Howard Jacobson: Kalooki Nights

Why did I marry Chloë?

Why, after being divorced so comprehensively by Chloë — divorced from my own reason, I sometimes felt — did I marry Zoë? And why, after being left by Zoë, did I marry. . but I must not give the wrong impression. This is more a tale of separation than of marriage.

Why — speaking of disloyalties, forsakings and acts that seemingly cannot be explained — did I forsake myself to draw cartoons, when I am averse by nature to caricature, ribaldry and violence?

Why do I wake each day as though I am in mourning?

Who or what am I in mourning for?

3

Why Elohim forsook us, or why Manny Washinsky raised his hand against those he was meant to honour, or why I married who I married, are questions which cannot be answered in a short space of time. But I can explain — which is at least a start — why I took up crayons. Because I liked the oily smell of them. Because I liked it that they streamed colours. Because I enjoyed watching a picture emerge that I hadn’t intended to make. Because I discovered I could do a likeness. Because I felt there was some emotion locked away inside me that I couldn’t get at until I drew it on a piece of paper. And because I wanted people to admire and adore me. Show that you can draw when you’re four or five years old and everyone is awestruck. It’s the same with words, only words don’t win you the affection pictures do. They lack the charm. There is something, it would seem, uncanny about sentences issuing fully formed from a cherub’s mouth, as though Beelzebub must be in there somewhere, hammering phrases out on his infernal anvil. Whereas a wavy purple path leading to a little orange house with plumes of smoke spiralling from its tipsy chimney — that’s the work of God, our protector, ever with us, Elohim who modelled man out of clay and put him in a garden.

But those who were enchanted by my precocious pictorial genius should have looked harder at the blackness of that plume of smoke and wondered what was burning.

I drew so the world might love me, and subsequently drew ironically, against myself, because I couldn’t love the world.

The plainer explanation for why I drew at all — an explanation favoured by my mother, who blamed herself, and who thought I might have had a happier, less fractious life had I gone into commerce or the law (and I agree with her) — is that I was born into a noisy house and couldn’t get a word in edgeways. Both my parents had loud voices, earnests of good lungs and therefore, you would have thought, long lives; my mother’s a lovely honeyed contralto, wasted, I used to think, marvelling how beautiful my older sister Shani looked in whatever she was wearing, prior to marvelling how much more beautiful she would look if she were wearing something different; and wasted even more on shouting out ‘Kalooki!’ with her friends every other weekday evening. Kalooki, for those who don’t know it, is a version of rummy much favoured by Jews — Jews, Jews, Jews — on account (though not all Jews would agree) of its innate argumentativeness. My mother’s trumpeting ‘Kalooki!’ at the moment of laying out her cards, for example, was not incontestably the right thing to do. But that, as I gathered, was the joy of it: not just the game but the bickering over how and in what spirit it should be played. Some kalooki evenings were great social successes though not a hand was dealt. ‘A fast game ’s a good game,’ someone would say, and agreeing how fast was fast would take up the rest of the night. My father stayed out of this, employing his bass-baritone in a higher cause (though not always in another room), preaching the religion of non-religion, a species of Judaism emptied of everything except its disputatiousness and liberality — a sort of secular universalism I suppose you’d have to call it, comprising socialism, syndicalism, Bundism, trade unionism, international brotherhoodism, atheism, not to mention pugilism — which he imagined would one day be the saving of the Jews. And didn’t just imagine it either, but discussed it vociferously and voluminously with the communists and syndicalists and atheists and pugilists who took advantage of his open-door policy, turning up whenever they felt like it, as much to watch my mother leap from her seat and shout ‘Kalooki!’, I always fancied, as to change the world and the Jew’s place in it. Add to their chorus the racket my sister made, slamming doors, crying over her hair and throwing shoes around her bedroom — never the right ones, no matter how many pairs they bought for her, never the right ones to go with the clothes she wanted to wear, which were never the right ones either — and you will have some understanding of the clanking foundry in which my reticence was forged.

But there was more noise still in my young life in the form of an uncle, and in the continuous voicing of my father’s objections to that uncle — that’s if he really was an uncle — Tsedraiter Ike. The same uncle who was always saying that for this the Nazis wanted to exterminate us, though it was my father’s contention that it was actually for him , Tsedraiter Ike, that the Nazis wanted to exterminate us.

We had five Uncle Ikes in our family, taking family to include every Jew who shared our name, married into our name, or offered to be friendly, ours being a sort of Battersea Dogs’ Home for stray Jews. Big Ike, Little Ike, Liverpool Ike, Dodgy Ike and Tsedraiter Ike — called Tsedraiter Ike because he was the tsedraitest, that’s to say the most imbecile, of the five. Also called Tsedraiter mischievously, I fancied, because he could not himself,with a single tooth, negotiate the word. Tsedraiter: the Tse to be pronounced sibilantly, with a sort of lisping hiss: Tsss, Tsss ; the vowel sound somewhere between a sir and a sid : Tsssirdraiter/Tsssidraiter; the second and third syllables to rhyme with hater.

Why Tsedraiter Ike lived with us, I never knew. Precisely what relation to us he bore, I never knew either and suspect I wasn’t meant to know. As with other family embarrassments, you just accepted and asked no questions. I think I assumed he was my mother’s brother because it was she who always defended him from my father’s scorn. In appearance, though, they could not have been more unalike. My mother — born Leonora Axelroth — as euphonious as her name, tall and tapering, legs and ankles if anything too thin, like an Ethiopian’s, her hair almost bronze in colour, her skin, the minute it was exposed to sun, the same. A burnish on her, which made her look expensive, of the highest quality. Whereas Tsedraiter Ike (who received letters addressed to Isaac Finster, not Axelroth) was flabby, one-toothed, wet about the mouth, discoloured, as though he ’d been dipped in ink at birth. I don’t think I ever knew what he did for a living, but it couldn’t have been much because he was almost never out of the house, at least in my early years, and, from what I gathered from the arguments about him, made no contribution whatsoever to his keep. ‘Keep?’ I recall my mother saying in his defence. ‘He isn’t an animal, he doesn’t have to be kept . But if we’re talking keeping, at least he keeps himself smart’ — ‘smart’ being a big accolade with my mother, a word she used almost as often as ‘Kalooki!’ To which my father — who was never smart — replied always with the same words: ‘Correction: at least I keep him smart.’

In fact Tsedraiter Ike wasn’t smart either, merely fallen-formal in the manner of some minor shtetl functionary, one of those embittered, jeering, half-demented clerks you read about in nineteenthcentury Russian novels, halfway to being rabbinical, in Tsedraiter Ike’s case, in a black, far too shiny gaberdine suit and a sort of morning, or do I mean mourning, tie. It’s my sense that wealthy Russian and Polish families once retained such people talismanically, partly as jesters, partly to assuage their consciences, as though they could thereby pay their dues to learning or religion or the twisted life of the mind. My father tolerated Tsedraiter Ike, though he could ill-afford him, in a spirit that was the very obverse of this. ‘Look what we have left behind us,’ that’s what he was saying. ‘Behold our ignominious past. Learn from this human wreckage what we dare never allow ourselves to sink into again.’ In response to which unspoken motive, Tsedraiter Ike hummed loudly around the house, making sounds that were more a parody of Hebrew prayer, as far as I could tell, than prayer itself, rocking, rustling, moaning, wailing, whistling, choking, humming — humming Hebraically, yes, it’s possible — and, whenever he caught my eye, winking at me and interrupting his devotions or whatever they were to chuck me affectionately under the chin and call me, in reference to heaven knows what, his ‘old palomino’. Palomino being, by my calculation, one of the hardest words a person with only one tooth in his head could ever try to pronounce. Which could be why he never left off trying to pronounce it.