Kalooki Nights (32 page)

Thus did my mother take over from my father the responsibility of making Tsedraiter Ike feel unwanted. It suited him. He needed someone to make him feel that.

At the same time she informed me that she was about to resume kalooki.

I looked at her as Hamlet looks at his mother in every production of the play I have ever seen. That it should come to this: but two months dead, nay, not so much, not two . . . Not even one month in my father’s case. Not two weeks . . .

‘Are you upset with me?’ she wanted to know.

‘Ma, it’s a bit soon.’

She sat me down at the kitchen table and stretched her hands out so that they were touching mine. Not holding, just a light rhythmic tap of her fingers on my fingers. ‘Your father asked me to promise him that I would marry again,’ she said.

I was discomforted by the intimacy. We didn’t go in for this kind of talk in our house. None of the Jews I knew did. Whatever Gentiles surmise, sometimes enviously surmise, of the closeness of Jew to Jew, of the hothouse which is the Jewish family, the
home life of Jews is in truth marbled with the finest traceries of reticence. Yes, we live in each other’s pockets, often long after the historical necessity to do so has been removed, but you can live in each other’s pockets and still be strangers. It took death to acquaint me with Shani. But since my mother had brought up the subject of her marrying again, I had no choice but to ask, ‘And will you?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Well, if you’re up for cards, why not a husband?’

‘They’re not exactly the same thing, Maxie. Your father asked me to promise him solemnly that I would find another man – he even suggested a couple of names . . .’

‘Who?’

‘Little Ike and Liverpool Ike, if you must know.’

‘But they’re Jewish. Surely he’d have wanted you to take a Catholic. Or at least an atheist. And if he has to be a Jew, what’s wrong with “Long John” Silverman? Dad loved “Long John” Silverman. And “Long John” Silverman has always drooled at the mouth for you.’

She inclined her lovely head. No point denying what was undeniable, and, let’s face it, due. ‘Maxie, “Long John” Silverman has a wife of his own.’

‘Big deal. Get Little Ike to run away with her.’ Little Ike, for the record, being known, despite his size, as something of a runner with other men’s wives.

My mother curled her mouth at me. ‘Very funny, darling. Marital musical chairs. But you know how bad I’d be at that. Everyone else gets a seat, I’m left standing.’ She paused, surveying herself marooned at the party, only her on her feet. Then she shook herself out of it. No self-pity. It was her great strength. She refused sadness. ‘None of it’s of any relevance just now, anyway,’ she went on. ‘I refused to make the promise your father asked for. I don’t want another husband. I cared too deeply for your father to suppose I can care deeply for someone else. I don’t
intend even to try. I don’t want to care deeply, in that way, for another man. It’s foolish, I accept that, to pretend to know how I’ll feel ten or fifteen years from now, but I hope I will be saying the same to you then.’

‘Well, I don’t,’ I said. ‘But just for the moment . . .’

‘You’d like me not to play kalooki?’

Against the hosts of other men lined up waiting for my mother – she was a beauty, don’t forget, and the more beautiful, I thought, for being a widow, with lovely lugubrious ovals, like ashen teardrops, looped beneath her eyes – against the Little Ikes, and even the Big Ikes for all I knew, a game of kalooki, when all was said and done, did not represent the greatest of derelictions. But then it wasn’t a matter of one or the other, was it? For a little while at least, it was open to her not to take another husband
and
not to play kalooki. ‘Or is that,’ I asked, twisting the corners of
my
mouth this time, ‘too much to ask?’

She had a way of nodding her head – not shaking it from side to side as Tsedraiter Ike had taken to doing, in apparent disagreement with Someone – but as though to concur in everything you were saying while not really listening to a word of it. ‘No,’ she said, ‘it isn’t too much to ask, and if you’d rather I didn’t, then I won’t.’

‘What does Shani think?’ Shani, the new arbiter of right and wrong, the new Moses Maimonides in our family. Guide us out of our perplexity, Shani.

‘Shani thinks I should ask myself what your father would have wanted.’

‘You know what my father would have wanted. He hated kalooki. He believed it was the name of a shtetl.’

She looked hurt. ‘You’re wrong there, Max. That was just his teasing. He had no desire to play himself, I grant you, but he liked it that I played. He said he’d rather know where I was, that he’d rather have me sitting shuffling a kalooki deck at home with my friends than see me dolling myself up to go to shul, or busybodying myself in Jewish causes.’

’I thought kalooki
was
a Jewish cause.’

‘Only when I made it one to get you your gala night.’ No mistaking the reprimand. As though to say this was a poor way to thank someone who’d delivered me Gittel Franks and Simone Kaye.

I inclined my head in acknowledgement of that, then scratched it. ‘So you’d really be getting back into kalooki for Dad, is that what you’re saying? You’re really doing it as a favour to him.’

‘You know what your father was like. No fuss. No sentimentality. Life is for the living. You could make fun of me, Maxie, if I came home tomorrow with a new prospective husband and said I was marrying him for your father. But I have no intention of doing that.’

It was a trade-off. I can bring a Mr Murdstone back, or you can leave me to my kalooki. You choose, Maxie.

I threw up my hands, much as my father would have done. ‘Play your cards,’ I said.

Thereafter, though there were no further conversations on the subject, I thought a great deal about what she’d said to me. She was frightened, I could see that. She feared she would be rudderless and didn’t want to go down the usual route of finding another man to rudder her. Fair enough. More unsettling was the bold implication – for such I took it to be – that by returning to kalooki before decency allowed she was at a stroke reinstating the provocatively secular regime of my father. The unbeliever is dead, long live the unbeliever! Continuity – that was how she was selling it to me and no doubt to herself. Get kalooki back into the house, quick, and it would be as though my father had never left us.

On the face of it, the logic was hard to follow, but once followed, hard to fault. I was even prepared to be admiring of it. My mother, the heroine of the unconventionalities. No wonder my father had loved her.

But what if she were simply shallow?

1

Manny had no more recognised me than I had recognised him that first time we got together again at the pizza restaurant in Manchester. But he didn’t tell me that until the second time we got together again.

‘You’re different,’ he’d said, without quite looking at me.

‘Well, it has been half a lifetime since we last saw each other,’ I’d reminded him.

‘We ate together last week.’

‘I thought we were talking about before that.’

‘Thirty-eight years.’

I had no idea when he was counting from. ‘Not surprising then.’

This time he did half look in my direction. So blue the eye he showed me, so much bluer than I’d remembered, that for a moment or two I seriously wondered if it were glass. The consequence of a prison fight? Or of an operation to extract the patricidal section of his brain? But then he showed me the other eye, and that too was the colour of the sky. ‘No,’ he said, ‘something’s different. Your nose is different.’

He was right. My nose was different. Not different in the way that Zoë in her time would have liked – not smaller, but then again not exactly bigger either. The adjective is hard to find. But Manny probably put his finger on it. ‘It seems to have spread across your face more,’ he said, with a cruel indifference to my feelings which I at first attributed to the hardening influence of incarceration, until I remembered that he had always been like that. Not rude, just unaware of politeness.

Not without its ironies, what had happened to my nose. Not without ironic implications for Zoë, anyway. When Zoë wasn’t pestering me to get it shortened she was complaining about the noises I made through it when I breathed. Not much I could do about that, I told her, short of giving up breathing altogether.

As always she gave consideration to whatever I suggested, the sweetest of quizzical expressions lighting up her impeccable and soundless features.

My own theory was that my breathing, which I freely acknowledged could be over-audible at times, was a consequence of the same condition that gave me nosebleeds, the epistaxis which I had inherited from my late father.

‘And did your father also snore like an express train?’ Zoë wanted to know.

‘Whether he did or he didn’t,’ I answered, ‘I believe my mother slept like a normal person and therefore didn’t notice.’

This was a reference to what I considered to be the
ab
normality of Zoë’s sleep patterns, a matter of some contention between us, since she believed she slept the way a person was meant to sleep, that’s to say stretched between waking and unconsciousness like piano wire, her eyes wide open and every millimetre of her flesh aquiver to the faintest rustle, let it be breath issuing from my nostril or the wind fluttering a sweet wrapper three streets away.

‘There is nothing wrong with the way I sleep, were I only allowed to,’ was how she made the point to me.

‘Same here,’ I said. ‘Do you not suppose I would sleep more soundly and therefore more silently myself if I didn’t have to lie there, awake even when I’m not, listening to the sound of you not sleeping?’

‘You’re so Jewish,’ she said. ‘You’re so fucking illogically, argumentatively Jewish.’

Which I suppose was just another way of making my point, that we are a dialectical people.

We resolved our differences in the end. She sent me to an ear, nose and throat specialist. Who sent me to an otolaryngologist. Because I was uncertain what one of those would do to me I checked him out with Kennard Chitty, the plastic surgeon Zoë had unearthed a year or two before with a view to getting him to harmonise my face with hers. It was Chitty who had refused to lay a scalpel anywhere near my nose because of the patriarchal associations it held for him, he being of the opinion that a Jewish appearance was the noblest on earth, wanting only the true conviction that came with Christ. ‘Jesus must have had a nose like yours,’ he’d told me, ‘so it would be unchristian to change it surgically in any way.’ We’d become friends of a kind, with him buying a set of my Old Testament cartoons to hang on his consulting-room walls, along with other odds and ends, and I allowing him to invite me to his Christmas parties and shtupp me with cheaply printed literature explaining how it was only by learning to love Jews that Christians would finally save the world, but first the Jews had to consent to becoming Christians. All that apart, he told me not to worry about otolaryngology and even recommended a treatment he’d read about for someone with my condition. Sphenopalatine artery ligation it was called, which excited Zoë when I mentioned it because she assumed it meant I was getting surgery after all.

‘While they’re at it . . .’ she began.

But I had to explain to her that it was surgery from the inside not the out, and that if she thought I’d be coming home from the otolaryngologist retroussé, she’d do well to think again.

Here’s the irony I talked about. In the end the otolaryngologist advised against ligation in my case – some issue with the septum nasi which I was not capable of grasping – and put me on a regimen of what can only be called ‘packing’, all manner of materials being stuffed into my nose over a long period, the eventual effect being that it took on the appearance of being larger rather than smaller, even if Manny’s description of it spreading all over my face was exaggerated. I did bleed less frequently, as a result, and I snored less too. But it was a cruel blow to Zoë who found it harder than ever to look at me.

2

My memory draws a blank when I try to picture Manny and me after my father died. I see no air-raid shelter, recall no further talk of the Brothers Stroganoff, retain nothing of any conversations we might have had about the Nazis. He came to my father’s funeral with his father, that much I know. I see them standing together, to one side, both in long black coats. But no Asher. Shortly afterwards Manny delivered himself of that sick nonsense about his envying me not having a father, but I cannot see the place or remember the circumstances in which he delivered it. Then there was his crisis of faith or whatever it was which I spitefully threw back in his face; though that, too, will not locate or define itself. Otherwise a black hole. We didn’t fight, we didn’t in any of the usual ways fall out, we simply stopped.

Sex stopped it partly. At fifteen, Errol Tobias started going out with Melanie Kushner, a South Manchester girl with a woman’s breasts, and that was that – goodbye to the carefreeness of childhood. No more
Scourge of the Swastika
, no more breaking a religious man’s windows, no more spluttering circle of onanists. ‘Won’t be needing you now,’ Errol had announced at a sort of extraordinary general meeting of the latter, called, as it were, to wind up the company’s affairs. All over. We were in business for real, suddenly. Or at least Errol was. For the rest of us there was some serious catching up to be done and we weren’t going to manage that with meshuggeners like Manny Washinsky hanging around. I became one of the boys, that’s why I lost touch with him. I hit the town.

And Manny? No idea. He didn’t exist.

Not entirely true. Something comes back to me, dimly, in the
reluctant half-light of shame. Me and a girl, hand in hand, leaving the Library Theatre, an Arthur Miller, I think, always Arthur Millers at the the Library Theatre, me and Märike it must have been, stepping into the wintry dark, stopping for a kiss on the steps of the Central Library itself, this is how we kiss in Kobenhavn, this is how we kiss in Manchester, and then there, sitting in an old raincoat, on the cold stone, scratching his face, giving the air of waiting for somebody, but obviously not, Manny Washinsky, not looking my way. How old would I have been? Nineteen? I was already at art college, I am sure of that, because I had met Märike, if indeed it was Märike, at a college dance and was bringing her home to meet my mother. So this was probably me showing off the sights of Manchester to her. Theatre, Library, Mother, Art Gallery –
now
will you put your hand inside my trousers? Showing off the sights of Manchester to her, but also showing off her to Manchester. Oh, to have been able to show her off to Errol Tobias, but he was married already, a child bridegroom, and living in the South with pictures of women exposing their vaginas on his toilet door. So poor Manny, sitting there, thinking his own thoughts, had to suffice. There were losses and gains to this. No points for showing her I knew Manny. But points aplenty for showing Manny how intimately I knew her. Why that should be, when Manny was now as nothing to me, and no measure of anything I any longer valued, I cannot explain. Some imp of malice or uncertainty, though, some hunger for validation, explain it how you will, made me make him notice us. See what you’re missing, Manny. See what I’ve got and you haven’t. I even effected a cursory introduction – Manny, Märike; Märike, Manny. He didn’t get up from where he was sitting. Just nodded his head, then looked away again. Whether he was feigning indifference, or genuinely didn’t care who I was with, I am unable to say for sure, but at the time I feared the latter. He was otherwise absorbed, as incurious about me as I had been about him, but more self-sufficient than I was,
it appeared, since I had set about attracting his attention, whereas he hadn’t shown the remotest interest in attracting mine. Elohim? Was that the explanation? Was Manny back on friendly terms with Him? I decided yes. He had the look: not transfigured with light – that had never been his way – more as though returned to antiquity, in the process of turning back into the mud out of which the first man was fashioned. In which case, fine. I could live with losing to Elohim. But just between me and myself, I felt a clown.