Kalooki Nights (13 page)

The other advantage Errol enjoyed over Manny as a friend was his sexual precocity. By our third year at Bishops Blackburn Errol was the organiser of a ring of onanists who, on his instructions, kept diaries in which they listed times, whereabouts, details of ministering images or narratives, duration, outcome, etc, which they exchanged at the far end of the football field every lunch time to ejaculations of merriment or disgust. Though I counted
it an honour to be friendly with the boss, I stayed aloof from the organisation. Some things I felt better about doing on my own. This was a disappointment to Errol who wanted me to be the official artist not only of what conduced to my arousal but to everybody else’s. He chased me for a whole term, even offering to waive the joining fee of one and six. Not wanting to appear stuck up, I agreed, but backed out again after about a fortnight. When I told him it wasn’t working, that none of it was working, that the minute I shared a fantasy it became public and therefore no longer a fantasy, he said, ‘What about Ilse Koch?’

Each time Herman read such news, it awakened in him fantasies of vengeance in which . . . he managed to bring to trial all those who had been involved in the annihilation of the Jews.

Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Enemies: A Love Story

1

Strange to tell, there was an Ilse in my mother’s kalooki group, but a Cohen not a Koch. Ilse Cohen, an intense woman with tragic brown eyes, whom I took on that account to be intelligent. No umlaut or diaeresis in her name, so I was never in any danger of falling in love with her, but she had a fleshy face which I liked, and short agitated fingers with blood-red nails which it was impossible not to imagine taking gouges out of your back. In retrospect, I now realise that for erotic purposes I divided women, and had from a very early age, into vegetarians and meat-eaters. Ilse was a meat-eater. Vegetarians I took no interest in.

Though I seldom played kalooki myself, agreeing with my father that of all card games it was the most womanly, a form of sedentary shopping or hoarding, I looked on sometimes, not least because of the opportunity it gave me to study hands. Fascinating, the human hand, both as a piece of engineering in itself (of particular expressive value to a cartoonist) and on account of its wilfulness, the independence it enjoys from the rest of the body. And from the rest of the personality, come to that. You never know – I defy anyone to predict – what sort of hands a person is going to have. Where you would expect tapering artistic fingers, you find five amputated stumps, barely
more than carpals, like broken bits of chalk. Where you imagine you are going to encounter a gorilla’s fist, you come instead upon a little rolled-up ball of pads and creases, as heartbreaking as a newborn baby’s. Zoë, for example, though more delicate than a Byzantine madonna, had hands that would not have shamed a wrestler. Björk, who
was
a wrestler, from her wrists up could have made it as a Cambodian temple dancer. Only Chloë, of the women I lost my heart to, was manually consistent: she was an anti-Semite in her soul and she had anti-Semitic hands. The phalanges preternaturally straight, the knuckles pale and taut, the lunulae fastidiously cleared of cuticle, as perfect in their crescents as any moon over Arabia. Get her to turn her hands over and show you her palms and there was nothing to see – no warm accommodating pouches of skin, no comfortable adjustment of one finger to another, no life or love lines, just a vexed crisscross of Judaephobia like the railway tracks going in and out of Auschwitz, and (though you will have to take my word for this, since it was never put to the test – Chloë, unlike Ilse Koch, never being tried for war crimes) no fingerprints.

Whatever the surprises of the human hand, the one thing you could be sure of on kalooki nights was that every one of my mother’s friends would arrive with freshly painted fingernails. In later years, when the technology of nail painting had grown more advanced, they would turn up in silvers and magentas, tangerines and blacks, sometimes a different colour on each nail, and more latterly with the extremities painted the colour of white emulsion. Many years after these of which I speak, when I was in Manchester for Tsedraiter Ike’s funeral – an august enough event, but one which did not call a halt to kalooki – I saw that Ilse, a great-grandmother by then, maybe even a great-great-grandmother, sported nails which had the suits painted on them, a heart, a spade, a diamond, a club, and a joker on the thumbnail. But then it was Ilse who had gone further than the others in the early days, sometimes leaving the crescents of her nails unpainted, as
though to grant whoever cared to look a shockingly precise sliver of nudity. Otherwise, a velvet rich incarnadine prevailed on every hand. Which satisfied me. Little pools of blood bejewelling the pastoral green of the card tables.

That poor woman, by the by, who had a stroke and then fell victim to Alien Hand syndrome, that friend of my mother’s who had to fight with her own hand to stop it strangling her, was Ilse Cohen. That she still continued to lavish attention on the hand that hated her, rubbing cream into its joints, putting jewels upon its fingers, showing no favouritism whatsoever to the other hand, as far as I could tell, in the matter of buffing and decorating the nails, is evidence of a remarkable capacity for forgiveness.

Now if I could feel that way about those Jews – servants of a syndrome no less unnatural or anarchic – who by silence or connivance have gone for the throats of fellow Jews, meaning to strangle them themselves, or permit them to be strangled by others, the apostates, the name-changers, the crawlers to the cross, the
Taufjuden
(who sound like DevilJews, but that would be
Teufel
, whereas
taufen
means merely ‘to baptise’ – as though between
taufen
and the
Teufel
in this context there might be said to be a difference) . . .

But then if I were able to show the
Taufjuden
anything like the compassion Ilse Cohen lavished on her renegade hand, I would be out of a job, wouldn’t I? Or at least out of half a job since that too is what I’m paid for – excoriating my people when I’m not shielding them from harm.

2

Charming, silky names women had in those day. Ilse, Irma . . . The Irma who played kalooki at my mother’s table was not a regular as Ilse was, and not a meat-eater either, but she was handsome enough if you had a taste for women who piled their hair
like German sausages and looked as though they were on the point of coming apart. Not loose-limbed or loose-jointed so much as loose-nerved. Explicable in Irma’s case on account of her parents having sent her to Manchester from Munich at the first sniff of National Socialism. She was a slip of a girl at the time, but old enough not to mistake the uncle and aunt who looked after her in Cheetham Hill for the mother and father she had left behind. She exchanged letters with them every week until, early in 1940, they fell silent. She went on writing, hoping for a reply, for a further five years. Some 250 letters, all of them unanswered. And even ten years after that, I recall my mother telling me, she had not given up hoping to hear from them.

Was that why she piled her hair away from her face, so that she could keep her ears clear for news? That’s how I like to draw my victim-Jews in
Five Thousand Years of Bitterness
anyway, always with an ear cocked, always listening for something – a hoofbeat, a train approaching (Jew Jew, Jew Jew), a word from home.

An Ilse and an Irma, turning up together to play kalooki in my house – what’s the chance of that? Ilse and Irma, both lovely women, mirroring that other Ilse and Irma, Ilse Koch and Irma Grese, two of the least lovely women (speaking ethically now) who ever lived. Maybe it wasn’t such a coincidence as I thought. Maybe Ilse and Irma were common enough names in those days, at least if you happened to be the children of parents who had once loved the sound of German. And maybe they fell out of favour because of Ilse Koch and Irma Grese.

There is no photograph of Irma Grese in
The Scourge of the
Swastika
, and only the briefest mention of her as the person who tutored Dorothea Binz in depravity during the time they were at Belsen together, Binz later graduating to Ravensbrück, the women’s camp, while Grese stayed on at Belsen, liking it where she was. I owe what I know about these women to Manny Washinsky, though not the photograph of Irma Grese which I
happened upon, all on my ownio, a little later. Striking, you would have to say – eyes wide apart like a Tartar’s, an incongruous woolly cardigan tucked into an equally incongruous tartan skirt which she wore over boots, but too high on the waist, foreshortening her torso in a way that Chloë for some reason favoured too. Probably the same photograph which Myra Hindley was said to have carried around in her handbag.

An extravagantly beautiful woman, Irma Grese, yes, in the tragic Slavic-Chloë mode. Of a sort of beauty whose influence one can never calculate.

You could argue that they ought to ban photographs of monsters likely to be seen as role models by monsters-in-waiting; but then Ian Brady was an avid reader of Dostoevsky, and you can’t start banning Russian classics as well. It’s all grist to the deranged, that’s what it comes to. There is no such thing as an innocuous image. Or idea.

If you’re going to ban anything it should be the person likely to be susceptible. As they did with Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, and as they subsequently did with Manny Washinsky. Too late, of course.

But then isn’t it always too late?

Impossible to say whether Manny’s new school intensified his interest in the leading lights, in particular the leading ladies, of the Third Reich, or whether he was making progress simply by dint of lonely scholarship. It was handy for me all right, the numbers of new enemies of the Jews he was unearthing. Good for our project,
Five Thousand Years of Bitterness
, whether or not he still saw himself as part of it. But you could argue that it wasn’t particularly good for
him
.

Couldn’t have been healthy, a school just for Jews, all calling on God in the lavatory. Not that he ever told me what it was like, or talked about the other Jewish boys he met there, any more, I suspected, than he talked to them about me. We were both each
other’s secret. I liked to believe that I was his sole confidant, but of course it’s possible he spent every spare second between classes telling other kids called Emanuel and Eli about Irma Grese and Ilse Koch, unless it was they who were telling him. I have a lurid conception of what happens in a Jewish school – for which I suppose I must thank my father who as an atheist thought religious education was the devil’s work. Maybe the headmaster addressed them on the subject of Irma and Ilse at every school assembly. Fringes out, tefillin on, and now, boys, let’s dilate upon these most recent torturers of the Jewish people. Not all that different from my mornings if you leave out the tzitzis and tefillin.

He was my education, that much has to be said, no matter how he came by what he educated me in. Errol Tobias would rather that privilege had fallen to him. But Errol was merely the snake in the garden, whispering of fruit. Manny was the tree.

On my own I wouldn’t have remembered all their names or ever have been able to tell them apart – Vera Salvequart the poisoner, Dorothea Binz the dog-woman, Carmen Mory otherwise known as ‘The Monster’, let alone Ilse Koch and Irma Grese.

I catch myself out in a disingenuousness there. Ilse Koch I was always able to tell apart. Ilse Koch came to me via Errol Tobias as well as Manny, though I didn’t let on to Manny that I supped from a second fountain of Koch corruption, or that hers was a name which bound Errol and me in a knowingness of a sort of which Manny surely had no comprehension. Ilse Koch was a secret I shared with each of them separately.

‘You’ll have to remind me,’ was the usual way one of our induction sessions would begin – I inviting it, I the empty vessel, I offering myself to Manny like a flower opening up its countenance to the sun – ‘which is Dorothea Binz again?’

‘May her name be wiped out . . .’

That was what I had to say before he’d tell me about any of them. He was my tree of knowledge but he was also my angel of oblivion. Not an easy task for him to be both at once –illuminator
and expunger. But I suppose that’s what we’re all doing, making people remember what we would wish them to forget.

In our air-raid shelter it felt queerly ritualistic, as though the voices of the old rabbis were inhabiting the brickwork. ‘Dorothea Binz, may her name be wiped out,’ I’d say, ‘what did she do again?’

God knows what my father would have said had he caught me chanting one of those ancient curses. A boy, however, must get his education whichever way he can, and my father hadn’t interested himself in Dorothea Binz.

Once, when I was asking about her for what must have been the hundredth time, Manny answered by biting me. Not a feral leap at my throat, but not exactly what you could call a playful nip either. Without any warning, without even any show of temper, he dipped his head and sunk his teeth into my wrist. An uncanny action by virtue of its silence, as much as anything else.

I cried out. Not from the pain but from the shock. And also out of fear. A terror amounting to phobia attached to bites in Jewish Crumpsall. There had been an alarming incident in the neighbourhood, not many years before, when someone’s pet bulldog turned savage for no reason – as though a bulldog needs a reason – and chewed off a baby’s ear. An event which it was impossible to forget on account of that terrible twist of flesh, like an end of burnt vegetable, which the child was doomed to carry on the side of his face for all time. So we were all more than routinely conscious of mad dogs, especially Tsedraiter Ike who froze and lost his inky colour whenever a dog of any sort approached. ‘Look confident,’ he would warn me, flattening himself against a wall if he could find one, or failing that, flattening himself against me, ‘they can smell fear.’ But even Tsedraiter Ike never warned me about Manny Washinsky.

‘If it’s making you so angry I’ll stop asking,’ I said, looking at the marks at the base of my thumb. ‘Christ!’