Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

The day after my father died my mother threw Beatrice Potter’s words into the dustbin. Beating when she took up kalooki again by more than a week.

The point about ‘social morality’ anyway is that it hadn’t only been in order to protect the Selick Washinskys of the world from unscrupulous sweaters that agitators like my father’s father had encouraged Jewish tradesmen to go on strike; it had been to protect all Jews from themselves, to save them from an imputation which, true or not, threatened — as witness what eventuated in Germany — their very existence. For our failure to make connections we would pay a heavy price. But that was then. Who, other than a few of my father’s firebrand pals, cared about ‘social morality’ now? Let Selick Washinsky labour all the hours God sent if that was what he chose to do. His lookout if he sold himself cheap. His eyes to ruin. He wasn’t putting anyone else out of work. Dark little men in other socially amoral parts of the world were now doing that. You had, though, to call a spade a spade, and the spectacle of him bent over his sewing machine turned all our stomachs.

Why he was such a vexation to us, the kids of the street — not a one of whom was a communist or trade unionist — or such a trouble to our games which he never bothered to observe or threatened to disrupt, I don’t know. But so long as he was at his window he bugged us. When we dragged a bin into the road to be a wicket and took guard or ran up to bowl, there he was in the corner of our eye, not an incidental obstacle but the very thing we had to hit, the end and object of our game. Four runs if we smashed the ball into the main road, six if we drove at Washinsky’s window, and eight (though that was normally the conclusion of the innings, tantamount to a declaration) if we managed to break it. Similarly with tennis. Traffic was light enough then for us to throw a line across the street and have to take it down only in the early evening, at rush hour when we could expect about three cars to want to come through. Almost peaceful but for disagreements as to whether a ball had gone over the net or under it, and Washinsky concentrating on his needle, ever-present like an umpire with his mind elsewhere. Fifteen-love if your first serve was an ace; thirty-love if you aced it into Washinsky’s garden. Game if you got him to look up.

Jew-baiting was what it was. And we were all Jews who were doing it.

And I, who was in a manner of speaking — as someone close to Manny — a friend of the family? I was worse than anybody. I would have goaded him to death had it been in my power to do so. But then I had an excuse. I was close to Manny.

I was the first, anyway, to hit an eight. I’d clattered his window a few times when I’d been at the crease and got him to glare and wave his hands at us, but that summer we’d graduated from a soft to a hard cricket ball — the fearsome corkie which stung your fingers just to look at it — and when you hit a corkie at someone’s window there was only one outcome. We heard the glass shatter, clean like a rifle shot at first, and then a sound like a whole city coming apart, whereupon we exchanged looks of triumph mixed with terror, cheered, then ran in different directions, all for none and none for all, leaving the bin in the middle of the road. I don’t know how Washinsky knew it was I who struck the ball, maybe he just guessed, maybe he understood the perverse logic that made me, as his son’s best friend, his worst enemy, but whatever his reasoning it was me he gave chase to, finally cornering me — no one locking their doors in those days — in the parlour of my own house.

I calculate that it was early summer, one of the long hot evenings of a northern June, because there were not many days in the year when we could have been playing cricket in the street at the same time as my mother was playing kalooki in the parlour. It was one of her quieter schools, no more than half a dozen of her friends plus my sister who had obviously been dragged in to make up the numbers. Shani was sitting at the card table when I made my unmannerly entrance, one leg up, taking advantage of a pause in the proceedings to effect running repairs to the paint on her toenails. She had my mother’s lovely narrow legs and ankles, fine as a giraffe’s. And the same burnished, aristocratic bearing, even when she was jackknifed in this manner, looking as though she was meaning to suck her own toes. Something of one of Degas’s self-absorbed dancers about her. Until the moment she opened her mouth, you would have picked Shani for an Abyssinian princess.

‘What’s he want?’ she said, the first to register me in a sweat and Selick Washinsky in hot pursuit, all the other women being engrossed in totting up their points.

‘Shani!’ my mother reprimanded her, looking up, ‘that’s no way to talk.’

Not expecting to have wound up at one of my mother’s kalooki nights, Selick Washinsky held up the palms of his hands, as though to stave off whatever irreligious thoughts crowd in on a pious man pursuant to a game of cards and a roomful of women with uncovered heads, all sucking on the little gold pencils my mother never omitted to provide.

‘My apologies, Mrs Glickman,’ he said, straightening his braces and worrying at the tails of his shirt which had come out of his trousers. ‘This is neither the time nor the place. Your boy Max has just deliberately broken my window — after several months of trying, I might add — but I will discuss it with your husband another time.’

Somehow foreign, he sounded. Though he was born in England and had almost certainly lived here every day of his life, a strange intercontinental Jewishry of inflection, such as the most English of rabbis will employ when on Jewish business — a burring or doubling of an r here, a lisping of an s there — appeared to take possession of him. Romanian, was it? South African? County Cork with a hint of the Bronsk washed down with Novoropissik?

‘At least have some tea,’ my mother said, a touch intercontinentally herself, I thought, the condition being infectious. Then, presumably remembering that the Orthodox love kummel — ‘a Russian peasant concoction the colour of goat’s piss’ was how my father liked to describe it — she offered him a peach brandy.

‘Do we have peach brandy?’ Shani said.

From the other kalooki players, too, expressions of curiosity. Peach brandy? Now you’re talking.

But Washinsky was not staying. He touched his hat. .

More cartoonery. He wore no hat. I cannot make myself see him with his head bare, but bare I believe it was. No hat, no skullcap either. So what did he touch? His ears, I think. He touched his ears as though he had a migraine. Terrible for me now to think I brought a migraine on. A broken window is one thing, but terrible to think I hurt the mind of a man who would one day be murdered by his own son.

He hadn’t coloured, I noticed. Though acutely embarrassed, he didn’t have the blood to change colour, unless he turned a little yellower. ‘Let’s say we let it go this time, with a warning,’ he said, burring and lisping, backing out, almost bowing, the way he had come. I now realise that the spectacle of my mother’s kalooki companions, all made up for the occasion, their hair flagrantly abundant, their eyes afire with the excitement of cards, their faces turned towards him in ironically ladylike surprise, an expectancy of peach brandy moistening their lips, must have been very daunting to him, he a man who I must guess had only ever had intimate knowledge of one woman, she being the unfortunate Mrs Washinsky, a woman of no shape, presence or vitality, though not of course deserving of dying before her time for that.

‘Who’s he warning?’ Shani asked, but by then my mother had shown him, with her exaggerated courtesy, out of the house.