Kalooki Nights (23 page)

That’s when he feels the kiss of the whip she carries. The scourge.

‘A Jew cannot touch the flesh of a member of the master race,’ she tells him.

‘No, Gnädige Frau.’

Again she strikes him.

Mendel’s heart soars. I am her equal, he thinks. We are in this together.

She orders him to undress.

‘Yes, Gnädige Frau.’

She is wearing a glove now, and with her glove she reaches down and takes contemptuous hold of him. He understands what this means. Just as he cannot touch the flesh of a
member of the master race, so the flesh of the master race cannot touch the member of a Jew.

Disdained, it rises.

And that is that, for one day.

Back on their bunk, Pinchas wonders what has happened. ‘I am her little Yid,’ Mendel says.

‘For how long?’

‘What does it matter? For as long as the hobby amuses her.’

‘And when it doesn’t, what will she do with you?’

Mendel shrugged. ‘Crush me between her teeth,’ he said. ‘If I am lucky.’

‘So you are an artist,’ she says the next day, for yes, there is a next day.

Naked, pale in his nakedness, he nods.

‘And what sort of artist are you?’

He draws, he tells her, to reconcile his two backgrounds, his rationalist mother and his God-smitten father. Drawing is itself, he explains, a godlike act – making something out of nothing, dispelling the darkness of the original void, letting there be light, and in that sense, yes, can be said to usurp God’s function. But the mother in him scorns such nonsense, so he draws satirically, to spite himself. But as a satiric artist is a contradiction – at one and the same time making something of nothing and nothing of something – you could say it perpetuates the ambiguity of his situation.

He hopes she will love him for these paradoxes, but also beat him for them – another contradiction.

It is wonderful standing without his clothes, discussing art with Ilse Koch.

‘I have brought you pencils,’ she says, the day following, ‘so that you may draw me.’

‘Gnädige Frau, if I am to draw you I will have to look at you.’

‘I will remove a garment a day,’ she said. ‘You will look only at the part I have exposed. Some days I will put a garment back on. You will never know whether I am going to take a garment off or put one on. Nor will you ever see all of me naked altogether, as I now see you. If you try to assemble me naked in your imagination I will know of it because this will rise. And every time it rises I will beat it, Jew. Do you understand?’

‘I understand, Gnädige Frau.’

‘Do you have any questions?’

‘How do I finish the drawing, Gnädige Frau?’

‘You do not. You erase it every night and start again every morning.’

He has another question, if he dare ask it. What if this, his penis, does not rise? Will she not consider it . . . ?

‘An insult? Yes. No Jew dare look upon German womanhood limp.’

‘But day after day, Gnädige Frau, and while I am concentrating on my drawing . . .’

‘Treat me with disrespect and I will shoot you,
nicht
?’

Discontentment courses through his body. If they could distil melancholy and inject it into you with a syringe, this is how you would feel. Or if you finally came face to face with Elohim and found him to be common. A Northern German with a snub nose.

It is prosaic to be threatened, and doubly prosaic to be threatened with death by shooting. Is that all?

Will Ilse Koch, too, prove to be an anticlimax? In general the Germans have been a terrible disappointment to the Jews. They have not lived up to Jewish expectation. Such music! Such writing! Such an elaboration of myth! All for this! The great bathos of National Socialism. You would expect that where there is art there is refined imagination. But maybe
the imagination is all on the side of those who love the art, not those who make it. So am I, Mendel wonders, going to be Frau Koch’s superior in the refinements of cruelty as well?

His charge is not banality. It is not banal to do what they are doing. This camp is not banal. It is supremely ambitious. The end magnificent in its completeness, outdoing all previous attempts to bend creation to man’s will. No wonder the nation is so enthralled. Forget not knowing. They all know. They can smell exhilaration in the wind. And that isn’t all they can smell.

But the means!

Shoot him, indeed! And then what? A lampshade. Well, that too smacks of grand conception. Take human skin and do so little with it. As insults go, it is magniloquent. But why shoot him when she can have him, as she has her horse, as a live instrument of her desire? Own him, still living, as she owns her property. Make a household object, a utensil, of the living man, not the dead skin. But then he already is her property, is he not? Every Jew in the camp, every gypsy, every communist, is her property. So he must mean something else. Something which demeans with more exactness. He does. He would like to be tiny in her grasp. He would like her to lift him to her lips, like Goya’s Saturn devouring his own progeny, her hands become his ribcage, her eyes wide with forbidden knowledge. He would like her to laugh at his smallness, and then, like the giant, to close her mouth around him. He would like to be her food. Jewish food. He would like to give her kosher pleasure as she rolls him around her mouth, and himself unkosher pleasure as he is swallowed and disappears into her stomach. He would like to hear her moan a little from the inside, first with pleasure, then with grief at what she’s lost.

A voluptuousness that has not occurred to her, and would no doubt shock and appal her, deviant as she is said to be.

He would enjoy that. He would enjoy taking Frau Koch’s breath away.

And he has barely started yet. Hardly put his foot on the first rung of the ladder downwards into hell. Because where everything is permissible . . .

Shoot him, indeed!

In a flash, as the melancholy sluices through his body, he understands that she is conventional, a child of a conventional people, and will be bound to disappoint him. Through the blank clouds, Elohim with his snub Schleswig-Holstein nose regards him incuriously. This is no person-to-person accident. It would not have been otherwise had Ilse Koch been a different German woman, and he, Mendel, a different Jewish man. It is a fact of history. Another Jew let down by another German.

His penis falls limp. She strikes him with her whip and he cries out. Not from the pain but from the never-to-besatisfied longing.

Chinese Husband: Honollable wife, I have heard you are
   having affair with Jewish man.
Chinese Wife: Honollable husband, I cannot think where
   you are getting these bobby meises from.

1

And beyond staring into the end of the world, what did Asher Washinsky do when he realised that Dorothy’s father was German?

He cried.

But he cried only because Dorothy’s father cried first.

And Dorothy?

She of course cried at the sight of them both crying.

Manchester has enjoyed long and noble relations with Germany, both commercial and cultural. Not counting the signed photograph of Frankie Vaughan which stood on Shani’s bedside table, and Geraldo & His Orchestra’s version of ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’ which it was my mother’s custom to put on the gramophone and play at low volume when people turned up for kalooki, ours wasn’t a musical family; but even we took pride in the Hallé Orchestra without knowing that its founder was born in Hagen, Westphalia, and had briefly been a friend of Wagner’s, before moving to comfier accommodation in Greenheys Lane, in the south of the city, not at all far from where today stands Hillel House, the hall of residence for Jewish students attending Manchester University. That Charles Hallé was able to start and fund an orchestra of the Hallé’s quality was due largely to the enthusiasm, munificence and artistry of
the German community with whom he mixed, some of it German Jewish, some of it just German. A similar consideration – the presence of family, good business connections, articulate and convivial company from the homeland (though the city’s Schiller Institute with its skittle alleys and billiard room and gymnasium and male-voice choir was not yet established) – brought Engels to Manchester.

Dorothy’s father was related neither to the Hallés nor the Engels. But he was a Beckman – poorly and distantly related to the Manchester Beckmans, a discreetly high-bourgeois family originally from Düsseldorf which had owned a small engineering factory in Salford since about the time the Hallé played its first Beethoven symphony. A
very
poor and distant relation, for when he was sent over to meet his Manchester mishpocheh it was in the capacity of driver for one of the junior directors. A hundred years earlier and he would have risen in the firm and looked forward to a still more distant Beckman being sent over from Düsseldorf to drive
his
car. But this was 1937. Not a good time for a German with little English to be making his way in the world – not this part of the world anyway. When war broke out he was interned in Huyton, a camp on the outskirts of Liverpool, where he learned philosophy and Bible history and a few words of Yiddish from the other internees, most of whom were Jews. It’s feasible, though it was never discussed, that he did a bit of fire-yekelte-ing himself while he was there, in return for Hebrew lessons. Whether or not, he grew proficient in compassion, and by the time he was released in 1944 was a confirmed Judaeophile. Had he been acceptable to a Jewish girl he would have married one. Any one. As an act of atonement partly, for he was ashamed of his country’s crimes and believed that fewer of them would have been committed had he not left it when he did, but also from inclination. He liked how Jewesses looked. When he imagined kissing a Jewess he imagined licking out a jar of damson jam. In the event, all Jewesses being closed to him, he married lime
marmalade. The daughter of the respectable working-class family with whom he lodged, who had their own doubts about him as a German, but learned to judge him, in that English way, on his individual merits. Of those, industriousness and honesty – as evidenced by the little notebook he carried to write down every expenditure and debt – and the fact that his trousers always had a perfect crease in them, and that he liked double cuffs on his shirts, and that his fine gold cufflinks had his initials engraved on them –
AB
– struck them as adequate guarantees that their daughter would be well looked after. And she was. Not provided for to any high degree – Albert Beckman’s Germanness counting against him when it came to driving for anyone not a German, and for anyone who was, come to that, since there were some things, if you were German, you didn’t want to advertise – but cherished and indeed improved. The work he encouraged her to do for Jewish people, for example, was without doubt helpful in balancing their weekly budget, but it was also something he taught her to think of as a mitzvah – not just a good deed but an opportunity for them both to employ a word he ’d originally picked up in Huyton and liked the sound of.

‘See it as a mitzvah!’

Mitzvah
. No sooner did he shape the letters with his mouth, and with his mind shape the concepts of commandment, meritoriousness and charity which a mitzvah encompassed, than he felt he’d made a small recompense for a wickedness of which it was not finally for him to say that he was entirely innocent.

So when he heard that his daughter was in love with a Jewish boy, the son of a family his wife made regular expiation to on his behalf, he shaved twice, put on his best shirt, attached the double cuffs with the links his mother had given him for his fifteenth birthday, laid out an English breakfast, and waited for the hour of reckoning to arrive.

In comes Asher, not just the damson jam but the damson orchard entire, and is it any wonder Albert Beckman’s tears pour
from him like waters from the rock Moses smote when the Israelites were thirsty?

I know how I would draw the scene were I making a cartoon of it – Albert Beckman, double-shaven and double-cuffed, squarejawed in the manner of Dick Tracy, but with his head bowed and his hands to his temple, standing in a cloudy puddle of his own tears, and from his lips a bubble of exclamatory remorse: ‘Forgive me, my little
Judeler
! I am the Auschwitz German! Can you ever find it in your heart to forgive me?’ And Asher, purple as an aubergine, opening his arms and saying . . .

An anachronism, of course. People were not calling themselves the Auschwitz German in those days. Not least as Auschwitz itself had not yet acquired its terrible symbolism, outstripping even Belsen and Buchenwald as the
ne plus ultra
of concentration camps. But as a cartoonist who likes the future remembered in the past, a historian of essentials not of time (Haman lives – that’s my point), it pleases me to anachronise. And once you have actually been collared by a would-be Auschwitz German, backed up against a wall by someone who wants you, as a Jew, to fumigate his country’s past for him, you don’t lightly forgo the opportunity to make an Auschwitz German of them all.

The circumstances in which the phrase was first delivered to me were these:

I was travelling with Zoë, in one of her Jew Jew phases, visiting museums and synagogues and sites of camps in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania and God knows where else. Not Novoropissik, though. I’d given my father my word I would never go back there and my word to him was sacred. Had Zoë known of such an undertaking she ’d have found out where Novoropissik was and bundled me on to the first train, or the first horse and cart, that went anywhere near it. Although my father had died long before I met Zoë, she was at daggers-drawn with him. ‘I don’t think I’d have liked your father,’ she told me when she first saw his photograph. When I gave it as my opinion that he
wouldn’t have liked her, she was deeply insulted. ‘He didn’t know me,’ she said. I couldn’t be bothered taking her through the rigmarole of rationality – ‘And you didn’t know him’ etc. No point. Going on his photograph, Zoë adjudged my father to have been another one of those Jews who would have rejected her affection and suggested she go to Berlin and be a prostitute. In my father’s case she couldn’t have been wider of the mark. ‘Now there ’s what I call an English rose!’ he ’d have enthused. ‘Look at the complexion! Look at the dainty shnozzle!’ (In one of his unconscious reversions to the muddy language of Novoropissik he might even have added ‘Kuk the ponim on her!’ – the ponim the face, but always a little face, a face viewed affectionately, in my father’s usage.) ‘What are you waiting for, Maxie? Go ahead and marry the girl. Then at least my grandchildren will look like choirboys.’ But I didn’t tell her any of that either. With Zoë you had to assume that both sides of any coin offended her equally.