Kalooki Nights (42 page)

Until they pushed her off.

Her breasts grew, but not too much, and Leila Krystal took fright. Poor Zoë. Of this part of the story at least, I believed
every word. Oy gevalt, a gorgeous little shikseh with hand-grenade breasts and features so diminutive and precise she looked as though a fairy god had pinched them out of Plasticine. What chance of Selwyn and Seymour resisting that? She knew her boys. They weren’t rompers or wenchers. Gentile girls with rosy cheeks and udders to their ankles came and went without causing any lasting damage. But this brittle and unblemished piece with a haughty, pointed nose and icy, tragic purpose in her eyes – no, the moment they noticed what she had grown into they would not resist her. She would call to them in their brief sleep from across the river and they would plunge into the freezing waters though they knew they could not swim. They had no choice. The ancient music sang in their bones. It was a compliment to Zoë of course, but you couldn’t expect her to take it as one. Leila Krystal had been born with one foot in Berlin and another in Vienna, her mother had been born with one foot in Prague and another in Budapest, cities where beauty was understood to be a commodity you were a fool not to trade in if you had it. Telling Zoë to put on fishnet stockings and walk the Kurfurstendamm (or words to that effect) was not unappreciative advice. And who’s to say it wasn’t right, that this was not the big thing Zoë had been waiting for. Her calling. To be the whore to end all whores. After which, it was anybody’s guess . . . A royal title? The movies?

I even put that to her once. ‘Maybe Leila Krystal was your angel after all,’ I said. ‘Maybe she was showing you your destiny. And you blew it.’

‘Only a Jew would have put her mind to what I had between my legs and seen a business opportunity in it,’ she said, slapping my face, ‘and only another Jew would have thought she was doing me a favour.’

She agreed with Hitler in the matter of Jews and prostitution. Hitler believed prostitutes were a Jewish invention, and Zoë swung between believing that every Jewish wife was a sort of prostitute to her husband and every Gentile woman was a
prostitute in the eyes of every Jewish man. But they had it wrong, Zoë and Hitler both. There was nothing specifically Jewish in turning sex to your advantage commercially. The practice had attained a high level of refinement in what had once been the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It just so happened that in our journeying through this Gentile agglomeration of states, a number of us picked up the local way of thinking.

Thus Zoë’s myth of exile, anyway. It was like listening to the Kabbalah. A paradisal unity shattered, the vessels broken, the holy sparks scattered far and wide. A war waged between true primordial light and its imitators. At the end of which – and this you don’t find in the Kabbalah – poor little Zoë standing outside the gates of the garden, and the angel Krystal with his flaming sword, barring her from re-entering for ever. A myth of exile which she was bound to repeat, not only with me but
to
me, charging me with it whenever we fell out, for the reason that I was on the continuum of Jewish treachery which had precipitated it, and was therefore, in my own person, one of its primary causes.

Strange to say, I accepted this guilt. Just as I held every German alive or dead accountable for Germany’s misdeeds, so did I shoulder responsibility for all acts of wickedness perpetrated or still to be perpetrated by Jews on Gentiles. A hard theology, but at least consistent. Bearing Five Thousand Years of Bitterness entailed bearing Five Thousand Years of Culpability.

Another way of putting that is to credit Zoë with the gift – oh yes, she was loaded with gifts, and not all of them went unexploited – of getting me to know what it felt like to be inside her head. I would watch her standing at the window after one of our fights, and I could hear the sea raging behind her eyes. She would try to look out of herself, notice something happening in the street, a person getting into their car, a mother wheeling a baby, but everything that wasn’t me, wasn’t her, wasn’t the Krystals, would be swept away. Although she claimed she could remember
every poisoned word Leila Krystal had said to her on the afternoon of the great betrayal, and every movement of Leila Krystal’s bejewelled hands – ‘Here, child, sit here,’ patting the tapestried cushion on the deep-sprung buttercup-yellow sofa, and then two fingers on the point of Zoë’s knee, as though she couldn’t trust even herself to make more fleshly contact with the girl than that – the story never came out quite the same way twice; but that was beside the point, because the poison, like the sea, was cumulative, each dosage increased by the memory of how it was the last time she remembered. To get through today meant getting through last week, and getting through last week meant getting through the week before. It was beyond her. It stretched too far back. The sea of her shame – the multiplying shame of so many failures to throw off shame – crashed in her ears. Had Leila Krystal appeared before us and Zoë plunged a knife into her heart, the noise in Zoë’s head would have been a mitigating circumstance. Not that it would have stilled the sea. Had she been able to quell the shame she would have been left with hatred, and had she been able to quell the hatred she would have been left with pain. Go all the way back, past the week before and the week before that, and she could only hope, at best, to come upon the little girl – for that was how she saw herself, no matter how luridly Leila Krystal apprehended her and feared her, just an unsuspecting little girl – whose starry, dazzling universe of love and optimism was about to be smashed into a thousand tiny fragments.

It had happened, could never be made not to have happened, would always go on happening – I was the living proof of that, another shatterer of stars, another stealer of Zoë’s rightful glory – and only a brute would not have wept for her. Yes, she passed it on, made herself so vivid to me that for years the sea in her head became the sea in mine, though I have to say she was not herself made any quieter by the companionship. We simply suffered it together, until finally she saw that as the latest and
most diabolical Jewish trespass upon her of them all – my attempt to muscle in on her sorrow.

After which there was only one thing she could say to me.

‘What’s the difference between a Jew and a pizza?’

‘I don’t know, Zoë. What is the difference between a Jew and a pizza?’

‘Pizzas don’t scream when you put them in the oven.’

6

They give him a postcard to send to his family. On the front is a photograph of a railway line.

‘Here, Scooby-Doo, write to your parents.’

‘Do you have other ones?’ he asks.

‘Other ones?’

‘Different pictures.’

‘No. What’s wrong with this picture? We all like it, don’t we?’

They all agree. They all like it. All things considered it’s their favourite.

‘What about stamps?’

‘You don’t need a stamp. We’ll post it for you.’

‘What about a pen?’

They give him a pen. Roll it in through the cell door, throw it on to his shelf, pop it into the glass by his bed.

He recalls marvelling that they would do this for him. A postcard, for God’s sake! Yesterday they were getting him to eat his own shit, today they are providing postcards. What do they mean by it? He closes his eyes and opens them again, expecting the postcard to have gone – but no, it is still there.

An hour later they come to collect it.

‘Written to your parents yet, Scooby-Doo?’

‘I can’t think of anything to say,’ he says.

‘Tell them about the weather. Tell them about your friends. Describe your day. Tell them what you do. Tell them how much
you think about them. Say you wish they were here.’

But he can’t. For some reason he can’t think of anything that would interest them.

When they come to collect his postcard the next time they see he has addressed it, but otherwise left it blank.

‘I would like this to go by the next post,’ he tells them. ‘There is some urgency.’

‘But you haven’t written anything.’

‘I haven’t anything to say.’

They scratch their heads under their caps and look at one another. ‘We are not sure that it’s allowed to send a blank postcard.’

‘I don’t think the post office will mind,’ he says.

They laugh. ‘It’s not the post office that’s worrying us. It’s
we
who are not allowed to post a blank postcard. Who knows – it might be code. You might be conveying secret information.’

‘I would use words for that.’

‘Oh, would you!’

‘If I wanted to, but I don’t.’

They scratch their heads again, then one of them has an idea. ‘We’ll have to get you another postcard,’ he says, ‘so that we can watch you leave it blank. That way we’ll know if you’re up to anything.’

‘Such as using invisible ink,’ a second says.

‘Or leaving it blank in a particularly suggestive way,’ puts in a third.

‘Why don’t you do it for me?’ he wonders.

They suck their teeth. ‘Oh no. We can’t write prisoners’ postcards for them. We’ll be accused of painting too rosy a picture.’

‘Not if you leave it blank.’

They think about that. ‘No,’ they say at last. ‘Then we’ll be accused of being uninformative. You’ll have to leave it blank yourself.’

They come back with a new postcard for him and smile between themselves when he fills in the address.

That’s the moment he realises what they are up to. The reason they have given him a postcard to write to his parents is that he has no parents. The address he writes – s-sssch – is obsolete. They don’t live there, no one lives there, any more.

S-sssch.

It is the same with his suitcase.

Twice a week they get him to sign for his suitcase. His signature is an acceptance that they are holding it for him with his permission.

‘What’s changed since the last time I signed?’ he asks.

‘You have,’ they tell him.

‘But what bearing does that have on my suitcase?’

‘We want your signature before you forget.’

‘Forget what?’

‘Forget that you have a suitcase.’

‘But if I forget, then it doesn’t matter, does it?’

They accuse him of solipsism. Just because he doesn’t apprehend his suitcase with his mind doesn’t mean his suitcase doesn’t exist. ‘The suitcase is still there, even if you aren’t,’ they say.

‘And why is that important?’

‘It’s important for our records. We need to know who the suitcase belongs to.’

‘It belongs to me.’

‘Not if you suddenly decide to deny it.’

‘And why would I do that?’

‘It’s something people do who have lost their minds.’

‘I don’t know why that would worry you.’

‘Because then we’d have a suitcase on our hands we couldn’t account for.’

‘Destroy it.’

They make a tutting noise in harmony, like a glee club. ‘We couldn’t do that. Too much paperwork.’

And how, I asked, was that the same as the postcards?

He was surprised I didn’t see it. Because in both instances the efficiency of the system was on the line. And in the end that was all that mattered – the efficient working of the s-system. How well organised everything was, right down to the smallest detail, how much care they took, how much pride they showed in their work. And how hurt they would be when that was not appreciated.

It’s when they come in with an iron and ironing board, get him to strip off his uniform and then order him to press the yellow star which adorns it, taking particular care with the six points, each of which must be smooth, and then when they begin beating him with their rifle butts because one of the points is not smooth, that I decide to say something.

‘Why are you messing with my head, Manny?’

‘People don’t know how beautifully made those stars were—’

‘Stop it, Manny.’

He looked away, up at the broken ceiling rose I was always promising Zoë I’d get fixed. His eyes were bluer than cornflowers. Confronted with such an expression, Shitworth Whitworth would have clobbered him for dumb insolence.

Had he been deliberately messing with my head, or was his own head so messed up that he no longer distinguished between what he’d read and what he’d experienced, where he’d been and where he had always feared they would take him?

‘Do you want to know what actually happened?’ he asked me, an hour later.

I made no reply.

‘I lay on my bed and tried to find a justification for every crime that had ever been committed against Jews.’

‘For twenty years?’

‘Why not? I could have taken longer.’

‘And did you succeed?’

‘Yes. We deserved everything that had been done to us.’

‘And did it make you feel better to think that?’

‘Yes, it did. It’s always better to feel you’ve played your part. Anything’s better than being a victim.’

‘And what do you think now?’

‘I think anything’s better than being a victim.’

‘So you don’t ever think of yourself as one?’

‘As a victim? Me? How could I be? I broke the Ten Commandments.’

‘Only one of them, Manny.’

‘You can’t break only one of them. Break one, break them all.’