Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘You are refusing to have anything to do with your own child?’

‘How do I know it’s mine?’

‘How does any man know his child is his?’

‘By not marrying a slut, that’s how.’ Only he wouldn’t have said slut. He’d have said kurveh or zoineh.

‘I talk to a sailor and you call me a slut?’

He pointed to her belly. ‘You call that talking?’

She threw her head back and laughed, showing him throat. No woman should ever show a Jew her throat unless she wants him for a slave for life or an enemy for longer. Midianite women showed the Israelites their throats whenever the two peoples encountered one another in the desert, and short of wholesale massacre the Jews have had no defence against the gesture ever since. It was witnessing my grandmother’s throat that got my grandfather into this mess in the first place. ‘Did he fondle your breasts like this?’ my grandfather wanted to know. ‘Did he put his hand up your skirt, so?’

‘Did who?’

‘The sailor.’

‘I talked to the sailor for five minutes. You were there.’

‘I wasn’t there the whole time. I had to be sick overboard. Twice I left you to empty my kishkies into the North Sea. And what about in Brody? You weren’t even carrying a child when we first arrived in Brody.’

‘Then I admit it. In the time you were emptying your kishkies I let him fondle my breasts, then I let him put his hand up my skirt where he encountered no resistance to speak of, and here I am, twenty-four hours later, big with his child.’

‘I could kill you,’ my grandfather cried. ‘I could hack you into a thousand tiny pieces, you trollop.’ Only he wouldn’t, not having any English prior to this, and having landed in Hull only that morning, have said trollop.

In the end — and I tell the story exactly as my mother told me her mother told it to her — it took an immigration officer to separate them. ‘Not a promising start,’ he said, eyeing each of them in turn, then leading them out of the queue. He was a lean Englishman with no colour in his face but for the two stains of grey which marked the whereabouts of his cheekbones. Such men, cruel with the unhurried coldness of the English, have been turning back my people for centuries, and had my grandmother not shown him her throat, on the off chance that it might work as well on anti-Semites as on Jews, we might all of us have been turned back for ever.

‘You’re going to have to do better than this,’ he told my grandfather while he fondled my grandmother’s breasts. ‘Name?’

My grandfather answered him in whatever Eastern European mishmash he spoke. ‘I am Igor ben Whateverov. I am from Novoropissik. But I have spent the last thousand years in Brody trying to find the thief who stole our tickets.’

‘Do you know the Axelroths?’ the immigration man asked my grandmother. ‘They’re from Brody.’

She shook her head, letting the hair fall from her turban.

‘They are very nice people,’ he said. ‘They sell vegetables near me. Would you like to come into this country as an Axelroth?’

‘ Was? ’ My grandfather cupped his ear. Was , pronounced vas . The sound old deaf Jews made throughout my childhood. Vas? For that habit alone he deserved to lose my grandmother. ‘The Axelroths? A finster auf the Axelroths!’ A curse on anyone from Brody.

Apparently my maternal grandfather in full curse was a comic spectacle.

The official laughed, his colour high suddenly, my grandmother laughing with him. ‘That’s what we’ll call you,’ he said, taking out a pen. ‘Finster. But not Igor. You wouldn’t want to be called Igor in this country. Let’s agree to Ivor, yes? Ivor Finster it is then.’ And with that he stamped their papers and slipped his address into my grandmother’s burning little hand.

Six months later my grandmother was living in the village of Swine in the East Riding of Yorkshire with John Skinner, Immigration Officer, as his wife, and Ivor Finster was training to be a cabinetmaker in Crumpsall Park.

Ten or eleven years down the line my grandmother miraculously conceived again. This time there was no argument who the father was. John Skinner. He did not live to see the baby born. Not wanting to spend what was left of her life bringing up an afterthought child alone in Swine, she contacted Ivor Finster, who was now relatively comfortably off, and offered a deal. For the sake of the children she would resume relations with him in Crumpsall, bringing up the boy — his boy, Isaac — as a Finster, but Leonora — my mother — as a Skinner. She owed that to the man who’d given her a new life in Swine. My grandfather — except that it was now looking as though he was my great-uncle, not my grandfather — agreed in all particulars but the last. He could accept no Skinner as a child of his. He suggested reverting to their old name. What about Whateverov? My mother offered a compromise. Axelroth. A finster auf anyone called Axelroth, my great-uncle said. But he was lazy and lonely and they shook on the deal. Maybe they even slept together on it. And let people say whatever they chose to say.

It took me some time to digest what my mother was telling me, that’s if I have digested it yet. ‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘just hang on a minute.’ I was so confused I had to count relations backwards on my fingers. But whichever way I counted, it came out the same. One of my grandparents was a Skinner. A Gentile. Which meant, assuming that my poor father had no skeletons in his cupboards — though those assuredly were buried with his own skeleton now — that I was only three-quarters Jewish.

‘If any of it’s true.’

‘What do you mean if any of it’s true? How can you not know if any of it’s true?’

‘My mother was a colourful woman with a vivid imagination. And my father kept things to himself. You didn’t always know where you were with either of them.’

‘Is that your actual father you’re talking about now?’

‘Well, I only knew one, Max.’

‘And you never asked him about the other? You never asked why you had a different name? You never talked to your mother about him? You never thought of visiting his grave in Swine?’

‘I think you’ve forgotten, Maxie, how young I was when they all died. I was the child of old parents, Max. We made our own way in those days. There wasn’t anybody to ask.’

‘But you’ve had time to do a bit of checking since. Weren’t you curious?’

‘Time?’ She regarded me with wide-eyed astonishment. ‘What time have I had?’

‘Ma, you’ve done nothing but play kalooki for the past half-century.’

‘You, too,’ she said, ‘have a vivid imagination.’

‘Are you saying I’ve imagined the kalooki?’

‘I’m saying that I’m rather hurt you think that’s all I’ve done with my time. How do you think you and your sister got brought up?’

‘Under the kalooki table.’

‘That’s not amusing, Max. I don’t appreciate you making a cartoon of your family.’

‘Ma, how long is it since you finished bringing us up?’ I didn’t add the further question, ‘So how do you explain what you’ve been doing with your fucking life since?’

Which was where we left it until the next time I made the journey up to see her. Our conversation must have been preying on her mind because she reopened it almost the moment I arrived.

‘It’s not as though you’re made any less Jewish by all that,’ she said — looking rather exquisite, I thought, in the lugubriousness she’d adopted for the conversation — ‘though God knows why any of it should matter to you, given your record of marrying out. But you’re still playing with the full deck, if that was what worried you. My mother was Jewish. I’m Jewish. End of story — you’re Jewish. How much more Jewish do you need to be?’