Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

She seemed ever so slightly disappointed, as though there should have been more.

In a strange way I felt there had been too much. Loved us all . That wasn’t how my father spoke. No love talk. At least not away from the blackout which was his love affair with my mother. But then I didn’t know what fathers said when they were taking leave of their families. And it was always possible that Shani had made it all up to spare us the fact that what he ’d really said was, ‘My shaineh maidel’, and taken her into his arms one final time.

These Jewish men!

2

Selick Washinsky’s stroke affected Asher in ways he would not have expected. In expectation of such an event — and he had anticipated it often — he had seen himself running to the hospital and begging his father’s forgiveness. Thereafter there were alternative versions of the story. Sometimes he would promise never to see Dorothy again. Sometimes he would no sooner beg his father’s forgiveness than he would further beg him to give Dorothy a chance — ‘If you only knew her, if you would only meet her, you would love her, Dad.’ To which reasonable plea, in one version, his father would listen patiently. And in another would respond by having a second stroke.

What Asher had not made provision for was his own intransigence. No, he would not budge. No, he would not give in to blackmail. For his part, Selick Washinsky’s mistake was to have had an insufficiently serious stroke. He didn’t look ill enough when Asher went to visit him in hospital. Jack Glickman in a neighbouring bed looked far more sick, and Jack Glickman didn’t have a son who was seeing a fire-yekelte ’s daughter — that much he knew, leaving the son out of it, from the fact that the Glickmans didn’t run a kosher house and therefore didn’t need a fire-yekelte. His father wasn’t looking well, Asher accepted that, but when had his father looked well? As soon as he saw him, Asher decided it was a trick. Jewish fathers could throw strokes the way other men could throw a switch. There was nothing wrong with him. He just didn’t want his son marrying the daughter of the woman who made their fire and who also happened to be German. Well, that was tough shit. Asher kissed his father on both cheeks and handed him a box of kosher chocolates.

‘What’s this,’ his father asked, ‘a mockery?’

To which Asher replied, ‘No, Dad, the mockery is you.’

‘He’s faking it,’ he told Dorothy. ‘It’s not real. He made it happen.’

‘But he is in hospital,’ she reminded him.

‘He was in hospital. By now they’ll have let him out.’

She couldn’t see how this helped them. If anything the situation was worse now. If a man could fake a stroke to stop his son being with her, it didn’t mean he was less upset than had his stroke been real. It might mean he was more upset. She could see where this would end — with Selick Washinsky dying and Asher saying it wasn’t real, even as they were throwing pebbles on his grave.

‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘Tell them to geh in dred.’

‘And what does that mean?’

‘To go to hell.’

‘I know what the words mean, Asher. You’ve used them to me enough times. What I’m asking is what effect they will have.’

‘It will have the effect of making them realise that unless they want to lose me for ever they will have to accept you.’

She puffed her cheeks out. Sometimes she thought she knew Jewish families better than he did.

Asher didn’t tell his parents to geh in dred. They told him. Leave the girl or get out. There was nothing more to say.

In fact there must have been plenty more to say, otherwise Tsedraiter Ike would not have gone round there to see if Selick Washinsky were having another stroke. But that was what it boiled down to. Leave the girl or never be seen by us again. Leave the girl or accept that you are an orphan. Leave the girl or be as good as dead to us.

Asher made the mistake of saying, ‘Isn’t that a bit extreme, Dad?’

I happen to know that because Manny, finding it harder and harder to keep what had been happening to himself, told me, some time later, a little of what ensued. They had been drawing him into it for weeks. No avoiding it. ‘You talk to him, he ’s your brother, get him to see sense,’ coming from his parents; ‘Speak up for me, they’ll listen to you, tell them it’ll blow over if they give it time, but this way. . explain to them,’ coming from his brother. Manny hadn’t mentioned any of this while it was happening. Not a word. I’d be surprised if he said much to any of the parties either, despite what they asked of him. He was not a person who responded well to pressure. Demand anything of Manny and he’d hold his breath for half an hour. Try to get his attention and he ’d be off down the street, practising his breaststroke. He knew what he was good at. He understood his own tolerance level. When someone wanted help he swam away from them.

But after Asher’s ‘Isn’t that a bit extreme, Dad?’ he was willynilly a participant. When your father and your brother are wrestling on the floor, you cannot just stand there holding your breath, even if you are Manny Washinsky.

‘A bit extreme!’ Selick Washinsky had shrei’d — shrei being a Jewish scream, something only Jews can do. ‘Me! A bit extreme! You go to bed with a German girl, a child, you take advantage of a child , the daughter of a woman who works for us and who we respect. . You come to my hospital bed and call me a mockery. . You spit in your mother’s face, you bring disgrace upon your family, and you call me a bit extreme !’ He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, his hands tearing at air, as though it was the word itself he wanted to attack — extreme, the word extreme , if he could only get at it, and when he did get at it he would rip it apart letter by letter.

‘Selick, Selick, stop it! Selick, you’ve just come out of hospital,’ his wife had cried, trying to calm him, to come him between him and that word.

‘Extreme! A bit extreme!’ And then, because there’s nowhere else a shrei can go, and because he had decided at last where and where only the word was to be found, he had leapt at Asher’s throat. ‘I’ll kill you. May the Almighty forgive me, I’ll kill you. .’

And had he been possessed of the necessary strength he would have.

Maybe this was the fight that brought Tsedraiter Ike across, maybe it wasn’t. Apparently there were any number of scenes like these. This one, at least, was terminated when Manny piled in on top of his brother and his father, lashing out at both of them, and having what he described to me as an epileptic fit.

‘You are an epileptic?’

‘No. I just had this fit. My legs went stiff, I couldn’t stop my arms shaking, my face turned to ice and I was foaming at the mouth.’

Rabies! So I’d been right to be worried the time he bit me. If he’d bitten me that bit closer to my thumb who knows what the consequence would have been.

‘Have you ever foamed at the mouth before?’

‘Never.’

And no doubt he thought he would never foam at the mouth or be otherwise unrecognisable to himself again. Which just goes to show how little we know about ourselves.

How did it happen, how did Elohim allow it to happen, that a boy as hesitant and introjective as Manny Washinsky, a boy so unprovocative and — not to be unkind — invisible , could have found himself entrammelled in so much violence? How many times was it that I’d either seen or heard about him doing battle on the floor? Here am I, the son of a boxer, by profession a scratcher-out of eyes, a brute without a heart, if Zoë was to be believed, and to date I have never found myself in anything that remotely resembles a fight, not even an upright almost shaping up to be a fight, let alone a down and dirty horizontal wrestle.