The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  He was a big boy, too, in the get me sense. Everybody who witnessed the shlemozzle he caused at the World Championships reckoned he came out of it with great credit. Even his father, who managed to make it to the Assembly Rooms after all, Shabbes or no Shabbes, did what fathers don’t always do and hugged him afterwards, telling him that by the only standards that counted he was the real winner.

  What had happened was this:

  He had taken my grandfather’s advice and not watched the one hundred and seventy-nine contestants prior to him. He had even found a dark room in the bowels of the Assembly Rooms, where he’d gone into a mild trance of premonitory euphoria, imagining what it would be like when he was the World Champion. As a consequence he missed his number when it was called and had to publicly plead with the competition referee to be allowed to perform out of sequence. So by the time he finally made it on to the stage, carrying his brown Rexine travelling-bag, he was already a character.

  Don’t forget that in stature he was the same comical assemblage of sturdy right angles as my grandfather. In his square hand-me-down jacket and with his tie knotted clumsily at his throat he would have looked more like a parcel than a boy.

  As for the spectators, remember that they had been there most of the day, sitting on uncomfortable seats, suffering the August humidity, and frankly beginning to lose any capacity to tell one loop the loop from another. What were they ever going to do, from the moment my father gave them his big smile and hauled his chariot-wheel of a Yo-Yo out of his bag, but stomp their feet and cheer?

  After that, as the Manchester Evening News reported it, ‘the competition descended into such mayhem that the city will be fortunate if it is ever given a comparable event to stage again.’

  Allow for the hyperbole of the press. My father may have been the reason Manchester has never been given the Olympic Games, but even so allow for the hyperbole of the press. In fact, nothing occurred that was any more than boisterous. They’d taken to him, that was all. They thought he was plucky, and maybe a bit simple. But worth egging on, either way. From my father’s point of view all the hullabaloo was no more than he’d been expecting. He tried to loosen his tie but couldn’t budge the knot. He tried to roll up his sleeve to his elbow but couldn’t get it past his forearm. Perspiring heavily now — something else we do grandly in our family — he tested the tension of the string, clawed his fingers around the Yo-Yo, turned over his wrist and let it go. His stance was the conventional one, much like an ocean angler casting a line, legs slightly apart, the Yo-Yo propelled backhand from a height more or less level with his temple. He waited, knees sprung, shoulders braced, for the Yo-Yo to return fizzing in to his hand. How long did he wait? How long did it seem he waited? ‘Alles shvartz yoren!’ All the black years. An eternity.

  I have often wondered if he exaggerated, to make it a grander débâcle than it actually was. Surely it came back up a little bit? But no. He always insisted there was no movement whatsoever, nothing, not so much as a quiver along the line. It just lay there at his feet, twenty inches in diameter, five or six pounds in weight, as inert as a dead fish, except that a dead fish had once known life.

  He re-wound and tried again.

  Same thing?

  ‘A worse thing.’ This time it didn’t even fizz down the string. It just dropped like a stone.

  Thirty, forty, fifty years on, he could tell you where he’d gone wrong. He hadn’t allowed for the atmospheric conditions. It was a muggy Manchester day, the hammocks of cloud, bagging with the weight of warm Pennine rain, so low you could touch them. The string had sweated, become wet, and by the late afternoon lost its tensility. Something any experienced cotton worker would have thought of. But there you are — Rome wasn’t built in a day.

  On the other hand, he was giving pleasure, wasn’t he? Listen to the crowd! And at the last it’s all about giving pleasure, isn’t it?

  How hooked we’ve been been on the pleasure principle in our family! Pleasure, pleasure. But never for ourselves. The pleasure principle we’ve been hooked on, we Walzer men — even my grandfather looking down at the gratitude swimming in the eyes of another man’s wife — is the principle of giving it. As long as people say thank-you and remember us — that’s all we have ever asked.

  The more the crowd whistled the more my father grinned. He stared accusingly at his stricken Yo-Yo, shrugged his square shoulders, and pointed an imaginary pistol at his brain. He seemed to be as amused as they were. To them it looked as if he had done exactly what he had meant to do. It was as if, although that wasn’t how anyone in Broughton Park spoke in those days, he had deliberately set out to deconstruct the Yo-Yo.

  ‘Third and final attempt,’ the tournament referee warned him.

  I see the tournament referee, although my father never once described him to me. Round shouldered and blubbery, prematurely bald, with sad sea-lion moustaches and a broken-hearted demeanour. They upset easily in Manchester. It might be a climatic thing. Or a class thing. They nurse a deep hurt. And those who make it their business to adjudicate, to let a little equity into the universal unfairness of life, nurse a deeper hurt than most. I hear his defeated vowels, his cadences of hopelessness — ‘Third and final attempt’ — meaning try if you must, but you’re a dead man.

  A dead boy the size of a dead man.

  When all’s said and done, there are only two ways of getting a Yo-Yo into play — vertical or horizontal; you throw it down or you throw it out. Having failed with the vertical pass, my father concluded his programme with the horizontal …

  Most of the spectators had the foresight to cover their faces or duck the moment my father let go. Despite its great size, therefore, his Yo-Yo did no one any damage as it at last spun the way a Yo-Yo should, whirring out into the hall with a sound like the beating of a pheasant’s wings, a meteor loosed from its orbit, cooling the air it travelled through, until it broke from its umbilical cord with a snap like a knuckle cracking, and flew free.

  As luck would have it, it was his own father who stuck out a hand and caught it. Luck? Perhaps not. Who else in the hall had a hand big enough to pull off the catch?

  He was carrying it under his arm when he met up with my father after the event. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take your tsatske.’

  That was once my favourite word. Tsatske. When I was very small anybody could make me laugh just by saying it. It was like being tickled. Tsatske. Tsatske.

  A tsatske is a toy or playing, a shmondrie, a bauble, a whifflery, a nothing. It can also mean a nebbish, a nobody, and by extension, a tart. Not a serious tart, not the sort of high-class call-girl you’d think of ruining your reputation as a carefree shtupper and family man for, more of a dizzy broad, a toy or a plaything, a shmontse to help you through the tedium of a wet Manchester afternoon.

  But no definition is able to render the charge of fatuousness and triviality which I always heard in the word. A person who owned a tsatske was forever, it seemed to me, lost to seriousness and dignity. The way you were when you were being tickled.

  Maybe I knew I was going to be forever lost to seriousness and dignity myself.

  TWO

  Before using a racket for the first time in a match a player shall, if so requested, show both sides of the blade to his opponent.

  4.8 The Rules

  I WAS A natural. Ping-pong just came to me.

  One day, when I was eleven, I brought home a little white celluloid ping-pong ball I’d found bobbing on the boating lake in Heaton Park and began hitting it against the living-room wall with a book. I still remember the make of the ball. It was a Halex ***. A competition ball. Don’t ask me what a competition ball was doing in a lake in Heaton Park. Perhaps God had put it there. For what it’s worth I can still remember the title of the book as well — Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, in the soft green pitted-leatherette Collins Classics series which my mother’s side was helping me collect. I already had about thirty of them lined up alphabetically according to author on a she
lf over my bed — Austens, Jane; Brontës, Anne; Brontës, Charlotte; Brontës, Emily; Burneys, Fanny; Eliots, George; Gaskells, Mrs; Mitfords, Miss. You don’t need a degree in English Literature to work out that I must have chosen to hit the ball with Stevenson, Robert Louis, not because he came last in the line but because he was the only man I had.

  What with the flexi-dimpling on the book and the glossy whorls of plaster on the living-room wall there was no knowing what even a Halex *** was going to do. Hit the eye of the same whorl as many times as you like, the ball will not come back to you at the same speed or with the same spin twice. I don’t care how good your opponent is, he won’t surprise you the way a plaster whorl will. In my own manual to ping-pong — long out of date now, and long out of print — I recommend a Collins Classic and an Artexed wall as the ideal surfaces for familiarizing a young player with the caprices of the game. As for the table you push up against the wall — there again, the more grooves and scratches in it the better.

  Where my feel for the game came from, how I knew from my very first hit how to angle the book, how to chop, how to flick, how to half-volley, how to move — because yes, I had suddenly become a mover too — was a mystery to me. I’d never been a ball-player. I dropped catches. I mis-kicked. I allowed balls to be dribbled through my legs. Like an old man snoozing by an open fire, I dreamed in front of a gaping goal. Like a young girl counting the hairs on her first love’s chest, I lay on my back making daisy-chains on the long-leg boundary. You know the story — if you’re a reader you are the story: when the teams came to be picked I was the booby prize, the one you had to have because there was no one left. Sometimes I wasn’t picked at all; simply ignored, turned tail on, left smarting in the mud while the chosen ones ran off riotously to play. Hurtful, but at least safe. If the truth is told, I was frightened of balls and philosophically dismayed by them. Sphericality — was that it? Not knowing where a ball ended and where it began, not being able to tell the front from the back? I’m not looking for fancy excuses; it’s possible that my fear of balls proceeded from nothing more complex than the good relations other boys enjoyed with them. I don’t know where I was at the time or why I hadn’t been invited, but somewhere along the line, some time between my seventh and eighth birthdays, boys and balls had met at a party, hit it off, and been going steady ever since, leaving me to stay home on my own or play gooseberry. Ping-pong didn’t change that. Not all at once, anyway. But it met me half-way. It made concessions to my solitary nature. Ping-pong is airless and cramped and repetitive and self-absorbed, and so was I.

  But we sniffed greatness in each other.

  I’d always been short of people to play with. I had two sisters, both older than me. My father had been away in the army when I was born and now worked long hours. My mother and her sisters and their mother were my company but they were sedentary and introspective and no less frightened of balls than I was. We listened to the Morning Story and later in the day to Woman’s Hour on the radio together, did crosswords and jigsaws together, pored over old family photographs together, played hangman and snap! and noughts and crosses together, and on special occasions snakes and ladders or hoop-la on a board nailed to my bedroom door. I also seem to recall that they bathed me a lot. Otherwise, when it came to the rough-and-tumble necessary to summon up the blood and stiffen the spirit of a growing boy, they weren’t much use. We had moved from Cheetham Hill to Heaton Park a couple of years before, far enough to lose contact with my old friends, and I was slow at making new ones. The other catch with our new address was that there were prefabs in the park just opposite us — built by German prisoners of war — and every time I went out a gang of prefab boys threw stones at me. For the time being, until I was able to enjoy the protection of a gang of my own, or until the prefabs were pulled down, my mother much preferred it that when I wasn’t at school I stayed in the house.

  The only person not happy with this arrangement, apart from the prefab boys, was my father. ‘A stone’s going to kill him?’

  In protection of my skin, my mother was as fierce as a tigress. ‘Does it have to kill him? Isn’t it enough he loses an eye?’

  ‘They’re little kids. They can’t throw that hard.’

  ‘Joel, these are not Yiddisher boys. When did you hear of a shaygets who couldn’t throw hard?’

  ‘So let him learn to throw hard back. I’ll take him out in the park and teach him.’

  ‘You’ll find time to take him out in the park? And you’ll be here to put his eye back?’

  Most arguments came quickly to an end the moment my mother postulated my father finding time or being in.

  They were still young — my mother was still glamorous in that slightly orientalized, simultaneously petite and fleshy Polish style (with little round white fish-ball cheeks) that drove Russian men wild — and I’d like to think they were still in love, but without doubt my father suffered from what his side — dodging all questions of morality — called ants in his pants. He was driving a coach at the time, working for a firm that hired out buses to schools for field trips, and to social clubs for boozy nights out. So he necessarily went to far-flung destinations and worked long hours. Even allowing for that, though, his bus was frequently seen in some odd places at some odd times.

  The markets came later, following calls my mother made to the bus company. But it wasn’t long before his market lorry was seen in some odd places too.

  That men were by nature grandiose and unreliable, that they had ants in their pants, that they made you promises which they immediately broke, that they forgot you and half the time forgot their own children, was an assumption that no woman on my mother’s side so much as thought about questioning. That was just the way of it. It barely merited remark. And yet both my sisters were religiously educated to believe that no greater good awaited them than a man. Figure that out. And while you’re at it, figure out how come not a woman on my mother’s side — not my highly strung mother herself, not my palpitating aunties, not my small-boned fatalistic Polish grandmother — ever taught me to think of their sex with anything but suspicion. They chased me down the snakes and up the ladders, they floated me in my little bath, and they whispered to me of all the Jezebels who were already out there, growing their nails, waiting for the hour when I would offer them my heart and they would pluck it out.

  All in all, given the threat from the prefab boys and the cruel intentions of women, ping-pong for one was my safest option by a mile. The noise drove my sisters crazy, but my mother shushed them into leaving me alone. As long as I was hitting a ball against a wall I was out of their hair, wasn’t I?

  Plock, plock. Kerplock, plock, if you want to be onomatopoeically pedantic about it, these being the days before sponge or sandwich. It began early. I had just started grammar school, a forty-minute walk and train ride away, so if I was going to get my regular hour’s practice in I had to begin at seven at least. And then, as soon as I was back from school, plock, plock, plock. Another hour on the balls of my feet. I loved it. The sound, the self-absorption, the growing mastery. And the nursing of a secret dream — to be impregnable, plock, to be the greatest, plock, and to win, thereby, plock, plock, the respect of men and the love of beautiful women with little white fish-ball cheeks.

  So they hadn’t succeeded in frightening me off women, my mother’s side? Of course they hadn’t. You can’t float a boy in a bath and tell him about Jezebels with purple nails and then expect him not to want one.

  Plock, plock. How they would roar when I snatched one title after another off Ogimura and brought the trophies back to the mantelpieces of Europe! 21–0, 21–0, 21–1 — a flawless performance but for Ogimura’s fluked net return on the last-but-one point of the final game, when a moment of rash but understandable complacency caused me to take my eye off the ball and survey the ecstatic, entirely female crowd. How they would cluster around my dressing room, waiting for me to come out to sign autographs, pressing their soft, perfectly spherical breasts into my stone chest
, retracting their bloody claws …

  By the time such folderols as bats and nets came into the house I was already an accomplished player with every stroke in the game. And I still wouldn’t play with anything except my Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. My mother’s side, of course, presented no sort of test. I could have hit them off the dining table with a bookmark, never mind a book. My father’s side put up a stiffer resistance, but they too had no answer in the end to the amount of backspin I could impart with the leatherette, let alone to the speed and accuracy of my attacking shots. Neighbours were brought in to marvel at what I could do and to try their hand against me. I fancy that my father was even secretly putting money on me. ‘A tusheroon says the kid’ll pulverize you. And he won’t even be using a bat!’

  If I’m right about that then he must have cleaned up nicely in the early days. Nobody who hadn’t seen me play could have been anything but certain of beating me, so little did I look like a person who knew how to win, so completely, on the surface at least, was I the child of my mother. Even at the table I was diffident and apologetic, blushing if I happened to lose a point, and blushing even more when I took it.

  I blushed with such violence in these years that I must have been in danger of combusting. Heat, that’s what I remember most about being a boy — how like it was to being the kettle that spluttered and steamed all day on my grandmother’s fire. So long as I was only practising on my own against the wall I was able to exercise a measure of control over my temperature — about eighty degrees Fahrenheit in the immediate vicinity of the ball, never more than that. But as soon as I played against another person the ovens came on. It wasn’t fear of losing — I knew I couldn’t lose. It was the exposure. Call it compound contradictory existential bashfulness. 1) — I was ashamed of existing, and 2) — I was ashamed of existing so successfully. Five, six unbeatable backhands on the run and my hand would be on fire with consciousness of its temerity; a couple more and there’d be smoke pouring out of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. At the end of a pasting I’d handed out to Lol Kersh, an older kid with a purple birthmark and a stamp collection from across the street, his father, who had come to watch, demanded a closer look at my unconventional bat. He’d smelt the fumes. ‘I’ve rumbled you, you little mamzer,’ he said. ‘You’ve baked that book like a conker. Show me, show me. I bet it’s as hard as a brick.’ But when he inspected it he found that it was soft — very hot and very wet, but soft. As, in the face of his false accusation, was I.