Kalooki Nights (51 page)

Unless this was precisely the reason she’d been brought so low – the spider at the centre of the centre, the spider
imagining
he was at the centre of the centre, otherwise known as me. Arachnidman.

I had no choice, since it was almost certainly my fault, but to marry her. If I married her she would not feel a stranger in my house. If I married her I would not go to sleep worrying whether or not she would be there in the morning. If she agreed to marry me, that would prove she believed in a future. Not just our future, but
any
future. The bells would ring, the gates to all the camps and ghettos of Eastern Europe would fly open, and the Americans would be there with Hershey bars.

And she didn’t turn me down. Yes, she would marry me, but
wished, if that was all right with me, to postpone any decision as to when.

I had the feeling she thought there was more work to be done on me before she could become my wife.

Apart from my mind
. She left everything as she found it, apart from my mind.

I came home from shopping one morning – Alÿs never shopped – to find her sitting on the edge of the sofa in tears. She had been looking through a portfolio of unfinished work I had left with her to see if she thought I was heading in the right direction. Caricatures of famous Jews who were either damned in being too Jewish, or damned in being not Jewish enough. Wildly funny stuff, in my view – wildly funny not least about the state of mind of the caricaturist – but too angry or too bilious to know quite what to do with. (The title
No Bloody Wonder
came much later, as a riposte to the mess she had made of me.) She was wearing her inevitable caftan, some sort of Mexican cape with feathers and mirrors sewn into it, a robe designed for dancing and laughing in, but which, on Alÿs, became funereal, a covering one might wear for the Day of the Dead. Her sandals looked buckled tighter than ever.

‘So upsetting,’ she said.

‘Me doing the shopping? Well, there’s nothing to stop you doing it with me.’

‘You are so hurt,’ she said, tapping the portfolio in her agitation. ‘I didn’t know you were so hurt.’

I was taken aback. ‘Well, they are certainly meant
to
hurt,’ I said. ‘I grant you that.’

‘You are fooling yourself. The only person these are meant to hurt is you. You can’t go on like this. You will destroy yourself.’

Out
, I should have said.
Get the fuck out of here, you fucking ghoul!

But ours was not a swearing relationship. And then, what if
she were right? Not about my destroying myself – that was melodrama. But the implication of her words was that the prisoner in this house was me, not her; and that I was imprisoned in some fatal solipstic engagement, my rage not finding an outlet, never mind an audience. I knew enough about the frustrations that beset cartoonists, especially Jewish cartoonists, not to suppose I could be a cheerful exception to the rule. The plight of Bernard Krigstein had been before me since I was a teenager. You pursue the Nazi of your nightmares until he falls under the wheels of a subway train, and then how happy are you? Where do you find your victory? As a cartoonist, Krigstein believed nobody recognised how good he was. As a serious painter, he believed nobody recognised how good he was. Would another dead Nazi have given him the recognition, or even just the satisfaction, he craved? Should he have gone out looking? Should he have gone out combing the subways for more enemies of the Jewish people, that’s assuming enemies of the Jewish people were truly at the heart of what was amiss with him? That way madness lay. Maybe all ways madness lay. Perhaps Alÿs was on to something. Besides, she was in a privileged position. She taught popular culture. She knew what sold. She knew what the goyim in their fucking millions bought. And they sure as hell weren’t buying me.

And thus began my re-education.

She read to me, no doubt as she read to her students on the first day of term, the cartoonist Robert Crumb’s description of his methodology or provenance or procedure, call it what you will – ‘“Doodles, scribbles, worthless foolishness, playful notions, silliness, aimless meanderings” – how much of that do you recognise, Max?’

‘Me? None of it.’

‘You never doodle?’

‘Never. If I’m drawing I’m drawing.’

‘And worthless foolishness?’

‘Well, that’s a verdict others may pass on me, and have, but as a description of my own endeavours to myself I do not recognise it, no.’

‘Aimless meanderings?’

‘I cannot conceive of such.’

‘And why do you think that is, Max?’

‘Because I’m Jewish and Jews understand art to be expressly against the wishes – no, the commandments – of Elohim. Therefore when they do it they do it solemnly and in the expectation that the fabric of the planet will be rent in two. You want to see galactic meltdown? Take a look at what’s going on in the firmament after a Jewish boy has dared to make a likeness.’

‘So why are you a cartoonist?’

‘It doesn’t say anywhere, Alÿs, what sort of likeness is forbidden. Oil painting, sculpture, caricature – they’re all serious infractions to Him. And they’re all serious infractions to Me.’

‘You’re in the wrong branch of the wrong business. You probably always have been. Don’t doodle if doodling’s not what you care to do.’

‘I don’t doodle.’

‘Exactly. You don’t doodle. So do what you do do.’

‘It’s a little late in the day for me to turn my hand to landscapes. And I won’t be making video installations.’

And that was when she introduced me to the graphic novel.

‘
Five Thousand Years of Bitterness
not graphic enough for you?’I wondered.

‘No narrative.’

‘Alÿs, it’s the narrative of my soul.’

‘Exactly. No narrative that anyone wishes to accompany you on. Your soul’s old hat, Max. Your soul’s had it. That particular aspect of your soul has, anyway. It went out with the Ark.’

‘It began with the Ark.’

She took my head between her hands and looked into my eyes.
Not easy for Alÿs to look at me or anyone, so heavy were her eyelids.

‘Some time in your life you jumped off the train that everybody else was travelling on, Max. It was your own decision. You can make the decision to jump back on again.’

The train. Jew Jew, Jew Jew.

6

So jump back on I did.

The Wonderment Express.

Boo hoo, boo hoo! Boo hoo, boo hoo!

And for four or five years, the years before we married, I let it take me – take us, to be exact – where it was taking everybody. Africa, Cambodia, Croatia, Chernobyl, East Timor, you name them, though in plain truth they name themselves – the heartlands of our bad conscience. I’m not saying we always went there in person. In fact we almost never went there in person. But our sympathies took flight, and what we didn’t see with our own eyes Alÿs could always find a research assistant to see for us. The stories Alÿs attended to herself. Linear narratives of bad faith and lost illusions a child could have written. But then a child was meant to have written them. She was quick to seize an important truth, my Alÿs. Never again, not in our time, anyway, would a man’s voice – or a man’s hand, come to that – be acceptable. If you wanted to be heard or noticed, if you didn’t want to scratch at the margins of the margins, you changed your gender or you changed your age. From here on in the man would be allowable only in the boy. I stopped drawing and began to shmeer instead. Life as a child saw it, or as the age chose to believe a child saw it, all pastel wash and finger painting, any vibrancy or discord (and all blacker-than-hell jokes) whited out with Turpenoid. In a trice I was no longer Maxie Glickman but Thomas Christiansen, graphic novelist with heart. Co-author of
Boy of Bhopal
.
Followed by
Boy of the Balkans
. Boy books begging to be loved.

They sold reasonably well. Not sensationally. We were probably too sour, Alÿs and I, to boy it as convincingly as was required. But they sold well enough to disgust me with the people who were fool enough to buy them. I knew how fatuous they were.
I
did them for a quiet life and to make a woman who was depressed for me, a little less so. But what was
their
excuse?

Having, as she believed, got me back on course, she agreed to marry me. We made no provision for a honeymoon. Her decision. We would melt somewhere appropriate when the occasion was right. We would deliquesce into history like my watery paintings.

Neither getting me back on course nor agreeing to be my wife did anything for her spirits. She still began each day with her sandals buckled, so she would be ready when they came to bundle her away, either to the ovens or to freedom.

Wife of Sorrows, I called her.

About six months into our marriage she proposed a honeymoon. Work-related. I dreaded the worst. Ten days in the Congo? A fortnight in Chechnya? I wasn’t even warm. Palestine.

‘I beg yours?’

‘Palestine.’

‘You mean Israel.’

‘I mean Palestine.’

Now I think back to our time together I cannot recall a single Israel-related conversation. It might have been that we both knew to keep away from each other’s views on the subject. Or we might just have been lucky. On our watch, Israel simply didn’t come up.

When I say ‘views on the subject’ I do not mean to imply that I had any. My father believed that Jews bore a special responsibility not to be special, so he hated Israel for existing, then hated it for not existing well. Less bothered by such contrarieties, my mother threw the occasional charity kalooki night
for our beleaguered Israeli cousins, the proceeds from which would not have bought a stamp to send what she had raised. I enjoyed a sleepy repose somewhere between their positions. But that did not mean I was prepared to put up with any moralising from the goyim. To the goyim I had one thing and one thing only I wanted to say: You threw us out, you won’t now dictate to us where we can go. A Chinaman might be entitled to express an opinion, but a Christian of French or German or even English descent, no sir. Not when the mess, if you go back far enough – and I go back far enough – is all your doing.

Alÿs, I accept, was not a goy. Nor had she, in all fairness, as yet expressed an opinion. Except that calling it Palestine expressed all the opinions it was necessary to express. I saw what was coming.
Boy of Bethlehem
. Maybe worse. Maybe
Girl of Gaza
.

I asked her if getting me on to the train was always the beginning of a process, in her mind, that would climax in her dropping me square in the middle of the shit that was the Occupied Territories. She denied any such intention vehemently. She had been thinking of me. Of the state I was in. Of my work which was bogged down in repetition, contradiction and pointless irony. Nothing else had motivated her, nothing! How dared I impute so base a motive to her! How dared I!!

But what
was
so base about her wanting me to go to Palestine, unless she meant by it that I should shmeer some paint around while I was there and rub it in the faces of my people? ‘The fact is, Alÿs,’ I told her, ‘your outrage proves my fears. You want to de-Jew me. It’s not enough you took the man. Now it’s the Jew you’re after . . . what’s fucking left of it!’

She hung her head. Not in shame, in rage. It occurred to me that if she did look up it might be preparatory to an act of murder. I had said enough to
be
murdered, I accepted that. When you accuse someone of taking away what is essential to your life, you are asking for them to take the life itself. Why not finish it? Why not do what you stand accused of?

The strange thing was that she could not, at this moment, have looked more archetypally Jewish herself. In her fury, Judith the beheader. In her rectitude, Deborah the judge. In her sorrow, Naomi. In her fidelity to me – oh yes, in her outraged loyalty – Rachel. In her presentiment of grief – why not say it? – that best of all Jewish mothers, the Virgin Mary herself. And this before we’d started on the martyrs of the diaspora – from the wise and fertile wives who’d kept the flame alive throughout the persecutions of the Middle Ages to those heroines of my own profession, the Malvina Schalkovas and Gela Seksztajns who didn’t make it to their middle years. It was no wonder she couldn’t lift her head, considering the amount of retroactive narrative it contained.

I hated her. All at once I realised how much and for how long I had hated her without knowing it.

The fucking lugubrious Jewess she was! Ghetto-laden, Holocaust-ridden, God-benighted, guilt-strewn, and now by that latest twist of morbid Jewish ingenuity, Jew-revolted.

The sandals told their own story. Why hadn’t I been listening to what my eyes told me? There is only ever one reason an adult person wears a sandal when it isn’t summer and they are not winkle-picking on the beach, and that is because they wish to throw their lot in with simplicity. A sandal is a symbol of poverty and, by extension, of oppression. You wear it to affirm that what is good is simple, and what is simple must be true. No doubt there were Jewish settlers who wore sandals too, as an assertion of the simple continuity they enjoyed with Abraham and Sarah. Alÿs had pulled off something spectacular. She wore her sandals Jewishly, in the name of our common ancestors, but also anti-Jewishly in the name of those she believed we had dispossessed.

Not satisfied with being ashamed of all the shame we felt, now we had to be ashamed of not being ashamed enough. You can see why the goyim resorted to the gas chambers. They wanted us to leave their heads alone. But here we still were, still
ratcheting up our consciences. Jews refining their Jewishness in the act of refusing to be Jewish.

Or at least here Alÿs Glickman, née Balshemennik, still was. She made my head spin, never mind the poor goyims’. I needed to be wearing sandals myself. I needed my own simplicities back. I needed to be working in vibrant colours again, doing overt violence on the page.

We didn’t speak that night. I fully expected her to be gone in the morning. But there she lay, flattened in the bed as though history had rolled over her again while she slept. I left the house, staying out all day, giving her the chance to gather together her things which in truth she could have squeezed into a matchbox. Thirty seconds were all it would have taken her to pack and go. But I gave her a day. Not for a moment did I suppose she would be there when I returned. But she was back at her workstation, bent over the coffee table reading fantasy comics without a zap or flicker of emotion, not making a nuisance of herself, not incommoding me by the disturbance of a single atom.