Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

Her turn to tap her forehead. ‘Your father won’t be told.’

It was a stark moral choice: my father or Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye. Like having to choose between the Arabs and the Jews. In other words no choice at all.

And it worked. My mother found a night when she knew my father would be out of the house watching a fight, and Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye succumbed to Zionist blackmail and agreed to come. I was out of my skin with excitement. Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye, in our house! At night! Together! But if I was excited I was also frightened. Be careful what you ask for, Maxie Glickman. What if Gittel Franks, knowing this to be my de facto bar mitzvah, the occasion of my official entry into manhood, were actually to slide her slit Persian pussy eyes my way and mean it this time? What if Simone Kaye, forgetting how old I was, or simply in remembrance of things past, pulled me to her and trapped me between her silken knees?

I wasn’t sure I could I handle either of these immoderacies, but what if I was confronted by both !

I needn’t have worried. Things never turn out as you expect them to. Be careful what you ask for, but also be careful what you hope for. It wasn’t the fault of Gittel Franks or Simone Kaye, neither of whom could have looked more as I’d hoped they’d look had I set their hair, applied their make-up and poured them into their dresses myself. Gittel gilded and narrow, confined in something tight and rustling, as though to minimise the damage she might do, but laughing hoarsely and smashing glasses the minute she arrived; Simone Kaye as creamy as a Chantilly basket, everything on the point of spillage, at her lips the tiniest bubble of mirth. And me between. Sh-boom, sh-boom, as Errol Tobias sang when he was gardening. Something about paradise up above. Which this so nearly was, and would have been had my mother, fearing the competition from both sides, not gone to the trouble of making sure she would outshine them both. What was in her hair? Rubies? What shone on her skin? Gold leaf? Had my father rolled her in ochre before heading off to Belle Vue to watch two white-faced consumptives chasing each other round the ring? The consequence of her appearance, anyway, was that I was unable to take my eyes off her, when they should have been on Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye, and Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye were unable to take their eyes off her either, when they should have been on me. I also think the cards came out too soon. Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye had not squared up over the same kalooki table before. They needed time to settle down. Yet there they were, almost before the politenesses had been completed, fighting over the rules relating to the discard pile.

‘You can only take from there if you lay down,’ Gittel Franks said, seeing Simone Kaye’s hand hovering where it shouldn’t.

‘I’m laying down, I’m laying down, don’t rush me,’ Simone Kaye replied. ‘She’s such a rusher, this one.’

‘Kalooki!’ my mother called.

‘Huh,’ Simone Kaye said on the reshuffle, picking up a card she didn’t like, ‘just my luck!’

‘A silent game’s the best game,’ Gittel Franks told her.

‘Kalooki!’ my mother called.

When Gittel Franks was the first down with her cards a look of oriental certainty passed across her face. She folded her hands across her breast in exaggerated modesty.

‘Who does she think she’s being,’ Simone Kaye whispered to me, ‘Twankey-Poo?’

I wondered if she meant Nanki-Poo. She waved her hand at me, a gold ring on every finger. ‘Twankey-Poo, Shmanki-Poo — you must tell me later how your schoolwork’s going.’

Then it was back to winning.

No one else got a look-in. The competition grew so fierce finally, the heat coming off the three of them so tropical, that Ilse Cohen, looking quite plain in such company, had to get up and open all the windows with her good hand, against the efforts of her bad hand to close them again.

Normally the evening was over when the cards were. But on this occasion, for some reason — I suspected my mother must have shushkied something to them about its being a special night for me — the women stayed on for a final coconut macaroon, Gittel Franks retiring to the sofa in order to show her legs, Simone Franks staying at the table, with the intention I hoped, of entrapping me between hers one last time, where nobody could see. How we got from cards to Suez to the Melbourne Olympics to Gittel Franks getting up and imitating Rosemary Clooney singing ‘This Ole House’ — ‘Ain’t a-gonna need this house no longer /Ain’t a-gonna need this house no more’ — escapes me now and I suspect was beyond me at the time. Once we were there, though, it was no distance at all for Simone Franks to counter with ‘ Oh Mein Papa ’, the Eddie Calvert trumpet version which she was able to perform to perfection with her third lip, or for my mother (who I was pretty sure had taken Gittel Franks’s reference to this ole house personally) to insist that while she knew her taste was more classical than other people’s there was still nothing in her estimation to beat ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’.

Taking one thing with another, I decided I was suddenly very weary. Was Gittel Franks going to slit her eyes at me before she left? Was Simone Kaye going to whoosh me between her knees? I didn’t want to stay to find out. I couldn’t face the disappointment.

The next time I saw either of them was in a cemetery. I haven’t seen them since. Thus do opportunities slip through your fingers.

Considering my devotion to Jewish women of a certain age and allure, it remains surprising to me that I never married one. At least not one who whooshed her stockings or fell off her stilettos into a display cabinet of precious china. I can only suppose it had something to do with their taste in music. But that can’t tell the whole story because Chloë adored My Fair Lady , and Zoë went to Evita at least once a month, and I married them.

3

My father found out about my mother’s gala kalooki night in aid of Israel. In a moment of inadvertent vainglory my mother had published the amount of money it had raised in the Crumpsall Jewish Herald which, in a moment of inadvertent indolence, my father picked up and perused while he was queuing for delicatessen.

‘You don’t expect to have to read the Jewish papers to find out what’s going on in your own house,’ he said.

‘You don’t expect your atheist husband to be reading the Jewish papers,’ my mother said, laughing her most unconvincing contralto laugh.

‘It fell open.’

‘Just at the right page?’

‘In a Jewish paper there isn’t a right page. If it isn’t bar mitzvahs it’s Israel.’

‘There are the obituaries.’

‘Don’t be smart with me, Nora. You know my feelings on this subject. Couldn’t you have found another charity?’

She fell silent. At last she said, ‘It wasn’t for charity, it was for Max.’

‘Max? What did Max have to do with it?’

I was listening on the stairs, guilty but excited. It aroused me to hear my parents bandying around my name.

Did my mother know I was listening? Suddenly her voice went quiet. But my father’s reply was clear enough. ‘If the kid was so upset, you should have told me.’

‘He wasn’t upset.’

‘Then what was the problem? Has the Tsedraiter been stirring it?’

‘No, he hasn’t. There was no problem. Maxie’s fine about it. He hasn’t been complaining, I swear to you. But I thought it would be nice to give him a little something to make up for it.’

‘To make up for what?’

‘For it. For there not being an it.’

‘You just said he didn’t care.’