Chloë.’
‘Oh, Jews, Jews, Jews!’
‘Well, they do figure in the story.’
‘They figure in your story!’
‘I’m afraid my story is this story, Chloë. Would that it were otherwise.’
‘You see! We can’t even go to a concert without your bleeding heart coming with us.’
‘Then you should be more careful which concert you choose for us to go to.’
‘Max, there isn’t one that’s safe. They all come back to the Nazis in the end.’
‘Have I said anything about the Nazis?’
‘You don’t need to say anything. I know you. You’ve thought of nothing else all evening.’
Not quite true – I loved and had thought about the music – but near enough. I had wept – as I always weep – at the desolation of Christ’s cry to a God who wasn’t answering. Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?But I’d also joked sotto voce (that’s to say, so that only Chloë could hear) – as I always joke sotto voce at this moment in this greatest of all liturgical works – that it was something else having the question put in German. Mein Gott, mein Gott, warum hast du mich verlassen?! A bit rich, a plummy German baritone ‘why’,when the God who last forsook the Jews did so, as one might put it – no, as one is duty bound to put it – under German auspices.
Warum? You are not, mein kleines Brüderlein, the ones to ask that question. Just you go about the business of building Holocaust memorials and making reparation to your victims and leave the whys to us.
Jew, Jew, Jew. Joke, joke, joke. Warum, warum, warum?
For which Chloë, weary with all three, was leaving me.
But it behoves a man with a story of perplexities to tell to put his whys on the table early.
Such as:
Why did God, having once chosen us, forsake us?
Why did my friend Emanuel Washinsky – from whose lips I first heard God accused of dereliction (in our house we accused God of nothing except not existing) – forsake his family and beliefs and commit the most unspeakable of crimes against them?
Why, if I call Emanuel Washinsky my friend, did I keep my friendship with him separate from all my other friendships – a thing religiously apart – and why did I wash my hands of him when it was reasonable to surmise that he needed friendship most?
Why did I marry Chloë?
Why, after being divorced so comprehensively by Chloë – divorced from my own reason, I sometimes felt – did I marry Zoë? And why, after being left by Zoë, did I marry . . . but I must not give the wrong impression. This is more a tale of separation than of marriage.
Why – speaking of disloyalties, forsakings and acts that seemingly cannot be explained – did I forsake myself to draw cartoons, when I am averse by nature to caricature, ribaldry and violence?
Why do I wake each day as though I am in mourning?
Who or what am I in mourning for?
3
Why Elohim forsook us, or why Manny Washinsky raised his hand against those he was meant to honour, or why I married who I married, are questions which cannot be answered in a short space of time. But I can explain – which is at least a start – why I took up crayons. Because I liked the oily smell of them. Because I liked it that they streamed colours. Because I enjoyed watching a picture emerge that I hadn’t intended to make. Because I discovered I could do a likeness. Because I felt there was some emotion locked away inside me that I couldn’t get at until I drew it on a piece of paper. And because I wanted people to admire and adore me. Show that you can draw when you’re four or five years old and everyone is awestruck. It’s the same with words, only words don’t win you the affection pictures do. They lack the charm. There is something, it would seem, uncanny about sentences issuing fully formed from a cherub’s mouth, as though Beelzebub must be in there somewhere, hammering phrases out on his infernal anvil. Whereas a wavy purple path leading to a little orange house with plumes of smoke spiralling from its tipsy chimney – that’s the work of God, our protector, ever with us, Elohim who modelled man out of clay and put him in a garden.
But those who were enchanted by my precocious pictorial genius should have looked harder at the blackness