Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

Two days later, Shani rang again. This time catching me in my digs. ‘Have you talked to Errol Tobias yet?’ she asked me.

‘I haven’t been able to contact him,’ I lied.

‘OK,’ she said. ‘Don’t. Just come straight up here instead.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘Just come. No one’s been hurt. Not yet anyway. But they might be if you don’t get here quick.’

Tsedraiter Ike.

Mick Kalooki hadn’t been imagining things. He was being followed. But it wasn’t a Tobias or a Tobias henchman who was following him. It was Tsedraiter Ike.

He was cowering in his room when I arrived. My job was to try to coax him out. Or at least get him to take some food. For her part Shani didn’t care whether the mamzer starved himself to death, but my mother couldn’t allow her own brother, or whatever his relation was to her, to die under her roof.

My other job was to stand in witness. ‘I want you to hear this,’ Shani said. As though I were my uncle’s keeper, or as though I in some way seconded, if not his repulsive behaviour, then his repulsive beliefs. An imputation that went all the way back to my having said Jew Jew, Jew Jew, Jew Jew, that day my mother was bringing me back from New Brighton.

From the other side of his bedroom door, Tsedraiter Ike denied that he had been following Mick Kalooki. What he had in fact been doing was waiting for an opportunity.

‘Ask him to do what,’ Shani said. ‘Ask him to tell you what he was waiting for an opportunity for .’

I didn’t need to ask. What Tsedraiter Ike was waiting for was the opportunity to tell Mick Kalooki, in a dark and secluded place — as though that was going to make a difference — that we didn’t want a shaygets in the family, thank you very much, even one who knew a kreplach from a k’nish.

I only had it half right. ‘Tell him,’ Shani shouted, ‘tell him what else you did.’

There was silence for a while. Though whether it was angry or abashed silence I couldn’t be sure. For a moment I even wondered whether I could detect a sound like sobbing. But it might just as easily have been ‘It’s only me from over the sea, said Barnacle Bill the sailor’. Then at last, defiantly, what Shani wanted me to hear. ‘I offered to make it right with him,’ he said.

I stared at Shani. ‘Make it right with him?’

’Money. By making it right with him he means money. Five thousand pounds. He offered Mick five thousand pounds, cash, to skedaddle.’

My mouth fell open. I didn’t live in a world where people tailed people in the dead of night, and then offered them dough to beat it out of town. I’d read a million comic books where such things happened, but I wasn’t living in a comic book and this was my uncle, Tsedraiter Ike not Ming the Merciless or Pruneface. I can’t pretend that along with everything else I felt, I didn’t also feel impressed. That took some doing! Yes, it was obscene, of course it was obscene, and it made a nonsense of the moral high ground in whose name Tsedraiter Ike believed that he was acting, to offer a bribe, to put money on the table in the sacred name of Elohim. But by Christ it took some chutzpah!

And then there was the size of the bribe itself. Five thousand pounds! Where the fuck had Tsedraiter Ike found five thousand pounds?

‘Give it me,’ I said. ‘I’ll skedaddle.’

Shani grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t make a joke of it, Max. Don’t let him think there’s a funny side. There is no funny side. He offered Mick five thousand pounds to leave me. Apart from anything else, do you not see how insulting of him that was, to suppose there would be any amount of money in the world that Mick would be prepared to leave me for? How insulting to me, and how insulting to Mick? And what does it tell you about his feelings for me, his only niece, that he would go to such lengths as actually to spend money to make me unhappy?’

From behind his door Tsedraiter Ike was insisting that Shani’s happiness was all he cared about. Didn’t she see? It was precisely to spare her unhappiness that he had done what he had done.

‘Fuck you,’ Shani shouted at him, which was the only time the F-word — in my hearing anyway — had fallen from her lips.

Which Tsedraiter Ike was just smart enough not to adduce as evidence that the shiksefying of his niece had already begun.

That evening, as a peace-offering to Tsedraiter Ike, Mick Kalooki cooked a kosher chicken with tsimmes and latkes — the first kosher dinner ever cooked on my mother’s stove. In his naïveté, Mick believed friendship with Tsedraiter Ike was still possible if only Tsedraiter Ike would sit down and shmooze with him. Despite the smells, which must have reminded Tsedraiter Ike of Shabbes nights in Novoropissik, and would have been too much for a man of less obdurate principle, he refused to budge from his room.

‘What’s your view?’ Mick asked me. ‘How can such a Godfearing man be acting in this way. Didn’t Ruth say to Naomi, thy people shall be my people, and thy God shall be my God, and wasn’t she, though a Moabite, the progenitor of David, King of the Jews? If your Uncle Isaac wasn’t a knowledgeable Jewish man, I’d say he was ignorant of Jewish history. But that cannot be, Max, can it? I’d even go so far as to say his attitude to me was racist, but that cannot be either, am I right?’

Sweet. He was a sweet man, Mick Kalooki. He went on to be a good husband to Shani and a good father to their five children, the sons among whom were circumcised in the proper manner, though not without some misgivings on the part of Shani herself. Thirty years later she would have found it hard to meet a Gentile with such a benign attitude to Jews. A Jew can’t be a racist? Don’t make me laugh!

But even for his times he was naïve. ‘A Jew is as likely to be a racist as the next man,’ I told him. ‘Not because of what has or hasn’t happened to him, or what he has or hasn’t been taught, but because he is a person with a personal psychology. And no God, however kind or cruel, can save you from your psychology.’

I was hot on psychology that year. It was a liberal studies option at art college, one that Chloë was taking, and I wanted to be close to her. Why I wanted to be close to Chloë, who in those days either ignored me or confused me with some other Israelite, was itself a question I thought doing the psychology option might help me answer. Masochism, as far as I could tell from the little reading I had done — masochism was the key to everything. I tried putting it to Mick Kalooki that masochism was the engine that drove Tsedraiter Ike as well. Not racism but — to employ the language proper to the discipline — Masochismus .

The way to look at it was this:

What was the proven consequence of any positive assertion by a Jew of his own sense of worth — whether as a man of moral excellence, prestige, or intellectual superiority? Hostility. If any single lesson has been learned by the Jew it is that his apparent arrogance or conceit will land him in deep trouble. Why then does he persist? There can be only one answer to that. He persists because appearing arrogant serves the psychic function of satisfying an unconscious masochistic need to be landed in deep trouble. Tsedraiter Ike’s offer of money to Shani’s Mick was an assertion of religious and moral superiority. Not only was Mick not fit to be Shani’s husband, Tsedraiter Ike’s behaviour declared, his unfitness would be demonstrated by his acceptance of filthy lucre (never mind, for the moment, that he refused it). But by acting as he had, and who was to say not in full awareness of Mick’s steadfast unwillingness to be corrupted, however large the sum, Tsedraiter Ike had drawn down, and at some level anticipated, a greater obloquy upon himself. Behold, yet again, the Jew laid low. ‘And there he is, even as we speak, whimpering in his room.’