Howard Jacobson
Page 39
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!
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?’
‘No point asking him, Mummy,’ Chloë would remind her. ‘He’s too brainy to waste his praise on a day. Unless it’s the anniversary of a day on which a few thousand of his people’s enemies were slaughtered.’
‘It’s our calling,’ I told them both. ‘We are put on this earth to be hard to please. We are the high priests of refusal. Only God gets our hosannas.’
And now here I was, servant of the holy flame, hierophant of the sacred fucking mysteries, ready to shed a bucketload of sublunary tears because Tsedraiter Ike, someone whose worth as a human being, let alone a critic of the grotesque arts, I had discounted utterly for forty years, had kept a corner of his heart soft for me after all.
My wives were right. The severity of my morality, like the sternness of my aesthetic, applied only to other people. I won’t accept that meant only to Gentiles, except in so far as a substantial number of those other people were of necessity Gentiles, because it was Gentile company I sought out. But certainly I operated two standards. One for them, one for me. And to me I was a pussy cat.
But then someone had to be.
So I got my desserts. What happened next flowed directly from my sentimentality towards myself.
I reasoned that I owed it to Dolly, while I was up in Manchester for the funeral, and she lived only two streets away, to pop along and share another kichel with her and Mr Balshemennik. She had loved my uncle and I wanted to thank her for it. And if she needed to talk about him, it was the least I could do to listen. But my true motive was to verify her story about Tsedraiter Ike collecting my cartoons. If he had proudly amassed album upon album of my work, I wanted to see them. I wanted to bathe briefly in his devotion. It wouldn’t be like finding your oeuvre in the Library of Congress, but you take what commemorations are on offer.
Visiting Dolly Balshemennik solved the mystery, if nothing else, of why she had a shtetl voice. She had a shtetl voice because she lived in a shtetl. Not the street – the street was only ordinarily ghettoised Crumpsall – but the house was authentic Novoropissik. Barely light enough to see your own hand by, the carpets still smelling of Noah’s flood, cats with the droopy melancholy eyes of Russians, a sideboard, missing only a samovar, displaying photographs of long-gone relatives in Caucasian dirndls and skullcaps that looked like fezes from Tashkent, and a sound of something, a little like crickets, which I thought might have been Sydney Balshemennik’s heart, but that turned out to be the wheezing of an ancient grandfather clock. No wonder Tsedraiter Ike loved it here. I raised the matter of Barnacle Bill from over the sea, but she did not know what I was talking about. Never heard him sing it. Not once in her presence. But then he wasn’t from over the sea when he was here. He was back home.
Thrilling. The hairs rose on the back of my neck at the thought of it. Home is the sailor, home from the sea.
Dolly Balshemennik had a granddaughter who happened to be visiting her when Tsedraiter Ike passed away, and who, out of motives no less altruistic than mine, also decided to stay a little longer. A rather beautiful woman if you were able not to see her resemblance to her grandmother. Though I have to say that on someone her age, and framed by a storm cloud of charcoal hair, that tear-stained shte
tl look was mightily appealing. She recalled the thousands of photographs I’d seen of Jewish women being rounded up and bundled on to the Jew Jew train to Auschwitz and all stations east. More particularly, in the hoodedness of her eyes, she reminded me of Malvina Schalkova, the Prague-born artist posthumously famous for the sketches and watercolours she made in Theresienstadt, and whose self-portrait, mirroring an infinity of sorrow, I first became familiar with when I visited Theresienstadt with Zoë. In other moods, when something more fiercely animal took possession of her temper, she resembled Gela Seksztajn, the Warsaw Ghetto artist who perished in Treblinka in 1942, aged thirty-five. ‘I have been condemned to death,’ Gela Seksztajn had written in a diary later found buried with her paintings in the Ringelblum Archives in the Warsaw Ghetto, ‘Adieu my dear friends and companions. Adieu Jewish people! Don’t allow such a catastrophe ever to happen again.’ Words you need, strictly speaking, to read with her blazing self-portrait – if you can only bear to look at it – before you. The burning sarcasm of the eyes, the fleshly hunger of the mouth, adding not poignancy but rage to a farewell we have grown to think of as conventional. ‘Never again’ – but the exhortation bitter and ireful this time. All this, and more, I saw in Dolly Balshemennik’s granddaughter.
And then there was her name. Alÿs.
‘As in Wonderland,’ I said when she first told me.
‘No, not Alice, Alÿs.’ She spelled it out for me in air writing, puncturing space with two fingers where the umlaut went.
‘With an umlaut! Is it a German name?’
‘Celtic.’
Celtic, with an umlaut, and eyes like Malvina Schalkova’s! Was this Tsedraiter Ike’s parting present to me, from the grave – the nice Jewish girl he had always wanted me to have . . . Alÿs Balshemennik? From Crumpsall Park?
Alÿs Balshemennik. My Schicksal – meaning fate or destiny – only this one wasn’t a shikseh.
My third wife, going purely numerically . . .
My first wife, counting by Jewish law . . .