Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘You never don’t exist for me. I think about you every minute.’

‘That’s not the same. You might be thinking about me, but when you’re elsewhere you become a person who isn’t with me and doesn’t know me. It’s not being your secret I mind — at least as your secret I’m an important part of you — it’s being of no account. Never to be mentioned, always to come second to your family.’

‘You don’t come second.’

‘No, I come third. Or even fourth. How can I feel I know you unless I know your family?’

He told her that it would kill them. That he would have to tell them slowly. First his brother. Then, his father. .

‘Then?’

Could he tell his mother? His father he imagined storming and raging. He could accept that. But his mother? He imagined her in tears, on her knees, clinging to his legs. Don’t do it, Asherla, don’t bring this shame upon us.

‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s a bit primordial.’

‘A bit?’

He shrugged. ‘She ’s my mother.’

‘Oh yes, Jewish boys and their mothers!’

Unless that was Chloë or Zoë speaking. ‘Oh, yes, Jewish boys and their mothers!’ They both hated my mother.

Also a bit primordial. Of them, I mean.

He would have looked helpless, hands by his side, a little boy lost. Standing on the railway station with his suitcase by his side, waiting for the Auschwitz Express — Jew Jew, Jew Jew. ‘Please don’t take me from my mother!’ Whatever your religion, you’re born knowing the day will come, born wondering if it will be today or if it will be tomorrow — the separation, the choice, her or her, your mother or your mother’s mortal enemy, the other woman. But if you’re born Jewish, the other woman is your people’s mortal enemy as well; as in this instance, not just a Gentile woman, not just the daughter of the woman who makes your fires on a Shabbes, but — is he mad or what is he? — a German! How many sins? Go on, Asher, add up the offences.

The poor girl. How could she know how many offences she amounted to?

‘I want their approval,’ she told him. ‘I want your mother and your father to love me for loving you.’

He pointed to his chest. Made a dagger of his hand and plunged it between his ribs. ‘It doesn’t feel right for me, either,’ he said. ‘Here! It doesn’t feel right, here, without their approval.’

‘What doesn’t feel right? You mean you don’t feel right about me?’

‘Everything. Nothing. None of it feels right.’

She stared at him, a chill about her heart.

‘My mother and father loom very large in my life,’ he told her, as though she didn’t already know.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s why I want them to loom very large in mine. And why, so long as they don’t know about me, I feel I don’t loom very large for you. Take me to meet them, Asher.’

Did she want the brutal truth? Did she want to hear him say Not a hope in hell, Dorothy?

And so it descended into the usual. ‘You’re not the only one with feelings because you’re Jewish, Asher.’

Tears in his eyes. He the more emotional of the two. But silent. The silence a goad.

‘I’m not nobody, Asher. I’m not a nobody because I’m not Jewish.’

A movement of his shoulders. Meaning what? That he knew she wasn’t nobody but there was nothing he could do about it?

Until finally — ‘You people!’

Whereupon Asher could empty his conscience of its guilt, accuse her of being an anti-Semite, and go home to his family.

4

‘I bet you didn’t know,’ Manny said to me on one of his rare visits to my house, ‘that Germans iron their underwear.’

He had just visited the bathroom, which seemed to explain the association. But it was also clear that he was looking for something to say to cover his embarrassment. Not easy for Manny, going to someone else ’s bathroom. His own bathroom was trial enough, what with the number of times he had to test that the wash taps were really off before he left, and the amount of flushing of the lavatory he had to do, but someone else ’s imposed a near-intolerable burden of conscientiousness on him. I was not a tap-twiddler myself. I did not believe that if I was not super vigilant, and then doubly vigilant of the effects of my vigilance, the sink or cistern would overflow, flooding the house or drowning its inhabitants in ordure. But I was similarly delicate. It was how we’d been brought up. For a people refined in the matter of the body’s exigencies, and respectful of others’ privacies, a visit to an alien bathroom constituted a transgression. In my case it was often (and still is often) accompanied by extreme sadness, as though the neatly folded towels and the scented tissues, the new soap in the soap dish, the eau de cologne, the considerate rows of scissors, tweezers, nail files, represented an innocence of which I was the defiler.

Whether I am describing a philosophical dismay which is peculiarly Jewish I can’t be sure. But though we never discussed it, I knew that Manny was beset by it no less than I was. So if it is Jewish, it isn’t specifically Orthodox or liberal Jewish. It is of a Jewishness which predates theological finessing.

Either way, it has to be said that Errol Tobias didn’t share it. Errol would have set up a branch of the Crumpsall Park Onanists in any bathroom that had a door to it, and even the door was optional. Years later, when I stayed with him for one night in Mill Hill — this was prior to his move to Borehamwood — I was shown into a guest bathroom papered with photographs torn from pornographic magazines of women with their legs open. ‘I like a bog to be a bog,’ he told me. ‘Enjoy!’

But then Errol was the exception that proved every rule.

As for Germans ironing their underwear, that’s one of those things you aren’t sure whether you know or not. It seemed of a piece with everything else I’d read about their methodical cruelty, but whether it had cropped up in The Scourge of the Swastika I couldn’t remember.

‘So how do you know this?’ I asked him. ‘Did Ilse Koch — may her name be wiped out — iron hers?’

He threw me a strange look. ‘I just know it,’ he said, rubbing his fist in his hair. He had been reading about the importance of getting blood to the brain and reckoned that massaging his scalp with his knuckles would facilitate this. Then he suddenly asked me, ‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘Depends on the secret. If it doesn’t threaten the safety of my family I will keep it.’

‘It threatens the safety of my family.’

‘Then I’ll keep it.’

‘It’s someone Asher knows,’ he said, lowering his voice. Not counting the German letter he claimed he’d found in the street, this was the first allusion Manny had made, in my hearing, to Asher’s troubles.

‘Asher knows a German?’

‘He knows a girl who knows a German.’

‘Asher knows a girl ?’

Disingenuous of me. Everyone knew that Asher knew a girl. And everyone knew a lot more than that as well. But I didn’t want my knowledge to upset him.

‘It’s her father. Asher says he irons underwear in the kitchen, in front of him.’

I pulled a face. The same face, apparently, that Asher pulled.

We are finicky, we Jews. We no more want to see other people ‘s underwear or bathrooms than we want them to see ours. It was a matter of honour in our house not to leave even the most innocent item of underclothing lying about. It is possible I idealise, but I do not recall once coming upon a slip of my mother’s where it should not have been, nor my father’s vest, if he ever wore a vest. The same principle operated at the Washinskys’ which was in every other regard a rubbish dump. The first time Manny took me home he asked me not to look at anything. ‘My mother isn’t well,’ he told me. ‘That’s why nothing has been done today.’ But ‘doing’ wasn’t the problem. From the way the place appeared you could only guess that when the Washinskys ripped their clothes off at night they threw them on the floor in rage and left them there. Shirts, shoes, trousers, dresses, hats, keys, loose change, books, pens, pieces of paper — whatever had been about their persons was spilled and forgotten as though God had advised them the very moment they were naked to clear their minds of everything else and make ready to appear before Him. Yet even here, God or no God, not a single item private to the Washinskys’ wardrobe was left where you could find it. If I close my eyes I can picture their house as though I had been in it only this morning, the dumps of bed linen, the piles of towels, the tangles of disregarded clothing, the torn siddurim, but no articles of underwear do I espy. It’s possible they stuffed them into pillowcases. It’s possible they burnt them. It’s possible God took them. It’s conceivable they wore none. Whatever the explanation, the same fastidiousness that operated in the gleaming godless palace that was our house operated in the sad site of superstition and neglect that was theirs.