Kalooki Nights (59 page)

‘She’s a programme-maker, Errol. They might like a girl to show a bit of spirit, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to transmit a hate programe.’

‘Don’t be a shmuck all your life. She won’t be making hate programmes. Would she have come to you for a hate programme? She ‘ll just whittle away, Max. A dig here, a wound there. Undermine, undermine. And the more often she can find a willing Jew like you to do it for her – Jew eat Jew – the cleaner her hands will look. She’s lethal, Max. She’s lethal because she’s white, because she’s English, because she’s educated, because she’s plausible, because she’s not frightened, because she fits in, because she’s beautiful, because she’s got a middle-class voice, because she’s got nice tits, and because she’s a woman. That’s enough to fool a lot of people into believing they’re talking to a reasonable,
warm-hearted educated human being who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Especially the woman bit. It fooled you.’

Did it? Or had I nosed her out as well? Had I nosed her out and not minded? Or even nosed her out and liked it, whatever I smelt?

A queer, weightless sensation of surpriselessness floated through me like lethargy. At the last there are no revelations. Everything has been there at the beginning, always will be there at the beginning, everything you will ever need to know, waiting in the baby fist of time. You prise the fingers open or you don’t. Good for Errol. He’d rip the hand off if he had to. I – I was a gentler soul.

‘I’m listening,’ I said.

‘You want more? I’ve finished. That’s it. You can have all I’ve got on her. I’m not making a word of it up. If you want my advice I’d shtupp her and then get the hell out.’

‘We always did things differently, you and me, Errol.’

‘What does that mean? You’re going to go on working with her?’

‘No. But I won’t be shtupping her either.’

‘Pity,’ Errol said. ‘I’d hoped you might bring her round to watch a video.’

6

I rang the next day and asked to take her out for lunch. You don’t hang about when you know the Nazis are after you. For old times’ sake I suggested the rabbit-hutch restaurant in Soho, halfway down the passage a dog wouldn’t piss in.

‘It’s not happening,’ I told her.

Hardly a surprise to her. I too had been waiting in the baby fist of time. Not someone she had ever trusted much in the first place, I hadn’t contacted her for weeks, hadn’t answered her calls and finally, in a dead voice, had invited her out.

My treat, Francine.

Of course it wasn’t happening.

She inclined her head at a folder of papers I’d brought with me. ‘Treatment?’ she asked. Good joke. You know when someone has got a stash of evidence against you on the table. But she was daring me to deliver. She was brazen, I had to give her that. She looked utterly unworried by anything I meant to say to her or show her.

‘People are allowed to hate Jews,’ I said.

She fixed me with her green, fascinator’s glimmer. Funny, how it helped some women to have bad eyesight.

‘Who hates Jews? I don’t hate Jews.’

‘Some of your best friends . . .’

‘Well, you said it.’

‘Francine,’ I said, ‘why did you take my photograph?’

‘I am not aware that I ever did take your photograph.’

‘In this restaurant. You got a waiter to take a photograph of us together.’

‘Ah, that’s different. I like to have photographs of people I work with. I’m sentimental like that. Why do you find it sinister?’

It was a hard question to answer. The reason I found it sinister was that I believed that somewhere there was a photographic archive of Francine with Jews, which would one day be brought out and adduced as evidence of how much she liked them. And they her. But I couldn’t quite say that without sounding like a megalomaniac.

I tapped the file. ‘Photographs can be very damning,’ I said.

‘They can also be faked.’

‘Why would anyone want to fake your photograph?’

‘Why would anyone want to do anything? Why would anyone want to do something sinister with the photograph the waiter took of us?’

I tried meeting her gaze. Then asked her, ‘Why are you so interested in Jews?’

‘I’m not.’

’What was it you wanted me to get from Manny? How did it feel? How did it feel to be a Jew, of all people, turning on the gas taps? Did your fingers tremble? What was it like for a Jew who is enjoined above all things to honour his father and his mother to murder them in their beds? Were you glad? Was it a relief to you? Did you hate them as you did it? I want to ask the same of you, Francine. Does it give you an unholy thrill to imagine the Jew not the victim, but the author of atrocities? Is it the same as accusing Israelis of being Nazis – are you exacting a sort of retrospective justice?’

‘You’re raving, Max. There are no thrills in this for me, holy or unholy. And honouring his father and his mother isn’t what a Jew is enjoined to do above all things. Above all things a Jew is enjoined to have no other God. Not to bow down himself unto them, nor to serve them. Genesis 20.’

‘For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God. Why are you so interested in Jews, Francine? Are you jealous of our jealous God?’

‘Why would I be?’

‘Why wouldn’t you be? Perhaps you feel excluded from His love.’

‘Aren’t I meant to be excluded from His love?’

‘As a Gentile?’

‘As a goy.’

‘Ah, it’s the goy thing.’

‘Ye shall destoy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves – For thou art an holy people unto the Lord. Deuteronomy 7. How do
you
deal with that, Max?’

‘As something in a book, Francine. As a founding myth. All religions have them.’

‘And he shall deliver their kings into thine hand, and thou shalt destroy their name from under heaven . . . Yes, it’s a goy thing.’

She smiled at me, loosing her silvery aura about me like a net. We were in a small restaurant. Had they chosen to, every diner at every table could have been privy to our conversation. It was
a necessary gift, given the places she liked to eat, her ability to throw a bubble of confidentiality around herself and the company she kept. Infinitely soothing I had found it in the past, when I was in the mood for it. As though a goddess had stretched down her hand and scooped you away in it to another realm, into another layer of reality even.

This time, though, I didn’t want to be anywhere else. I smiled back, without the aura. ‘Get a life, Francine,’ I said. ‘Get another life. Go somewhere where there aren’t any Jews. Give yourself a break from us. It isn’t healthy to be doing what you’re doing. You wallow in us. You seem not to be able to know or get enough of us or our religion. You have more knowledge of us than we have about ourselves. Which of course means that who you know is not in fact who we are. But that aside, how do you explain this infatuation? It resembles the behaviour of a rejected lover, now showing us how little we matter to you, now unable to do anything but dog our footsteps. How did we let you down? What did we promise you that we didn’t deliver? Did we unrequite you? Whence the hurt, Francine?’

I was banging my chest for emphasis. Did we hurt you here?
Here?
An action which Francine took to be too demonstrative in this crowded space. ‘I would ask you to keep your voice down,’ she said. ‘This is a favourite restaurant of mine.’

‘And mine,’ I reminded her.

‘And I would ask you not to menace me.’

‘Francine, I have not menaced you.’

But I was not able to say that with the force it required without throwing open my arms – another action too demonstrative for this crowded place. Unable to confine our conversation within her silvery net, she was beginning to look around her in alarm.

All at once I realised I didn’t want to go on with this. It had been uncouth of me, in breach of the laws governing social intercourse. Your heart did not have an entitlement to speak through your mouth on all occasions. The comedian Tommy Cooper was
right in his assessment of what you say when you find yourself sharing a train compartment with Adolf Hitler.
Sssss!
Anything further wants decorum. And Francine Bryson-Smith wasn’t Hitler, whether or not she would have taken roses to him in his bunker.

Sssss!
Anything more you must deny yourself. That used to be where God came in. Anything more He would take care of for you.

Sssss!

‘It’s not happening,’ I repeated, rising from my seat, remembering to leave sufficient money on the table to clear the bill.

7

Through his lowered head he sees her. The lozenge pattern on her dress, like involuted diamonds, similar to one his mother used to wear, for casual but smart, a shopping, striding dress. He remembers the sound it made when she increased her pace, a soft sucking, like a kiss in reverse, lips coming away from the skin.

TTSSSSSSSSKKK!

He stands behind her in the queue for the ticket machine, then follows her down the escalator. Her hair is grey now. His too, what there is of it. But he is more distressed by hers. Grey hair on a woman measures loss more poignantly than on a man. But on this woman it also measures injustice. She should have died aforetime, when her hair was gold. That she has grey hair means she has got away with it.

BOOO!

He doesn’t like the Underground. It upsets him to be dependent on artificial lighting. If the lights fuse it will be as black as unfathomed space down here. And then the rats will come out. The idea of tunnelling upsets him too. In a
way he can’t explain, it feels contrary to God’s will. God made the earth and now man in his ingratitude tunnels underneath it. Underearth is where the dead only belong.

It is always either too busy or too quiet. Tonight it is too quiet. There are only the two of them on the escalator, he nine or ten steps behind her, looking down into the greyness of her hair, imagining that she is descending into hell.

It is hot enough for hell. This is the other reason he never travels on the Underground if he can help it. The stuffiness and the heat. The smell of fuel and smoky rubber in the stations, and on the trains the smell of flesh going quickly off.

She doesn’t like it either. He can tell she doesn’t like it. She holds herself as though every outside sensation assails and hurts her. Good. He will gladly suffer any inconvenience or perturbation, any anxiety or alarm, in the knowledge that she is suffering them as well. He always wanted there to be a certain harmony of pain between them, and now they have it. She doesn’t know they have it, but he does, and that’s all that counts. She wouldn’t recognise it anyway. She is too stupid to understand the concept. The disappointment to him she always was. Except that debasement is never more refined than when the human cause of it is stupid. Any man can be the slave of a countess. It takes a sort of genius to understand why it’s better to be answerable to a scullery maid, skivvy, servant girl, bedmaker, fireyekelte, dogsbody,
femme de chambre
. . .

SLAVER! DROOL!

Not that there will be any more of that. He is long past that. She too, what she ever understood of it.

There is no one on the platform. Just the two of them. A fat rat crosses the rails.

He sits, she doesn’t. She paces. Good. Pacing is good. People who pace have active minds. ‘Mind’ is too flattering a word for what she has, but however you describe the space
between her ears, it is evidently busy with something. Torment, he hopes. Demons, he hopes. Or if none of those, at least that existential nausea to which even the wicked and the stupid are susceptible. Mental disgust with one’s fleshly condition. Unless she is of another species altogether – and some would say she is – she will wake every morning wishing that she hadn’t. The revulsion that comes with waking – this is what he wishes on her. The horror of being alive. Or
Weltschmerz
as she will know it, only
Weltschmerz
is a touch self-pleasing for what he has in store for her. Too Sorrows of Young Werther-ish. The monsters brought forth by Goya’s
Sleep of Reason
are more like it. A sky blackened with birds with human faces, batwinged and jeering.

YIPES!

The train pulls into the station.

JEW JEW! JEW JEW!

Only it isn’t that sort of train. Except that every train is that sort of train. Which might be why she comes down here.

She gets into the train. He gets into the train.

She stares out of the window. Where is she? Is she remembering? Is she back
there?

The train pulls out of the station. He gets up to open a window. Nobody in the compartment but the two of them, and a drunk asleep. ZZZZZZZZ! The sound of shikkered shaygets sleeping.

When he returns to his seat she sees him. ‘You!’ she says.

CHOKE!

He could expose himself to her. He has thought of that a thousand times. Look. Remember? Remember me?

AARGH!

But what would he achieve by exposing himself to her? And what if he exposed himself erect? How would that serve his cause? Still weird after all these years, is that what he wishes her to see? Still fucked in the head?

She clasps her hands together.

GULP!

Should he ask why she hates Jews? Or will she tell him he’s raving.
I don’t hate Jews. You’re raving.

So what should he say to her?
SSSSS! You are a very bad
person. SSSSS!

The train SCREECHES! to a halt. The doors SSSSSLIDE! open. This is her chance. Run for it.

RUN! as you ran the last time. RUN! as you ran from those who allowed you to run because they didn’t know what else to do with you. RUN! from yourself.

She is in front of him again, RUNNING! The lozengepattern dress is tight across her back. It is a young mother’s dress, not an old lady’s. She looks ludicrous in a dress that clings, and then makes a soft sucking sound when it comes away from her thighs. Something more becoming would be more becoming. And a stick. If she had a stick he could attack her with it. An eye for an eye, a stick for a stick.

THWAAAACK!

The platform is deserted. Not even a rat wants to be down here.

‘HAVE PITY!’ she cries as he pursues her. ‘PLEASE!’