The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  Shy — even the word is shaming. And I was beginning to shame everyone around me.

  One night I overheard my uncle Motty ask my father — it’s still not easy for me to reproduce his words, however long ago he spoke them — ‘When’s that genius kid of yours going to come out of his shell?’

  What was I in his eyes — a snail, a tortoise, a whelk?

  We were at a wedding. Not a real fresh virginal wedding, but a silver or a ruby wedding. I can’t remember whose. I probably never knew. I kept my head down at family get-togethers. Especially if it was my father’s side that was getting together. I wasn’t equipped to handle their ramping verve.

  ‘Well halloa dair, Amos,’ was how my grandfather greeted me.

  I was never certain that he knew who I was. That’s the terrible contradiction at the heart of shyness. You think everybody’s looking and you fear no one is.

  ‘My name’s Oliver,’ I said.

  He rolled his eyes, retracting the pupils and showing me the whites. Then he pinched my cheek. ‘Oliver,’ he said — as though coining a diminutive, as though my actual name for outside of the family, gentile use was Olive — ‘Oliver, help your Zadie to that chair.’

  We were still on the street outside the Higher Broughton Assembly Rooms, waiting to clap in the happy couple. So a chair … ?

  ‘What chair, Grandpa?’

  He had me again. ‘Wotcher, Oliveler!’ And he was off, looking for more descendants to torment.

  And then there was the dancing …

  Considering the shape we were — for the Walzer women, too, were built like brick shithouses — you’d have thought we might have passed on dancing, left it to the Yakipaks who lived in the south of the city, the svelte Sephardim with their slithery Spanish and Portuguese hips. Fat chance. A band played us into the hall and no sooner was the soup served than my uncles were out of their seats, buttoning up their dinner jackets, as though that would somehow make them lighter, steering my aunties around the dance floor the way my father drove his bus, fast on the bends and heavy on the clutch. Thereafter it needed no more than a thimbleful of sweet red wine for us to be back at the convergence of the Bug and the Dniester, throwing glasses over our shoulders and leaping on to tables to dance the kasatske. Make no mistake, a kasatske may sound like a tsatske from Kazalinsk, but there was nothing footling or fatuous about the way we did it, down on the heels of our dancing pumps, our arms folded, our jackets tight across our backs, our short stout Kamenets Podolski shanks going like pistons.

  When I say our …

  In fact it was what we’d assimilated in Higher Broughton that I dreaded more than what we’d brought from Podolia. The polka and the mazurka had a certain sad elegance of yesteryear about them; the sight of a forebear slapping his thighs and shouting ‘Hoy!’ stirred ancient fertility associations — in these I could almost forget myself. But the hokey-cokey, and worse still, the conga — what were such trashy plebeian tortures invented for but my humiliation? Come on, Oliveler, join the line, join the line!

  Join a line, me? Be seen in a line, me?

  And who did I think was looking? Irrational, I acknowledge it. Why would anyone have been looking specifically at me? And who was there to look anyway, given that everyone was in the line? But what’s reason got to do with anything.

  On the night in question I was standing in a corner at the back of the hall practising ping-pong shots with an imaginary ball and trying to be invisible when the conga suddenly snaked my way, a deadly centipede of Walzers shrieking ‘Ayayayay, conga!’ and kicking its legs out. I turned the colour of Kamenets beetroot and ran for it. At one exit my grandfather was saying ‘Well halloa dair, Amos,’ to a small bewildered square-shouldered brick shithouse of a girl in a frilly pink dress. Close by the other my father was down on one knee, impressing a cluster of cousins by lifting chairs one-handed. The combination of himself in a tight dinner suit and a crowd to watch him was always fatal for my father. Down he’d go and up would come the chair. Nothing remarkable about that? I haven’t finished. Once he’d limbered up lifting empty chairs, he’d start on chairs that had my aunties in them. Not the introspective weightless aunties on my mother’s side, either, but rollicking Walzer aunties with round knees and deep chests. Three inches ... six inches ... a foot off the floor! One-handed! Oy a broch, Joel, you’ll rupture yourself! ‘Do you want me to tell you something, Oliver? — Solomon didn’t have the kaych your father has.’ I knew who they meant. They meant that Samson didn’t have my father’s kaych. And I also knew what my father did for an encore. A chair with an aunty sitting on it, plus me sitting on the aunty.

  I took the only path that was clear, to the men’s room, where I came upon my uncle Motty standing at a urinal, shaking his penis to get the last drop out of it, actually banging it the way you bang a near-empty ketchup bottle. My uncle Motty was the next Walzer brother down from my father. He was more placid than the others. A sofa to put his feet up on, a few quid in his pocket, the odd shtup — nothing serious, as long as it was with someone not his wife — and he was happy. When you looked at Motty’s big blond face you couldn’t understand why anyone found life difficult. Which made it difficult for me to look at him. He winked at me. ‘Jew in a restaurant,’ he said without preamble. ‘Says to waiter — “Hey, you got matzo balls?” Waiter says, “No, I always walk like this.”’ He waited for me to laugh. I couldn’t do it. I wanted to but I couldn’t find the mechanism. Not for a smile either. Where to look, that was the problem. If I looked away it would be rude. If I looked at him I’d be looking at his penis — also big and blond, and still refusing to yield up its last reserves, no matter how hard my uncle Motty shook it. I turned an even deeper red and ran for it again.

  It was shortly after this encounter that I overheard him wondering how much longer I was going to cower in my shell. Unfortunately for me, the phrase struck a chord with my father. ‘Hello — are you in there?’ he’d ask, rapping me on the head as he passed me on the stairs — hardly a tactic to get a whelk or a tortoise to show its face, let alone to tickle out a shrinking invert like me. But my father wasn’t a man for gentle coaxing. Having a son in a shell seemed to infuriate him to such a degree that I knew it wouldn’t be long before he resorted to trying to beat me out of it. He was a beater, my father? Let’s just say he had been klopped by his own mother and that these were, as a matter of course, klopping times. In the nineteen-forties and fifties we were all klopped. And are now the better for it? What do you think?

  In the meantime, my sisters too wanted to get in on the act. I’d crawl out of bed in the morning and find a plate of lettuce outside my bedroom door. I’d put my foot in a shoe and find it full of broken eggshells. One morning I woke to the sight of a terrapin making eyes at me on my pillow. A gift tag was tied to one of its forelegs. ‘Hi, I’m Tilly,’ it read. ‘Can I be your girlfriend?’

  I was twelve now, and spending an increasing amount of time on my own. When I wasn’t knocking a ball against a wall with a book I was running to the toilet where I’d lock myself away for hours on end, also with a book.

  ‘How long’s he been in there this time?’ — my father, back from work, not even bothering to enquire where I was. He knew where I was.

  ‘Days!’ — my sisters, wanting to stir it.

  ‘What’s he doing in there?’

  ‘Reading’ — my mother, wanting to calm it.

  ‘Reading? Reading what?’

  ‘A book, Joel, what do you think?’

  ‘The time he spends in there he could have written a book.’

  ‘The time you spend away you could have written twenty books.’

  ‘It isn’t normal. You can’t tell me it’s good for you, sitting on top of your own chazzerei for that long.’

  ‘Normal? Let’s not talk about normal. Eat your tea.’

  My mother understood the needs of a retiring nature. The way my father’s side could move their bowels and be back out in the world again in sixty seconds flat had al
ways disgusted her. To her way of thinking there should at least have been a cooling-off period, a fifteen-or twenty-minute interregnum between a motion and the resumption of normal activities, much as the laws of sexual hygiene insisted on an interval of pollution separating menstruation and intercourse. The three hours I was taking may have been excessive, she allowed, but then I was a boy and boys had other matters to attend to in a toilet. No names, no details. I’d be over it soon. In the meantime, loz aleyn, leave the boy alone.

  Easier said than done. I was in a shell and I was in the toilet. ‘He’s always hiding,’ my father said. ‘He’s always in something. The only time I see him is when he’s giving a ping-pong ball a zetz, and then he’s in a trance.’

  Didn’t he like me playing ping-pong? Hadn’t I won money for him? Yes. But he wanted me out in the world more. Why wasn’t I playing in a club? Why wasn’t I playing for a team? Why didn’t I play with a bat now, like a normal kid? Why didn’t I have a girlfriend? Why was I sitting for hours over my own chazzerei? Why was I blushing all the time? Why did I show him up in front of his brothers? Why was I such a kuni-lemele?

  Kuni-lemele. If tsatske was my most favourite word as a child, kuni-lemele was my least. In itself it didn’t denote anything much more offensive than oafishness. A kuni-lemele is a rustic simpleton. Not quite the village idiot, more the shtetl shlemiel. There can even be a bit of affection in the word. Not on my father’s lips, though. When my father called me a kuni-lemele he filled his mouth with a quivering kuni-lemele milksop substance, a curdled yellow jelly that shrank from the touch and trailed slime, like the underbelly of a slug.

  That was what I heard, anyway.

  It was in order to de-kuni-lemelize me, to get me out in the world, whether I shrank from it or not, that my father borrowed the coach one weekend for a family outing to Blackpool, where a boys’ weekly comic just happened to be sponsoring a giant nationwide ping-pong gala. My sisters were jumping up and down on the back seat of the bus, blowing kisses at male motorists on our tail. My mother was sitting with her mother in the seat behind my father, och un veh-ing together, and I was up beside him so that I could smell the diesel and see how the gears and the pedals worked and thereby get a taste for manly things. Mistake. Putting me up there just meant that when we pulled into a petrol station I was in harm’s way. In those days petrol stations weren’t self-service. Nor were those who filled you up merely anonymous pump attendants. Running a garage was a profession then; drive in for a couple of gallons and you were negotiating with men of substance — a retired naval officer who loved cars, a barrister lending a relative a helping hand over the long weekend. It was my misfortune to run into a wing commander. ‘Cheer up,’ he called to me, after switching off the pump and exchanging pleasantries with my father. ‘Cheer up — it may never happen.’

  ‘It already has,’ I said.

  He had a red, raging, humourless face, the way they always do, the homicidal depressives who tell you to cheer up.

  He looked bemused. ‘What has?’

  This was a longer conversation than I had the courage for. But I was in now. ‘The thing you said may never happen …’

  I waited for him to catch up. It’s possible I allowed my contempt for his slowness to show, even through my own intense embarrassment.

  ‘… it already has.’

  ‘Has what?’

  ‘Happened.’

  That’s all I said. Happened. Not happened, you shmuck. Not happened, you fucking psychopath. Just it already has, and then happened.

  I watched his mouth vanish. So far he had been addressing me from the driver’s side, now he came around the bus and climbed up on to the running-board. My window was open and his face was so close to mine I could count the hairs on his facetious aviator’s tash.

  ‘See this garage?’ he said. ‘See that workshop? See those fields behind it? See those fences? See those trees? See that grass? See those houses at the end of that lane? All mine. Every stick and stone. Every brick. Mine. I own the lot. All of it. So don’t you think you can be smart with me, son.’

  Where is that mysterious far-away realm to which the diffident fly to find courage? Our secret; even from ourselves. ‘What about the birds?’ I was aghast at hearing myself saying. ‘Are they yours, too?’

  That did it. All at once I was in a universe of total silence, not broken even by the tweeting of my impertinent birds. A raging silence vibrating fearfully to the throbbing of our hearts. All our hearts — mine, his, my father’s, my sisters’, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. Maybe one of us was going to have a heart attack. Maybe we all were. Then I realized there was a finger in my face. Actually in my face. And that it had a voice.

  ‘You little snot-nose,’ it said. ‘I could buy and sell you a hundred times over. You wouldn’t make a dent in my bank balance. I spend more on manure in a day than it’d cost me to buy you …’

  Then, abruptly, silence again. The finger was gone and my adversary with it. Gone without another word to any of us. Disappeared inside their workshop the pair of them, no doubt, to calculate their value in spanners and jacks.

  Now here’s a question: Why, if this incident so incensed my father — and take my word for it, it did, it did — why didn’t he land one on the wing commander who was responsible for it, instead of on me who wasn’t?

  It wasn’t a punch. I’m not saying my father laid me out. But no sooner had he returned to the driver’s seat than he let fly with a backhand Ogimura would have been proud of, a humdinging swipe that caught me on the mouth, bringing tears to my eyes and silencing my sisters, who were just getting ready to start spluttering with laughter again. From my mother and her mother it drew a conjoined gasp. ‘Oh, Joel!’ my mother said.

  He revved the bus out of the garage forecourt — ‘Oh, Joel,’ he jeered — and swung out on to the Blackpool road, careless of the traffic. We were at that stage of the journey where a penny was usually offered to the first person who saw the Tower, but there was no family fun of that sort today. I sat with my head down, determined not to cry, but promising myself that one day I would put a knife in my father’s heart, supposing I could ever find it. He looked stonily ahead, no doubt promising himself some similar reward in relation to me. When he finally spoke it was to justify what he’d done. ‘You and your long farkrimt face,’ he said. ‘I’m sick of you showing me up. You’ll treat people with respect when you’re out with me, you stuck-up little …’ But he didn’t finish. He wasn’t a swearer.

  Looking back, I think I did the right thing not asking how I could be simultaneously diffident and arrogant, stuck in and stuck up. It could only have led to another klop. And who knows, to the bus spinning out of control and the whole family being wiped out.

  So we drove the rest of the way in silence until we arrived at the Tower.

  For northerners in search of their first good time in the ten or fifteen years after the War, Blackpool was where you always went looking, and the Tower Ballroom was where you invariably found it. In the Tower Ballroom you smooched your first smooch, kissed your first kiss, missed your first last bus home. For me the Tower Ballroom was where I first saw a row of twenty ping-pong tables, every one of them in use. It’s a sight, I have to say, going on recent experience, that still has the power to move me. People who love the spectacle of football speak of that heart-stopping moment when you come up out of the darkness of the stands and suddenly find yourself looking down upon the luminous verdure of the turf. Cricket, baseball, rugby, bowls — the same. In the end it’s the arena we come for, the landscape. And the landscape of sport is always green. Always and forever green. The colour of the Elysian Fields. Our only glimpse of Paradise. Which was what I saw when I walked into the Tower Ballroom. The Holy City. Avalon. The olive garden of the Hesperides and twenty separate ping-pong balls going plock. The music of the spheres.

  It wasn’t a tournament. You just went over to a table and took your turn. Winners stayed on for a maximum of three games, losers went to th
e back of the queue and waited for another crack. But it wasn’t about winning and losing. It was about being spotted for potential. A dozen senior players and coaches wandered between the tables looking for kids who had what it took. Or to whom they believed they could teach what it took. This was big-break time. If you were to have any chance of snatching the title from Ogimura or some other inscrutable pen-hander in the future, this is where it would have to begin.

  And here was me with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde already smoking in my hand and a cut mouth to remind me that less than an hour before I’d been publicly humiliated by a man I was no longer prepared to regard as my father. Some preparation for my big break that was.

  He — he — had dropped us off at the Tower and then gone to have some repairs done to the bus. Tactful of him. My sisters were out on the Golden Mile, rolling pennies and looking for men. Tactful of them, too. As usual, the ones who felt most keenly for one’s suffering were the only ones who didn’t have the nous to get out of the way. So I was stuck, on my first ever ping-pong outing, with a mother and a granny.