripped them out.’

I wondered why that was.

Manny pulled a face. ‘They said I could see them when I was older.’

The book itself, though I can recite half of it to this day, I have no memory of actually sitting down and reading. So I must have imbibed its contents some other way. And eventually, courtesy of Errol Tobias who had his own copy — the street, it turned out, was awash with The Scourge of the Swastika — I got to see the missing photographs as well.

On consideration I think Manny’s parents were right to have kept them from him. The pity was that he got to see them in the end.

The pity was that any of us did.

6

Emanuel Eli Washinsky was found guilty of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility in 1973. The year of my first divorce. And the year Syria and Egypt coordinated a surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, also on the basis of diminished responsibility. So a big year for Jews. In fact the Yom Kippur War was a bit of a godsend for Manny, in that the consternation and anger it generated distracted attention from his trial. That’s assuming he cared one way or another by that time.

The crime itself had been committed the year before. I was gone from the neighbourhood when it happened. I was plying my trade. Living modestly in London and selling my cartoons — this was well before my Tom of Finland phase — to whoever would buy them: Punch, Private Eye , the Spectator , I wasn’t particular. I doubt I had yet developed an individual style. Baleful I suppose was the word for what I did — incongruities, absurdities and falsities eyed splenetically and in the English manner: Gillray, Rowlandson et al, but more fingery in the line, more persnickety, and without the current affairs. Not yet on an epic scale, you might say. But then the epic scale I was reserving for what really mattered to me — Five Thousand Years of Bitterness . Yes, it had been our book, a Stroganoff Brothers production, but Manny had washed his hands of it, both spiritually and intellectually, years before. Blasphemous. Unclean. Unfunny. So I felt that the moral rights to it had reverted to me. Besides, I wasn’t using any of his words. Beyond a few necessary AARGH!s and SPLAT!s and SKREEAAAK!s there were no words. Just pictures. Illustrations, in the grotesque mode and with lots of colour — think Dr Doom as drawn by Goya — of what successive generations of bastards had done to us in every corner of the globe. Graphic novels hadn’t even happened yet, so I was at the vanguard of comic history. Not that I was drawing fiction. This was graphic history. And not just any graphic history. The graphic history.

I wasn’t rushing. No one was breathing down my neck. When I finished it I finished it, and when I finished it the world would notice. That wasn’t arrogance, merely the certainty without which you cannot do the work. The only people I couldn’t imagine reading it with pleasure were the Germans, though I have since learned that collective guilt, if you know how to work it, can sell books in piles as high as bones. In the meantime I could just about earn enough to keep me in cigarettes, Bell’s whisky, and the sort of Gentile women — awe-inspiring and essentially ill-disposed to me — who made me go weak at the knees. Being squeezed through the divorce courts by Chloë, post St Matthew Passion , had depressed my spirits and strained my finances, but I felt that when I needed more I could always draw more. As for running out of ideas, the proposition would have struck me as laughable. I was the fruit of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness which meant that I was heir to Five Thousand Years of Jokes.

It was from my mother that I first heard about the Washinskys’ tragedy. A phone call at an odd hour. The call you know, from the time and from the ringtone, bodes only ill.

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I have something very terrible to tell you.’

‘Is it Shani?’

‘No, it isn’t anybody in the family. We ’re all all right. It’s the Washinskys. Something unbearably awful has happened. Oh, Max, I don’t know how to start to tell you.’

Although she had moved out of Crumpsall Park soon after Shani left, installing herself and Tsedraiter Ike into a maisonette in more salubrious Prestwich, with the intention of renting out our old house for extra income, she was back in it again for reasons of economy, neither she nor Tsedraiter Ike being capable of administering a property, or of earning a penny any other way come to that. A family feature — our hopelessness with money. Always some retrenchment in the offing, though never when it came to shoes, or indeed to any other aspect of my mother’s appearance which had altered after my father died only in that sadness rendered it the more exquisite and, by Crumpsall standards, expensive. It was from our old house, anyway, in our old street and on our old phone, that she was ringing me. Though I rarely visited Crumpsall any more I could see it all as if I’d been there only the day before. Dread can do this. My skin turned cold and I saw the street, saw Manny whom I hadn’t seen in years, saw his father sewing at the front window, saw the neglected garden, the forlorn weeds growing through the cracks in the paving stones, the paint long peeled from every door and window frame, giving the house not so much a derelict as a blanched, bled-white appearance, saw Manny’s mother peering out of an upstairs window to look for him, frightened for him and frightened for herself, not wanting to show her face, not trusting her neighbours or the light of day, no longer welcoming home the men of the family as she used to do before her family was made a laughing stock, and saw Manny swinging from a rope in his bedroom, his eyes bulging, his body hanging like an empty sack. Then I heard the wailing, centuries old.