Howard Jacobson - Kalooki Nights

This is the price you pay for enlightenment. To be enlightened means to assume the enlightenment of others.

Given which serious miscalculation, I ought by this time to have evolved a world view more adequate to the facts. As Manny, to do him credit, most definitely had. Little by little I was growing to envy him. It behoved a man living in the twenty-first century, as it behoved the dramatis personae of Genesis, to be acquainted with abomination. The laughter I gave vent to when he pulled his metaphorical gun on me was misplaced and false. It masked incompetence and dissatisfaction with myself. Face to face with my old farshimelt friend, a person who on paper had lived no life to speak of, I felt the incomplete one. I hadn’t killed my parents. I hadn’t held a gun. I couldn’t even draw a gun. If anyone hadn’t lived a life, I hadn’t.

6

Chloë came at me with a knife once. I ran into the bathroom, said ‘God fucking help me!’ into the mirror, and began to cry.

‘I can smell your fear,’ she triumphed. ‘It’s leaking out from under the door.’

‘I’m not afraid for myself,’ I answered, ‘I’m afraid for you.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t be. It’s not me I’m going to kill.’

She kept me in there for two hours, then swore on her mother’s life that it was all right for me to come out.

What I hadn’t realised was that she’d nipped out of the house in that time. While I was straining my ear to gauge the dangerousness of her silence, she’d been down to the chemist to purchase a bottle of antibacterial skin-wash.

Swearing on her mother’s life always brought a sort of peace between us. If she was lying and meant to knife me the minute I emerged, there was at least the consolation that her mother might die for it.

‘There,’ she said, when I did at last venture out, ‘use this.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s to take away the smell of fear.’

I thought it was a joke. Forgetting that Chloë didn’t make jokes.

‘You’ve got a surprise coming if you think I’ll be using that,’ I told her.

Whereupon she came at me with the knife again.

For the duration of what was left of our marriage, I used the skin-wash twice a day.

I wasn’t lying when I said I was afraid for her. A woman wielding a knife as though she means to use it is a fearful spectacle. More fearful than a man wielding a knife because the woman with the knife appears to be parted more extremely from her nature. But of course I was afraid for myself as well. Not only afraid of being mortally wounded, but afraid that the ordinary condition of my life — a life of jokes, Jews, bitterness and whys — could so easily be disrupted and made to count for nothing. A knife raised in anger made life morally not worth living, whether the blade touched you or not. A gun the same.

And the antibacterial skin-wash couldn’t help with that.

7

The moment I got the opportunity I asked Manny what he would have done with a gun had he bought one.

‘Shot someone,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Who do you think?’

For some reason an event unrelated to any we’d been discussing flashed into my mind.

‘Errol,’ I said.

‘Errol? Who’s Errol?’

‘Errol Tobias. The meshuggener from our street who used to bully you.’

‘I don’t remember him.’

Was he lying? I had no idea. Was he lying about the gun, come to that? Again, I had no idea.

But I could see that it illuminated Manny’s face to learn that I could imagine more people for him to shoot than he had imagined for himself. He would have liked it, I thought, had I gone on guessing. H-horst S-ssschumann, then? Klaus Endruweit? The judge who pronounced sentence on you? Shitworth Whitworth? The people who made you eat your own faeces from the metal pot? David Irving? Me?

Rather than embark on what might have turned out to be another list of the enemies of the Jewish people, I tried him with a teaser of my own.

‘Why, Manny?’

‘Why didn’t I shoot anyone?’

‘Well, that too. But I meant why did you want to.’

His reply surprised me not only by its promptness, but by its vehemence.

‘It couldn’t go on for ever,’ he said. ‘In the end someone has to sort things out.’

‘With a gun?’

‘With whatever.’

Meaning, I supposed, the gas taps. But in that case, why all the gun talk?

‘So are you saying you did get a gun?’ I asked him.

He suddenly turned impatient on me. It was always the same. You asked him one innocuous little sentence — So did you get a gun or didn’t you? — and he was off.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said

An hour later he popped his head round the door. In his dismal green-and-grey-check 1950s pyjamas, he looked disembodied. Though they would have fitted an average-size schoolboy, his pyjamas hung off him. A magician might tap them with his wand and hey presto — they would fall to the floor, and nobody would be inside!

He coughed, wanting my attention.

‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’ he said, when I looked up. ‘The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword. But sometimes the coward does it with a sword as well.’

With which he wished me goodnight and retired a second time.

So what the fuck did any of that signify?

I found it hard to sleep. Unlike me. Even with Alÿs lying beside me like the ghost of pogroms past I had always managed to sleep. To my astonishment and self-disgust I had slept soundly the night my father died. But there was no sleeping through Manny’s riddles, of which the coward and his sword were, to tell the truth, by no means the most perplexing. What about his ‘sorting things out’ with a gun? What about his daring me to face up to him with a gun? Was that metaphorical or did he actually have one in his posession, here, in my house, hidden in his suitcase or under Zoë’s old mattress?

Present fears aside, nothing he had said to me made any sense. Whatever sorting out had needed doing he had done. He had sealed the door with a sheet — easy because there were sheets piled everywhere in the Washinsky house — turned on the gas tap, and that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was the obstacle to his brother’s union, sorted. What need of any gun? Unless, to be on the safe side, or as an act of kindness to them, he had shot them first. But I recalled no talk of bullets, and presumably the police, though inexperienced in the crime of double Jewish patricide in Crumpsall Park, would have noticed had any been discharged.

Since my mother kept bohemian hours, playing cards until very late, or sitting up listening to talkback radio half the night, and never minded whatever time I called, I thought I’d ring and ask what she remembered.

‘You kalooki-ing or not?’ I enquired.

‘Just finished.’

‘Did you win?’

‘The game won.’

‘Listen, Ma, did you ever hear anything about Manny Washinsky’s parents being shot?’

My mother was elderly now. This was cruel of me. ‘I remember something,’ she said. ‘Weren’t they killed in a road accident? Or was that their boy?’

I hadn’t told her I had made contact with Manny again, let alone that he had become my lodger. It all felt too complicated to explain. And I feared — I can’t explain why — that it might upset her. But she was evidently past upset on the Washinskys’ account.

‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I won’t bother you any more.’

‘Why do want to know? You aren’t going to put them in a cartoon?’

‘Ma, why would I do that?’

‘You tell me. Why would you put me or your sister in a cartoon?’

‘I have never put you or my sister in a cartoon.’

‘That’s not true. You used to get Shani to pose for you in boots,’