Kalooki Nights (21 page)

Had a Mercedes been a problem for me on German grounds, then a Volkswagen would surely have been a greater one. Linguistics, partly. But also something Errol Tobias had told me once when we were having to lower the tennis net across the street to allow a Volkswagen to pass. ‘If you look at the hubcaps on a Volkswagen,’ he whispered from the side of his face, ‘you’ll see that the VW makes a swastika.’ Since we had a Volkswagen there, waiting for the net to go down, I was well positioned to check.

‘No it doesn’t,’ I said. All I could see was VW.

‘It’s got to be travelling, shmuck.’

So I waited for it to move off. Nothing. Just VW.

‘No, it’s got to be travelling at exactly fifteen miles per hour. Fourteen miles per hour, you won’t see it. Sixteen miles per hour, you won’t see it. It’s got to be fifteen. German efficiency for you.’

I believed him. But it wasn’t easy finding a Volkswagen travelling at exactly fifteen miles per hour. Fifteen miles per hour was a damnably smart speed to pick. Too slow for the main road, too fast for our street. Those Nazis! You have to hand it to them.

But I have managed to find a Volkswagen doing fifteen miles per hour. Once. In Berlin. And the V and the W did embrace into a swastika. I
think.

When I made the mistake of mentioning this phenomenon to Chloë she said, ‘Right, we’re having one.’

As I understood it, the
Volk
in Volkswagen didn’t carry an umlaut.
Völkchen
and
Völkerschaft
, yes. Volkswagen, no. But Chloë inserted one regardless. To be precise about it, she inserted two, yodelling the spaces between the
v
and the
l
, and then the
l
and the
k
for good measure, as though a double valley of umlauting divided them. On occasions she even threw one over the
a
in wagen, which made three umlauts in all.

Because she knew it annoyed me, we carted her mother around in the Beetle whenever we were up with her or she was down with us; and because
she
knew it annoyed me, her mother sang cod-German songs in the back seat. No sooner did I put us into top gear than Chloë would wind open the little aperture in the roof, which was the signal for her mother to begin. ‘I Love to Go a Wandering’ was her favourite, especially the line about ‘a knapsack on my back’ which she interpreted as ‘ein k-näpsäck ön mein bërk’. Carols, too, she liked, in particular ‘
O Tannenbaum
’ and ‘
Stille Nacht
’, employing German noises, nothing more than gargles, where she didn’t know or couldn’t remember the words.

‘Christ the what-is-it again, darling?’ I remember her asking Chloë one clammy afternoon as we powered through the Cheshire dales.

‘
Der Retter
, Mother.’

‘
Retter
meaning?’

‘Saviour, Mother.’

‘Shh – not in front of Maxie, darling’ – this in a stage whisper
– ‘it might upset his sensibilities . . .
Christ, the saviour was bororn, Chri-ist the saviour was born
. . . Do you people accept the idea of a saviour, Max, or are you above saving?’

‘Beyond saving, more like,’ I told her.

‘Ah, well, ho-hum, what you can’t save you can’t have, as the actress said to the archbishop.’

‘Mother, don’t be vulgar!’

‘What – what have I done?’

‘Actresses and archbishops! Act your age!’

‘All right, as the Jewess said to the chief rabbi, then.’

While all along I sat with the dinky volksie steering wheel clamped in my white clenched fists, racking my brain for some county that had the word
mutilation
or
perdition
in it, up or down the little wooden hill to which etc. Then it was home, James, and don’t spare the horsepower, followed by ‘I’ll be saying
auf
Wiedersehen
to you now –
auf Wiedersehen
!’

To show there were no hard feelings, Chloë’s mother bought me a toy rabbi to hang in the rear window of my Völökswägen. What she thought I’d like about it was the way it nodded its head when the car was in motion, just like ‘one of those Hassocks you sometimes see mumbling to Mecca on a train’.

‘I think you mean Hassids,’ I told her. ‘A hassock’s a hairy cushion.’

‘Same difference, darling.

‘And they’re not looking towards Mecca.’

She rolled her eyes at her daughter. ‘So touchy your husband’s people, Chlo. You can’t even buy them a present without their getting aerated.’

I don’t know where she bought the rabbi. She travelled a bit when she could tear herself away from my company, so it was possible she had picked it up in some colony of ex-Nazis hanging out in Argentina. Or a friend could have found it for her, thinking of me, the sheeny son-in-law, in a corner shop in one of the more
Orthodox suburbs of Jerusalem. Meer-sh’arim maybe. You can never tell with tat; bad taste narrows the gap between the sentimental way you see yourself, and the scorn with which others see you. Half of what’s for sale in Israel you’d consider anti-Semitic if you saw it anywhere else.

The one thing I knew for sure was that neither she nor her daughter had made it. They lacked both the patience and the aptitude for handicrafts. It’s also very unlikely, wherever Chloë’s mother came by the nodding rabbi, that she’d have shelled out much for it. ‘I’m as tight as you people are,’ she winked at me one day. ‘Only I’m a tightey-whitey, whereas you’re . . .’

She couldn’t think of anything.

‘A meany-sheeny,’ I came back, quick as a flash.

How did she do that? How was she able to lure me into being rude about myself? It was an astonishing gift. She could make you say the vilest things in the hope of saying them before she did.

But as far as the rabbi goes, wherever she got it and however much it cost was finally irrelevant. It was the thought that counted.

4

And among the thoughts it occasioned was this one: it looked like Manny.

A cruel thing to say, as it was a cruel thought to have, but that was the truth of it – the toy rabbi reminded me of Manny, rocking and rolling to Elohim in my Völökswägen’s rear-view mirror.

I wasn’t, you see, much better than my mother-in-law when it came to respect for the holy.

That was my only reminder of Manny in those day – the days before he broke all the Ten Commandments in the act of breaking one – the only reason I ever had to think of him. What had become of him I didn’t know. Not something I enquired about
on my occasional visits to Crumpsall Park – whether he’d left home, whether he was still studying at the yeshiva, whether he had indeed become a rabbi, or whether he was tramping the watery pavements like the man with paper in his shoes who popped up all over Manchester, muttering and looking skywards – at one time a famous rabbi himself, people said. Had I seen him in the street I would have stopped to talk to him, of course. Had I bumped into either of his parents on my visits home, or even Asher – though Asher had become a sort of ghost in my imagination by this time – I’d have asked after him and sent him my best wishes. But they didn’t leave the house much, Asher never materialised, and I didn’t go looking.

When I sold the Völökswägen I remembered to retrieve the toy, faithfully repositioning it where it would be visible in the mirror of the new car. And I did it again with the car after that. A sentimental ritual, though whether it was Chloë and her mother I was sentimentalising, or Manny Washinsky, I couldn’t have told you. But after the phone call from my mother apprising me of Manny’s crime, it seemed proper to remove what all at once appeared to be a cruelly satiric effigy of him. I didn’t throw it away. But I didn’t want to see it, didn’t want a comical reminder, bobbing about in the back of my car, of someone who had passed out of comical remembrance into something more terrible.

Later, when they locked him up, I would picture him despite myself – for I tried not to picture him at all – as Goya’s blackchalked
Lunatic Behind Bars
, his head dehumanised, as pitiful as a caged dog’s, staring out at something he could not see, one naked arm out of the bars, the bars criss-crossed like a wooden crate, a creature as much boxed as barred, nailed away for ever, the more heartbreaking for his compliance.

My removal of him from my sight was more friendly. Not me scalding all trace of him from under my fingernails. More an act of piety.

* * *

I still have the rabbi among my possessions, wrapped in a silk handkerchief and folded into a black cardboard box which had originally housed an expensive set of pencils – a gift from Zoë, ‘To my juicy Jew Jew boy’ inscribed in the lid.

She should have seen Manny’s brother.

That Manny Washinsky was not going to have a conventionally happy life was obvious to everyone who knew him. You couldn’t picture him settled comfortably in a nice house with a loving family and in a fulfilling job – those being what a happy life comprised in those days. You couldn’t even picture him breathing normally. But had someone suggested he would wind up in prison on a murder rap, I’d have laughed and told them they had the wrong person. Right street, wrong person. You mean Errol Tobias, further up and on the other side. You mean Errol Tobias, whose depravity is such that it would be a kindness to the community if you incarcerated him now, the damage he was going to do being only a matter of time. Yet today Manny is the old lag, his imprisoned mind a charnel house, while Errol Tobias performs the functions of an exemplary husband and father, importing wines from Israel and living quietly in Borehamwood.

Whether there are any lessons to be drawn from that, whether Errol Tobias’s depravity was only skin-deep, a passing sinfulness which he would grow out of eventually, or whether it’s still in there, biding its time, I can no more than guess. But he was the most depraved person I had ever met and it’s hard to imagine where in the universe such depravity could have got to had it left him.

His version of the terrible fight he had with Manny – for me a high watermark (or do I mean a low watermark?) in the history of his depravity, though for him I suspect it was just another day – began with Manny biting him. When I disagreed, insisting that from where I stood Manny only started biting him when he started pulling off Manny’s trousers, he changed the story without a
qualm to its all beginning when Manny laughed at him. I wasn’t there for that part, which occurred, if it occurred as Errol described it all, at the bottom of the street where Errol was ripping out the Golonskys’ garden. Manny had apparently swum past, on his way home from school, flailing his arms, his mouth opening and closing like a carp’s, at the sight of which Errol had plainly said something along the lines of – though I’m only guessing –
Fucking freak! Fucking frummer freak!
Not enough to make Manny stop. He was used to being abused. Not by other Jewish boys, it’s true, but then Errol Tobias wasn’t like other Jewish boys. To have got Manny so much as to look up – and I’m still guessing – Errol must have tried needling him about Asher, maybe at that very moment inventing the calumny (because he surely was its source) that Asher was sleeping with the fire-yekelte in Manny’s mother and father’s bed. Very likely, in that event, that Manny would have halted, wondered what to do or say, then grinned that ghastly ice-mask grin of his, the one that got him into so much trouble with Shitworth Whitworth, the one that served the single purpose of stopping his face collapsing altogether. Only someone even less self-possessed than Manny could have taken that laugh of evisceration as directed derisively at him. But that was exactly how Errol, by his own account, took it.

I knew him for a belcher, Errol Tobias. He was one of those boys who could roll belches out of his stomach for as long as he believed it amused people to hear them. An unusual gift in a Jew, who is usually at pains to keep his stomach to himself. And for the same reason especially abominated by Jews, who do not want that knowledge of another person’s. So I reckon he would have shouted
Your brother’s fucking the fire-yekelte
a few more times, then belched in Manny’s face, before returning to his massacre of the Golonskys’ foliage.

But he must have gone on brooding over what had happened, and nothing good ever came of Errol’s brooding. When he followed himself into his head it was always darker there than it
was outside. Manny and I were in the air-raid shelter, refining another year of Jewish bitterness among the five thousand that there were to cover – though we never, I have to say, went at it chronologically – when he turned up. It was a shock to both of us. We weren’t aware that Errol even knew of the shelter’s existence, let alone that it was a hideout of ours.

‘This is between me and him,’ he said, holding the flat of his hand out to me, like a policeman stopping traffic. ‘Me and the frummer.’

I’d been warned about just such a day, when the yoks would come with their white-boned fists and start knocking us about. Tsedraiter Ike had often told me what to do. ‘Give them everything. Your watch, any money you’re carrying, your yarmulke, everything. And if they call you a dirty Jew, agree with them. Don’t even attempt to defend yourself. You’re bound to lose. They don’t feel pain, remember that. Even if you were to beat their brains out they wouldn’t have the brains to understand that that was what you’d done. Unconscious, they’d still be able to beat you up. Cultivate the Jewish virtue of patience. You’ll get your own back another time, when you’re the judge and they’re up before you for housebreaking. Or when you’re the surgeon . . .’ Even my father, who of course set a very different example of standing up to Nazis, counselled caution when the terrible day, the little local pogrom we all knew was just around the corner, finally rolled round. But what nobody had anticipated was that the yok with the white-boned fist would be Jewish.

And, more ironically still, the very Jew who had made a corkscrew of the neck of Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall, who until then had been a one-man pogrom of his own.

He pushed Manny to the ground – on to the broken bricks and dirt which we’d barely trodden in, so lightly did we occupy the place – and began trying to get his trousers off.

‘Errol . . .’ I said.