Kalooki Nights (41 page)

My own view is that it would be impossible. That one would sooner explode. But then I have so far been spared extremity. More than that, I have gone to great lengths to avoid extremity. Not to find myself in an extreme circumstance – Chloë and Zoë excluded – has been the principal study of my life. It has kept me quiet. And law-abiding. It would have stopped me turning the taps on my parents, for example. But not everybody remembers how terrible the lavatories are going to be before they commit a crime.

After he finally succeeds in filling the pot he is instructed to empty it. I don’t ask how long this has taken him. A week? A month? A year? Nor do I ask him where he empties it. Ask a question and you might just get an answer. Shortly after his success, they – the guards, the wardens, the nurses – return with his food in a pot he recognises. His pot. It has not been washed. The next time he tells me the story they don’t bring him food, they bring him back his faeces. But what they say in all instances is the same.

Eat.

Not for me to have an attitude but I find it hard not to express
surprise that things are quite so primitive in Her Majesty’s mental hospitals.

Once, when I do raise a question along those lines, he turns on me in irritation and tells me he is not describing life inside any kind of hospital I might have encountered.

Well, what do I know? For all my experience to the contrary he could be remembering what it’s like inside a yeshiva.

Or wherever it was in Lymm that tubercular Jewish boys were sent to.

And I am taking him to be exercising a degree of poetic licence, anyway, ordering his recollections in a fashion that can only be called metaphorical.

If I’d had the appropriate psychological language – something a touch more nuanced for him than catatonic schizophrenic, or frumkie – I might have been better positioned to decide whether he was actually meting out to himself, in memory, the punishment he thought he deserved. A life for a life, but with what do you pay for two lives?

5

I had offered him the use of a granny flat I’d had built as an extension just before Zoë left. Part of our trial separation. Got all you need, I’d told him – private entrance, galley kitchen, tiny living room,
your own lavatory
, no reason for you ever to come out. I hadn’t expected him to accept. Just because he was talking didn’t mean he’d turned sociable all of a sudden. Any more than it meant he had decided to like me. Nor, to be, honest, had I wanted him to accept. But if he was meting out punishment to himself, then maybe it was time I meted out punishment to
my
self. My punishment was him. This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine, etc etc.

He turned up with a few things in a cardboard suitcase of a sort I hadn’t clapped eyes on since the 1950s. I didn’t doubt it was the same suitcase that bore his belongings when they put him
behind bars. Something in the sentimental way he carried it.

He took the keys from me without meeting my eyes. Then he asked whether he would need change for the gas meter.

Could that have been a hellish joke?

I decided probably not. He was simply pointing out the difference, I decided, between his circumstances and mine. But if it was a joke then I wished Zoë had been around to hear it. She enjoyed that sort of humour.

No one had slept in the granny flat since Zoë left. We exchanged farewells there. ‘Goodbye, Bollocky Bill,’ she said, extending her hand. Every time we reached the point of breaking up Zoë would offer me her hand, an action so piteous in its finality – reduced to this, a mere formal handshake, we who had rolled all our sweetness up into one ball – that we both dissolved into tears and fell in love with each other again. Not this time, though. This time we meant it.

‘Bollocky Bill’ was what she had called me, despite my scant resemblance to a Bill, bollocky or otherwise, in the early days of our marriage, before the romance went out of it. ‘Bollocky Bill from over the hill.’

No relation, that I knew of, to Barnacle Bill, although Barnacle Bill does become Bollocky Bill in saltier versions of the ditty. Mere coincidence. ‘Bollocky Bill from over the hill’ was pure Zoë coinage. The charm of nonsense had eluded her as a child, and the discovery in her maturer years that she could make rhymes and limericks and doggerel of her own – actually and of her own volition put nonsense into the world – gave her enormous pleasure. If the nonsense could at the same time comprehend an insult or two to me, her happiness was complete. Another man might have begrudged her this, I could not. The more particularly as she viewed these forays into verbal play as proof that we had not entirely destroyed in her the creative genius she could have been. ‘We’ being the Jews.

But this is not to say that Bollocky Bill didn’t proceed from an impulse even deeper in my Jew-besotted wife. I would not have put it past her, for example, to have detected my Bollocky/Barnacle Gentile ancestry long before I knew of it myself, discerning, in that uncanny way of hers, the Bill closeted behind the mask of Max. Yes, she married me to reconnect herself to that Jewishry from which, as a girl, she had been so brutally repulsed, but she also looked forward to a time when I’d have my nose off and look the goy I had it in me to look.

With Zoë, prognostication waited upon the iron of her will. What she foresaw was what she would make happen. She espied a moustache on my face and she made me grow one. Ditto the beard. Ditto the long hair. Ditto the rainforest eyebrows.

‘I’m not able to see out of here,’ I complained in the early days.

‘What do you want to see?’

‘The world.’

‘You’ve seen the world.’

‘Zoë, I’m a fucking artist. If I don’t see the world, we starve.’

‘An artist! You! Don’t make me laugh, Max. If anyone’s an artist in this relationship, I am. You’re just a cartoonist. Which means you don’t see the world at all. You only see your own sick view of it. What you do, you can just as well do blind.’

There wasn’t much of a future for us, anybody could see that. Fucking Bollocky Bill the sailor could see that. But I’d been brought up to do what women told me. Zoë wanted to find out what the whores looked like in Berlin, I took her to see what the whores looked like in Berlin. Zoë wanted me to forgive the German people, I forgave the German people. Zoë wanted me blind, I went blind. Very nearly I acceded to the nose job.

When she said she was an artist she was right. I’m not referring to her abusive ditties or the calligraphy which she only ever put her energy into fitfully, when friends wanted wedding invitations written for example, or she needed to inscribe some instruction to me in eyeliner on the bathroom mirror –
Don’t say God fucking help me every time you take a leak,
or
Try imagining there isn’t something in the middle of your face stopping you from getting close enough to read this.
No, Zoë’s artistry didn’t reside in anything she actually produced, any more than Chloë’s did. She was an artist by virtue of the power vested in her fancy. She was an artist in her disenchantments. It’s open to any old soul to imagine themselves hard done by, let down or disappointed; Zoë’s sense of being obstructed by the universe – personally spited, as though it were a face-off between the divinity and herself (a Jewish divinity was how she always saw him, a divinity with specifically my features) – was of an epic inventiveness. She could have been, she could have done, she could have achieved –
anything
! She had been set down among us for that sole purpose,to astound us with her gifts, to change the language and conception of woman, to make Zoë the very currency of intelligence and beauty the world over. Forget celebrity: Zoë pre-dated celebrity and exceeded it in ambition. Nothing short of imperishable legend could answer to her sense of destiny.

In this, as in all things, she was encouraged by the devotion of parents to whom she had been a late and unexpected gift, a miracle almost, as Isaac was to Sarah. Together, just the three of them – her father a retired art teacher who rarely spoke, her mother an embroideress and potter who smiled at stars and squirrels – they strode the heathland heights of North London, Zoë papoosed to one or other of their chests, listening to their heartbeats and gathering intimation there, like Wordsworth’s pigmy poet, of all that nature had in store for her. They pointed out wild flowers to her, taught her the names of birds and butterflies, explained how you could tell a tree by the configuration of a single leaf, and, when she was ready, stretched out their hands so that she could see, over the rooftops, beyond the Finchley Road, the silhouetted golden city where she would make her name. As what, was immaterial. She was already a prodigy by virtue of being born to them
at all. The rest would follow as surely as the wheeling night followed the deep slow satisfactions of the day. But they were careful not to leave it only to chance. For her fourth birthday they enrolled her in ballet classes. For her fifth birthday they bought her a little artist’s easel. For her sixth birthday a violin. For her seventh birthday they gave her singing lessons and sent her to acting school. And so on and so on, this showering of opportunity through the long summer afternoons in which she otherwise rowed on lakes and walked her dogs and smiled whereat her mother smiled and rolled down grassy banks laughing in her silent father’s arms, until – a genius in happiness as well as everything else – she reached the age of nine, when the Krystals moved in next door.

At first it seemed that they too were presents from her parents. Or another Annunciation, like the one that presaged her amazing birth. Behold my child, the Krystals, the angels for whom you have been waiting, through whose supernatural agency you will be brought before the breathless courts of public notice.

‘You can’t imagine how much I loved them,’ she told me. ‘They shone, they glowed, they sparkled. The first time I saw them as a family they burned my eyes. It was as though a giant candelabra had been installed next door, and whenever I passed their window or looked out of mine, there it was – blazing light!’

No mention of wings, but wings they clearly had.

They owned a factory making plastic bowls and mop buckets, everything for the kitchen, though nothing made of plastic ever turned up in their kitchen, that’s if they even owned a kitchen, which was highly unlikely given that angels have no stomachs and as a consequence no need of food. A library, that was what Zoë remembered most vividly about their house, the rows of bookshelves holding books unlike the books her parents showered on her – the ballet books and how-to books and I-spy nature books with pictures of snails and flowers and empty pages to press flowers of your own in – no, no books of that sort on the Krystal
shelves, but Freud, Kafka, Gombrich, Wittgenstein (unless she was imagining Wittgenstein because of his name’s spitefully clever-clever all-mind-no-nature Jewish resonance), books with words in, words being the only thing her all-providing parents lacked, along, of course, with that which words enabled: worldliness. Celestial worldliness.

‘It was as if they moved in another dimension,’ she told me. ‘Neither the inside as I knew it, nor the outside as I knew it. They inhabited somewhere else.’

‘It’s called Jew-space,’ I explained.

‘Now, to my cost, I know that. Then, what did I know? What you have to remember is that I only ever saw my father in an open-necked shirt or a windcheater with a bobble hat. One for in, one for out. Footwear the same. Carpet slippers for in, walking boots for out. What else did he need? Where else was he going? Then suddenly there appeared these other-dimensional men in suits that seemed made of silver foil, wearing shoes in whose reflection I could see my face.’

‘We don’t polish them,’ I wanted her to understand. ‘You buy them pre-lacquered. There are Middle Eastern shops on Bond Street that sell nothing else.’

‘What, with the reflection of some gullible shikseh already burned in? How many pairs do you own, Max?’

‘I don’t know any gullible shiksehs . . .’

‘Why don’t you shut the fuck up and let me tell you what I’m telling you. This is my story, not yours. It’s enough the Jews did this to me, without another Jew providing the fucking footnotes. What was I telling you?’

‘Shoes you could see your fucking face in—’

‘Don’t swear at me. Why must you always swear? And without laces, these shoes! Can you imagine how amazing that was? My father squandered his life doing up his laces, foot up on a little kitchen stool, starting again each time to be sure the ends were even, a little tug after every hook, remembering to tuck in the
tongue, then twice around the ankle before being tied in a double hitch. That’s how I defined a man. A person with his head between his knees, roping up his feet. Now here was this laceless breed, who in a single movement could slip their feet into their shoes and be gone. And ties! Before the Krystals came I doubt I’d seen a tie. And certainly not silk. Wool, maybe, for when my father came to a school speech day. Or to keep his trousers up at home. But the Krystals wore ties so refulgent, Max, they danced.’

I needed no convincing. Mine too. Once I was out of art school and no longer having to look like a goyisher housepainter, my ties leapt like Nureyev upon my chest. Never mind fringes and yarmulkes, a dancing tie is also a prescription of the Lord’s.

But Selwyn and Seymour Krystal were scarcely older than she was when they blazed for her through their window that first time. Ten, eleven. Were
they
in Jewish showbiz business suits already?

‘They were men, Max. They shaved. They had deep voices. They had the
charm
and confidence of grown men.’

‘And you fell in love with them?’

‘Of course. How could I not? But I wasn’t just in love with the boys. I adored the whole family. I am not going to say they were warm – I’ve had it with warm Jews, Max. And it’s a cliché anyway. It’s how you like to see yourselves. Loving. Generous.
Gemütlich
. Fuck all that. What they were was hot. Hot in the words they used. Hot in the jokes they told. Hot in the hurry they were in to top one another’s stories. Conversation was like a race. They didn’t drowse away the days as we did, they consumed them, they burned time. It was like a mission – to grow up, to move forward, to get somewhere. I was exhilarated by them. They came through my life like a train and I had to jump on . . .’