Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

Apart from my mind . She left everything as she found it, apart from my mind.

I came home from shopping one morning — Alÿs never shopped — to find her sitting on the edge of the sofa in tears. She had been looking through a portfolio of unfinished work I had left with her to see if she thought I was heading in the right direction. Caricatures of famous Jews who were either damned in being too Jewish, or damned in being not Jewish enough. Wildly funny stuff, in my view — wildly funny not least about the state of mind of the caricaturist — but too angry or too bilious to know quite what to do with. (The title No Bloody Wonder came much later, as a riposte to the mess she had made of me.) She was wearing her inevitable caftan, some sort of Mexican cape with feathers and mirrors sewn into it, a robe designed for dancing and laughing in, but which, on Alÿs, became funereal, a covering one might wear for the Day of the Dead. Her sandals looked buckled tighter than ever.

‘So upsetting,’ she said.

‘Me doing the shopping? Well, there’s nothing to stop you doing it with me.’

‘You are so hurt,’ she said, tapping the portfolio in her agitation. ‘I didn’t know you were so hurt.’

I was taken aback. ‘Well, they are certainly meant to hurt,’ I said. ‘I grant you that.’

‘You are fooling yourself. The only person these are meant to hurt is you. You can’t go on like this. You will destroy yourself.’

Out , I should have said. Get the fuck out of here, you fucking ghoul!

But ours was not a swearing relationship. And then, what if she were right? Not about my destroying myself — that was melodrama. But the implication of her words was that the prisoner in this house was me, not her; and that I was imprisoned in some fatal solipstic engagement, my rage not finding an outlet, never mind an audience. I knew enough about the frustrations that beset cartoonists, especially Jewish cartoonists, not to suppose I could be a cheerful exception to the rule. The plight of Bernard Krigstein had been before me since I was a teenager. You pursue the Nazi of your nightmares until he falls under the wheels of a subway train, and then how happy are you? Where do you find your victory? As a cartoonist, Krigstein believed nobody recognised how good he was. As a serious painter, he believed nobody recognised how good he was. Would another dead Nazi have given him the recognition, or even just the satisfaction, he craved? Should he have gone out looking? Should he have gone out combing the subways for more enemies of the Jewish people, that’s assuming enemies of the Jewish people were truly at the heart of what was amiss with him? That way madness lay. Maybe all ways madness lay. Perhaps Alÿs was on to something. Besides, she was in a privileged position. She taught popular culture. She knew what sold. She knew what the goyim in their fucking millions bought. And they sure as hell weren’t buying me.

And thus began my re-education.

She read to me, no doubt as she read to her students on the first day of term, the cartoonist Robert Crumb’s description of his methodology or provenance or procedure, call it what you will — ‘“Doodles, scribbles, worthless foolishness, playful notions, silliness, aimless meanderings” — how much of that do you recognise, Max?’

‘Me? None of it.’

‘You never doodle?’

‘Never. If I’m drawing I’m drawing.’

‘And worthless foolishness?’

‘Well, that’s a verdict others may pass on me, and have, but as a description of my own endeavours to myself I do not recognise it, no.’

‘Aimless meanderings?’

‘I cannot conceive of such.’

‘And why do you think that is, Max?’

‘Because I’m Jewish and Jews understand art to be expressly against the wishes — no, the commandments — of Elohim. Therefore when they do it they do it solemnly and in the expectation that the fabric of the planet will be rent in two. You want to see galactic meltdown? Take a look at what’s going on in the firmament after a Jewish boy has dared to make a likeness.’

‘So why are you a cartoonist?’

‘It doesn’t say anywhere, Alÿs, what sort of likeness is forbidden. Oil painting, sculpture, caricature — they’re all serious infractions to Him. And they’re all serious infractions to Me.’

‘You’re in the wrong branch of the wrong business. You probably always have been. Don’t doodle if doodling’s not what you care to do.’

‘I don’t doodle.’

‘Exactly. You don’t doodle. So do what you do do.’

‘It’s a little late in the day for me to turn my hand to landscapes. And I won’t be making video installations.’

And that was when she introduced me to the graphic novel.

‘ Five Thousand Years of Bitterness not graphic enough for you?’I wondered.

‘No narrative.’

‘Alÿs, it’s the narrative of my soul.’

‘Exactly. No narrative that anyone wishes to accompany you on. Your soul’s old hat, Max. Your soul’s had it. That particular aspect of your soul has, anyway. It went out with the Ark.’

‘It began with the Ark.’

She took my head between her hands and looked into my eyes. Not easy for Alÿs to look at me or anyone, so heavy were her eyelids.

‘Some time in your life you jumped off the train that everybody else was travelling on, Max. It was your own decision. You can make the decision to jump back on again.’

The train. Jew Jew, Jew Jew.

6

So jump back on I did.

The Wonderment Express.

Boo hoo, boo hoo! Boo hoo, boo hoo!

And for four or five years, the years before we married, I let it take me — take us, to be exact — where it was taking everybody. Africa, Cambodia, Croatia, Chernobyl, East Timor, you name them, though in plain truth they name themselves — the heartlands of our bad conscience. I’m not saying we always went there in person. In fact we almost never went there in person. But our sympathies took flight, and what we didn’t see with our own eyes Alÿs could always find a research assistant to see for us. The stories Alÿs attended to herself. Linear narratives of bad faith and lost illusions a child could have written. But then a child was meant to have written them. She was quick to seize an important truth, my Alÿs. Never again, not in our time, anyway, would a man’s voice — or a man’s hand, come to that — be acceptable. If you wanted to be heard or noticed, if you didn’t want to scratch at the margins of the margins, you changed your gender or you changed your age. From here on in the man would be allowable only in the boy. I stopped drawing and began to shmeer instead. Life as a child saw it, or as the age chose to believe a child saw it, all pastel wash and finger painting, any vibrancy or discord (and all blacker-than-hell jokes) whited out with Turpenoid. In a trice I was no longer Maxie Glickman but Thomas Christiansen, graphic novelist with heart. Co-author of Boy of Bhopal . Followed by Boy of the Balkans . Boy books begging to be loved.

They sold reasonably well. Not sensationally. We were probably too sour, Alÿs and I, to boy it as convincingly as was required. But they sold well enough to disgust me with the people who were fool enough to buy them. I knew how fatuous they were. I did them for a quiet life and to make a woman who was depressed for me, a little less so. But what was their excuse?

Having, as she believed, got me back on course, she agreed to marry me. We made no provision for a honeymoon. Her decision. We would melt somewhere appropriate when the occasion was right. We would deliquesce into history like my watery paintings.

Neither getting me back on course nor agreeing to be my wife did anything for her spirits. She still began each day with her sandals buckled, so she would be ready when they came to bundle her away, either to the ovens or to freedom.