Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

She wishes to discuss art with him. She is confused by what he has told her about caricature. He has told her that art is not the rendering of what is outside art. That art sees but remakes what it sees, in that way causing something to appear that wasn’t there before. But to draw a caricature is to acknowledge dependence on something previous to the work, even to evoke something previous to the work, because it is only by recalling the original that the caricaturist can be seen to be exaggerating. In this sense, the caricaturist is the least godlike, most second-hand of all artists. But because the caricaturist is by nature a satirist, and the impulse to satire is denial, he is also the most godlike. In his act of creation, the satirist destroys.He is careful to keep his disquisition simple enough to maintain her interest, but at the same time abstruse enough to guarantee him a beating.He is drawing the fine isthmus of candle-white flesh above the Tubercle of Pubis. She has loosened her belt and infinitessimally eased her riding trousers down her hips so that he can see it well enough to draw. Three or four hairs of different lengths have strayed from her pubic triangle. He has seen a sufficient number of these hairs, now straying upwards, now straying down, now curling sideways, and now en masse, matted, like a tiny haystack, to reproduce Frau Koch’s pubic triangle in its entirety were he of a mind. But he is not of a mind even to imagine it. The three or four stray hairs are more engaging. I am a man with a soul and an intelligence, he tells himself as he draws, I am here in fulfilment of some inscrutable but divine intention, and I will not be here again; yet there is not a part of me that is not at this moment concentrated on a single one of Frau Koch’s nether hairs arbitrarily uncovered, a scratchy incidental filament which would assuredly have a sour odour if I could get my nose close enough to its smell, which resembles nothing more beautiful or significant in creation than the torn-off leg of a spider, and of itself and thus disposed fulfils no function worth putting the smallest corner of my imagination to. And yet, precisely for these reasons, and precisely because it grows from the body of a woman who fulfils no function worth putting the smallest corner of my attention to, my self-annihilating absorption in it is bliss beyond the power of dreaming.She catches the shadow of his satisfaction on his face. ‘Why are you smiling, Jew? You are not satirising me, I hope?’‘If I were, I would not be smiling, Frau Koch.’’I will make it my purpose before I am finished with you, Jew, to drive all satire from your mind.’‘You already have, Frau Koch.’She sits very still, like a model. Not in deference to his expectations as the artist, but because she does not want him to see anything more of her than his daily allowance. A rigidity which is the nearest she will ever get to understanding the punctilios of his perversion.His member stirs, and she strikes it.‘And now your face. .’He brings his face towards her, an upward arc from below, and she strikes that.He closes his eyes.‘Open,’ she says. ‘You cannot work if you cannot see. And you are forbidden to work from memory.’He likes that idea and wonders if she is getting better. With time he could make the perfect mistress of her. He will say that for the Germans. They learn.He is half inclined to make a satiric mark on the paper, as an encouragement to her to drive all satire from his mind.She is getting better. She reads what he is thinking. ‘Is it Jewish, this satire of yours, Jew?’‘It is, Frau Koch. Satire is written into our natures. Nietzsche believed we invented democracy out of a satiric impulse, as a refusal of aristocrats and heroes.’She doesn’t, of course, know who Nietzsche is. The education of the German people, though advanced, is a long way from being complete.‘So are all Jews satiric?’‘Only the clever ones, Frau Koch.’‘I thought you were all clever.’‘We are, Frau Koch.’She strikes his face again, with her gloved hand. ‘Don’t be satiric with me, Jew. I have told you I will remove all satire from your mind. You have said satire is written into your natures. So if I remove the satire from the Jews, there are no Jews, nicht wahr ?’ Ja wohl , Mendel thinks.

6

Errol had found Zoë in The Library, examining his shelves. If I was to trust her account, he had enquired as to her favourite writers and when she told him Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt and A. A. Milne, he asked her if she had ever seen Deep Throat .

‘I thought this was intended to be a serious evening,’ she told him.

‘It is a serious evening. Deep Throat is a serious film. It’s about a disability.’

She took two paces back from him, thought about quitting the room altogether, then decided to sit down. She needed, she told me, to compose herself.

‘Max said you were raising money for some sort of Holocaust Fellowship.’

‘We are. Are you interested in the Holocaust?’

Zoë detected insult in that. We were a phobic, perceptually oversensitive, paranoiac couple. Or at least we were when we went out in each other’s company. If I didn’t detect an insult on my own account, Zoë detected it for me. And vice versa. But on this occasion Zoë had done all the detecting necessary for herself.

‘Why shouldn’t I be interested in the Holocaust?’ she asked. Meaning — but it was obvious what she was meaning.

‘No reason. I am pleased you are. It is important that you should be.’ With which he opened a cupboard in his bookcases, brought out a bundle of what turned out to be pornographic magazines and films, and tossed them to her on the sofa. ‘Holocaust material,’ he said. ‘You choose.’

’So now,’ she told me when I found her, ‘I say the same to you. “You choose.”’

I made an automatic move in the direction of Errol’s ‘material’.

‘Don’t be a fucking moron, Max. What you’re choosing is whether we stay or go.’

It was one of those moments. Even at the time it felt like one of those moments. Though of course, as with all moments that are moments, the true consequences are not fully revealed until long afterwards. There it was, anyway. Maxie’s Choice. Did we go or did we stay?

It should have been cut and dried. We should have gone. I knew what Zoë thought. Get us the hell out of here, Max . The issue waiting to be decided wasn’t what we should or shouldn’t do, what hung in the moral balance was me.

That I ‘chose’ unwisely, I put down to several factors. I was tired, and didn’t immediately feel like driving home. Errol and Melanie Tobias were my friends, and I didn’t see how we could walk out on them just like that. What is more, if Errol had intended to treat my wife insultingly, the right thing was to get him to apologise, not to cut and run. In later conversations, Zoë would have none of these. ‘The night held out unholy promise,’ she insisted, ‘that was why you chose to stay. You chose to stay because you couldn’t bear what you would miss out on if we went.’ To which my reply never wavered. ‘It wasn’t the night that held out unholy promise, Zoë, it was you.’

The bare facts were these. Errol had thrown a bundle of porno on the couch for her to look at. There was without doubt sexual provocation in that, though he was not to know that Zoë believed a Jew had only to look at her to see a whore. Upset or not, Zoë could have got up and walked into another room, said not a word about it to me, and that would have been the end of it. For her to have turned it into a melodrama of decision for me — ‘ Your choice, Max ’ — merely proves that she had made herself imaginatively complicit in a narrative which began in porn and ended in her becoming the whore she believed Errol and I took her for. Her fault then, I maintained, if I failed to make the right choice — her fault for enticing me into making the wrong one.