Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

I doubt anybody who knew the Washinskys would have pictured any other scene had they been told only what my mother had so far told me. Sit down. Something unbearably awful has happened . .

Manny. What else could you think? Manny had taken his life. The likelihood had always been that he would kill himself, he had talked about killing himself, had even practised killing himself, and now he’d done it.

’Who found him?’ I asked. The hanging part was so to be expected, the only drama was in the discovery.

‘Manny? Nobody’s found him. Nobody knows where he is.’

My skin turned a little colder.

‘Ma,’ I said, ‘what’s happened?’

‘Well, it’s unclear. There are still police in the street. The house is cordoned off, Maxie. It’s too terrible.’

‘Ma, just tell me what’s happened.’

‘Channa and Selick have been found dead.’

‘Christ!’

‘In their beds, Max. They think gassed.’

‘Gassed!’

‘I know.’

You don’t say ‘gassed’ to Jews if you can help it. One of those words. They should be struck out of the human vocabulary for a while, while we regroup, not for ever, just for a thousand years or so — gassed, camp, extermination, concentration, experiment, march, train, rally, German. Words made unholy just as ground is made unholy.

Side by side, holding hands, was how I imagined them. Like a devout Christian couple engraved in cathedral brass. Staring up at the dome from which Lord Jesus in a night sky of stars and angels looks down in celestial majesty. I had never seen inside their bedroom, but supposed it must have been like the rest of their house — unaired, unloved, not exactly unclean but uncared for, clothes and linen thrown about the floor, bare bulbs hanging from the ceilings, the furniture gaping stuffing, everything broken, the world of here and now a tribulation to them, and yet nothing suggestive of the spiritual life either, unless the flotsam of Judaic tat, cheap household objects adorned with Hebrew lettering, torn prayer books, fringed vestments thrown over the backs of chairs, and yes, yes, the odd angelically ignited candle, could be said to constitute spirituality. But the gassing of them somehow cleaned up around them. Gassed, they had joined the sacred millions, photographs of whose piled-up bodies I had first seen in Lord Russell of Liverpool’s The Scourge of the Swastika , the righteous by virtue of victimisation, and no one stood judgement on their domestic surroundings.

Into the spaces my mother was granting me to digest the news, a stray thought flew.

‘What about Asher?’

Asher was Manny’s older brother. Somehow farshimelt and dashing in the past tense — dashed — all at once. Hollowed out, was how he had looked to me, great black volcanic gouges for eyes, and a sunken, tubercular chest. There was a touch of that about Manny too, but in his case you imagined that he had simply never inhaled enough fresh air, that his were coward’s lungs, whereas in Asher you saw someone made ill by late nights, if not alcohol then coffee, and if not debauch then at least the imagination of debauch. All guesswork on my part. I hardly knew him. He appeared a handful of times to keep Jewish assembly at our school — that’s to say to look after the Jewish kids while the Gentiles were hymning their saviour in the hall. He was meant to be teaching us Hebrew, or at least occupying us Hebraically, but all we did was chant a few letters of the Hebrew alphabet and throw chalk at him. He made no attempt to keep us in order. When a piece of chalk hit him he would smile and put it in his pocket. He was unnerving. He was somewhere else in his head.

Because he was six or seven years older than Manny he had never figured in our conversation, never came out to offer us his opinion on The Scourge of the Swastika , never followed us into the air-raid shelter to make suggestions for Five Thousand Years of Bitterness , and for all I knew was unaware that he even had a brother, let alone that his brother had a friend. But although he wasn’t much in evidence in person, rumours about him had circulated freely, stories so wild and contradictory it was hard to believe they referred to the same person. Now he was a teacher at a Talmud Torah somewhere in the Midlands, and such was his popularity that children cried to be allowed to go to his lessons. A businessman in New York who happened to be in the Midlands at the time was so impressed by Asher’s methods that he was funding him to set up a string of chederim — Sunday schools for Jews — all over the United States. But the next week he was out of work, penniless, keeping bad company, haunting low dives, in such deep trouble morally that his parents had disowned him, and not only disowned him but actually recited the prayers for the dead over him. And there’s only one reason why devout Jewish families ever do that. A shikseh!

Asher and a shikseh! The whole of Crumpsall was abuzz with it.

Could Asher — training to be a rabbi — really have been found in bed with the fire-yekelte who was three times his age, a sootyfingered woman in an apron who only ever visited the house on Saturday, and who therefore must have seduced or been seduced by him on the Sabbath? Count the sins against Leviticus, count the number of abominations the Washinskys would have enumerated in that! Once the most reserved family in the street, the Washinskys were suddenly waking us all up in our beds with their cursing. So violently did they turn on one another that Selick Washinsky had to be carried out on a stretcher, collapsing after trying to tear his son’s heart out. If the father didn’t kill the son, the son would kill the father. ‘Help!’ Channa Washinsky ran out into the street to cry. ‘They are murdering each other!’ My own father was dying at the time. I recall our concern that the last weeks of his sublunary sleep should not be disturbed by the war that had broken out between the Washinskys. But what could we do? A family had a right to rip itself apart if it wanted to. My father even found a sort of consolation in it. With luck these were the death throes of the Orthodox. They would tear themselves to shreds and that would be the end of this strange passage of ahistoricity and fancy dress which Jewish history had entered. Then all things stopped together: my father’s breathing and the Washinskys’ shouting. Asher, like my father, was spirited away. To a yeshiva in the North-East, it was said, Gateshead no doubt, where Manny, too, went years later, and then to some convalescent camp in Lymm in Cheshire. I might have the order of those exiles wrong. Both were terrifying destinations; places of oblivion to my sense, like those schools in Dickens to which parents sent children they did not love in the hope of never hearing from them again. Gateshead, closer to Scandinavia than to Manchester, where the boys sat on hard benches and studied the head-hurting subtleties of Jewish law all day. Draitheboys Hall. Lymm no better. Always a stigma attaching to Lymm, as though the bad-chested boys who went there had brought their badness on themselves.

Manny talked to me about Asher only on a couple of occasions. An out-of-bounds confidence never to be repeated or alluded to. As if the extremity that spoke through him drew a magic circle around us. Otherwise, the subject of his brother and his departing from the straight and narrow path of Judaism was closed. Verboten . In later years, Asher Washinsky, now assumed to be a ruined man, was reported to be working as a shammes, a janitor, in a small synagogue in South America, or was it South Africa, or was it South Australia, but he could just as easily have been out drinking himself to death. Or sobbing in some alley. That was what he looked — a wild, hollow, melancholic rake who read the Talmud.