The Dog's Last Walk

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘It isn’t only that you won’t know when you’ve lost something,’ I shouted, ‘but when the driver of that bus over there suffers cardiac arrest you won’t hear it careering towards you; you won’t hear the mad cyclist (not that there’s any other kind) ringing his puny bell and abusing you for being a pedestrian; you won’t hear air-raid sirens, bells tolling, buildings being blown up by terrorists, a plane falling out of the sky…

  ‘Apart from which, why seal yourself away like this, why deny yourself a faculty, why shut your ears to the multifarious sounds of the city, the very carnival of existence itself, for the sake of a tune you’ve listened to a thousand times already? Do you have no conception of quiet? Is it really inconceivable to you that your head might want to think its own thoughts unmolested by the monotonous beat of a band you should be ashamed to have heard of let alone to call your favourite? Little Mix! Are you quite mad? I like your scarf by the way.’

  Though she had no English I didn’t doubt that had there been a policeman close to hand she’d have summoned him.

  And then a family of Italians stops me on Haymarket and asks the way to Abercrombie & Fitch. There are four of them, mother, father, and two daughters aged somewhere between six and thirty. They are well dressed, in possession of a bella figura apiece, the mother swathed in furs, and wheeling suitcases.

  I want to ask them why they aren’t in a taxi. Why people cart luggage through the streets of London when there are plenty of taxis, and taxi drivers know where Abercrombie & Fitch is, I don’t understand. Are they saving money? If they want to do that why don’t they buy cheaper tickets for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or Mamma Mia!, or better still no tickets at all. They must know people who have sat through these trumperies. Are their lives perceptibly better for the experience? Do they have an inner glow? And there is something else they can do to make their time in London more pleasant, to avoid having to schlep through the West End wheeling cases, wondering where Abercrombie & Fitch is – they can not bother going there.

  ‘Aberzombie & Filch,’ I joke to my wife whenever we pass the shop in question. She is not amused. What I mean is that the young are being stolen from by a cynical fashion industry that turns its customers into zombies. Tourists wearing the expressions of the undead queue outside Aberzombie & Filch in all weathers in order to take photographs of themselves queuing to buy identical T-shirts and gawp at half-undressed California boys with muscled torsos. ‘You can get that at home without queuing,’ I tell my wife, who still isn’t amused.

  I refuse, anyway, to show the Italian family where the shop is on the grounds that their daughters should not be encouraged in their avidity, their conventionality, and their Grazia-driven concupiscence. ‘Why not take a taxi to the Wigmore Hall instead,’ I say, ‘or Hatchards where you can buy your girls a novel each by Dickens and return them to their innocence?’

  I don’t know if that’s preaching, but if it is, someone has to do it.

  American buffalo

  The first time I met David Mamet he was wearing a red shirt and black braces and playing honky-tonk piano. I had expected no less. He was in London to promote a novel, had spoken in interviews about the new play he was working on, the film he’d just finished, the children’s books he’d recently written and illustrated, and the research he was undertaking into Jewish mysticism. He had to be playing the honky-tonk piano when I met him.

  Had they put a piano in the green room of the Southbank Centre especially for him? He was a big star; they would give him what he wanted. Myself, I asked politely for a sparkling mineral water but said still would do if that was all they could lay their hands on. We were due to go onstage together, to talk about writing, being funny, being Jewish, being men. At the eleventh hour, though it had loomed large in the transatlantic briefing, he decided he didn’t want to talk about being Jewish. He wasn’t, he said, a performing monkey. I wished I had the courage to say the same, but as the chairman was more interested in the Jewish part than any other, there’d have been nowhere to go had I too refused to play the monkey. So there we were, onstage in front of a packed house of Mamet fans, with me throwing my hands about, making jokes about my Manchester upbringing, anti-Semitism yes and no, Cambridge, Dr Leavis and Talmudic exegesis, and Mamet sitting silent.

  He grew interested in Leavis whom he claimed never to have heard of, so I gave him a short seminar on the subject. Occasionally he jotted something down. The word ‘cretin’ maybe. Afterwards we signed a few books. No one seemed to have minded. Simply seeing Mamet was apparently enough.

  As for me, I was completely smitten with the man. I knew his prose works better than his plays – a number of his essays and a powerful novel about the lynching of a Jew in Georgia in 1915. He was as bolshie as they come. Bristling with principles, some loopy perhaps, but others of a sort we would all bristle with if we had the balls. And he played honky-tonky piano. I wanted him for my father.

  I saw him one more time for lunch, when we argued over Dickens. He couldn’t be doing with the comic names. I reminded him of the morality-play tradition Dickens partly inherited. He reckoned the problem was the English. We thought things were funny that weren’t. I told him the Americans thought things weren’t funny that were. I felt him going off me. We promised to correspond but of course didn’t.

  I haven’t seen anything he’s done recently, though word that his views have been growing ever more extreme has reached me. I set no store by that. He’s a writer, not a politician – a writer ought to be contrary and in a samey sort of world any contrariety looks extreme. I don’t doubt, either, that he plays with seeing how far he can go: it’s a way of showing that strictly speaking a writer should have no views – views are not what art’s about – but since you ask, and if all you really want to hear is the same left-leaning, liberal-humane mishmash of pre-prepared attitudinising, get ready to be disappointed. I also know that ‘extreme’ is code for being over-supportive of Israel.

  Mamet has been forgiven many things for his art – the bolshiness, the macho posing, the gun-toting backwoodsman politics, but being over-supportive of Israel strains the loyalty of even his most ardent fans. Odd, isn’t it, that while we in the arts pride ourselves on disparities of understanding, of thinking the unthinkable, of going, intellectually, where no one has gone before, we elect certain subjects to be sacrosanct (though we don’t believe in the sacred), inviolable (though we rate violation to be the artist’s first vocation), unsusceptible to difference (though difference is the prime justification for what we do). When it comes to Israel, we must all think the same.

  In an interview with the Financial Times last week, Mamet prodded away at the prevailing pieties, attacking Obama and praising Sarah Palin (how’s that for going where you don’t expect an artist to go), dismissing global warming, heading dangerously, if anything, to a too-predictable jettisoning of pinko commonplace. Not that it matters: he’s an artist and no one’s going to vote for him. But while his interviewer took all this on with good grace, he stumbled before what Mamet had to say about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. The great no-no of our times is to say that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism by another name. In fact very few people argue that it is, but in a sophistical twist which itself perfectly illustrates the meaning of the word chutzpah, the anti-Zionist paints himself a victim of a crime that has not been committed. Where once he argued that he was not necessarily an anti-Semite, he now insists he cannot possibly be an anti-Semite precisely for the reason that disreputable people say he is. We are but a hair’s breadth from seeing it argued that anti-Zionist is ipso facto an expression of love for Jews.

  Asked the question – is the one necessarily the other? – Mamet pauses, bites the air, and then, emitting a ‘grunt of relief … throws caution to the wind’. It’s a dramatic description and should be interpreted as drama. Why the preliminary caution? And why the relief? Because Mamet, like the rest of us, lives in a moral world inundated by sophistries of the sort I have just described. And for once,
the joy of it, the joy of letting his interlocutor have it with both barrels. That the interlocutor should dare to say he considers Mamet’s calling anti-Zionism by its worst name ‘offensive’, and this after Mamet has delivered a broadside against British anti-Semitism, is a measure of how deeply the conventional wisdom is embedded. If Mamet is even only infinitesimally right about the ‘ineradicable taint of anti-Semitism in the British’ and ‘the anti-Semitic filth’ he finds in the work of many contemporary British novelists and playwrights, it is not for his interviewer to be ‘offended’. Offended where, pray? Offended how? You want to turn the tables on those you offend? Purloin his offence.

  That said, while I can think of a few routinely anti-Semitic British playwrights, I must say I’m not sure who the filthy British novelists are. For all I know he might mean me. Americans can read one in the wrong spirit. But that doesn’t matter. Here is someone speaking against the murderous orthodoxy of the times. Agreement is the last thing he’s angling for.

  Norovirus

  You want to know how to get through the rest of the winter norovirus-free? Don’t handle anything. This advice, I accept, will be harder for some to follow than others. To me – because I grew up to be a universal non-handler, not touching other people, alien food, animals or myself – it’s second nature. That I was a precociously fastidious boy I ascribe primarily to a confused understanding of Jewish hygiene laws: if it was sinful to go near some things, but impossible to remember in the heat of living which, the most sensible plan of action was to go near nothing. Otherwise I put it down to my family’s revulsion – probably acquired over centuries of being treated like dirt in Eastern European shtetls – from filth.

  Though we lived in a house in Manchester big enough for us all to enjoy a degree of privacy, we congregated in the living room. Whoever needed to make use of the bathroom or the lavatory would slip away without making reference to it, though his absence was immediately noticed. There were two sorts of contamination we feared: viral and aural. Distance and doors protected us from the latter; against the former we waged an unending war of disinfectant and ingenious precaution.

  What we most went in terror of, to be precise, were drains, sinks, pipes, plugholes, toilet bowls, anything, that is, through which waste matter was dispatched and therefore through which waste matter could be regurgitated. Just because you hadn’t seen the regurgitation process with your own eyes didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. In the night, for example, or while you were out of the house. Back it all came. And whoever doubts that toilet traffic can be two-way should try sitting on an outback dunny in far North Queensland and waiting for the blue frogs to come leaping back up through the plumbing. In Manchester, from where I confess we would have re-migrated to Lithuania had we seen a frog in the lavatory, this anxiety extended not only to drains and plugholes, but to everything in their vicinity. Anything onto which germs could have leapt – handles, levers, chains, plugs, showerheads, towel rails, light switches, wall sockets – we avoided like the plague, because they were the plague.

  In the first fifteen years of my life I never once flushed a lavatory with my bare hands. To those anxious to avoid norovirus today I recommend flushing with the ends of a scarf or a tie, also gloves, though gloves have to be thrown away once they’ve been used for this purpose, which makes them an expensive option unless you buy them from the market, but remember that means risking such market viruses as those attendant on receiving change or breathing in. As for trying on gloves that are sure to have been tried by someone before you, don’t even consider it. Man-size Kleenex doubled and fashioned into a sort of glove itself is an alternative, provided you destroy it immediately afterwards, though you can easily get trapped in that vortex of using one to flush the lavatory and then realising you have to use another to flush the first away, and so on until you have emptied the box or lost your mind.

  Best to employ your foot wherever possible. If the lever is too high you can always stand on the pedestal, so long as you don’t omit to clean it as a courtesy to the person who comes after you. There are people I know who feel they need to clean their shoes after this as well, but that strikes me as neurotic. What you do if the lavatory is old-fashioned and has a chain depends on your athleticism. I had a lanky friend at school who used to invite us into the latrines to watch him do a handstand on the toilet bowl and pull the chain by making a sort of grappling hook of his feet, but I wouldn’t recommend that to everybody.

  It’s important, once you are set on such a course – and as long as young men are spitting in the street to attract women, and young women are throwing up in it to attract men, such a course is necessary – it’s important to follow it through to the letter. There’s no point, for example, in being vigilant in the matter of what you touch around the cistern if you go insouciant in the matter of what you touch around the sink. Assume you have emptied a dispenser of soap onto your fingers and then scalded them for upwards of forty-five seconds in boiling water – all this goes for nothing if you then manually turn off a tap that will previously have been touched by someone who, for all you know, is not only a constitutional bare-hand chain-puller but has dropped his iPhone into the lavatory pan and fished it out without even rolling up his sleeves.

  How to turn off a tap without undoing everything you turned the tap on to achieve remains one of the great hazards of using public conveniences. Unless you’re lucky enough to have found taps that work electronically – and you’ll encounter these only in expensive restaurants and Germany – I would propose the scarf, the tie, your elbow, or the foot option again. Turning a tap off with your foot requires considerable dexterity and balance – only ballet dancers do it well – and can be embarrassing in a crowded lavatory at the theatre, but you can always lurk in the bar – keeping your distance from other drinkers – and wait for everybody to return to their seats. So you miss the play? You’ll be missing more than that when you’re emptying the contents of your stomach onto your own bathroom floor.

  In the end, the choice is yours. You can keep your dignity or you can keep your health.

  Nani in space

  I got clobbered in the street recently. In a hurry to make a doctor’s appointment, I found myself on a narrow pavement behind two enchantingly voluble middle-aged, middle-class women, one pushing a couple of twin babies, presumably her grandchildren, whom she addressed as though they were just home from university, the other gesticulating with wild expressiveness, as though to draw the attention of pilots preparing to land at Heathrow.

  What with the roar of the traffic, the screams of the babies and the women’s honking conversation, my hoarse ‘Excuse me’ went unheard. I attempted to slip in on the twins’ side but there was insufficient space between their pushchair and a road murderous with cyclists, so I had to risk the almost equally dangerous option of dodging the other woman’s flailing arms. I miscalculated and she caught me with her elbow full on the jaw. ‘Oh my God,’ she cried, hearing the crunch, ‘I’m so dreadfully sorry.’ ‘Madame, you have a right to animated conversation,’ I told her, spitting out a tooth. ‘The fault, comprising impatience and a lack of spatial awareness, is all mine. Think no more about it.’ And so peace was made. But had there been a Turkish referee observing us, he would have handed her a red card.

  I take it that the significance of this little parable, which also happens to be a true record of events, is not lost on readers who saw, in the flesh or on television, the gross and cruel misjudgement which did for Manchester United’s chances against Real Madrid on Tuesday night. Enough has been said about the legal niceties of this incident in the sports pages of the world’s press for me to pass over them with speed. Ignore those letter-of-the-law pundits who thought the sending-off had merit. It didn’t. Nani, in space, innocently raised his foot in order to control a ball, just as the voluble woman innocently waved her hands to make a point, and as I walked into her fist, so Alvaro Arbeloa walked into Nani’s boot, the difference being that I didn’t roll on the ground
clutching a part of me that hadn’t been touched.

  Why football hasn’t introduced the hot-spot technology employed in cricket is a mystery to me. If you can tell whether a batsman has nicked a ball by X-raying the bat, you can surely tell whether a footballer has been kicked in the heart by X-raying him. It might be slow, it might necessitate an MRI scanner being rolled onto the pitch, but what’s time when truth is in the balance?

  There is something else I don’t understand: why we didn’t wake up on Wednesday morning to find that UEFA had convened an emergency session in the night, overturned the decision and handed Manchester United a passage into the last eight of the European Cup, which it would then go on to win? Or failing that, why wasn’t the natural world in disorder when we woke, why weren’t the sun and moon distracted from their orbits, why hadn’t the sheeted dead climbed from their graves, why weren’t owls killing falcons and horses eating one another?

  If there were such a thing as natural justice, if the spheres moved in harmony, if God existed, then a thunderbolt would have struck and burnt to cinders the red card waved officiously by Cüneyt Çakir – a man whose name sounds too much like the insults that must get thrown at him, a man too encumbered by umlauts and cedillas to follow what is happening on the field of play.

  I know – indeed no one knows better – that a game of football is just a game of football. Except that it isn’t. Nothing that we do is ever just what we do. Our every action is a sort of foreshadowing of the essential Great Action whose meaning is locked away from us and might never be revealed. If there is no justice in small things, then there can be no justice in large, and life becomes a random, absurdist lottery for which we’d be fools to buy a ticket. The very reason we play games, or in my case watch them, is to affirm a metaphysical order in imitation of the ideal order we long to see but cannot.