Kalooki Nights Read Online Free PDF Page B

why can’t we have a flat in town; get a mistress, how dare you even look at another woman; fuck me hard, fuck me gently, and finally don’t fuck me at fucking all.
    But it was about Jews that she harried me the most. She had been badly treated in her life by Jews. Only the once, not counting her treatment by me, but once can be enough. She had grown up next to a family of them on one of those high-blown scraps of wood and coppice you find between cemeteries and golf clubs in North London, taking ‘growing up’ to mean from the age of nine or thereabouts, that crucial hormonal period when, as Zoë herself fancifully explained it, she was poised to ‘change from a plant into a person’, a period not to be confused with that she spent in my company, during which she changed, again in her own words, ‘back into a plant’. The horticulture was more than a figure of speech. Jews interfered with the natural growing process, were not themselves natural – that was what she intended by it. When Zoë was depressed she sat under a tree. When we fought she gardened. In soil she found the antithesis to me. And presumably, also, to the Krystals, the family who had stunted her. I knew the drama of their treachery by heart, she told it me so often. They came and she adored them, in her innocence drawing no distinction between the love she bore the senior Krystals, Leslie and Leila, and the love she bore the two boys, Selwyn and Seymour. Important I understood that: she loved them all , and loved them without design – played with them, ate with them, learned with them, progressed from late infancy to adolescence with them, then out of an unclouded powder-blue sky received her marching orders from them. When Zoë turned fifteen – ‘the very next day, she couldn’t even wait a week’ – Leila Krystal took her to one side and told her that with her looks and figure she’d make a fine living as a whore in the cafés of Berlin. Wanted her out of the way, you see. Wanted her far from where she could light any fires (some fire-yekeltes we want, some we don’t) in the hearts of either Selwyn or Seymour or both. At fifteen – so Zoë sobbed to me in my bed – she overnight became an anathema. ‘They looked at me as though they’d never seen me before. The minute I became a woman, in their eyes I became filth. A prostitute. Nothing else. That’s why,’ she explained, ‘I am in love with you.’
    ‘Because you have reason to hate Jews?’
    ‘Because they deprived me of my right to love Jews.’
    It seemed a fair enough deal to me. Thank you, Leila Krystal. I’d get Zoë and in return be the Jew whom Zoë could love.
    But it seemed I’d overdone it. Now Zoë was wondering why I had to look quite so Jewish quite so much of the time.
    ‘Because I am fucking Jewish,’ I reminded her.
    ‘All the time?’
    ‘Every fucking minute.’ ‘Stop swearing,’ she said.
    ‘I’ll stop fucking swearing when you stop asking me why I look so fucking Jewish.’
    ‘Why is everything a negotiation with you? Why can’t you stop swearing and stop looking Jewish?’
    ‘What do you want me to do, have a fucking nose job?’
    She thought about it. Showed me her impertinently undemonstrative Gentile profile, every feature segregated from the other. My features, whatever else you thought about them, were on good terms, enjoyed a warm confabulation, each with each. Zoë’s face was a species of apartheid.
    ‘Good idea,’ she said at last. ‘Have it off.’
    ‘You used to like my nose.’
    ‘I used to like you.’
    ‘Then why do you want me to stop at the nose? Why don’t I have everything off?’
    She pushed her mouth at me approvingly, one lip at a time, making little stars of fucking Bethlehem (nothing I could or can do about the swearing when proximate to Zoë) dance in her frosty fucking eyes. Always Christmas, always the birth of her saviour when she looked at me. Never a minute when a theological squabble two thousand years old