Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘See it as a mitzvah!’

Mitzvah . No sooner did he shape the letters with his mouth, and with his mind shape the concepts of commandment, meritoriousness and charity which a mitzvah encompassed, than he felt he’d made a small recompense for a wickedness of which it was not finally for him to say that he was entirely innocent.

So when he heard that his daughter was in love with a Jewish boy, the son of a family his wife made regular expiation to on his behalf, he shaved twice, put on his best shirt, attached the double cuffs with the links his mother had given him for his fifteenth birthday, laid out an English breakfast, and waited for the hour of reckoning to arrive.

In comes Asher, not just the damson jam but the damson orchard entire, and is it any wonder Albert Beckman’s tears pour from him like waters from the rock Moses smote when the Israelites were thirsty?

I know how I would draw the scene were I making a cartoon of it — Albert Beckman, double-shaven and double-cuffed, squarejawed in the manner of Dick Tracy, but with his head bowed and his hands to his temple, standing in a cloudy puddle of his own tears, and from his lips a bubble of exclamatory remorse: ‘Forgive me, my little Judeler ! I am the Auschwitz German! Can you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?’ And Asher, purple as an aubergine, opening his arms and saying. .

An anachronism, of course. People were not calling themselves the Auschwitz German in those days. Not least as Auschwitz itself had not yet acquired its terrible symbolism, outstripping even Belsen and Buchenwald as the ne plus ultra of concentration camps. But as a cartoonist who likes the future remembered in the past, a historian of essentials not of time (Haman lives — that’s my point), it pleases me to anachronise. And once you have actually been collared by a would-be Auschwitz German, backed up against a wall by someone who wants you, as a Jew, to fumigate his country’s past for him, you don’t lightly forgo the opportunity to make an Auschwitz German of them all.

The circumstances in which the phrase was first delivered to me were these:

I was travelling with Zoë, in one of her Jew Jew phases, visiting museums and synagogues and sites of camps in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and God knows where else. Not Novoropissik, though. I’d given my father my word I would never go back there and my word to him was sacred. Had Zoë known of such an undertaking she ’d have found out where Novoropissik was and bundled me on to the first train, or the first horse and cart, that went anywhere near it. Although my father had died long before I met Zoë, she was at daggers-drawn with him. ‘I don’t think I’d have liked your father,’ she told me when she first saw his photograph. When I gave it as my opinion that he wouldn’t have liked her, she was deeply insulted. ‘He didn’t know me,’ she said. I couldn’t be bothered taking her through the rigmarole of rationality — ‘And you didn’t know him’ etc. No point. Going on his photograph, Zoë adjudged my father to have been another one of those Jews who would have rejected her affection and suggested she go to Berlin and be a prostitute. In my father’s case she couldn’t have been wider of the mark. ‘Now there ’s what I call an English rose!’ he ’d have enthused. ‘Look at the complexion! Look at the dainty shnozzle!’ (In one of his unconscious reversions to the muddy language of Novoropissik he might even have added ‘Kuk the ponim on her!’ — the ponim the face, but always a little face, a face viewed affectionately, in my father’s usage.) ‘What are you waiting for, Maxie? Go ahead and marry the girl. Then at least my grandchildren will look like choirboys.’ But I didn’t tell her any of that either. With Zoë you had to assume that both sides of any coin offended her equally.

The business of going to Berlin to be a prostitute so preyed on her mind that we took a detour from our Jewish-sites-of-horror pilgrimage to see what working as a prostitute in Berlin would be like. We stayed in a modern hotel auf dem Zoo and hung around the strip joints and video booths at night. When we couldn’t find any prostitutes we went inside to watch the porno, twin cabins with a communicating hole. Not something a man is supposed to do with the woman he cherishes, watch porno, but these were special circumstances. When aren’t the circumstances special? A few years earlier I’d persuaded Chloë to accompany me to Love Camp 7 — All the youthful beauty of Europe enslaved for the pleasure of the Third Reich — at a ratty cinema in Amsterdam. ‘I can see this is something you have to do, so let’s just go in and get it over with,’ Chloë said at the time. When we returned to England she changed the cinema into a live sex theatre and complained to her mother that I’d not only forced her into it but made her go up on to the stage and take part in unnatural sex acts, threatening to throw her into the canal if she refused.

‘But sweetling, you’re married to him,’ her mother reminded her. ‘Isn’t that enough of an unnatural sex act already?’

‘I know, Mother,’ Chloë wailed. ‘But it was that or the canal.’

‘And was the canal in question the Herengracht, dear?’ An enquiry that filled me with dread lest the Herengracht concealed some terrible jeu to plague me with.

Very clever of her. To this day I cannot hear the Herengracht mentioned without tremor cordis coming on me. The price she made me pay for debauching her daughter.

The next time I was in Amsterdam it was with Zoë. ‘No,’ she said, as I kicked my heels outside a row of video cabins. I respected her firmness. A honeymoon is a honeymoon. Besides, the most tempting vid on offer was Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS , which I took to be about you-know-who and which, on that account, I couldn’t watch with Zoë a mere fumble through a hole away. Some things you don’t mix up. Not even when all you’re mixing up is one Nazi she-wolf with another. I liked to think I had grown out of Ilse/Ilsa anyway, though it interested me to discover that others hadn’t. I made a mental note. On my ownio, and as a caricaturist of derangement, I thought I should find a spare hour to look into it.

Berlin came later, but even in the adjoining filth-boxes auf dem Zoo, Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS appeared not to be available.German delicacy.

‘You choose,’ Zoë said. Which presupposed there was choice. In fact, Aryan porno only has one subject: regression. What excites them is to see adults returned to the condition of messy childhood. You wet the bed when you shouldn’t any longer, you poop your pants when you’re in your thirties — and that’s the turn-on. The land of Dürer and Goethe. And before these people the whole world trembled! No Nazis on the bill of fare however. Just Norbert in a rubber nappy and Solvig going for her weekly enema. We plumped for Solvig, the eroticism consisting not so much of her lying with her toches in the air on a hospital bed in a field with the Bavarian Alps in the background, as the time it took the enema to kick in. They are monotonous in their appetites and patient in their perversions, the Germans. They wait and wait. Too monotonous and patient for Zoë who was out of there long before the attendant physicians, or whoever those men in leather aprons were, had finished inserting the syringes and clyster pipers necessary to the operation, all the while pleading, ‘ Ja, komm, komm, oh ja, Scheisse, Scheisse, ja, komm . .’

‘If this is what being a prostitute in Berlin is like. .’ Zoë protested.

I stopped her, offering it as my view that a prostitute did more than watch shit-and-piss videos with her husband sitting in the adjoining cabin.