Kalooki Nights (8 page)

I envied him. I would have liked to look the way he looked, at least before the affair with the fire-yekelte ruined his life. Marked black, like Cain.

So had I been the detective in charge of the investigation, I’d have known where to look. And where were you, Mr Asher Washinsky, between the hours of . . .

But that was to jump the gun. Who’d said anything about a police investigation? What reason did I have to believe there was a suspect?

Asher? Well, in fact it was my mother’s understanding that for
all the rumours of his having gone to ground in the furthest corners of the earth, he had in fact returned recently to Manchester. The police found him living round the corner, woke him in the middle of the night and told him the appalling news. ‘Maxie, it’s so upsetting. They say he doubled over when he heard, as though someone had shot him. He’s been spitting blood and howling like an animal.’

I took that with a pinch of salt. How did anybody know how Asher had behaved in the presence of the midnight policeman? And as for spitting blood, it was what Jewish sons were said to do when their parents died. It was a manner of speaking, a metaphor for the enormity of their grief. I hadn’t so far spat blood myself, but I had howled right enough. Howled and howled.

‘And does anybody know what exactly happened?’ I asked.

‘No. The Greens next door smelled a leak. It was they who called the police. We’re lucky there wasn’t an explosion. The whole street could have gone up.’

I knew what my late father would have said. They shouldn’t be allowed gas when they’re in that condition. People as primitive as the Washinskys oughtn’t to be trusted with modern inventions. They crashed their cars. They turned their stoves and ovens into ancient altars which needed the breath of Yahweh or failing that a disrespected member of the Gentile working classes to light them on the Shabbes. And now they’re gassing themselves.

‘So is that what they’re thinking? Just a leak?’

‘
Just
? Maxie, you sound disappointed.’

I sighed. Did I? Would I have wanted it to be something else? Robbery with violence? Hard to imagine any robber with his head screwed on supposing the Washinskys had anything to steal, other than mezuzahs and menorahs and tefillin bags. And a few scrag ends of whatever fur it was that Selick Washinsky sewed into whatever garment it was he sewed. Not mink, not Persian lamb, not ocelot – nothing precious was surely ever allowed in to that decaying house. As for an assault by Jew-haters, we would have
heard, my mother would have known by now, the whole of Jewish Crumpsall would have been in uproar. The desecration, the swastikas, the burning crosses nailed to the garden gate. You can’t keep those quiet. Leak it was then. Ho-hum. Having laid them down side by side in my imagination, blanched of their sins by whoever had gassed them, I was ready, since no one had gassed them, to leave them to their eternal rest. I hadn’t really known them when I’d known them, and hadn’t seen or thought about them for years. Their going made no material difference to me. And I had never been able or allowed to penetrate Manny’s affective system. Did he care about them? Love them? Would he spit blood and howl when he found out? God knows.

So even for him I couldn’t feel their loss.

Done and dusted. A gas leak. Very sad. Very sad indeed. End of perturbation. Back to my cartoons.

I had an inadequate sense of them as human beings. A terrible confession, I acknowledge. But I am, despite occasional departures from his teaching, my father’s son. Something makes me except the devout from the human family, no matter that the heat of their lair had beguiled me once. They step out by virtue of their other-worldliness, so I leave them there. Had the decently secularised parents of some far more distant friend than Manny been found gassed in their beds I’d have lain awake for weeks picturing their torment. But because of the odour of mouldering prohibition in their house, because of the stained black trilby that Selick Washinsky wore for synagogue every Shabbes morning, because of the poverty of Channa Washinsky’s wardrobe (nothing that would have done for even the most modest of my mother’s kalooki friends to wipe her nose on), because of the holy books that occupied their bookshelves instead of encyclopaedia and romances, the torn siddurim they took out to read from on Friday nights, the holy writ or mumbo-jumbo as my father used to call it, because of all the junk there was to touch and kiss, and start in superstitious trepidation from, I couldn’t feel for Manny
anything of what I should have felt. I couldn’t anticipate his horror. Beyond a passing sadness for him, such as the death of someone’s animal might bring, God help me, I couldn’t participate in his grief. Is this the explanation of the Five Thousand Years of Persecution, of the pogroms, of the Shoah even, is this the answer to the age-old question – How Could They Do It? – that the perpetrators of these crimes were able to do what they did because those on whom they visited inhumanity did not themselves seem to be
of
humanity? No excuse. You should not visit inhumanity on a dog. But people do and it is important we understand how and why. Or maybe I am merely seeking to forgive myself.

There it is, anyway. Two people with whom I hadn’t exactly grown up, but who had been intimate figures in my landscape, no matter that they were mostly figures of distaste, the parents of a boy I had at one time been as close to as I have to anybody – two elderly, God-revering, God-startled people with whom my life, like it or not, had been accidentally entwined, two Jews, two
more
Jews, lay gassed in their beds and other than a brief essay into the picturesque I could neither envision the scene with any pity worth speaking of, nor lament their passing.

So that when Manny was reported the next day as having handed himself over to the police, very quietly and with no histrionics confessing that he had crept into his parents’ bedroom while they slept, turned on the taps of their little gas fire, made a mound of sheets outside their door to stop up ventilation, and slipped out of the house, I felt that it was my guilt he had owned up to.

Superman grew out of our feelings about life . . . this tremendous feeling of compassion that Joe and I had for the downtrodden.

Jerry Siegel, co-creator of Superman

1

I didn’t go to Manny’s trial. Why should I have? I wasn’t his friend. I was in America at the time, getting over Chloë and trying to interest the
New Yorker
in my cartoons. Absurd. I should have been in San Francisco talking to the publishers of
Zap
. I had known about the underground comic revolution since my student days, and had even ripped off some early Robert Crumb for a rag-week publication. Whatever contradictions fuelled, or at this time failed to fuel my cartooning, I would have been better throwing in my lot with overt rudery and dysfunction, rather than trying to gain acceptance from the effete mob that ran the
New Yorker
. But I was an English Jew – that was my dysfunction – and somehow English Jews have had all the rudery squeezed out of them.

My only contact with the
New Yorker
was Yolanda Eitinger, a fact-checker with no sense of the ridiculous who had once been married to someone I’d palled out with at art college. A bigamist. Not Yolanda, the man she thought she’d married. When Yolanda found out the truth she returned to New York, combed her hair down in front of her face, doubled the thickness of her lenses, and fact-checked the life out of every piece that landed on her desk. ‘I’ve got a portfolio of funnies with me,’ I told her over the phone, ‘but I’m not bringing them in if you’re going to set about checking their veracity.’

‘Cartoons aren’t my department,’ she told me, meaning she would if she could.

Yolanda was what we call a farkrimteh. A sourpuss. Try any sort of play in the company of Yolanda and she turned so nervous – sometimes going as far as to shield her face with her arm – she made you feel you’d opened a window and let a bat in. Even over the phone you could hear her covering her head.

But at least she honoured our old connection by fixing me an introduction to a junior editor who, like so many New Yorkers in the arts, got his dress sense from the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. Irving, he was called. Mellifluously spoken, over-shaved, and in the custody of his polka-dot bow tie. Where it led, Irving followed. Like Yolanda, Irving also looked anxious when someone released a joke into the room. But being a man, he didn’t hide his face.

Over a faux English sandwich at a faux English club he tried explaining to me what made Thurber hum
or
ous.

‘Desperation,’ I interrupted him.

‘I beg yours?’

‘What made Thurber hum
or
ous was desperation. Only I don’t think the word for it is hum
or
exactly. It’s not hum
or
when you’re at the end of a rope. What makes Thurber funny is that you smell death in every sentence he wrote and despair in every line he drew.’

Since Irving didn’t think anything made
me
funny I reckoned I was lucky to get the sandwich out of him. But for everyone being jittery about flying anywhere in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, I’d have caught a plane back to London that night. Instead I went to a peep show on 42nd Street, paid a girl five dollars a second to let me fondle her through a couple of holes in the wall, and asked her to guess what I did with my hands. ‘You fondle broads,’ she guessed. ‘Wrong,’ I told her, ‘I draw cartoons.’ ‘Like Disney?’ ‘No, like Thurber.’ ‘Who’s Thurber?’ ‘A great and very desperate man.’ ‘Did he like fondling broads?’ ‘I suspect he never tried.’ ‘His loss.’

My point exactly.

Before she’d relieved me of every dollar in my wallet, she wondered if I ever did cartoons for
Playboy
. ‘Little Annie Fanny – something tells me you’d be good at that.’

The minx!

Uncannily prescient of her, though. In a desperate hour I’d tried sending some of my work to Hefner, only to be told by one of his editors that they had their team and that I was too English for it anyway. A man should count his blessings. Little Annie Fanny broke the balls of Harvey Kurtzman, the great American illustrator who founded
Mad
. Kurtzman, I happened to know, had cut his teeth as an assistant on the
Classics Illustrated Moby-Dick
, a picture book I had especially loved as a boy. Boys get the symbolism of that maddened pursuit, the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity, and all that spumescence. So it was painful, however low my opinion of
Mad
, to think of Kurtzman selling his soul to Mammon and not even being happy in the process. A fastidiousness around money I must have picked up from my father and his trade union pals. And maybe a fastidiousness around American Jewish cartoonists as well. I cared for them without knowing them. Probably because I knew I had denied them in my English Jewish heart, and wished – for my own sake as much as theirs – I hadn’t.

That I had gone to New York in order to deny Manny in my heart, is a charge I would have repudiated at the time, but I am not so certain now. The line I spun myself was that he had been the friend of that period of my life from which few friendships survive. No one remembers the kids they collected stamps or exchanged cigarette cards with, why should I remember Manny? But in fact I did remember Manny, even if the memory was an embarrassment to me. And there, I guess, lay the dishonesty. I did not want to have been the friend of a nutter. Criminal I could have coped with, religious nutter, no. So I closed my ears to the conduct and the outcome of his trial. I chose not to know. In that, I was no different from the rest of our community. He was for all of us – the Orthodox no less than the secular – the Jew we didn’t want to acknowledge as our own. He was a throwback, and we were moving on. As time itself was moving on. The crime had been committed more than a year before. Sensational when it first broke, it was stale news now, and had been superseded by more interesting events. Enough. ‘Enough,’ as Tsedraiter Ike put it, ‘with giving satisfaction to the anti-Semites. Just lock the meshuggener away.’ And it wasn’t as though there was any uncertainty as to the trial’s outcome. By his own confession, Manny had done what he had done and would go to prison or a lunatic asylum for it. He had told the police he was following the example of the Austrian-born euthanasiast and flautist Georg Renno, deputy director of the SS gassing institution at Hartheim. On his belated arrest in 1961, Renno, wondering what all the fuss was about, had made a statement for which his name would always be remembered. ‘Turning the tap on,’ he said, ‘was no big deal.’ It was in order to verify this claim that Manny had turned the tap on while his parents were asleep. Renno was wrong, he said in his statement. Turning the tap on
was
a big deal. These were the grounds on which Manny’s lawyers successfully argued that his mind must have been impaired by abnormality. No normal person, however engrossed in the history of the Holocaust, would have taken research to quite such lengths.

In secular Crumpsall we had our own layman’s understanding of what was wrong with Manny. I am not talking about the specific circumstances, or what we assumed in a gossipy sort of way to be the specific circumstances, leading up to the murder: the unhappiness which Asher had unloosed on his family when he took up with the fire-yekelte all those years ago; the rows so violent they could have raised the dead; the ignominy that seemed to stain the Washinskys for ever after, even though Asher himself vanished from the neighbourhood and not a word of the fire-yekelte was heard again; the shame that emanated from their very house, as though it too hung its head and shrank from any form of discourse with the world; the sense we had of their morale rotting away from the inside, so that the final catastrophe felt like the operation of inevitability, fate or nature exacting its price, a tragedy which, when it happened, we all could say had been waiting to happen. These were the incidentals, or even, if you like, the trigger for Manny’s monumental act. But they didn’t explain what was wrong with Manny – what ailed his soul – only why what was wrong with him happened to take the form it did. And what was wrong with Manny was that he was Manny. His abnormalities were intrinsic to his religious observance. To believe as the Washinskys believed was itself a derangement. They had visited this derangement on both their sons who visited it back on them. One ran for it, the other stayed. No other enquiry into cause or motivation was necessary. The mystery wasn’t why Manny had done what he had done but why all Orthodox Jewish boys positioned as he was – Jewish boys who hadn’t run away – weren’t doing the same.