Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘A bit rich,’ I complained, ‘considering that I didn’t own an article of jewellery until I met you. The way I look is how you’ve made me look.’

‘ Made you.’ She sniffled her contemptuous sniffle. ‘The victim is always willing, Max.’

I knew the reference. I’d heard it enough times. Cartier-Bresson, her hero, on the photographer seeking to capture the inner silence of the willing victim. The reason, as a cartoonist, I hated photography. All that silence shit. Not that I cared much for the willing victim as a concept either. None of my victims was willing.

‘My willingness,’ I said, ‘is just marital courtesy.’

She had, as I have said, no sense of the ridiculous. She couldn’t bat a joke back. ‘You should be fucking grateful to me,’ she said, ‘You should be on your knees.’

‘I’m on my knees. I’m always on my knees. I’m just not sure, in this context, why.’

‘Because I’ve made you look how you were always intended to look, that’s why.’

‘And what’s that?’

‘Preposterously vain.’

‘Which I thought you liked.’

‘Well, you’re better than you were.’

‘And how was I?’

She struck a pose, feet pointing outwards, tongue lolling, Catherine wheels spinning at her ears, suggestive of a Novoropissik simpleton with sidelocks.

Suggestive, in fact, of Manny Washinsky.

Had the parody not been so inaccurate — I was the art school goyisher housepainter when she met me, more like Hitler as a boy than Manny Washinsky — I might have turned nasty. There are parts of Cheshire where a woman can get herself sodomised on a smaller provocation. Even by a man who’s on his knees.

But that was our contract. She jeered at me for not being what she was in hiding from — a cherry plucker — and I took her jeering as evidence of my superiority to it. A superiority, I don’t deny, which looked at from another angle wasn’t much of a superiority at all. I wasn’t a bully, but didn’t that, by the merest switch of logic, imply I was a coward, a man of intellect and introspection only because it wasn’t open to me to be anything else, all mental cunning because mentality was my sole possession?

‘But then again,’ I recall Chloë’s mother saying to me one scratchy Sunday Cheshire afternoon, after I’d cleaned them both up at Monopoly and Scrabble and most other games besides, and then apologised for myself by making slighting reference to my lack of muscularity — ‘but then again’ — Chloë’s mother’s favourite expression — ‘you are such brainboxes, darling. It really is no cost to you, admitting you’re all coward-cowardy-custards in your bodies when it’s really only the brainbox you value. What say you to that, Chlo?’

‘Agree with every word, Mumsy. Do you know what they’re calling it now?’

‘What’s that, my precious?’

‘Reading books and things. . Being brainboxes. .’

‘Tell me.’

‘Hermeneutics.’

‘Never!’

‘I tell you truly, Mamma.’

‘Sounds so. . you know what, doesn’t it? Hymie Neutics. Shall we call him Hymie Neutics?’

‘It would serve him right for always making it so plain.’

‘Making what so plain? His origins?’

‘Well, those too. But I was thinking of the contempt he shows us.’

‘For not having a brainbox the size of his?’

‘And for not being Freud or Einstein ourselves, Mamma.’

Helène wrinkled up her nose. ‘Do you think Frankenstein was one, Chlo?’

‘One what, Mamma?’

She tapped her nose. ‘You know.’

‘Could be, Mamma. Why don’t you ask him?’

‘Maxie, darling, was the monster one of yours?’

‘Frankenstein was the name of the scientist, Helène,’ I told her.

She rolled one eye to heaven and another to her daughter. Was there no end to the over-subtilising of these people? ‘The scientist, then, darling. Was he one?’

‘I am not sure there is any evidence to suggest such a thing.’

‘No, but what do you think in that great big whirling brainbox of yours? What’s your conclusion, Maxie? Yea or nay?’

‘Well, I’m not sure that he made any money out of his creation, Helène. Does that help?’

She smiled sweetly at me. ‘Well, money, I have to say, darling, was the last thing on our minds, wasn’t it, Chlo?’

Leaving me to curse myself for falling on her chintzy fist and knocking myself out yet again.

There it was, anyway. Mercantilism and mentalism — if they couldn’t catch me with the one they’d nail me with the other.

As for what Chloë was doing going near someone in whom both found their personification — and when I protested my innocence of materialism at least, she pointed to the photographs she’d taken of me in a voluptuous Arabia of the senses — only the science of perverseness explains it. No doubt we both had problems in the area of what popular psychologists call self-worth. We corroborated each other’s damaged self-esteem. We stayed together for the time we did because, Jew to Gentile, Gentile to Jew, we were a confirmatory insult to each other.

As the years roll by I understand more and more why Tsedraiter Ike sang, ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor.’ It’s only me. A phrase my mother has also started to employ when she telephones me. Only me . Not anyone of worth.

6

In the light of that song, Tsedraiter Ike’s resistance to Shani’s fiancé, a one-time sailor, takes on an interesting aspect. Of course Tsedraiter Ike was always going to oppose an Irishman on religious grounds, whether or not Mick now knew the difference between a kreplach and a kneidlach and could rock the k in k’nish. But I too was gone among the Gentiles — gone among the anti-Semites in fact — and though he berated me for it, tutting when he saw me, and dropping the ‘old palomino’ from his conversation, he didn’t turn on me as ferociously as he turned on Shani. So the sea could have had something to do with it.

But it takes a bit of winkling out.

We had no sailors in our family. No Bills, no Barnacles. My father did once say that in another life he wouldn’t have minded sailing single-handedly around the world, but he got a nosebleed the one time he took us rowing. And neither Ike nor my mother had what you could call a strong stomach. A short car ride and both of them turned the colour of mould. So a heaving deck in the middle of the Atlantic was no place for any of us.

But we hadn’t just sprouted in Crumpsall Park like mushrooms. Our origins were elsewhere and we had to have got from there to here somehow. And since we came before there were planes, it stood to reason that at least one of us had been on a boat. Was that why Tsedraiter Ike sang ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor’ — because he remembered being shipped over from one of those shit-heap Eastern European shtetls in his mother’s belly? I don’t find it hard to believe you can remember how things were for you before you were born. Myself, I go back four, five thousand years. Part of it’s fake memory, I grant you, prompted by old photographs and stories handed down from one generation to the next. But some of it I remember as though I’d been there. Abraham, Joseph, Moses, Esther. And if I remember it as though I’d been there that’s because I was. It’s not only the sins that are visited upon you if you take the details of your antecedence seriously. Start admitting guilt from five millennia back and you’ll be privy to the good times too. The golden calf, for example, no matter what Manny insisted it was made of and stood for — what a hoot of a fucking night that was!

Tsedraiter Ike knew about the sea foetally, that’s my view. The wind howled, the rain spat, my grandmother sat huddled in a lifeboat in case any of those bastard Cossacks had slipped aboard at Arsopol or Voznosenski Isnosenski, and Tsedraiter Ike, lurching in her watery belly, learned about Barnacle Bill. There’s even a chance my grandmother herself conversed with Barnacle Bill in hiding. According to my mother, who would open the door on the subject about an inch every ten years, her mother was a flirtatious, not to say highly sexed woman, with little or no erotic respect for her husband, from whom I therefore imagine Tsedraiter Ike to have got his looks and personality. And something of a sexually unpleasant nature definitely happened on the crossing — or if not on the crossing itself then in the period they had been housed in Brody, trying to find whoever had sold them and then robbed them of their tickets — because immediately on landing my grandfather vowed that for decency’s sake he would see the child born and then have nothing again to do with either of them.