Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

Wife of Sorrows, I called her.

About six months into our marriage she proposed a honeymoon. Work-related. I dreaded the worst. Ten days in the Congo? A fortnight in Chechnya? I wasn’t even warm. Palestine.

‘I beg yours?’

‘Palestine.’

‘You mean Israel.’

‘I mean Palestine.’

Now I think back to our time together I cannot recall a single Israel-related conversation. It might have been that we both knew to keep away from each other’s views on the subject. Or we might just have been lucky. On our watch, Israel simply didn’t come up.

When I say ‘views on the subject’ I do not mean to imply that I had any. My father believed that Jews bore a special responsibility not to be special, so he hated Israel for existing, then hated it for not existing well. Less bothered by such contrarieties, my mother threw the occasional charity kalooki night for our beleaguered Israeli cousins, the proceeds from which would not have bought a stamp to send what she had raised. I enjoyed a sleepy repose somewhere between their positions. But that did not mean I was prepared to put up with any moralising from the goyim. To the goyim I had one thing and one thing only I wanted to say: You threw us out, you won’t now dictate to us where we can go. A Chinaman might be entitled to express an opinion, but a Christian of French or German or even English descent, no sir. Not when the mess, if you go back far enough — and I go back far enough — is all your doing.

Alÿs, I accept, was not a goy. Nor had she, in all fairness, as yet expressed an opinion. Except that calling it Palestine expressed all the opinions it was necessary to express. I saw what was coming. Boy of Bethlehem . Maybe worse. Maybe Girl of Gaza .

I asked her if getting me on to the train was always the beginning of a process, in her mind, that would climax in her dropping me square in the middle of the shit that was the Occupied Territories. She denied any such intention vehemently. She had been thinking of me. Of the state I was in. Of my work which was bogged down in repetition, contradiction and pointless irony. Nothing else had motivated her, nothing! How dared I impute so base a motive to her! How dared I!!

But what was so base about her wanting me to go to Palestine, unless she meant by it that I should shmeer some paint around while I was there and rub it in the faces of my people? ‘The fact is, Alÿs,’ I told her, ‘your outrage proves my fears. You want to de-Jew me. It’s not enough you took the man. Now it’s the Jew you’re after. . what’s fucking left of it!’

She hung her head. Not in shame, in rage. It occurred to me that if she did look up it might be preparatory to an act of murder. I had said enough to be murdered, I accepted that. When you accuse someone of taking away what is essential to your life, you are asking for them to take the life itself. Why not finish it? Why not do what you stand accused of?

The strange thing was that she could not, at this moment, have looked more archetypally Jewish herself. In her fury, Judith the beheader. In her rectitude, Deborah the judge. In her sorrow, Naomi. In her fidelity to me — oh yes, in her outraged loyalty — Rachel. In her presentiment of grief — why not say it? — that best of all Jewish mothers, the Virgin Mary herself. And this before we’d started on the martyrs of the diaspora — from the wise and fertile wives who’d kept the flame alive throughout the persecutions of the Middle Ages to those heroines of my own profession, the Malvina Schalkovas and Gela Seksztajns who didn’t make it to their middle years. It was no wonder she couldn’t lift her head, considering the amount of retroactive narrative it contained.

I hated her. All at once I realised how much and for how long I had hated her without knowing it.

The fucking lugubrious Jewess she was! Ghetto-laden, Holocaust-ridden, God-benighted, guilt-strewn, and now by that latest twist of morbid Jewish ingenuity, Jew-revolted.

The sandals told their own story. Why hadn’t I been listening to what my eyes told me? There is only ever one reason an adult person wears a sandal when it isn’t summer and they are not winkle-picking on the beach, and that is because they wish to throw their lot in with simplicity. A sandal is a symbol of poverty and, by extension, of oppression. You wear it to affirm that what is good is simple, and what is simple must be true. No doubt there were Jewish settlers who wore sandals too, as an assertion of the simple continuity they enjoyed with Abraham and Sarah. Alÿs had pulled off something spectacular. She wore her sandals Jewishly, in the name of our common ancestors, but also anti-Jewishly in the name of those she believed we had dispossessed.

Not satisfied with being ashamed of all the shame we felt, now we had to be ashamed of not being ashamed enough. You can see why the goyim resorted to the gas chambers. They wanted us to leave their heads alone. But here we still were, still ratcheting up our consciences. Jews refining their Jewishness in the act of refusing to be Jewish.

Or at least here Alÿs Glickman, née Balshemennik, still was. She made my head spin, never mind the poor goyims’. I needed to be wearing sandals myself. I needed my own simplicities back. I needed to be working in vibrant colours again, doing overt violence on the page.

We didn’t speak that night. I fully expected her to be gone in the morning. But there she lay, flattened in the bed as though history had rolled over her again while she slept. I left the house, staying out all day, giving her the chance to gather together her things which in truth she could have squeezed into a matchbox. Thirty seconds were all it would have taken her to pack and go. But I gave her a day. Not for a moment did I suppose she would be there when I returned. But she was back at her workstation, bent over the coffee table reading fantasy comics without a zap or flicker of emotion, not making a nuisance of herself, not incommoding me by the disturbance of a single atom.

‘If it’s your intention to murder me by depressive propinquity, you’re succeeding,’ I told her.

She didn’t raise her eyes. ‘It isn’t my intention to murder anyone,’ she said.

The liar!

Why did she stay? That is a question I am still unable to answer. To make me miserable is too obvious. To make herself miserable is more likely. Being miserable, after all, was the thing she did best. No doubt the true answer was to be found in her grandfather, Sydney Balshemennik, who also stayed on long after any decent man would have hopped it. But other than a smile, you couldn’t get anything out of him.

As for why I didn’t ask her to leave, I was too much the Jewish husband. Gentile men analyse their wives then toss them from the top of twenty-storey buildings. Jewish men do not. Jewish men put up with whatever it pleases God to visit on them.

Nor did I suggest she move into Zoë’s old space. Good taste, partly. You don’t have a stream of wives passing through the same granny flat. And maybe I believed she was a punishment I deserved.

We continued in this vein for the best part of a year. Like two panes of glass in the same door, each trembling to the identical vibration. You can hear glass strained to the limits of its endurance. It seemed just a matter of time. The minute one pane shattered, the other would.

Then one morning, hallelujah, she was gone. No corpse of the Jewish nation steamrollered by my side. No silent reproaches, two thousand years in the rehearsing. No little feet padding in little round-toed sandals. Not a trace of her. Not a single hair to say she had ever been here. Only the books we had done together left, slender spines up, supported by a teapot and a biscuit jar, on the coffee table that had been her desk. Bitter evidence of her wasted years in my company? Proof of the benignity of her intentions all along? Or a reminder of what I would miss without her? The chance she gave me to be a different artist, to be a different man. The chance I blew.