Kalooki Nights (60 page)

You dream that they will beg you to HAVE PITY! You promise that if you ever again meet them and they beg you to HAVE PITY! you will devote the rest of your days to the service of Elohim. Not a lot to ask. Just sit them next to me in a JEW JEW! train, have them beg me to show PITY! and I am yours, O Lord.

He is gaining on her, which isn’t difficult, given her age, given her dress, given her fear, when she loses her footing. It is all in slow motion, all happening in high, narrow incontrovertible frames, the wicked falling from the height of their wrongdoing, the good almost static in their icy vengefulness, never to be satisfied, inconsolable.

She falls, frame by frame she goes over, just as another train is coming into the station.

JEW JEW! JEW JEW!

He stands stiller than justice, and watches. The train, the woman, the train, the woman, the train SPLAAAAT! the train.

And then the faces in the window, each as blank and pitiless as his own.

Thank you, Elohim. Have pity? NO!

‘What happened?’ people gather from nowhere to ask. ‘Ever see her before?’

‘No,’ he answers, averting a head which is blackened, however the shadows fall on him. ‘No, she . . .’

Then as to no one, his back turned, impassive, sepulchral, denied, as the impenetrable dark swallows him – it’s the number of shades of darkness he has found that you admire the cartoonist for, that and the elegant chasteness of the overall design – ‘She was a perfect stranger.’

A painting is finished when the artist says it is finished.

Rembrandt

Yisgadal veyiskadash . . .

For my mother this time. They all leave you. One by one, they all depart.
Yisgadal veyiskadash shemey rabo, Be’olmo di’vero
chir’usey
. May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified in the world He created as He willed. Amen.

I had not been expecting it. She had been growing forgetful, but she had lost little of her slender youthfulness, even her ankles still worth stealing a glance at had any of her old admirers been alive. And I had thought that kalooki, if nothing else, would keep her immortal. You live to a riper age, they say, if you stay mentally agile. The more you perplex your mind, the longer it works for you. Kalooki wasn’t quantum mechanics but it did engage her in calculations that needed a bit of knotting out. Not just computing what you could do with the cards you held yourself, but what everyone else could be expected to do with theirs. Likelihood theory. What must Ilsa Cohen have in her hand for her to have discarded the jack of spades. How would Gittel Franks respond, knowing Gittel Franks, if you held on to your cards for one round more. The trouble was that Ilsa Cohen, though nominally alive in defiance of her own rogue hand’s attempts to do away with her, had lost her mind and was languishing in an old persons’ home where at least, Shani told me, the staff continued to paint her fingernails with hearts and diamonds, spades and clubs. And Gittel Franks had collapsed and died while being Shirley Bassey at a karaoke night thrown to celebrate her great-granddaughter’s
sixteenth birthday. Not all at once, though the shock of realisation was sudden enough, my mother woke up to the fact that they were leaving her. And you can’t play kalooki on your own.

They stopped coming and that was the end of it. She barely had what you could call an illness. Her heart failed. It was as simple as that.

Shani rang me and I flew back up. You can’t hang around when it comes to Jewish burial. Blink and they’ve put your mother in the ground. Habdalah. Keep the quick from the dead.

Shani and I hugged for a long time. We weren’t hugging siblings but we were on our own now. We said the usual things, that it was good she hadn’t suffered, that she went as she would have chosen to go, that she had loved Dad and stayed faithful to him, and how touching it was that she had viewed that – though she could easily have had another nibble, another bite even, at romance – as the one and only important relationship of her life. I began to say I wished her time had not been given over so exclusively to a simple card game; that it was a pity she never went to the theatre or the opera, a tragedy that she didn’t read, that she didn’t listen to good music, that she didn’t welcome abstract thought, that she hadn’t, as a Jew, availed herself of Jewish seriousness – but Shani reminded me that that could just as easily have been her life I was describing. ‘It’s not a sin to be a philistine,’ she told me. And I didn’t tell her that for a Jew I thought it was.

Mick Kalooki tried hard, for Shani’s sake, not to go to pieces. But it wasn’t easy. Only in the nick of time was Shani able to stop him ordering a wreath for the coffin in the shape of a deck of cards. He couldn’t understand why not. Why shouldn’t Leonora be buried surrounded not only by those she loved but in the company, so to speak, of
what
she loved? It was tough, without hurting his feelings as an honorary Jew, trying to explain to him that Jews didn’t as a general rule do flowers in a big way at funerals, and never at all on the coffin itself. Flowers at funerals were common and showy. The word MOM made of pink roses
was unthinkable to a Jew. POP done with red geraniums the same. Simplicity was the thing. An austere simplicity before the great democracy of death. Start having flowers on your coffins and soon the rich man will be buried in greater pomp than the pauper.

‘It’s a very beautiful religion,’ Mick said. He was unable to keep the tears back.

He loved my mother. But I also knew it upset him to realise there were elements of Judaism he was never going to master. All those hours put into k’nish and kreplach, and still flowers for the dead could floor him.

I lost all control of myself at the cemetery. When it came to the shovelling of soil on to my mother’s coffin – a mitzvah for a Jew, a sacred duty of love – I staggered back from the grave and let the shovel fall from my hand. I couldn’t throw dirt on her. I couldn’t accept her returned to dust. If it had to be, it had to be, but I didn’t have to be party to it. Shani took me by the hand, like a mother with her child, and helped me. We held the shovel together, but I was unable to look. Just hearing it was bad enough. Gravel on wood. The end of us.

As I was leaving the cemetery I saw Manny. He was wearing a long black coat and a yarmulke. Had he not been standing at a distance from most of the other mourners, as though he believed he had no real right to be there, he could have been mistaken for the officiating rabbi. A little old rabbi flown in from Novoropissik to do the business as they used to do it in the old country. I went over to him and held out my hand. He wished me ‘long life’. I inclined my head. I hoped he was not going to say he envied me not having a mother.

‘I’m sorry,’ was what did he say. ‘I remember your mother. She was a very nice person. My parents always spoke highly of her.’

For the second time that afternoon I wondered if I was going to faint. ‘It’s nice of you to have come,’ I said.

I was surprised to see he was not on his own. A woman who had been standing even more removed from the proceedings
than he was, brought herself forward, also to wish me ‘long life’. She was not anyone I knew. A woman a little older than me, I estimated, a touch heavy in the torso, with a strong square face and a fiercely vulnerable expression. Pretty still, or maybe pretty, as sometimes happens, only since she’d aged. Some issue of age, over and above the usual ones of regret and apprehension, hung over her. The prettiness spoke of it, the unnaturally piercing blue eyes spoke of it, and the long hair, worn down her back like a girl’s, proclaimed it – notwithstanding everything else I had to sorrow over – to a degree I found painful. From the way she positioned herself by Manny I surmised that she was in some caring or even custodial relation to him. Could Manny have been rearrested and reincarcerated? I wondered. Had they let him out, just for the afternoon, on humanitarian grounds, and could this woman have been his nurse or his prison guard? Were they even, for the duration of my mother’s funeral, manacled together?

I thanked them both for their attendance and was about to walk away to join Shani and Mick when Manny suddenly said, ‘Max, this is Dorothy.’

There are no revelations. Everything you learn, you know already.

I insisted they return with me to the shiva house. I wanted to give them something. Wine sweeter than sweet sherry, and kichels. ‘Be careful, you can break your teeth on those,’ I told Dorothy. But of course she knew that already.

I stuck Mick Kalooki on to Manny. If there were things about the faith Mick had not got to the bottom of yet, Manny was the one to ask. A crying shame they hadn’t been introduced to each other earlier. Dorothy I engineered into a corner, by the celloshaped cabinet where my father’s boxing gloves were still on display, and where my mother kept the glasses and the doilies for kalooki, sitting us both down on those low stools which mourners
are meant to occupy for the duration of the shiva. And there I got her to tell me everything I knew.

The house, of course, to which Manny had once invited me and where we’d pitted Rothko against cartoons, the house I’d imagined was a charitable home for Jewish men who’d killed their parents, was of course – of course of course – Dorothy’s. I’d fancied it was near to where she had walked Asher to meet her father in the days of their innocence before all their worlds fell in, but I’d got that slightly wrong. It wasn’t near her old home. It
was
her old home. And Manny lived there. Not as a lodger, she wanted me to understand, though she wasn’t always able to get Manny himself to understand that. But she hoped that I did. Not as a lodger. It was his home too. Had been his home from the day he was released. She had gone personally to collect him. As how could she not? Who else was going to do it?

The question on a day of tears made me want to cry again. Who else? Well, why not Asher?

She looked at me I wasn’t sure whether with astonishment at what I didn’t appear to know, for someone who appeared to know everything, or to be certain that I was strong enough to hear speak of it now. I made similar enquiries with my eyes of her.
Me?
her expression said.
I’m strong enough for everything
. And I didn’t allow my eyes to say in return
Is that why you let your hair
grow down your back like a girl’s?

I wasn’t strong enough and never will be. I bleed easily. Epistaxis of the imagination. The membranes of the brain dry quickly, then are quick to rupture. Many cartoonists suffer from the same condition. But I was obliged to learn a lesson from my father. You stay on your feet no matter how much blood you lose.

Asher.

The Jew I envied above all others. Marked black like Cain, the way I’d have liked to look. Seeded like a pomegranate with the sorrows and the tribulations of his people, but juicy with the wine
of the pomegranate, too, spicy with spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, his lips like a thread of scarlet.

But he was seeded with a sorrow too many. When the police roused him from his bed (Dorothy beside him) to tell him that his parents had been murdered, he bent double as though a horse had kicked him in the stomach, and bawled blood. His doing. He was marked black like Cain. It was his doing. Yes, his brother had lost his reason, but what had
made
his brother lose his reason?

And the Lord said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now thou art cursed from the earth . . .

Cursed from the earth, Asher knew at once that he would never be able to resume relations with the woman he loved and had wanted, for as long as he could remember, for his wife. Whenever he looked into her face, he would see them. As for his brother, Asher could not even begin to describe the abhorrence he felt. He was bereft of everything, and at his brother’s hands. Was that what Manny had wanted – to put an end to everybody’s happiness if he could have no happiness of his own? He could not have been so deranged, could he, as to suppose that with his parents dead, Asher would settle down to a carefree life with Dorothy? No one could be so deluded. So it had been an attack on all of them. Manny had gassed them all – his mother and his father, and Asher, and Dorothy, and himself.

Dorothy, after many years to think about it, did not agree with Asher. Yes, she believed, Manny
had
been deluded. She believed he had done it, partly, for her. Out of deluded love for her. Not selfish love. The very opposite of selfish love. And you can’t get much more deluded than that. Even at the time, she wanted to tell Asher that. Forgive your poor brother. He did not comprehend what he was doing. He doesn’t think as other people think. But Asher had gone again. Gone once, and now gone a second time. Gone not to come back. And she was not able to tell him anything.

’For which abandonment of you, after all he had done to promote your happiness, Manny fantasised about shooting him?’

She was surprised I knew that. ‘To this day Manny believes he did in fact shoot his brother, yes,’ she said. She had begun to rock a little on her chair. ‘So he told you that?’

‘Not in so many words. But I wonder why he doesn’t also believe he shot you.’

‘Because I’m here. Because he can see me. Because I’m not dead.’

Ah.

So we had got to it at last. What I needed to be told but had always known. That Asher was out of it. Lying under a shovelful of dirt, just like my mother.

It seems that he went back to Israel. ‘Seems’, because Dorothy too had had to piece it all together. Did not stay for the inquest into his parents’ death or for their funeral, never looked upon his brother, never spent another hour with Dorothy, never spoke to her or otherwise informed her where he’d gone, never even packed a bag. And in Israel, not many years into Manny’s sentence, they shot him. He had thrown in his lot with the fanatics, stood guard at the iron gates of a settlement in Ramallah, with his rifle in one hand and his Bible in another, claiming back what Elohim had promised to his people, where they shot him.

‘They being terrorists?’

She hesitated. Was I meant, I wondered, to have said ‘freedom fighters’, as Alÿs would have demanded? But that wasn’t the reason for the hesitation.