Kalooki Nights (49 page)

‘Not,’ Asher went on, ‘that we ever gave her a chance to convert.’

Perverse though it might have been to feel this, given his brother’s bitterness and distraction, Manny believed he had never before been as happy as he was that afternoon, talking to Asher of holy things among the torn books and sun-bleached dereliction of The Rambam’s grave. Several times their conversation was halted by a pilgrim, come to read Maimonides to Maimonides and pray over his thousand-year-old remains. One of them, a pale young man who wore his yarmulke like a tonsure, and actually sang his respects to The Rambam, fluting them like a boy soprano, reminded Manny of himself, that is to say of himself as he could be were he to stay with Asher in Israel and forget that Crumpsall ever existed. Perhaps the part of Asher that craved Dorothy never would be whole again, but these were precious weeks to both the brothers, Manny was convinced, and he imagined them as David and Jonathan, loving each other as they loved their own souls.

And then, KERPOW! Dorothy!

3

Are women as sentimental as men? Do they, too, when they lose the person they love, accept The Rambam’s arguments for the indivisibility and incomparableness of the object of their devotion?
The more beloved, like Hashem himself, for never being seen? For dissolving at last from corporeality to idea?

Manny was not the one to tell me. But to generalise from my own experience, the answer is no, they do not. Chloë and Zoë will never have missed me as I have missed them. Of that I am certain. There might be reason for it in my nature. I accept that I might well be an eminently unmissable man. Or it is possible that women are simply less whimsical and self-hurting in their affections, and prefer to love what they can see and touch.

In other words, women are Christians, men are Jews.

In which case we marry out every time we marry.

However you understand it, I deduced from what Manny
was
able to tell me that Dorothy had kept a corner of her heart forever shrouded in sadness for Asher, a little shrine to his memory which from time to time she tended with a sigh, but otherwise did not repine as he did, did not think of herself as a scar that would never heal. If she had not married, that was not because she could not bear to. Asher was a road she had not taken, that was all. A missed opportunity, an opportunity immeasurably important to her, but not the only opportunity that would ever come her way. She had entered the teaching profession, as she had always intended to, and was succeeding well enough at that. Head of modern languages at Bishops Blackburn, the only woman on the staff – imagine! At the same time she was studying for a PhD on the Elimination of the Blood Sacrifice in Judaism, the degree, were she to get it, to be awarded by the extra-mural studies department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In relation to which she had flown out to Israel not more than a week after Manny.

When Shabettai Zvi proclaimed himself the Messiah he circled the walls of Jersusalem twelve times. Dorothy, who was a student of Jewish history, might well have been reminded of this incident when she noted for the second time the man in the long beard and the white robes pass her where she was taking
photographs at Damascus Gate. She would not at first have registered that Asher was not alone. Though they had grown close, the brothers still kept their physical distance from each other. And once Asher had pointed something out to Manny he left him to form his own thoughts, not least because he wanted to be alone with his. Asher wasn’t the only Jesus lookalike in Jersualem. The city swarmed with them. But to Dorothy’s eye he did it better than the rest. His sadness was what struck her. Where the other messiahs were busy garnering attention and looked as though they might try to sell you jewellery if you caught their eye, this one had the authentic disappointed air of a messiah who had been rejected by his people and forsaken by his God.
Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?
If Jesus were to come again among us, having failed to get an answer to that question, this surely was how he would look.

Did she see that it was Asher, or did Asher see that it was her? Who got there first?

Manny was not sure. In the confusion he even wondered if he had been the one who did the recognising and was recognised, but he wouldn’t swear to that. It simply happened, that was all he could tell me. One minute he and Asher were walking along, staring up at masonry and turrets, not talking, barely even aware of each other, the next – as though in a dream, or as though they had wakened from a dream and were back in Crumpsall where they belonged, the Crumpsall they had never really left – there was Dorothy!

He thought she was the first to speak. ‘Oh!’ he thought she said. ‘Oh!’ as though she had been caught out in a wrongdoing. Then she covered her mouth with her hands.

Asher too behaved guiltily, raking his hair with his fingers and breaking out into a sweat. ‘Not possible,’ he said. ‘This isn’t possible.’

‘What are
you
doing here?’ Dorothy asked, as though
they
were the surprise, as though it was the most normal thing on earth that
she
should be in the Holy Land, out taking photographs of Old Jerusalem.

‘I live here.’

‘How long have you lived here?’

‘However long it is since I last saw you. A hundred thousand years.’

An expression crossed her face which Manny took great pains to describe, presumably because he believed it partially explained his subsequent behaviour. It was like a cloud darkening her eyes, not with anger but with pleading. She seemed to close her vision down. She compressed her lips, so tightly that grooves appeared in her skin on either side of her mouth, etches of age and suffering. Had she begged Asher to leave her alone, to pass by and pretend they hadn’t met, that they didn’t know each other after all, that they were mistaken in their recognition, she could not have pleaded more eloquently. It was her mouth that upset Manny most. The sad compression and yet at the same time the moistness of her lips. The resolution contending with the longing – everything she had dreaded but also everything which in foolish hours she had hoped for descending on her without a moment’s warning. Manny had no experience of romantic love. It’s likely he had never even read a love story. Love of God he knew about, but love of God marks the face differently. So he had never seen sorrow in the full flower of its voluptuousness. Had Asher forgotten all about her, fallen out of love with her over time, he surely would have succumbed to all his old feelings for her again. But Asher had not fallen out of love with her. Imagine, then, Manny urged me, imagine then the excitement in his heart, seeing her like this – seeing
her
like this! – palpitating with regret for what Asher had himself regretted every day for a hundred thousand years.

Because they couldn’t stand there like this for another eternity, she silently begging him to go away, he white and trembling, they finally proceeded – Manny’s word:
proceeded
– into each other’s arms.

Manny stood about for a few minutes, not knowing what to do, then resolved to go back to his brother’s hermit cell, collect his belongings and make enquiries about flights home.

4

The fires of romantic love. So fierce they even singed poor loveforgotten Manny.

But then it’s foolish to suppose anyone escapes, no matter how unromantically disposed they appear to be. I should have guessed – we all should have guessed – that when Tsedraiter Ike began to absent himself to visit the houses of the dead, he was on a different errand altogether. By the time my father died, Tsedraiter Ike was disappearing to sit shiva with virtual strangers three or four times a week. It ought to have been obvious to us that there weren’t enough Jews dying at that rate, not in Crumpsall anyway. It’s true that once Mick Kalooki began laying siege to Shani’s affections Tsedraiter Ike had reason to leave the house, but even when they moved out into a love nest of their own he continued with his errands of mercy, taking round chicken soup in plastic containers, or bagels filled with chopped liver and wrapped in greaseproof paper, to families too ravaged by bereavement to make their own food.

In fact everything went to the same person. Dolly Balshemennik. For all those years Tsedraiter Ike had told us he was nipping out to comfort mourners he was actually going to comfort Dolly Balshemennik. Hence the best coat and the homburg. Hence the vigorous brushing to which he subjected his single tooth. Dolly Balshemennik. He would not of course have been able to pronounce more than about two vowels of her name. Maybe that was his excuse. It was easier to say he was sitting shiva for the umpteenth time that week than to say he was visiting Dolly Balshemennik.

Dolly Balshemennik – I’ll say the name for him. She came to
his funeral. A twittering little woman with broken veins, almost no hair, and permanent tear stains on her cheeks. She lived round the corner to us. Just two streets away. Her being so close a neighbour amazed even us more than her Ike ’s mistress. Two streets away! We couldn’t get over that. Had we discovered he ’d been catching the early-morning flight to Novoropissik three times a week and flying back in time for supper, we would not have marvelled at his duplicity anything like so much. Two streets away! How do you like it!

There were other things to marvel at in this affair. Dolly Balshemennik had a husband. Sydney Balshemennik. He too came to the funeral. In a wheelchair which Dolly Balshemennik pushed. In a manner of speaking Tsedraiter Ike had after all been visiting a house of the dead. Sydney Balshemennik could no longer be counted among the living. Nothing of him remained in mind or body. More years ago than anyone could remember he had suffered a serious stroke – not the frivolous Selick Washinsky ‘vay iz mir my son has run off with a shikseh’ sort of stroke – the Jewish double-stroke in which one seizure cancels out another – but the full neurological catastrophe, leaving him incapable of doing anything but smile. So much did he appear to enjoy being tended first by his wife, and later by Tsedraiter Ike, that he saw no reason to die any more than he already had. He smiled when Tsedraiter Ike arrived and he smiled when Tsedraiter Ike left and that was the sum total of his interference in their union.

I watched him at the graveside, smiling.

Back at the shiva house his wife fed him kichels as though he were a slot machine. It had been my father’s theory that it was the kichels – those rock-hard little biscuits which Jews like to serve on these occasions with whisky or syrupy sweet red wine – that explained the condition of Tsedraiter Ike’s mouth. One of his very last jokes at Tsedraiter Ike’s expense – ‘If you went to fewer shiva houses, Ike, you’d have more teeth.’

Teeth or no teeth, he would be sorely missed by Dolly
Balshemennik who had already wept more than her own body weight in tears, and was weeping copiously still. When she had stuffed what she judged to be a sufficient number of kichels into Sydney Balshemennik’s slot, she held up a little glass of syrupy sweet red wine for him to sip, not looking to see whether he was spilling it or not.

‘Your uncle was a saint,’ she told me.

‘He was always very good to me,’ I said.

‘Good to you! Max, he never stopped talking about you. He lived for you!’ She had what my father used to call ‘the shtetl voice ’, ancient and quavering, full of hurried conspiratorial sorrow, cracked like a rusted bell tolling one more lamentation before the Cossacks rode in. How did she come by that voice? Dolly Balshemennik was born in Crumpsall. By her own admission she had never been near a shtetl in her life. So by what means did the shtetl live on in her larynx? Or in the vocal cords of those thousands of Jews who had never ventured more than a short train ride out of Middlesex or Brooklyn? My theory was that wherever we had been survived in our voices. Just a shame, as my father believed, that we had been to such shitty places.

‘Uncle Ike and I were very close when I was growing up,’ I said.

‘Close wasn’t the word he used. He loved you. You were like a son to him. Such pride he took in you, Max.’

I inclined my head. I was one of the principal mourners so it would not have been suitable for me to laugh. Pride! Ha! He’d hated everything I’d done since I left home. Every idea I’d had. Every woman I’d married. Every mark I’d made on paper.

But then so had I.

She saw what I was thinking and laid a trembling hand on my arm. Her whole body had begun to shake. I took the glass from her other hand. It wasn’t kind on Sydney Balshemennik, however much he smiled, to have him following it about vainly with his lips.

’You’d be wrong, you know,’ she said, ‘to think he wasn’t proud. He didn’t just have all your books, he kept all your cartoons. In cellophane! Such cartoons! Where did you learn to draw like that? A Jewish boy. We have books filled with them. Like wedding albums. Come round and look at them. He always hoped you would. He can come round and look at them, can’t he, Sydney?’

Was she telling the truth? I could think of no reason why she should be lying. But in that case why had Tsedraiter Ike not only kept his opinion of my work from me, but actually persuaded me that he thought the opposite? A
nestbeschmutzer
, he had called me. ‘I simply ask you to consider,’ he had written ‘who this is likely to help. Us, or them?’ My father, of course, had he lived to see me earning, would have done the same. ‘Why have you got such a chip on your shoulder?’ I hear him saying. ‘What have the goyim ever done to you?’ Pushed, he might have told me he didn’t mind so much the big tocheses.

Why was this? Was it generational? Could men that age not own up to a bit of simple pride or once in a while dole out a bit of simple praise? Or was it
Jewish
men of
any
age? ‘You’re such a withholding fucker,’ Zoë used to say to me. ‘Getting a kind or encouraging word out of you is like getting blood out of a stone, you tight-arsed fucking Jewish bastard.’

Chloë the same. ‘What a lovely day,’ her mother would announce, when I perchance wound open the roof of our Völökswägen during a spin through the Cheshire countryside. ‘Wouldn’t you say it is a lovely day, Max, or do you not feel the sun the way we do?’