Read Online Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson - Free Book Online Page B

of administering a property, or of earning a penny any other way come to that. A family feature – our hopelessness with money. Always some retrenchment in the offing, though never when it came to shoes, or indeed to any other aspect of my mother’s appearance which had altered after my father died only in that sadness rendered it the more exquisite and, by Crumpsall standards, expensive. It was from our old house, anyway, in our old street and on our old phone, that she was ringing me. Though I rarely visited Crumpsall any more I could see it all as if I’d been there only the day before. Dread can do this. My skin turned cold and I saw the street, saw Manny whom I hadn’t seen in years, saw his father sewing at the front window, saw the neglected garden, the forlorn weeds growing through the cracks in the paving stones, the paint long peeled from every door and window frame, giving the house not so much a derelict as a blanched, bled-white appearance, saw Manny’s mother peering out of an upstairs window to look for him, frightened for him and frightened for herself, not wanting to show her face, not trusting her neighbours or the light of day, no longer welcoming home the men of the family as she used to do before her family was made a laughing stock, and saw Manny swinging from a rope in his bedroom, his eyes bulging, his body hanging like an empty sack. Then I heard the wailing, centuries old.
    I doubt anybody who knew the Washinskys would have pictured any other scene had they been told only what my mother had so far told me. Sit down. Something unbearably awful has happened . . .
    Manny. What else could you think? Manny had taken his life. The likelihood had always been that he would kill himself, he had talked about killing himself, had even practised killing himself, and now he’d done it.
    ’Who found him?’ I asked. The hanging part was so to be expected, the only drama was in the discovery.
    ‘Manny? Nobody’s found him. Nobody knows where he is.’
    My skin turned a little colder.
    ‘Ma,’ I said, ‘what’s happened?’
    ‘Well, it’s unclear. There are still police in the street. The house is cordoned off, Maxie. It’s too terrible.’
    ‘Ma, just tell me what’s happened.’
    ‘Channa and Selick have been found dead.’
    ‘Christ!’
    ‘In their beds, Max. They think gassed.’
    ‘Gassed!’
    ‘I know.’
    You don’t say ‘gassed’ to Jews if you can help it. One of those words. They should be struck out of the human vocabulary for a while, while we regroup, not for ever, just for a thousand years or so – gassed, camp, extermination, concentration, experiment, march, train, rally, German. Words made unholy just as ground is made unholy.
    Side by side, holding hands, was how I imagined them. Like a devout Christian couple engraved in cathedral brass. Staring up at the dome from which Lord Jesus in a night sky of stars and angels looks down in celestial majesty. I had never seen inside their bedroom, but supposed it must have been like the rest of their house – unaired, unloved, not exactly unclean but uncared for, clothes and linen thrown about the floor, bare bulbs hanging from the ceilings, the furniture gaping stuffing, everything broken, the world of here and now a tribulation to them, and yet nothing suggestive of the spiritual life either, unless the flotsam of Judaic tat, cheap household objects adorned with Hebrew lettering, torn prayer books, fringed vestments thrown over the backs of chairs, and yes, yes, the odd angelically ignited candle, could be said to constitute spirituality. But the gassing of them somehow cleaned up around them. Gassed, they had joined thesacred millions, photographs of whose piled-up bodies I had first seen in Lord Russell of Liverpool’s The Scourge of the Swastika , the righteous by virtue of victimisation, and no one stood judgement on their domestic surroundings.
    Into the spaces my mother was granting me to digest the news, a stray thought