Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

Errol Tobias must have told me this. Otherwise there’s no explaining how I come to know it.

The film itself — more cartoonery than porno: hence my interest — I first happened upon in Amsterdam as I have already explained. That being my honeymoon, I never went to see it. We observe the decencies, we Jewish husbands, whatever else there is to say against us. But the memorandum I made to myself on a small folded-down corner of that honeymoon, to look into Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS when I had a spare and more seemly hour on my ownio, turned out to be unnecessary. Before such an hour could be found, the she-wolf looked into me. The circumstances take a bit of unravelling. Errol had something to do with this as well. When did Errol not have something to do with the underbelly of my life? Zoë too. Errol and Zoë. Two people who could not have loathed each other more.

Why I didn’t keep them apart is a question I have often asked myself. But it’s possible that without Errol, Zoë and I would have never met. Or at least never got together. And there’s also an argument — though it’s a trifle far-fetched — that without Zoë, Errol and I would never have resumed our friendship.

We differed, Zoë and I, as we differed over most things, in the matter of how and where we made each other’s acquaintance. She said it was in a crowd on Oxford Street watching a young Chinese man threatening to throw himself off the roof of Selfridges. I said it was when she was a kissogram at a party at Errol’s. I remembered the person threatening to throwing himself off a roof, only I remembered him as African. She remembered Errol — finally, and with a little coaxing, oh yes, she remembered Errol — but had no recollection of being a kissogram.

It was a disagreement, partly, about the nature of the word ‘met’.

‘I saw you that day in the crowd,’ I admitted. ‘I could hardly not have seen you. But we didn’t meet.’

‘You stared at me, appraised me with your eyes, like a length of cloth you fancied for a suit, then asked me what I was doing afterwards.’

‘ Actually asked you, or appeared to ask you?’

‘I don’t accept the distinction.’

‘And when you say I asked you what you were doing afterwards . . did I mean after the African jumped?’

‘Chinese. After he jumped or after he didn’t jump. You didn’t specify. But there was a growing feeling in the crowd that they’d been cheated of their time and that he wasn’t going to jump, so you could have meant after they’d dispersed.’

‘I remember the disappointment. The impatience even, as though he was letting us all down by not carrying out his threat. You would have thought we’d paid good money for front-row tickets. If you’re going to fucking jump, fucking jump, I remember hearing someone say.’

’That was me.’

‘Before or after I asked you what you were doing afterwards?’

‘Both.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I said I didn’t need another Jew in my life.’

‘Did you say that actually , or did you appear to say it?’

‘I don’t accept the distinction.’

‘Well, listening to your argument, it seems to me we didn’t meet.’

‘No. We met, I just didn’t go to bed with you.’

‘A pretty unsatisfactory meeting, then. You’re lucky I didn’t threaten to throw myself off Selfridges’ roof in the African’s place.’

She had nothing to say to that except, ‘Chinese.’

The other version of our meeting, my version, begins in a pub out in the sticks somewhere near Borehamwood. I was lost. Trying to find Errol Tobias’s new house. We had stayed in loose contact with each other, chiefly by virtue of Errol’s needing to drop me a postcard once or twice a year to tell me what so-and-so’s real name had been before he or she had changed it. ‘Just a quick line to let you know that Mike Nichols was born Michael Peschkowsky, the mamzer. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t. Errol.’ Or ‘Long time no see, you meshuggener. Bet you didn’t know Jane Seymour was Joyce Penelope Frankenburg. Worth a shtupp whatever her name. Go in health. E.’ And once he surprised me as it were on my own doorstep. ‘Here ‘s one for you, Max. Max Gaines, publisher of the first ever comic books. . Maxie Ginzberg. But then you probably knew that. All Maxies are Yiddlers.’ This time, though, he had rung to invite me to a party. It was his fortieth birthday and he wanted old friends around him. The Bishops Blackburn Onanists reunited. To see how many — his joke — had gone blind. Kätchen, my girlfriend at the time, was reading me directions. Kätchen the blind navigator — my joke. It was when we drove past this pub for the third time, Kätchen by now upside down in her seat trying to orient herself on the map, and I turning left when she said right, and right when she said left, on the assumption that every instruction she gave needed to be reversed, that we accepted our relationship was at an end.

‘I’ll drive you home,’ I said.

‘You aren’t capable of finding my home,’ was her reply.

‘I’m just the driver,’ I reminded her.

‘Drop me at the pub,’ she insisted. ‘I’ll pick someone up.’

‘Ask me before you do and I’ll describe him to you,’ I suggested.

As it turned out, we both picked someone up. Zoë was dressed as Marlene Dietrich, sitting on a small round table, drunk, in a top hat and with her skirts up, showing suspenders and frilly French knickers. Not a sight you expect to see in a Hertfordshire pub. And the surprise for me was doubled because I recognised her at once. Where I recognised her from I had no idea. But I knew the fraught oval of her face as well as if it had haunted me in a dream. Once I placed her — and that was much later in the evening — I wondered if the agitation she caused me could simply be ascribed to the memory of a man throwing himself off a roof. The chances were, however, that it pre-dated that. I’d been waiting for her.

She was causing a bit of a sensation, titillating the drinkers and deliberately embarrassing the man she appeared to be with, a bit of a sensation in his own right, I gathered, on account of his being a twopenny-halfpenny actor in a onepenny-halfpenny television soap. No person of sound mind, seeing what she was up to, would have gone near her. But she was in lewd and angry spirits, her brittle body giving off sparks, the demureness of her countenance belied by or belying the promise she was holding out. And since when was a sound mind any defence against the Blue Angel?

She heard me asking for an address. ‘What do you know? That’s where I’m going,’ she called over.

So, it turned out, were most of the people at the bar. It wasn’t the fault of Kätchen’s navigating that we were lost. Everyone was lost. In fact Errol’s house was just a hop and a step away, but set back in a field that was invisible from the road, so that in the end a visitor had no choice but to go into the pub and ask the way. What had kept them, as it would surely have kept me, was the sight of Zoë in her underwear.

‘It’s not a fancy-dress party, is it?’ I’d asked her.

She looked me over. ‘Well, you obviously think it is,’ she said.

I explained that I was an old Crumpsall friend of Errol’s, and that in old Crumpsall we dressed for parties exactly as I was dressed, as though to carry a coffin. What was her excuse?

A good one, as it happened. She did not know Errol from Adam but had been hired to be a kissogram.

‘Then let me deliver you,’ I said.

I waited at the bar while she put on a coat and shook her actor friend’s hand. ‘Goodbye, Bollocky Bill,’ or something similar. Zoë’s heartbreak shake.