Free Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson Page A

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 forall 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 haveheard, my mother would have known by now, the whole of Jewish Crumpsall would have been in uproar.