Kalooki Nights (12 page)

‘So clever in all the small things of life, your husband, Chlo.’

‘It’s in the genes, Mama. Terminal triviality to genius level. It’s why they make such good accountants.’

‘Too true, I wouldn’t trust my stockings and shares to anyone else. Ho-hum, well, I’ll be saying goodnight now, goodnight.’

At which moment, espying her heading in the direction of retirement with a volume of G. K. Chesterton in her hand (if it wasn’t Chesterton it was Belloc, and don’t ask me what stopped her taking the annotated English countrywoman’s
Letters of
Heinrich Himmler
up to Bedfordshire), something induced me to call out, ‘Off up the little wooden hill to Buchenwald, are we?’

Chloë was outraged. ‘Max!’

‘What?’

‘How dare you talk to my mother like that!’

‘Like what?’

‘How dare you wish my mother in a concentration camp!’

‘Book,’ I said. ‘
Book
enwald, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Leave it,’ Helène shouted down. ‘He spent his formative years in Dewsbury, remember.’

‘Jewsbury!’ I shouted back. ‘Did you just say Jewsbury?’

But she’d won again. I knew that. She was mistress of the gazetteer of the British Isles, to whatever end of phobia and whimsy, and that was that. A man must know when he is beaten. A man must accept his
Schicksal
.

And I accepted mine.

7

We like a thread in my business. We like a leitmotif. Strip cartoonists more than one-offers of the sort I am, but then
Five Thousand
Years of Bitterness
, when you come to think of it, was a strip cartoon of sorts.

So let’s run with maps and gazetteers, a recurrent theme in my life, anyway, considering that I met Björk (who later introduced me to Kätchen) in a map shop in Covent Garden, and wouldn’t have got to know Zoë had Kätchen not walked out on me after a row about her navigation skills.

And then there was Shitworth Whitworth MA, senior geography master at Bishops Blackburn Grammar School . . .

For one year Manny and I were at Bishops Blackburn together. After which his parents took him away. He did well, I reckon, to last a year, given how ill they accommodated even a Jew of my milk-and-water sort, let alone one who held to Manny’s rigid and irrational system of beliefs. I am not accusing the staff at Bishops Blackburn of being anti-Semitic. They simply had us on the brain. When they beheld us, and in fairness there were quite a lot of us to behold for a school with strong Church of England associations, they could see nothing but the Jew in us. I am the same. But then I’m a caricaturist: I am meant to concentrate only on what’s salient. Whereas our teachers were meant to see us all round. They tried. I sincerely believe they had the best intentions. But when they looked at us all round they saw even more Jew than when they looked at us on one plane.

‘Can someone tell me how come a Jew can’t draw a map?’ was the question that precipitated the row that finally precipitated Manny Washinsky from the school. The question issuing from Shitworth Whitworth MA, a sarcastic man who appeared to have been overwound, whose skin vibrated like a percussion instrument when he was upset, and who owned the biggest collection of detachable stiff white collars, always worn with blue and pink striped shirts, and always half a size too tight, any of us had ever seen.

Geography. Most ethnic troubles in most schools originate in geography or PE. They do for Jews, anyway, who can neither draw a map nor hang upside down from a wall bar. The two deficiencies are not entirely unrelated. Jews cannot draw a map nor negotiate a wall bar because they have seldom had any use for either.

To that degree, Shitworth had said nothing that wasn’t just. True, he should not have held up Manny’s suppurating map of Canada by one corner as though it were something one of us had brought in on his shoe. Nor should he have declared that a spider with a pen in each leg could have drawn it better, nor rolled it into an inky ball and thrown it into Manny’s distorted face. Nor should he have eared Manny out of his seat and demanded what he was grinning about, boy, when it ought to have been obvious to a teacher of his years and competence that Manny grinned out of some strange reflexive instinct, the alternative being a total collapse of his facial musculature, followed by annihilation of his personality and maybe even cessation of his or someone else’s heartbeat. Teacherly ineptitudes, those. You are meant to know when you have a homicidal maniac in your class. But fair’s fair – it was the case that none of
us who were Jewish could draw a map. Even I couldn’t draw a map and I had already been picked out as the school’s star drawer. It’s possible that we’d have fared better had the maps Shitworth asked us to draw contained matter more germane to our interests and experience. Of the atlases I presently own, a good 90 per cent of them are atlases of Jewish migrations, expulsions, marches, pogroms, ghettos, shtetls with names like Kalooki and Kalush, ruined synagogues, graveyards, inquisitions, executions, massacres, gas chambers, concentration camps. We know whereby we are engaged. ‘Do me a map showing the most recent liquidation of your people, Glickman,’ might have elicited a positive response. The corn belts of Manitoba on the other hand . . .

Fair or not fair, Shitworth Whitworth was the recipient by 9 a.m. the following morning of a letter from the parents of every Jewish boy in the school, even mine – something I admired in my father; his utter inconsistency in all matters relating to criticism of Jews – the sum content of which was as follows:

Mr Shitworth sir dear sticks in the gullet insensitive not to say offensive not to say ignorant of catastrophic Jewish history otherwise would understand inability to draw map tragic consequence of being homeless people without choice as to domicile for almost as long as you you anti-Semitic bastard have been teaching geography proof of Jewish genius otherwise in arts Chagall Sigmund Freud Sammy Davis Jr [not to forget, in my parent’s letter, Maxie Glickman] whose shoes you not fit to lick you telling me Chagall couldn’t have drawn Canada had he been so minded yours faithfully.

Why Shitworth couldn’t have let it go at that, since no one was asking more of him than a grovelling apology, I will never understand. Instead, the next time an ill-executed Jewish map of maize fields in the Americas provided him with the opportunity, he held
it up by one corner, screwed it into a ball again, threw it at me, because it was mine, but missed and hit Manny Washinsky again, for which he also did not apologise, and said, ‘It has recently been brought to my attention that the Twelve Tribes of Israel have not sat still long enough to find the time to consult an atlas or otherwise acquaint themselves with the lineaments of the physical world. Wouldn’t you have thought, boys, that the opposite would be true, and that our Hebrew brethren’s love of foreign travel would have encouraged curiosity in them as to the contours of every country they have visited?’

‘Not exactly “visited” sir,’ I found the courage to pipe up, since my map was the cause of this.

Watching Shitworth Whitworth trying to swallow under the constriction of his collars was one of the few consolations our twice-weekly hour of geography afforded. Would his stud fly off, or would his Adam’s apple burst? This time it looked as though his whole chest was about to explode, like the Incredible Hulk’s coming out of his shirt.

He had advanced upon me, isolating me from the class. The whole of him compressed into the two fists he placed with great deliberation upon my desk, first one, and then the other, like grenades.

‘Not
exactly visiting
, weren’t you, Glickman? So what
exactly
were you doing?’

‘Running away, sir.’

‘Ah, running away. And now, here? Struggling against persecution, are you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Are you saying you are a prisoner here, Glickman? Are you here under duress?’

I didn’t have the language – you never have the language when you need it – to talk spatiality to him, to tell him that I thought it unreasonable of Gentiles to complain that Jews were always in constant motion, incapable of the arts of repose, when it was
they, the Gentiles, who were forever moving Jews on. ‘No, sir,’ was all I could find to say, instead.

He closed his eyes, as though praying to God (his, not ours) to give him strength. Then he opened them and sniffed.

‘You’re a cartoonist, aren’t you, Glickman?’

‘I hope to be one, sir, yes.’

A cartoonist, you see, not a landscape painter or gardener or cartographer. Agitation, satire, distortion, not the beauty of the visible world humming exquisitely on its axis.

‘You hope to be one? Good. I hope you to be one too. And no doubt as part of your education to that end you will be studying other examples of the art. I assume you are familiar, Glickman, with the Katzenjammer Kids?’

I was. Though not exactly an enthusiast. Brilliantly drawn though they were, they made me feel queasy. Something to do with the undigested immigrant nature of the knockabout. Hans and Fritz the kids were called, and something about those names made me feel queasy too.

I nodded.

‘Zen in ze immortal vords of ze Katzenjammers, Glickman, let me put zis proposition to you. Could it be zat ze reason you and your fellow Chews feel so unvelcome in country after country is zat you do not do your hosts ze courtesy of noticing vere you are? As for example, Glickman – and you, Vashinsky – by consulting a map?’

I knew a rhetorical question when I heard one. As did Shitworth Whitworth. ‘And now I suppose you will all go home and get your parents to write me another letter?’ he said, rather sadly suddenly, like a man reading out his resignation speech.

8

He was gone by the end of the week. Put over someone’s knee and thrashed, it was fun to think, like the Katzenjammer Kids
receiving their leitmotif beating from Mama Katzenjammer. Manny and I drew a map of hell and posted it to him care of the school. But whether he received it or not we were never to discover.

A term later Manny was gone too, removed to a Jewish school at the other side of town, where it didn’t matter how bad you were at cartography so long as you put your tefillin on every morning. So there are deficiencies in all systems of education.

I can’t pretend I was sorry to see Manny leave. Having him as a friend in our air-raid shelter was one thing. He was my private life. But as such he no more belonged in my class than my mother did. Besides, I felt that my association with him was doing me no good. He was too odd. Four, five, six times a day he put his hand up and asked to be excused. No boy at Bishops Blackburn – maybe no boy in the
history
of Bishops Blackburn – needed to go to the lavatory as often as Manny Washinsky. And once he was there he wouldn’t return. Mainly we would all forget about him, but occasionally his absence would rile a teacher who would then send one of us, occasionally even a party of us, to search for him and bring him back. Reports of Manny-sightings in the lavatories varied. Some told of Manny sitting in a cubicle with his trousers fastened, reciting Jewish prayers. Others heard him swearing, though I never did. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck . . . just that, over and over. One person said he’d watched from a distance while for fifteen minutes Manny washed and rewashed his hands, sometimes no sooner drying them than going back and washing them again, pulling back the skin at the tip of his fingers so that the scalding water could get under his nails. Another said he saw Manny winding toilet paper from a roll and stuffing his pockets with it. Thieving toilet paper, could you believe that? Jewing it. The one time I was sent to get him I found him sitting on the toilet with his jacket covering his head – this, as he explained to me later, to stop anyone who was standing on a seat in another cubicle from looking down and recognising him. ‘But
who’d bother to do that?’ I asked him. ‘Well, you just have,’ he reminded me.

To be absolutely candid, I didn’t consider Manny’s behaviour around his ablutions to be anything like as bizarre as others did. Far more peculiar, in my view, was the casual attitude the Gentile pupils of Bishops Blackburn adopted to the inconveniences of the body, their carelessness as to privacy and hygiene, the small circumstantial, not to say spiritual difference pissing and shitting seemed to make to them. That they didn’t understand why a person might take precautions as regards taps and switches, etc, I also attributed to the absence in them of any imagination of disaster. As for praying or cursing in the lavatory, while I would not have been able to explain
why
Manny did it,
that
he did it surprised me not at all. I cursed or otherwise called on God whenever I visited the lavatory myself. The relief of finding sanctuary? The fear of loneliness? Sheer existential astonishment? Who knows. But it was second nature to me to say ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ the moment I undid my trousers, or, when I had finished and was looking at my reflection in the mirror, ‘God fucking help me!’ Half the time I did not not even know I was saying anything, and only confronted the phenomenon years later when Zoë overheard me and made me promise on my life never to swear or call on God in the toilet so long as we shared one. It was also her belief that I should accompany her to a clinical psychologist that minute.

For her sake, because of the love I bore her, I refused the psychologist, but forswore the swearing. Only on the night she left me did I revert, looking long at my reflection in the mirror, little by little recognising someone I thought I had seen the last of, and hearing him cry out ‘God fucking help me!’

At school, though, and in the glare of classroom publicity, I found Manny as weird as everybody did and disowned him. I wanted to be with the more normal kids, like Errol Tobias, who famously Chinese-burned the neck of the school bully –Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall – leaving him with orange-coloured striations visible above the collar of his shirt for the rest of his days at Bishops Blackburn. It was Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall who used to order any stray Jew he found in the playground at the end of break to stand with his hands on his head for forty minutes, and not move until Broderick released him hypnotically with the words, ‘Jew, Jew, run away, till Broderick gets you another day.’ It is mortifying to recall how many of us did what Broderick told us to do, standing in the rain and freezing cold, trying to count the 2,400 seconds in forty minutes in case we missed the hypnotic release. Because for us to be found by Broderick still standing there
after
the expiry of the forty minutes was no less serious an offence than to be caught trying to escape
before
it. Broderick would probably have tyrannised us without detection, or without anyone much caring even had he been detected – for ours was a school which believed in the manly virtues of bullying and being bullied – had he not tried it on with Errol Tobias. Though he was half Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall in height and weight, Errol had the beating of him in the beserk department. It was over in seconds, like one of those filmed encounters between an anaconda and a field mouse. Broderick made as though to touch Errol’s arm and the next thing he was lying on the playground the colour of jam roly-poly with Errol twisting his head off. I later drew the encounter to please Errol, with Broderick ‘The Bull’ Chisnall walking in one direction and his head facing in the other. A bit Disney for me, and probably for Broderick, but Errol liked it.