The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  They were on speaking terms again. Monosyllabic, but at least speaking. She had given him an old faded pink and yellow candlewick bedcover to spread out on the stall. Even before he’d drawing-pinned it on to the trestle table there were women fighting for it. That was how good a gaff Stockport was.

  And he sold it? Of course he sold it. ‘I’d have sold my own gatkes,’ he said, ‘if anyone had asked for them.’

  A salesman suddenly.

  His other advice to me in later years was, ‘Always make a nice flash.’ He made a nice flash, a lovely flash, that morning. The proof of which was that by midday it was all gone.

  A tycoon suddenly.

  True, he didn’t have, as he put it Mancunianly himself, ‘a very lot’ to get rid of. All the soft toys he could squeeze into a couple of cardboard boxes that weren’t too bulky to carry on a bus. Not his bus. He no longer had a bus. On a red, double-decker public bus. Which he had to wait for in the cold at five in the morning. On two red, double-decker buses, because the first one only took him to Cannon Street, from where he had to shlepp his boxes up Market Street to Piccadilly and wait, still in the freezing cold, for the second one to take him to Stockport. No picnic. No picnic, having a wife who loses you your job. And a son who’s never out of the Benghazi.

  He’d bought the toys from a warehouse near to where my grandfather used to labour in the shadow of Strangeways, imagining he could hear the sirens signalling knocking-off time. In those days all the warehouses were owned by fellow refugees from the Podolski Plateau. Asians qua Asians hadn’t even started on the markets yet. One muffled-up Indian selling nylons on a scrap of waste ground behind Victoria Station, that was the extent of their penetration. Otherwise all unserer — one-time beetroot farmers rising from the Podolian swamps. Peddling, markets, wholesaling, importing, next generation in the professions — that was the way of it. The old merry-go-round. That it was a cycle not a progression, that mud-nostalgia would once again exert its shtetl pull, none of us could ever have imagined. We were on the move then, upwards and onwards, conscious of not a single impediment. If anything, we Walzers were slower than many. My father started markets when other Yiddeles his age were opening cash and carries, and I was playing ping-pong when others my size were preparing themselves for the law. But then we had big hearts, we Walzer men.

  And big ideas.

  If soft toys weren’t quite a big idea they were certainly a bright one. Christmas was coming, the season of soft toys. And my father was good with toys. He understood them. Could relate to them. Tsatskes, remember. Had things panned out differently he might have made it as one of the world’s great puppeteers. Or ventriloquists. At Stockport he sat a stuffed parrot on his shoulder, called out ‘Aha, Jim lad!’, and engaged in proxy conversation with mothers trundling their trolleyloads of snot-strewn progeny. Why northern gentile children were always snotty in those days I don’t know. It might have been a parenting fad. But the sight of them never put my father off. He was a humanitarian. Few other Bug and Dniester marketmen had such a natural way with the big-spending northern proletarian poor. ‘I say! I say, Mrs Woman!’ he’d get the parrot to squawk. ‘Take me home with you and I’ll keep you warm at night. I’m very cheap, you know. How cheap? Cheep-cheep. Love you.’

  And Mrs Woman would glow with the compliment, tell the proxy parrot he was cheeky and open her purse.

  ‘The one thing you never do even when you’re selling toys,’ my father used to tell me, ‘is appeal directly to the godforbids themselves. I don’t approve of that.’

  By the time the Christmas tree had gone from the market square and the little lights no longer twinkled under the tarpaulins he’d earned enough to put a deposit on a small van. Had found a second market in Garston at the Speke end of Liverpool. And had hit upon another bright idea. What were these soft toys anyway? Half a yard of furry Draylon, a fistful of flock filling, a couple of buttons for the eyeballs and a triangle of scarlet felt for the tongue. Machining was in the family. Why give the money to a wholesaler when he could knock up the gear himself? By he he meant we.

  At first the cutting-out was done by my grandfather on my father’s side. He was retired now and sitting staring into space. Now he really did have a grandfather chair. But he hadn’t lost any of the old mind-numbing skills. He’d cut out and partially machine; then the toys would come to us to be stuffed and to have their features sewn on by hand; then they’d go back to my grandfather to have their remaining seams stitched up and, where necessary, their looks improved; then they’d come back to us for bagging. That was my job: blowing open the polythene bag, popping in a yellow Gestetner’d WARNING slip giving notice, as was required by law, that the toy was not fire-proof, that the dye was not suck-proof, that the eyes were a danger to children under twelve, that the bag itself presented a threat to the life of anyone idle enough to think of putting it over his head, and then sealing it with a sufficient number of staples to rip open the hand of any ordinarily inadvertent adult,

  Clearly we couldn’t go on like this. The toys were flying there and back so often they were virtually second-hand by the time I came to bag them. But it wasn’t only the wastefulness of our system of manufacture that finally decided my father against going on employing my grandfather. Not aesthetics exactly, but something like aesthetics also had a bit to do with it. No matter what animal he was meant to be machining, my grandfather couldn’t stop himself turning it into a version of a golliwog. Not just the monkeys, but the pandas and the kittens and the polar bears too, the whole bestiary, came back with fuzzy hair and rolling eyes and white Mr Interlocutor gloves on their paws.

  The times were less nice then. Amos and Andy were on television once a week. A Black and White Minstrel show still turned up regularly at the Ardwick Hippodrome and drew large audiences of utterly well-meaning Stephen Foster fans. My father could have specialized in golliwogs and got away with it in Stockport. But somehow or other one of my grandfather’s creations landed on the desk of Robertson’s Jams and Marmalades who came carrying briefcases to see my father on his market stall and threatened him with a lawsuit for breach of copyright. And you know by now how little my father liked upsetting people.

  Queer, the trouble we always seemed to be having around jam and marmalade. And we didn’t even touch the stuff. Cheese — that was what we put on our toast. Melted killer cheese.

  Without my grandfather we were stymied as far as soft toy production went. My father had tailoring skills himself, but he couldn’t be expected to make the stock and sell it. And the few he did try his hand at all came out hunch-backed. Buy me and I’ll keep you warm at night, cheep-cheep, I love you, was all very well, but not if the bunny-wunny with a pink ribbon round its neck looked like Quasimodo. He ran my mother up a pair of curtains for their bedroom with what was left of the spotted furry Draylon and that was it with the cuddly stuff. Soft toys don’t sell that well after Christmas anyway. Besides, my father had already come up with another bright idea. Coffee tables. He’d seen them in the warehouses, he’d seen other grafters pitching them out on Garston, and he couldn’t see why he couldn’t make them himself. What was a coffee table when all was said and done? An oval of chipboard, four screw-on angled spindle legs, a sheet of glass and a strip of plastic beading. He could do it easy. By he he meant we.

  And by we he meant me. Him and me. All very well getting the girls and the infirm to help with the teddies, appropriate even, given how infirm and girlish teddies themselves were. But there was nothing fluffy about a coffee table — coffee tables were carpentry, and carpentry was what men did. Measuring, sawing, screwing, gluing. (How much did he know about me and glue?)

  There was a further aspect of coffee tabling he needed me for. Artwork. I was the grammar school boy. I knew something about pictures, didn’t I? Paintings. All that malarkey. The coffee tables my father had watched the pitchers clearing out on Garston market — ‘Not five pounds, not four pounds, not even three pounds, here, look, I’ll tell you what I’ll do �
�’ — were illustrated, showing scenes from Swan Lake and The Nutcracker under their glass tops. My father didn’t know what the ballets were called, or even that they were ballets. They were pictures, that was all, and someone had to choose them. Me. The one with all the green books.

  Leaving aside the crazed salacious collages I made in the privacy of the lavatory, what did I know about art? Well, I knew that my grandmother’s reverend head on a naughty schoolgirl’s torso wouldn’t be a seller in Catholic Liverpool. I knew that there were no famous paintings of ping-pong players in action. And I knew I could do better than Swan Lake. I had the regulation art tastes of a shell-shrinker my age. I revered a couple of Rembrandt self-portraits, as well as The Nightwatch and the person in the gold helmet; I owned a jigsaw puzzle of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel; and I was stirred at some deep and upsetting level by Bosch’s nightmare demons with flowers in their bums. Enough there to be going along with, wouldn’t you have said, for a coffee table company limited in its production capacity by the space available after supper on the living-room floor.

  We soon got to the bottom of the omnipresence of The Nutcracker and Swan Lake. They were the only prints of a suitable size you could pick up. No printer cheap enough to keep our tables competitive had Brueghel’s Tower of Babel in stock. Nor The Nightwatch. We enjoyed some good fortune with the Bosch, though. One small firm in Eccles was so taken with the flowers in the bum they were prepared to have one of their artists copy it. But we had to order five hundred. ‘Done,’ my father said. We still have them. Somewhere under the stairs of my mother’s house is a soggy cobwebbed oblong carton containing four hundred and ninety-nine barely-look-alike Bosch posters printed in the primary colours. We never sold a single one. The public knows what it likes and it knew it didn’t like a coffee table showing Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, chiefly anal, under glass. What it liked was Swan Lake. Also anal, but melodic. The only Bosch table in existence is owned by me. ‘Keep that one for yourself,’ my father said ironically as we dismantled the three dozen we had made, substituting the art people wanted for the art they didn’t. ‘Consider it an early wedding present.’

  A better early wedding present would have been to leave me alone.

  To get on with what?

  To get on with ping-pong for a start.

  I’d been wrong to think there was nothing left to live for after losing in the fog in Dukinfield. There was getting even left to live for. There was passing on the pain and beating someone else left to live for. In short, there was next week.

  Thus the beauty of playing in a league was quickly made manifest to me. In a league there is never a last chance. Never a final, once and for all deciding match. Play in a league and you do not have to come face to face with your maker. Next week you might thrash your maker.

  The week after Dukinfield was a home match. Against the Post Office. I was told we played better at home. I could have figured that out for myself. We would have played better on an ice floe in the Arctic Circle so long as we hadn’t had to spend an hour in Aishky’s Austin beforehand.

  As though it took a special interest in our progress and had committed our fixture list to memory, the fog which had lifted immediately after Dukinfield began to fall again. ‘You’re not going out in that on your own,’ my mother said. ‘Your father will drive you.’

  ‘What in?’ my father asked.

  Losing a bus is like losing a limb: it takes a while to remember you no longer have it. More than once I’d seen my father pat his face clean, throw on a tie and go whistling out of the house only to return disconsolately half a minute later.

  ‘Then your sisters will take you.’

  ‘No!’ I said.

  ‘Ah, Ma, no!’ they said together.

  They no more wanted to be seen with me in my tracksuit than I wanted to be seen with them in their ballooning net petticoats and ankle socks and Olive Oyle high heels.

  So there was nothing else for it. My mother and the Violets accompanied me on the train from Bowker Vale and waited for me in the card room at the Akiva. It’s an ill wind. There was a dance on in the card room that night and it was here that my aunty Dolly, the oldest of the Violets — though she had come out in nothing more alluring under her maroon overcoat than a yellow cardigan with a button missing, and the S for Spinster throbbing on her chest — met the man who would one day take her out of herself, make her heart dance, and then break it. Gershom Finkel.

  I went all phlegmy seeing Twink and Aishky again. I coughed, blaming the fog, but it was puppy love that was guggling up at the back of my throat. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed them. They hadn’t turned up for practice after the jam and marmalade fiasco. Aishky had had to lie down all week, and Twink had blown his life savings on a trip to London to hear Giuseppe di Stefano sing Rudolfo at Covent Garden. Di Stefano was his favourite living lyric tenor. Aishky thought Mario Lanza but Twink laughed in his face. That shreier! Not counting those who had long jossed it like Caruso, and those who had recently jossed it like Gigli (though he’d always been too much of a crooner for Twink’s taste), it went di Stefano one, Björling two, Ferruccio Tagliavini three …

  Over Del Monaco?

  … Tagliavini three, Mario Del Monaco four, Richard Tucker five …

  And then Mario Lanza?

  Twink snorted. Mario Lanza, Aishk, didn’t make it into the top twenty.

  Sheeny Waxman wanted to put in a vote for Bill Haley.

  ‘Do me a favour,’ Twink said.

  I tried a joke myself. ‘Where would you rate Victor Barna?’

  Twink looked nonplussed. ‘As a table tennis player … ? You’re moodying me.’ Then he got it. ‘Dependable, but not up there with the very best of them. He can be a bit flat for me. But definitely above Lanza.’

  He was in high spirits, limber, laundered, up there with the best of them himself, ready to take on anybody. Opera lifted him, warmed him through, cleared his asthma, put arias in his hair. He’d unearthed some rare and precious 78s of John McCormack while he was in the Smoke, including Act I of Boito’s Mefistofele and the exquisite and almost impossible to find ‘Pur Dicesti’ by Antonio Lotti, both in mint condition. It was Twink’s ambition to own the biggest collection of recordings of lyric tenors in the country. Already it was second to none in Prestwich. ‘I’ve got stuff even the BBC don’t know where to lay their hands on,’ he told me. ‘They ring me. How do you like that?’ So he was well on his way.

  I noticed that his bat looked as laundered as he did. The pimples sat up unusually flexuous and nipply. ‘Have you shampooed your bat?’ I asked.

  ‘Listen to the kid! Have I shampooed my bat? Shmerel! I bought new rubbers from Lillywhites. Fatter pimples. I decided to change my game while I was away.’

  He was magnificent that night. Going on a hunch, Aishky put him in at number one, which was strictly Sheeny’s spot according to recent form, to say nothing of its being what Aishky had promised me when he’d signed me up. But Twink didn’t let him down. He hit like di Stefano. Full of chest, but sweet. No screamers, just winner after winner stroked sweetly off a thrumming blade, lovely smooth high bouncing legatos, picked up early and pitched perfectly on the line.

  His form affected the rest of us. Aishky found the rhythm that had deserted him the week before. He could do no wrong. Even when he was manoeuvred out of position and was forced to try his infamous behind-the-back retrieval — a shot Twink was forever begging him to forgo, because it looked smart-arsed and would upset the goyim — he pulled off an unbelievably acute angled return that left his opponent open-mouthed, with his hands on his hips. ‘The ball’s stuck to my bat,’ he whispered to me, beaming, as he changed ends. ‘It’s on elastic’

  Selwyn Marks won handsomely, by his standards, as well. Striking his thigh and sometimes even his head with his bat, and berating himself as always — ‘Make your mind up, play the shot you mean to play, what’s the point of starting to hit if you don’t hit, come on, watch the ball, come ON, COME ON!�
�� -but actually playing shots tonight, actually trying to get the ball past his opponent instead of just keeping it in play and hoping.

  ‘Geh, Selwyn!’ Sheeny Waxman called out after a couple of exaggeratedly effective forehand smashes, whereupon a circle of pink appeared in each of Selwyn’s cheeks and he smashed the next five forehands into the net.

  ‘No,’ he yelled to himself. ‘NO!’ And netted two more.

  ‘Steady, Selwyn,’ Sheeny called. ‘Take it a point at a time.’ And the crisis was over. Having thrown away a 19—12 lead to end up on 19 all he reverted to what he did best and pushed his way to a 21—19 win. ‘Better,’ he said to himself even as he was shaking hands. ‘BETTER!’

  Sheeny, ticking and flicking, won easily. That goes without saying. He should have been playing in a higher division. But that would have meant practising a couple of nights a week, keeping himself in shape. And Sheeny was otherwise engaged. He had an air of wasted brilliance about him. Could do better, they’d written on his school reports. Does himself no justice. Performs below his potential. He carried that one around in his wallet and showed it to the girls he chatted up in the Kardomah. ‘I wouldn’t mind performing below your potential, darling.’ Be careful not to underestimate me — that was the challenge he threw out. I’m not the low-life you take me to be. Not only the low-life you take me to be. I have a say in the matter.

  And I? How was I on my first ever home appearance?

  I beggared belief. Need I say more? I made a pauper of credulity.

  Whatever embellishments Aishky went on adding to the famous story of how I’d turned up at the Akiva carrying a bat as big as the Empire State Building and zetzed my way into club legend, I was never an out-and-out come-what-may hitter. My game was built around control and demoralization. I loved ping-pong most when I felt the fight go out of my opponent. You can hear it sometimes. Hear their self-belief crack, hear their heart break. Like a twig snapping in a moon-frozen forest. The fight goes out of players differently. Some give up in a fit of irritation as soon as you’ve bamboozled them with a couple of spin serves. Others decide you hit too fiercely for them and settle for admiring what you can do. ‘Shot, son. Too good.’ Or they sense the night’s luck is running your way and can’t be bothered to resist it. But nothing hollows out a player more than when you soak up everything he’s got. Think Ali on the ropes against George Foreman. You stand back and let them do their worst, take the lot — go on, hit harder, harder, go on, is that it, is that all you’ve got? — and then kapow! All very well releasing my backhand and thinking I was Victor Barna. I did that only once the ball sat up, begging for it to be over, a superiority I’d achieved at a distance of ten or twenty feet from the table, chopping deep and low in the manner of Richard Bergmann, the little Austrian defender who stood so far back he was almost in the next room, and who had become World Champion at the age of seventeen.