Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

‘Tell me something,’ he said at last, ‘do you ever worry what the goyim think?’

‘In what sense? Do I worry that they miss the joke? Of course they miss the joke. They’re goyim.’

‘I don’t mean that. I mean do you ever worry that you’re telling them too much about us?’

‘What, by blowing the lid on what we’re like? You think they don’t know? My position, Errol, is that they managed to detest and fear us well enough before I came along.’

‘Don’t you think they’d show us more respect if we showed ourselves more respect? For example, look at this. .’

He extended his hand to a small drawing — one of a series illustrating Jewish jokes which I’d unsuccessfully pitched, when I was hard up, first to a publisher of greetings cards and then to a Christmas cracker company. It showed two stereotypical old Yiddlers sheltering under a tree and looking up at a bird which had defecated on them. ‘And for the goyim they sing,’ one of the men was saying.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m looking.’

‘Well, why’s that funny, Max? What’s amusing about Jews always seeing themselves as being shat on? Isn’t it time we outgrew that?’

‘It’s time we outgrew making lists of Jews who change their names, but some of us do it, Errol.’

‘I don’t publish those lists for all and sundry to read, Max.’

‘Ah, so it’s not my shitting on those poor old Jews that bothers you, it’s my doing it for the entertainment of the Christians. The accusation is not Masochismus but Nestbeschmutzing . Well, as far as charging me with nestbeschmutzing is concerned, let me tell you that others have got there before you. There isn’t a Jew living who isn’t guilty, in the opinion of some other Jew, of fouling the nest. Unless you take a vow of silence or wire your jaw you’re a nestbeschmutzer . And if you do take a vow of silence or wire your jaw you’re suffering from Judische Selbsthass . We either love ourselves too much or hate ourselves too much. To a Jew there is no acceptable way of being Jewish. Every other Jew does it wrong. And I can’t say that aloud either in case a Christian hears. Which is the best joke about us of the lot. I must remember to find a Christmas card company to send it to.’

He made a placatory gesture with his hand, almost, but not quite, patting me on the back. Even though he hadn’t touched me I could feel the skeletal outline of his fingers on my spine.

‘Make fun of what I’m saying all you like,’ he said, ‘but there are people out there ready to seize on everything we say against ourselves. Have you read Did Six Million Really Die? ? ’

‘Why would I? I can tell there are no laughs in it. And anyway, I don’t read books that have questions for titles. I like authors who know the answers.’

‘This author knows the answers, believe me. No, Six Million Did Not Die .’

‘Don’t tell me. Five million, was it?’

‘Too few to count, Max. And of those that did, most were victims of the Russians, illness, or an unwillingness to accept emigration. We’re a pestilence on the face of the earth, and in a well-regulated world six million of us would die every afternoon, but as it happened, and in this particular instance, they didn’t harm a hair of our heads.’

‘Yep. I know. And this is the thanks we give them — inventing the chambers and the ovens.’

‘Exactly. And claiming compensation for Jews who couldn’t possibly have died or there wouldn’t be so many of us left controlling the media, bankrupting the planet and stealing land from poor Arabs.’

‘You shouldn’t be reading it, Errol, it will make you ill.’

‘Someone has to.’

‘I agree with you. And better it’s you than me. But I don’t see what this has to do with my shitting bird.’

‘They make their history by seizing on every instance of one Jew differing from another. They’d see you dead tomorrow, but if they can quote you against your own people they will make you a hero for a page. They’ll even invite you to one of their conferences and be photographed with their arms around you. “Look — they’re such liars these Jews that even Jews don’t believe them!” They’re besotted with us, Max. If you state that 260,000 Jews lived in the Baltic States before the German invasion, and I put the figure at 260,001, they’ll use us to confute each other. They monitor everything we say and do.’

‘Then they’ll be monitoring this. Are you sure you’re not becoming paranoid, Errol?’

‘From you! Five Thousand Years of Fucking Bitterness!’

‘That’s not paranoia. It’s history.’

‘Well, they deny it, Max.’

‘Well, let them. It will work in our favour in the end. If they’re so determined to disprove all our complaints about the past, they have a stake in giving us nothing to complain about in the future. Think of them as the guarantee of our children’s future. See it as having free bodyguards.’

He fell into an armchair and grinned at me. ‘It’s good to see you again, you meshuggeneh Yid,’ he said.

I fell into an armchair opposite. ‘Good to see you, too,’ I lied.

‘So?’ he said.

‘So?’

‘So tell me about the kissogram.’

3

Did I want to defile Zoë as she claimed? Was it the case that I no sooner looked at her than I saw the whore of Babylon? And could it really have been my buried wish to have her get it on with me and Errol both — a stubby shikseh passed like a roach from Jewish hand to Jewish hand?

Honesty demands I be scrupulous about my dark unconscious, whether or not I thereby give ammunition to Gentiles on twentyfour-hour Jew-degeneracy watch. Beholding her bare-thighed on Errol’s knee, outlola’ing Lola Lola — a joke she didn’t quite get herself — did I not wonder how far, for veracity’s sake, she might go? And when Errol put it to her that she might go so far as to suck his dick, did I post-date my dread that she might into an expectancy, an assumption — all right, all right, into a longing — that she would?

No. Yes. No.

But dreads do have a way of fulfilling themselves. And the time came when yes, God forgive me, yes, I did behold Zoë, or at least when I with good reason imagined I beheld Zoë — by then become my wife, a woman I had undertaken to honour and protect, Zoë Glickman, the mother-to-be of my children, except that we would have no children — yes, when I came as close to beholding as you can come to beholding without actually beholding, whatever it was I thought that I beheld.

Which answered, all things considered, to that longing I did not dare acknowledge?

Yes.

No.

Yes.

But yes or no it didn’t happen all at once. And that it did happen at all ( if it did happen at all) was so contrary to any desires I recognised on the upper levels of my person that I reject as wicked libel Zoë’s assertion that it was just another act of Jewish machination practised upon her innocence. First Leila Krystal, now me — no sooner did we see her trusting beauty, Zoë the unspotted, golden as the corn she came through, than the need was on us to befoul it.

Reason not the need, Zoë. Need never entered into it. Any befouling came as surplus to desire. And its object was me, not you.

Self-befouling, nestbeschmutzing , all the cunning cartoonery of the heart — we are too busy with ourselves, Zoë, to have time to worry about demeaning you.

Despite Errol’s continuing curiosity, I didn’t bring him and Zoë into each other’s company again for several years. Our friendship had been rekindled and we kept it up à deux , meeting each other halfway, as it were, in East Finchley, or Hendon, or other last outposts of the city where we had heard rumours of a new salt-beef bar or similar having opened. I am not sure why either of us persisted. It certainly wasn’t for the food. Nor was it for the company, come to that. I always groaned when the time came to get ready and do the trek, and I never doubted that Errol felt the same. But we must have felt we were honouring something in our past, even if we couldn’t have given it a name.