Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

I’m not saying that he grew suddenly garrulous crossing the river on bridges that hadn’t been there when they first put him away, or hobbling along the King’s Road like a Chelsea Pensioner, but he would comment on what he saw — people ’s dress, the numbers of foreigners in the streets, everybody wired up to some item of technology or another — so that I at least became privy to his sudden negligences and parentheses. It was as though the city acted as a chaperone between us, releasing him from the fear of unwonted intimacies, while making small talk easier. Not ideal, given that it was intimacy I was after — and I could hardly seize upon the iPod as a pretext for bringing up double homicide — but as I kept telling them in Wardour Street, just give me time.

One Saturday morning I picked him up off the early train from Manchester and took him to the British Museum. I thought he might like to mooch around the new courtyard, and otherwise wander where his fancy took him. How we got to Ancient Egypt I am not entirely sure. More by accident than design, I think, since as Jews neither of us was able to get excited by pharaohs or the mummification of their priests. I hadn’t cared for mummies even as a pre-adolescent when all that bandaging is supposed to speak to some regressive sexuality in a boy, and never warmed to them thereafter, for all that they were demonstrably a species of cartoon — panels of naturalist narrative criss-crossed with garrulous strips of hieroglyphics, not an inch of space left undevoured. Noisy, vivid, the bright colours of life refusing the monochrome of death, one hyperbolic assertion of history and nature tumbling over another. My bag, you would have thought. Done with me in mind. That they left me cold and even slightly queasy I can only ascribe to instinctual Jewish resistance to plaster and paint, to bandages and gum, to extracting the internal organs of the dead, and to what I understood of the principle of ka , the life force which was said to live on and expect feeding after the individual had died. We Jews draw more cut-and-dried distinctions than that, clear our dead away much quicker. Among Jews it is possible for you to have a heart attack after dinner and be in the ground by breakfast. Hasty but clean.

And there’s no ka hanging around hoping for a hot meal after.

Habdalah.

The older I get, the more enamoured I grow of the principle of Habdalah. Keep the meat from the milk, keep the holy from the profane, keep the living from the dead.

And the goyim from the Jews? As an incorrigible mixer, and with the bruises to show for it, I am still thinking about that.

Seeing me holding back from the mummies, Manny shuffled to my side. ‘Ugh,’ he said, and shuddered.

Funny, the difference an unwelcome corroboration can make to your evaluations. Who was Manny to be shuddering at a once great civilisation, for Christ’s sake, when he’d grown up in a house of rags no better than a mausoleum itself?

‘I suppose you don’t much care for this guy either?’ I enquired, moving him on ill-temperedly to a small painted wooden Bes, the dwarf fertility god — smirking, naked, phallic, prancing, laden with musical instruments.

One of Zoë’s favourites, Bes, whenever we’d encountered him in a museum on our travels.

‘You know there is something of Bes about you, Max,’ she liked to tell me, ‘if we discount the fertile, the naked, the phallic, the prancing and the musicality.’

She loved a joke, Zoë, as I loved her for making them. ‘So all that leaves,’ I would say. .

‘. . is the smirking dwarf. Exactly.’

But there was a more serious point she wanted to make. ‘Don’t you wish you had a Bes in your pantheon?’ she asked me once, I think it must have been in Charlottenburg, on our seeing how she would hack it as a Berlin harlot. By ‘your’ she meant not belonging to me but belonging to the Jews.

‘A pointless question,’ was my answer. ‘We don’t have a pantheon. We have Elohim, full stop. I think that’s wiser myself. One God or No God. Start letting everybody in and you end up praying to a hunchback with his dick out and tambourines in his hands.’

‘I thought you were a musical people, Max.’

‘We are. But when we discover a musical gift in ourselves we don’t take all our clothes off and start dancing. We apply for a job as first viola with the Israeli Philharmonic.’

‘And go mad with living in your brain. You’d be healthier with more than one sort of god, Max. You’d be more various in your interests. In your case you might even get an interest. And you’d certainly look better. . all of you.’

Which of course was exactly what I wanted to say to Manny. Had you made a bit of room for Bes in your heart, Manny, who knows — you might not have had to play the Holocaust around and around in your head, or stutter into your fingernails, or gas your parents.

He didn’t engage with me on Bes. Maybe he was thinking what I was thinking. But he did stop and look long into a case of bronze and limestone deities, half-animal, half-human — a squatting antelope, a leering jackal, a cat-headed goddess slinky as a nightclub singer, knowing and obscene. Irresistibly disgusting, all of them. And impossible, for a cartoonist anyway, not to admire. Easy enough to take or leave a painted sarcophagus, but I couldn’t, professionally, resist comic gods and goddesses who mocked the spiritual, could I?

‘Do you think this was what Moses found our people dancing around when he came down Sinai with the tablets in his hands?’ I wondered, gesturing at a ram-headed deity.

‘No. That was a gold calf made from women’s earrings.’

‘But an animal god, anyway. Something sickening and slightly wonderful like this, wouldn’t you say? I can see why they danced. He makes you swoon. Look at his obscene, wide-apart ears, and those extended arms, like a curtain opened on himself — behold, see what’s beneath, see what animality is incident to your graceful humanness. You can’t say no to it, Manny.’

He sent his blue eyes twinkling into the ironic distance again, something he hadn’t done all morning. With a quick dart of his tongue, he wet his lips then touched his moustache as though he feared he might have licked it off. ‘What I was taught,’ he said, still looking away, ‘was that the children of Israel danced around the calf because, like children, they thought Moses had gone for ever. They were desolate and wanted to worship something they could see.’

‘Agreed. Something palpably indecent. Something which answered more to what they recognised as the complexity of their natures. Something that wasn’t words and interdictions.’

Odd that I should have been playing the devil’s advocate.I knew where I stood on the question of gods. Four-square behind words and interdictions. But sometimes Zoë’s voice spoke through me. This can happen in a marriage, even long after the marriage has been dissolved. You open your mouth and lo! — your longlost spouse’s voice comes out.

‘That’s an interpretation,’ Manny said, also ventriloquising, I thought. ‘It isn’t the one I was taught.’

Lost him. Lost him again to our invisible God, in whom he had forfeited the right to believe.

He was looking at nothing now, wanting to be gone, wanting the morning to be over. To spite him I lingered longer than curiosity demanded, taking in whatever obscenities I could find — a squatting baboon with a penis the size of a cartoonist’s pencil, a jeering hippopotamus-headed god, another jackal, a turtle, a second inebriate Bes clanging his cymbals. And not a word of the Law to be heard.

3

It might have been something or nothing, but Manny engineered a queer encounter outside the museum. We had agreed we would have lunch together, but first I needed to visit the comic shop opposite. If it’s funnies you want, Bloomsbury’s the place to go. Since a comic shop could not possibly interest Manny and the morning was warm, we agreed that he would sit in the sun and wait for me. That’s what nutters do — they sit in the sun and wait. I left him to find his own slab of concrete, which is never easy given the busloads of foreign schoolchildren who gather here to eat their sandwiches and discuss Egyptian art. To my surprise — a surprise I cannot justify — he chose to sit himself, very deliberately it seemed to me, between a Muslim gentleman who was reading a newspaper, and two children who were surely his, busy playing with their Quetzalcóatl keyrings, Rosetta Stone mouse mats, and countless other items of swotty tat bought from the museum shop. What surprised me more when I returned was the sight of Manny, who I couldn’t trust to purchase his own bus ticket, engrossed in convivial conversation with the whole family. Not only that, he knew their names.