Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

I envied him. I would have liked to look the way he looked, at least before the affair with the fire-yekelte ruined his life. Marked black, like Cain.

So had I been the detective in charge of the investigation, I’d have known where to look. And where were you, Mr Asher Washinsky, between the hours of. .

But that was to jump the gun. Who’d said anything about a police investigation? What reason did I have to believe there was a suspect?

Asher? Well, in fact it was my mother’s understanding that for all the rumours of his having gone to ground in the furthest corners of the earth, he had in fact returned recently to Manchester. The police found him living round the corner, woke him in the middle of the night and told him the appalling news. ‘Maxie, it’s so upsetting. They say he doubled over when he heard, as though someone had shot him. He’s been spitting blood and howling like an animal.’

I took that with a pinch of salt. How did anybody know how Asher had behaved in the presence of the midnight policeman? And as for spitting blood, it was what Jewish sons were said to do when their parents died. It was a manner of speaking, a metaphor for the enormity of their grief. I hadn’t so far spat blood myself, but I had howled right enough. Howled and howled.

‘And does anybody know what exactly happened?’ I asked.

‘No. The Greens next door smelled a leak. It was they who called the police. We’re lucky there wasn’t an explosion. The whole street could have gone up.’

I knew what my late father would have said. They shouldn’t be allowed gas when they’re in that condition. People as primitive as the Washinskys oughtn’t to be trusted with modern inventions. They crashed their cars. They turned their stoves and ovens into ancient altars which needed the breath of Yahweh or failing that a disrespected member of the Gentile working classes to light them on the Shabbes. And now they’re gassing themselves.

‘So is that what they’re thinking? Just a leak?’

‘ Just ? Maxie, you sound disappointed.’

I sighed. Did I? Would I have wanted it to be something else? Robbery with violence? Hard to imagine any robber with his head screwed on supposing the Washinskys had anything to steal, other than mezuzahs and menorahs and tefillin bags. And a few scrag ends of whatever fur it was that Selick Washinsky sewed into whatever garment it was he sewed. Not mink, not Persian lamb, not ocelot — nothing precious was surely ever allowed in to that decaying house. As for an assault by Jew-haters, we would have heard, my mother would have known by now, the whole of Jewish Crumpsall would have been in uproar. The desecration, the swastikas, the burning crosses nailed to the garden gate. You can’t keep those quiet. Leak it was then. Ho-hum. Having laid them down side by side in my imagination, blanched of their sins by whoever had gassed them, I was ready, since no one had gassed them, to leave them to their eternal rest. I hadn’t really known them when I’d known them, and hadn’t seen or thought about them for years. Their going made no material difference to me. And I had never been able or allowed to penetrate Manny’s affective system. Did he care about them? Love them? Would he spit blood and howl when he found out? God knows.

So even for him I couldn’t feel their loss.

Done and dusted. A gas leak. Very sad. Very sad indeed. End of perturbation. Back to my cartoons.

I had an inadequate sense of them as human beings. A terrible confession, I acknowledge. But I am, despite occasional departures from his teaching, my father’s son. Something makes me except the devout from the human family, no matter that the heat of their lair had beguiled me once. They step out by virtue of their other-worldliness, so I leave them there. Had the decently secularised parents of some far more distant friend than Manny been found gassed in their beds I’d have lain awake for weeks picturing their torment. But because of the odour of mouldering prohibition in their house, because of the stained black trilby that Selick Washinsky wore for synagogue every Shabbes morning, because of the poverty of Channa Washinsky’s wardrobe (nothing that would have done for even the most modest of my mother’s kalooki friends to wipe her nose on), because of the holy books that occupied their bookshelves instead of encyclopaedia and romances, the torn siddurim they took out to read from on Friday nights, the holy writ or mumbo-jumbo as my father used to call it, because of all the junk there was to touch and kiss, and start in superstitious trepidation from, I couldn’t feel for Manny anything of what I should have felt. I couldn’t anticipate his horror. Beyond a passing sadness for him, such as the death of someone’s animal might bring, God help me, I couldn’t participate in his grief. Is this the explanation of the Five Thousand Years of Persecution, of the pogroms, of the Shoah even, is this the answer to the age-old question — How Could They Do It? — that the perpetrators of these crimes were able to do what they did because those on whom they visited inhumanity did not themselves seem to be of humanity? No excuse. You should not visit inhumanity on a dog. But people do and it is important we understand how and why. Or maybe I am merely seeking to forgive myself.

There it is, anyway. Two people with whom I hadn’t exactly grown up, but who had been intimate figures in my landscape, no matter that they were mostly figures of distaste, the parents of a boy I had at one time been as close to as I have to anybody — two elderly, God-revering, God-startled people with whom my life, like it or not, had been accidentally entwined, two Jews, two more Jews, lay gassed in their beds and other than a brief essay into the picturesque I could neither envision the scene with any pity worth speaking of, nor lament their passing.

So that when Manny was reported the next day as having handed himself over to the police, very quietly and with no histrionics confessing that he had crept into his parents’ bedroom while they slept, turned on the taps of their little gas fire, made a mound of sheets outside their door to stop up ventilation, and slipped out of the house, I felt that it was my guilt he had owned up to.

1

I didn’t go to Manny’s trial. Why should I have? I wasn’t his friend. I was in America at the time, getting over Chloë and trying to interest the New Yorker in my cartoons. Absurd. I should have been in San Francisco talking to the publishers of Zap . I had known about the underground comic revolution since my student days, and had even ripped off some early Robert Crumb for a rag-week publication. Whatever contradictions fuelled, or at this time failed to fuel my cartooning, I would have been better throwing in my lot with overt rudery and dysfunction, rather than trying to gain acceptance from the effete mob that ran the New Yorker . But I was an English Jew — that was my dysfunction — and somehow English Jews have had all the rudery squeezed out of them.

My only contact with the New Yorker was Yolanda Eitinger, a fact-checker with no sense of the ridiculous who had once been married to someone I’d palled out with at art college. A bigamist. Not Yolanda, the man she thought she’d married. When Yolanda found out the truth she returned to New York, combed her hair down in front of her face, doubled the thickness of her lenses, and fact-checked the life out of every piece that landed on her desk. ‘I’ve got a portfolio of funnies with me,’ I told her over the phone, ‘but I’m not bringing them in if you’re going to set about checking their veracity.’