Kalooki Nights by Howard Jacobson

Author:Howard Jacobson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Humorous, Holocaust, General, Fiction - General, English Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors, Jewish, Jewish (1939-1945), Fiction, History
ISBN: 9781416543435
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-04-22T01:33:52.431000+00:00

BOOK TWO

NO BLOODY WONDER

NINE

1

Manny had no more recognised me than I had recognised him that first time we got together again at the pizza restaurant in Manchester. But he didn’t tell me that until the second time we got together again.

‘You’re different,’ he’d said, without quite looking at me.

‘Well, it has been half a lifetime since we last saw each other,’ I’d reminded him.

‘We ate together last week.’

‘I thought we were talking about before that.’

‘Thirty-eight years.’

I had no idea when he was counting from. ‘Not surprising then.’

This time he did half look in my direction. So blue the eye he showed me, so much bluer than I’d remembered, that for a moment or two I seriously wondered if it were glass. The consequence of a prison fight? Or of an operation to extract the patricidal section of his brain? But then he showed me the other eye, and that too was the colour of the sky. ‘No,’ he said, ‘something’s different. Your nose is different.’

He was right. My nose was different. Not different in the way that Zoë in her time would have liked – not smaller, but then again not exactly bigger either. The adjective is hard to find. But Manny probably put his finger on it. ‘It seems to have spread across your face more,’ he said, with a cruel indifference to my feelings which I at first attributed to the hardening influence of incarceration, until I remembered that he had always been like that. Not rude, just unaware of politeness.

Not without its ironies, what had happened to my nose. Not without ironic implications for Zoë, anyway. When Zoë wasn’t pestering me to get it shortened she was complaining about the noises I made through it when I breathed. Not much I could do about that, I told her, short of giving up breathing altogether.

As always she gave consideration to whatever I suggested, the sweetest of quizzical expressions lighting up her impeccable and soundless features.

My own theory was that my breathing, which I freely acknowledged could be over-audible at times, was a consequence of the same condition that gave me nosebleeds, the epistaxis which I had inherited from my late father.

‘And did your father also snore like an express train?’ Zoë wanted to know.

‘Whether he did or he didn’t,’ I answered, ‘I believe my mother slept like a normal person and therefore didn’t notice.’

This was a reference to what I considered to be the abnormality of Zoë’s sleep patterns, a matter of some contention between us, since she believed she slept the way a person was meant to sleep, that’s to say stretched between waking and unconsciousness like piano wire, her eyes wide open and every millimetre of her flesh aquiver to the faintest rustle, let it be breath issuing from my nostril or the wind fluttering a sweet wrapper three streets away.

‘There is nothing wrong with the way I sleep, were I only allowed to,’ was how she made the point to me.

‘Same here,’ I said. ‘Do

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