Kalooki Nights (56 page)

‘Trust me, Max,’ she said, ‘it’s about religion.’

2

There’s a simple rule about temper: if you can’t lose it with one person you lose it with another.

In the brief but bruising time I was married to Alÿs – I accept it was brief and bruising for her too – I behaved abominably to my mother. ‘If this is what you’re like married to a nice Jewish girl,’ she said towards the end of one of my more vitriolic Crumpsall visits, in the course of which I’d attacked everything she did and everyone she knew, ‘I can’t wait for you to be divorced and going out with a shikseh again.’

‘Amen to that,’ I said. ‘And Alÿs isn’t a nice Jewish girl. There are no nice Jewish girls. The first Jewish girl I ever touched gave me crabs—’

‘Max!’

‘Well, it’s the truth. And this one wants me to become a
Palestinian. They’re either lewd or they’re self-righteous. Or they live in the mikveh. Or they play kalooki.’

‘Well, that’s a variety for you to choose from.’

‘But none of them are nice. I’ve never met a nice Jewish girl.’

‘What about your sister? Isn’t Shani a nice Jewish girl?’

‘Yes but she’s my sister, and she plays kalooki.’

‘Will you shut up about kalooki!’

‘I can’t. Why if you must play cards don’t you at least play bridge? Or poker even. Why don’t you go to the theatre? This house used to be full of intellectuals. They talked Marx in the garden, Ma. Where are they now?’

‘Dead, Max.’

‘So find some more.’

‘There are no more. They don’t make Jews like that any more. And anyway, they came for your father, not me.’

‘That isn’t true. They came every bit as much for you. I remember how their faces lit up when they saw you.’

‘You can hardly call that intellectual.’

‘Yes, you can. Since they weren’t, I assume, all having affairs with you, they were in love with the idea of you. And you have to be an intellectual to be in love with the idea of beauty.’

‘Thank you, Max. But I was young then. I’m sorry that I haven’t been able to stay young for you for ever.’

‘Ma, it’s not just about being young. You used to dance in the living room with trade unionists. And when you weren’t dancing you were arguing. Now you watch soap operas on television and go to see
Phantom of the Opera
with your girlfriends.’

‘Twice!’

‘Exactly.’

‘What’s wrong with
Phantom of the Opera
?’

‘Everything. But the main thing wrong with it is that it’s not Jewish. It’s goyisher. You should have some pride.’

‘So what are we supposed to do? Watch
Fiddler on the Roof
every night?’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘You marry shiksehs and I watch
Fiddler on the Roof
to make it right! Here’s an idea – why don’t you stop marrying shiksehs and let me enjoy
Phantom of the Opera
?’

‘Because I lose my temper when I’m not married to a shikseh.’

‘You’re not exactly happy when you’re with them, Max.’

‘I know. But at least my unhappiness isn’t Jew-centred. I can be unhappy and not think it’s the fault of our religion. I don’t have to be disappointed by another Jew. What’s happened to us, Ma? Why are all the Jews up here either make-believe goyim or Hassidim in fancy dress? In hiding, or not in hiding enough. Where did our Jewish seriousness go?’

‘The Hassidim you are so rude about are serious. How can you say they aren’t? They wouldn’t think you were much of a serious Jew.’

‘Because I’m a cartoonist?’

‘Because you’re not a serious Jew. What do you do that is Jewish?’

‘What do I do that is Jewish? That’s a laugh. What do I do that isn’t Jewish? And everything I do is more Jewish than anything they do. They’re a sect. They’re two centuries old, tiptop. And they’re as flaky as Mormons. I’m the real thing, Ma. I go back to the Old Testament. I’m what a Jew is supposed to be. I don’t forgive. I separate things. I argue with the Almighty. He likes that. He likes what I do more than he likes their blind obedience or all that ecstatic dancing they go in for. Every time anyone danced in the seeing of the Lord in the good old days He sent down thunderbolts to burn them up. He’d have Hassids for breakfast if He were still around. They’re not serious. They’re hysterics. Serious was what happened in our garden.’

‘Don’t upset me.’

But I needed to upset her.

‘I want my dad back, Ma.’

‘So do I, Max.’

And in the same way, for the very reason that I couldn’t tell Francine what I thought of her – not least because I didn’t
know
what I thought of her – I took it out on Manny.

‘Look, I enjoy having you here,’ I told him, when he finally surfaced for breakfast. He hadn’t bothered to change out of his neurovegetative pyjamas. His curiously unlined face was crumpled from sleep. He looked like a boy who had gone to bed forty years ago, and woken up an old man.

But not old enough to respond gracefully. No
Thank you very
much, I am enjoying being here myself.
No shy smile of gratitude if words were beyond him. But then what the hell! – he never did have manners.

‘You can stay for ever if you like,’ I went on. ‘To my surprise I find your company soothing. But come on, Manny. You know perfectly well what the gesheft is here. You agreed to it. Yes, you said, yes you’d talk to me. And all I get, when I get anything, when you haven’t gone into hiding for a week, is Horst Schumann, Oscar fucking Wilde, guns, swords, you shooting Dorothy—’

‘Who said anything about shooting Dorothy?’

‘You asked me to guess who you might have fancied pointing your little gun at. So that’s my guess. Dorothy. Or that
was
my guess. Today I don’t think you fancied pointing a gun at anybody.’

‘Why would I have wanted to s-ssschoot Dorothy?’

He was growing agitated, banging the tips of his fingers together.

‘I’ve just told you, that isn’t any longer what I think. You were winding me up. I let myself be wound. OK?’

‘But you let yourself think I wanted to kill Dorothy?’

‘Manny, for God’s sake – I did, I do, I will, think anything. I am not proof against thoughts. Particularly when another person’s prompting them as you were. Don’t make anything of this.’

I passed him the toast. Peace.

He took two slices and cut them into narrow segments, like the
soldiers children dip into their eggs. Then he stared down at what he’d done. Two hands, of five fingers each.

‘Why, of all people, did you choose Dorothy? I was Dorothy’s friend. If you want to know, I liked her more than Asher.’

Did he mean he liked her more than Asher liked her, or he liked her more than he liked Asher? You don’t ask. You don’t quibble over syntax when someone’s making human hands out of toast. But it did matter, what he meant. It made a difference.

‘That’s interesting,’ I said. Thinking as I said it that poor old Francine had employed the wrong person for this job. She was right – I did come at everything backwards.

‘I’m flattered by your interest. But I want you to explain your thinking to me. You explain what you think Dorothy had ever done to me that I should want to harm her.’

Fucked your life, was the answer I wanted to give. But what I chose to say was, ‘Caused everyone great pain. Caused you misery.’

‘How had she caused me misery?’

‘It caused you immense misery to see everyone so distressed the first time. You told me that. You told me you were having fits. I can easily understand that when she appeared from nowhere, starting the whole thing over, just as you and Asher were getting on well . . . Christ, Manny, you said yourself you felt as though your life had just begun . . . I can easily understand why that would have upset you.’

‘
Upset
me?’ More out of distress than anger, it seemed to me, he pushed his toast away from him. A couple of pieces fell to the floor. My job to retrieve them, I thought. And maybe my job to stay down there, scrabbling about under the table, while he calmed himself.

‘S-sscch-sssch-shit!’ he said, rising from his chair. It was the first time he had ever got the word out. The first time I had ever heard him swear.

A great desolation swept over me. Now that he had sworn, the
world was a sadder, meaner place. We’d been happy so long as Manny kept the s-shit inside him. We hadn’t known it, but we were.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

He went over to the sink and turned the tap on, holding his hands under the water. Not washing, just letting them get wet. ‘Sorry. That’s all right then, is it? You’re sorry.’

‘No, it isn’t all right if you don’t feel it is. But I’m still sorry.’

He was, I thought, resolutely showing me his back, not just hiding himself from me but denying me his face, excluding me from human commerce. Was that what prisoners did? I wondered. Was that how, in a confined space, you withdrew the consolation of humanity?

From behind he resembled a crippled child, twisted and shrunken, the head, on its optimistic questionmark neck, still a little boy’s; but inside the dressing gown his bones were disintegrating. Shake the dressing gown and he’d fall out of it in bits.

I could tell from the movement of his neck that he was saying something, emptying words into the sink.

‘I can’t hear you,’ I said. ‘If you want to speak to me, you’ll have to turn the water off.’

He swung round and bared his little teeth at me. Had he been holding a gun . . .

‘You don’t kill people,’ he said, ‘because they “upset” you.’

It was now or never. ‘So why
do
you kill people?’ I said at long, long last.

3

I knew the official version by heart. On his belated arrest in 1961, the Austrian-born euthanasiast and flautist Georg Renno, deputy director of the SS gassing institution at Hartheim, declared that ‘Turning the tap on was no big deal’. According to Manny’s lawyers, it was in order to verify this claim that Manny had turned
the tap on while his parents were asleep. Renno was wrong, he said in his statement. Turning the tap on
was
a big deal.

I wondered if, over breakfast – over what was left of breakfast – Manny was going to tell me what he’d told his lawyers.

But it was hard to get him off the subject of Dorothy. I cannot reproduce the fits and starts of what he said. Now returning to the table to discuss it all equably, as though he hadn’t thrown his toast on the floor, hadn’t turned his back on me, hadn’t bared his teeth, for all the world as though we were discussing nothing more important to him than an item in the morning’s newspapers; then rising from his chair again in what I feared could be the beginning of a fit, going over to the sink, turning on the water as though he needed not to hear himself, shouting into the water and rinsing away his words. But the gist of it was that he saw Dorothy as an opportunity not just for Asher, but for his family, for his father and his mother, and for himself. She was their second chance. In Dorothy something else had happened that wasn’t the same old story. She was a release for them. Nothing to do with forgiveness. Nothing to do with making peace with Germans. It wasn’t even about her, it was about them. Whatever the rights and wrongs of refusing her the first time, they should, for their own sakes, have accepted her a second. He could see the argument going on for ever. Again and again, round and around, for another two thousand years and another two thousand years after that. Dorothy gave them a way of breaking the chain. Accept Dorothy and it was as good, after all that darkness, as accepting light. He made her sound like a new religion.

I nodded. But my offering to know what he meant made him furious.

‘Why are you doing that?’ His voice almost became a bark. ‘Do you think I am saying this in order for you to agree with me? This was my truth, not anybody else’s. I don’t invite you to s-sssshare my truth.’

I was careful not to nod my head at that.

But he could see inside my head anyway. Although he didn’t look at me I could feel him burrowing away in there, turning his X-ray vision on me. Banality – that was what he saw.
And then
you snapped, Manny. And then you felt you could take it no longer. Someone had to make a change, so you did. Quick, before someone else attempted something even worse. Quick, before you had a fit. Unless it was in a fit that you did it. Boom! Hiss!
Whatever noise the instruments of murder make.

Banalities.

So I was prepared for him to be at least more original. And he didn’t let me down.

‘I didn’t kill my parents,’ he said, seemingly inconsequentially, and yet very precisely too, as much as to suggest that he had all along been coming to this point, organising his answer not just to the question I had put to him minutes before, but to every question raised by our meeting up again in the first place, if only I’d been patient – ‘I didn’t kill my parents, I simply stopped protecting them.’

The kitchen, I thought, turned very cold.

I wanted to nod, but yet again I did not dare. I also had the feeling that it was important to him that I should be bemused by this; that he needed us to be a long way apart, of no moral or experiential likeness to each other whatsoever.

Ever since he was a child, he went on, he had believed his parents’ safety to be dependent on him and him alone. He could not remember when he hadn’t thought the only thing that stood between them and catastrophe was him. There were dangers all round, and it had been his responsibility to avert them for everybody. He was the reason the house did not burn down or flood. He was the reason they were not burgled and killed in their beds. If his father were to escape being put up against a wall and shot, he, Manny, had to watch over him. He knew what they did to Jewish women. What was to stop them doing it again? There was no indignity or degradation or disaster he did not imagine
befalling them. He foresaw everything. Foresaw it photographically, pictured them in a picture book, though not the sort of picture books I made. I could laugh all I liked (I hardly need to point out that I was not laughing), but whatever had happened once could happen again. There was even a sense, though he didn’t expect me to understand this either, in which everything that had happened
had
happened again, and
was
happening, and happening to them, despite all his efforts to keep them safe. Asher was no use. Asher was incapable of looking out for anybody. Asher, in fact, was just another of his obligations. If Asher did not fall under a bus or forget to wake up in the morning, if Asher wasn’t found hanging from a tree in the forest with his genitals cut off, that was only because he, Manny, stood guard to see it didn’t happen. He kept them alive, every member of his family, by sheer effort of his will. And kept himself alive for them likewise, because – he didn’t expect me to understand this – these too were among the horrors he imagined on their behalf: his own death, their horror at finding him with all his bones broken at the bottom of the stairs, or drowned in the bath, the grief they would feel, the shock which would itself be enough to kill them, so that he couldn’t take a step without being conscious of his own safety and how much he owed them that, how important it was that he stayed alive for them, that he spared them the anguish of his death . . .