The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘They look nice boys on that table,’ my mother said. ‘Why don’t you join them?’

  In my heart I knew I was not going to join anyone. I wasn’t a joiner. It wasn’t going to happen like that for me. It would all unfold in some other way. It would be the same with the Jezebels. I would not meet them at a dance. I would meet them some other way. And what was it I wanted, then, from ping-pong and from Jezebels, that was not what others wanted, that could not be initiated or satisfied in the ordinary way? Nothing. That is what has been so disappointing about my life — at the last, after all the blushing and the shrinking, all the exceptional hesitancy and reluctance, there is nothing I have ever wanted other than to lift the cup and fuck the girl.

  It’s possible, then, that the man who was no longer my father was within his rights to nail me for a stuck-up prick and zetz me as hard as he did?

  Anything’s possible.

  What I also knew in my heart, now I was here, was that I wouldn’t have the courage to bat with a book. I looked around at the other kids. Several of them wore tracksuits. Some seemed to have their parents with them (though not their grannies), acting as trainers, muttering to them between points — ‘Concentrate, concentrate! Keep it simple!’ — dumb-showing strokes from the sidelines. And all of them, of course, used bats. But did I see anyone I couldn’t have licked? A few who might have pushed me hard, maybe. A tall kid with an over-pronounced follow-through, who hit the ball with plenty of topspin, but all you’d have to do with him was counter-hit from close to the table and you’d have the ball past him while he was still putting the final flourish to his previous stroke. A heavy chopper who was winning applause from bystanders for his showy retrieving, but where would he be when I got the ball to stop dead at the net? And perhaps the toughest of them, if only because he was the most determined, a round-faced boy in shorts who bounced around the table a lot, doing breathing exercises, refusing to accept that a ball was ever out of his reach. He’d take the longest to beat, because of the pleasure there would be in wearing him out. Death by push shot. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde itched in my palm. So no, I didn’t see anyone I couldn’t have licked. But I still didn’t have the nerve to line up with my book.

  It doesn’t make much sense, does it? First they’d have laughed, then I’d have wiped the laughter off their faces. Game, set and match to me, with the moral victory thrown in. My trouble was that I couldn’t think long term — all I could hear was the snorting of that initial mockery, instead of the soft purrings of my own satisfaction in the end.

  That’s the difference between a winner and a loser.

  ‘So how did it go?’ the man who was still not my father asked on the way back.

  Behind me, the bus had fallen very quiet again.

  ‘I didn’t play,’ I said.

  ‘You didn’t play! We went all the way to Blackpool and you didn’t play!’

  ‘He was upset,’ my grandmother put in.

  ‘I wasn’t upset. I just didn’t want to play.’

  ‘Didn’t want to play, or couldn’t play? Didn’t want to play, or wouldn’t come out of your shell?’

  (Something else my sisters had been doing while they were on the loose in Blackpool — collecting shells from the beach to slip into my pocket when we were back on the bus.)

  ‘I don’t think they’d have let me play with my book.’

  ‘Did you ask?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No. ‘Course not. Why ask? Too much of a kuni-lemele to ask. Better to hide in a corner and go red. Or maybe you were sitting on the Benghazi smelling your own chazzerei the whole time you were there.’

  ‘Joel!’ my mother said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘if I want to play with a book any more.’

  ‘Fine. So get a bat.’

  ‘I don’t know if I’ll be any good with a bat.’

  ‘Right!’ he said. That was the end of it. Right meant discussion over. In arguments with my mother, right meant that the bus would be parked in some very odd places that night. In arguments with me, right usually meant no more than that he’d lost interest.

  But a couple of days later I came home from school to find the bus outside the house and my father sitting on the garden wall waiting for me. Never in my life had I seen my father sitting on this, or any other, garden wall. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘We’re going out.’

  He had a queer elsewhere expression on his face. As though he had decided that I no longer existed and was going to address all future comments to a ghost boy standing behind me.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You’ll see when we get there.’

  I should have noticed that he was carrying a brown holdall but I was too anxious about what was happening to notice anything. My father was never home at this time of the day. He never sat on walls. He never took me anywhere. And he never talked to ghosts.

  ‘Is Ma all right?’ I asked.

  ‘Everybody’s all right. Hop in.’

  Everybody was all right but my father was taking me somewhere. Was he taking me to be adopted?

  He drove without speaking, but calmly. Up Blackley New Road, past the reservoirs where other boys’ fathers took them fishing, around the biscuit factory which always smelt of malted milk and which I therefore thought a woman’s breasts would smell like once I next got to suckle some, and then slowly by the gates of Crumpsall Hospital.

  A hospital — was that it? Electric-shock treatment to get me out of the toilet? A lobotomy?

  But we didn’t stop at the hospital. Nor at the Jews’ Cemetery which abutted it. So it was life we were chasing, was it? More frightening still.

  After about fifteen minutes he slowed down alongside some playing fields, peered out of my window, then drove another fifty yards before pulling in by a building that resembled a cricket pavilion.

  ‘Out,’ he said.

  ‘What are we doing?’ I asked.

  ’We’re not doing anything. You’re joining the Akiva.’

  I’d heard of the Akiva. The Akiva Social Club. Hadn’t one of my aunties on my father’s side once been treasurer, prior to rumours that she’d been caught shmuckling subscriptions? All hushed up. Hadn’t another of the Walzer women found a husband there — someone else’s husband — at a Chanukkah dance? Also hushed up. How could I join the Akiva? The Akiva was for grown-up sophisticates and socialites. I was twelve. You don’t need a shmuckling treasurer for a club that has twelve-year-olds as members. Nor an adulterous dance floor …

  Aha — a dance floor! So that was it. A dance floor. Forget the lobotomy; the man I could no longer call a man let alone a father had dragged me from my home and was now going to deposit me into the middle of a hokey-cokey — in my school blazer! Come on, Oliveler, join the line, join the line.

  ‘No,’ I said. It was a small protest but at least I made it. ‘No.’

  He took me by the arm. ‘Don’t make this difficult for yourself,’ he warned me.

  What happened next seemed to happen very quickly. One minute we were signing forms; then I was shaking the hand of someone preternaturally affable, in a painfully obvious wig, and with a still more painfully obvious hearing-aid; then I was walking down a long passage with my father; then he was turning the handle of a door.

  The door opened on to a ping-pong room. There were about half a dozen people in there, two playing, the rest sitting around. They were all older than me, I saw that at once. What I also saw was that they were not sophisticates or socialites. No one had told me that in any club the table tennis room is always where the nebbishes and nishtikeits hang out, but I was able to make an immediate assessment along those lines unaided, for all that I was a running river of no-hoper embarrassment myself.

  For their part, they greeted my arrival as though a bad smell had entered the room. I know now it wasn’t personal. Over the years I have seen that look a thousand times. Just when you think you’ve got the table to yourselves for the evening, mapped out a competition and started to relax
into a little light male conversation — chipping, moodying, fannying — in walks a kuni-lemele with his dad.

  But I knew from the pressure on my shoulders that there was no point in hanging back.

  ‘Play,’ my father said. ‘I’ll be in the bus waiting for you. I’ll wait as long as it takes. But don’t come back out in under two hours.’

  ‘I’m not prepared,’ I said. ‘I haven’t brought my book.’

  Only then did I notice that he was carrying a holdall. ‘You said you didn’t want to play with a book any more,’ he said. ‘So here.’ He unzipped the bag and brought out a bat. The biggest bat I had ever seen in my life. A good eighteen inches in diameter, as heavy as a hockey stick, its surface coated with coarse sandpaper, so that what? — so that I should make the sparks fly?

  ‘Nah. Geh gesunterhait. Win.’

  And he shoved me into the room.

  Some time later I learnt that my father had made the bat with parts from his precious Yo-Yo which he’d been hoarding for over twenty years.

  So he loved me after all.

  THREE

  The ‘free hand’ is the hand not carrying the racket.

  5.5 The Rules

  WE NOW ENTER an embarrassing phase even by the standards of this history of embarrassments. I can at least promise brevity.

  My father was right to want to prise me out. Out of my shell and out of the lavatory. But I was further in than he knew.

  Sometimes I wondered whether I was further in than any boy had ever been. Somebody had to be the World Shell-Skulking Champion, somebody had to hold the record for time sitting steaming on top of his own chazzerei — why shouldn’t it have been me?

  Somebody had to have had the most disgusting imagination in history, as well, and the scummiest ever habits to go with it; and there I yielded to no one, man or boy. I had some way to go yet before I became the ping-pong player I had it in me to be; but I was already the Ogimura of filth.

  The hand that built the Yo-Yo built the bat, but the hand that rocked the cradle moved the hand that wasn’t carrying a bat. You understand me?

  Take time.

  So far I’ve shovelled whatever blame I can on to my father’s side. Now it’s my mother’s side’s turn. In an important sense, it wasn’t me who was bolting the lavatory door and making love to myself for sessions which I considered brutally foreshortened if they failed to exceed three hours. It was them.

  I choose my words carefully. Love.

  I was a pupil at a boys-only grammar school with vague Church of England associations and a motto taken from Seneca — POTENTISSIMUS EST, QUI SE HABET IN POTESTATE — which translated roughly into HE IS MOST POWERFUL WHO TAKES HIMSELF IN HAND. Which was what we did. We took ourselves in hand from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon, with no more than thirty minutes off for lunch. Prayers at assembly, ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’, ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’, and then six and a half hours of self-love, singly, together, in teams competitively, in teams callisthenically, in the playground, in the showers, in the library, in the gym, under the coconut mat, up the wallbars, over the vaulting-horse, behind the cricket nets, behind the blackboard, under the desks, in the inkwells beneath the very noses of our teachers. St Onan’s Church of England Grammar School for Boy Perverts, Radcliffe.

  Jerking or jacking off, was what the other boys called it. Their prerogative. They were less nice in their vocabulary than I was; they came from less particular homes; and they treated themselves with less respect. It’s not for me to judge. I can only state that there was nothingjacky or jerky in what I was doing. And nothing to justify the idea of off, either. I stayed on. May God be my witness, I stayed on.

  Alone. The other thing some of the less nice boys did was to disobey the school motto and take hold of someone else. I never went along with that. Such a practice was against the Kamenets Podolski faith which still pulsed faintly in my blood. Besides, I had no taste for it. I didn’t like what Church of England boys looked like. I preferred me.

  Love — I don’t know what else to call it. I fell for myself. I swore eternal fidelity to myself, made myself promises I would never be able to keep. Jerk? No flesh has ever been shown steadier or more silky consideration than I showed to mine. Except that it wasn’t really me who was showing it. It was them. My mother’s side. They were the ones making promises they would never be able to keep.

  Was I engaged, then, in multiple incest? Most definitely yes, if showing silky consideration to yourself while viewing photographs of your mother’s side, alive and dead, is incest. But incest isn’t the half of it. Oh, no. Incest isn’t the quarter of it. Not even when it’s multiple and mortuary incest. And if I am to accept my responsibility for the damnable things that were thought inside that shell and done behind that door, they must accept theirs.

  I’ve promised brevity so I won’t waste time on all the usual psycho family biog stuff — the circumcision carried out by an aspen-leaf Mohel with delirium tremens and dirt beneath his fingernails; the bloody bandages; the mother’s guilt drying up the mother’s milk; the furious denunciation of God and His ways; the bet-hedging remorse, expressed in renewed prayers and promises; the pledge to make it up to the boy and his putz, to be over-and-above solicitous to the boy, and over-and-above over-and-above solicitous to his putz, for ever and ever Amen. Yes, I was fussed over. Yes, I was lovingly washed and exquisitely talcum’d and meticulously dried, as though the wound had never healed and never would heal. And yes, yes I was — to employ the humiliating idiom of my mother’s side — held out over the lavatory come pee-pee time, confidentially squeezed and shaken and squeezed again like a hose-pipe during a hose-pipe ban. But that’s normal. What was exceptional was the number of women doing it.

  My father was serving in the army when I was born. Driving a truck and re-styling his officers’ trousers. (‘You look like a tailor, Walzer,’ they’d observed, ‘take these in.’ And he did.) It was news of me that got him out of going overseas where the fighting was. And by the time he’d completed his compassionate leave there was no fighting left. But there is driving and tailoring to be done even in peacetime, so he wasn’t demobbed immediately. Which meant that the world I was just starting to see the right way up was exclusively populated by females. I had two sisters. My mother had three sisters, one of whom, Fay, lived with us in the absence of my father, while the other two limited their visits to a dozen times a day, more often than not in the company of their mother. So how many women is that?

  There was a grandfather on my mother’s side, but he was one of the reasons all the women came to us. He drank. Isaac Saffron, shicker to us, piss-pot to you. I’m still keeping it brief. He drank, actually pulled pints in the manner of a shaygets behind a bar in Collyhurst so he could be close to the supply, bet on the dogs, treated my grandmother like a domestic, klopped my aunties, and on one famous occasion — the straw that broke the camel’s back — drove out a party of my mother’s friends who had been sitting around in paper hats celebrating her eighteenth birthday. ‘There’ll be no bloody atheists in this house,’ he shouted, stumbling into the furniture and threatening to burn the place down. I have several photographs of my grandfather. He is handsome in the early ones, a little Polski princeling with sleepy eyes, a voluptuous mouth and dainty hands and feet. By the time there are photographs that have me in them as well he has lost his looks to alcohol. But in one regard nothing changes — in all of them he has his fists clenched.

  The atheism charge was a reference to the free-thinking company my mother kept and provides a clue, over and above her delicate yet fleshy oval beauty, to why my father was so keen to marry her. She knew communists, she dated doctors, she hummed Tchaikovsky, she corresponded with men who were fighting with the International Brigade in Spain, and she read books. It wasn’t that she opened the door to the mind for my father; it was that she kept it closed. If he married her he’d be able to go on never reading a book himself. She could look after all that.

  It was th
e best sort of match: they loved each other for what they didn’t have in common. For her part, she loved him because he brought the lightness of inconsequentiality into her life, entertained her with tsatskes, and wasn’t frightened of anything.

  She was still only eighteen when they married, and he was hardly much older than that himself. Immediately after the wedding he drove her away in a big chocolate and cream shooting-brake which he’d coach-built for her with his own hands, along the lines of the mobster getaway saloons he’d seen in George Raft movies. My grandmother was unable to join the crowd of well-wishers waving them off. She stood with her back to the street, her face buried in her hands, praying aloud that they should be delivered from the evil eye — ‘Kayn aynhoreh zol nit zayn!’ My aunties, too, trembled for their sister. A husband, laughter, a big car — how much further could she push her luck?

  The Shrinking Violets was the name my father gave his sisters-in-law. He always alluded to them collectively — ‘What, no Shrinking Violets for tea tonight?’ or ‘I hope we can at least go to that together, just the two of us, without the Shrinking Violets in tow’ — as though they were an established showbiz group like the Andrews Sisters. Inevitably you pictured them on stage with a big band singing ‘Bei Mir Bist Du Shain’, which was ludicrous since it was actually impossible to picture them on stage doing anything.

  They were frightened of everything, my mother’s side. A stroll in the park, the tweet of a bird, the approach of a stranger. Let a moth come in through an open window on a summer’s night and beat its wings in a lampshade, and their lives hung in doubt before them. A thread finer than cobweb attached them to life, finer than gossamer.

  (And here’s something interesting — in its earliest days that was what ping-pong was called: Gossima.)

  After my grandmother died, a whole wardrobe of unworn garments was discovered, some of it dating back to when she was a bride herself. Dozens of ‘best’ dresses on their original hangers, drawers of long skirts and high-buttoned blouses still folded as the shop-girls had folded them fifty years before, shoes in their boxes, silk stockings, items of underwear that had never been taken out of their wrappings. Gifts, most of them. Gifts she was unable to accept in her heart. She wasn’t worthy. Gifts were for other people. And ‘best’ was always for some future time which, like the Messiah, was never meant to come. Be seen by the Almighty risking the presumption of a ‘best’ frock, and the heavens would come down on you.