Kalooki Nights (45 page)

Honesty demands I be scrupulous about my dark unconscious, whether or not I thereby give ammunition to Gentiles on twentyfour-hour Jew-degeneracy watch. Beholding her bare-thighed on Errol’s knee, outlola’ing Lola Lola – a joke she didn’t quite get herself – did I not wonder how far, for veracity’s sake, she might go? And when Errol put it to her that she might go so far as to suck his dick, did I post-date my dread that she might into an expectancy, an assumption – all right, all right, into a longing – that she would?

No. Yes. No.

But dreads do have a way of fulfilling themselves. And the time came when yes, God forgive me, yes, I did behold Zoë, or at least when I with good reason
imagined
I beheld Zoë – by then become my wife, a woman I had undertaken to honour and protect, Zoë Glickman, the mother-to-be of my children, except that we would have no children – yes, when I came as close to beholding as you can come to beholding without actually beholding, whatever it was I thought that I beheld.

Which answered, all things considered, to that longing I did not dare acknowledge?

Yes.

No.

Yes.

But yes or no it didn’t happen all at once. And that it did happen at all (
if
it did happen at all) was so contrary to any desires I recognised on the upper levels of my person that I reject as wicked libel Zoë’s assertion that it was just another act of Jewish machination practised upon her innocence. First Leila Krystal, now me – no sooner did we see her trusting beauty, Zoë the unspotted, golden as the corn she came through, than the need was on us to befoul it.

Reason not the need, Zoë. Need never entered into it. Any befouling came as surplus to desire. And its object was me, not you.

Self-befouling,
nestbeschmutzing
, all the cunning cartoonery of the heart – we are too busy with ourselves, Zoë, to have time to worry about demeaning you.

Despite Errol’s continuing curiosity, I didn’t bring him and Zoë into each other’s company again for several years. Our friendship had been rekindled and we kept it up
à deux
, meeting each other halfway, as it were, in East Finchley, or Hendon, or other last outposts of the city where we had heard rumours of a new salt-beef bar or similar having opened. I am not sure why either
of us persisted. It certainly wasn’t for the food. Nor was it for the company, come to that. I always groaned when the time came to get ready and do the trek, and I never doubted that Errol felt the same. But we must have felt we were honouring something in our past, even if we couldn’t have given it a name.

Though he never failed, the minute we met, to ask after the kissogram, and I never failed, the minute we parted, to send my love to Melanie, we otherwise avoided home talk. That way I didn’t have to tell him I was getting married or invite him to the wedding, and he didn’t have to involve me in whatever ceremonies of the hearth clicked off the years in Borehamrigid. Mainly we talked the emotional politics of being Jewish as we individually saw it: the philistinism of Hertfordshire and Crumpsall Jews (me), the shrinkage of the Jewish population due to intermarriage and name-change (Errol), the continuing silence of English Jewish intellectuals on Jewish matters (me), the refusal of Jewish readers to take Jewish cartoonists to their hearts (me), and of course Israel, about which there was good and bad to say, though Errol – again bearing remarkable similarities to Tsedraiter Ike who, after the Six Day War, had succeeded in getting half of Crumpsall to boycott the
Guardian
– never ceased wondering how as a Jew I could submit cartoons to papers which only saw the bad.

Plus we talked the Holocaust that wasn’t.

In this respect, at least, we recaptured something of the feverish excitement of our youth – Errol inducting me into the salacities, not of the Swastika as Scourge this time round, but of the Swastika as Scourgee, were such a word to exist, the Swastika as Bemused and Slandered Bystander, the Swastika as Boon could we only see it, the Swastika as Benediction. The horror clocks might have stopped in Manny’s head, but elsewhere cruelty was evolving nicely. No need for anything so crude as Ilse Koch’s lampshades any more, no sadism so precise and graphic you could not have told it apart from your dreams, or told those dreams apart from fears of dreams to come, no, something far more subtly inhuman
was afoot now – the gaze of insolent incredulity, denying even those who’d died the factuality of their death. The jeer of the SS militiamen that even if a single Jew survived, no one would believe him; Primo Levi’s nightmare, the recurring nightmare of all the prisoners he knew, that were they to get home alive, not only would those dearest to them not give credence to their stories, they would refuse to listen, they would turn away from them in silence – these terrifying apprehensions of the limits of human sympathy, wherein, for his offence against metaphysical good manners, the victim becomes the perpetrator, these horrors had become realities.

‘Only partial realities,’ I said, trying to look on the bright side. ‘There are a strictly limited number of these cranks kicking about, surely.’

‘That’s how forgetfulness starts,’ Errol said.

I didn’t know how forgetfulness started. But I accepted that even a single instance of it amounted to such wickedness that Elohim would have been within his rights to put a torch to us once and for all.

I’ll show you fucking forgetfulness, you fuckers!
Or however Elohim talks.

Looking back, I’m not sure that many people were then aware that a revisionist movement was gathering momentum. A few people who made it their business to be in the know (like Errol) had noticed that the German academic world was quietly realigning itself away from guilt, but that movement for reimagining German history which became known as the
Historikerstreit
had not yet publicly declared itself. Its chief architect, Ernst Nolte, was yet to oppose plans to build a memorial in Germany to Jewish victims of the Nazis, and yet to be caricatured by me, giving the Nazi salute (well, why not!) while declaring that ‘To remember completely is just as inhuman as to forget completely’, as though anyone had granted him the right to be exercising the slightest choice in the matter. And as for the now infamous whitewashes by more populist writers, English and American – they were still
to come. But Errol was in advance of his times. He knew so much that I sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t in the pay of Mossad or some other secret Jewish agency dedicated to rooting out and hunting down our enemies. Were the wine-buying expeditions a blind? Did he go to Golan four times a year not to taste the grapes but to collect his instructions? I was the beneficiary of his knowledge anyway, that’s if you can call knowing the name of every neo-Nazi slimeball able to find a publisher a benefit. But I too had a job to do. And it rarely happened that I left Errol without another tormentor of the Jews to add to my jest book of hellhounds – Alexander Ratcliffe, leader of the Scottish Protestant Party, early refuter of the Holocaust, and not averse to posing in Nazi regalia; Austin J. App, lover of literature, apologist for the Third Reich, and author of the
Eight Incontrovertible Assertions
, the most selffulfillingly incontrovertible of which being that the Jews who died in the camps were criminals and subversives; Maurice Bardeche, a French critic with a Monsieur Hulot pipe, creator of the myth that gas was used only as a disinfectant, but blaming Jews for what happened to them anyway because they had supported the Treaty of Versailles; Paul Rassinier, another ruminative Frenchman, debunking the genocide with mathematics, totting them all up, the Yemeni Jews, the Polish Jews, the Turkish Jews – (1.55 + 2.16)/2 = 1.85 – as though algebra could refute witness, moving the figures about the globe until every Jew supposed to have gone missing in Auschwitz turned up in Tel Aviv or Rio; and so on and so on, the roll-call of infernal pedants, each egging on the other, none of them arguing from the impossibility of such cruelty, or belief in the essential goodness of the human heart, only the impossibility of the numbers, the failure of practice to live up to ambition, all of them bent on saving Jews from the gas chambers so that they could kill them again in their minds . . .

‘You’ve got to listen to this,’ Errol laughed one afternoon in a quasi-kosher café somewhere north of Muswell Hill. ‘I’ve just been dipping into a book called
Imperium
. An anti-Semitic rant
hundreds of pages long by a man called – and you’re going to love this – Francis Parker Yockey.’

‘Yockey by name . . .’

‘. . . and Yockey by nature. Dead right. I knew you’d like it.’

‘I don’t believe you, Errol. You’ve run out of revisionists so you’ve newly minted this one.’

‘Newly minted? Him? He’s the fucking
father
of revisionism!
Imperium
came out in 1948, and even then he was saying there was no evidence of any gassing, the photographs were frauds, the Jews were a shagged-out people anyway, and blah blah blah.’

‘What I don’t get is why they aren’t delighted it happened. Why, instead of doing the arithmetic of impossibility, they don’t celebrate the mathematics of achievement. So many dead in so little time, hosanna, hosanna, hosanna!’

‘Well, you’d think so with Yockey in particular, since he believes in anti-Semitism as a wholesome organism resisting the disease which is Jewish life.’

‘Meaning that the body of society has a sanative responsibility to destroy Jews?’

‘Exactly.’

‘A bounden duty?’

‘Nothing less.’

‘In which case three cheers for Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Belsen.’

We’d have drunk to that, clashed our glasses of Russian tea, cut our hands open maybe, bled all over each other, chewed our fingers off in the frenzy, had we not remembered in time that we were in the Netanya Falafel Café, Friern Barnet.

4

And then, out of the blue, he suggests a charity kalooki night, his place.

‘In aid of what, Errol?’

’In aid of a Holocaust Denial Fellowship.’

‘You want to give them a fellowship?’

‘Not the deniers, shmuck. We want to fund a lawyer to investigate ways of criminalising them.’

‘And you think kalooki’s the way?’

‘Every little helps.’

‘I’ll contribute a comic strip.’

He looked disappointed.

‘Fine. I’ll write you a cheque. But no kalooki. My family plays kalooki, I don’t. Not playing kalooki was how I learned to understand I wasn’t my mother.’

‘What about the kissogram? I bet she plays.’

‘She doesn’t play any games. It’s against her religion. She plays the flute, the harp, the violin, the piano, the cello – all to concert level – but she doesn’t play kalooki.’

‘I’ll teach her.’

‘Errol, we’re not coming. It’s too far. I get lost.’

So he left a message on my answerphone, repeating the invitation. To both of us.

‘Who’s Errol?’ Zoë wanted to know.

‘You know perfectly well who Errol is. We met there.’

‘What do you mean “there”? Is Errol a place? Besides, we met in Oxford Street, waiting for a Chinese to jump off a roof.’

‘We met at a pub next door to Errol’s. You were a kissogram. And he was African.’

‘Errol’s African? Never met him. And I have never been a kissogram. You’ve got the wrong gal, pal.’

‘Palais de drek, Borehamrigid – ring any bells?’

She shook her head. Always pretty when she shook her head. Her nose like a little bell itself.

‘Nope. But are we going?’

‘Nope. You don’t play kalooki.’

‘How do you know I don’t play kalooki? What is it, anyway? A Polynesian stringed instrument?’

‘Well, if it were, you’d play it beautifully. It’s a card game. You don’t play cards.’

‘Only because I was never taught.’

She turned it into a reproach. The things I never taught her! The number of doors these Jews she had the misfortune to get mixed up with slammed upon her genius!

I could have left it at that. She would have forgotten. But something – a little worm of perverse honourableness gnawing at my heart (or was it some other part of me?) – made me tell her what the kalooki evening was in aid of. After which there was no question but that we would go. Wherever she stood at any moment on the Jewish question in general, Zoë was rock solid on the Holocaust. It was Zoë, on our Jew Jew trip to Eastern Europe, who had wept over every killing site, not me. Yes, she had persuaded me to accept the apology of the German people, but she would not have done that had she not believed the German people had something to apologise for. It occurred to me as we filled flasks, packed sandwiches, wrote wills and motored out to Hertfordshire, that the fellowship should go to Zoë. The greatness that had always been in store for her, that special thing she had been appointed to do before she died – was this not it: to strangle with her bare hands every freak found crawling over what was left of Auschwitz with a set square and calculator?

It’s possible the same thought crossed her mind. She was highly excitable when we arrived, murderously elegant in the European introspective mode – Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir
and
Jean-Paul Sartre – in a black polo-neck sweater and plain long black skirt, neither her wrists nor her ankles showing. Zoë funereal, showing respect to the Six Million Dead.

‘How do you do,’ she said to Errol, extending her goodbye hand as though to insist she had never clapped eyes on him before. ‘What a beautiful house you have.’

I made a face at him not to let on he knew her. He wrinkled his nose at me.
The devil knows what little fibbers women are, Maxie.

Then he wrinkled his nose at Zoë.

I hadn’t believed a word of Errol’s story about raising money for a Fellowship in Holocaust Denial Denial, and so was surprised to see the make-up of the gathering.

‘Christ, who are these people?’ Zoë whispered to me. ‘They all look the same.’

‘They are the same,’ I told her. ‘They’re all in charity.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘A cartoonist’s trick. You have to scrutinise their faces very closely. The men all look as though they have something to repent – you can see it in the melancholy brackets round their eyes. And the wives have all got their tits out.’