Kalooki Nights (7 page)

‘All boys read comics,’ my mother said.

But I was right and she was wrong. Manny Washinsky had never read a comic in his life. But he, too, wanted someone to play with. So for a dozen
Beanos
and one
Tarzan
he swapped me
The Scourge of the Swastika
. ‘Only I’ll be wanting it back,’ he told me.

‘Then I’ll be wanting my
Beanos
back.’

‘You can have them back now. I won’t look at them anyway. I’m not allowed.’

‘So why are you giving me this?’

‘I’m not. I’m just lending it you.’

‘What’s it about?’ I asked.

‘The Final Solution.’

‘Is it any good?’ It looked good, if the cover was anything to go by. Blood-red lettering on a cowardy cowardy custard-yellow background. A figure in jackboots, seen from behind and below, as a trodden worm might see him; in his belt a revolver, the jackboots themselves astride the globe, like the very portals of the earth. And between his legs, viewed from a distance, cowering and hopeless, with nowhere to hide, the trodden-worm masses of the Jewish people.

More than that, it appeared well thumbed.

‘There are supposed to be photographs in it,’ Manny told me, ‘but my parents ripped them out.’

I wondered why that was.

Manny pulled a face. ‘They said I could see them when I was older.’

The book itself, though I can recite half of it to this day, I have no memory of actually sitting down and reading. So I must have imbibed its contents some other way. And eventually, courtesy of
Errol Tobias who had his own copy – the street, it turned out, was awash with
The Scourge of the Swastika
– I got to see the missing photographs as well.

On consideration I think Manny’s parents were right to have kept them from him. The pity was that he got to see them in the end.

The pity was that any of us did.

6

Emanuel Eli Washinsky was found guilty of manslaughter on the basis of diminished responsibility in 1973. The year of my first divorce. And the year Syria and Egypt coordinated a surprise attack against Israel on Yom Kippur, also on the basis of diminished responsibility. So a big year for Jews. In fact the Yom Kippur War was a bit of a godsend for Manny, in that the consternation and anger it generated distracted attention from his trial. That’s assuming he cared one way or another by that time.

The crime itself had been committed the year before. I was gone from the neighbourhood when it happened. I was plying my trade. Living modestly in London and selling my cartoons – this was well before my Tom of Finland phase – to whoever would buy them:
Punch
,
Private Eye
, the
Spectator
, I wasn’t particular. I doubt I had yet developed an individual style. Baleful I suppose was the word for what I did – incongruities, absurdities and falsities eyed splenetically and in the English manner: Gillray, Rowlandson et al, but more fingery in the line, more persnickety, and without the current affairs. Not yet on an epic scale, you might say. But then the epic scale I was reserving for what really mattered to me –
Five Thousand Years of Bitterness
. Yes, it had been
our
book, a Stroganoff Brothers production, but Manny had washed his hands of it, both spiritually and intellectually, years before. Blasphemous. Unclean. Unfunny. So I felt that the moral rights to it had reverted to me. Besides, I wasn’t using any of his words. Beyond a few necessary AARGH!s and SPLAT!s and SKREEAAAK!s there were no words. Just pictures. Illustrations, in the grotesque mode and with lots of colour – think Dr Doom as drawn by Goya – of what successive generations of bastards had done to us in every corner of the globe. Graphic novels hadn’t even happened yet, so I was at the vanguard of comic history. Not that I was drawing fiction. This was graphic history. And not just any graphic history.
The
graphic history.

I wasn’t rushing. No one was breathing down my neck. When I finished it I finished it, and when I finished it the world would notice. That wasn’t arrogance, merely the certainty without which you cannot do the work. The only people I couldn’t imagine reading it with pleasure were the Germans, though I have since learned that collective guilt, if you know how to work it, can sell books in piles as high as bones. In the meantime I could just about earn enough to keep me in cigarettes, Bell’s whisky, and the sort of Gentile women – awe-inspiring and essentially ill-disposed to me – who made me go weak at the knees. Being squeezed through the divorce courts by Chloë, post
St Matthew Passion
, had depressed my spirits and strained my finances, but I felt that when I needed more I could always draw more. As for running out of ideas, the proposition would have struck me as laughable. I was the fruit of Five Thousand Years of Bitterness which meant that I was heir to Five Thousand Years of Jokes.

It was from my mother that I first heard about the Washinskys’ tragedy. A phone call at an odd hour. The call you know, from the time and from the ringtone, bodes only ill.

‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I have something very terrible to tell you.’

‘Is it Shani?’

‘No, it isn’t anybody in the family. We ’re all all right. It’s the Washinskys. Something unbearably awful has happened. Oh, Max, I don’t know how to start to tell you.’

Although she had moved out of Crumpsall Park soon after Shani
left, installing herself and Tsedraiter Ike into a maisonette in more salubrious Prestwich, with the intention of renting out our old house for extra income, she was back in it again for reasons of economy, neither she nor Tsedraiter Ike being capable of administering a property, or of earning a penny any other way come to that. A family feature – our hopelessness with money. Always some retrenchment in the offing, though never when it came to shoes, or indeed to any other aspect of my mother’s appearance which had altered after my father died only in that sadness rendered it the more exquisite and, by Crumpsall standards, expensive. It was from our old house, anyway, in our old street and on our old phone, that she was ringing me. Though I rarely visited Crumpsall any more I could see it all as if I’d been there only the day before. Dread can do this. My skin turned cold and I saw the street, saw Manny whom I hadn’t seen in years, saw his father sewing at the front window, saw the neglected garden, the forlorn weeds growing through the cracks in the paving stones, the paint long peeled from every door and window frame, giving the house not so much a derelict as a blanched, bled-white appearance, saw Manny’s mother peering out of an upstairs window to look for him, frightened for him and frightened for herself, not wanting to show her face, not trusting her neighbours or the light of day, no longer welcoming home the men of the family as she used to do before her family was made a laughing stock, and saw Manny swinging from a rope in his bedroom, his eyes bulging, his body hanging like an empty sack. Then I heard the wailing, centuries old.

I doubt anybody who knew the Washinskys would have pictured any other scene had they been told only what my mother had so far told me.
Sit down. Something unbearably awful has
happened
. . .

Manny. What else could you think? Manny had taken his life. The likelihood had always been that he would kill himself, he had talked about killing himself, had even practised killing himself, and now he’d done it.

’Who found him?’ I asked. The hanging part was so to be expected, the only drama was in the discovery.

‘Manny? Nobody’s found him. Nobody knows where he is.’

My skin turned a little colder.

‘Ma,’ I said, ‘what’s happened?’

‘Well, it’s unclear. There are still police in the street. The house is cordoned off, Maxie. It’s too terrible.’

‘Ma, just tell me what’s happened.’

‘Channa and Selick have been found dead.’

‘Christ!’

‘In their beds, Max. They think gassed.’

‘Gassed!’

‘I know.’

You don’t say ‘gassed’ to Jews if you can help it. One of those words. They should be struck out of the human vocabulary for a while, while we regroup, not for ever, just for a thousand years or so – gassed, camp, extermination, concentration, experiment, march, train, rally, German. Words made unholy just as ground is made unholy.

Side by side, holding hands, was how I imagined them. Like a devout Christian couple engraved in cathedral brass. Staring up at the dome from which Lord Jesus in a night sky of stars and angels looks down in celestial majesty. I had never seen inside their bedroom, but supposed it must have been like the rest of their house – unaired, unloved, not exactly unclean but uncared for, clothes and linen thrown about the floor, bare bulbs hanging from the ceilings, the furniture gaping stuffing, everything broken, the world of here and now a tribulation to them, and yet nothing suggestive of the spiritual life either, unless the flotsam of Judaic tat, cheap household objects adorned with Hebrew lettering, torn prayer books, fringed vestments thrown over the backs of chairs, and yes, yes, the odd angelically ignited candle, could be said to constitute spirituality. But the gassing of them somehow cleaned up around them. Gassed, they had joined the
sacred millions, photographs of whose piled-up bodies I had first seen in Lord Russell of Liverpool’s
The Scourge of the Swastika
, the righteous by virtue of victimisation, and no one stood judgement on
their
domestic surroundings.

Into the spaces my mother was granting me to digest the news, a stray thought flew.

‘What about Asher?’

Asher was Manny’s older brother. Somehow farshimelt and dashing in the past tense – dashed – all at once. Hollowed out, was how he had looked to me, great black volcanic gouges for eyes, and a sunken, tubercular chest. There was a touch of that about Manny too, but in his case you imagined that he had simply never inhaled enough fresh air, that his were coward’s lungs, whereas in Asher you saw someone made ill by late nights, if not alcohol then coffee, and if not debauch then at least the imagination of debauch. All guesswork on my part. I hardly knew him. He appeared a handful of times to keep Jewish assembly at our school – that’s to say to look after the Jewish kids while the Gentiles were hymning their saviour in the hall. He was meant to be teaching us Hebrew, or at least occupying us Hebraically, but all we did was chant a few letters of the Hebrew alphabet and throw chalk at him. He made no attempt to keep us in order. When a piece of chalk hit him he would smile and put it in his pocket. He was unnerving. He was somewhere else in his head.

Because he was six or seven years older than Manny he had never figured in our conversation, never came out to offer us his opinion on
The Scourge of the Swastika
, never followed us into the air-raid shelter to make suggestions for
Five Thousand Years
of Bitterness
, and for all I knew was unaware that he even had a brother, let alone that his brother had a friend. But although he wasn’t much in evidence in person, rumours about him had circulated freely, stories so wild and contradictory it was hard to believe they referred to the same person. Now he was a teacher at a Talmud Torah somewhere in the Midlands, and such was his
popularity that children cried to be allowed to go to his lessons. A businessman in New York who happened to be in the Midlands at the time was so impressed by Asher’s methods that he was funding him to set up a string of chederim – Sunday schools for Jews – all over the United States. But the next week he was out of work, penniless, keeping bad company, haunting low dives, in such deep trouble morally that his parents had disowned him, and not only disowned him but actually recited the prayers for the dead over him. And there’s only one reason why devout Jewish families ever do that. A shikseh!

Asher and a shikseh! The whole of Crumpsall was abuzz with it.

Could Asher – training to be a rabbi – really have been found in bed with the fire-yekelte who was three times his age, a sootyfingered woman in an apron who only ever visited the house on Saturday, and who therefore must have seduced or been seduced by him on the Sabbath? Count the sins against Leviticus, count the number of abominations the Washinskys would have enumerated in that! Once the most reserved family in the street, the Washinskys were suddenly waking us all up in our beds with their cursing. So violently did they turn on one another that Selick Washinsky had to be carried out on a stretcher, collapsing after trying to tear his son’s heart out. If the father didn’t kill the son, the son would kill the father. ‘Help!’ Channa Washinsky ran out into the street to cry. ‘They are murdering each other!’ My own father was dying at the time. I recall our concern that the last weeks of his sublunary sleep should not be disturbed by the war that had broken out between the Washinskys. But what could we do? A family had a right to rip itself apart if it wanted to. My father even found a sort of consolation in it. With luck these were the death throes of the Orthodox. They would tear themselves to shreds and that would be the end of this strange passage of ahistoricity and fancy dress which Jewish history had entered. Then all things stopped together: my father’s breathing and the
Washinskys’ shouting. Asher, like my father, was spirited away. To a yeshiva in the North-East, it was said, Gateshead no doubt, where Manny, too, went years later, and then to some convalescent camp in Lymm in Cheshire. I might have the order of those exiles wrong. Both were terrifying destinations; places of oblivion to my sense, like those schools in Dickens to which parents sent children they did not love in the hope of never hearing from them again. Gateshead, closer to Scandinavia than to Manchester, where the boys sat on hard benches and studied the head-hurting subtleties of Jewish law all day. Draitheboys Hall. Lymm no better. Always a stigma attaching to Lymm, as though the bad-chested boys who went there had brought their badness on themselves.

Manny talked to me about Asher only on a couple of occasions. An out-of-bounds confidence never to be repeated or alluded to. As if the extremity that spoke through him drew a magic circle around us. Otherwise, the subject of his brother and his departing from the straight and narrow path of Judaism was closed.
Verboten
. In later years, Asher Washinsky, now assumed to be a ruined man, was reported to be working as a shammes, a janitor, in a small synagogue in South America, or was it South Africa, or was it South Australia, but he could just as easily have been out drinking himself to death. Or sobbing in some alley. That was what he looked – a wild, hollow, melancholic rake who read the Talmud.