Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

On the strength of that sentence, if nothing else — and I couldn’t care less whether or not he lacked instinctive sympathy for Marx’s view of history — Isaiah Berlin was a hero to me. But by virtue, as I understood it, of his being a well-connected Jew, he frightened and bewildered me as well. How could you be a well-connected Jew? Who could you be connected to ? No Jew was well connected where I came from. It was a contradiction in terms. For this I both hated Isaiah Berlin and craved his approval. By ‘his’ I meant that of people like him. Other well-connected Jews. Win their approval — I say nothing of admiration or friendship — and you would thereby, magically, become well connected yourself. But what chance of that after Errol, in his hearing, had introduced me as a dick-artist and got me to blow on Tillie Guttmacher’s chest? Of Sir Isaiah Berlin’s connections, how many were dick-artists?

In fact, as the smallest amount of research into his circle reveals, quite a number of them were. But they didn’t call themselves that, there was the difference. And what you call yourself determines how people see you. A. J. Ayer couldn’t keep his dick in his pants, but he called himself an iconoclast and libertarian. Just as Goya, the greatest of cartoonists, knew to present himself to posterity as a painter, satirist and historian. The secret of reputation: call it big and they’ll think it big.

Whether or not Isaiah Berlin in later life remembered me from the curry restaurant in Rusholme I have no way of knowing. But he never responded to my publishers when they sent him an advance copy of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness , a work which, given what he wrote about Tolstoy, you’d have expected him, if not to endorse or even like, at the very least to understand. Other well-connected Jews of his calibre the same. Not a peep. Mine was not, that was all I could deduce — since not every one of them had come to hear of me first as a dick-artist — their idea of serious discourse on a Jewish theme.

4

The clap!

We went back to Errol Tobias’s house, ostensibly to remove the curry stains from Tillie Guttmacher’s blouse, crept about among the washbasins and the hairdryers, made free with the reclining chairs, and she gave me the clap. A carelessness to repay a carelessness.

My first sexual encounter with a Jewess, which also happened to be my first sexual encounter of any kind, and it poisoned me. Hard to square this with my going on imagining Jewish women as sexually inaccessible, I know, but I was somehow able to delude myself that the sex I’d had with Tillie Guttmacher I hadn’t, and that the clap she gave me I contracted through some other agency. It didn’t much feel like sex, in the dark and the discomfort of the salon, with Tillie complaining about her blouse, and Melanie laughing, and Errol egging us on and quite possibly, for all I could see or recognise to the contrary, manually busying himself between us. And what didn’t feel like sex surely couldn’t give you any of the diseases that were the punishment for sex. I’d caught the clap off Errol, I decided. Off Errol’s hands, off the seats of Errol’s mother’s salon chairs, off the words Errol spoke, off the air Errol breathed, off Errol’s pestilential contiguity.

Alvin Shrager, the doctor who had attended my mother in both her pregnancies and my father in his final illness, and who therefore saw me as a sort of ward of his practice, reprimanded me for bringing an infection into his surgery that was not of a kind either of us had any business with — ‘A boy like you shouldn’t be coming to me with this,’ were his exact words, which made me wonder what a boy like me should be coming to him with — and confirmed that it couldn’t have been a Jewish girl who infected me. ‘What you get for going to prostitutes,’ he told me.

‘She wasn’t a prostitute.’

He made that Merchant of Venice weighing motion with his hands, as though to suggest that in the scale of things, a lapse was a lapse and a trollop was a trollop. He’d just told me I had the clap. Who was I to be making nice distinctions of morality?

‘I’m telling you,’ I said. ‘She wasn’t a prostitute.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I didn’t pay her, for one thing.’

He removed the pipe from his mouth, laid it on the desk next to his stethoscope and threw his head back. ‘There’s more than one way of paying,’ he laughed. ‘And you’ve paid all right.’

Then he took his pipe up again and bit on it. These days doctors don’t smoke while they’re treating you, but Shrager was what was known as an old-fashioned family doctor even then. He breathed an almost solid fuel of bile and pipe tobacco into the faces of his patients.

The need rose in me — inexplicable in the circumstances — to defend the reputation of Tillie Guttmacher. I was a snap of the fingers away from giving Shrager her name and, had I known it, her address. She’s a Guttmacher, of the Didsbury Guttmachers! Now what have you go to say? But I settled for something almost as conclusive. ‘She’s a nice Jewish girl,’ I said. ‘The nice Jewish girl every nice Jewish boy is supposed to marry.’ I would have liked to add that she could have been his daughter.

He arched an eyebrow. He was famous, Alvin Shrager, for his shaggy eyebrows. Shani believed they were false. My mother thought he simply roughed them up every morning, before surgery. Craggy wisdom was what I thought — the mamzer wanted to give the impression of reflection seasoned in experience.

Out of the depth of which experience he came up with a gem of unpleasantness, even by his standards. ‘Think on,’ he said, ‘where else might you have been?’ The most unpleasant part being that I had been asking myself the very same question.

I laid out for him the topography of my uncleanness: the school lavatories with their cracked wooden seats, the school shower, a club in town where the urinals overflowed and the washbasins were green, the Temple Cinema known with good reason as the fleapit, the number 35 bus, Tsedraiter Ike’s towel, the changing rooms in Halon’s man’s shop in Withy Grove where I’d tried on a pair of trousers, the trousers themselves previously tried on by God knows who else, the chairs in Errol’s mother’s salon, Errol’s conversation, my own mind. . Could a boy get the clap from his own imagination?

Shrager sucked on his pipe. ‘You can’t catch what you’ve got from any of those,’ he told me. ‘Who else have you had sexual relations with?’

I opened the palms of my hands to him. He had that effect on me. He made me feel guilty about whatever ailed me. Not just the clap, a cold as well, a sore throat, a bad stomach, an ingrowing toenail. All my fault. ‘No one,’ I said, ashamed to admit it, because that was clearly another thing I bore the fault for — being a virgin until Tillie Guttmacher had her way with me while she was waiting for her blouse to dry — that’s if she really did have her way with me.

He pointed to a chair. Sit. While I sat he filled another pipe. At any time the ritual of pipes infuriated me. That was another of the ways I denoted cartoon villainy when I was denied a big nose — a pipe. Only a very bad man would subject others to that tyrannous time warp where all of creation must wait on the filling of a pipe. But I had further reason to be impatient. I was suffering from a debilitating disease of particular incidence to artists, a disease that had wrecked the lives of Cellini, Manet, Lautrec, Gauguin, to name only the ones who sprang to mind, and instead of beginning treatment immediately, before it wrecked my life, a life that had barely begun, Dr Alvin Shrager was sticking a thumb in his pipe bowl and preparing me a lecture.