Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

For her sake, because of the love I bore her, I refused the psychologist, but forswore the swearing. Only on the night she left me did I revert, looking long at my reflection in the mirror, little by little recognising someone I thought I had seen the last of, and hearing him cry out ‘God fucking help me!’

At school, though, and in the glare of classroom publicity, I found Manny as weird as everybody did and disowned him. I wanted to be with the more normal kids, like Errol Tobias, who famously Chinese-burned the neck of the school bully — Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall — leaving him with orange-coloured striations visible above the collar of his shirt for the rest of his days at Bishops Blackburn. It was Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall who used to order any stray Jew he found in the playground at the end of break to stand with his hands on his head for forty minutes, and not move until Broderick released him hypnotically with the words, ‘Jew, Jew, run away, till Broderick gets you another day.’ It is mortifying to recall how many of us did what Broderick told us to do, standing in the rain and freezing cold, trying to count the 2,400 seconds in forty minutes in case we missed the hypnotic release. Because for us to be found by Broderick still standing there after the expiry of the forty minutes was no less serious an offence than to be caught trying to escape before it. Broderick would probably have tyrannised us without detection, or without anyone much caring even had he been detected — for ours was a school which believed in the manly virtues of bullying and being bullied — had he not tried it on with Errol Tobias. Though he was half Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall in height and weight, Errol had the beating of him in the beserk department. It was over in seconds, like one of those filmed encounters between an anaconda and a field mouse. Broderick made as though to touch Errol’s arm and the next thing he was lying on the playground the colour of jam roly-poly with Errol twisting his head off. I later drew the encounter to please Errol, with Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall walking in one direction and his head facing in the other. A bit Disney for me, and probably for Broderick, but Errol liked it.

The other advantage Errol enjoyed over Manny as a friend was his sexual precocity. By our third year at Bishops Blackburn Errol was the organiser of a ring of onanists who, on his instructions, kept diaries in which they listed times, whereabouts, details of ministering images or narratives, duration, outcome, etc, which they exchanged at the far end of the football field every lunch time to ejaculations of merriment or disgust. Though I counted it an honour to be friendly with the boss, I stayed aloof from the organisation. Some things I felt better about doing on my own. This was a disappointment to Errol who wanted me to be the official artist not only of what conduced to my arousal but to everybody else’s. He chased me for a whole term, even offering to waive the joining fee of one and six. Not wanting to appear stuck up, I agreed, but backed out again after about a fortnight. When I told him it wasn’t working, that none of it was working, that the minute I shared a fantasy it became public and therefore no longer a fantasy, he said, ‘What about Ilse Koch?’

1

Strange to tell, there was an Ilse in my mother’s kalooki group, but a Cohen not a Koch. Ilse Cohen, an intense woman with tragic brown eyes, whom I took on that account to be intelligent. No umlaut or diaeresis in her name, so I was never in any danger of falling in love with her, but she had a fleshy face which I liked, and short agitated fingers with blood-red nails which it was impossible not to imagine taking gouges out of your back. In retrospect, I now realise that for erotic purposes I divided women, and had from a very early age, into vegetarians and meat-eaters. Ilse was a meat-eater. Vegetarians I took no interest in.

Though I seldom played kalooki myself, agreeing with my father that of all card games it was the most womanly, a form of sedentary shopping or hoarding, I looked on sometimes, not least because of the opportunity it gave me to study hands. Fascinating, the human hand, both as a piece of engineering in itself (of particular expressive value to a cartoonist) and on account of its wilfulness, the independence it enjoys from the rest of the body. And from the rest of the personality, come to that. You never know — I defy anyone to predict — what sort of hands a person is going to have. Where you would expect tapering artistic fingers, you find five amputated stumps, barely more than carpals, like broken bits of chalk. Where you imagine you are going to encounter a gorilla’s fist, you come instead upon a little rolled-up ball of pads and creases, as heartbreaking as a newborn baby’s. Zoë, for example, though more delicate than a Byzantine madonna, had hands that would not have shamed a wrestler. Björk, who was a wrestler, from her wrists up could have made it as a Cambodian temple dancer. Only Chloë, of the women I lost my heart to, was manually consistent: she was an anti-Semite in her soul and she had anti-Semitic hands. The phalanges preternaturally straight, the knuckles pale and taut, the lunulae fastidiously cleared of cuticle, as perfect in their crescents as any moon over Arabia. Get her to turn her hands over and show you her palms and there was nothing to see — no warm accommodating pouches of skin, no comfortable adjustment of one finger to another, no life or love lines, just a vexed crisscross of Judaephobia like the railway tracks going in and out of Auschwitz, and (though you will have to take my word for this, since it was never put to the test — Chloë, unlike Ilse Koch, never being tried for war crimes) no fingerprints.

Whatever the surprises of the human hand, the one thing you could be sure of on kalooki nights was that every one of my mother’s friends would arrive with freshly painted fingernails. In later years, when the technology of nail painting had grown more advanced, they would turn up in silvers and magentas, tangerines and blacks, sometimes a different colour on each nail, and more latterly with the extremities painted the colour of white emulsion. Many years after these of which I speak, when I was in Manchester for Tsedraiter Ike’s funeral — an august enough event, but one which did not call a halt to kalooki — I saw that Ilse, a great-grandmother by then, maybe even a great-great-grandmother, sported nails which had the suits painted on them, a heart, a spade, a diamond, a club, and a joker on the thumbnail. But then it was Ilse who had gone further than the others in the early days, sometimes leaving the crescents of her nails unpainted, as though to grant whoever cared to look a shockingly precise sliver of nudity. Otherwise, a velvet rich incarnadine prevailed on every hand. Which satisfied me. Little pools of blood bejewelling the pastoral green of the card tables.

That poor woman, by the by, who had a stroke and then fell victim to Alien Hand syndrome, that friend of my mother’s who had to fight with her own hand to stop it strangling her, was Ilse Cohen. That she still continued to lavish attention on the hand that hated her, rubbing cream into its joints, putting jewels upon its fingers, showing no favouritism whatsoever to the other hand, as far as I could tell, in the matter of buffing and decorating the nails, is evidence of a remarkable capacity for forgiveness.

Now if I could feel that way about those Jews — servants of a syndrome no less unnatural or anarchic — who by silence or connivance have gone for the throats of fellow Jews, meaning to strangle them themselves, or permit them to be strangled by others, the apostates, the name-changers, the crawlers to the cross, the Taufjuden (who sound like DevilJews, but that would be Teufel , whereas taufen means merely ‘to baptise’ — as though between taufen and the Teufel in this context there might be said to be a difference). .