Kalooki Nights (19 page)

6

Although ‘Asher and the fire-yekelte’ was how it was originally rumoured, the woman with whom he was having the affair wasn’t, strictly speaking, the fire-yekelte at all. She was the fire-yekelte’s daughter. Yes, when her mother was unavailable or unwell, she did a little fire-yekelting for the Washinskys herself, but fire-yekelte qua fire-yekelte she was not. Which made a difference, or didn’t, according to where you stood on yekeltes in general. Remove the age discrepancy and you remove some of the transgression; remove the transgression and you remove much of the audacity. As a boy transfixed by the idea of the older Gentile woman, I would have been more in awe of Asher had he plumped for the mother. But it was certainly audacious enough of him, given his upbringing, to have let his feelings lead him where they did; less lubricious, less heroically unchaste, more conventionally sentimental, more Romeo than one of the Karamazov boys, but on that account, weighing this against that, still bold.

Don’t ask how I know what I know about this sorry business. ‘Don’t ask,’ as Tsedraiter Ike would say when anyone was fool enough to enquire about anything. His health, the state of Israel, the condition of the Jewish people –
don’t ask
. Let’s just say I picked up some of it at the time it was happening from Manny, though he was by no means a leaky vessel; some of it from Errol Tobias whose mother, as the local hairdresser, was privy to every whisper of impropriety; and more from my own mother later, most of it an extravagant act of backward deduction from the details of Manny’s arrest and subsequent trial as they appeared in the local newspapers; to say nothing of what any man will find if he consults his own heart. Nor do I think it too fantastical to claim intuitive knowledge of Asher Washinsky’s feelings from his countenance, that mask of ascetic dissolution which I studied with fascination on the few occasions I saw it, so much did I wish it had been mine. Those hollow gouges where other men had eyes – wonderful to draw because they were already made of charcoal in the flesh – told me everything about the intensity with which he loved a woman. Desperate, he must have been. Far gone, to do what was bound to cause anguish to his parents. And far gone indeed, to do it, to be able to
bear
to do it – for that was what was whispered – in their bed!

He had met her – Dorothy was her name, no saving diaeresis, but it could have been un-Jewishly worse, they could have called her Dot – coming out of his parents’ house with coal dust on her face. So that was the two of them black-eyed. He saw her and stopped. She saw him and stopped. Then he took out a handkerchief and handed it to her. ‘Here, wipe your face with this.’ She could easily have surrended to the same impulse in herself. He was the kind of man you wanted to mend. Picture them then, on the Washinsky path, dabbing at each other’s eyes.

I want to dab at mine, thinking of them. She was pretty. I caught a glimpse of her once or twice, briefly, before she became Asher’s girlfriend, standing in for her mother at the Washinskys’
grate. A blonde, as you’d expect. When the devil seeks to make trouble in a Jewish family he does it as a blonde. But not one of Tsedraiter Ike’s peroxide blondes. Golden, like a cornfield. With creamy skin, yellow-green eyes, and, as I understand it, despite her lowly origins, a good brain. Doing A levels. French, German, Latin. The spot of fire-yekelte-ing she had taken on was a favour to her mother and a way of putting away a few shillings for when she went to university. Not that the Washinskys actually ‘paid’ for the Shabbes services they received. Only lately have I learned that such a thing was infra dig. What you did was put money where it could be found and then you left it to the fire-yekelte to make the appropriate deduction. Ditto giving the fire-yekelte direct instructions. An Orthodox Jew is not allowed to derive benefit on the Sabbath from saying, ‘Put the lights on for me, there’s a dear,’ but must ‘hint’ at what needs doing, as in, ‘Oy, am I having trouble seeing anything today!’ Given how smart Dorothy was, it has to be assumed that she knew where to find the money and how to take a hint.

Love at first sight, anyway.
Coup de foudre
. A bolt of lightning striking both their hearts simultaneously, illuminating them and them alone and plunging everything else into darkness. Midnight in the Garden of Love and Traif.

Forbidden meat, that was what each was for the other. And only a fool would deny that their passion was the greater for a little leavening of the
verboten
.

That I too have managed to transpose the Washinskys’ scrubby path into a garden of desire shows how wedded to romantic love I still am, despite my own failures at it. Also shows why I should have listened to my first art teacher’s advice and softened my palette, swapped my pencil for a brush, and gone to live in Tuscany for a summer. He was a romantic himself, Ted Hargreaves, as he demonstrated when he resigned his post and ran off with a senior prefect from our sister girls’ school who, he said, reminded him of Raphael’s Fornarina. Were I half the
Hogarthian I have sometimes pretended to be I wouldn’t hesitate to lampoon that elopement. Raphael’s Fornarina with a hockey stick, for God’s sake! But it’s no good pretending. Ask other men in my profession to depict a woman in a man’s arms and they give you Olive Oyl in Popeye’s. Or Flo Capp in Andy’s. At poetic best, Lois Lane in Clark Kent’s, dreaming of Superman. Ribald in the doing or the withholding. Because I am not by nature a satirist, I picture Asher and Dorothy (and Ted and Sheila, come to that) in a Rubensesque setting, cherubim in the clouds, the silk of their garments rustling, his fingers unlooping curls that fall about her peachy neck, both their faces on fire.

Aflame with the shock of love, that was how I saw them.
Shamed
with it. And Rubens and Rembrandt both found just the colour for that shame. The Dutch flush.

Under whichever sky you see them, they were mad for each other and might have stayed that way had the ‘harpies’ (a word with which Manny was to surprise me later) not spoilt it for them. It’s possible Asher wasn’t in it for the long term, I don’t know. It’s also possible he wasn’t a man you could love for ever. Those cadaver good looks might very well consume all parties to them early. Indeed I’ve heard it said – Chloë? Zoë? – that that’s precisely the erotic appeal of Jewish men. It’s like throwing yourself on a bonfire. But there isn’t any evidence that these two were playing conflagrations. They were a serious pair of kids. Not the sort, either of them, to embark on a friendship, let alone a love affair, lightly. They both had exams to pass. She intended to become a language teacher. He a rabbi; but then a rabbi, too, is a teacher of tongues. And they would both have felt, given their differences, that they had a lot to teach each other.

Because of his people’s perceived exoticism and predisposition to pedantry, it’s usually the Jew in a mixed relationship who does the explaining. This is why we put mezuzahs on the lintels of our doors; this is why we light candles at Chanukah – Ch . . . no,
Ch
, from the back of a throat, as though you’re coughing up phlegm;
this is why we lean at the Seder table. I can even imagine, in this instance, Asher coaching Dorothy in the rudiments of Hebrew, she being a linguist, remember, and quick to learn. But I have no doubt that he wouldn’t have had it all his own way. She was a strong-minded woman. When first she saw Asher her heart would have burst, but when she raised her dazzled eyes to him a second time she’d have seen he was somebody who needed liberating. He looked like a man in chains. You could tick off everything he didn’t know, everything he was afraid to go near or put his mind to, in the marks about his mouth. His lips were never still, not because he was praying to Elohim, though he was surely doing that as well, but because he was rehearsing answers to uncomfortable questions, spells and divinations that would get him through the terrors of the day. In knowledge is safety, and the first thing she decided to do was acquaint him with a few things – this is the earth, that is the sky, I am a Gentile, and no you will not feel unclean in the morning for having touched me.

What a time they must have had, learning about each other, sneaking around the backs of both their lives, heads together, eyebeams plaited, fingers locked, meeting in parks and cinemas, kissing in doorways, maybe jumping on trains to escape the environs of guilt, maybe booking into hotels, though there couldn’t have been a lot of that otherwise he would surely not have risked taking her home when his parents were away and uncovering her nakedness in their bed.

Except that there is reason to believe he never did any such thing. Years later, after he had changed his name to Stroganoff, Manny vehemently denounced the story of his brother’s defiling of their parents’ bed as a calumny. Confirming, I must say, what I had always thought. Why would Asher Washinsky, when all was said and done, have taken the fire-yekelte’s daughter to his parents’ bed when they were out of the house, given that their being out of the house just as opportunely gave him access to his own? More room to thrash about in, you could argue, his bed
being narrow, as befitted a yeshiva boy with nothing but Elohim on his mind; but the luxuriousness of more room would surely have been vitiated by the unluxuriousness of the bed being that in which your mother and your father slept, unless that is to betray, as someone who missed out on being bar mitzvah’d, my ignorance of the depravity of observant Jews.

So scrub the bed.

She took him home. Up the hill from the denser thickets of Orthodoxy in the Manchester/Salford lowlands to the more feathery coppices of half-belief in Heaton Park, then up the hill again to where the Gentiles breathed the clean air of the foothills of the Pennines and not a Jew of any sort had been seen since Leo the Pedlar passed by selling pins and ribbons in the 1780s. People came to their windows to look. Passers-by clutched their children to them. A dog, meaning to bark, changed its mind and shrank back behind its fence. Cars slowed down to look. Later, describing the day, local people would remember that their power supply failed, their gas blew out, their paintings trembled and fell off the walls. All agreed it went dark suddenly.

Dorothy held his hand. ‘Not much further,’ she told him.

‘How much further?’

She squeezed his hand five times.

‘Five miles?’

‘Five minutes.’

She couldn’t decide whether she had been away a long time, circumnavigating the globe, and was now bringing home the spoils of her travels, or whether the real prize was this, her sublunary Gentile world, and she was rewarding Asher with it.

As for him, I know what he was feeling. I’ve been walked up the hill many times myself, now by Chloë, now by Zoë, halfbooty, half-apology. Look Ma, look Pa, look what I’ve found! The frightening part being not knowing if they intend to open your mouth and examine your teeth, or have a quick feel around
to locate your tail. But then you could say that’s the arousing part as well, allowing that it can be arousing for a rare species to be used for the sexual satisfaction of a more common one. Ask the merman. Ask the minotaur.

I say I know what he must have been feeling, but in truth he was bound to have been far more terrified than I ever was, if only because he quickened greater curiosity. Enough Jew blazed from my face for Zoë to make the future of our marriage dependent on my agreeing to be de-Semitised, but the very fact that she badgered me to have my nose rolled up and put away – that’s what ‘retroussé’ means, by the way, ‘rolled up’ – suggests she did not think I looked otherwise, absolutely and incontrovertibly, on pain of death, Jewish. Noseless, it’s possible I could have got away with being merely Slavic and depressed. Whereas where Asher walked, the whole of the Old Testament walked with him. Seeded like a pomegranate he was with the sorrows and the tribulations of his people, but juicy with the wine of the pomegranate, too, spicy with spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, his lips like a thread of scarlet.

And people notice you when you look like that. Especially people from cold countries.

Home was where she was taking him, but not to meet her mother. It had been decided by the interested parties, at least those of them who were in the know, that for Asher to meet her mother was, for the time being at any rate, inappropriate on account of her mother being the person who cleaned out Asher’s mother’s grate, in which capacity he had already met her. So the daughter was taking him home to meet the father. And since the easiest time to arrange meeting the father but not the mother was Shabbes morning, when Dorothy knew the father would be in and the mother would be out, they set a Shabbes morning for it. Odd for them both, odd for the father too, sitting around the fire in Higher Blackley making small talk, while all along their minds must have been on that other fire in Crumpsall Park, tended by one to whom
there was no good reason not to allude, yet to whom nobody felt they could.

That Asher’s mind would also have been on Elohim, at this moment receiving prayers in Asher’s shul, goes without saying.

‘Asher will be missing synagogue in order to meet you,’ Dorothy had explained to her father in advance.

‘And your father, will he be missing the pub to meet me?’ Asher knew better than to ask. But the question would certainly have occurred to him, alcohol being almost as big a stumbling block between Jews and Gentiles as the resurrection.

(‘Put the glasses away, he doesn’t drink,’ I remember Chloë hissing to her mother.

‘What, not ever?’

‘Not ever, Mother. None of them do.’

‘Afraid that they’ll forget which pocket they keep their wallet in, is that it?’

‘Shush, Mother! Promise me you’ll shush.’ But laughing as she said it.

‘Crack you a bottle of something, or will I be having fun on my ownio?’ was how Chloë’s mother greeted me, notwithstanding her daughter’s pantomime objurations.

So I asked if she had a Château Latour 1949 already open – which started our relationship off on the wrong foot. Unless what started our relationship off on the wrong foot was my adding that if she didn’t have a Château Latour, a bottle of communion wine would do as well – any vintage that took her fancy, as long as it was genuinely the blood of You Know Who.)