The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  I won.

  Someone had to.

  So potent was the magic which my mother’s side worked on me — it is more captivating, when all is said and done, to be told that victory is not indiscriminate, but yours to throw away — that I can only suppose every other boy had a mother’s side working against him too. The closer I got to the final the more my aunties wheedled. My ears were wet with them. Their fingers paddled in my heart. I threw away leads, I served into the net on match point to me, I missed sitters — ‘That’s it, like that, my darling, just like that’ — but my opponents’ aunties must have loved them more, because for every sitter I missed, they missed two.

  For the final itself all the lesser tables were cleared away and just one master table — the best and greenest table I had ever played on (a Jacques International Match Play Executive, I think it was called) — was erected in the centre of the hall. Then two hundred and eleven chairs were arranged around it.

  I can be precise about the number. I counted them.

  ‘Do you think they’ve made a mistake?’ I asked Aishky.

  Twink and Aishky had been knocked out of the senior tournament earlier in the day — if I haven’t mentioned a senior tournament that’s because I had no eyes for it — but they were staying on to give me encouragement. I doubt I was adequately grateful to them at the time. It takes courage to stay on at a tournament when it has no more use for you. And there were other things they could have been doing on a Saturday night. They were better friends to me than I deserved.

  ‘A mistake in what sense?’ Aishky wondered.

  In the sense that two hundred and eleven chairs were hardly sufficient to seat a thousand spectators, was what I wanted to say. But I could hear in advance how that was going to sound. A man may think in thousands but he should never speak in them. I make no apologies for the wildness of my expectations. What did I know about tournaments? Wimbledon — that was my only model. All right, the Manchester Closed was not the All England, and table tennis was not lawn tennis, but I believed I’d made allowances for the difference. I was only thinking thousands, not tens of thousands.

  I let the subject drop. Aishky looked concerned for me. He had mistaken my grandiosity for finals’ nerves. He nodded in the direction of my opponent, Nils Hagtvet, who was lying across three chairs (three more chairs, I noted) underneath the draw, a packet of Stuyvesant’s on his belly, blowing smoke rings. ‘He’s more nervous than you are,’ Aishky said. ‘He’s a ball chaser. He hasn’t hit one all day. He knows what you’re going to do to him.’

  ‘Does he?’

  Now I did have finals’ nerves. Was I up to beating a boy who could blow smoke rings?

  More than that, was I up to beating someone quite so elongated? I had wanted to meet an incontrovertibly white boy in the finals. Be sure you really want what you want before you ask for it. Nils Hagtvet was the whitest and most extruded boy I had ever seen. He could have come out of a machine for rolling vermicelli. Where he actually came from no one seemed to know, but he played in a higher division than I did, for Tootal Ties.

  Twink echoed Aishky’s concern. ‘Do yourself a favour,’ he advised me, ‘take a long shower. And then see if you can find somewhere dark to lie down for half an hour. Don’t think about anything.’

  It was the same advice my grandfather had given my father on the morning of the World Yo-Yo Championships. Except that Aishky added, ‘And don’t play with your putz.’

  I knew better than to play with my putz before a match.

  But in the event, I did something worse.

  I went looking for chairs. Not with the intention of carrying them out into the arena myself, I should make plain, but just so as I’d know where they were when the multitude turned restive.

  * * *

  ‘Well?’

  My grandmother, my mother and my aunty Fay were waiting for me when I got home.

  I shrugged.

  ‘Never mind,’ they said. My seraglio of despairing counsel. How prompt they were with their siren consolations.

  Too prompt, on this occasion.

  ‘I won,’ I said.

  ‘You won?’

  ‘I won.’

  ‘You won?’

  ‘I won. Big deal.’

  ‘Well it is a big deal.’ Now we could reverse roles. Now they could console me for discovering that victory was a trollop. Had my father been here, instead of broken down in the forecourt of a transport café outside Welshpool, he’d have given me a backhander for winning with so little grace. You pays your money …

  I showed them my silver cup.

  ‘Oh, that’s beautiful,’ my mother said.

  ‘Swag,’ I said.

  They passed it from one to the other, peering under and over their spectacles to see if there was an inscription. Not a good eye between the three of them.

  ‘I take it in to get my name engraved next week,’ I said.

  They all said ‘ah!’ as though I’d told them something upsetting.

  ‘So how many people did you beat?’ Aunty Fay asked.

  ‘Seven.’

  My grandmother shook her head. ‘Seven,’ she repeated. She seemed to see a challenge to the Almighty in it. ‘Seven,’ she said again, meaning no good could come of so big a number.

  And she was right. No good had come of it.

  I hadn’t won well, then? The crowds hadn’t cheered me to the rafters? The girls hadn’t scratched me with their nails?

  Crowds? Girls?

  Why did it matter to me that of the two hundred and eleven chairs arranged around the Jacques International Match Play Executive the better part of two hundred remained unoccupied?

  Because it made me feel I was in possession of a skill no one valued.

  I needed the confirmation of others, then, did I? I placed no philosophical value on the ping-pongness of ping-pong for itself?

  Yes and no. Perhaps what had really gone wrong was that my opponent, Nils Hagtvet, was an oaf, and that my ascendancy over him — as a player, and I like to think as a moral being — reawoke section two of my old compound contradictory existential bashfulness, that’s to say my shame at existing so successfully. It was like being back on the kitchen table at home making mincemeat of one of my father’s associates, while Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde smoked in my hand and my cheeks burned with consciousness of my own effrontery.

  Nils Hagtvet’s speciality was a freeze serve. Taking up a position as far to one corner of the table as was possible without disappearing from it altogether, he would touch the playing surface with the ball, hitch up his shorts, exaggerate the flatness of his palm, freeze into a crouch, and then in a sudden spasm would toss the ball high enough for him to pass his bat under it twice before imparting what appeared to be the most terrifying spin to it on the third attempt. That he would occasionally miss the ball altogether was not surprising given the complexity of the manoeuvre. Fine, so long as the percentages favoured him. But what you would never have guessed until you faced one of Nils Hagtvet’s serves was that there was no spin on it whatsoever. No spin, no speed, no angle, nothing. How long did it take for him to crouch, hitch, freeze, and spasm? Forty-five seconds? A minute? Humiliating for him, then, when you disdainfully smashed it past him before he’d even completed his convulsive follow-through.

  In the first game he never won a single point on his service. And modesty forbids me telling how many I lost on mine. I couldn’t bear it. The contrast between us was too cruel. I kept reminding myself that he’d reached the final, that he’d beaten other players, that I had no reason therefore to be pitying him. But then I’d see him scampering after balls I’d hit at medium pace, falling over himself in a tangle of his own making, his arms in his way, his legs too long and queerly ineffectual in little white cotton schoolgirl’s socks that barely covered his ankles and kept vanishing inside his plimsolls, from which, after calling a let, he would periodically have to retrieve them. Never mind too cruel, it was too farcical. Didn’t it count against me, some
how, to be thrashing someone as inept as this? Wasn’t I inevitably implicated in the farce?

  As we approached the conclusion of the first game sadness took hold of him. He began to turn away from the ball as it came towards him, as though wanting to distance himself from his shots, or in the hope that help might come to him from some other quarter. We changed ends, not looking at each other. But I heard his heart beating and I could smell self-disgust on him. It dawned on me that without trying I could win the next game to love. Worse than that even: I would have to try if I was not to win the next game to love.

  Had I been all Walzer I surely would have moved in for the kill. But I wasn’t all Walzer. I was part Saffron, too. Part mollusc. Part whelk. Part milksop.

  I pretended to be bamboozled suddenly by his serves, raising my hand in acknowledgement of his canny play. I faked bemusement and fatigue. I stopped hitting and began to push. If nothing else that would prolong the match. Spare us both our blushes. And give the thirteen spectators something to get excited about.

  It doesn’t pay to tamper with your game. Before I knew it I had pushed a dozen balls into the net (balls I hadn’t meant to push into the net), Nils Hagtvet had sufficiently recovered his composure as to remember how to stay upright and to push back, the umpire was warning us for slow play, and I had lost the second game.

  A shame for Selwyn Marks that he hadn’t hung around after his own demise; he would have been in his element now. Told you so, told you so — ‘Walzer, you’re disqualified.’ Same umpire, too. Though there was more even-handedness about tonight’s warning. Wake up or you’ll both be out. But Hagtvet might have seen his salvation in that. At least that way he wouldn’t be going down in the archives as a loser. Title Vacant was what the records would have read, not Winner: Oliver Walzer; Runner-up: Nils Hagtvet.

  Except that having nicked the second game, Nils Hagtvet was now dreaming of making history himself. He took up extreme positions, miles back or miles wide, glared fixedly at me, hitched his shorts, and went into freeze posture — and that not just for his service but for mine as well. Ludicrous. All I had to do was serve short or into the opposite corner and he was a goner. Shaming. But he hung on. Actually thought he was in with a chance. Threw menacing glances at me, hurled himself from one side of the table to the other, charged and leapt until I too was having to scramble for every ball. Ludicrous. Shaming. Mortifying.

  He implicated me in his folly to the end. At 20–8 in my favour — so I was cruising anyway — he crashed into the table and put his knee out. When they presented me with the cup he was still lying twisted on the floor, howling.

  Years later he remained unshakable in his conviction that but for that smashed knee he would have walked all over me.

  I could have done without running into Gershom Finkel on my way back to the changing rooms.

  It was hot in the Sports Hall but he hadn’t removed his raincoat. He extended his hand. ‘You nearly blew that,’ he said, laughing.

  ‘Fuck off, Gershom,’ I thought. But what I said was, ‘Nice of you to come.’

  I hadn’t noticed him in the audience. That was how deeply Nils Hagtvet had embroiled me in unseemly contest.

  ‘We were passing,’ he said.

  ‘We?’

  ‘Dolly and Dora. We’re on the way to the Ritz, so we thought we’d pop in to see if you needed any encouragement. A good job we did.’

  ‘Are they here?’

  Was that why I’d nearly blown it, because my aunties were in the vicinity?

  ‘They’re in the car outside. They couldn’t bear to watch. Why don’t you come out and tell them you’ve won?’

  He was blowing, himself. Not exactly excited — he was too laconic ever to be excited — but staccato, spluttering, like a wet firework.

  ‘You tell them, Gershom,’ I said. ‘Say, “Oliver won”. I have to take a shower.’

  ‘Don’t you want to show them your trophy?’

  ‘I’ll show them later,’ I said.

  ‘Can I see, then?’

  I gave him my cup. He felt its weight, turned it upside down, laughed and handed it back to me.

  ‘We’re off dancing,’ he said.

  Only later did I realize how disturbed I’d been by the size of that ‘we’.

  No, no good had come of my win. It left me feeling too much like my old self. I was Champion of Manchester — never mind the Junior and never mind the Closed — but nothing had changed. I still hadn’t found my way out.

  It’s possible I was expecting too much too soon. Bit by bit hope crept up on me again. Next time there would be crowds. Next time I would play without being ashamed because I was good, and then being ashamed because I was bad. Show me a game to love in the future and I would seize it.

  My voice began to deepen, that helped. I still couldn’t croak like Sheeny Waxman, but I was on the way. Attacked by a hail of missiles from the prefabs while ambling down Sheepfoot Lane in a dream of glory, I stood my ground and hurled back whatever I could find. A stone struck. The first gentile blood I’d ever drawn. Maddened by the sight of it I threw still more ferociously and struck again. Two of them — I’d winged two of them! I heard a moan, and then the throwing stopped. Game to love. A week later I won a tournament in Barnsley and a month after that I was North of England Champion. Called up for Lancashire, I won both my singles’ rubbers against Cheshire and against Derbyshire. I won in the doubles too, but I didn’t count that: doubles entailed collaboration and I wasn’t by nature a collaborator. Where I was going, a man had to go alone.

  The pig episode confirmed my progress. It might not be going too far to say that the pig did even more than ping-pong to bring on that social audacity without which I would never have made it to the Kardomah.

  I was working the Bank Holiday fair at Bakewell — home of the Tart — with my father and Sheeny. The summer agricultural fairs were marked with stars in every marketman’s diary; you could be lying on your deathbed but you still didn’t miss an agricultural fair; and if it happened to be a Bank Holiday agricultural fair, you conjured up the already dead to help you work it. Bakewell was the most fabled Bank Holiday agricultural fair of the lot. At Bakewell you took more money in a single morning than you could count in a week.

  I loved the place. Half-timbered tea shops, the smell of warm pastry, a meandering stream, shepherds on the cobbled streets, animals in the pens. And crowds such as you’ve never seen. Sheeny loved it too. He rang his little dinner bell, clapped his hands, filled the skies with flying plunder, and pulled an edge that extended into the next county. It looked like Judgement Day on the banks of the Eternal River. ‘Over here and over there … !’ By noon there was hardly anything left in the van. That was all right. Things quietened down after lunch. You ran a better-toned pitch for an hour or so, shifting the classier and more expensive swag — the big shticks, as we called them, for size is everything with swag — and looked forward to being loaded and away by four. One of us could take a break at this time, too. I could sit by the stream and think about playing Ogimura for the geisha; Sheeny could walk around town and pull head jockey material; or my father could grab some shut-eye and a cheese sandwich in the van.

  It was during this more sedate afternoon pitch — Sheeny and I working it together while my father was out cold — that the pig escaped. There was no mystery about how he made his getaway: Bank Holiday godforbids messing with the gates of the pens and poking the animals with sticks. But why he chose our edge to charge there was no saying. My theory was that Sheeny’s gravelly patter attracted him. Who knows, to a pig it may have sounded like love talk. ‘I’ll tell you what, darling …’ The music of the heart. Whatever the reason, the pig burst through the crowd, women screamed, Sheeny dropped the bevelled mirror he was holding — ‘Who’s that in there?’ he’d just been asking a punter. ‘You? Thank God, I thought it was me!’ — and I found myself closer to any animal not a dog than I had been in my life. Strange, how much time you have for stray thoughts in moments of em
ergency. ‘Jesus Christ, look at the size of that pig!’ I heard Sheeny exclaim, but I was more struck by the hairs on its snout. Spinster hairs, I thought. Like those that grew on Dolly’s upper lip and chin, defying all the hours she put in with her tweezers, S for spinster hairs, only Gershom Finkel didn’t seem to mind.

  A sweet pinky smell, too, which also reminded me of my aunties. Calamine lotion — that was it. The calamine that used to be brought out whenever there was measles or chickenpox around, little wet dabs of calamine-drenched cotton wool which somehow always ended up in the sink or on the bathroom floor.

  So had this pig had the measles lately?

  He began to snuffle me. Sheeny called my father. ‘Joel, Joel, there’s a fucking pig out here eating your kid.’ But no noise on earth could wake my father once he was out, and Sheeny did nothing otherwise to help me. Nor did the punters. They were gone.

  What I did next affected Sheeny Waxman so deeply that for years afterwards he couldn’t introduce me to anyone without referring to it. ‘This is the ice-cream I told you about, the one who forehand-chopped the pig.’

  What else was I going to do? Punch it? I’d never punched anything. I did the only thing I knew how to do and played ping-pong on its snout. In Aishky’s language, I shmeissed it. In the calmer language of the handbooks, I imparted spin.

  Would the pig have gone mad eventually and savaged me, had his owner not turned up when he did? I’m not the one to ask. For a short while I’d confused him, that’s all I know. For half a minute or so he had no answer to my game.