Kalooki Nights (30 page)

‘Was he someone you were in with?’

He laughed through his nose – more a bark than a laugh. ‘Horst S-ssschumann? You don’t know Horst S-ssschumann? That’s a pity. I’ve a feeling you would have liked him. Many people did.’

I didn’t only not know who H-horst S-ssschumann was, I didn’t know how much of that was his name, how much was stutter, and how much of it was Manny’s hushing one of us either into sleep or vigilance.

‘Why would I have liked him?’ I asked, keeping it simple. ‘What were his qualities?’

‘An enquiring mind. A love of science. And a curiosity about Jews. All three took him to Au-auschwitz to run their mass sterilisation programme. There, he X-rayed the testicles and ovaries of Jewish men and women the age we were when we last met, then castrated them to make sure the X-rays had worked. Sometimes, on the assumption that they were as interested in his scientific findings as he was, he would carry out these experiments in view of the next patients. If you happened to survive the burning from the X-rays you’d die from t-terror or s-ssshock. I think that interested him scientifically as well – the amount of s-ssshock to which you could submit a Jew.’

‘May his name be blotted out,’ I said.

He looked at me as though I were a moral simpleton, stuck in some childish game of expunging our enemies from human
speech, a ploy which hadn’t worked when we last tried it and certainly wasn’t going to work now. He’d changed, that was what he wanted me to see. He’d had a long time to consider tactics. Now he loved the enemies of the Jewish people. And wanted them remembered evermore.

‘S-ssschumann’s name wasn’t blotted out, I am pleased to say. After leaving the mass sterilisation programme he worked as a doctor all over the world. No less conscientiously than he ’d worked at Au-auschwitz by all accounts. You should be sorry you were never able to consult him yourself. We both should be. He had a good bedside manner with Jews. Finally, after twenty years of good work, the Germans found him, brought him back and put him on trial. A series of events which, as you might imagine, he found very distressing. Fortunately they discovered he had – ha! – h-high blood pressure, and released him halfway through his trial. No l-laughing matter, h-high blood pressure. So they let him go. Which I call justice.’

My turn to bark. I would have adopted Manny’s crazy circus of verbal emissions had I dared.
H-high b-blood pressure? S-ssssssch! The f-f-f-f-fucker!
But I didn’t know whether they were an affliction brought on in anticipation of Nazi nomenclature or his throat’s refusal to accept his decision to love his enemies. Either way, they served the function of denying the f-f-f-fuckers decent articulation.

‘Well, the consolation is that they are released into the torments of hell,’ I said.

‘Is that what you think happens? Ha! Well, you might be right in some cases. It’s possible we will run into a few of them in hell when we get there, or at least when I do. But not any of the doctors in charge of the Nazi sterilisation and extermination programmes. After being released into a comfortable life here on earth, they will probably be in heaven now. S-ssschumann lived until he was seventy-seven, quietly in F-frankfurt. Klaus E-endruweit, accessory to the murder of thousands of the
mentally ill, was still in medical practice when I was inside. S-some of them are digging their gardens or cradling their greatgrandchildren while we speak. And I’m pleased to say that those who did die enjoyed obituaries from their profession of a s-sort we are unlikely to get from ours.’

Ours?
Which profession was Manny in? I wondered.

List-maker of murderers – did that count as a profession?

Eerie, all this. As though time had not happened anywhere but on our faces. If I kept staring at him would the years fall away, would we be back in the air-raid shelter, I with my pencil in my mouth, making Donald Duck noises, Manny running through the names of our eternal enemies, enumerating their crimes, biting their specialities into my flesh so that I would never forget them? Not much had changed, considering all that had happened to both of us. Not much of an advance, despite Manny’s apparent conviction that by pretending to love our enemies we could achieve some sort of moral victory over them. H-horst S-ssschumann – what a great bloke! And yet it was strangely consoling to be back doing what we were doing. I was impressed that he had continued with his studies while he ’d been out of circulation. There was something wonderful about it, Manny locked away all those years still pursuing in his head those who’d persecuted us. It was what he was for. His conscientiousness was a lesson to us all. And who was to say that this wasn’t what I was for as well: to listen to what he told me, to be his pupil – no matter that I saw myself as in loco parentis to him – to study at his feet.

One question I wanted to ask him about his cataloguing – whether he now included his own name, E-emanuel Eli W-wwashinsky, among the roll-call of unpronounceable killers of Jews?

But there were some smaller questions to be asked, before the greater. Where he lived now, for example, what he did for money, what he did to pass the time, how he had found the courage to return to Manchester where not everybody, surely, was unaware
of his existence. But even they seemed premature. ‘Pizza OK?’ was the best I could do.

He nodded, but gravely as though in response to one of the questions I hadn’t been brave enough to put to him.

‘So why Stroganoff?’ I asked at last. It was my way of trying to get him to make a declaration of friendship.
In memory of the
old days
, I wanted to hear him say.
In memory of us
.

But all he said was, ‘I needed another name.’

Why that should have distressed me as much as it did I am unable to explain. I had been careful not to think of him as a friend even in the days when he
was
a friend. And he had never shown me any warmth to speak of. It was a bit of a shock, nonetheless, to discover that time had no more softened him to me, than me to him.

We both looked at our food for a while, then suddenly he asked, without a stutter or any other impediment to speech, ‘How’s your father?’

‘He’s dead, Manny. You know that.’

He made a peculiar motion with his lips, half as though licking them to make them moist, half as though flicking something away.

‘He died years ago,’ I reminded him. ‘In your time. After the funeral you said you envied me not having a father. I have never forgotten that.’

‘Don’t remember,’ he said.

He was holding his left hand tightly in his right, the thumb of the one squeezing all colour out of the knuckles of the other. He protruded his jaw – a weak man’s resolution. But again, he wasn’t arguing with me. If he said that about my father, he said it. At the time to which I was probably referring he could, frankly, have said anything. The remark would have been directed at his father, not mine. He believed he had rather liked my father. And my mother. Whereas his own parents he did not, at that time, like. He had turned against them. Grown ashamed of them. Had I lost my mother he might have said he envied me not having one of those as well.

Strange. I had been thinking it would take us a thousand meetings for us ever to get anywhere, for me to find the form of question I felt I had any right to ask, for him to concentrate his attention long enough to answer me. Now here we were, in the very thick of things after only fifteen minutes. Manny grown ashamed of his parents. At this rate we would have the gas taps on before coffee.

And wouldn’t Francine be pleased.

What he told me came out haltingly, and much of it was addressed to someone who wasn’t there, and certainly wasn’t me. But what it amounted to was this:

4

After his outburst against Asher, he had fallen into one of those fits of despondency well known to people who act out of character. It had been exhilarating at first, losing his temper, making something happen, even if that something was Asher’s running away from home. Good. Excellent. Asher needed time to clear his head. And Manny needed not to hear his family screaming at one another. But when days went by and Asher did not return, Manny’s spirits deserted him. What if he had succeeded only in throwing his brother into the fire-yekelte ’s daughter’s arms? Worse – if anything could be worse – what if his brother had grown desperate and thrown himself under a bus? Was this to be the consequence of Manny’s single deviation from the laws of his own undemonstrative nature – the loss, one way or another, of his brother? But then, when Asher returned, Manny was exhilarated again. He had done some good after all. Asher had sorted himself out, come to his senses, and was now back where he belonged, trailing between home and the synagogue, without the girl. Wonderful, for Manny, to see before his eyes, as the very proof of his effect, the family reunited.

Or it would have been wonderful had they – ‘they’ meaning
his mother and his father and himself and maybe even Elohim – taken a little longer to pass from heartache to happiness. It was too sudden. Wounds don’t heal that quickly. Not if they are real wounds in the first place. No – I tried him with this – no, it wasn’t that he had wanted Asher to be kept longer in purgatory. Absolutely not. His eyes fluttered like trapped birds. Yes, he could see that his feelings were open to cynical interpretation. Why should Asher be rewarded with the fatted calf for going off the rails, while he, Manny, the good boy who had gone nowhere, was rewarded with nothing? Unjust, the jubilation which always awaits the return of the prodigal. But that wasn’t the cause of his depression. His mother and father were the cause of his depression. The fact that their affliction could turn to rejoicing in a second. The screaming, the emergency ambulance, the fisticuffs, a son raising his hand to his own father, Manny himself driven into an epilepsy to which he had not hitherto had any idea he was disposed – hadn’t any of it meant anything?

What’s the worth of rage that cools so quickly? What does it tell you about the cause? As a matter of seemliness, if nothing else, Manny believed his parents should have thought twice before trumpeting their relief with such blatancy. Should have thought twice before showing it to each other, but more importantly should have thought twice before blaring it at Asher. Was there not bad taste in that? Was it not gross of them to suppose that Asher would concur quite so promptly, if at all, in their felicity? And was it not cruel of them not to wonder how things were in Asher’s heart?

Manny talked about Asher’s heart as though it were an empty bed. Someone had lain in it beside him, and now she was gone. Manny could see the impression her body had made. He had been a lonely boy himself and was now an even lonelier man. Perhaps it was this that made him exquisitely aware of Asher’s loss. Never mind that the girl was German. It had surprised him, he told me, to catch himself not minding, because he had at first minded a great deal. A German was a German. A person you could not
forgive and should not go near. But he got to the humanity of not caring what she was via the impression she had left behind her in Asher’s heart. The impression was without religion or nationality. The impression – the sad, simple indentation – humanised her.

And by contrast dehumanised his parents who would not notice, or care, that it was there. For this, and without any prior warning signs in his theology, Manny, in his depression, blamed the faith of his fathers.

God, good. God, I was sure, would take us where I wanted to go. Wherever that was. Talk to me about God, Manny.

‘It wasn’t a fully-fledged religious crisis,’ he said, a queer blue smile irradiating his face. ‘I wasn’t intelligent enough for one of those. I just started to have my doubts.’

‘I remember,’ I said. ‘I remember you questioning the Unquestionable One. I suspect I wasn’t sympathetic.’

He didn’t appear to care whether I’d been sympathetic or not. ‘Illogical doubts,’ he went on. ‘I didn’t have the nerve to reprove God for His brutality, so I took what some would see as the easier option of wondering where He’d gone.’

‘You think He should have interceded for Asher?’

‘Of course I didn’t. Asher had to make his own mind up.’

‘Which he ’d done . . .’

‘Not really. Asher just got pushed around. He should have been braver. But it was upsetting to see him put in that position. I had originally agreed with everything my parents felt about him. In certain moods I still do. But in the end they should have let him go. The Jewish people were not going to perish because of Asher.’

‘My dad would have said that the Jewish people would have been the better for Asher taking himself a Gentile wife.’

‘Yes, but your dad didn’t always say what he meant.’

‘I don’t follow you.’

He wasn’t going to help me. He looked bored suddenly. He had even stopped gripping his left hand with his right. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘it’s the head. It gets tired.’

He got up to go to the lavatory. Would he come back, I wondered, and tell me that Germans ironed their underwear?

I was distressed to see that he shambled like an old man.

And was then struck by the thought that he hadn’t s-ssschushed me in a while.

5

Before we parted, he grew more forthcoming about God, more forthcoming about Asher anyway, which by Manny’s roundabout route amounted to the same thing.

Asher had not settled back into the life of his family. He was in torment. Manny’s word.
Torment
. He could not clear his mind of Dorothy.

‘You make her sound like an infestation.’

‘That’s your intepretation. But it was not her doing. Asher did not
want
to clear his mind of Dorothy.’

‘This is Asher being a free agent again. Not God’s fault.’

He hesitated. ‘Not God’s fault that Asher wanted to go on thinking of Dorothy. But you have to ask yourself whose fault it was that he felt he shouldn’t.’

‘Did Elohim ever tell us,
specifically
, to stay away from Germans?’ I asked.

‘He probably thought He didn’t need to, having warned us off everybody else.’

I don’t know how to do justice to the bitterness of that remark. It was thrown off, an aside almost, but had it been a well you could have sunk a bore a long way down before reaching bottom. Was the bitterness on his own behalf? Had Manny fallen for someone he shouldn’t, and had he too been warned off in the end? It felt unlikely. Manny sentimentally entangled with
anyone
, allowed or not, was beyond imagining. So was that the cause of the vexation I heard – that with him the warnings against wandering off weren’t even necessary, so good a job had his
parents done on him, so love-proof had they made him, for fear the love would go in an unacceptable direction?