Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

She wouldn’t kiss me in the car.

‘What kind of girl do you think I am?’ she asked.

‘A kissogram,’ I replied.

‘An actress,’ she corrected me.

‘Got it,’ I said. ‘An actress.’

‘Yes, well, don’t forget it.’ Meaning don’t go mistaking artifice for reality. Don’t go thinking a naked thigh entitles you to naked thoughts. But also meaning, I thought I detected, don’t go losing your heart. But it was a bit late for that. I already had.

Fifteen minutes later she was sitting on Errol Tobias’s knee, under a sticky oil painting studded with Eilat opals of a holy man from Safed, singing — Zoë, not the holy man — ‘Falling in love again, what am I to do. .’

‘Well, you could suck my dick for starters,’ Errol laughed.

From the other end of the room came the sound of Errol’s wife putting her fingers down her mouth and pretending to throw up. ‘Yuk, Errol!’ Melanie Kushner as was. Melanie Kushner, the girl with the woman’s breasts, whose friend Tillie Guttmacher had given me the clap. Now a matron with a matron’s breasts, three children to bring up, a shrine to Jewish shlock buried in the English countryside to maintain, and the moral decencies to uphold. ‘Yuk, Errol!’

‘Be fair,’ Errol shouted back. ‘It’s my birthday.’

The disconcerting thing was that for a moment or two it looked as though Zoë might just take Errol at his word. She had that air — a woman who, by the paradoxes of a nihilistic intelligence, believing in nothing, was capable of anything.

In the end, the chance to show off her gift for cabaret — wasn’t that what Leila Krystal had spotted in her as a girl, the licentious liebeslieder strumpet with tragic eyes? — overcame all other temptations. ‘See what the boys in the back room will have,’ she sang, and though I was later to be her husband and must therefore be accounted biased, I have to say I had never heard it sung, and never will hear it sung, with more sexual challenge.

I believe she did the Weimar lingerie with more vitality and wit than the original as well. It doesn’t fall to every woman to pull off suspenders and frilly knickers. In order not to look desolate in that haberdasher’s nightmare of ruffled silk and taut elastic, or not too trussed up in it, come to that, you need to give a suggestion of aloofness. But then again not too much. You have to show that you can do irony and corruption, funny and sad. A skill Zoë had off to a tee.

The rest of the evening was, for me at least, as a brief descent into hell. Devils clutched at me from every side. First Errol, asking how come I knew the kissogram and what about a swap. And when I asked him who the fuck with he said with Melanie who the fuck did I think with and did I have any objection to that. To which the answer was, well, any number, Errol, of which the fact of her being your wife, the fact of her unattractiveness, the fact that her friend had once given me clap (all right, crabs), the detail of her consent to a swap not yet having been asked for or given, to say nothing of my not being in a position to swap Zoë even had I wanted to, having only just met her, were but the first that sprang to mind. Then Melanie herself, arriving in the nick of time, for I couldn’t of course say any of the above to Errol, with the kind offer of showing me around (as I hadn’t yet seen it) the sick fantasy of ormolu and alabaster they called their house — a house which Zoë, collaring me next, referred to — with commendable restraint I thought — as a palais de drek of a sort that only a Jew could want to live in, before dragging me into one of the bathrooms, the one with a Venus rising from the Dead Sea painted on the door, and giving me my kiss at last. Only we hadn’t properly locked the door — this being Errol’s house, it was likely there were no proper locks on bathroom doors — and were discovered in embrace in the Romano-Israelite bath by Kätchen and Zoë’s actor boyfriend who had hitched up in the pub, decided they would come along to the party since that was where their partners had headed off to and they were so far from anywhere else, and were looking for a Roman bath to embrace in of their own. Fuck you, Zoë’s boyfriend said, I wasn’t sure to whom; fuck you, Zoë said in return; fuck you, Kätchen said to Zoë, and before I could say fuck you to anybody, Errol burst in, utterly unsurprised to see any of us there, but mouthing to me with an exaggerated roll of his Mephistophelian lips the question WELL?

Should I have told Zoë of Errol’s proposal? Hell or no hell, did I owe her the truth? My friend wants me to swap you for his wife. I hate his wife, I hate him, I hate it here, I’ve only just met you but I love you — so what do you think?

No, was the answer. No I should not have told her. But I did tell her.

‘Why?’ she asked me.

‘Why does he want to swap?’

‘Why are you telling me?’

‘Because. .’ Why was I telling her? ‘Because I was afraid you’d think me a coward if I didn’t. Because if I didn’t tell you there would be an untruth between us from the start. Because it’s funny.’

‘If it’s funny, why aren’t you laughing?’

‘Because it’s not only funny. Because it’s horribly depressing as well.’

‘Try being more courageous, Max. That is your name, isn’t it? Max? I always like to know a man’s name before he trades me for his best friend’s wife. You should have the balls to come clean. Either say you want it or you don’t.’

‘Want what? The swap? I want the plague more.’

‘Then why did you bring it up?’

‘I told you.’

She showed me the full sadness of her perfectly defined face, knowing she had nothing to fear from the closest scrutiny, knowing that wherever my eye lit, it would be pleased with the clarity of what it saw. Had I ever before seen a face less blurred, or one in which the relations of part to part were so chaste? Yes, as a matter of fact I had, in a crowd in the moment before a man fell from a roof. But that wasn’t the first time either. The first time was in Siena, five hundred years or so before. A Sano di Pietro Madonna, that’s who she was, without a baby to feed but otherwise with all the cares of Christianity on her shoulders. As for the sadness, it adhered to her face as an immutable law, as though perfect beauty must always expect an impossible perfection of appreciation, and so must always be disappointed.

And if you’re a Madonna, the people who disappoint you the most, of course, are Jews.

‘But what you told me was not the truth,’ she said.

‘You think I have a secret agenda? You think I want to roll between Melanie Tobias’s fat breasts?’

‘Well, who am I to say? But no, since you ask me, no, I don’t think that. I think you want to disparage me.’

‘Why would I want to do that?’

‘You tell me. You’re the pervert. Because you’d like me to do a turn with you and your friend — how does that sound? Because you fancy a gang bang. But because you’re ashamed of saying that’s what you want, you plant the suggestion and then run away from it, hoping I will do the rest. You can’t help yourself. You see a Gentile and you see sex.’

‘Let me stop you there,’ I said, gesturing at her naked Berlin thighs.

‘Oh, don’t be so fucking gross! At whose behest do you suppose I am dolled up in these ludicrous clothes? I play the slut you pay me to play. You aren’t the first and you won’t be the last. I seem to excite something in you people.’

‘We people?’

‘What — is it supposed to be a secret? Look around you, Mister Max. We’re in a bordello designed by a rabbi who’s lost his faith or his reason. It’s like a whorehouse in Tel Aviv in here. If you were thinking that this was a good way of keeping a low profile, think again.’