Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

My first impulse was to send them flying. Fuck you, Alÿs. But I was proud of having done no violence, real or symbolic, to her so far, and wanted it to stay that way.

I could smell her absence. It was like spring. I threw open all the windows and inhaled. Ah, yes! Ah, yes, yes, yes!

Then I realised I knew what it was to be a Nazi.

1

Asher was on fire.

Those were not Manny’s words, but I didn’t need Manny to tell me how Asher felt.

On fire. Desire piled upon desire piled upon desire, because desire rekindled and reconfirmed exceeds itself at a rate which is beyond the seemingly straightforward mathematics of reunion. Desire, too, re-enacted in a climate which suited desire better. He couldn’t stop touching her and wherever he touched her her skin sizzled. Cold was how he remembered her. Cold with the chill of Crumpsall in her veins. It had been part of their lovers’ ritual — having to go back for a cardigan for her, or a coat even in the middle of summer, and his arm always around her shoulder. His job had been to warm her through. One reason why they’d loved each other’s flesh — the disparity in their temperatures. Now, hot of her own accord, she was a novel sensation for them both. They imagined how their night would be — assuming, always assuming there would be a night — their kisses viscous, their limbs moist and indistinguishable.

On fire, but not only because the sun coming off the Jerusalem stone was fiery. He was on fire with agitation.

‘Just a minute, don’t say anything, I need to know how long you’re here, where you’re going, what your plans are, who you’re here with.’

Who you’re here with . On fire with not knowing, and on fire with needing to know in an instant what it would take an age to unravel.

She laughed.

On fire with the sound of her. The look of her. Her throat.

On fire with what was familiar, on fire with what was new.

Which was the more exciting — what he recognised or what came as a shock? Difficult choices. A new woman or the previous woman come back? Or was the way to think of it that the previous woman had been returned to him renewed?

On fire with the strange infidelity of holding an ex-lover in your arms.

Except that she wasn’t an ex-lover. He had never replaced her. And never thought of her as belonging to a time that was dead. She was his lover, had remained his lover, continued to be his lover in the present, even though he wasn’t seeing her and hadn’t seen her for so many years that they could have had a son and bar mitzvah’d him in the time.

She the same. How he felt, she felt. She had never stopped loving him.

But there was a subtle difference in how they each received this news. It saddened her and filled her with a sense of wasted years. Whereas Asher was exhilarated by the words. Better than fame, better than being fought over by a thousand women, better than coming back from the dead to find the whole world made distraught by your passing — to be told that you have been held in a single heart, thought about and thought about, missed, longed for, pictured and bodied forth day after day, month after month, year after year, and for all your failings heroised.

‘You have come back to me,’ Dorothy said when they lay side by side, without blankets, in her Moorish hotel room with its clattering air conditioning. She had discovered she could buy English roses in Jerusalem and liked to fill the room with them. Would he remember that she had talked to him about roses when they visited gardens together, gardens being the best places, he had joked, to avoid being seen by Jews? And the best places to smell flowers, she had replied. Would he smell the roses, and would the smell remind him? She had waited to be sure of him. Waited to hear what he had to say. Waited to find out whether he had married or intended to marry another woman, never mind his protestations of fidelity. Waited to see whether his effect on her would be as it had always been, to say nothing, of course, of her effect on him. But now she was satisfied. ‘My hero has returned.’

The return of the hero . He was on fire, as any man would have been on fire, with that. You could see the flames from Jericho.

He had, he would have been the first to admit it, done nothing heroic. Quite the opposite. He had taken fright and run away. But hero was a manner of speaking. When the man returns it is always as a hero. A good woman understands this. A man must live on as an idea, in his mother, in his wife, in his children, in his mistresses. This is why he leaves them. So that he will persist as a glowing abstraction for them, before he returns — if he returns — to make that abstraction flesh again. That’s the fantasy, anyway. I have it myself, in relation to Chloë, Zoë, even Alÿs. I need to know that they are thinking — if not longingly, at least exceptionally — of me. As a man it is where I exist. Not in the flesh, as a woman exists: in her children, in the home she makes, in the palpable achievements of her devotion. A man is more spiritual. A man lives in the sentimental apprehension of him that women carry around. And when a woman divulges this sentimental homunculus to the man of whom it is an ideation, his happiness can barely contain itself. Asher’s spilled over like lava, happiness enough to engulf all Jerusalem. And because Dorothy was as intelligent as she was devoted, because she was in no hurry to deliver herself of her stored-up reproaches on their first night back together — a night she had perfumed with English roses — she didn’t begrudge him his childish vanity.

‘There is only one thing,’ she said.

He was stretched out on her bed in the attitude of a god. Not Elohim. Any god but Elohim. A tracery of perspiration made the hairs on his chest glisten. It was as though dew had fallen on him, she thought.

’Anything,’ he said. ‘Just ask.’

She made a pincer of her nails and plucked at one of his chest hairs, turned grey in the time they’d been apart.

‘Leave me again and I will kill you.’

2

Back in Crumpsall, Manny barely had time to dump his bags in his room before the interrogations began. How come he had returned so suddenly when he had talked of staying on at least another month? Was he ill? Was Asher ill? Had they fallen out? Manny had written that he and Asher had never been so close — what then had occurred to make them not so close?

‘I did my best,’ Manny told me, ‘to be non-committal.’

I did my best not to laugh. Manny non-committal was impossible to conceive. Even now, so many years later, he could not conceal the agitation which having to lie for Asher caused him. He was jiggling both his knees. Much more of it and my window panes would start to shatter. It was like having Alÿs back in my life.

I put my hand out to stop him. ‘How long were you able to be non-committal for?’

‘About a minute.’

I was relieved. I didn’t want to be the only one who saw the funny side of this — Manny arrived back from Israel the colour of falafel, with the shock of walking into Dorothy still starting in his eyes, pretending that his last days in Jerusalem had been like absolutely any old person’s last days in absolutely any old place.

The surprising thing was, considering the terrible job of concealment he had obviously made, how long it took the Washinskys to come even close to the truth. Illness remained their first suspicion. Asher’s lungs had succumbed to something. Asher had been shot. Asher had been blown up. Their guilt talking, no doubt; suddenly imaging the dangers they had cheerfully exposed him to rather than let the fire-yekelte and her daughter have him.

‘If you’re preparing us for the worst, we would rather you didn’t,’ Mrs Washinsky said. ‘Just tell us what you must tell us.’