Kalooki Nights (26 page)

5

It finally fell out as it was bound to.

They were seen. The irony of it is that they were probably arguing at the time. As they thought, hid in hugger-mugger, each accusing the other of being a racist. Maybe even deciding to call it a day. No matter. They were seen and they were reported. Whether with diabolic intent, or with inside knowledge of the relative mental strengths of the Washinskys, whoever was the bearer of the news bore it to Mrs Washinsky first.

And Mrs Washinsky’s initial impulse was interesting. She decided to keep it from her husband.

‘This will kill him,’ she told Asher, who had always thought it would kill
her
.

They were sitting in the kitchen – as I conceive it, the debris of a dozen meals around them. Which you can be certain is me cartoonifying them again. The house was as one of the rubbish dumps of hell, but they were particular about food. They had to be. The Lord had ordered it. Merely to separate what was flaishikeh from what was milchikeh – not just the meat but the meat-associated from not just the dairy but the dairy-associated – occupied half a day. And that’s not to mention the amount of salting that went on. ‘I’d get nothing else done if I had to keep a home that was even ten per cent kosher,’ my mother used to say. By ‘nothing else ’, she was thinking of kalooki. And Channa Washinky kept a home 110 per cent kosher. Hence the rest of the house looking the way it did. Kosher ruled the roost. Kosher was king. Separating this from this – habdalah, keeping apart what didn’t belong together, the great act of discrimination at the centre of Jewish thought as well as Jewish diet – made it virtually impossible for the poor woman to lift a finger to anything else.

Couldn’t the fire-yekelte have helped? Couldn’t the fire-yekelte have done a bit of general cleaning up – making the beds, dusting
the furniture, taking the towels off the bathroom floor – after she ’d swept the grate? She did, she tried, but a fire-yekelte, too, was a thing apart, and besides, this was not a good time to be bringing up the fire-yekelte.

Eerily, to Asher, his mother brought up nothing. She didn’t charge him. She didn’t ask how much of what she’d heard was true. She didn’t take him through the sacrifices both she and countless generations of Jewish mothers before her had made so that he, Asher, could with impunity find a Jewish woman who would in turn be mother to generations of Jews to come. She simply conjured her husband’s presence – his ghost in advance of his dying, as it were – and told Asher who would be held responsible.

It was good psychology. A boy mindful of the sacredness of his father’s life cannot prevaricate, cannot lie or make excuses, when the ghost-to-be is in the room. It was also – depending where you’re coming from – good morality. It asserted the primacy of his father’s life over everything. Asher would be a father himself one day, all being well. And would expect to receive the same respect from his son. Thus, without saying much, without even having recourse to the J-, let alone the G-word, did she play the continuity card.

She was a problem for the cartoonist, Channa Washinsky. I keep wanting to put her in a sheitel, the wig that every Orthodox Jewish wife is supposed to wear in order to prevent a man not her husband from lusting after her in his heart; but in all honesty, although they are usually easy enough to pick, on account of their making the wearer look tipsy and slow of wit, like some catatonic Netherlandish doll, I am not able to say whether she wore one or not. I want to make her pallid as well, but again without justification. I saw a photograph of her not long ago, and not only was her hair her own – it was too fine and lifeless to be anything else – but her complexion was halfway to being swarthy. Which shouldn’t be at all surprising, given Asher’s Levantine colouring. So why can’t I, why
couldn’t
I, see her as she was?
Caricature is a methodology for telling a greater truth – that’s where I stand – but even I accept that what the artist caricatures, the ordinary eye must recognise as just. So why couldn’t I be just to Channa Washinsky? Why couldn’t I, to cite another example of my determination to distort her, not see that she had rather fine dark eyes, a little sleepy it is true, but poignant in their thwarted lustre? A sentence of Zoë’s returns to me. ‘Unless a woman is made up to the nines, dressed to kill, smelling like the perfume counter in Harrods and beckoning you with her little finger which must have gold on it, you don’t notice her – do you know that?’ ‘I noticed you,’ I reminded her. ‘Of course you noticed me – I was spotlit, fuckwit, standing on a stage, imitating Marlene Dietrich, in six-inch heels and a see-through gown that was slit to my vagina . . . I’m speaking metaphorically.’ Point taken. I didn’t notice Manny’s mother because she wasn’t anybody I wanted to see. She wasn’t immodest.

But even in the matter of modesty I must try to be true to her. Modesty was not then what it is now. On the night before her wedding Channa Washinsky would certainly have immersed herself in the ritually cleansing waters of the mikveh. Even my sophisticated mother, Leonora Axelroth, about to be the wife of a notorious non-believer, visited the mikveh without telling him that one time. Thereafter, if she wasn’t sheiteled, it was unlikely that Channa Washinsky would have fussed about her body religiously at all. We were coming out of the dark ages in those days, not going back into them again. The laws of modesty have been around a long time, the obligation on a Jewish woman to make herself appear pleasant in a quiet way, to avoid brightly coloured or tight-fitting clothing, to choose her decorations with moderation and discretion, to be sure not to ‘make a tinkling with her feet’ (Isaiah 3:16). But the great love of the vividness of the world which Jews enjoy (the shadow side of our longing to be invisible) kept even the reticent tinkling.
Kept
. Past tense. Half a century later we are born again, and with born again comes clean
again. Except that there ’s nothing more unclean, is there, nothing lewder, nothing more likely to lead the mind to thoughts of what is
im
modest, than the modesty consciousness of the fanatical. (See the little comic book on mikveh practices I published privately a few years ago – if you can find it.)

Whatever problem she poses for the cartoonist, Channa Washinsky posed even greater problems for her son. Not the least of these being that he was all at once smitten by her. It’s often at this time that men fall in love with their mothers all over again, whether or not their mothers make a tinkling with their feet. Maybe the mothers have been waiting patiently for this very opportunity. Wheel out the opposition and watch me chop her into tiny pieces. Sometimes they do it with exaggerated vitality, as my mother did. You bring another woman into your life and suddenly your mother is a Busby Berkeley Musical Extravaganza. But sometimes they do it by being exquisite in their reserve. This was Channa Washinsky’s method.

And it worked. Worked in the sense of making Asher appreciate her, anyway. He didn’t know she could be so self-possessed. He didn’t know that she could vest such authority in herself. As for working in the other sense . . .

A week later she raised her eyes to him. Not beseeching. Beyond beseeching. Well?

He hadn’t done it. It would take him longer. It wasn’t as easy . . .

Then her words came. ‘I don’t blame the girl. I don’t blame her mother or her father. I blame you. I’m not saying I don’t understand you. I’m saying I blame you. I don’t wish to argue the rights and wrongs of it with you. In your eyes what you are doing might appear right. But had you stopped to think for a single minute how this was going to affect us, you wouldn’t have done it. There are a hundred things you could have done to hurt us, Asher. There are hundred things I have imagined you doing. But this was never one of them.’

This
. How much did she know?

Could he ask her? Could he go though his transgressions, counting them out on the fingers of both hands, until he came to one she hadn’t heard about?

Imagining the worst, that she still wasn’t in possession of everything, he took the coward’s option and said, ‘It will blow over, Ma.’

‘If it will blow over why did you let it start?’

‘Oh, Ma,
start
. . .’

‘If it’s so unimportant to you that you think it will blow over, it can’t be important enough to let it kill us.’

Us. Kill us. He was responsible for them both now. This was more how he thought it was going to be. She’d be screaming soon. Tearing gouges out of her flesh. The week before, he ’d been close to sacrificing Dorothy to her. What was Dorothy with her stretched-forth neck and wanton eyes compared to the dignified woman who’d given birth to him? Now that his mother threatened melodrama, he was once again besotted with Dorothy – the sweet, the calm, the melodious Dorothy.

Is this cynical of me, to suppose that Asher could operate only dialectically – one woman rising in his estimation as the other one descended? I don’t mean it to be. This, as I recall, is how it feels to be a boy in the throes of his first big passion. Especially if he’s a Jewish boy with dialectic in his soul. This or that. Meat or milk. Jew or Gentile. Wife or lover. Your life or your father’s. Choose.

‘All I ask,’ he said, ‘is that you don’t say anything to Dad yet.’

‘Until it blows over – is that what you’re asking me?’

‘Or until I decide to tell him myself.’

She put her hand out to him, as though the ghost she ’d been seeing were his now.

‘You are not to do that,’ she said. ‘Promise me you won’t do that.’

So he promised.

But later that same week his father got to hear about it anyway, and had what was diagnosed in our community as a double stroke. One on discovering his son was sleeping with a shikseh. One on discovering that the shikseh was a German. By our understanding of medicine, it was the second stroke that saved him from the worst effects of the first. Sometimes the news can be so bad that you go on living. Especially when going on living is worse than death.

The doctors said that Selick Washinsky had suffered a minor stroke. There you are! That was how terrible things were.

I remember the ambulance coming for Manny’s dad. How could I not? Twenty minutes later another one was coming for mine.

6

Under the body of his father, a boy lies.

It is hot. The boy can hear flies buzzing and dying. He thinks he can smell them too – decomposing flies. He doesn’t know how late in the day it is, or even whether it is the same day. His father is lying on him, his chest on his face. The boy understands the intentionality of this. His father doesn’t want him to see, but more than that he doesn’t want him to be seen. Nor does he want his breath to be heard. No word was spoken between them but he is lying as he knows his father wants him to lie, in utter silence, seeing nothing, barely breathing.

They are in a pit, in a clearing in a forest, in the shtetl of Butrimantz in the south-west of Lithuania. When the shooting started his father pushed him into the pit and then fell on top of him. When the shooting stops, the sounds in his father’s chest stop as well.

The boy listens but can hear nothing. Only the flies. He listens for so long that if there were other boys lying, breathing silently beneath their fathers, he would hear them. He is the only boy
alive in the pit, maybe the only boy alive in the whole of Lithuania – who knows, he may be the only boy alive in the whole world.

He hasn’t got the strength for what is required. He is overcome by sadness. To what end must he exert himself? To what purpose?

A contradiction, as terrible as the pit, assails him. He owes it to the love he bears his father not to live. He owes his father death. But his father gave his own life so that he, the son, should live on. So he owes his father life as well.

Someone explain to the boy how he can repay his father by living and not living at the same time.

No one can explain this to him. There is nobody who knows. There is nobody alive.

When they start throwing soil into the pit, he makes a decision for life. Thus it happens: we want what we cannot have. He pushes his face into his father’s neck, takes one deep breath, then closes his throat and nose. Everything goes black. This must mean that there was light before and he was seeing it. The light perhaps of the same day. Perhaps of the same hour. It’s conceivable he has been lying here no time at all, a matter of minutes, no more, seeing light he did not recognise as light. But he sees nothing now.

The boy is Manny Washinsky.

Living on the pockets of air in his father’s jacket and shirt, he survives his own burial, escapes the pit in the dead of night, hides in the forest for weeks on end, criss-crosses the Lithuanian/Polish border, and finally finds his way to Kaliningrad where partisans smuggle him on to a boat bound for Hull. Subsequent to that he has lived with his uncle Selick in Crumpsall Park.

This was the story Manny began to put about soon after his father was released from hospital.

‘I’m glad your father’s better, Manny,’ I said.

‘He’s not my father,’ he replied.

‘Who is he then?’

‘My uncle. My father’s dead.’

And that was when I got to hear about the pit in Lithuania.

Out of some motive too base to investigate, I told Errol Tobias what Manny had been saying about himself. ‘It’s bullshit,’ Errol said. ‘The Nazis cleaned out Lithuania in 1941. Your meshuggeneh friend wasn’t born yet.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘How do I know when your meshuggeneh friend was born?’

‘How do you know about Lithuania?’

He tapped his forehead. ‘By fucking reading. Probably the same fucking books as your meshuggeneh friend’s been reading. Ask him. Ask him about the
Einsatzgruppen
. Ask him when they’d finished.’

They were all reading. Every Jew I knew. All swallowing bile. Even Errol Tobias who could have passed as a member of the
Einsatzgruppen
himself. All storing up their rage. The only person I knew who wasn’t by his fourteenth birthday an expert on the Holocaust (whether or not we called it by that name yet) was me. But I had enough bile in me already. And what I didn’t know I could imagine.