Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘It’s not my house, Miss Dietrich. And I didn’t pay you.’

‘You might not have paid me but you’re happy enough to get an eyeful. And whether it’s your house or not, you sure as hell don’t look out of place in it.’

‘That’s because it’s you who’s doing the looking. You people only see what you want to see. You think we look at you and see a prostitute, but it’s you who look at us and see a pimp. You aren’t the first. And you sure as hell won’t be the last.’

She appeared sorry for me, suddenly. She put her hand up to my nose. The merest touch at first, perhaps in fear that I might pull away, but gradually a more exploratory caress, ascertaining the soundness of the bone, the thickness of the cartilage, then feathery again, the movement of her finger tips almost trancelike, slowly tracing every contour, as though we both might find peace in it.

‘Nice,’ I said. ‘Very nice.’

She seemed surprised by my docility. ‘Would you let anyone do this?’

‘Explore my nose? Only you.’

Finally she pinched my nostrils together and stepped back.

‘It’s very fine,’ she said, ‘but it will have to go.’

2

‘Once he has served her, that’s the end of him as a man.’

Interesting that in the movie none of the She-Wolf ’s victims is specifically Jewish. Why would that be? Good taste?

For months after that party Errol never left me alone. He was on the phone to me almost daily. What had happened to our friendship? Why were we seeing so little of each other? Was I aware that Yves Montand’s real name was Ivo Levi and Simone Signoret’s Simone-Henriette Kaminker? How long had I known the kissogram?

Eventually, because I couldn’t face the hike to Hertfordshire, I invited him to lunch at my place in Belsize Park, the house I had once shared with Chloë, the house outside which we had parked our Völökswägen with the rabbi swinging in the rear window. He turned up in powder-blue pants and canary-yellow sweater with a flamingo-pink suede blouson hanging loosely on his shoulders. The warmth of the day explained his outfit partly. But I knew what explained the rest of it. Desire.

You could smell it on him. The thin, needling fetor of cold semen.

He was disappointed that it was only him and me for lunch. I watched him counting the cutlery and weighing up the salad. At every noise he started, hoping it was her. The kissogram.

‘You live here on your own now then?’ he asked me more times than was polite.

‘Since my divorce, yes.’

‘Did I meet that one?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Would I have liked her?’

‘No.’

‘Would she have liked me?’

I looked him over. The devil, presumably, doesn’t change. As he was when an infant imp, so as a hundred-thousand-year-old demon. No healthy principle of growth. Errol the same. The bones still as cruel as ever, the skin still so fine a purple light seemed to shine through it. There is a sort of thinness that denotes abhorrence. An extremity of distaste which we expect to find in puritans and ascetics. The mystery of Errol Tobias was that he was capable of such fastidiousness of expression even while he rolled in shit. ‘No,’ I said — though he alone of all the Jews I knew was not particular from which direction he took a woman, which versatility Chloë might well have smelled on him — ‘no, she wouldn’t have liked you one bit.’

He laughed through his nose, pleased at the effect he might have had on my ex-wife, had he only met her. ‘What’s happened to us, Max?’ he said, his face wrinkled into sentimentality. ‘Why have we seen so little of each other?’

‘London. London’s like that. And anyway, look at us. You live in a palace. .’

‘Well, this isn’t exactly a shit-heap. Belsize Park, for fuck’s sake.’

‘There ’s Belsize Park and there ’s Belsize Park,’ I reminded him. ‘And neither is Borehamwood. I live on a main road, I’ve got squatters dossing either side of me, I don’t have two acres of garden, I don’t have a tennis court, or a marble-pillared porch—’

‘—or a swimming pool.’

‘Exactly. Or a swimming pool.’

‘But so what? You draw cartoons, I import wine. Sometimes I have a good year, sometimes I have a bad year. It must be the same for you. Maybe next year will be a good year.’

‘Errol, this year is a good year.’

He wiped his mouth and took a look around. There was something in the way he examined my work that told me he was putting his mind to how I could run my business better. First there’d be an exposition of the problem as he saw it. Then there’d be a game plan for the future. Then he’d present me with the bill for his services which he’d waive for a night with the kissogram.

‘How much do you get for one of these?’ he asked.

‘No, Errol, we’re not doing this. Sit down and I’ll bring you cheesecake.’

‘Could you do my family?’

I shook my head. I didn’t do portraits.

‘Could you do the house?’

I shook my head again. Ditto houses.

I did cartoons, full stop. And he wouldn’t want anyone or anything he loved — not that there was anyone or anything he loved — in one of those.

He was frantic. There had to be something he could give me. In return for which. .

‘What wine do you drink?’ he asked me.

‘Errol, how can you ask me that? I drink whatever wine’s put in front of me. So long as it’s sweet. We drank Mateus Rosé with our curries, don’t you remember that? And we found that somewhat on the dry side. We were wonderfully above wine. That’s something I’ve been meaning to ask — where did it all go wrong for you? How come you became such a gantse wine-macher?’

‘To tell you the truth it was a piece of mazel. First I met Melanie who had an uncle in the business. Then the Israelis captured the Golan and planted vines on it. Plus, you know me, I read a few books on the subject. And this is the result.’ He opened his arms wide to show me the fruits, then remembered he was in my shabby sitting room/studio, not his palais de drek in Borehamrigid. Zoë’s joke.

‘How’s your mother?’ he suddenly asked me.

‘She’s fine. She has her kalooki, and of course her grandchildren. How’s yours?’

‘Fine, too. She’s still working. She must be the oldest hairdresser in the country. I’ve offered to buy them something down here, but they say they know no one. I tell them they know me and Melanie and their grandchildren, but they say they can’t come and stare at us all day. So they stay in Crumpsall. How’s your sister? Did she marry that yok?’

I clicked my tongue at him. Of all the Jewish fear words for the Gentile, yok is the most hateful. There are contested derivations of the term. Some say it denoted a citizen of York, where an angry and unlettered mob chose to believe the usual rumours and in the year 1190 massacred 150 Jews. Others see it simply as goy spelled backwards, with the final consonant unvoiced. I favour the former explanation. Goy is too neutral ever to have mutated into yok. A Jew can feel affectionately to a goy. But in yok you hear the baying mob. The lowest form of humankind. It expresses an indelible loathing. And that before it suffered comminglement with Errol’s noxious spit.

‘Do me a favour, Errol,’ I said. ‘Don’t call him that.’

He backed off. ‘OK. But we had a little quarrel with him in our family, don’t forget. He moved in on my mother’s business.’

‘Errol, he cut about fifteen people’s hair in a year. All men. I’d hardly call that moving in .’

Fine. He wasn’t arguing. Not to meet my eye he began circling the room again, scrutinising my cartoons as though conscious that he hadn’t done his best by them the first time round.