Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

And if you think that denotes derangement you should have heard what Errol had to tell me about Buchenwald in the days of Ilse Koch, the cock-shrinker.

Don’t I mean the head-shrinker?

Yes, that too.

6Ach Buchenwald ich kann dich nicht vergessen

Weil du mein Schicksal bist.O Buchenwald, I can’t forget you,

Because you are my fate.

‘Buchenwaldlied ’

They sang songs in Buchenwald. Figure that.

A mystery to me, who found it hard enough to sing in Crumpsall Park. True they were ironic songs about Schicksal , but a song’s still a song.

Schicksal — meaning fate or destiny.

Shikse — meaning floozie. From which shikseh — meaning Gentile girl. Otherwise, wife to Maxie Glickman.

They used to say that character was destiny, but now they know that language is.

So shiksehs were my destiny.

‘I am not,’ Chloë said, the day she left me, ‘your floozie.’

‘My daughter is not—’ Chloë’s mother said.

‘I know what she is not,’ I interrupted, ‘she is not my floozie.’

‘That she certainly is not.’

‘Say goodbye, then,’ I said.

‘Goodbye.’

I was sorry to part from her. Leaving women’s mothers was always harder for me than leaving the women themselves. Somehow more final when you leave the mothers. And I’d grown attached to Chloë’s mother, Helène, in an equilibrium-of-detestation sort of way. I hated the way she would say, when we were staying with her, or she was staying with us, ‘I will be saying goodnight now — goodnight.’ And she hated everything about me.

After she had said she would be saying goodnight, and saying it, she would add that she was going ‘up the little wooden hill to Bedfordshire’. Should that have annoyed me to the extent it did? She came from Cheshire, naturally from Cheshire I mean, not as a newly moneyed import. People just talked like that there. Genteel Southern-Northern cute. It was what you signed up for when you fell in love with cutesie genteel Gentile girls from the Southern North — their cutesie genteel Gentile mums. Part of the appeal of the daughter, a mother who wore knitted frocks to show off her ‘figure’, white or knitted stockings, sometimes white and knitted stockings, nipped-in waist, little perky acorn tits in padded bras, the smell of the racecourse in her hair, and a cutesie country turn of phrase. Exactly what a shikseh-loving Yiddler from the inner city should have thanked the Almighty for giving him as a ma-in-law, you’d have thought. ‘Gott tsu danken. Now equip me with the male equivalent of cutesie country Gentile tits and I will think that I am an English person born.’ But I didn’t have it in me to accept my good fortune and make peace with it. I couldn’t rest — night after night I got no sleep — until I was able to match my motherin-law’s little wooden hill to Bedfordshire with some odious genteel Gentile punning cosiness of my own. I ransacked the English counties. Sussex, Essex, Cornwall, Devon, Leicestershire, Cheshire itself. Nothing. What I needed was a county called Hell. ‘Why don’t you be off down the little wooden hill to Hellshire, Helène?’ Or a town called Blazes. ‘Hey, Helène, how about going to Blazes for the weekend?’ Though neither of those, I grant you, would have been a patch on the inspired inanity of Bedfordshire.

Then, at the sleepy-byes end of one particularly irksome evening à trois , to employ another Helènism — I was doomed in this marriage either to be à trois or on my ownio — I believed I’d hit the jackpot. We’d been playing fish, the card game where you have to remember the whereabouts of downturned cards, and then match them with upturned cards, a game at which I happen to excel, something Helène and Chloë put down to Semitic deviance of the brain.

‘So clever in all the small things of life, your husband, Chlo.’

‘It’s in the genes, Mama. Terminal triviality to genius level. It’s why they make such good accountants.’

‘Too true, I wouldn’t trust my stockings and shares to anyone else. Ho-hum, well, I’ll be saying goodnight now, goodnight.’

At which moment, espying her heading in the direction of retirement with a volume of G. K. Chesterton in her hand (if it wasn’t Chesterton it was Belloc, and don’t ask me what stopped her taking the annotated English countrywoman’s Letters of Heinrich Himmler up to Bedfordshire), something induced me to call out, ‘Off up the little wooden hill to Buchenwald, are we?’

Chloë was outraged. ‘Max!’

‘What?’

‘How dare you talk to my mother like that!’

‘Like what?’

‘How dare you wish my mother in a concentration camp!’

‘Book,’ I said. ‘ Book enwald, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Leave it,’ Helène shouted down. ‘He spent his formative years in Dewsbury, remember.’

‘Jewsbury!’ I shouted back. ‘Did you just say Jewsbury?’

But she’d won again. I knew that. She was mistress of the gazetteer of the British Isles, to whatever end of phobia and whimsy, and that was that. A man must know when he is beaten. A man must accept his Schicksal .

And I accepted mine.

7

We like a thread in my business. We like a leitmotif. Strip cartoonists more than one-offers of the sort I am, but then Five Thousand Years of Bitterness , when you come to think of it, was a strip cartoon of sorts.

So let’s run with maps and gazetteers, a recurrent theme in my life, anyway, considering that I met Björk (who later introduced me to Kätchen) in a map shop in Covent Garden, and wouldn’t have got to know Zoë had Kätchen not walked out on me after a row about her navigation skills.

And then there was Shitworth Whitworth MA, senior geography master at Bishops Blackburn Grammar School. .

For one year Manny and I were at Bishops Blackburn together. After which his parents took him away. He did well, I reckon, to last a year, given how ill they accommodated even a Jew of my milk-and-water sort, let alone one who held to Manny’s rigid and irrational system of beliefs. I am not accusing the staff at Bishops Blackburn of being anti-Semitic. They simply had us on the brain. When they beheld us, and in fairness there were quite a lot of us to behold for a school with strong Church of England associations, they could see nothing but the Jew in us. I am the same. But then I’m a caricaturist: I am meant to concentrate only on what’s salient. Whereas our teachers were meant to see us all round. They tried. I sincerely believe they had the best intentions. But when they looked at us all round they saw even more Jew than when they looked at us on one plane.

‘Can someone tell me how come a Jew can’t draw a map?’ was the question that precipitated the row that finally precipitated Manny Washinsky from the school. The question issuing from Shitworth Whitworth MA, a sarcastic man who appeared to have been overwound, whose skin vibrated like a percussion instrument when he was upset, and who owned the biggest collection of detachable stiff white collars, always worn with blue and pink striped shirts, and always half a size too tight, any of us had ever seen.

Geography. Most ethnic troubles in most schools originate in geography or PE. They do for Jews, anyway, who can neither draw a map nor hang upside down from a wall bar. The two deficiencies are not entirely unrelated. Jews cannot draw a map nor negotiate a wall bar because they have seldom had any use for either.

To that degree, Shitworth had said nothing that wasn’t just. True, he should not have held up Manny’s suppurating map of Canada by one corner as though it were something one of us had brought in on his shoe. Nor should he have declared that a spider with a pen in each leg could have drawn it better, nor rolled it into an inky ball and thrown it into Manny’s distorted face. Nor should he have eared Manny out of his seat and demanded what he was grinning about, boy, when it ought to have been obvious to a teacher of his years and competence that Manny grinned out of some strange reflexive instinct, the alternative being a total collapse of his facial musculature, followed by annihilation of his personality and maybe even cessation of his or someone else’s heartbeat. Teacherly ineptitudes, those. You are meant to know when you have a homicidal maniac in your class. But fair’s fair — it was the case that none of us who were Jewish could draw a map. Even I couldn’t draw a map and I had already been picked out as the school’s star drawer. It’s possible that we’d have fared better had the maps Shitworth asked us to draw contained matter more germane to our interests and experience. Of the atlases I presently own, a good 90 per cent of them are atlases of Jewish migrations, expulsions, marches, pogroms, ghettos, shtetls with names like Kalooki and Kalush, ruined synagogues, graveyards, inquisitions, executions, massacres, gas chambers, concentration camps. We know whereby we are engaged. ‘Do me a map showing the most recent liquidation of your people, Glickman,’ might have elicited a positive response. The corn belts of Manitoba on the other hand. .