Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

Love at first sight, anyway. Coup de foudre . A bolt of lightning striking both their hearts simultaneously, illuminating them and them alone and plunging everything else into darkness. Midnight in the Garden of Love and Traif.

Forbidden meat, that was what each was for the other. And only a fool would deny that their passion was the greater for a little leavening of the verboten .

That I too have managed to transpose the Washinskys’ scrubby path into a garden of desire shows how wedded to romantic love I still am, despite my own failures at it. Also shows why I should have listened to my first art teacher’s advice and softened my palette, swapped my pencil for a brush, and gone to live in Tuscany for a summer. He was a romantic himself, Ted Hargreaves, as he demonstrated when he resigned his post and ran off with a senior prefect from our sister girls’ school who, he said, reminded him of Raphael’s Fornarina. Were I half the Hogarthian I have sometimes pretended to be I wouldn’t hesitate to lampoon that elopement. Raphael’s Fornarina with a hockey stick, for God’s sake! But it’s no good pretending. Ask other men in my profession to depict a woman in a man’s arms and they give you Olive Oyl in Popeye’s. Or Flo Capp in Andy’s. At poetic best, Lois Lane in Clark Kent’s, dreaming of Superman. Ribald in the doing or the withholding. Because I am not by nature a satirist, I picture Asher and Dorothy (and Ted and Sheila, come to that) in a Rubensesque setting, cherubim in the clouds, the silk of their garments rustling, his fingers unlooping curls that fall about her peachy neck, both their faces on fire.

Aflame with the shock of love, that was how I saw them. Shamed with it. And Rubens and Rembrandt both found just the colour for that shame. The Dutch flush.

Under whichever sky you see them, they were mad for each other and might have stayed that way had the ‘harpies’ (a word with which Manny was to surprise me later) not spoilt it for them. It’s possible Asher wasn’t in it for the long term, I don’t know. It’s also possible he wasn’t a man you could love for ever. Those cadaver good looks might very well consume all parties to them early. Indeed I’ve heard it said — Chloë? Zoë? — that that’s precisely the erotic appeal of Jewish men. It’s like throwing yourself on a bonfire. But there isn’t any evidence that these two were playing conflagrations. They were a serious pair of kids. Not the sort, either of them, to embark on a friendship, let alone a love affair, lightly. They both had exams to pass. She intended to become a language teacher. He a rabbi; but then a rabbi, too, is a teacher of tongues. And they would both have felt, given their differences, that they had a lot to teach each other.

Because of his people’s perceived exoticism and predisposition to pedantry, it’s usually the Jew in a mixed relationship who does the explaining. This is why we put mezuzahs on the lintels of our doors; this is why we light candles at Chanukah — Ch. . no, Ch , from the back of a throat, as though you’re coughing up phlegm; this is why we lean at the Seder table. I can even imagine, in this instance, Asher coaching Dorothy in the rudiments of Hebrew, she being a linguist, remember, and quick to learn. But I have no doubt that he wouldn’t have had it all his own way. She was a strong-minded woman. When first she saw Asher her heart would have burst, but when she raised her dazzled eyes to him a second time she’d have seen he was somebody who needed liberating. He looked like a man in chains. You could tick off everything he didn’t know, everything he was afraid to go near or put his mind to, in the marks about his mouth. His lips were never still, not because he was praying to Elohim, though he was surely doing that as well, but because he was rehearsing answers to uncomfortable questions, spells and divinations that would get him through the terrors of the day. In knowledge is safety, and the first thing she decided to do was acquaint him with a few things — this is the earth, that is the sky, I am a Gentile, and no you will not feel unclean in the morning for having touched me.

What a time they must have had, learning about each other, sneaking around the backs of both their lives, heads together, eyebeams plaited, fingers locked, meeting in parks and cinemas, kissing in doorways, maybe jumping on trains to escape the environs of guilt, maybe booking into hotels, though there couldn’t have been a lot of that otherwise he would surely not have risked taking her home when his parents were away and uncovering her nakedness in their bed.

Except that there is reason to believe he never did any such thing. Years later, after he had changed his name to Stroganoff, Manny vehemently denounced the story of his brother’s defiling of their parents’ bed as a calumny. Confirming, I must say, what I had always thought. Why would Asher Washinsky, when all was said and done, have taken the fire-yekelte’s daughter to his parents’ bed when they were out of the house, given that their being out of the house just as opportunely gave him access to his own? More room to thrash about in, you could argue, his bed being narrow, as befitted a yeshiva boy with nothing but Elohim on his mind; but the luxuriousness of more room would surely have been vitiated by the unluxuriousness of the bed being that in which your mother and your father slept, unless that is to betray, as someone who missed out on being bar mitzvah’d, my ignorance of the depravity of observant Jews.

So scrub the bed.

She took him home. Up the hill from the denser thickets of Orthodoxy in the Manchester/Salford lowlands to the more feathery coppices of half-belief in Heaton Park, then up the hill again to where the Gentiles breathed the clean air of the foothills of the Pennines and not a Jew of any sort had been seen since Leo the Pedlar passed by selling pins and ribbons in the 1780s. People came to their windows to look. Passers-by clutched their children to them. A dog, meaning to bark, changed its mind and shrank back behind its fence. Cars slowed down to look. Later, describing the day, local people would remember that their power supply failed, their gas blew out, their paintings trembled and fell off the walls. All agreed it went dark suddenly.

Dorothy held his hand. ‘Not much further,’ she told him.

‘How much further?’

She squeezed his hand five times.

‘Five miles?’

‘Five minutes.’

She couldn’t decide whether she had been away a long time, circumnavigating the globe, and was now bringing home the spoils of her travels, or whether the real prize was this, her sublunary Gentile world, and she was rewarding Asher with it.

As for him, I know what he was feeling. I’ve been walked up the hill many times myself, now by Chloë, now by Zoë, halfbooty, half-apology. Look Ma, look Pa, look what I’ve found! The frightening part being not knowing if they intend to open your mouth and examine your teeth, or have a quick feel around to locate your tail. But then you could say that’s the arousing part as well, allowing that it can be arousing for a rare species to be used for the sexual satisfaction of a more common one. Ask the merman. Ask the minotaur.

I say I know what he must have been feeling, but in truth he was bound to have been far more terrified than I ever was, if only because he quickened greater curiosity. Enough Jew blazed from my face for Zoë to make the future of our marriage dependent on my agreeing to be de-Semitised, but the very fact that she badgered me to have my nose rolled up and put away — that’s what ‘retroussé’ means, by the way, ‘rolled up’ — suggests she did not think I looked otherwise, absolutely and incontrovertibly, on pain of death, Jewish. Noseless, it’s possible I could have got away with being merely Slavic and depressed. Whereas where Asher walked, the whole of the Old Testament walked with him. Seeded like a pomegranate he was with the sorrows and the tribulations of his people, but juicy with the wine of the pomegranate, too, spicy with spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, his lips like a thread of scarlet.