Howard Jacobson

by Kalooki Nights (v5)

  ‘You don’t kill people,’ he said, ‘because they “upset” you.’

  It was now or never. ‘So why do you kill people?’ I said at long, long last.

  3

  I knew the official version by heart. On his belated arrest in 1961, the Austrian-born euthanasiast and flautist Georg Renno, deputy director of the SS gassing institution at Hartheim, declared that ‘Turning the tap on was no big deal’. According to Manny’s lawyers, 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.

  I wondered if, over breakfast – over what was left of breakfast – Manny was going to tell me what he’d told his lawyers.

  But it was hard to get him off the subject of Dorothy. I cannot reproduce the fits and starts of what he said. Now returning to the table to discuss it all equably, as though he hadn’t thrown his toast on the floor, hadn’t turned his back on me, hadn’t bared his teeth, for all the world as though we were discussing nothing more important to him than an item in the morning’s newspapers; then rising from his chair again in what I feared could be the beginning of a fit, going over to the sink, turning on the water as though he needed not to hear himself, shouting into the water and rinsing away his words. But the gist of it was that he saw Dorothy as an opportunity not just for Asher, but for his family, for his father and his mother, and for himself. She was their second chance. In Dorothy something else had happened that wasn’t the same old story. She was a release for them. Nothing to do with forgiveness. Nothing to do with making peace with Germans. It wasn’t even about her, it was about them. Whatever the rights and wrongs of refusing her the first time, they should, for their own sakes, have accepted her a second. He could see the argument going on for ever. Again and again, round and around, for another two thousand years and another two thousand years after that. Dorothy gave them a way of breaking the chain. Accept Dorothy and it was as good, after all that darkness, as accepting light. He made her sound like a new religion.

  I nodded. But my offering to know what he meant made him furious.

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ His voice almost became a bark. ‘Do you think I am saying this in order for you to agree with me? This was my truth, not anybody else’s. I don’t invite you to s-sssshare my truth.’

  I was careful not to nod my head at that.

  But he could see inside my head anyway. Although he didn’t look at me I could feel him burrowing away in there, turning his X-ray vision on me. Banality – that was what he saw. And then you snapped, Manny. And then you felt you could take it no longer. Someone had to make a change, so you did. Quick, before someone else attempted something even worse. Quick, before you had a fit. Unless it was in a fit that you did it. Boom! Hiss! Whatever noise the instruments of murder make.

  Banalities.

  So I was prepared for him to be at least more original. And he didn’t let me down.

  ‘I didn’t kill my parents,’ he said, seemingly inconsequentially, and yet very precisely too, as much as to suggest that he had all along been coming to this point, organising his answer not just to the question I had put to him minutes before, but to every question raised by our meeting up again in the first place, if only I’d been patient – ‘I didn’t kill my parents, I simply stopped protecting them.’

  The kitchen, I thought, turned very cold.

  I wanted to nod, but yet again I did not dare. I also had the feeling that it was important to him that I should be bemused by this; that he needed us to be a long way apart, of no moral or experiential likeness to each other whatsoever.

  Ever since he was a child, he went on, he had believed his parents’ safety to be dependent on him and him alone. He could not remember when he hadn’t thought the only thing that stood between them and catastrophe was him. There were dangers all round, and it had been his responsibility to avert them for everybody. He was the reason the house did not burn down or flood. He was the reason they were not burgled and killed in their beds. If his father were to escape being put up against a wall and shot, he, Manny, had to watch over him. He knew what they did to Jewish women. What was to stop them doing it again? There was no indignity or degradation or disaster he did not imagine befalling them. He foresaw everything. Foresaw it photographically, pictured them in a picture book, though not the sort of picture books I made. I could laugh all I liked (I hardly need to point out that I was not laughing), but whatever had happened once could happen again. There was even a sense, though he didn’t expect me to understand this either, in which everything that had happened had happened again, and was happening, and happening to them, despite all his efforts to keep them safe. Asher was no use. Asher was incapable of looking out for anybody. Asher, in fact, was just another of his obligations. If Asher did not fall under a bus or forget to wake up in the morning, if Asher wasn’t found hanging from a tree in the forest with his genitals cut off, that was only because he, Manny, stood guard to see it didn’t happen. He kept them alive, every member of his family, by sheer effort of his will. And kept himself alive for them likewise, because – he didn’t expect me to understand this – these too were among the horrors he imagined on their behalf: his own death, their horror at finding him with all his bones broken at the bottom of the stairs, or drowned in the bath, the grief they would feel, the shock which would itself be enough to kill them, so that he couldn’t take a step without being conscious of his own safety and how much he owed them that, how important it was that he stayed alive for them, that he spared them the anguish of his death . . .

  ‘I protected and protected and protected them, and then one day’ – I thought he was going to snap his fingers to show how little effort it had cost him to come to his decision, how sudden and serene that ‘one day’ was – ‘I didn’t want to protect them any longer.’

  The calm that came off him, like the sudden cold in the kitchen, was preternatural. I had not before been privy to an explanation of a murder. I had no idea what happened next. Would he faint clean away? Would he turn to ashes while I looked at him? Or was it up to me to return him to humanity, to enfold him in my arms and keep him there for however long, however many hours or days or years, it took? The language of professional carers: And who was watching over you, Manny?

  But that was not a language, fortunately or unfortunately, over which I possessed the slightest mastery. Who was looking after you, Manny? Who is looking after you now, Manny? Sorry, couldn’t do it. Not within my compass. Didn’t know how and to be truthful didn’t want to. Too emotionally fastidious. The only voice I trusted in myself, face to face with Jews – different with my Gentile wives, but then everything was different with my Gentile wives – was Yahweh’s, the voice of the unforgiving mountain god. Between ourselves – unserer – there were no pardons granted. Between me and the others – anderer – every sort of moral laxity was allowed a voice. But maybe that was because between me and anderer nothing counted. That was how they understood it, anyway. ‘You don’t see me,’ Zoë told me once. ‘I might as well be a ghost. You should be married to a Jew. You only really notice Jews.’ ‘But I love you,’ I told her. ‘I believe you,’ she replied, ‘but what’s that worth when you don’t value love?’

  No arms around Manny, anyway. In the eerie cold, only exegetical austerity, yeshiva boy to yeshiva boy. Something did not yet add up. In the logic of events, inaction and action had been elided. ‘But actually turning on the tap, Manny . . . Actually bending to the task of doing that, turning on the fucking tap for Christ’s sake . . . If that was not an action in itself, but was merely desisting from an action, then you might as well be telling me it was no big deal . . .’

  ‘You think I have been saying it was no big deal? Then you haven’t listened to a word I’ve said.’

  And that was it. Spell broken.

  He did not lose his temper a second time. He merely, as it were, washed his hands of me. If I wasn’t up to receiving his c
onfidences, I wasn’t. No more to say. There was an air of bruised fatality about him. A man too accustomed to being misunderstood or misconstrued, or simply not listened to, to make a fuss of any new instance of incomprehension.

  ‘I think I’ll go out now,’ he said.

  ‘Go out where?’ So far he had never the left house without me. We hadn’t discussed it, but I had taken that to mean he was frightened to be out in London on his own. It touched me rather. He was my charge. I was responsible for him. So ought I to be allowing him out? ‘I’ll come with you,’ I suggested.

  He shook his head. ‘I want to walk.’

  Walk? Since when did Manny walk? Zikh arumdreying was what Manny did, going around in purposeless circles, but walking . . .

  ‘Where will you walk?’

  ‘I’ll find somewhere.’

  ‘Do you want a map? I’ll lend you an A to Z.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you have money?’

  ‘I’m not your child,’ he said.

  ‘And I have no desire to be your parent,’ I replied. A remark which in retrospect I realise could have been misconstrued.

  I left him to it anyway, taking the papers to my bedroom. There were things I needed to think about. I gave it about an hour, then went back to the kitchen, fully expecting to see him there, staring at his toast. But he was gone. He was gone from Zoë’s old room too. Something about the way he’d left it, something about the half-made bed and the empty bedside table, something suggestive of a final evacuation, made me look for his cardboard suitcase. I admit to being disappointed to discover it was still there.

  But since it was, I had no choice but to go through it. He had not emptied his clothes into any of the drawers I had made available to him. Nor had he made use of the wardrobe. There they still were, the few shirts and pairs of trousers he’d come away with. Folded neatly, something he must have learned in prison, because the Washinskys had not been folders. I had never seen clothes so uninvested either with the promise or the memory of life. It wasn’t so much that they were cheap clothes – though they were that, cheap and drab and thin – as that they gave no idea of the person to whom they belonged, why he owned them, according to what principle he had chosen them. Institution clothes were what they looked, to be worn in a place of incarceration. Clothes without expectancy or anticipation. Clothes which might as well have been the cerements of a corpse.

  No gun, however. Assuming I’d have known a gun when I saw one, no gun in his case, and no gun under Zoë’s mattress either. Nor anywhere else I searched. Just childish bravado, then, his gun talk.

  Unless he had taken it out with him.

  4

  After two hours persuading myself I didn’t care where the meshuggener had got to, I thought I had better go and look for him. Manny’s well-being in the big city apart, I believed I had a duty of care to the community: it is irresponsible to let a possibly armed homicidal maniac – a person who thinks of murder simply as a cessation of responsibility – out of your sight.

  If he was going to be anywhere, he was going to be in the vicinity of the British Museum. There was no other part of London he knew. And he could hardly be said to know that well. Occasionally, when I dropped into the Comic Shop, he would do some second-hand book browsing, but never more than half a block from me. When the sun shone it was understood that if I lost him I would find him again in the courtyard of the British Museum, on a concrete slab if he could grab one, or on the steps, or just standing against the railings looking at the sky. The cafés which he liked he only ever visited with me. A matter of saving money, partly, since I told him we were on expenses and that if I paid I could always claim the money back from Lipsync, but I suspected diffidence also played a part. It was my guess he would not have known how to ask for the chicken-avocado ciabatta I ordered for us when I was feeling stern, or the Nutella and banana pancake I ordered for him when I was feeling indulgent, because he didn’t know what either dish was called.

  I tried all the cafés, though, when neither the bookshops nor the courtyard yielded him, going back to each of them three or four times in case he’d shuffled into the one while I was looking in the other. But he wasn’t to be found. And there wasn’t anyone I could ask. Everyone was here for the day only, and would not have remembered him anyway even had they seen him half an hour before. You don’t notice an invisible man.

  My own preference, when I was in the area, was for a coffee and a biscuit inside the museum itself, under Norman Foster’s glass roof. I liked seeing the sky while listening to the babble of human voices, a noisy sky appealing to me far more than a silent one. Anthropocentric, one of my art teachers had called me. No eye for what wasn’t human. The Jewish failing. Laws, ethics, Spitzfindigkeit (or kopdreying, to employ the sweeter cartoonery of Yiddish), which means exactly what it sounds: twisting the mind in increasingly over-subtle acts of exegesis – and let nature go hang. Laws, ethics, Spitzfindigkeit, and now Manny. In one sense I was freer of him than I’d been in weeks. He had filled me in. I could stop imagining that if I kept asking I would discover he was innocent of any crime. No, Asher had not done it; Dorothy had not done it; Dorothy’s father – out of motives of fatherly concern and recrudescence of Teutonic loathing – had not done it; Errol Tobias – as an expression of unfocused malignity – had not done it; Shitworth Whitworth – out of whatever hatred governs geography teachers – had not done it; some passing anti-Semite – giving vent to passing anti-Semitism – had not done it; the Washinsksys themselves – sick of the strife and the shame – they had not done it to each other; and nor – as an act of the imagination, hating so virulently the idea of Jew which the Washinskys put into the world that I turned the tap on psychokinetically – nor had I. Manny had done it. Which should have been all right, but wasn’t.

  I couldn’t let him alone. In some way I could not explain or give any reason for, I wanted to call him to my account. The State had completed its business with him. For all I knew God had completed His business with him. Now I needed us to settle our affairs. But what on earth did Manny have to answer to me for?

  I drank more coffee, wondering what I would do if I didn’t find him, then saw him, much as if he’d been there all along and I hadn’t known how to look, sitting at a strange angle, half on, half off a swivel stool, at a table with a group of six or seven children, Asians or Arabs or Israelis. I wasn’t sure, from the distance between us, whether the Azams were among them. Assuming that they didn’t visit the British Museum every day, it was hardly a reasonable expectation that they should have been. Unless Manny had been in secret communication with them, which was surely impossible. But he looked at home with them, whoever they were, examining with minute interest what they’d bought from the museum shop, joining them in winding thongs around his wrists, opening books as they did, in that violent way of children, as though they meant to throw away the page now that they had finished with it. And they, in turn, appeared to be enchanted with him, light flashing from the fishpools of their Heshbon eyes when he played the fool, laughing like the children of gods when he pretended to a panic because he could not free his finger from a Chinese finger-trap in which one of them had trapped him. That’s if he was pretending.

  Nutters get on with children, I had observed that before. Maybe their size is right. Maybe they don’t notice the nuttiness. I won’t go down the route of claiming that they share visionary qualities. They looked as at ease with him as they were with one another, anyway. So much so that I found myself wondering whether he had a paternal gift which, tragically, he had never found the opportunity to exercise. He was up against uncommonly good opposition. At every other table a father was demonstrating the art of modern parenting: holding his child to his chest so he could plug in to the soothing beating of Daddy’s heart, kneeling to point out a detail of architecture or sculpture – ‘You see that statue, there, of a man on a horse’ – showing infinite patience in the face of a display of blank unreasonableness for which a father of m
y father’s generation would have sent us to our rooms without dinner. Finished, all that. No more patriarchs. The boy-father of today, mindful of every psychological scar in the catalogue, strews rose petals before his offspring’s baby feet. Which doesn’t augur well for circumcision. Or any other of the Primal Father’s cruel exactions, come to that. We are falling out of moral fashion. Once upon a time, confusing circumcision with castration, the Gentiles saw us as an effeminised people. They even believed we menstruated. The men, I mean. So degenerate were we, we bled like women. Hence our unquenchable thirst for Gentile babies’ blood: we had to replenish our own exhausted stocks. Chloë – speaking of my having been effeminised – took me to see an S&M allleather Salomé in Hamburg once, partly for the satisfaction of drawing my attention to the dramatis personae – Jew One, Jew Two, Jew Three, Jew Four, Jew Five. ‘You’re all essentially so alike,’ she said, ‘I think calling you by numbers is as satisfactory a system as any. From now on I’ll know you as Jew Thirteen.’ But chiefly she wanted me to hear what peevish, caterwauling eunuchs Richard Strauss had made us. The squeaking Jew, without a sinew in his body.

  Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we were too harsh.

  Watching Manny with the children, you might have picked him for our saviour. Thanks to Manny, unselfconsciously engrossed with kids, as restless and awkward at the table as they were, without any pretence to Old Testament authority – Manny shy, Manny gentle, Manny wriggling about – we had a future. I caught myself smiling watching him, as though he were a child of mine. I had sent him out to play – Go on, swap comics with them – and he had found himself some little friends. I won’t pretend I wasn’t even upset by the sight, as though I knew I would eventually have to let him go. It was only when I saw him reach along to touch the hair of the boy sitting next door but one to him – so it wasn’t anybody’s hair; it was specifically this child’s hair he wanted to touch, hair as gleaming dark as damson jam – that I took fright. The man had spent half his life behind bars, his mind impaired by abnormality. Of what he had done or become in prison, of how he had solaced himself, or imagined solacing himself, I knew nothing. It wasn’t completely out of the question that he had a gun on him. And I was smiling benevolently on the easy way he had with children. Had I taken leave of my senses?