Free Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson Page B

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 Mannyanything 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