Kalooki Nights (36 page)

‘Time will do it,’ I said. ‘Leave him to me a little longer.’

What was I up to, I could hear hear her thinking.
What’s your little game, Maxie Glickman?

It was always a little shivery getting Francine in person on the phone. She had a way of making you feel she was taking a moment off from tea with Henry Kissinger, or a Bellini with Berlusconi, to talk to you. If you listened hard you could hear them breathing at her elbow. The other thing you could hear if you listened hard was Francine’s beauty. It had an audible quality, like temperature. You can hear heat and you can hear cold; in Francine’s case you could hear the strained patience in her green eyes, and the challenge that was so important an element in her mellifluous looks. I could not have drawn her from her voice, but I immediately remembered how it felt to be in her company. Above all, the sensation of having
let oneself down. But whether that was because I didn’t measure up to her, or disliked myself for trying, I couldn’t decide.

As for Manny, with whom for very different reasons I felt something similar, the truth was that after four or five meetings I still hadn’t said a word to him about there being a scriptwriter at my elbow wanting to empty my mind of that of which I’d emptied his. Of course he knew the basis on which we ‘d been meeting, and wasn’t naïve enough to suppose I’d be spending this much time in his company simply for the love of it. But getting his story down on paper hadn’t come up as an issue between us. And the business Lipsync was most interested in – the gas taps, the gas taps, Max – was not proving to be as imminent as I’d first thought. My own fault. I’d got him on to theology and art. I’d made him teleologically self-aware. Now he thought twice before he mentioned God, and God, I felt, held the key to it.

However, so long as no one rushed either of us, I saw no reason not to believe we would eventually get there.

It might have been my imagination, but I thought he found it easier to talk when he was out of Manchester. He seemed to like coming off the train at Euston with
The Times
under his arm and being surprised to see me waiting for him. It must have felt to him as though he had business to attend to. And I was beginning to prefer it when he came to me. A trip north inevitably incurred family obligations which I didn’t always have the mental strength to honour. Jewishly, it didn’t feel healthy up there any longer either. The air was not bracing. There were no Jewish ramblers left. If there were still Jewish atheists in town they were lying low. The sky had darkened. People were waiting for the Messiah. My mother’s kalooki nights went on almost as before, but I noted that she suspended play on the High Holy Days and even on some of the Lower Holy Days, a respectfulness she would not have dreamed of exercising once upon a time. ‘Frummers got to you again, Ma?’ I would say when I called in and found the tables
empty. But there was no teasing her. ‘Without the frummers as you call them, Maxie, we wouldn’t be here.’ See! They’d slipped into the vacancy left by my father and blackmailed her. They’d made her feel that it was they who had kept us going for five thousand years, the lungs and bellows of the Jewish people, precisely so that Jews like her could lead their frivolously irreligious lives unimpeded. Left to her, there’d be no Jews. That was the package of obligation they’d sold her. Left to her – and me – we’d have died out. Someone the spitting image of her might have persisted, paying for her hair to be sculpted, painting her nails and playing kalooki, but she wouldn’t have been Jewish. So she owed them.

Made no sense to me, but I wasn’t living there, breathing in the tainted air.

Made no sense to my poor father either, I’d have staked my life on that, and he
was
still there.

Occasionally I’d visit his desolate grave in Failsworth, a blasted Jewish cemetery for the privilege of lying in which my mother had been paying a burial board functionary a penny per week per person by my calculation since Cromwell let us back into the country.
Failsworth
– it describes what happens to your heart when you get within a mile of the place. But that’s the way of it with Jewish graves and graveyards: they are of necessity sites of failing strength and failed imagination. After death, nothing.

I hadn’t fought when my father’s grey slab went up, commemorating the bare bones of his existence in Hebrew script. I hated the look of Hebrew characters almost as much as I hated German. On a grave they reduced the inmate to nothing but an addendum to Jewish history, a mere slip of an ancient tongue which alone enjoyed eternity. But we hadn’t been able to come up with a satisfactory alternative. My mother could not abide the idea of burning him, I knew of no country churchyard with an enclosure for amateur boxers with names like Jack ‘The Jew’ Glickman, and Shani believed that burying him in the manner his father and
his father before him had been buried was, though unsatisfactory, best.

So much for his attempt to change the course of Jewish history.

For which failure on our part – because that was how I saw it:
our
failure not his – I apologised each time I went to see him.

And each time there seemed more to apologise to him for.

2

It wasn’t only being out of Manchester that appeared to relax Manny’s tongue. It was being out full stop. He didn’t move well, but as long as he felt he wasn’t under pressure to get anywhere, he liked wandering around. Sightseeing. Shopping. Hanging about, or zikh arumdreying, as it pleased him to call it, laughing to himself about the expression, as though it delighted him to remember a Yiddishism he’d had no reason to employ for years. There was no zikh arumdreying where he ’d been. He ’d shlumped, but that was different. Zikh arumdreying implied active, even ingenious hanging about, whereas a shlump just quietly rotted into the earth.

I’m not saying that he grew suddenly garrulous crossing the river on bridges that hadn’t been there when they first put him away, or hobbling along the King’s Road like a Chelsea Pensioner, but he would comment on what he saw – people ’s dress, the numbers of foreigners in the streets, everybody wired up to some item of technology or another – so that I at least became privy to his sudden negligences and parentheses. It was as though the city acted as a chaperone between us, releasing him from the fear of unwonted intimacies, while making small talk easier. Not ideal, given that it was intimacy I was after – and I could hardly seize upon the iPod as a pretext for bringing up double homicide – but as I kept telling them in Wardour Street, just give me time.

One Saturday morning I picked him up off the early train from
Manchester and took him to the British Museum. I thought he might like to mooch around the new courtyard, and otherwise wander where his fancy took him. How we got to Ancient Egypt I am not entirely sure. More by accident than design, I think, since as Jews neither of us was able to get excited by pharaohs or the mummification of their priests. I hadn’t cared for mummies even as a pre-adolescent when all that bandaging is supposed to speak to some regressive sexuality in a boy, and never warmed to them thereafter, for all that they were demonstrably a species of cartoon – panels of naturalist narrative criss-crossed with garrulous strips of hieroglyphics, not an inch of space left undevoured. Noisy, vivid, the bright colours of life refusing the monochrome of death, one hyperbolic assertion of history and nature tumbling over another. My bag, you would have thought. Done with me in mind. That they left me cold and even slightly queasy I can only ascribe to instinctual Jewish resistance to plaster and paint, to bandages and gum, to extracting the internal organs of the dead, and to what I understood of the principle of
ka
, the life force which was said to live on and expect feeding after the individual had died. We Jews draw more cut-and-dried distinctions than that, clear our dead away much quicker. Among Jews it is possible for you to have a heart attack after dinner and be in the ground by breakfast. Hasty but clean.

And there’s no
ka
hanging around hoping for a hot meal after.

Habdalah.

The older I get, the more enamoured I grow of the principle of Habdalah. Keep the meat from the milk, keep the holy from the profane, keep the living from the dead.

And the goyim from the Jews? As an incorrigible mixer, and with the bruises to show for it, I am still thinking about that.

Seeing me holding back from the mummies, Manny shuffled to my side. ‘Ugh,’ he said, and shuddered.

Funny, the difference an unwelcome corroboration can make to your evaluations. Who was Manny to be shuddering at a once
great civilisation, for Christ’s sake, when he’d grown up in a house of rags no better than a mausoleum itself?

‘I suppose you don’t much care for this guy either?’ I enquired, moving him on ill-temperedly to a small painted wooden Bes, the dwarf fertility god – smirking, naked, phallic, prancing, laden with musical instruments.

One of Zoë’s favourites, Bes, whenever we’d encountered him in a museum on our travels.

‘You know there is something of Bes about you, Max,’ she liked to tell me, ‘if we discount the fertile, the naked, the phallic, the prancing and the musicality.’

She loved a joke, Zoë, as I loved her for making them. ‘So all that leaves,’ I would say . . .

‘. . . is the smirking dwarf. Exactly.’

But there was a more serious point she wanted to make. ‘Don’t you wish you had a Bes in your pantheon?’ she asked me once, I think it must have been in Charlottenburg, on our seeing how she would hack it as a Berlin harlot. By ‘your’ she meant not belonging to me but belonging to the Jews.

‘A pointless question,’ was my answer. ‘We don’t have a pantheon. We have Elohim, full stop. I think that’s wiser myself. One God or No God. Start letting everybody in and you end up praying to a hunchback with his dick out and tambourines in his hands.’

‘I thought you were a musical people, Max.’

‘We are. But when we discover a musical gift in ourselves we don’t take all our clothes off and start dancing. We apply for a job as first viola with the Israeli Philharmonic.’

‘And go mad with living in your brain. You’d be healthier with more than one sort of god, Max. You’d be more various in your interests. In your case you might even
get
an interest. And you’d certainly look better . . . all of you.’

Which of course was exactly what I wanted to say to Manny. Had you made a bit of room for Bes in your heart, Manny, who
knows – you might not have had to play the Holocaust around and around in your head, or stutter into your fingernails, or gas your parents.

He didn’t engage with me on Bes. Maybe he was thinking what I was thinking. But he did stop and look long into a case of bronze and limestone deities, half-animal, half-human – a squatting antelope, a leering jackal, a cat-headed goddess slinky as a nightclub singer, knowing and obscene. Irresistibly disgusting, all of them. And impossible, for a cartoonist anyway, not to admire. Easy enough to take or leave a painted sarcophagus, but I couldn’t, professionally, resist comic gods and goddesses who mocked the spiritual, could I?

‘Do you think this was what Moses found our people dancing around when he came down Sinai with the tablets in his hands?’ I wondered, gesturing at a ram-headed deity.

‘No. That was a gold calf made from women’s earrings.’

‘But an animal god, anyway. Something sickening and slightly wonderful like this, wouldn’t you say? I can see why they danced. He makes you swoon. Look at his obscene, wide-apart ears, and those extended arms, like a curtain opened on himself – behold, see what’s beneath, see what animality is incident to your graceful humanness. You can’t say no to it, Manny.’

He sent his blue eyes twinkling into the ironic distance again, something he hadn’t done all morning. With a quick dart of his tongue, he wet his lips then touched his moustache as though he feared he might have licked it off. ‘What I was taught,’ he said, still looking away, ‘was that the children of Israel danced around the calf because, like children, they thought Moses had gone for ever. They were desolate and wanted to worship something they could see.’

‘Agreed. Something palpably indecent. Something which answered more to what they recognised as the complexity of their natures. Something that wasn’t words and interdictions.’

Odd that I should have been playing the devil’s advocate.
I knew where I stood on the question of gods. Four-square behind words and interdictions. But sometimes Zoë’s voice spoke through me. This can happen in a marriage, even long after the marriage has been dissolved. You open your mouth and lo! – your longlost spouse’s voice comes out.

‘That’s an interpretation,’ Manny said, also ventriloquising, I thought. ‘It isn’t the one I was taught.’

Lost him. Lost him again to our invisible God, in whom he had forfeited the right to believe.

He was looking at nothing now, wanting to be gone, wanting the morning to be over. To spite him I lingered longer than curiosity demanded, taking in whatever obscenities I could find – a squatting baboon with a penis the size of a cartoonist’s pencil, a jeering hippopotamus-headed god, another jackal, a turtle, a second inebriate Bes clanging his cymbals. And not a word of the Law to be heard.

3

It might have been something or nothing, but Manny engineered a queer encounter outside the museum. We had agreed we would have lunch together, but first I needed to visit the comic shop opposite. If it’s funnies you want, Bloomsbury’s the place to go. Since a comic shop could not possibly interest Manny and the morning was warm, we agreed that he would sit in the sun and wait for me. That’s what nutters do – they sit in the sun and wait. I left him to find his own slab of concrete, which is never easy given the busloads of foreign schoolchildren who gather here to eat their sandwiches and discuss Egyptian art. To my surprise – a surprise I cannot justify – he chose to sit himself, very deliberately it seemed to me, between a Muslim gentleman who was reading a newspaper, and two children who were surely his, busy playing with their Quetzalcóatl keyrings, Rosetta Stone mouse mats, and countless other items of swotty tat bought from the
museum shop. What surprised me more when I returned was the sight of Manny, who I couldn’t trust to purchase his own bus ticket, engrossed in convivial conversation with the whole family. Not only that, he knew their names.