The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  I felt a bit small still to conduct anything as big as a family rupture. ‘Wouldn’t Aishky be better?’ I asked.

  Twink patted me on the shoulder. ‘You’ll be all right. You don’t have to do anything. Just be there. I couldn’t ask Aishk. You know his nerves. He’d worry himself too much.’

  We went directly to his room where he asked me what I wanted to hear. We both knew it had to be Figaro — Cherubino off to the wars. He put on the Lisa della Casa version, and pulled out the Irmgard Seefried so I could make a comparison, then he went downstairs looking for his mother. She was famously emotional, Mrs Starr, a bruised-petal beauty in her time who had been betrayed by so many men you couldn’t count them and now imagined that the postman and the milkman and the paper boy were trying to rape and rob her. Sometimes she would sit sobbing on the swirly carpet with her skirts pulled up, showing you the tell-tale bruises on her thighs.

  ‘Why don’t you call the police?’ I once asked her.

  She snorted. ‘The police! You know what they’ll do …’

  Mr Starr took no notice of any of this. He occupied an upright wooden chair by the fireplace the whole time, whether there was a fire burning or not, dressed as though to receive company, his thin white hair fastidiously combed, his nails the same unimpeachable pink as his scalp, gold studs in his collar, but never moving and never addressing company when it came. He hadn’t left the house or conversed with anyone in it since his brother had embezzled and bankrupted him ten years before. ‘His own flesh and blood!’ Twink told me. ‘My uncle! You couldn’t tell them apart. They were like twins, I’m telling you. They started the business together. They put in exactly the same amount of money and took out exactly the same amount of money — and then that! His own brother! Can you imagine?’

  I couldn’t. I only had sisters.

  Everyone in Crumpsall and Prestwich and Higher Broughton had a relation who never left the house or lifted a finger as a consequence of some monumental act of treachery suffered by him at the hands of his own flesh and blood. It was a Bug and Dniester thing: all Jews have to have someone they can’t forgive, but Bug and Dniester Jews always have to have someone in the family they can’t forgive. Usually, though, we were voluble on the subject, took strangers through every detail of the original affection, the closeness, such closeness, and then, with precise reference to dates and hours, the how and the where, the when and the why, the perfidy … ! On my mother’s soul, may she rest in peace, I only wish him to burn in hell! Right down to the particular corner of hell we wished him in. And the exact degree of burn. Mr Starr was the only person I’d come across who wouldn’t speak about it. I took that to be a measure of how bad the betrayal had been.

  The Starr house itself was forever in extremis. An air of desperation clung to every household object. Nothing was confident it was where it should be. Everything was at breaking point. Pictures fell off the walls. Sofas spat their stuffing. Lampshades shattered of their own accord. The china shrieked in the display cabinet. Dresses and blouses and slacks which Mrs Starr took in to re-fashion — for someone had to bring in money — were thrown on every available chair with their seams still unstitched and the pins protruding dangerously, or lay in tangled heaps on the floor like the skins of spent wrestlers from whom the souls had departed. Only Twink’s room was in control of itself, every record in alphabetical order according to composer, then cross-referenced on filing cards according to performer; every record sleeve dead-straight on the shelf and dust-free, a card saying From The Collection Of Theo Starr glued to each one, though not so that it would interfere with any programme notes.

  I turned down the volume of Figaro, reckoning that Cherubino was a tasteless choice after all and would only contribute to the emotional scenes to come. After hearing absolutely nothing for about an hour, apart from the spontaneous groaning of boards and the occasional glass exploding in the kitchen, I began to fear heart attacks or a suicide pact. I eased open the door, went out on to the landing, and started to creep down the stairs. I had to be careful: the stair carpet had worked loose from the rods — that’s if there had ever been any rods — and if you lost your footing even slightly it would balloon up from the steps and become a forty-five degree slide. This, I suspected, was how Mrs Starr got the bruises on her thighs.

  I was only half-way down when I saw Twink — Theo — standing in the centre of the living room holding his mother. I couldn’t tell if she was crying, but she was very still in his arms, dressed in nothing but a black slip, her hands clasped about his neck like a lover’s, her feet not quite touching the floor. It was almost as if they were smooching.

  Mr Starr was erect by the fire, ready to receive guests, squeaky clean, motionless, immovable.

  Twink noticed me on the stairs and made a signal with his eyes. ‘Leave us,’ his look said. ‘Everything will be fine. Thanks, Oliver. Leave us now.’

  And that was the last I saw of him for forty years.

  Whether Aishky fell into bad company as a result of Twink’s call-up I was never able to decide. There’s the further question of whether he knowingly fell into bad company at all; and even the police weren’t able to decide that.

  He took Twink’s going hard, there’s no doubt of that. He pretended it was just a team thing — ‘Our mazel, we get to the Second Division for the first time in our history, and now one of our best players decides he wants to become a soldier and defend the country!’; and the truth of it was that without Twink we were indeed seriously weakened and had to resort to fielding both Marks brothers which was never a good idea because they screamed at each other and sometimes resorted to fisticuffs in the middle of a match — but you could see that Aishky was missing Twink’s company as well, the teasing, the chipping, the falling-out over competition balls and wet cloths. He was hurt that Twink had gone without telling him, even though Twink left him a note explaining that he hadn’t wanted to upset his nerves.

  ‘You see anything of Twink last weekend?’ he would sometimes ask me. ‘I heard he was home on leave for a few days.’

  I hadn’t. To my knowledge no one had, except presumably his mother, that’s if he’d been in Manchester on leave at all.

  No one on the team heard from him or of him. For all we knew he could have been sent to Cyprus or Kenya or some other hot spot and been taken prisoner, or court-martialled, or shot. But it didn’t feel like that. What it felt like was that he’d closed a chapter. Made a decision that now he was gone he was gone. Why upset everybody’s nerves all over again by re-appearing? Especially with an army haircut. We took partings differently in those days. They were more a matter of course. One day you were there, and then the Cossacks or the SS came through, and that was that.

  Not Aishky, though. He took nothing as a matter of course. His game began to deteriorate. His arm stiffened up. He could anticipate the ball all right but it was as if he couldn’t bring himself to hit it. He would just stand there, like a man mesmerized, and watch it go past him. ‘Hit it, Aishk!’ we’d shout out. ‘Your ball, shmeiss the gederrim out of it!’ But he wouldn’t. Couldn’t. ‘My arm just won’t move,’ he said. ‘I’m playing shots in my head but my head isn’t talking to my arm.’

  It turned out he was lying. ‘I’m not even playing shots in my head,’ he confided to me. ‘This is the emmes — I can’t even imagine how to hit the ball any more.’

  We tried one of us standing behind him during practice sessions, moving him about as though he were a marionette. Bit by bit we were able to thaw the stiffness out of him, bringing a smile to his face as we bent him forward, swivelled him on his hips, and steered his strong freckled Esau arm through its old satisfying arc. Plock. ‘There you are, Aishk, you hit it!’

  After about an hour of this he would go loose like a scarecrow, as passive as a baby, happy to abandon his impaired will to ours. The moment we left him to his own devices, however, he seized up again, staring at the ball as though it were an object he’d never seen before and comprehending no possibl
e relation between it and the pimply paddle that lay limp in his hand.

  ‘It’s my neshome,’ he said to me, at the end of a match from which he’d had to retire after watching five serves go past him without his moving a muscle. ‘It’s my soul. My soul is saying no to the ball.’

  ‘Maybe you should go to see a hypnotist,’ I suggested.

  ‘Or a rabbi,’ Selwyn Marks said.

  Aishky laughed. ‘Maybe I should just see a bird with big bristles.’

  He kept trying, though. He kept turning up on match nights, changing into plimsolls and re-adjusting his braces, on the assumption that everything was going to be all right. So when it got to nine o’clock and he still hadn’t shown up for a home tie against Prestwich Maccabi — a grudge match if ever there was one — we began to fear for him. I didn’t want to ring his home. When you rang home you got mothers and when you got mothers you got trouble, especially if you began by asking, ‘You wouldn’t by any chance happen to know where … ?’ And I didn’t want to do what the mother would then have done, which was ring the police, the fire brigade, the burial board and every hospital in Manchester. In the end it was a hospital that rung us. Not knowing that you waited for a point to be concluded before you barged into the ping-pong room, Mrs Showman from the front office fell into Louis Marks who was defending twenty feet back from the table, skidded on the highly polished wooden floor, and almost broke her own neck in her urgency to tell us that Aishky was in the Northern Hospital undergoing emergency surgery on his playing hand.

  The funny thing was that Aishky had decided not to play against Maccabi even before he had his accident, and it was that decision which caused the accident, not the other way round. He had gone into a phone box on the way home from work to ring me to say he wouldn’t be playing. He could tell already that he was not going to be able to raise his bat to the ball that night and he didn’t want the Maccabi boys laughing at him. Anderers, it didn’t matter. Unserers, well that was different. Verstehes? The only trouble was, the phone didn’t work. He struggled with it for a few minutes, looking for different combinations of change and trying to get the operator. All to no avail. The machine swallowed his change and the operator hung up on him. Then his nerves went. He couldn’t find the door out. He searched all four sides of the phone box, even the one with the phone attached to it, for a handle, for something to pull, he tried yanking at the window frames, but everything was stuck fast. He thought it might be a good idea to knock on the glass to get attention, but few people were passing and those that were thought he was a meshuggener — who else stood inside a phone box tapping on the windows? Phone boxes you tapped on from the outside. He decided to calm himself by sitting on the floor for a while but then grew afraid that he would fall asleep down there and freeze to death. He had one more go at finding the door, felt his heart make an attempt to get out through his throat, and smashed his hand through a pane of glass. Fortunately, someone saw that the meshuggener with his hand hanging out of the phone box was bleeding profusely, and called an ambulance. When they lifted him from the box, Aishky noted with interest that the door opened outwards.

  A couple of days after he was released from hospital, I went to see him in his parents’ council flat off Smedley Lane. He was the only one of unserer I knew who lived in a council flat. That he was ashamed of where he lived I guessed because he had never once invited either Twink or me back, and he was most particular, on this occasion, that I should come in the late afternoon when it was dark. Not after six, because then his mother and father would be home, and he clearly didn’t want me to see them either. Say five.

  When I got there all the lights were out. But behind the fresh medicinal smells I could pick out damp wallpaper and unaired linen.

  Emotions, too, leave an odour. Love you can sometimes smell; hate you always can. What I could smell in the Mistofskys’ council flat was that Aishky was morbidly devoted to his parents.

  He too had a record collection. But they were all 78s and all Mario Lanza. He got me to put ‘M’Appari’ on the turntable and we sang along with it together. I knew his musical taste wasn’t as good as Twink’s, and there was no comparison between them when it came to operatic knowledge, but Aishky liked to sing duets with his records, and Twink never did that. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I could have held on to my composure had Twink departed from his customary silent vigil before his record player and suddenly invited me to join him in a singalong. Whereas with Aishky there was somehow never any embarrassment.

  All things considered he was remarkably cheerful. He held his bandaged paw out. ‘They reckon I won’t be able to do much with this,’ he said. ‘No table tennis, that’s for sure.’

  I couldn’t bear it. First Twink, now Aishky. ‘Maybe they’re wrong,’ I said. My voice was all chocolatey with upset. I felt false too, a kid consoling a man. But I soldiered on. ‘Doctors are often wrong,’ I said. ‘And anyway they don’t know your determination.’

  He was in far better spirits than I was. He beckoned me to sit on his bed. He wasn’t wearing his spectacles, which made him unrecognizable up close, but I could tell that he was amused by something. ‘It’s a metsia,’ he whispered, looking upwards. ‘A gift from Elohim. My hand was finished. You saw that. It was oisgeriben. So now I get a chance to learn with the other one — for gornisht — on the National Health.’

  And that was what he did. He taught himself to play all over again.

  In the meantime, without Twink and Aishky our ping-pong team was looking pretty oisgeriben itself. When you’re all playing well you can get away with going into a few matches a man short. But Selwyn and Louis Marks were abusing each other out of any form, Sheeny Waxman was turning up exhausted (oisgemartet, since we’re on ois words) as a consequence of his own late nights and the daily detours to transport cafés he was having to make as my father’s sidekick, and although I was impregnable, I couldn’t win for everybody. So when Gershom Finkel astonished us all by offering to play while Aishky changed hands we were in no position to refuse.

  ‘Only one thing,’ he said. ‘I play at number one.’

  Number one was my spot this season. I couldn’t conceal my unhappiness. ‘Just humour him,’ Aishky said. ‘The man used to play for England. What’s it to you? Anyway, don’t I hear he’s going to be your uncle soon?’

  As yet that was only a moderately offensive thing to say. Gershom had not so far double-dealt my aunties. Not openly. The only charges one could level against him at this stage were all to do with his demeanour — his general slothfulness, his habit of turning up at our house expecting to be fed, yawning when other people were talking, cheating at canasta and jeering at the idea of me as a table tennis player. Whenever he came round he would pick up one of the cups I’d just won, turn it upside down as though to discover the name of the shop from which I’d bought it, and give a little laugh.

  So it didn’t please me, although from the point of view of our team’s salvation it should have, that his game was several classes above any I’d yet seen with my own eyes. He didn’t jump around like the rest of us, he didn’t bother to exaggerate a feint or overdo his follow-through, he didn’t spend the first five minutes of a game feeling out his opponent, he simply shot out a hand and the point was over. He played as he spoke — rapid sub-machine-gun fire, then the sudden cut-out. Ugly to watch, as it was ugly to listen to, but effective. He was so quick you couldn’t always be certain what stroke he’d played. If that was a forehand drive how had he been able to hit it so flat? If that was a flick on the backhand — and the ball reared as though he’d flicked it — how come we hadn’t seen him turn his wrist over?

  Racket-head speed, if you want an answer. Never mind the before and after — at the moment of impact he was able to generate the most extraordinary speed, the pisher he was.

  I understood now why he never took his raincoat off. He didn’t need to take his raincoat off. But Aishky, who was still Club Secretary and non-playing captain, insisted he at least stri
p down to his jacket, by way of showing politeness to the opposing team.

  Louis Marks came alive now that Gershom was playing for us. He felt that something of the greatness of the past had returned.

  ‘You can sniff Barna and Szabados on him,’ he said. ‘Who else plays like that today? You know he was nearly World Champion?’

  ‘Yeah I know, Louis,’ I said.

  ‘You know it was only Schiff –’

  ‘Yeah I know, Louis,’ I said.

  Louis shook his head and rubbed his face. ‘It was a terrible thing,’ he said. ‘What a tragedy.’

  ‘I don’t see how it’s a tragedy,’ I said. ‘Everybody gets beaten. If he’d had any bottle he’d have fought back. A lot of people who were beaten by Schiff went on to become World or European champions.’

  ‘Who’s talking about being beaten by Schiff? He’d have recovered from that. He did recover from that. He played for England, didn’t he? That’s the tragedy.’

  ‘What’s the tragedy?’

  ‘That they stopped him.’

  ‘What do you mean they stopped him? If he was good enough, why would they have stopped him? They don’t stop you playing for your country just because you’re human drek.’

  Louis dismissed my rudeness with a click of his tongue, looked around the room, lowered his voice and made a money-counting gesture with his fingers. ‘Gelt,’ he whispered.

  ‘What are you saying, Louis? That Gershom wasn’t rich enough to play for England?’

  ‘Neh! Gelt, gelt!’

  ‘He was too Jewish? Don’t give me that. You’re beginning to sound like your kid.’

  ‘Who said anything about Jewish? Gelt, gelt. You know Gershom’s weakness.’

  I didn’t. That’s to say I knew so many of his weaknesses I wasn’t able to single out any one of them for special consideration.