Kalooki Nights (27 page)

And what I could imagine I could draw.

Errol had one other point to make about the miracle of Manny’s escape from the pit before leaving the subject. ‘I bet the creep got the idea for that from the time I beat him up in that air-raid shelter of yours,’ he said. ‘His father lying on top of him, me sitting on his face stopping him from breathing. I bet he wanks about me being a Nazi, the freak.’

‘Or about you being his father,’ I said. Which caused Errol to pretend to beat me up.

Of course I knew that every word Manny had said about Lithuania was preposterous, but the fact of his bothering to lie at all made me suspect that some essential aspect of it could be true, that while he was too young to be a survivor of the war, he
was just possibly someone other than we thought he was, and certainly not the brother of Asher, for example, whom he resembled in absolutely no particular.

But then the rows between his brother and his parents (real or imaginary) began in earnest, terrible screaming contests, some of them so blood-curdling that on a couple of occasions Tsedraiter Ike had to go over and hammer on their door to make certain Selick Washinsky was not having another and this time more serious stroke. At which time it occurred to me that Manny’s pit story wasn’t a description of the past at all, but of the future.

7

The reason it was Tsedraiter Ike who did the neighbourly thing and not my father was that my father wasn’t up to it. He had gone into hospital on the same day as Selick Washinsky, and even shared a ward with him for forty-eight hours, before they let him out with a warning: ‘Take it easy.’ In those days that was all they could do for a worn-out heart, before bypasses and transplants – prescribe rest and quiet and as many pills as he was prepared to swallow.

‘What about boxing?’ he ’d asked the doctor.

Not quite a family friend, Dr Shrager. Though he chose to act like one. ‘Over my dead body,’ he said.

‘What about being Jewish, speaking of dead bodies?’ This to needle Shrager, who did Jewish in a bigger way than my father thought a doctor of medicine should.

‘What
about
being Jewish?’

‘Do I have to die Jewish?’

‘No one’s talking about dying, Jack.’

‘Well, I wasn’t, but
you
are.’

‘Just take the pills.’

‘And if they don’t work they’ll bury me the same afternoon and have some rabbi mutter mumbo-jumbo over me.’

Similar mumbo-jumbo to that from which he ’d preserved me on my thirteenth birthday.

How much all that thirteenth-birthday stuff had contributed to the breakdown in his health I cannot say with any certainty. But I do recall, in the period after his discovering the real reason behind my mother’s gala kalooki night, a strange passage in which, around me particularly, he alternated needless irritation with an unaccustomed, not to say uncomfortable, solicitousness. One occasion stands out above the others. I had been in the habit, when it was too cold to go on drawing in the air-raid shelter, of bringing my sketchbook back home, being careful always to keep it out of the way. All discussion of Manny’s and my cartoon history of the anguish of the Jewish people had stopped the day my father recommended I get another interest – boxing, say – a year or so before. Just how serious his objections would be if he learned I was still at it, I didn’t know, but it seemed prudent not to put him to the test. He asked no questions, I told no lies. So I shouldn’t have been such a fool as to leave it where he could see it – Freudian? well, I accept it sounds Freudian – a caricature of Ilse Koch
à la
Hank Jansen in full riding gear and with swastikas on her saddle inspecting a line of naked Jewish prisoners with hard-ons. (Unless that should be, as Errol always insisted, hards-on.)

‘I don’t mind the sexual fantasy,’ my father said. ‘You like a big toches on a woman – that’s your business. At your age I was no better. But I’ll tell you what I do mind . . .’

I was covered with embarrassment. ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know – the swastikas. And the private parts.’

He looked at me in astonishment. ‘Why should I mind the swastikas or the private parts? The only time I’d mind a swastika is if you came home wearing one. And we’ve all got private parts. What I mind, Maxie, is the look on the faces of those Jews. Why have they got no fight in them?’

Well, I couldn’t tell him, could I, that in my book acquies
cence, when you knew what you were acquiescing to, was a sort of fighting.

He shook his head. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘if you’re going to be an artist, be an artist. But do me a favour’ – and here he reached across and grabbed my wrists, a restraining officer, handcuffing me with his fingers – ‘just don’t make every Jew you draw synonymous with suffering.’

I wanted to protest that he hadn’t taken adequate cognisance of their hard-ons/hards-on; that their hard-ons/hards-on, artistically speaking, stood for the virility of the Jewish people in the face of adversity. You know, a cartoonist’s way of saying you cannot keep us down. But there are some conversations you don’t have with your father, particularly when he’s taken you into custody. And even more particularly when he’s unwell.

It must have been about a fortnight after this conversation that he complained of pains in his chest and the same ambulance which had earlier in the day come for Manny’s father, came for mine.

Back home, gulping tablets, he became a chair person, falling asleep in the middle of a conversation, or begging to be excused from taking an interest in anything that wasn’t happening in his chest. ‘My ticker,’ he ’d say, apologetically, touching it and looking somewhere else.

Eventually it became another member of the family – Jack’s ticker. The person other people came to see. His old communist pals visited most days, determined to cheer him up, to get him back to the firebrand he’d been, but they were themselves down in the mouth, not to say shamefaced, after the invasion of Hungary. Elmore Finkel took me into the garden to ask whether I thought it could have been that act of betrayal that had made my father ill. ‘Disillusionment is a terrible depressive,’ he told me. I shook my head. My father had never been under any illusions about Russia. Russia for my father was Novoropissik. The past, not the future. I was proud of him. Only moral and political infants do
disillusionment. Only people foolish enough to have illusions. And my father was not one of those.

But he was tired. Soon, to our great consternation, he didn’t even want to see his chums. We noticed him begin to wince when he heard them on the path. I suggested that we lock the door like other people, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Our door had always been open to everybody and he wasn’t going to close it now. Increasingly, though, he treated them as though they belonged to another existence, pointing to his chest, saying, ‘My ticker,’ and signalling them to leave almost before they’d arrived.

Three months later it stopped ticking altogether.

‘You know, I envy you,’ Manny said, not long after. ‘I wish I didn’t have a father.’

Man has the right and the privilege to declare himself
to be in disagreement with every natural occurrence,
including the biological healing that time brings about.

Jean Améry

1

The revelation was my sister. In the last weeks of my father’s life she was never out of his sight. Following my mother’s lead, I was acting as though everything were as normal. We ate at the same time, made the usual amount of noise, and dropped in to see my father propped up in his bed the way we would on an ordinary Sunday morning. He was lying in, that was all. He was taking a breather. But not to Shani, he wasn’t. To Shani he was dying and she didn’t want to lose a moment of whatever time was left to her to be with him.

She wept openly in his company, sitting by his bedside, stroking his hand. Once when I went in to see him he was holding her in his arms the way he must have held her when she was baby, kissing and smelling her hair, crooning over her. His shaineh maidel he called her – his lovely girl. I couldn’t believe my ears. Shaineh maidel was grandparent Yiddish, maybe even great-grandparent Yiddish. When I drew shtetl Yiddlers that was what I had bubbling out of their mouths – shaineh-maidel talk. No one used that expression any more, except in self-parody, least of all my father. So was that why they’d named her Shani? Had my father crooned into her baby scalp and called her his shaineh maidel the moment he first saw her, his lovely girl, his beautiful daughter – and was she therefore the child of his Jewish sentimentality, Shani because
he had never clapped his eyes on anything prettier in his life, and there was no other word to describe her?

You howl when you hear your dying father remembering when he first held his baby in his arms, regardless of whether that baby was you or someone else. And that was what I did, I ran out of the house and howled the rest of the day away in the air-raid shelter. Was I jealous of Shani? I’m not sure the question is even worth asking. Jealousy and envy are so constituent to our natures we might as well factor them into every consideration of our dealings with one another and not refer to them again. But beyond that, beyond that mole of inwrought meanness, I don’t believe I was put out. My father hadn’t named me after anything beautiful, but I did bear the name of a boxer he admired, and boxing had certainly been as important in his life as beauty. Yes, I howled for me because I would soon be fatherless, but otherwise I howled for him, and, though it goes against the grain professionally for me to say this, for the love he bore his daughter. Call that
my
Jewish sentimentality. He adored her. She was his shaineh maidel, which meant that he adored her with some part of himself that was mysterious to me, and must have been equally mysterious to him. Was it
his
father who was talking through him, or his father’s father before him? I had never known either, but I howled for them as well.

She never left his side. There were complications. Pneumonia? I don’t know. I couldn’t bear to take in the physical facts of his illness. Nor could my mother. We closed our ears when the doctor spoke to us. It wasn’t my father’s death we were in denial of but the truth about bodies. And not just our bodies,
all
bodies. We didn’t want to know how they worked. Offered the choice between ignorance and knowledge, we chose ignorance. Shani was different. Shani took in every detail of what was wrong with him, saw to the medication, told him what to expect, cleaned him up, changed his pyjamas, turned him in his bed, everything. And all without a single expression of petulance or complaint.
Gone, the angry fretful girl who had locked herself away all day, unable to reconcile her eyes to her appearance, gone as though she had never existed. Unable to comprehend what we were seeing, my mother and I exchanged wide-eyed stares of astonishment when we passed on the stairs, but otherwise said nothing. It was as though we didn’t want to speak in case we broke the spell. It’s also possible we were too ashamed to speak. Ashamed of our incompetence and squeamishness, but equally ashamed of the bad opinion we ‘d had of Shani. She wasn’t who we thought she was. Not simply unlike herself, but a different person entirely.

The only one who didn’t seem surprised by this was my father. At an hour when Shani would normally have been immured in her bedclothes, there she was, taking his temperature or delivering him his breakfast. And
dressed
. Dressed not in a sheet either! ‘And how’s my beautiful daughter this fine morning?’ he would say to her, as though she ’d been ministering to him with precisely this efficiency every morning of her life.

She sponged his face, emery-boarded his nails, shaved him – though until the final days he wasn’t so weak that he couldn’t have shaved himself – even cut his hair. He behaved like a child throughout these procedures, submitting to her, as he had never submitted to the decisions of any referee, with the sweetest compliancy, smiling, gazing up at her, and sometimes laughing to himself.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she would say, gently pinching his cheeks.

‘So that you will do that.’

She could barely catch her breath. ‘You’re trying to make me cry.’

He would smile at her, his turn now to touch her face. ‘I’m not. I wouldn’t make you cry for the whole wide world.’

But sometimes, usually in the late afternoon when she ‘d finished her tasks, they wept openly together. And then he would
call her his shaineh maidel again. Which only made her weep the more copiously.

Whether he wept with my mother, I don’t know. That would have happened, if it happened at all, in the night. What occurred between them had always been subject to the strictest blackout. No jocularity, no ribaldry, in our house in the matter of intimate relations between man and wife. They could have been a rabbi and rebitsin, so decorous were they. Indeed, I am hard-pressed to think of any rabbi I have ever met who was as instinctively modest as my father. Never once, for example, did I see him naked. I have photographs of him in the ring, with his chest bare and his chin out and his nose about to bleed, but even in these he is wearing shorts up to his neck and down to his ankles. My mother the same, and I don’t mean with regard to the chest and the shorts. I cannot recall ever having seen her anything but dressed and made-up for the day, and certainly never in a bathrobe. I can only guess, then, at what it must have been like for them in the night, organising their goodbyes, with my father so respectful of her, and she so unwilling to approach the failing of his body. But black circles were appearing around her eyes, and she was beginning to fall absent, forgetting what she had to do, and on occasions who she was talking to.

To me, my father was soldierly. I had to be a strong boy and look after my mother and my sister. Unfortunately I was rarely able to be soldierly in return. No sooner did he say those words – ‘You’re going to have to be a strong boy, Maxie, and look after your mother and your sister’ – than I would begin my howling again. I do no better remembering the words today.

He asked for me one evening, gave me his hand to hold, which I hadn’t done since I was about six, and told me to fight the good fight. When I asked him what he meant he said he didn’t know but I should fight it anyway.