Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  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 histor
y 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.

  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.

  THREE

  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 w
ith 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.