Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

Whereupon, in recollection as no doubt at the time, Manny’s knees began to jig again.

They got to a girl before they got to the girl. The girl might not have left their consciousness entirely, but she had happened long ago. Asher had been in Israel for years, and they could not have conceived circumstances in which Dorothy would have taken herself there. There were plenty more Jewish boys left in Crumpsall if her heart was still set on one of those. As for what objection there could be to a girl Asher had met in Israel, they were hard pressed to imagine any, short of her being a Bedouin.

‘Is she an Arab, Manny?’

‘Why do you think there’s got to be a “she”?’

‘We know our son. There’s always a “she”.’

‘There isn’t a “she” and she isn’t an Arab.’

‘So what is she?’

‘I came home because it was too hot there. And I didn’t want to go on being a burden to Asher.’

‘He’s your brother. How can you be a burden to your brother?’

‘I know he’s my brother. That’s why I didn’t want to be a burden to him.’

‘You didn’t want to go on being a burden to Asher when he was doing what? You didn’t want to be a burden to him and whom?’

‘Look — I’m telling you the truth. Go there yourself if you don’t believe me.’

So they did.

‘Did you warn him?’

‘Did I warn him what?’

‘Did you warn him they were coming?’

He began pulling at his fingers and whistling. Usually the sign that I had pushed him further than he could bear to go.

I made tea and served him ginger cake, which he liked. It was becoming routine. Breakfast of granola and honey, or a no less sticky lunch of Nutella and banana pancake, both in the vicinity of the British Museum which I guessed he favoured in the hope of running into the Azams again — his only friends in London, not counting me, the only people he had ever talked to — followed by tea with ginger cake back at my place, and then, if I wasn’t careful, an evening in front of the television together. It was not unlike being married. Wife Number Four — Emanuel Eli Washinsky, except that he was unsuitable by virtue of having no diaeresis.

‘No,’ he said, after a mouthful or two of tea. ‘No I didn’t warn him. I thought that would have been taking sides.’

‘But weren’t you taking sides when you got home and told your parents there was nothing wrong?’

He thought about it, looking for the answer on the ceiling. ‘No. That was different. That was me refusing to be used as a messenger boy by them.’

‘You weren’t being a sort of messenger boy for Asher? A messenger boy whose message was to stay shtum?’

‘Yes. I know. They all wanted something from me. They always had.’

It was the first intimation I had that he’d been at all put out by the great Jerusalem reunion. Stupid of me. Stupidly romantic to suppose that all the world loves a lover. All the world loves a lover when it’s got a bit of love going for itself.

Stupid of me, as I explained to Francine Bryson-Smith over a snatched tea at Patisserie Valerie in Old Compton Street, not to have realised that however delighted he was for his brother, Manny was bound to be a wee bit jealous as well.

‘Jealous because he didn’t have a little shikseh of his own?’

( Ways of Saying Shikseh When You’re Not Jewish , Vol. II.)

I put lines around my eyes, where a smile is meant to form. ‘Well, that too, but I was thinking jealous because he’d been spending a lot of time with his brother when Dorothy turned up out of the blue. They’d discovered each other. Time had ironed out their age difference and opportunity had made them friends. Think of it — travelling around Israel together, talking theology, looking at the sea, eating kebabs in the sunshine. For Manny, who had never seen sun before, it was like the beginning of a new life. And then at a stroke, it was gone. Dorothy arrived and his brother dropped him. Cruel, but that’s the way of it. When love calls, you jump. And poor Manny was back on his own again.’

‘So why didn’t he gas his brother, do you think?’

‘I’ll need to think about that,’ I said, leaving her to pay the bill.

3

They got there and found everything as they would have wanted it. Asher living on his own, no longer acting the Messiah, no longer with his hair down to his toches, not shot, not blown up, not coughing blood, and best of all not living with a Bedouin.

They had come to take him home, but now they were not so sure. He gave them the tour he gave Manny. Down to the Red Sea, up to the Dead Sea, there the mountains, there the rivers, here there and everywhere the manifest word of God. Had they been able to afford it they’d have stayed. ‘Left me in Crumpsall,’ Manny said without any smile lines round his eyes, ‘and started a little fur business in Netanya.’

Anyone watching the three of them together would have been touched by the spectacle. A loving Jewish son, purple as the seeds of a pomegranate, leading around parents whose every gesture exuded love for him. Too late for them, in all reality, the Israel he was showing them, just as it had been too late for Moses, but they could at least stand on a mountaintop with their boy between them and look out. As far as the eye could see, the Jewish future, covenanted thousands of years ago but now at last, thanks to men like Asher, on the point of being realised.

What you would not have been able to tell just from looking at the three of them together was that the son had thoughts only for the woman he loved, the fire-yekelte’s daughter who, at this very moment, was setting up home for the two of them in a Land no less Promised — Higher Blackley.

Was that a cruel deception on Asher’s part, or was it a kindness?

‘I was being considerate,’ was how Asher explained it to Manny when he got home. ‘I didn’t want to spoil their holiday,’

‘Dad says you would have shown more consideration had you given them poison to drink,’ Manny told him.

‘Dad would. Dad has a taste for overstatement. He’s a typical diaspora Jew — he thinks the Jewish world is always on the point of coming to an end. That’s what I like about Israel — because they live in a real and not an imaginary Jewish world they don’t spend every hour thinking it’s going to disappear.’

‘That’s because they have an army to see it doesn’t,’ Manny reminded him.

Asher laughed. He was laughing again. Aflame and festive. ‘I could do with an army myself,’ he said.

‘An army won’t help. What you need is a team of doctors. Dad’s going round clutching his heart again.’

‘He’s bluffing. Don’t worry about it. He’ll get over it. They’ll both get over it this time. They’re used to me not being here. If they don’t want to see me they can pretend I’m back in Israel.’

‘With a German?’

‘The world has changed. You’ll see.’

Asher had told them the truth on the plane back. Just before they landed at Manchester Airport. He hadn’t wanted to spoil the flight for them either. And just possibly he wanted them both to be confined in seat belts when he told them.

He genuinely believed what he had said. So much time had gone by, everyone was so many years older, the arguments had been gone through so often they were threadbare by now, not even arguments, just rags of prejudice and dogma, and Dorothy had become proficient in Hebrew, was doing a PhD that had been ratified by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, knew more about Jewish history than they did, for God’s sake — surely, in the face of all this, what remained of his parents’ objections would melt away.

Manny thought otherwise. Manny had not been out of the country, breathing in other ideas. Being Jewish might have looked different to Asher in Jerusalem, but in Crumpsall it was still the same, maybe even worse. In Israel, as Manny had seen with his own eyes, Jews got a bit of air around themselves. In Crumpsall, excepting those who had opted out of being Jewish altogether, they had begun to return to the bad old ways of the shtetl, retreating behind the defences of an ancient faith, living and breathing it as they’d done in Novoropissik, as though the practice of their religion was the only activity open to them. That or kalooki.