Kalooki Nights (46 page)

She corrected me – ‘No,
all
the wives have all got
all
their tits out. But why?’

‘It’s an unconscious expression of their givingness. Somebody says charity and they think of giving suck.’

‘And this applies to all charity-givers, does it?’

‘Only Jewish ones. The tit part anyway. Jewish women give more tit than Gentile women. It’s their way of saying sorry to their boy children for subjecting them to circumcision. In fact the whole shebang is about saying sorry. The Jews are a highly apologetic people.’

‘Oh, Jew Jew Jew!’

I shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t my fault that Errol Tobias had assembled half of fucking philanthropic Elstree.

Put the swearing down to Zoë. But also put it down to half of fucking philanthropic Elstree. If Zoë agitated me into near sociopathic philo-Semitism, fucking philanthropic Elstree agitated me, no less nearly, into its opposite. The stain of Crumpsall on me, was it? Something I believed they saw, whether they did or not? My origins in poor-house, atheistical Judaism? Yes, I was paranoid, without a doubt. But I didn’t imagine the men with the bored, sad hoodlum eyes asking me what I did, as though they found it hard to believe from the look of me that I did anything,
nor their expressions of the profoundest indifference when I told them ‘cartoonist’, nor their wet-nurse wives thinking that they might just have seen, at some time, somewhere, something or other I might have done . . .

The thanks you get for chronicling their Five Thousand Years of Persecution.

As usual, Zoë when they asked her told them she was a concert pianist and opera singer.

‘You’re wasting your time with that stuff here,’ I whispered to her. ‘If you want to impress this bunch tell them you’re in fucking
Evita
.’

‘I thought Jews were supposed to be cultivated.’

‘Not these Jews. Different Jews.’

‘Oh, Jews Jews Jews!’

Though she understood nothing of the principle of cards, Zoë threw herself into kalooki, won a hand, believed she had a natural genius for the game, lost a hand and left the table.

When I next saw her she was sitting on her own, weeping, in a small anteroom which I remembered Melanie describing, the night she showed me around the house, the night of Errol’s demented proposition, as The Library. Most of the bookshelves were taken up with family photographs in rococo frames – the Tobiases grinning by the Dead Sea, the Tobiases grinning at the Wailing Wall, Errol sniffing Israeli grapes on the Golan – and those shelves that didn’t hold photographs held glass paperweights which Melanie collected for want of anything else to do. But there were a few rows of books in gilt bindings – some in Hebrew, the sorts of books you were given for your bar mitzvah, assuming you were given a bar mitzvah, and a number of popular classics, a brown leatherette set of Dickens, for example, which a national newspaper once distributed to every family in Crumpsall, plus about two dozen Reader’s Digest condensations. I had expected The Library to be given over to Errol’s research
interest, Yockey and his chums, and at first took these to be the reason for Zoë’s tears. She had opened Rassinier, I reasoned, come upon (24.8% + 28.8%)/1.85 = fuck you, and felt the ground go beneath her. But she did not have Rassinier beside her on the camel-hide and onyx couch, she had a collection of Errol’s porno.

5

She hasn’t shot him yet. That’s something.

He has seen almost every part of her naked, and so is able to put an image of her together in his head. But she has forbidden him to do this.

‘How will you know, Gnädige Frau?’

‘I will know. I will see it on you.’

‘But how am I to stop myself?’

‘That’s for you to work out.’

They have not yet discussed what will happen when she has no part of herself left to show him.

It occurs to him that she is saving something special for him. The climax. The 1001st night. When, in the moment before she shoots him, he is permitted to see the parts assembled, and to draw what he sees.

As always, her vanity makes her coarse. As his degradation makes him subtle. Does she not understand that the parts have become greater than the whole? Mendel’s parents bought him jigsaw puzzles for his birthdays. They would do them together as a family, the three of them standing round the oval walnut dining table, not speaking, leaning across one another for a piece, their faces creased in concentration. The Tyn church. The wild crocuses in Lazienki Park. The Neris river on ice. Mendel remembers the disappointment of finishing. Now what? What’s to be done with a completed jigsaw puzzle? They would leave it there for an hour or so, a disconsolate monument to the futility of
human endeavour, then his mother would sweep the pieces back into the box so that she could set the table for dinner. Finding a piece on the carpet or under a chair, Mendel would marvel at the curiosity it rekindled. Where did that piece go again? Was it light on stone? Was it a crocus leaf licking the foot of Szymanowski’s flowing sculpture of Chopin? – the statue Mendel remembered the Germans blowing up not many months after they marched into the city. Why would they blow up a sculpture of a composer? And what did the piece denote? So many questions attaching to such a tiny, foolish shape, endlessly intriguing in its male and female symbolism, on the face of it no different to every other piece, but in fact unique. Once in place, though, once its mystery had been plumbed and the questions as to its function answered, all interest in it faded.

The Germans could not abide a statue of a Polish composer to remain standing in a once Polish, now a German park. Was that because they too felt the anticlimax of completion and wanted matter returned to its component parts? Were they doing to humanity what they had done to Chopin?

If that were the case then Frau Koch was out of step with her co-iconoclasts. Not knowing that Mendel was more than satisfied to look at her in fragments, she believed he must be waiting to see her recombined. She was building up, she thought, to Mendel’s big day, not knowing that every day that Mendel feasted like a slave on whatever scrap she threw him already
was
his big day.

Perhaps Frau Koch wasn’t out of step in that case, and all Germans felt the same. They were not dismantling humanity for the pure joy of destruction but simply clearing the pedestals for the day when Germany perfected would be put on show. Behold the Godhead.

So they were not able even to pursue the logic of their own nihilism.

Frau Koch’s unimaginativeness would be a trial to Mendel were it not, by the laws of his own subtlety, a further inducement to abasement in him. There would be nothing rare and strange about submitting himself to the whims of a woman of quality. Men do that every day and call it love and marriage. But to give oneself without modesty or restraint to a woman who possesses no qualities whatsoever – unless you count the coarseness of her intelligence a quality – there is satisfaction beyond words in that!

He is enjoying erasing his drawings at the end of every day. It lends purpose to his nights, imagining what he will see, what he will be drawing, what shape he will have to go grubbing for, in the morning. The anticipation of starting again, as though he never was and never more will be, excites him. The transience turns out to be voluptuous.
Einmal ist
keinmal
, the Germans say. What happens only the once might just as well not have happened at all. Which is a clue to the force for repetition and self-commemoration that drives them. Mendel reads
einmal
differently.
Einmal
is the yellow of the crocus.
Einmal
is finding where the jigsaw piece goes.
Einmal
is seeing his mistress only one part at a time, and never that part again.
Einmal
is ecstasy.
Einmal
is art.

She wishes to discuss art with him. She is confused by what he has told her about caricature. He has told her that art is not the rendering of what is outside art. That art sees but remakes what it sees, in that way causing something to appear that wasn’t there before. But to draw a caricature is to acknowledge dependence on something previous to the work, even to evoke something previous to the work, because it is only by recalling the original that the caricaturist can be seen to be exaggerating. In this sense, the caricaturist is the least godlike, most second-hand of all artists. But because the caricaturist is by nature a satirist, and the impulse to
satire is denial, he is also the
most
godlike. In his act of creation, the satirist destroys.

He is careful to keep his disquisition simple enough to maintain her interest, but at the same time abstruse enough to guarantee him a beating.

He is drawing the fine isthmus of candle-white flesh above the Tubercle of Pubis. She has loosened her belt and infinitessimally eased her riding trousers down her hips so that he can see it well enough to draw. Three or four hairs of different lengths have strayed from her pubic triangle. He has seen a sufficient number of these hairs, now straying upwards, now straying down, now curling sideways, and now en masse, matted, like a tiny haystack, to reproduce Frau Koch’s pubic triangle in its entirety were he of a mind. But he is not of a mind even to imagine it. The three or four stray hairs are more engaging. I am a man with a soul and an intelligence, he tells himself as he draws, I am here in fulfilment of some inscrutable but divine intention, and I will not be here again; yet there is not a part of me that is not at this moment concentrated on a single one of Frau Koch’s nether hairs arbitrarily uncovered, a scratchy incidental filament which would assuredly have a sour odour if I could get my nose close enough to its smell, which resembles nothing more beautiful or significant in creation than the torn-off leg of a spider, and of itself and thus disposed fulfils no function worth putting the smallest corner of my imagination to. And yet, precisely for these reasons, and precisely because it grows from the body of a woman who fulfils no function worth putting the smallest corner of my attention to, my self-annihilating absorption in it is bliss beyond the power of dreaming.

She catches the shadow of his satisfaction on his face. ‘Why are you smiling, Jew? You are not satirising me, I hope?’

‘If I were, I would not be smiling, Frau Koch.’

’I will make it my purpose before I am finished with you, Jew, to drive all satire from your mind.’

‘You already have, Frau Koch.’

She sits very still, like a model. Not in deference to his expectations as the artist, but because she does not want him to see anything more of her than his daily allowance. A rigidity which is the nearest she will ever get to understanding the punctilios of his perversion.

His member stirs, and she strikes it.

‘And now your face . . .’

He brings his face towards her, an upward arc from below, and she strikes that.

He closes his eyes.

‘Open,’ she says. ‘You cannot work if you cannot see. And you are forbidden to work from memory.’

He likes that idea and wonders if she is getting better. With time he could make the perfect mistress of her. He will say that for the Germans. They learn.

He is half inclined to make a satiric mark on the paper, as an encouragement to her to drive all satire from his mind.

She
is
getting better. She reads what he is thinking. ‘Is it Jewish, this satire of yours, Jew?’

‘It is, Frau Koch. Satire is written into our natures. Nietzsche believed we invented democracy out of a satiric impulse, as a refusal of aristocrats and heroes.’

She doesn’t, of course, know who Nietzsche is. The education of the German people, though advanced, is a long way from being complete.

‘So are all Jews satiric?’

‘Only the clever ones, Frau Koch.’

‘I thought you were all clever.’

‘We are, Frau Koch.’

She strikes his face again, with her gloved hand. ‘Don’t be satiric with me, Jew. I have told you I will remove all
satire from your mind. You have said satire is written into your natures. So if I remove the satire from the Jews, there are no Jews,
nicht wahr
?’

Ja wohl
, Mendel thinks.

6

Errol had found Zoë in The Library, examining his shelves. If I was to trust her account, he had enquired as to her favourite writers and when she told him Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt and A. A. Milne, he asked her if she had ever seen
Deep Throat
.

‘I thought this was intended to be a serious evening,’ she told him.

‘It is a serious evening.
Deep Throat
is a serious film. It’s about a disability.’

She took two paces back from him, thought about quitting the room altogether, then decided to sit down. She needed, she told me, to compose herself.

‘Max said you were raising money for some sort of Holocaust Fellowship.’

‘We are. Are you interested in the Holocaust?’

Zoë detected insult in that. We were a phobic, perceptually oversensitive, paranoiac couple. Or at least we were when we went out in each other’s company. If I didn’t detect an insult on my own account, Zoë detected it for me. And vice versa. But on this occasion Zoë had done all the detecting necessary for herself.

‘Why shouldn’t I be interested in the Holocaust?’ she asked. Meaning – but it was obvious what she was meaning.

‘No reason. I am pleased you are. It is important that you should be.’ With which he opened a cupboard in his bookcases, brought out a bundle of what turned out to be pornographic magazines and films, and tossed them to her on the sofa. ‘Holocaust material,’ he said. ‘You choose.’

’So now,’ she told me when I found her, ‘I say the same to you. “You choose.”’

I made an automatic move in the direction of Errol’s ‘material’.

‘Don’t be a fucking moron, Max. What you’re choosing is whether we stay or go.’

It was one of those moments. Even at the time it felt like one of those moments. Though of course, as with all moments that are moments, the true consequences are not fully revealed until long afterwards. There it was, anyway. Maxie’s Choice. Did we go or did we stay?