Kalooki Nights (54 page)

Shani grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t make a joke of it, Max. Don’t let him think there’s a funny side. There is no funny side. He offered Mick five thousand pounds to leave me. Apart from anything else, do you not see how insulting of him that was, to suppose there would be any amount of money in the world that Mick would be prepared to leave me for? How insulting to me, and how insulting to Mick? And what does it tell you about his feelings for me, his only niece, that he would go to such lengths as actually to spend money to make me unhappy?’

From behind his door Tsedraiter Ike was insisting that Shani’s happiness was all he cared about. Didn’t she see? It was precisely to spare her unhappiness that he had done what he had done.

‘Fuck you,’ Shani shouted at him, which was the only time the F-word – in my hearing anyway – had fallen from her lips.

Which Tsedraiter Ike was just smart enough not to adduce as
evidence that the shiksefying of his niece had already begun.

That evening, as a peace-offering to Tsedraiter Ike, Mick Kalooki cooked a kosher chicken with tsimmes and latkes – the first kosher dinner ever cooked on my mother’s stove. In his naïveté, Mick believed friendship with Tsedraiter Ike was still possible if only Tsedraiter Ike would sit down and shmooze with him. Despite the smells, which must have reminded Tsedraiter Ike of Shabbes nights in Novoropissik, and would have been too much for a man of less obdurate principle, he refused to budge from his room.

‘What’s your view?’ Mick asked me. ‘How can such a Godfearing man be acting in this way. Didn’t Ruth say to Naomi, thy people shall be my people, and thy God shall be my God, and wasn’t she, though a Moabite, the progenitor of David, King of the Jews? If your Uncle Isaac wasn’t a knowledgeable Jewish man, I’d say he was ignorant of Jewish history. But that cannot be, Max, can it? I’d even go so far as to say his attitude to me was racist, but that cannot be either, am I right?’

Sweet. He was a sweet man, Mick Kalooki. He went on to be a good husband to Shani and a good father to their five children, the sons among whom were circumcised in the proper manner, though not without some misgivings on the part of Shani herself. Thirty years later she would have found it hard to meet a Gentile with such a benign attitude to Jews. A Jew can’t be a racist? Don’t make me laugh!

But even for his times he was naïve. ‘A Jew is as likely to be a racist as the next man,’ I told him. ‘Not because of what has or hasn’t happened to him, or what he has or hasn’t been taught, but because he is a person with a personal psychology. And no God, however kind or cruel, can save you from your psychology.’

I was hot on psychology that year. It was a liberal studies option at art college, one that Chloë was taking, and I wanted to be close to her. Why I wanted to be close to Chloë, who in those days either ignored me or confused me with some other Israelite, was itself a question I thought doing the psychology option might
help me answer. Masochism, as far as I could tell from the little reading I had done – masochism was the key to everything. I tried putting it to Mick Kalooki that masochism was the engine that drove Tsedraiter Ike as well. Not racism but – to employ the language proper to the discipline –
Masochismus
.

The way to look at it was this:

What was the proven consequence of any positive assertion by a Jew of his own sense of worth – whether as a man of moral excellence, prestige, or intellectual superiority? Hostility. If any single lesson has been learned by the Jew it is that his apparent arrogance or conceit will land him in deep trouble. Why then does he persist? There can be only one answer to that. He persists because appearing arrogant serves the psychic function of satisfying an unconscious masochistic need to be landed in deep trouble. Tsedraiter Ike’s offer of money to Shani’s Mick was an assertion of religious and moral superiority. Not only was Mick not fit to be Shani’s husband, Tsedraiter Ike’s behaviour declared, his unfitness would be demonstrated by his acceptance of filthy lucre (never mind, for the moment, that he refused it). But by acting as he had, and who was to say not in full awareness of Mick’s steadfast unwillingness to be corrupted, however large the sum, Tsedraiter Ike had drawn down, and at some level anticipated, a greater obloquy upon himself. Behold, yet again, the Jew laid low. ‘And there he is, even as we speak, whimpering in his room.’

‘That’s total shit,’ Shani said. ‘Are you telling me that every time a Jewish parent objects to his child marrying out, what he actually wants is someone to kick him?’

‘In the toches,’ Mick added.

‘No. What he actually wants is his child not to marry out. But what he wants and what he is seeking might not be the same thing. Though it might also be the case that the kicking, if and when it comes, will ultimately harden his conviction that he is a thing apart, a victim of a brutal Jew-hating world, which he is therefore right to save his child from if he can.’

‘Total shit,’ Shani repeated.

Throughout all this my mother regarded me with a prunelike expression. She didn’t like fancy explanations. You won at kalooki if you had a good knowledge of the deck and could anticipate what the other players were thinking. You worked on the straightforward assumption that they wanted to win. If you had to take on board the possibility that what they really wanted was to lose – well, frankly you wouldn’t know where you were.

But she wasn’t going to say anything that might add fuel to the fire. She had grown to love Mick Kalooki. And her brother was her brother. She got up from the table, loped her long Ethiopian stride across the room, sat in an armchair and crossed her legs. When you saw my mother’s ankles you wanted to cry. They were the best argument for Judaism – its golden allure, its sensuality and its fragility – I had ever encountered. Why, then, I was otherwise attracted; why, when I had grown up with this rich aroma of spiced indolence around me I let my nose lead me in the direction of flesh that was by comparison odourless and colourless, I was not at that time – not having yet done ‘Introduction to Psychology II’ – in a position to understand.

As for Tsedraiter Ike, he came out of his room at last and resumed his visits to the houses of the Jewish dead. He never addressed a word to Mick Kalooki again. Nor did Shani – against all Mick Kalooki’s attempts at conciliation – address another word to him. When Ike died, Mick attended his funeral, hung his head and even shed a tear. Shani stayed at home.

5

I never liked the expression ‘stiff-necked’, but yes, as I conceded to Chloë’s mother in the course of what I now realise had been planned as a goodbye and good-riddance tea, we were an implacable
people. ‘I doubt we are that by nature,’ I told her. ‘Nobody is anything by nature, Helène, unless we make an exception of your Judaeophobia. But by bitter experience. Kill or be killed.’

‘Bit OTT, your soon to be ex-hubby, Chlo,’ she’d said, taking a scone from my plate and wiping it on the sleeve of her blouse, while I sweated to think of a county that had ‘fuck you’ in it.

But yes. We were, by bitter experience, an implacable people. And we had with reason come to believe that it was only by being implacable that we had survived. True, some of us had had a go at being lenitive. Behold, we are an accommodating bunch. But the last time we had a serious go at that was in Germany. The Haskalah, as we called it. The Enlightenment. Our love affair with the Kraut. And you don’t go making that kind of mistake twice.

I wanted to do my best imaginatively by Channa and Selick Washinsky, anyway. As I wanted to do my best by Manny. A moral balancing act of some complication, I accept. Of course you want to have your son sectioned when he falls in love for the second time with the same shikseh. And of course you, Manny, know that for wanting him sectioned they no longer deserve to be among the living.

It was partly to simplify my own feelings that I said to him later that same afternoon, after we too had broken off for tea, ‘Christ, Manny, did it never occur to them just to go out and buy a gun and have done with it?’

He had been pulling at his fingers throughout our conversation, cracking them one by one, pulling at them as though he meant systematically to take his hands apart. ‘No,’ he said, after taking his time to think about it, not looking in my direction, not looking anywhere, ‘I don’t think so. But it occurred to
me
.’

I laughed. ‘I don’t see you with a gun, Manny.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just don’t see it. You don’t go together. You and guns? Forgive me – it’s too incongruous.’

‘You think I wouldn’t know how to use one?’

‘I can’t see it in your hand. I can’t picture it. If I imagine a gun in your hand it falls out. I mean that as a compliment.’

‘So why are you laughing?’

‘To express solidarity with your humanity. I can’t picture a gun in my hand either. We were brought up to carry books, not guns,’

‘That’s not what they say in Israel.’

‘Israel’s different. You don’t laugh in Israel.’

‘You wouldn’t laugh here if I was pointing a gun at you.’

‘I don’t know about that, Manny. Maybe I would.’

‘I bet you wouldn’t.’

‘I couldn’t take your money.’

‘Do you want to try?’

I laughed again, though not as easily as I had the first time. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I very much don’t want to try.’

The problem with Bernie Krigstein was that he didn’t have much of a sense of fun. In the end there are only two sorts of Jews, and I don’t mean those who went through the Holocaust and those who only thought they did. I mean Jews who see the funny side of things and those who don’t. The mistake is to suppose that those who see the funny side of things become cartoonists, and those who don’t go into law. It’s often the other way round. Krigstein made history with his comic-book story ‘Master Race’ because it wasn’t comic. Not a line of it that wasn’t sombre. ‘Krigstein didn’t understand the humor,’ said Harvey Kurtzman, who employed him for a while on
Mad
. By ‘the humor’, he meant pretty well the humour of anything he was given to illustrate. ‘He did funny grimnness,’ Kurtzman went on. ‘Grimness in slapstick.’ Not that there’s anything you can call slapstick in ‘Master Race’. But then you could argue that commandants of death camps don’t as a rule give rise to slapstick much.

I don’t know. I never knew. It could have been the house I grew up in – my father’s punchy scepticism, my mother’s deathdefying kalooki nights, or just the physical and psychological
ludicrousness of Tsedraiter Ike – but for me nothing was so dreadful that I couldn’t see its essential drollery. This could explain why drawing Superman was ultimately beyond me. In my hands Superman’s X-ray vision would only have revealed the absurdity at the heart of things. And that included Manny. Here he was, implying he had it in him to be a hit man, and I was supposed to take him seriously. It was so preposterous that I momentarily forgot he
was
a hit man, a man accused and convicted of the murder of his mother and father.

Guns were the problem. For me guns belonged to an inconceivable universe. Not only could I never have pulled a gun myself, I couldn’t draw one. I could no more credit a gun with presence than I could the bulge in Tom of Finland’s pants. As for whether Manny had ever owned, or, as he seemed to want to menace me into believing,
still
owned a gun, I didn’t know what I thought. But the idea was gathering that I ought to be thinking something.

It’s a form of disrespect, of course, I acknowledge that, not being able to grant a person the dignity of taking him entirely seriously. But that comes with the territory. Don’t expect respect from a cartoonist.

Historically, the laugh was on the sort of man I was. Without any doubt I would have been among those who pooh-poohed the idea that Nazism in 1930s Germany posed any personal danger to me. Housed snugly in the Berlin suburbs, penning Grosz-like satires on pig-faced
bürgerlich
nationalism in the daytime, and slipping out at night to perform cunnilingus on Zoë under a table at Der Blau Angel, I would have hung on until the final hour and beyond, convinced that violence was a joke at heart, that no one beyond the occasional ruffian felt any differently about guns than I did. Even on the Jew Jew train I cannot imagine myself ever really believing that the guns were made of anything but cardboard or that they were taking us anywhere but to the seaside.

This is the price you pay for enlightenment. To be enlightened means to assume the enlightenment of others.

Given which serious miscalculation, I ought by this time to have evolved a world view more adequate to the facts. As Manny, to do him credit, most definitely had. Little by little I was growing to envy him. It behoved a man living in the twenty-first century, as it behoved the dramatis personae of Genesis, to be acquainted with abomination. The laughter I gave vent to when he pulled his metaphorical gun on me was misplaced and false. It masked incompetence and dissatisfaction with myself. Face to face with my old farshimelt friend, a person who on paper had lived no life to speak of, I felt the incomplete one. I hadn’t killed my parents. I hadn’t held a gun. I couldn’t even draw a gun. If anyone hadn’t lived a life, I hadn’t.

6

Chloë came at me with a knife once. I ran into the bathroom, said ‘God fucking help me!’ into the mirror, and began to cry.

‘I can smell your fear,’ she triumphed. ‘It’s leaking out from under the door.’

‘I’m not afraid for myself,’ I answered, ‘I’m afraid for you.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t be. It’s not me I’m going to kill.’

She kept me in there for two hours, then swore on her mother’s life that it was all right for me to come out.

What I hadn’t realised was that she’d nipped out of the house in that time. While I was straining my ear to gauge the dangerousness of her silence, she’d been down to the chemist to purchase a bottle of antibacterial skin-wash.

Swearing on her mother’s life always brought a sort of peace between us. If she was lying and meant to knife me the minute I emerged, there was at least the consolation that her mother might die for it.

‘There,’ she said, when I did at last venture out, ‘use this.’