Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

But then if I were able to show the Taufjuden anything like the compassion Ilse Cohen lavished on her renegade hand, I would be out of a job, wouldn’t I? Or at least out of half a job since that too is what I’m paid for — excoriating my people when I’m not shielding them from harm.

2

Charming, silky names women had in those day. Ilse, Irma. . The Irma who played kalooki at my mother’s table was not a regular as Ilse was, and not a meat-eater either, but she was handsome enough if you had a taste for women who piled their hair like German sausages and looked as though they were on the point of coming apart. Not loose-limbed or loose-jointed so much as loose-nerved. Explicable in Irma’s case on account of her parents having sent her to Manchester from Munich at the first sniff of National Socialism. She was a slip of a girl at the time, but old enough not to mistake the uncle and aunt who looked after her in Cheetham Hill for the mother and father she had left behind. She exchanged letters with them every week until, early in 1940, they fell silent. She went on writing, hoping for a reply, for a further five years. Some 250 letters, all of them unanswered. And even ten years after that, I recall my mother telling me, she had not given up hoping to hear from them.

Was that why she piled her hair away from her face, so that she could keep her ears clear for news? That’s how I like to draw my victim-Jews in Five Thousand Years of Bitterness anyway, always with an ear cocked, always listening for something — a hoofbeat, a train approaching (Jew Jew, Jew Jew), a word from home.

An Ilse and an Irma, turning up together to play kalooki in my house — what’s the chance of that? Ilse and Irma, both lovely women, mirroring that other Ilse and Irma, Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, two of the least lovely women (speaking ethically now) who ever lived. Maybe it wasn’t such a coincidence as I thought. Maybe Ilse and Irma were common enough names in those days, at least if you happened to be the children of parents who had once loved the sound of German. And maybe they fell out of favour because of Ilse Koch and Irma Grese.

There is no photograph of Irma Grese in The Scourge of the Swastika , and only the briefest mention of her as the person who tutored Dorothea Binz in depravity during the time they were at Belsen together, Binz later graduating to Ravensbrück, the women’s camp, while Grese stayed on at Belsen, liking it where she was. I owe what I know about these women to Manny Washinsky, though not the photograph of Irma Grese which I happened upon, all on my ownio, a little later. Striking, you would have to say — eyes wide apart like a Tartar’s, an incongruous woolly cardigan tucked into an equally incongruous tartan skirt which she wore over boots, but too high on the waist, foreshortening her torso in a way that Chloë for some reason favoured too. Probably the same photograph which Myra Hindley was said to have carried around in her handbag.

An extravagantly beautiful woman, Irma Grese, yes, in the tragic Slavic-Chloë mode. Of a sort of beauty whose influence one can never calculate.

You could argue that they ought to ban photographs of monsters likely to be seen as role models by monsters-in-waiting; but then Ian Brady was an avid reader of Dostoevsky, and you can’t start banning Russian classics as well. It’s all grist to the deranged, that’s what it comes to. There is no such thing as an innocuous image. Or idea.

If you’re going to ban anything it should be the person likely to be susceptible. As they did with Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and as they subsequently did with Manny Washinsky. Too late, of course.

But then isn’t it always too late?

Impossible to say whether Manny’s new school intensified his interest in the leading lights, in particular the leading ladies, of the Third Reich, or whether he was making progress simply by dint of lonely scholarship. It was handy for me all right, the numbers of new enemies of the Jews he was unearthing. Good for our project, Five Thousand Years of Bitterness , whether or not he still saw himself as part of it. But you could argue that it wasn’t particularly good for him .

Couldn’t have been healthy, a school just for Jews, all calling on God in the lavatory. Not that he ever told me what it was like, or talked about the other Jewish boys he met there, any more, I suspected, than he talked to them about me. We were both each other’s secret. I liked to believe that I was his sole confidant, but of course it’s possible he spent every spare second between classes telling other kids called Emanuel and Eli about Irma Grese and Ilse Koch, unless it was they who were telling him. I have a lurid conception of what happens in a Jewish school — for which I suppose I must thank my father who as an atheist thought religious education was the devil’s work. Maybe the headmaster addressed them on the subject of Irma and Ilse at every school assembly. Fringes out, tefillin on, and now, boys, let’s dilate upon these most recent torturers of the Jewish people. Not all that different from my mornings if you leave out the tzitzis and tefillin.

He was my education, that much has to be said, no matter how he came by what he educated me in. Errol Tobias would rather that privilege had fallen to him. But Errol was merely the snake in the garden, whispering of fruit. Manny was the tree.

On my own I wouldn’t have remembered all their names or ever have been able to tell them apart — Vera Salvequart the poisoner, Dorothea Binz the dog-woman, Carmen Mory otherwise known as ‘The Monster’, let alone Ilse Koch and Irma Grese.

I catch myself out in a disingenuousness there. Ilse Koch I was always able to tell apart. Ilse Koch came to me via Errol Tobias as well as Manny, though I didn’t let on to Manny that I supped from a second fountain of Koch corruption, or that hers was a name which bound Errol and me in a knowingness of a sort of which Manny surely had no comprehension. Ilse Koch was a secret I shared with each of them separately.

‘You’ll have to remind me,’ was the usual way one of our induction sessions would begin — I inviting it, I the empty vessel, I offering myself to Manny like a flower opening up its countenance to the sun — ‘which is Dorothea Binz again?’

‘May her name be wiped out. .’

That was what I had to say before he’d tell me about any of them. He was my tree of knowledge but he was also my angel of oblivion. Not an easy task for him to be both at once — illuminator and expunger. But I suppose that’s what we’re all doing, making people remember what we would wish them to forget.

In our air-raid shelter it felt queerly ritualistic, as though the voices of the old rabbis were inhabiting the brickwork. ‘Dorothea Binz, may her name be wiped out,’ I’d say, ‘what did she do again?’

God knows what my father would have said had he caught me chanting one of those ancient curses. A boy, however, must get his education whichever way he can, and my father hadn’t interested himself in Dorothea Binz.

Once, when I was asking about her for what must have been the hundredth time, Manny answered by biting me. Not a feral leap at my throat, but not exactly what you could call a playful nip either. Without any warning, without even any show of temper, he dipped his head and sunk his teeth into my wrist. An uncanny action by virtue of its silence, as much as anything else.

I cried out. Not from the pain but from the shock. And also out of fear. A terror amounting to phobia attached to bites in Jewish Crumpsall. There had been an alarming incident in the neighbourhood, not many years before, when someone’s pet bulldog turned savage for no reason — as though a bulldog needs a reason — and chewed off a baby’s ear. An event which it was impossible to forget on account of that terrible twist of flesh, like an end of burnt vegetable, which the child was doomed to carry on the side of his face for all time. So we were all more than routinely conscious of mad dogs, especially Tsedraiter Ike who froze and lost his inky colour whenever a dog of any sort approached. ‘Look confident,’ he would warn me, flattening himself against a wall if he could find one, or failing that, flattening himself against me, ‘they can smell fear.’ But even Tsedraiter Ike never warned me about Manny Washinsky.