The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  This was the turning point of my relations with Sheeny Waxman. When it was all over he lit a cigarette, sat on the side of the van examining his cuffs, and muttered repeatedly, as though the danger were still present, ‘Oy a broch! Oy a broch!’ He was worried about his collar, too, which had suddenly turned itchy on him; and his tie, which he continued to brush all the way back to Manchester — because you don’t go where Sheeny went with pig bristles sticking to your nishmas kol chai.

  ‘I wish I’d seen it!’ my father kept repeating. ‘I wish I’d been awake to see it! But don’t say anything about it to your mother.’

  Later, though, whenever our eyes met, over tea and toast in one of the market cafés, or in the middle of a match at the Akiva, or late on a Saturday night at Laps’, Sheeny would jerk his head back, tick with merriment and say, ‘Oink! oink!’ And I would smile too, and say ‘Oink! oink!’ back.

  Thanks to the pig I could already smell Kardomah coffee.

  Also thanks to the pig I began to enjoy the gaffs more. Sheeny’s doing. He was prepared to welcome me, now, into that secret confederacy of grafters from which my father had so far protected me. Not the lewd stuff. The old man still stood guard over that. I remember Sheeny introducing a new routine into his spiel one morning in Retford, holding aloft a violently trembling middle finger and begging a buxom woman at the front of the edge to help him stop it shaking. ‘What do you want me to do, duckie?’ the woman laughed. ‘Sit on it,’ Sheeny said. It was the nearest my father ever came to sacking him. ‘Now, I’ve told you before, Sheeny,’ he warned from the floor, one eye turned to me, ‘that’s out!’ But the close, confidential script which marketmen deploy to communicate under the very noses of the punters, the quick contemptuous code by which you are able to identify nudzhes and shnorrers and nutters, warn against tealeafs, shtum up troublemakers, protect yourself against their cunning while keeping them in complete ignorance of yours — that whole iffy dug-in camaraderie of the gaff which I’d previously been deemed too much of a teapot lid to be trusted with was now thrown open to me.

  ‘Kuk, kuk, the ganov,’ Sheeny would say with sotto voce urgency, even as he was rising on the balls of his feet, refusing to let one bedspread go if he couldn’t move a gross, and I knew to shadow the fat man in the big raincoat to the back of the stall, so that he couldn’t fill his pockets with discoloured truffles.

  ‘Na, geshwint, hob saichel, shneid,’ I’d mutter to my father between my teeth, so that he’d know to hold the balsa-wood sewing box together and get it in the punter’s shopping basket, quick, before it fell apart.

  Suddenly I was fly. And I loved it.

  Can you be bashful and fly? Can you be a kuni-lemele and a bit of a wide boy?

  I managed.

  And I was beginning to say startlingly brilliant things at school. Misogyny, that was my bag. I wrote essays in which I affected to hate women, detailing their imperfections through the ages. Instead of clipping me round the ear and telling me to button my lip until I had steered my fragile bark safely through puberty, my male grammar school teachers, few of whom had come out the other end of puberty themselves, gave me A plus/minuses and started mentioning Cambridge.

  Did they play ping-pong at Cambridge? My grandiosity grew a twin. I would be better than anybody at two things. Did Ogimura have a degree? Did Wittgenstein have a drop shot?

  Knowing my own nature, I foresaw advantages to myself in the double track approach to success. Should I lose at ping-pong I would be a philosopher. Should I be routed in argument I would be Victor Barna. When you suffer from grandiosity you cannot have too many fall-back positions.

  With my distant, not-so distant and immediate prospects bounded by Cambridge, the Kardomah and wherever my bat took me, I finally ventured out of my shell. Not far. All very well multiplying strings to my bow, but there was still the small matter of the in-between to keep me timid. My aunties may have been suffering less mutilation at my hands than they once had, thanks to how busy winning tournaments and writing essays on the woman question I now was, but I continued to brood over terrible in-between related secrets. I hadn’t done anything with it. I hadn’t put it anywhere. Soon it would be clapped out, yet I still hadn’t given it to anybody outside the family to hold. Those are not negatives you want people to find out about when you’re nudging towards the age of consent. (Consent? In order for you to consent mustn’t somebody first put in a request?) So I stayed within range of my husk, just in case.

  But at least I was out. My body temperature was beginning to drop. I was acquiring a measure of control over my skidding mouth. And people no longer said, ‘Cheer up, it may never happen,’ the minute they clapped eyes on me.

  Life was looking rosy.

  And then, out of the blue and in quick succession:

  Twink Starr was called up to do national service.

  Aishky Mistofsky severed the middle two fingers of his playing hand trying to get out of a phone box and then blew off the middle two fingers of his other hand in an explosion.

  Gershom Finkel proposed to my aunty, which was a catastrophe however you looked at it, but which would not have been quite the catastrophe it turned out to be had the aunty he proposed to been the aunty he was dating.

  And — a not altogether unconnected event, I fear — my adored fatalistic little Polish grandmother lost two thirds of her body weight in six weeks and gave herself up, without a murmur of protest, into the arms of the Almighty.

  BOOK II

  ONE

  Many of the world’s best hitters are extremely sensitive …

  Twenty–One Up, Richard Bergmann

  I WAS WITH Twink in Burnley, attending the Ribble District Table Tennis Academy, when he dropped his bombshell. We’d been going to Burnley together, for long weekends of coaching and extensive work-outs, over the course of a year or more, whenever I could escape from the markets and whenever Twink could slip away from his button machine. We caught the bus in Bury and talked tenors all the way to Burnley and all the way back. I say all the way, not because the distance was great but because the journey took a long time in those days, what with stray sheep wandering off the moors and the Ribble flooding and the bus driver running out of diesel or having to stop in the centre of Ramsbottom or Rawtenstall to wait for residents to remove their washing from the main street. We wouldn’t have wanted to live a pint of diesel’s drive north of Bury ourselves - untamed Shaygetsshire, every inch of it — but we didn’t mind the delay: the longer the bus ride took the more opera we could get through. But the moment we arrived at the academy we talked and breathed only ping-pong.

  We shared a room and sometimes even a bed, each clinging to the furthest extremity of the mattress (I had to hold on to a mattress button with two fingers one night, so as not to fall off), going through what we’d learnt about our respective games that day. ‘You’re a more instinctive table tennis spieler perse than me,’ Twink would say, ‘but I’m a more natural all-round sportsman. That gives me the advantage of seeing the ball quicker than you, though you hit it harder.’ He reckoned he placed the ball more accurately than I did too, though I didn’t believe that was borne out by the first of the day’s exercises when we had to try to knock over matchboxes. But I deferred to him because of the difference in our ages.

  I was still enjoying the friendship of Twink and Aishky and wished Aishky would sometimes come to Burnley with us. But he laughed at the idea. ‘Yeah, that’s all I need after a hard week’s graft, going marathon running with you two. Why can’t we just go to Blackpool to see the illuminations and find some pretty girls to sing Mario Lanza songs to, like normal people?’

  Twink and I trained, you see, when we were in Burnley. We changed into our tracksuits after breakfast at the hotel, did twenty-five press-ups in our room, then sprinted to the academy. Before we were allowed on to the tables we had to skip like boxers for fifteen minutes and then do twenty-five more press-ups followed by a further ten minutes of stretching. We drank Lucozade when we were t
hirsty, chewed glucose tablets when we felt faint, and spent the morning serving into thimbles. After a lunch of light salad and Vimto we returned to the tables and did one hundred forehand smashes followed by one hundred backhand smashes followed by one hundred half-volleys followed by one hundred backhand chops followed by one hundred forehand chops followed by one hundred backhand smashes … We filled out cards, noting how many times we’d hit into the net or off the table, then we sat round over tea working out our percentages.

  Usually about twenty people turned up for a coaching weekend, though Twink and I were inclined to keep ourselves to ourselves. Most of the others were ferrety Calder or Ribble boys, from Todmorden and Clitheroe and the like, and spoke a different table tennis language. They were greedier in their play, somehow, more pinched and avid, colourless, without flourish or bravura. They’d stamp on the floorboards querulously, I remember; they’d tuck their shorts into themselves like gym knickers and stand with their legs apart, wagging their rumps like mongrels on heat, rubbery and relentless, as dispiriting as rats. I suppose that what I’m trying to say is that they played working-class ping-pong, and brought the cramped back-to-back atmosphere of their living conditions, a moorland narrowness and undernourishment of soul, to the table. Make no mistake, they were not easy to beat. One of them, the hairless chopper Jack Langho from Haslingden, was my chief rival for the number one Lancashire position and probably beat me more often than I beat him. But playing them was dismal, impersonal, ungenerous — they never lit up as Aishky lit up, they never said ‘Oy a broch!’ when you hit a screamer and laughed that lovely fatalistic laugh which conceded all the power and skill to your opponent, claiming for yourself only the gift to be amused — and when you lost to them you felt you’d been the victim of some petty and pointless felony, as though you’d had your pockets picked by someone you were going to give it all away to anyway.

  Am I describing the difference between the amateur and the professional? Was what I liked about Aishky’s oy a broch — with its unspoken ‘What chance do I have against the shaygets when he hits like that?’ — the primacy it claimed in the end for ironic appreciation? When all’s said and done you are at liberty to marvel over the shaygets’s power of shot because ultimately you value something else more — the right to be amused, the intelligence to register the vanity of all skill and striving at the last. Yes, we were irredeemably amateur, we Akiva boys. Just passing through.

  On the way to where?

  Ah — to the Almighty, like my grandmother, I guess.

  We ended up playing for Lancashire together, Langho and I, alternating the number one spot, forming a formidable doubles partnership which lasted for three seasons, but I am not able to recall a single word he said to me in that time. Maybe he would be similarly blank in his recollections of me. Maybe he doesn’t even remember I existed. I hope he doesn’t. That will clinch my argument. I was God-bound — not through any choice of my own, but as a matter of cultural necessity; we were all God-bound, we Akiva boys, preparing our souls, via ping-pong, for their final resting place — whereas he just wanted to win. Now I think twice about it, it’s not true that I recall nothing he said. I recall him telling me about the state of his elbow, the progress of his wrist strain, the worries he entertained about a calf muscle he’d pulled, the trouble he was having adjusting his grip to the new strapping he’d put around the handle of his bat. ‘Played, Jack,’ I’d say to him after we’d notched up another easy win in another noiseless hall in Rhyl or Wolverhampton, and he’d take me through the various ailments which had prevented his playing even better. Played, Ollie? Not something it ever occurred to him to say. Who was Ollie? Another person? What’s another person? He was lost in the pure egoism of the sportsman. Ask him how he was and he told you — whoever you were.

  When I asked Twink how he was on our last weekend in Burnley together he immediately changed the subject. There’s the difference. We’d had an unusually eventful day. Quite out of nowhere a girl had turned up at the academy, a beautiful all-moving-parts girl in close-fitting brief blue shorts. Lorna Peachley. There were no beautiful girls in table tennis. Strictly speaking there were no girls in table tennis full stop. That was why Aishky favoured us knocking off and going to Blackpool for the weekend, where girls grew like weeds by the roadside. But Lorna Peachley was no Blackpool bog-moss. Lorna Peachley had eyes like Greek olives, a prancing pony-tail of blue-black hair tied with a lovesick purple ribbon, strong even teeth and thighs that fizzed like Lucozade. Those were the incidentals. Where she scored over every other girl either of us had ever seen was in the movement department: somehow or other she was able to set each of her parts (and she had many more parts than other girls, too) in discrete and sometimes incommensurable motion. You didn’t know where to look, that’s what I remember about her. You couldn’t decide where to send your eyes first. If you weren’t careful, you’d go dizzy.

  ‘Classy, too,’ Twink observed. ‘Did you hear her elocution? She says “Deuce” — D … D … D — not “Juice” the way we do. She’s got soft Ds.’

  We laughed at that. Soft Ds. That wasn’t all she had that was soft, eh Twink, eh Oliver?

  Twink had persuaded her to knock up with us. Which wasn’t difficult to do given that the Ribble pickpockets weren’t offering. We were on an exercise which involved serving, running round the table to retrieve your own serve, and then on to the next person who had to return your return and then run around to return his own, and so on. Three of us running round the table increased the fun without taking away anything from the rigour.

  She could play, too. She’d represented Hampshire girls the season before but was in the process of moving house with her parents to Timperley, hence this getting-to-know-you weekend. Yes, she was a player all right, with that all-round game of exaggerated loops and non-stop jigging favoured by southerners. ‘She’s got one glaring weakness, though,’ Twink muttered to me over the Vimto break, ‘she’s vulnerable against the drop shot.’ Then his face splintered into shards of laughter. ‘Gevalt!’

  So we peppered her with drop shots, driving her from the table with heavy topspin forehands, and then getting her to come charging in with all her parts in motion. I suspect she knew what we were up to. Because in the end she was practising her own drop shots on us. But she was a good sport. She never stopped bouncing on the balls of her feet. Nor did she try to punish us by keeping herself still or just moving in one direction.

  Lorna Peachley was the subject to which Twink reverted when we lay at the furthest ends of the mattress that night and I asked him, noticing a change in his mood, if everything was all right. ‘Lucky you,’ he said. ‘She’s going to have to play in the Manchester league if she wants to get some decent opposition. You’ll get to see a lot of her.’

  ‘So will you,’ I said.

  He fell silent. Our room gave out on to a busy thoroughfare. A feeble street-lamp sent a yellow poltergeist glare through the torn net curtains. The streets were noisy. Burnley had become the unofficial European capital of rock-and-roll after mill lads in crêpe-soled shoes and kiss-curls had ripped the local cinema apart on the first showing of Rock Around the Clock. The town was under a certain obligation now to stay rowdy. Teddy Boys hung around on corners strumming invisible guitars and making electric humming noises with their mouths. The old shrank from them. Where was Lorna Peachley staying, I wondered.

  ‘Not me,’ Twink said at last, ‘I won’t be here.’

  I felt frightened. Not of the rockers but of change. ‘Why, where will you be?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been called up.’

  ‘You’re moodying me.’

  ‘It’s the emmes. I’ve been called up. I’ve got to go to Dorset.’

  ‘Dorset? Why Dorset? Is there a war on in Dorset?’

  ‘I don’t think I’ll be going to war. But then you never know.’

  ‘Why you?’

  Lying on his back, Twink sighed, rattling his lungs. ‘My turn,’ he said. ‘I thought they woul
dn’t take me with my asthma. But they examined me and said they couldn’t find any signs of it. Not real asthma.’

  ‘What’s unreal asthma? Surely you’ve either got it or you haven’t. What are they saying — that you’ve got hysterical asthma?’

  He wasn’t saying what they were saying.

  All at once I felt rage against the system. What about those useless hooligans on the streets of Burnley? They’d make good soldiers. They were born to be soldiers. What else were they doing out there except killing time until they were ordered over the top? And what about Langho? I could see him with a bayonet, standing with his legs apart, stamping the floor, waggling his little proletarian arse, shouting ‘Who goes there?’ and then telling them how he was. Whereas Twink, who loved opera and ping-pong … Where was the justice in putting him in uniform?

  The following evening, on the bus home, he asked me back to his house. I’d been there many times, marvelling at his record collection and sitting in the dark with him in his room, comparing Gigli with Björling and di Stefano. ‘Name an opera,’ he’d challenge me. ‘Name an aria.’ Then he’d show me that he had ten different versions of it. Ten on LPs and ten on 78s. We didn’t only do tenors. I remember one or two wonderful Schwarzkopf and Tebaldi nights. And some of the low-down he gave me on Callas went straight into my school essays on women’s instability through the ages. But it was the tenors that made our hair stand and our flesh shiver and got us gulping in the darkness.

  I could tell, though, that tonight was not going to be just another tenor night. There was an atmosphere of special occasion about tonight. ‘I want to spend as little time as possible alone with my mother,’ he told me. ‘She’s going to be a bit broyges with me, and a bit upset.’

  No wonder. It turned out that Twink was off to Dorset in the morning. He’d known for months and had said nothing to any of us. His mother was aware he was going, but not when. Tonight, with me acting as emotional lightning conductor, he would have to break it to her.