The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  Louis had now become so circumspect he was almost inaudible. He spelt it out, so that no impressionable child within a foot of us would be able to make head or tail of what we were discussing. ‘G—a—m—b—l—i—n—g.’

  ‘Since when does being a g—a—m—b—l—e—r disqualify you for playing for your country?’

  ‘Ssh! Saichel, saichel! You’re not supposed to gamble on your own results, shmulkie.’

  It didn’t seem such a crime to me. If Gershom was that confident of himself …

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Louis said. He’d begun to look as wild-eyed as the Ancient Mariner. He even clutched me by the sleeve. ‘Gershom bet against himself’

  Ah!

  With his crossbow, he shot the albatross.

  ‘Gershom bet against himself?’

  ‘Chochem! Now he understands!’

  ‘You’re telling me that Gershom bet on himself to lose when he was playing for England!’

  ‘How many more times?’

  ‘And they found out?’

  ‘Someone squealed. One of the Swedes. That’s who we were playing — Sweden. 1946. He lost every match. Not by much, but by enough. You’d have thought the Swedes would have been grateful. But no. Swedes for you! They were good to us in the War, mind you. Anyway, one squealed and Gershom was finished. Never selected again. That’s the tragedy.’

  I fell quiet. Why didn’t I run home then and there and tell my aunties what I’d found out? That Gershom was a man who would sin against his own neshome. Who would poison his own soul. Who would betray the only gift he had. What grief I could have saved them!

  But consequences take a long time to pan out. Had Gershom Finkel not bet against himself in 1946, had I not kept silent about what I knew about him, had the aunty of mine he finally plumped for been able to have children of her own, who knows whether I would be living today in the circumstances I do.

  I live off Gershom Finkel’s winnings?

  Only in a manner of speaking.

  And only indirectly.

  And only partly.

  And not to any very high standard.

  Because he didn’t lay that big a bet against himself, the miserable shvontz. He wasn’t just a cheat, he was a cheap cheat.

  Aishky Mistofsky was back playing for the Akiva in five months. The progress he’d made was so extraordinary that the Manchester League struck a special medal for him, inaugurated a handicap tournament in his honour, and named him inspirational player of the year. Opposing teams clapped him when he went on to the table. Everybody wanted to be the first to lose to him. There seemed to be some superstition in it, as though losing to a new playing hand was in the same category of trespass as touching a humpback, and therefore bound to be lucky. But by week three of the following season he was out again.

  This time, though, his nerves weren’t to blame. He had simply got caught up in the Bedding Wars.

  One way or another, what with the blast shattering our windows, and Cheetham Hill Road being closed to traffic for three days, and the police knocking on our doors asking if we recognized a particular suede shoe which had been blown off in the explosion and presumably belonged to the incendiarist, the Bedding Wars affected just about all of us. But Aishky more than most.

  Taking the Copestakes to be the aggrieved party — aggrieved in the sense that it was their bedding shop that was blown up — I could claim some small originating role in their disaccommodation myself. It’s just possible that had we not beaten them to the punch for the bomb site between Boots and Woolworths on London Road in Liverpool they wouldn’t have opened up their bedding shop in Cheetham Hill in Manchester and ended up a bomb site themselves.

  How my father got to hear that there was a plum pitch going begging in the centre of Liverpool, right by Lime Street Station, a handkerchief of waste ground just big enough to back the van on to, unhampered for some reason by any Toby Mush or bye-laws, and yet enjoying all the advantages of a prime retailing position, I don’t recall and probably never knew. But the Copestakes, father and son, had got to hear about it as well. Every Saturday morning for six weeks we raced one another down Hilton Lane, over Rainsough Brow, past the Agecroft Collieries, across the Manchester, Bolton and Bury Canal, swinging left on to Bolton Road, sharp right just before Irlams O’ Th’ Height, and then out like the very devil on to the East Lancs Road, approaching Liverpool through Carr Mill and Knowsley, skirting the West Derby Cemetery (‘That’s where we’ll end up if you don’t slow down, Joel’ — Sheeny Waxman), the Sugar Brook Sewage Disposal Works (‘And that’s where you’ll end up if you don’t take a shtum powder’ — my father), and on to the London Road bomb site via Norris Green, Tue Brook and Everton. And every week we won. Sometimes by a whisker, sometimes by a full van’s length, but always by enough to thwart them, for once you’d got your front wheels on to the kerb there was no getting past you. Usually we were neck and neck until about three-quarters of the way along the East Lancs. My father liked to keep them just in sight in his rear-view mirror. Then, with seven or eight miles to go, he’d put his foot down. But on the morning of the seventh Saturday we didn’t see them at all. It was still pitch black. Week by week the race had been starting earlier, to the point where Sheeny was now going without sleep the night before and wondering whether it wouldn’t be easier all round if my father simply picked him up outside the Plaza in his Friday-night jiving and head jockey clobber.

  ‘Any sign of ’em yet?’ my father said, as we scorched through Agecroft.

  ‘Don’t ask me, Joel,’ Sheeny said. ‘This is still a Friday night for me. And on Friday nights I don’t have eyes for anything except goyishe k’nish.’

  My father leaned across me and punched Sheeny’s arm. ‘Shveigst du,’ he said. ‘The kinderlech!’

  The kinderlech was me — although strictly speaking you have to be more than one child to be kinderlech — sitting up between them on a blanket over the engine. When I was present there was to be no swearing or lewdness of any kind. What Sheeny and I talked about when my father wasn’t there was another matter. Similarly what they talked about when I wasn’t there. But when we were in each other’s company not an immodest word was to be spoken. It was biblical. A word was an event, and for us to have met over an impudicious event would have been tantamount to my uncovering his nakedness. Which is forbidden.

  ‘Like the kinderlech doesn’t know from anything!’ Sheeny laughed. He was especially hoarse this morning. ‘Tell your old man how you’ve never seen what’s between a shikse’s polkes, Oliver. Oink! oink!’

  I blushed, liking the imputation of wantonness and ashamed because I had done nothing to deserve it.

  ‘Shtum,’ my father said. ‘And tell me when you see the Copestakes.’

  But we didn’t see the Copestakes. Not charging out over Rainsough Brow, not anywhere along the East Lancs, not charging into Carr Mill. Not a hair of them. ‘Do you know what I think?’ my father said as we hit Norris Green. ‘I think they’ve finally had a sickener and packed it in.’

  ‘Alevei!’ Sheeny said in his sleep.

  ‘Yep. The grobbers have given up. Bleh, bleh, bleh bleh bleh!’

  Had he had an ounce of Saffron superstition in his bones he’d have known never to exult in a victory even after the event, let alone before it. But there’s no telling a Walzer. And what of course we saw, as we came rattling up the London Road with the brakes of our yellow Commer smelling like Saudi Arabia and the engine smoking like Gehenna, was the Copestakes’ Ford, already on the bomb site, in full and uncontested possession!

  Bleh, bleh, bleh bleh bleh!

  ‘How the hell,’ my father wanted someone to tell him, ‘have they managed that?’

  But just a moment … There was the Copestakes’ Ford right enough, but where were the Copestakes themselves? Were the boot on the other foot, and the boot had been on the other foot every Saturday prior to this, the Copestakes would have found us jumping about and clapping our hands to keep them warm, bleary ey
ed and hungry, but already busy putting up the stall, clanking bars, throwing planks, in other words incontrovertibly in evidence.

  So why weren’t they?

  My father got out of our van and went over to theirs. He walked around it a few times, keeping his distance as though he feared it could be boobytrapped, then chancing a closer inspection, peering into the cab, trying the doors. At last, after scratching his head, he felt the radiator. Cold! Ice cold!

  ‘The chazerim must have driven here last night,’ he said. He was outraged by this breach of etiquette, hopping mad, like a boxer who has been hit low.

  ‘So what do we do?’ I said. It was early in the morning. There was still time for us to drive to one of our old gaffs, shmeer the Toby and have a bacon and liver butty prepared for us by one of my father’s transport café floozies.

  ‘I’ll tell you what we do,’ he said. ‘We move the van.’

  ‘Our van?’

  ‘Their van.’

  ‘They’ve left the keys in?’

  ‘Course they haven’t left the keys in. We’ll have to bump it. Wake Sheeny.’

  Sheeny was still asleep, with his head on his chest. It was the only time he was ever still. I shook him gently. ‘We’re bumping the van,’ I said.

  ‘Bumping whose van?’

  ‘Bumping their van.’

  ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘Not in this whistle. Tell your old man he’s off his rocker. You can’t go round bumping people’s vans.’

  But my father was resolute. We hadn’t been beaten fair and square. The Copestakes had pulled a fast one. Which meant that we were within our rights, morally, to bump their van out of the way before they got back from wherever they were skulking. If Sheeny wouldn’t help, fine. We’d do it together. Father and son. Backs to the bumper, shoulders to the wheel.

  It’s amazing what you can move when you have right on your side. The Copestakes’ Ford wasn’t as big as our Commer but it had good brakes and was laden with blankets and pillows and eiderdowns and counterpanes and bolsters and palliasses and sheet-sets and pillowslips and valences in boxes and, from the weight of it, a good few mattresses and bedsteads and quilted headboards as well. Inch by inch, though, heave by heave, we bumped its nose and then half its chassis out into the street. We’d have succeeded completely had my father’s ‘And one, and two, and three!’ not woken the Copestakes, with whom their van also happened to be laden and who had been sleeping the deep sleep of the devious among their wares.

  What followed was a fracas of such unseemliness that in the end only the police could restore order. Quickly coming to an understanding of who was up to what, the Copestakes scrambled out through a side door, rubbed the sleep from their eyes and, calculating that they were no match for us physically, began placing bricks, of which there is never any shortage on a bomb site, under the tyres. No sooner did a brick go under one tyre than we removed it from another. And no sooner did we remove it than they replaced it. The quicker they moved, the quicker we did; and the quicker we moved, the quicker they did. ‘Front offside!’ my father shouted to me. ‘You take the front offside. Get that brick away. Offside, offside! That’s nearside, you tsedraiter!’ The chase around and around the van had got so hectic that it was difficult to remember whether you were kicking bricks out or stuffing them in. ‘Rear right!’ Copestake called to his kid. ‘There’s nothing under the rear right.’ ‘But I thought I’d just put one under the rear right.’ For a split second we had all the wheels free. ‘Geshwint!’ my father yelled. ‘Push!’ But we could never keep all four tyres free for long enough to make any further progress in our bumping.

  Even before we had become rivals for the bomb site we hadn’t much liked the Copestakes. My father had gone to the same primary school as Copestake Senior and remembered him as a sneak. And funnily enough I had gone to primary school with Copestake Junior and remembered him as a sneak. It’s possible that neither of them actually sneaked but both just looked as though they did. It was their complexion that gave you the impression of surreptitiousness. They had a dirty shine on them like cockroaches, and they moved furtively like cockroaches too, turning up and vanishing and turning up again you couldn’t tell from where, just as they’d appeared from inside the bedding this morning while we were rightfully bumping their van into the road. One other thing I remembered about Copestake Junior from primary school was that he sold tickets to see Reeny Cohen do pee-pees in the garages behind Huxley Avenue. I can’t say what his arrangements were with Reeny Cohen, but if she didn’t know he was profiting from her water then sneaky was definitely the word for him. Otherwise plain disgusting.

  It was this over-and-above dislike for the Copestakes that erupted in the early morning on London Road when, after what had at first been a silent chase around the van — silent as far as our talking to them or their talking to us was concerned — Copestake Senior suddenly took it into his head to start cursing. ‘Putz!’ he shouted at my father. ‘Kaker, yentzer, tochesleker.’ In other words: prick, shit-head, fucker, arse-licker.

  ‘Hob saichel,’ my father shouted after him, ‘mit der kinderlech.’

  ‘Hob saichel! You push my van into the fucking road and you tell me to hob saichel.’

  ‘No swearing. I don’t care what you do in front of your own family but I’ve told you, no swearing in front of my kid.’

  They were both breathing heavily, both panting, and if you had turned up on the scene innocent of what was afoot you would have been hard pressed to decide which of them was chasing the other.

  ‘You want me to worry about your kid, now? I’ll tell you what I think of your kid, Joel Walzer — Ich hob your kid in toches!’

  And that was when the police had to be called, otherwise my father would have torn him limb from limb. As I’ve said, we were biblical.

  Spoil it for one, spoil it for all. The police closed London Road to casual traders, and for a number of years not even a barrow boy was allowed to do business there.

  It wasn’t a serious blow to us. We could, as I’ve already said, return to one of our old Saturday gaffs. But it set the Copestakes back. It seemed to turn them off the markets too, because suddenly they materialized, cockroach-like, on Cheetham Hill Road as Copestake’s Cash ‘n’ Carry Bedding Emporium — Retail Service At Wholesale Prices. A move that was bound to infuriate Beenstock’s Cash ‘n’ Carry Bedding Emporium — Wholesale Prices With Retail Service, which was only half a block away on the other side of the road.

  Ike Beenstock was the brother of Sam Beenstock, otherwise known as Sam Sam the Bedding Man, for whom Sheeny had worked before coming to us. I mention that only because it always seemed to me possible, though I never made enquiries, that it was through Sheeny that Ike Beenstock made the acquaintance of Benny the Pole. But it’s also the case, I admit, that anyone who knew anyone who frequented the Kardomah was in a direct chain of hearsay that led ineluctably to Benny the Pole.

  How any sort of glamour or intrigue was able to attach itself to the specific fact of Benny’s being a Pole, given how many Poles there were among us, is a mystery to me to this day. My mother’s mother, as I have already explained, not only came from Poland but made a little Poland around her wherever she went, but we never thought that that lent her fascination or allure. Nor did we once consider referring to her as Granny the Pole. In Benny’s case, though, Polishness was all at once transformed into a sinister and shadowy quality, suggestive not of smoked sausages or peasants who stank of their own animals, but brotherhoods and contraband and seduction. Benny the Pole could fix things. Benny the Pole could find things. Benny the Pole could lose things. But above all, Benny the Pole could pull.

  Because not everyone dared venture into the Kardomah — and even those who had successfully negotiated Laps’ sometimes lacked the nerve to make the transition — Benny the Pole put on a free public pulling demonstration on the footpath outside the Kardomah on Market Street every Saturday lunch-time in good weather. Even in the week, provided it wasn’t windy, this was a
seething pitch. Need a new watch, cheap? A diamond ring? Tickets to see Manchester City? Tyres for your Jag? Radio for your Jag? The Jag itself? The footpath outside the Market Street Kardomah was the place to go. The talk was good too, if you were of the right age. Burial boards, heart disease, cures for arthritis, facials, tailors, football, horses, cars (especially the rights and wrongs of owning a Mercedes), poker schools, holidays in Rimini, and birds. The facials helped but in the end it was only the birds that kept you young. Tsatskes. Every boy must have his tsatske. Which was why Benny the Pole enjoyed such celebrity. He possessed the secret of eternal youth. And on Saturdays, from about twelve, you could watch him work.

  What did he have going for him? Not looks. He was a knobby rather than an aquiline Pole — that’s if he was a Pole at all — with scarred, over-sunbrowned skin and tuberous eyes which lacked even the saving Polish grace of expressing sadness. He didn’t have much in the way of physical presence either, being more on the tall side of short than the short side of tall; though it was hard to gauge the amount of meat there was on his bones because of the way he wore his coat, loose over his shoulders like a cloak, with the sleeves empty but menacingly mobile, giving him the impression of being a man with four arms. His toupee was among the worst I’d ever seen, both for fit and for colouring; yet because of the success with which it was associated every Kardomah frequenter over fifty wore one just like it. (Hence their reluctance to gather on the footpath on windy days.) Discussing him once with a woman who’d yielded to his spiel — by which I don’t mean to imply that there were any women in Manchester who hadn’t yielded to his spiel, only that they didn’t all discuss him — I learned that he had beautiful violin-like feet, small, curvilinear, harmonious, with an almost feminine instep. He was without doubt conscious of this natural advantage, for he was known to spend a small fortune on pedicures and was always sensationally shod. I cannot say that I vouched with my own eyes for the truth of the rumour that he never wore the same pair of shoes twice; I saw him on too few occasions for my observations to be worth anything on that score. But the three or four pairs of shoes I did see him wear I never forgot. Only on Benny the Pole had I ever seen gold heels. Only on Benny the Pole had I ever seen sneakers made from the cheek pouches of the Komodo dragon. So maybe his secret was in his feet, in the lightness with which he approached his victims.