Howard Jacobson: Kalooki Nights

But we each bail out according to our characters and circumstances. Some just let it discreetly lapse for professional reasons, claiming never to have noticed it was there much anyway. Some drop the subject after a long engagement with it, and think of themselves as enjoying a well-earned retirement. Others can’t be goyim soon enough. In the case of Manny Washinsky, it was a matter of needing to keep his head down. The first thing he did when they let him back out into the world was change his name to Stroganoff. Hardly going to get him a job in the Vatican golf club, but then he wasn’t so much not wanting to be Jewish any more, as not wanting to be the Jew he’d been. I could relate to that, as Chloë’s mother also said (Chloë’s mother who could relate to nothing). He had suffered great notoriety in Manchester in the early 1970s. Whatever the anti-Semites tell you, Jewish murderers are few and far between. At least they were in Crumpsall Park. And even by the standards of your average Jewish murderer, were such a personage imaginable, Emanuel Eli Washinsky — Talmud scholar and yeshiva boy — was exceptional. He’d been locked away a long time, but there were still people around, like me, who could remember him and what an unnatural thing he ’d done.

I’d lost contact with Manny by the time he was incarcerated, let alone released, and probably wouldn’t have seen him again or even learned that he ’d come out and changed his name to Stroganoff, had not a pink-eyed, pug-nosed writer of no distinction or imagination — one Christopher Christmas, for Christ’s sake — interested a small production company in a possible drama, something for television, something for twopence, based on Manny’s life, the only Jewish double homicide in the history of Crumpsall Park.

In the course of his vulturous researches into someone else he thought he could interest a producer in making a film about for twopence — based on real life, that was the line he threw out: these things actually happened ! — Christmas had come across Manny Washinsky, and in the course of his researches into Manny, he had come across me. Grist to his mill, whatever he unearthed. A shilling here, a shilling there. It no doubt helped that my name was rustily familiar. Maxie Glickman, isn’t he—?

I say no more than helped . They weren’t offering gold dust, they were quick to make that clear. And Christmas himself was already on another project. Grub, grub. But there was a little something in it for me if indeed I was the same Maxie Glickman who’d been Manny Washinsky’s friend, and if I was prepared to meet up with him again and get him to talk.

‘Get him to talk about what exactly?’ I asked over lunch in a rabbit-hutch restaurant in Soho, somewhere you could only get to via Berwick Street market, halfway down a passage which even a dog wouldn’t piss in, elbowed between a tattooist’s and a novelty shop for perverts.

My hosts were Lipsync Productions UK, otherwise the sisters Francine and Marina Bryson-Smith. Not my world, film and television. The moving picture left me cold, whatever its size. Too naturalistic. Never funny or despairing enough. Never both at the same time, anyway, which is how I like it. But for all my indifference to the medium I always seemed to know who was powering it. ‘Don’t watch, then,’ is what they tell you when you complain of television. But it’s not the watching that’s the problem — it’s the being made aware of those of whom, all things considered, you would rather not have heard. Francine and Marina Bryson-Smith, for example. Somehow or other, though I did no light reading, I knew of them as media socialites and, for all that I couldn’t have told you the name of anything they’d made, had even heard of Lipsync Productions. A witty and rather sexy name for a production company, I thought, despite myself. Beyond the technical reference, I heard something lippy in it — an ironic, syncopated allusion, perhaps, to Francine Bryson-Smith’s onetime reputation (vehemently denied) as a society lipstick lesbian, and maybe a pun on sink, as in Kitchensync — an assertion, however you read it, of the glamorously contrary. Hence, I assumed, the location of the hellhole restaurant.

That I would therefore be expected to begin our meeting on a sexual note I never doubted. ‘Don’t you think it’s funny,’ I’d remarked, even as we were shaking hands, ‘that all you can ever buy in “adult” shops are toys?’

They didn’t, as it happened. In retrospect I see I could have put it better, or at least not made it sound as though buying toys in adult shops was all I ever did. But they smiled at me politely enough, or rather Marina smiled. What Francine did was glimmer. She was what I remember my father calling a fascinator. ‘It’s just short-sightedness,’ my mother used to tell him, reducing her own vision to show him. In Francine Bryson-Smith’s case, however, it didn’t look like an impairment; it looked more like wariness posing as intense curiosity. Who are you, Maxie Glickman? she seemed to be asking me. Who is the real Maxie Glickman? What, if I am not careful, is he going to do to me? And when a beautiful woman in the flower of her middle age asks you those questions through a short-sighted, green-eyed mist, you have to be an exceptional man not to feel intense curiosity in return. She had three university degrees, I believed I’d read somewhere. Not the nugatory stuff, not media studies or journalism, but Middle English, philosophy, history, possibly even divinity — real subjects. Yet before that, aged eighteen, she had won a beauty contest. Miss Whitstable, or Miss Herne Bay. Somewhere there. Because she wore her hair long and blonded, in glamour-girl flounces, and didn’t skimp with the lipstick, you could still see the beauty queen in her. Miss East Grinstead, DPhil. She was hard to say no to if you like your women vexed.

Marina hadn’t made so good a job of keeping her figure, or her face. She had grey bags under her eyes, somewhat desperately flecked with silver glitter, and wore make-up more to hide than adorn. She did the shmoozing and the PR, filling me in on what else Lipsync was up to at the moment — a docudrama, still in development, about Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who blew the whistle on Israel’s nuclear arsenal; a costume extravaganza, also still in development, about the philosopher Spinoza; and one or two other things in pre-development, but all at the serious end of the market, as I could see, programmes you made for love not money. She did the snuggling up to me, too, calling me darling and telling me how excited they were, etc, before recognising people at other tables who excited her more, and eventually, with a squeeze of my upper arm, leaving me to Francine, who all the time surveyed me, even when she wasn’t looking in my direction, through sensors situated snake-like in the sides of her head.

‘Get him to talk about himself. How he feels about what he did. What his life has been like since then, etc. .’ was how she countered my initial wariness.

‘We were never all that close, you know,’ I warned her.

‘But you did know him, that’s the thing. You were neighbours. You played together. Am I right in thinking you went to the same school?’

‘Yes, but only briefly. He went his way, I went mine.’

‘I understand that. Your paths diverged. But they diverged from the same starting place. You grew up together. You shared interests and beliefs.’

‘Not exactly. In many ways our upbringings were diametrically opposed.’

She subjected me to her unnerving peer. Who are you, Maxie Glickman? Why are you making these distinctions? To trap me? ‘That I understand,’ she said, ‘but you knew that world.’

That world.