Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘Yeah, well,’ — he almost had Manny’s trousers off — ‘don’t tell me what’s shit. He’s shit, that’s what’s shit.’

Manny himself was saying nothing. He had curled himself into a ball, a quill-less hedgehog. He was more concerned to cover himself than to inflict any damage on Errol. And it was only when he could see he was losing that battle that he bared his teeth. Mistake, I thought. You don’t bite a mad dog unless you’re an even madder dog yourself.

Against Errol’s elbow in his windpipe, Manny had no defence. You can’t bite when you’re choking.

‘All right, let’s stop this,’ I said. Feeble, but what do you do?

‘The mamzer bit me,’ Errol said. He had fine skin, almost transparent nostrils, which made him appear more dangerous, as though there were some intervening tissue missing in him, some insulative wadding which keeps the peace, prevents internal heat escaping and making a bonfire of everything around. He was too thin of flesh for his own and everyone else ’s good. He was breathing hard. For a moment I thought Manny wasn’t breathing at all. But then Manny had been preparing for just such a moment.

I stood over them, like one of those referees who used to count my father out because of a minor nosebleed. The difference being that I had no authority.

‘The little mamzer bit me like an animal,’ Errol said, as though to himself. He was diaphanous with rage. An almost violet light seemed to shine through him. ‘And now I’m going to show him what we do to animals.’

He had Manny’s trousers round his ankles. Manny had gone foetal, trying to bring his knees up to protect himself, his hands on his genitals. Every boy knows this position from his nightmares. Every man too. Go into the male ward of a hospital and that’s how you will see the men lying. It’s the position in which we expect death to take us.

And what was I to do? If I’d attempted to intervene, to pull Errol off or threaten to get help, he’d have gone even crazier. You don’t provoke a man whose nostrils you can see through. As long as I stayed there, I thought, not taking sides, there would be a limit to any damage he could inflict. I didn’t want to look on, I didn’t want to be a witness to Manny’s shame, I didn’t want to see his nakedness. But I couldn’t risk leaving them alone together.

So now I have imprinted on my mind for ever the picture of Manny failing to cover his private parts, pink and helpless like something not yet born, not at all the colour of the nakedness Dorothy must have fallen for in Manny’s brother, and with nothing of a lover’s grandeur, least of all when he began to squeal, and then to scream, terrible inhuman wails, because Errol had taken hold of his testicles as though he meant to empty them for ever of their contents.

Not out of love have I ever squeezed another man’s testicles, nor can I imagine how I could possibly do it out of hate. If Manny was disgusting to Errol, then how could Errol touch him? Even to inflict humiliation, how could he put his hands on him, there ?

I have thought about it since. Only the devil could squeeze the balls of a man he found repugnant. Only the devil or a camp commandant’s wife.

But what Errol did next I am not sure even the devil could have done. He released Manny’s testicles and snatched at his penis, grabbed it as though it were a clump of weeds in the Golonskys’ garden, and pulled. ‘So who do you think of,’ he said, ‘when you’re on the khazi day and night doing this to yourself? Your mother? I bet you think of your mother. I bet you think of your ugly fucking mother in her long dress. Or do you have a shikseh you like to think about, a little fire-yekelte just like your brother’s? Or. .’ He looked up in my direction, treating me to that lewd gentleman’s gentleman expression he’d inherited from his father, and for a moment I wondered what I would do if he brought my mother or Shani into this. Would I let him get away with that as well? But it was a quite different confidence he wanted to establish. Ilse Koch. Can’t be sure. Can’t prove it. He didn’t finish his sentence. I just felt that Ilse Koch was in the air between us.

End of event. He belched twice in Manny’s face, then was gone. A minute later so was I. Whatever Manny needed to do to recover, I sensed he needed to do it on his own.

What I needed to do to recover I am still trying to find out nearly half a century later. But if I imagined that Ilse Koch thing, if I conjured her out of the horrors of that disgusting scene, grew her like lilies out of manure, what does it say about me?

Manny Washinsky would do an unimaginably evil thing and rot away for it among the criminally insane; Errol Tobias assuredly sups with Beelzebub most nights whatever else he does in Borehamwood; only I have gone on to live a wholesome life, allowing that being a cartoonist, even a marginally failed cartoonist, to say nothing of being a marginally failed husband, does not disqualify a man from wholesomeness. Good citizenship. Kindness to old ladies. Attentiveness to my own mother, who lived to the fine age of eighty-five, all but the first five of them devoted to kalooki. A good boy is what I am. A gutte neshome. Which cannot be said for the other two. Inner life for inner life, though, how much was there to choose between any of us?

5

We were all fucked. There are fifty chapters on the subject in Five Thousand Years of Bitterness , subtitled The Fucking of the Jews , one for every hundred years of it. Not easy to accomplish in pictures only, though I say so myself, without any of the ameliorating charms of prose. Just panel after panel of unrelieved fuckings-over. Not excluding fuckings-over by ourselves, though most of those I was conscientiously reserving for a further volume. It’s important you take responsibility for your own history, but not until you’ve finished blaming all the other bastards first. Credit where credit’s due: we are a self-defeating, self-disgusted, self-eviscerating people, but we couldn’t have got there without outside help.

The Jews, of course, were the first to reject this analysis when Five Thousand Years of Bitterness was published. Fucked up? Us?Who are you calling fucked up, you sick fucker? Or words to that effect.

You can easily upset the Jews. We are dainty-stomached, with no taste for obscenity (I am a case in point: I weep, thinking of Manny with his trousers off), and a proud sense of reserve, most especially in the matter of having attention drawn to us by other Jews. If someone must depict us we would rather it were a Gentile. The Jewish Contribution to Civilisation , by Sir Shaygets St John-Shaygets-Shaygets, goes down a storm whenever it is reprinted. We suck on praise from Gentiles like babies on the tit. In the praise of Gentiles we find justification for everything we have been through. Thank you, thank you — now would you like to see us go through it all again? But Jews on Jews embarrass us. They put us in mind of Ham, the son of Noah, uncovering his father’s nakedness and discussing it with his brothers. It isn’t just unseemly, it is parochial. If anyone’s going to uncover our nakedness, let it be a goy, preferably one with a title.

So no, if you’re wondering, they didn’t like my cartoon contribution to Jewish art, my lot. Neither did anyone else, much. Not in this country, not in America, not in Israel, not even in Germany where no publisher for it could be found. I like to think the timing was unfortunate. Winter 1976 was when Five Thousand Years of Bitterness saw the light of day here and in America, the warm pro-Yiddler glow of the Entebbe Raid not yet faded. If you were Jewish you were proud again, just as you had been after the Six Day War in 1967, no longer finding your reflection in the furrowed brows of rabbis and philosophers, but in fighter pilots and one-eyed generals. So the last thing you wanted to be reminded of was five thousand years of loss and jeering. Jeer at a Jew post-1967 and you risked a strafing from the Israeli Air Force. Now, post-Entebbe, anyone stealing a Jew could expect to wake to see commandos in his garden. We took no shit. And people who take no shit don’t have to go round making jokes about themselves. Jokes are the refuge of the Untermenschen . Hadn’t that been one of the declared aims of Zionism — the creation of a people who would no longer value themselves only for the wit they brought to bear on their misfortunes? A people, maybe, who would never have to make a joke again. Least of all against themselves.