Kalooki Nights (11 page)

Somehow foreign, he sounded. Though he was born in England
and had almost certainly lived here every day of his life, a strange intercontinental Jewishry of inflection, such as the most English of rabbis will employ when on Jewish business – a burring or doubling of an
r
here, a lisping of an
s
there – appeared to take possession of him. Romanian, was it? South African? County Cork with a hint of the Bronsk washed down with Novoropissik?

‘At least have some tea,’ my mother said, a touch intercontinentally herself, I thought, the condition being infectious. Then, presumably remembering that the Orthodox love kummel – ‘a Russian peasant concoction the colour of goat’s piss’ was how my father liked to describe it – she offered him a peach brandy.

‘Do we have peach brandy?’ Shani said.

From the other kalooki players, too, expressions of curiosity. Peach brandy? Now you’re talking.

But Washinsky was not staying. He touched his hat . . .

More cartoonery. He wore no hat. I cannot make myself see him with his head bare, but bare I believe it was. No hat, no skullcap either. So what did he touch? His ears, I think. He touched his ears as though he had a migraine. Terrible for me now to think I brought a migraine on. A broken window is one thing, but terrible to think I hurt the mind of a man who would one day be murdered by his own son.

He hadn’t coloured, I noticed. Though acutely embarrassed, he didn’t have the blood to change colour, unless he turned a little yellower. ‘Let’s say we let it go this time, with a warning,’ he said, burring and lisping, backing out, almost bowing, the way he had come. I now realise that the spectacle of my mother’s kalooki companions, all made up for the occasion, their hair flagrantly abundant, their eyes afire with the excitement of cards, their faces turned towards him in ironically ladylike surprise, an expectancy of peach brandy moistening their lips, must have been very daunting to him, he a man who I must guess had only ever had intimate knowledge of one woman, she being the unfortunate Mrs Washinsky, a woman of no shape, presence or vitality, though not of course deserving of dying before her time for that.

‘Who’s
he
warning?’ Shani asked, but by then my mother had shown him, with her exaggerated courtesy, out of the house.

The following day my father repaired Washinsky’s window then came home and handed me a good hiding.

‘We don’t do persecution, Max,’ he told me.

After which our street games went on as before, with this exception: I felt sheepish about lobbing balls into Washinsky’s garden or hitting eights through his window while he was sewing lining into a stole, and managed to avoid doing either – I think without being rumbled by the others – for what remained of the summer.

Manny Washinsky was not, of course, party to these games. Mainly we didn’t play together, mainly we talked God, the death camps, and
Five Thousand Years of Bitterness
; but when games were called for and it was just him and me, we’d throw a tennis ball at a penny, trying to get it to flip over, or flick cigarette cards against the wall. The moment anything more communal was afoot he hung back and I did not encourage him to join in. He was weird, I wasn’t. He wouldn’t stand on lines in the pavement. He never left the house without ringing his own door bell to be sure it still worked, and then ringing it again to be sure he hadn’t broken it the last time. Then he would have to try the door, pushing at it with all his might in case he had left it open in his anxiety about the bell. He even did the same with our air-raid shelter though it had no door; he would have to go back every time we left it, once, twice, three times sometimes, to make certain everything was where he’d meant to leave it, the torches pointing in the right direction, our pencils lying as he believed they should lie: his where he sat, mine where I did. Weird! And I didn’t want to be thought of as weird by association. Especially by Errol Tobias who bossed the street, who had taken a particular fancy to me as a smart but still naïve kid whom he could educate in the ways of the world, and who treated Manny as someone so beneath him he was invisible.

It was Errol Tobias who had first shown me the photographs
that were missing from Manny’s copy of
The Scourge of the
Swastika
, turning the pages one by one, all the while staring at me and not saying a word, as though he did not want to miss a flicker of my facial reactions or the faintest tremor of my soul.

5

Errol Tobias was the street gardener. He had no skills, he simply ripped stuff out. Weeds, if weeds were specifically what troubled you, but anything and everything was his speciality. Few people did much with their gardens in our street. No feeling for it. Occasionally someone laid off from work essayed a bumpy lawn bordered with lupins; now and then a few geraniums in primary colours appeared; otherwise all our gardens were tangles of privet hedge and ivy which twice a year, during school holidays, Errol Tobias would pull out by the roots for you. He had his own shears, his own barrow, and his own staff. The year he initiated me into
The Scourge of the Swastika
illustrated I was his staff.

As for my salary, it was never discussed. Tacitly, I settled for
The Scourge of the Swastika
, unexpurgated.

Did I say Errol Tobias ‘showed’ me the missing photographs? Too feeble a verb, ‘showed’. He divulged them to me, rather. Like Moses coming down from Sinai with the tablets, he made them manifest to me, inducting me in them, one revelation succeeding another, as though the photographs weren’t merely in his possession but had somehow been divinely vouchsafed him, and were now his by metaphysical right.

We were in the long grass of somebody or other’s garden. Mrs Margalit’s. Mrs Getzler’s. They were all the same. The overgrown gardens of people forever on the run. You garden when you can be sure you’re staying and the Margalits and Getzlers had not been here long enough to know whether they were staying or not. This was why each generation of Jewish immigrants was scornful of the next, why the German-born Jews who had been here since 1820
looked down their noses at those of us who came from Novoropissik a half-century later, and why we looked down on those who came from places even worse a half-century after that. Every influx reminded us of our antecedents and threatened the fantasy of permanence we’d erected around ourselves like a stockade. In the new arrivals the Gentiles would see who we really were.

Fools, the fools we’ve been, to suppose they have ever needed reminding.

How long the Tobiases had been here I didn’t know. They were hard to pick. By virtue of something in their pigmentation, they could have passed for non-Jews of a lower, somewhat rural station. Not quite pig farmers, more a pig farmer’s chauffeur and maidof-all-work. In fact, Mrs Tobias ran a hairdressing salon in the back room of her house, and other than sneer at her clients in their curlers, Mr Tobias did nothing. Errol, too, had the lewd, obscenely confidential air of a gentleman’s gentleman. That moral fastidiousness which is itself indecent. But in the long grass I didn’t scruple to be inducted by him into the illustrated
Scourge of the
Swastika
. He must have made a good job of it, because not only am I able to remember in considerable detail all the photographs I saw, I am able to remember the order in which I saw them . . .

The charred bodies found in the church at Oradour.

The slaughter at Autun.

The village of Lidice, quiet in the snow, like a Brueghel winterscape.

Then Lidice after the massacre, the buildings ripped apart, the bodies lined up on their backs for all the world as though they are schoolkids on the gym floor, waiting for permission to get up again.

The photograph of a mass execution found on a German prisoner.

Birkenau before the crematorium was built, the naked bodies smoking in pits.

Patriots hanged at Tulle, the German officers smiling.

Arbeit Macht Frei
– the gateway to Auschwitz.

A crematorium oven at Buchenwald, with a charred skull inside.

The disfigured limbs of human guinea pigs at Auschwitz.

The pile of discarded artificial limbs taken from victims of the gas chambers.

Ilse Koch. Ilse Koch, wife of the commandant of Buchenwald, not looking as enticing after her capture (this a judgement made with the benefit of hindsight) as she did before it.

Below, a couple of the shrunken heads said to have been commissioned by her for her collection.

Josef Kramer’s driving licence.

The confession of Rudolf Hess – ‘I personally arranged on orders received from Himmler in May 1941 the gassing of two million persons . . .’

A mass grave at Belsen – the bodies almost beautiful in their abstraction, that’s if you dare let your eye abstract in such a place.

The British soldier with a kerchief over his nose, bulldozing those abstractions to clear the camp.

Corpses by the wagonload at Buchenwald – boots, feet, faces, the inspiration for Philip Guston’s distracted cartoons of ignominy and death (there is, you see, a place for great cartoonery, even here).

And finally and most famously and shamelessly, the one we looked at longest, the naked Jewish women being paraded for medical inspection, running across the prison yard while the German guards, some with their hands in the pockets of their uniforms, look on. My first sighting, God forgive me, of pubic hair in print.

If I am not mistaken this last photograph is among those which Orthodox Jews in Israel, following the earlier example of Manny Washinsky’s parents, have petitioned to be removed from public display. Not to be shown anywhere, not for whatever educative purpose, not even in Yad Vashem. It affronts, they say, the modesty of the women, thereby implying that modesty is something that
might live after you. A woman’s immortal modesty. I agree with them. The photograph should not be shown. It certainly should not have been shown to me or to any other boy my age. I would rather not have been aroused by it. Yes, even in the most careful household, a boy is always in with a chance of seeing more of flesh and bone and hair than is good for him to see, but an actual sighting, at speed and in confusion, is not the same as a photograph on which one can rest one ’s eyes for all eternity. It was unwelcomely arousing, too, without a doubt, to share the experience with Errol in the long grass. Whatever else we knew, we knew we should not have been looking. Because what might just have been most arousing of all was our knowledge that the women were petrified, perhaps about to be subjected to all the degradations a boy’s imagination can invent, death being among the kinder of them.

And if you think that denotes derangement you should have heard what Errol had to tell me about Buchenwald in the days of Ilse Koch, the cock-shrinker.

Don’t I mean the head-shrinker?

Yes, that too.

6

Ach Buchenwald ich kann dich nicht vergessen
Weil du mein Schicksal bist.

O Buchenwald, I can’t forget you,
Because you are my fate.

‘Buchenwaldlied
’

They sang songs in Buchenwald. Figure that.

A mystery to me, who found it hard enough to sing in Crumpsall Park. True they were ironic songs about
Schicksal
, but a song’s still a song.

Schicksal
– meaning fate or destiny.

Shikse – meaning floozie. From which shikseh – meaning Gentile girl. Otherwise, wife to Maxie Glickman.

They used to say that character was destiny, but now they know that language is.

So shiksehs were my destiny.

‘I am not,’ Chloë said, the day she left me, ‘your floozie.’

‘My daughter is not—’ Chloë’s mother said.

‘I know what she is not,’ I interrupted, ‘she is not my floozie.’

‘That she certainly is not.’

‘Say goodbye, then,’ I said.

‘Goodbye.’

I was sorry to part from her. Leaving women’s mothers was always harder for me than leaving the women themselves. Somehow more final when you leave the mothers. And I’d grown attached to Chloë’s mother, Helène, in an equilibrium-of-detestation sort of way. I hated the way she would say, when we were staying with her, or she was staying with us, ‘I will be saying goodnight now – goodnight.’ And she hated everything about me.

After she had said she would be saying goodnight, and saying it, she would add that she was going ‘up the little wooden hill to Bedfordshire’. Should that have annoyed me to the extent it did? She came from Cheshire, naturally from Cheshire I mean, not as a newly moneyed import. People just talked like that there. Genteel Southern-Northern cute. It was what you signed up for when you fell in love with cutesie genteel Gentile girls from the Southern North – their cutesie genteel Gentile mums. Part of the appeal of the daughter, a mother who wore knitted frocks to show off her ‘figure’, white or knitted stockings, sometimes white
and
knitted stockings, nipped-in waist, little perky acorn tits in padded bras, the smell of the racecourse in her hair, and a cutesie country turn of phrase. Exactly what a shikseh-loving Yiddler from the inner city should have thanked the Almighty for giving him as a ma-in-law, you’d have thought. ‘Gott tsu danken. Now equip me with the male equivalent of cutesie country Gentile tits and I will think that I am an English person born.’ But I didn’t have it in me to accept my good fortune and make peace with it. I couldn’t rest – night after night I got no sleep – until I was able to match my motherin-law’s little wooden hill to Bedfordshire with some odious genteel Gentile punning cosiness of my own. I ransacked the English counties. Sussex, Essex, Cornwall, Devon, Leicestershire, Cheshire itself. Nothing. What I needed was a county called Hell. ‘Why don’t you be off down the little wooden hill to Hellshire, Helène?’ Or a town called Blazes. ‘Hey, Helène, how about going to Blazes for the weekend?’ Though neither of those, I grant you, would have been a patch on the inspired inanity of Bedfordshire.

Then, at the sleepy-byes end of one particularly irksome evening
à trois
, to employ another Helènism – I was doomed in this marriage either to be
à trois
or on my ownio – I believed I’d hit the jackpot. We’d been playing fish, the card game where you have to remember the whereabouts of downturned cards, and then match them with upturned cards, a game at which I happen to excel, something Helène and Chloë put down to Semitic deviance of the brain.