Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

The following day my father repaired Washinsky’s window then came home and handed me a good hiding.

‘We don’t do persecution, Max,’ he told me.

After which our street games went on as before, with this exception: I felt sheepish about lobbing balls into Washinsky’s garden or hitting eights through his window while he was sewing lining into a stole, and managed to avoid doing either — I think without being rumbled by the others — for what remained of the summer.

Manny Washinsky was not, of course, party to these games. Mainly we didn’t play together, mainly we talked God, the death camps, and Five Thousand Years of Bitterness ; but when games were called for and it was just him and me, we’d throw a tennis ball at a penny, trying to get it to flip over, or flick cigarette cards against the wall. The moment anything more communal was afoot he hung back and I did not encourage him to join in. He was weird, I wasn’t. He wouldn’t stand on lines in the pavement. He never left the house without ringing his own door bell to be sure it still worked, and then ringing it again to be sure he hadn’t broken it the last time. Then he would have to try the door, pushing at it with all his might in case he had left it open in his anxiety about the bell. He even did the same with our air-raid shelter though it had no door; he would have to go back every time we left it, once, twice, three times sometimes, to make certain everything was where he’d meant to leave it, the torches pointing in the right direction, our pencils lying as he believed they should lie: his where he sat, mine where I did. Weird! And I didn’t want to be thought of as weird by association. Especially by Errol Tobias who bossed the street, who had taken a particular fancy to me as a smart but still naïve kid whom he could educate in the ways of the world, and who treated Manny as someone so beneath him he was invisible.

It was Errol Tobias who had first shown me the photographs that were missing from Manny’s copy of The Scourge of the Swastika , turning the pages one by one, all the while staring at me and not saying a word, as though he did not want to miss a flicker of my facial reactions or the faintest tremor of my soul.

5

Errol Tobias was the street gardener. He had no skills, he simply ripped stuff out. Weeds, if weeds were specifically what troubled you, but anything and everything was his speciality. Few people did much with their gardens in our street. No feeling for it. Occasionally someone laid off from work essayed a bumpy lawn bordered with lupins; now and then a few geraniums in primary colours appeared; otherwise all our gardens were tangles of privet hedge and ivy which twice a year, during school holidays, Errol Tobias would pull out by the roots for you. He had his own shears, his own barrow, and his own staff. The year he initiated me into The Scourge of the Swastika illustrated I was his staff.

As for my salary, it was never discussed. Tacitly, I settled for The Scourge of the Swastika , unexpurgated.

Did I say Errol Tobias ‘showed’ me the missing photographs? Too feeble a verb, ‘showed’. He divulged them to me, rather. Like Moses coming down from Sinai with the tablets, he made them manifest to me, inducting me in them, one revelation succeeding another, as though the photographs weren’t merely in his possession but had somehow been divinely vouchsafed him, and were now his by metaphysical right.

We were in the long grass of somebody or other’s garden. Mrs Margalit’s. Mrs Getzler’s. They were all the same. The overgrown gardens of people forever on the run. You garden when you can be sure you’re staying and the Margalits and Getzlers had not been here long enough to know whether they were staying or not. This was why each generation of Jewish immigrants was scornful of the next, why the German-born Jews who had been here since 1820 looked down their noses at those of us who came from Novoropissik a half-century later, and why we looked down on those who came from places even worse a half-century after that. Every influx reminded us of our antecedents and threatened the fantasy of permanence we’d erected around ourselves like a stockade. In the new arrivals the Gentiles would see who we really were.

Fools, the fools we’ve been, to suppose they have ever needed reminding.

How long the Tobiases had been here I didn’t know. They were hard to pick. By virtue of something in their pigmentation, they could have passed for non-Jews of a lower, somewhat rural station. Not quite pig farmers, more a pig farmer’s chauffeur and maidof-all-work. In fact, Mrs Tobias ran a hairdressing salon in the back room of her house, and other than sneer at her clients in their curlers, Mr Tobias did nothing. Errol, too, had the lewd, obscenely confidential air of a gentleman’s gentleman. That moral fastidiousness which is itself indecent. But in the long grass I didn’t scruple to be inducted by him into the illustrated Scourge of the Swastika . He must have made a good job of it, because not only am I able to remember in considerable detail all the photographs I saw, I am able to remember the order in which I saw them. .

The charred bodies found in the church at Oradour.

The slaughter at Autun.

The village of Lidice, quiet in the snow, like a Brueghel winterscape.

Then Lidice after the massacre, the buildings ripped apart, the bodies lined up on their backs for all the world as though they are schoolkids on the gym floor, waiting for permission to get up again.

The photograph of a mass execution found on a German prisoner.

Birkenau before the crematorium was built, the naked bodies smoking in pits.

Patriots hanged at Tulle, the German officers smiling.

Arbeit Macht Frei — the gateway to Auschwitz.

A crematorium oven at Buchenwald, with a charred skull inside.

The disfigured limbs of human guinea pigs at Auschwitz.

The pile of discarded artificial limbs taken from victims of the gas chambers.

Ilse Koch. Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of Buchenwald, not looking as enticing after her capture (this a judgement made with the benefit of hindsight) as she did before it.

Below, a couple of the shrunken heads said to have been commissioned by her for her collection.

Josef Kramer’s driving licence.

The confession of Rudolf Hess — ‘I personally arranged on orders received from Himmler in May 1941 the gassing of two million persons. .’

A mass grave at Belsen — the bodies almost beautiful in their abstraction, that’s if you dare let your eye abstract in such a place.

The British soldier with a kerchief over his nose, bulldozing those abstractions to clear the camp.

Corpses by the wagonload at Buchenwald — boots, feet, faces, the inspiration for Philip Guston’s distracted cartoons of ignominy and death (there is, you see, a place for great cartoonery, even here).

And finally and most famously and shamelessly, the one we looked at longest, the naked Jewish women being paraded for medical inspection, running across the prison yard while the German guards, some with their hands in the pockets of their uniforms, look on. My first sighting, God forgive me, of pubic hair in print.

If I am not mistaken this last photograph is among those which Orthodox Jews in Israel, following the earlier example of Manny Washinsky’s parents, have petitioned to be removed from public display. Not to be shown anywhere, not for whatever educative purpose, not even in Yad Vashem. It affronts, they say, the modesty of the women, thereby implying that modesty is something that might live after you. A woman’s immortal modesty. I agree with them. The photograph should not be shown. It certainly should not have been shown to me or to any other boy my age. I would rather not have been aroused by it. Yes, even in the most careful household, a boy is always in with a chance of seeing more of flesh and bone and hair than is good for him to see, but an actual sighting, at speed and in confusion, is not the same as a photograph on which one can rest one ’s eyes for all eternity. It was unwelcomely arousing, too, without a doubt, to share the experience with Errol in the long grass. Whatever else we knew, we knew we should not have been looking. Because what might just have been most arousing of all was our knowledge that the women were petrified, perhaps about to be subjected to all the degradations a boy’s imagination can invent, death being among the kinder of them.