Howard Jacobson: Kalooki Nights

But it was about Jews that she harried me the most. She had been badly treated in her life by Jews. Only the once, not counting her treatment by me, but once can be enough. She had grown up next to a family of them on one of those high-blown scraps of wood and coppice you find between cemeteries and golf clubs in North London, taking ‘growing up’ to mean from the age of nine or thereabouts, that crucial hormonal period when, as Zoë herself fancifully explained it, she was poised to ‘change from a plant into a person’, a period not to be confused with that she spent in my company, during which she changed, again in her own words, ‘back into a plant’. The horticulture was more than a figure of speech. Jews interfered with the natural growing process, were not themselves natural — that was what she intended by it. When Zoë was depressed she sat under a tree. When we fought she gardened. In soil she found the antithesis to me. And presumably, also, to the Krystals, the family who had stunted her. I knew the drama of their treachery by heart, she told it me so often. They came and she adored them, in her innocence drawing no distinction between the love she bore the senior Krystals, Leslie and Leila, and the love she bore the two boys, Selwyn and Seymour. Important I understood that: she loved them all , and loved them without design — played with them, ate with them, learned with them, progressed from late infancy to adolescence with them, then out of an unclouded powder-blue sky received her marching orders from them. When Zoë turned fifteen — ‘the very next day, she couldn’t even wait a week’ — Leila Krystal took her to one side and told her that with her looks and figure she’d make a fine living as a whore in the cafés of Berlin. Wanted her out of the way, you see. Wanted her far from where she could light any fires (some fire-yekeltes we want, some we don’t) in the hearts of either Selwyn or Seymour or both. At fifteen — so Zoë sobbed to me in my bed — she overnight became an anathema. ‘They looked at me as though they’d never seen me before. The minute I became a woman, in their eyes I became filth. A prostitute. Nothing else. That’s why,’ she explained, ‘I am in love with you.’

‘Because you have reason to hate Jews?’

‘Because they deprived me of my right to love Jews.’

It seemed a fair enough deal to me. Thank you, Leila Krystal. I’d get Zoë and in return be the Jew whom Zoë could love.

But it seemed I’d overdone it. Now Zoë was wondering why I had to look quite so Jewish quite so much of the time.

‘Because I am fucking Jewish,’ I reminded her.

‘All the time?’

‘Every fucking minute.’ ‘Stop swearing,’ she said.

‘I’ll stop fucking swearing when you stop asking me why I look so fucking Jewish.’

‘Why is everything a negotiation with you? Why can’t you stop swearing and stop looking Jewish?’

‘What do you want me to do, have a fucking nose job?’

She thought about it. Showed me her impertinently undemonstrative Gentile profile, every feature segregated from the other. My features, whatever else you thought about them, were on good terms, enjoyed a warm confabulation, each with each. Zoë’s face was a species of apartheid.

‘Good idea,’ she said at last. ‘Have it off.’

‘You used to like my nose.’

‘I used to like you.’

‘Then why do you want me to stop at the nose? Why don’t I have everything off?’

She pushed her mouth at me approvingly, one lip at a time, making little stars of fucking Bethlehem (nothing I could or can do about the swearing when proximate to Zoë) dance in her frosty fucking eyes. Always Christmas, always the birth of her saviour when she looked at me. Never a minute when a theological squabble two thousand years old was not present between us. Just as my mother and Tsedraiter Ike — though separately and of course unbeknown to my father while he was living — had predicted. ‘She ’ll call you dirty Jew,’ Tsedraiter Ike had warned me, whistling the prognostication around his single tooth. ‘She ’ll accuse you of killing Christ,’ my mother said. ‘They always do in the end.’ They didn’t get that last part right. Zoë never did accuse me of killing Christ. Only of behaving as though I were Christ, which is a subtly different charge. But ‘dirty Jew’, yes, or at least ‘Jew’ with the dirty — meaning heated, meaning tumultuous, meaning unrefreshed and unrefreshable — implied. And now she wanted me to have my nose cropped.

Why did I so far entertain the idea as to get in touch with a plastic surgeon — who, incidentally, wouldn’t touch my nose, but tried to make me a Christian by the theological route, pushing smudgy pamphlets onto me about Christ’s mission to the Jews? Why didn’t I gather myself to my full height, push out my profile, and leave the marriage?

The sex partly. One-time fuck me fuck me women who lie there straight as toy soldiers when their ardour cools, eyes squeezed, mouths puckered like dried figs, wondering How long O Lord, How long, exercise a fatal fascination on men of my sort. You go on labouring in the hope that one day, like a princess in a fairy story, they will become reanimated in your arms. In the fairy stories which Jewish men tell themselves, the princesses are always Gentile. So that’s your task when your mother releases you into the world: to warm back into life the chilly universe of shiksehs.

Beyond that, I was sorry for her. Partly because of the Krystals who had treated her so contemptuously. But also because I’d been brought up to be sorry for any woman (this is, of course, the shadow-image of the previous fairy story) who was married to me: a Jew with the stinking waters of Novoropissik in his veins. And this regardless of whether she accused me of killing or appropriating Christ.

The other reason I didn’t walk out on her when she suggested plastic surgery was that the idea answered to some extremity of exasperation in myself. You can get sick of looking like a Jew. And you can get sick of being looked at like a Jew as well. It would be interesting to see how it felt not to be forever earmarked for something or other. They regard you oddly, the Gentiles, whether they mean you harm or not. You give rise to some expectancy in them. As though, for good or ill, you’ve got the answer about your person to a question they can’t quite find. It would be nice not to be the cause of that any longer. And — because whatever the question, you don’t ever have the answer — nice not to be regarded as a disappointment. What would it be like, I wondered, not to feel I’d raised a curiosity I couldn’t satisfy? Maybe I’d wake up happy instead of fucked off. Maybe I’d find a wider market for my cartoons. Maybe I’d get on better with my lozenge-stiff Hitlerian wife. With a smaller nose they say you give better cunnilingus. In fact Jews give the best cunnilingus in the world precisely because they have the nasal cartilage to give it with; though I grant you that in that case what they’re giving isn’t strictly cunnilingus. So maybe, pedantry aside, I’d give worse cunnilingus. That too was a consideration. Cut off my nose to spite the bitch.

3

The truth is, not everybody needs a white supremacist superwoman, or a missionary plastic surgeon, come to that, to do the prompting. You can wish away being Jewish, looking Jewish, thinking Jewish, talking Jewish, all on your ownio, to borrow one of Zoë’s mother’s, no, Chloë’s mother’s, cute locutions.

(As in ‘Well, there , I have to say, you’re on your ownio, Sonny Jim’ — whenever she disagreed with something someone said to her. Which was most of the time. All of the time, if the someone happened to be me.)