Kalooki Nights (55 page)

‘What is it?’

‘It’s to take away the smell of fear.’

I thought it was a joke. Forgetting that Chloë didn’t make jokes.

‘You’ve got a surprise coming if you think I’ll be using that,’ I told her.

Whereupon she came at me with the knife again.

For the duration of what was left of our marriage, I used the skin-wash twice a day.

I wasn’t lying when I said I was afraid for her. A woman wielding a knife as though she means to use it is a fearful spectacle. More fearful than a man wielding a knife because the woman with the knife appears to be parted more extremely from her nature. But of course I was afraid for myself as well. Not only afraid of being mortally wounded, but afraid that the ordinary condition of my life – a life of jokes, Jews, bitterness and whys – could so easily be disrupted and made to count for nothing. A knife raised in anger made life morally not worth living, whether the blade touched you or not. A gun the same.

And the antibacterial skin-wash couldn’t help with that.

7

The moment I got the opportunity I asked Manny what he would have done with a gun had he bought one.

‘Shot someone,’ he said.

‘Who?’

‘Who do you think?’

For some reason an event unrelated to any we’d been discussing flashed into my mind.

‘Errol,’ I said.

‘Errol? Who’s Errol?’

‘Errol Tobias. The meshuggener from our street who used to bully you.’

‘I don’t remember him.’

Was he lying? I had no idea. Was he lying about the gun, come to that? Again, I had no idea.

But I could see that it illuminated Manny’s face to learn that I could imagine more people for him to shoot than he had imagined for himself. He would have liked it, I thought, had I gone on guessing. H-horst S-ssschumann, then? Klaus Endruweit? The judge who pronounced sentence on you? Shitworth Whitworth? The people who made you eat your own faeces from the metal pot? David Irving? Me?

Rather than embark on what might have turned out to be another list of the enemies of the Jewish people, I tried him with a teaser of my own.

‘Why, Manny?’

‘Why didn’t I shoot anyone?’

‘Well, that too. But I meant why did you want to.’

His reply surprised me not only by its promptness, but by its vehemence.

‘It couldn’t go on for ever,’ he said. ‘In the end someone has to sort things out.’

‘With a gun?’

‘With whatever.’

Meaning, I supposed, the gas taps. But in that case, why all the gun talk?

‘So are you saying you
did
get a gun?’ I asked him.

He suddenly turned impatient on me. It was always the same. You asked him one innocuous little sentence –
So did you get a
gun or didn’t you?
– and he was off.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said

An hour later he popped his head round the door. In his dismal green-and-grey-check 1950s pyjamas, he looked disembodied. Though they would have fitted an average-size schoolboy, his pyjamas hung off him. A magician might tap them with his wand and hey presto – they would fall to the floor, and nobody would be inside!

He coughed, wanting my attention.

‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’ he said, when I looked up.
‘The coward does it with a kiss. The brave man with a sword. But sometimes the coward does it with a sword as well.’

With which he wished me goodnight and retired a second time.

So what the fuck did any of that signify?

I found it hard to sleep. Unlike me. Even with Alÿs lying beside me like the ghost of pogroms past I had always managed to sleep. To my astonishment and self-disgust I had slept soundly the night my father died. But there was no sleeping through Manny’s riddles, of which the coward and his sword were, to tell the truth, by no means the most perplexing. What about his ‘sorting things out’ with a gun? What about his daring me to face up to him with a gun? Was that metaphorical or did he actually have one in his posession, here, in my house, hidden in his suitcase or under Zoë’s old mattress?

Present fears aside, nothing he had said to me made any sense. Whatever sorting out had needed doing he had done. He had sealed the door with a sheet – easy because there were sheets piled everywhere in the Washinsky house – turned on the gas tap, and that, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was the obstacle to his brother’s union, sorted. What need of any gun? Unless, to be on the safe side, or as an act of kindness to them, he had shot them first. But I recalled no talk of bullets, and presumably the police, though inexperienced in the crime of double Jewish patricide in Crumpsall Park, would have noticed had any been discharged.

Since my mother kept bohemian hours, playing cards until very late, or sitting up listening to talkback radio half the night, and never minded whatever time I called, I thought I’d ring and ask what she remembered.

‘You kalooki-ing or not?’ I enquired.

‘Just finished.’

‘Did you win?’

‘The game won.’

‘Listen, Ma, did you ever hear anything about Manny Washinsky’s parents being shot?’

My mother was elderly now. This was cruel of me. ‘I remember something,’ she said. ‘Weren’t they killed in a road accident? Or was that their boy?’

I hadn’t told her I had made contact with Manny again, let alone that he had become my lodger. It all felt too complicated to explain. And I feared – I can’t explain why – that it might upset her. But she was evidently past upset on the Washinskys’ account.

‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I won’t bother you any more.’

‘Why do want to know? You aren’t going to put them in a cartoon?’

‘Ma, why would I do that?’

‘You tell me. Why would you put me or your sister in a cartoon?’

‘I have never put you or my sister in a cartoon.’

‘That’s not true. You used to get Shani to pose for you in boots,’

How did she remember that? ‘I wasn’t drawing Shani, I was drawing the boots.’

‘Yes, so that you could put her in a camp. I never understood what all that was about, Maxie. Concentration camps?’

‘I never put Shani in a camp. I drew the boots, that was it.’

‘And you put the boots in the camp. It’s the same thing. They

were Shani’s boots.’

‘Ma, it’s what you do if you draw. You draw from life.’

‘Life I wouldn’t have minded. What you were drawing, Maxie, was death. Camps, camps, camps – where did you get all that stuff from? The only camp you ever went to was Butlin’s.’

I rang off, making my usual promise to go up and see her soon. Had I been any kind of son I’d have kidnapped her from Crumpsall and brought her down to live with me in Belsize Park, where Jews were not pretending they were back in Poland. Me, my mother, Manny – it would have made a nice household, all that was left of the Crumpsall that had been.

But then again, not if Manny was keeping a gun on the premises.

Unable to sleep, I made myself some tea and paced the floor.
Someone has to sort things out
. If that didn’t mean what I had originally thought it meant, what did it mean?

An idea came to me, shocking at first, but plausible the more I thought about it.

Dorothy.

The cleanest, that’s to say the most effective way to have sorted things out was to have got rid of Dorothy.

Five thousand smackers would have been the cleanest way to do it, but she would surely have said no to that, just as Mick Kalooki had, and anyway, where was Manny going to lay his hands on that sort of money?

Why, after getting rid of Dorothy, Manny would have needed to get rid of his parents as well was a stage too far in my reasoning. But blaming them for making a murderer of him was certainly one motive. As was sparing them from discovering what he’d done. You can kill out of love as well as hate, as he had just reminded me.

But I was running ahead of my own thoughts. Dorothy shot and killed, or Dorothy shot and wounded, or Dorothy shot and missed, was substanceless imagining. Enough – terrible enough – just to imagine Manny
wanting
Dorothy to be shot. The Eleventh Commandment: you don’t go round killing people in your head. Least of all when the worst thing they’ve done to you is to fall in love with your brother. You should love those, should you not, who love those to whom you are devoted? You should be bound by the concurrence of your affections. As Shani believed Tsedraiter Ike should have been bound to Mick.

Then again, let Dorothy’s virtues plead angel-tongued against her taking off, she had wreaked havoc on the Washinskys. Twice, and twice is more than twice as bad as once. Selick Washinsky might make a better job of dying this time round. Asher too might
not survive it all again. True, Manny had looked with a brother’s love into Asher’s heart and imagined it as an empty bed which now, miraculously, was warm. But what if this rerun of old happiness merely presaged a rerun of old sorrows? She had made a ghost of Asher before; who was to say she would not make a ghost of him again.

It should have been over. Tragically over, but over. Manny had been on her side the first time. But her second coming changed the distribution of right and wrong.

And then there was himself to consider. Were his feelings of no account? Dorothy had stepped in between him and his brother – unceremoniously elbowing him aside – palpitating with the greed of life, just as Manny was thinking that his own life, at last, was brimming over with happiness.

Kill or be killed.

I’d have tackled him with this the next day had he allowed me. But he must have known something along these lines was in the offing. He spent the day in bed, whatever he knew. Only coming out to make himself a honey and banana sandwich when he thought I wasn’t around.

He spent the next day in bed as well. And the next.

This might have been pure fancy but it was as though he had turned himself in for a crime for which he had until now escaped punishment, appointing me to be his warder.

It felt quiet and oddly comforting in the house. I half wanted to go round at night, checking the cells, whistling, and jingling my keys.

I dunno...Maybe EVERYONE has to feel guilty.
EVERYONE! FOREVER!

Art Spiegelman,
Maus

1

On the evening of the third day, Francine rang. How was our yeshiva boy, she wanted to know. I tried my new theory out on her – not that of my house having become a prison, but Manny pointing a gun at Dorothy.

She was excited by the gun element. ‘A gun’s good,’ she said. ‘We like guns.’

‘Except,’ I said, going off my own theory the minute I voiced it, ‘I think it’s all baloney.’

‘Why do you think it’s all baloney?’

‘Well, for a start because there’s no reason to believe he shot anybody, except in his own head.’

Shooting people in his own head she was less excited by. ‘Not quite so televisual,’ she told me. ‘And besides, I rather liked where we were going last time. Manny sweet on the girl.’

‘Manny? Sweet? Manny doesn’t do sweet.’

‘Every man does sweet, Max. Even weird ones with

payess.’
Payess.
Hebrew for sidelocks. How did she know payess?

(
Ways of Saying Payess When You’re Not Jewish
, Vol. III.)

‘Run it by me, Francine,’ I said.

‘Manny sweet on girl, Manny jealous of his brother, Manny thinking of killing his brother, Manny then sparing his brother out of love for the girl, and killing his parents instead . . .’

’Because he blamed them for putting him in payess and making him unlovable?’

‘Well, that as well, certainly, but more I think because he wanted to make a statement about Jewish attitudes to Gentiles. He killed his parents because he could not forgive the things they had said about the girl. He was killing his religion. We can run on that. It’s only a shame – from the point of view of narrative I mean – that he didn’t then turn the gun on himself. That would have been perfect.’

‘Not gun, gas taps.’

‘Yes, gas taps, more perfect still.’

But if we were going in that direction, I had another thought. Asher, in despair of ever getting his parents to accept Dorothy, realising that they will never leave him alone so long as he is with her, and discovering, what is more, that they have tried to get him certified as a lunatic, turns the gas taps on them. Manny, out of love for the girl, takes the rap. ‘I accept that you love him and will never love me, so be it, and rather than see you suffer another moment’s unhappiness I will rot away my life in prison, adieu, my lovely, my golden faigeleh, be happy with my brother, this is a far far better thing, blah blah.’ Several years later, when Manny learns that Asher has turned into a love rat, cheating on Dorothy with any woman he can lay his hands on, he thinks of having him rubbed out. No – better still – Dorothy, who warned Asher she would kill him if he ever left her again, goes to Manny and asks him to arrange to have Asher rubbed out. Manny says he’ll see what he can do. The gun wasn’t literally in Manny’s hands. He put a contract out. Not hard to do when you’re inside. Whisper, whisper, bar of chocolate, maybe a blow job, and it’s as good as done. Only at the last minute he relented. He couldn’t make Dorothy husbandless – nor could he make her a murderer in the eyes of God – no matter what sort of mamzer the husband had turned out to be.

A longer silence than usual from Francine. Then, ‘Are you taking the piss, Max?’

Who are you, Maxie Glickman? What’s your game?

‘I don’t see,’ I said, ‘that my narrative is any more far-fetched than yours. Except maybe for the blow job.’

‘OK, so do we
know
that Asher was a love rat?’

‘We don’t know anything. Manny glides away from any discussion of Asher and Dorothy as they are now,
if
they are now, or even as they were when he was put away. I think they stopped for him when his parents stopped. It’s them we should ask.’

‘Easier said than done. First find them.’

‘Isn’t that Christopher Christmas’s job?’

‘I’ll speak to him. But in the meantime, Max, can we get the Jewish angle back?’

‘This isn’t about religion, Francine. I’m coming round to your way of thinking – it’s about love. I’m even wondering if we shouldn’t make them all Gentiles so as not to get sidetracked.’