Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

Fair or not fair, Shitworth Whitworth was the recipient by 9 a.m. the following morning of a letter from the parents of every Jewish boy in the school, even mine — something I admired in my father; his utter inconsistency in all matters relating to criticism of Jews — the sum content of which was as follows: Mr Shitworth sir dear sticks in the gullet insensitive not to say offensive not to say ignorant of catastrophic Jewish history otherwise would understand inability to draw map tragic consequence of being homeless people without choice as to domicile for almost as long as you you anti-Semitic bastard have been teaching geography proof of Jewish genius otherwise in arts Chagall Sigmund Freud Sammy Davis Jr [not to forget, in my parent’s letter, Maxie Glickman] whose shoes you not fit to lick you telling me Chagall couldn’t have drawn Canada had he been so minded yours faithfully.

Why Shitworth couldn’t have let it go at that, since no one was asking more of him than a grovelling apology, I will never understand. Instead, the next time an ill-executed Jewish map of maize fields in the Americas provided him with the opportunity, he held it up by one corner, screwed it into a ball again, threw it at me, because it was mine, but missed and hit Manny Washinsky again, for which he also did not apologise, and said, ‘It has recently been brought to my attention that the Twelve Tribes of Israel have not sat still long enough to find the time to consult an atlas or otherwise acquaint themselves with the lineaments of the physical world. Wouldn’t you have thought, boys, that the opposite would be true, and that our Hebrew brethren’s love of foreign travel would have encouraged curiosity in them as to the contours of every country they have visited?’

‘Not exactly “visited” sir,’ I found the courage to pipe up, since my map was the cause of this.

Watching Shitworth Whitworth trying to swallow under the constriction of his collars was one of the few consolations our twice-weekly hour of geography afforded. Would his stud fly off, or would his Adam’s apple burst? This time it looked as though his whole chest was about to explode, like the Incredible Hulk’s coming out of his shirt.

He had advanced upon me, isolating me from the class. The whole of him compressed into the two fists he placed with great deliberation upon my desk, first one, and then the other, like grenades.

‘Not exactly visiting , weren’t you, Glickman? So what exactly were you doing?’

‘Running away, sir.’

‘Ah, running away. And now, here? Struggling against persecution, are you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Are you saying you are a prisoner here, Glickman? Are you here under duress?’

I didn’t have the language — you never have the language when you need it — to talk spatiality to him, to tell him that I thought it unreasonable of Gentiles to complain that Jews were always in constant motion, incapable of the arts of repose, when it was they, the Gentiles, who were forever moving Jews on. ‘No, sir,’ was all I could find to say, instead.

He closed his eyes, as though praying to God (his, not ours) to give him strength. Then he opened them and sniffed.

‘You’re a cartoonist, aren’t you, Glickman?’

‘I hope to be one, sir, yes.’

A cartoonist, you see, not a landscape painter or gardener or cartographer. Agitation, satire, distortion, not the beauty of the visible world humming exquisitely on its axis.

‘You hope to be one? Good. I hope you to be one too. And no doubt as part of your education to that end you will be studying other examples of the art. I assume you are familiar, Glickman, with the Katzenjammer Kids?’

I was. Though not exactly an enthusiast. Brilliantly drawn though they were, they made me feel queasy. Something to do with the undigested immigrant nature of the knockabout. Hans and Fritz the kids were called, and something about those names made me feel queasy too.

I nodded.

‘Zen in ze immortal vords of ze Katzenjammers, Glickman, let me put zis proposition to you. Could it be zat ze reason you and your fellow Chews feel so unvelcome in country after country is zat you do not do your hosts ze courtesy of noticing vere you are? As for example, Glickman — and you, Vashinsky — by consulting a map?’

I knew a rhetorical question when I heard one. As did Shitworth Whitworth. ‘And now I suppose you will all go home and get your parents to write me another letter?’ he said, rather sadly suddenly, like a man reading out his resignation speech.

8

He was gone by the end of the week. Put over someone’s knee and thrashed, it was fun to think, like the Katzenjammer Kids receiving their leitmotif beating from Mama Katzenjammer. Manny and I drew a map of hell and posted it to him care of the school. But whether he received it or not we were never to discover.

A term later Manny was gone too, removed to a Jewish school at the other side of town, where it didn’t matter how bad you were at cartography so long as you put your tefillin on every morning. So there are deficiencies in all systems of education.

I can’t pretend I was sorry to see Manny leave. Having him as a friend in our air-raid shelter was one thing. He was my private life. But as such he no more belonged in my class than my mother did. Besides, I felt that my association with him was doing me no good. He was too odd. Four, five, six times a day he put his hand up and asked to be excused. No boy at Bishops Blackburn — maybe no boy in the history of Bishops Blackburn — needed to go to the lavatory as often as Manny Washinsky. And once he was there he wouldn’t return. Mainly we would all forget about him, but occasionally his absence would rile a teacher who would then send one of us, occasionally even a party of us, to search for him and bring him back. Reports of Manny-sightings in the lavatories varied. Some told of Manny sitting in a cubicle with his trousers fastened, reciting Jewish prayers. Others heard him swearing, though I never did. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. . just that, over and over. One person said he’d watched from a distance while for fifteen minutes Manny washed and rewashed his hands, sometimes no sooner drying them than going back and washing them again, pulling back the skin at the tip of his fingers so that the scalding water could get under his nails. Another said he saw Manny winding toilet paper from a roll and stuffing his pockets with it. Thieving toilet paper, could you believe that? Jewing it. The one time I was sent to get him I found him sitting on the toilet with his jacket covering his head — this, as he explained to me later, to stop anyone who was standing on a seat in another cubicle from looking down and recognising him. ‘But who’d bother to do that?’ I asked him. ‘Well, you just have,’ he reminded me.

To be absolutely candid, I didn’t consider Manny’s behaviour around his ablutions to be anything like as bizarre as others did. Far more peculiar, in my view, was the casual attitude the Gentile pupils of Bishops Blackburn adopted to the inconveniences of the body, their carelessness as to privacy and hygiene, the small circumstantial, not to say spiritual difference pissing and shitting seemed to make to them. That they didn’t understand why a person might take precautions as regards taps and switches, etc, I also attributed to the absence in them of any imagination of disaster. As for praying or cursing in the lavatory, while I would not have been able to explain why Manny did it, that he did it surprised me not at all. I cursed or otherwise called on God whenever I visited the lavatory myself. The relief of finding sanctuary? The fear of loneliness? Sheer existential astonishment? Who knows. But it was second nature to me to say ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ the moment I undid my trousers, or, when I had finished and was looking at my reflection in the mirror, ‘God fucking help me!’ Half the time I did not not even know I was saying anything, and only confronted the phenomenon years later when Zoë overheard me and made me promise on my life never to swear or call on God in the toilet so long as we shared one. It was also her belief that I should accompany her to a clinical psychologist that minute.