Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

When the daughters of Israel tinkled their feet for their menfolk, their intention was solely to give pleasure. Chloë too was in the pleasure business, but at the depriving of it end.

She was the first of the conceptualists, possessed of no manual dexterity, no sense of the ridiculous, and no patience to make art. So out of place among us did she look that everything she said and wore were taken to be ironic statements. Only a highly sarcastic and anarchic individual — that was the reasoning — would dare turn up at an art school looking like someone answering an advertisement in the Lady . In fact she was a deeply, even anarchically conservative woman. I like to think I was the only one who understood that. But that was just about all I understood.

She was furious when I met her. Her mouth in a perpetual arctic downturn, no matter that she was engaged in convivial conversation; a quiet, simmering rage narrowing her grey eyes, and issuing in a sniffle which never quite became a cold but which never left her in the all the years I knew her. That I wasn’t the object — the sole object — of this ferocious froideur, I now accept. It felt pretty personal the first time I encountered it, however. An icy blast directed at the softest chamber of my pulpy Jewish heart. But I wasn’t just in it for the insult. Or at least not just for the insult to me. What doubly attracted me the first time I clapped eyes on her — along with the armed cameras and equivocating shoes — was the look she had of having been insulted herself. There was something smutty, or do I mean smutted, about her. Someone had demeaned her. Why it is necessary, in order for me to fall in love, for one or other of us to feel slighted, I don’t know. My instinct is to put the question the other way round: how do people manage romantic attachment where there is not some history of disdain, some evidence of ignominy to stimulate the passions? I suppose none of this is necessary where sex is perceived as a natural activity, continuous with civility and good manners and all the other arts of social refinement and consideration. But that doesn’t sound like very satisfactory sex to me. Sex, surely, once we’ve put the animal state behind us, is an aberration, and therefore, for it to be sex at all, must thrive on imbalance and reversal, on usurpation of the decencies, on disregard for what is usually owing. As civilised beings we cannot do without respect; as sexual beings we cannot do without the opposite. All of which might not tell you anything except that The Scourge of the Swastika fell into my hands too early.

Fell into my hands too early, too .

As I was later to discover, there was an immediate occasion for Chloë’s rage. Someone had demeaned her. A short time before I met her, on the eve of her applying for a place at art college, the man with whom she had been living since she was a schoolgirl pushed her head into the kitchen sink and anally ravaged her. ‘Took her cherry’ was how she put it, her other cherry having been taken long ago. But the pretended lightness of expression did not belie the gravity of the crime. Nothing stayed light for long in Chloë’s mouth. In this instance she made you think of every sinister nursery rhyme you had ever heard. Cherry evoked merry but there was murder in the rhyme. She would kill him for it. Or if not him, someone.

She was two or three years older than the rest of us, having left home and gone to live with this man — a painter of people ‘s pets by trade and a rugby player by inclination — instead of pursuing her education. Her mother had not stood in her way. It sounded to me as though she had been sweet on him herself. He was her type. Hazily blue-eyed, square-necked, Cheshireborn, and tickled when she said she would be saying goodnight now, goodnight. James. Jim. Which would also have been her idea of a good name for a man. None of your Maxie-Shmaxie nonsense. James, Jim — whatever Chloë’s mother thought of him — had anally ravaged Chloë as a way of expressing his discontent with her decision to go to art college. Goyim do that. They get upset, see red, hit the roof and take it out on you anally. Prior to that, their life together had been unmarked by violence — unless you call rugby violence, which I do. But importantly he hadn’t raised a hand to her. In return for which she did his washing, removed pieces of other players’ bodies from his teeth, photographed the team in action and repose, and, because he had an ambition to paint flesh as well as fur, took her clothes off for him. None of these being activities she could regard as ‘hers’, she informed him at last of her intention to study photography, ‘for herself’, whereupon he told her that was retrograde to his desire, filled the sink and had his way with her from behind.

‘The mongrel didn’t even have the balls to look me in the eyes,’ she told me in due course.

‘Well, he hardly could, could he?’ was my response.

‘And what would you know?’ was hers. Meaning I wasn’t man enough to anally ravage her myself. Which indeed, as a Jew, I wasn’t. I’m not saying that the sodomising of women is unknown among Jews. But it’s not a favourite. Hygiene partly. Also the obstacles it places in the way of conversation. You can grunt your satisfaction but you can’t quietly discuss things, and Jews, who are a verbal people, like to talk during coitus. (For me, oral sex still means conversation.) But above all it’s the superfluity that bugs us, nature having already provided a vagina.

We have earlier discussed Habdalah, the keeping apart of that which should not be confused. But in this case it’s the aesthetics rather than the morality of Habdalah that’s decisive: the laws governing art and form, giving due place to this or that, honouring the beauty of things in their separateness and season. Aesthetics. It’s all aesthetics with Jews.

These are considerations to which violence, of course, is blind, and if Chloë when I met her was in flight from violence, she was also still, in some essential part of herself, in thrall to it. She admired strength, almost in the Nietzschean sense, until she was the victim of it. That’s the catch with Übermenschen . They’re fine until they start giving it to you from the rear. But she was backed into a corner of her own psychological making. She chose me because of all the people she encountered at art college, I (along with Aaron Blaiwais and Arnie Rosenfield) reminded her least of the brute she no longer wanted to be with, but precisely because I (we) reminded her least of the brute she no longer wanted to be with she was unable to feel good about herself in my (our) company.

Was it to turn me into somebody else, or to make me see who I really was that she showered me with gold in the first years of our marriage? A gold signet ring to go with the gold marriage band, two gold watches, gold cufflinks, gold studs for my dress shirt, a gold bracelet with my initials engraved, and nearly — had I let her — a gold necklace. ‘I can’t believe how little it takes to release the Arab in you,’ she told me, and photographed me in the attitude of a pasha, or what she took to be the attitude of a pasha, cross-legged on a Persian rug with my hand stroking a stuffed saluki and all my gold glinting.

Coming back from a shooting assignment in the Middle East she bought me a jubbah and had me wear it around the house without underwear. The scarf of the Palestine Liberation Army which she picked up on the same trip she had the sense not to give me until our relationship was already in tatters. But more than once she snapped me with a towel on my head, marvelling at how masculine it made me look.

This wasn’t a passing photographic fancy. She believed she was possessed of a sort of moral X-ray vision in relation to me, seeing behind the merely incidental Novoropissik sojourn of however many hundreds of years, to my origins in sun and sand. In this, her ambition bore a striking resemblance to my father’s. He wanted me out of the shtetl one end, she wanted me out of it the other. For both of them, the enemy was the life-fearing Ashkenazi Milquetoast who buried himself in holy books and mumbo-jumbo to escape the notice of marauding Cossacks. As indeed he was the enemy for me. So if Chloë was prepared to forgive me the last couple of thousand years and return me to my desert setting — as a sultan, a caliph, a sheikh, whatever she wanted to call me — provided it didn’t entail my actual living in a desert, I was up for it. And yet no sooner did I embrace the part, padding about in my jubbah and Ali Baba slippers, sipping mint tea, jingling my jewellery and letting my belly grow, than she accused me of being a crass vulgarian, an Oriental souk Jew with the taste for trumpery of a market-trader from Walthamstow.