Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

And by contrast dehumanised his parents who would not notice, or care, that it was there. For this, and without any prior warning signs in his theology, Manny, in his depression, blamed the faith of his fathers.

God, good. God, I was sure, would take us where I wanted to go. Wherever that was. Talk to me about God, Manny.

‘It wasn’t a fully-fledged religious crisis,’ he said, a queer blue smile irradiating his face. ‘I wasn’t intelligent enough for one of those. I just started to have my doubts.’

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘I remember you questioning the Unquestionable One. I suspect I wasn’t sympathetic.’

He didn’t appear to care whether I’d been sympathetic or not. ‘Illogical doubts,’ he went on. ‘I didn’t have the nerve to reprove God for His brutality, so I took what some would see as the easier option of wondering where He’d gone.’

‘You think He should have interceded for Asher?’

‘Of course I didn’t. Asher had to make his own mind up.’

‘Which he ’d done. .’

‘Not really. Asher just got pushed around. He should have been braver. But it was upsetting to see him put in that position. I had originally agreed with everything my parents felt about him. In certain moods I still do. But in the end they should have let him go. The Jewish people were not going to perish because of Asher.’

‘My dad would have said that the Jewish people would have been the better for Asher taking himself a Gentile wife.’

‘Yes, but your dad didn’t always say what he meant.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

He wasn’t going to help me. He looked bored suddenly. He had even stopped gripping his left hand with his right. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s the head. It gets tired.’

He got up to go to the lavatory. Would he come back, I wondered, and tell me that Germans ironed their underwear?

I was distressed to see that he shambled like an old man.

And was then struck by the thought that he hadn’t s-ssschushed me in a while.

5

Before we parted, he grew more forthcoming about God, more forthcoming about Asher anyway, which by Manny’s roundabout route amounted to the same thing.

Asher had not settled back into the life of his family. He was in torment. Manny’s word. Torment . He could not clear his mind of Dorothy.

‘You make her sound like an infestation.’

‘That’s your intepretation. But it was not her doing. Asher did not want to clear his mind of Dorothy.’

‘This is Asher being a free agent again. Not God’s fault.’

He hesitated. ‘Not God’s fault that Asher wanted to go on thinking of Dorothy. But you have to ask yourself whose fault it was that he felt he shouldn’t.’

‘Did Elohim ever tell us, specifically , to stay away from Germans?’ I asked.

‘He probably thought He didn’t need to, having warned us off everybody else.’

I don’t know how to do justice to the bitterness of that remark. It was thrown off, an aside almost, but had it been a well you could have sunk a bore a long way down before reaching bottom. Was the bitterness on his own behalf? Had Manny fallen for someone he shouldn’t, and had he too been warned off in the end? It felt unlikely. Manny sentimentally entangled with anyone , allowed or not, was beyond imagining. So was that the cause of the vexation I heard — that with him the warnings against wandering off weren’t even necessary, so good a job had his parents done on him, so love-proof had they made him, for fear the love would go in an unacceptable direction?

Rather than have the love go in an unacceptable direction, let there be no love!

As usual there was no clue in the expression of his face. His blue eyes — much bluer than I’d remembered — offering to be serene this time, not fluttering at the windows, just seeing beauty, perhaps angels, in the firmament. So maybe the example of Asher was explanation enough of Manny’s anger.

Asher was in torment. He could not forgive himself for the almost accidental way in which he and Dorothy had broken up. He owed her feelings more consideration. He owed his own feelings more consideration too. He had acted like a coward, a nobody, a nishtikeit in her language and in his. How terrible, to think it would be as a nishtikeit that she would for ever think of him, if she thought of him at all. He couldn’t decide what was worse: her contempt for his memory, or her crying over it. What did goodness teach? Where was Judaism on this? Does the good Jew suffer the obloquy of one he has loved in preference to having her suffer the grief of loving him still? Whose tears are the more precious? Where does it teach you in the Talmud to weigh the emotional consequences of betraying a German girl?

Over and above all this, he quite simply missed her. The one remedy for that — taking his chance and seeking her out again — was not to be entertained, regardless of whether she would even consider agreeing to see him. He could not start that war all over. He could not engage her affections again when he knew he would eventually have to forfeit them for the same reasons. Thus her dear face, whose image he carried in his heart like an ache, became entwined with the idea of impossibility. And when you think of a woman as impossible to you, denied you by forces in the universe over which you can exert no control, you have succumbed to romanticism in its most morbid and irresistible form.

He wept every night for her, and Manny heard him.

Then in the morning he would go to the post office in case she had written to him, which of course she had not. But on the way there, and on the way back, a hundred times in each direction he thought he recognised her. He grew gaunt and papery and more gouge-eyed even than he’d been before, but not once did his mother or his father think they had been wrong or wonder whether, for his sake, right or wrong, they should reconsider their ruling. They remained obdurate and relieved, and Manny saw them.

Then, when Asher did not recover his spirits, they sent him to convalesce in a home for weak-chested Jews in Cheshire, and Manny watched him go.

That was why Manny grew to hate his parents, and to lose his faith in G-god. The way he talked, the two were interchangeable.

6

Had my mother believed in God to start with, she too might have lost her faith in Him when my father died. As it was she turned to kalooki.

Though my father had expressly asked to be spared a Jewish funeral — I don’t want any of that machareike, he had said — it turned out that he had made no provision for any other sort, so a Jewish funeral was what he got. I think his Yiddish was at fault with machareike which he employed to mean fuss, but strictly speaking means contraption. I suspect the impatiently onomatopoeic qualities of the word confused him. The sound of something being made of nothing. It still perplexes and distresses me that he should have felt that way about his own death. But this might be the paradox of heroic atheism: you rob yourself at the last of the grandeur to which you believe your freedom of mind entitles you. I have, for this reason, made no provision for a secular burial myself, even though I too can’t stand all the machareike. Insidious, the old religion, the way it bides its time with everyone, knowing that when you want the big party or the big send-off, you’ll be on the phone.

I wept like a baby throughout my father’s funeral so didn’t notice whether the send-off was big or not. It began — this much I do remember — with my father’s comrades lining up outside the house, not sure what to do with their hands, some in hats or yarmulkes, some not, ‘Long John’ Silverman carrying a prayer shawl under his arm, Elmore Finkel bearing what looked like a gift for my mother tied in a black bow — just in case (how would he know?) a funeral gift was appropriate — all of them respectful but somehow emasculated in their blackest suits, each wishing me, as is the Jewish custom, ‘long life ’. That could have been the trigger for my tears. Their capitulation to Jewishry for this one hour hurt my head: I couldn’t decide whether it was ennobling or enfeebling. What would my father have thought? Wouldn’t he have preferred to see them in their hiking boots, grinning raffishly at the trappings of a faith they had no truck with? Wasn’t there a comradely farewell that would have become them, and honoured him, more? The rifles of the revolution, maybe? The singing of the ‘Red Flag’? A fusillade of anti-clerical jokes? Or did the death of one of their number necessitate a reversion to ancient custom? Was that, after all, the greatest respect they could show him? In which case. .