The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  He was the first man in Manchester to jingle. Before Benny the Pole no man resident in the north of England would ever have thought of wearing a chain around his wrist let alone around his neck. Unlike most fashions, which start among the young and slowly catch on with the more conservative generations, the wearing of gold chains in Manchester took off first among the old. Our grandfathers dared before we did. They gathered outside the Kardomah with too much face on show somehow — barefaced, that’s the only word for them, as barefaced as camels — and like camels ready to be mounted, they snorted and showed their brown teeth and jingled. Jingle, jingle, croak: I can still hear the sound of them and see the dust rise as one by one they drew themselves up to their full height — full for them — held on to their toupees, stepped out into the path of a young woman and offered her a shtup. Still shtupping, or at least still offering, at seventy. And for all of that we had to thank Benny the Pole.

  The offer of the shtup — the offer of it, not the request for it - was the distinguishing feature of Benny the Pole’s technique. I’m not at all sure that there was anything else. Of course there were bound to have been some crushing refusals in the early days. But by the time Benny the Pole was an accomplished fact, any young woman chancing her arm alone in Market Street would have known who it was that was accosting her, and must have felt a tremendous weight fall from her shoulders. For imagine the insult to your person in walking past the Kardomah at a lunch-time on a Saturday and not being offered a shtup by Benny the Pole.

  That there would have been an admixture of fear in many women’s capitulations I didn’t doubt. Benny the Pole could easily have been concealing a sawn-off shotgun in one of those empty sleeves. And that it was a willing fear, an impious curiosity as to where else those dragon shoes trod, a self-demeaning half-readiness to trollop it for a season in whichever underworld the Pole was offering them privileged access to, I also didn’t doubt. I had a low regard for women based on their low regard for me. Not my aunties, of course, but then my aunties weren’t really women. Yes, my sex was responsible for Benny the Pole in the sense that he was made of the same puppy-dog tails as the rest of us. But the all-things-nice sex was still more responsible in the sense that they yielded to him. They could have said no to the shtup. There were other men offering. There were other men too shy to offer. But the women craved the compliment of the insult. In this way what Benny the Pole taught me influenced my misogynistic essays and so helped clear the obstacles between me and Cambridge. And yet — such are the ups and downs of men’s fortunes — when I started university Benny the Pole still wasn’t through his term at Strangeways.

  Even though he was given a few years of his own in Strangeways to think about it, Ike Beenstock never recovered from the surprise of learning that Benny the Pole had undertaken the actual arson himself. He talked to me about it once, during one of my university vacations, when I was hungry for Bug and Dniester conversation, and had turned up at his house to collect his daughter Sandra on a date. ‘I always imagined he’d be farming it out,’ he told me. ‘Don’t get me wrong; to this day I consider it a compliment to me and my family that he looked after us personally. But who’d have expected a gantse macher like him, with his connnections and his dress sense, to go kriching around on his hands and knees with a box of matches?’

  Maybe he’d meant to farm it out. Maybe he’d had the very man for the job in mind on the day Sam Beenstock, acting on behalf of his brother, brushed past him on the footpath outside the Kardomah and slipped into his coat pocket the sealed envelope containing the bundle of used flims, the address of Copestake’s Bedding Emporium, and the instruction, written in letters cut out of the Jewish Telegraph:

  I don’t care whether you bomb it or burn it or what you do, just get rid of it

  Maybe the very man for the job had gone missing at the eleventh hour, or maybe Benny the Pole just wanted to do something for himself that didn’t end in a shtup. Whatever the circumstances, alone and without an accomplice Benny the Pole climbed over Copestake’s back wall, made free with a can of paraffin, lit the torch and famously lost the shoe by which he was ultimately and irrefutably identified. Who else in Manchester wore two-toned alligator suede slip-ons with built-up mother-of-pearl inlaid heels?

  Alone and without an accomplice ... So to whom did the two fingers, which were also found at the scene of the crime, belong?

  That they weren’t Benny the Pole’s the police were quickly able to ascertain, by virtue of the fact that he still had five on each hand. Not that they’d ever seriously believed they’d come off the same person who’d lost the shoe anyway, since the shoe was found at the rear of the store and the fingers were found at the front and it was unlikely that anyone would have been nutty enough to run through the building once it was alight, either without his fingers or his shoe.

  There was only one person the fingers pointed at. Aishky Mistofsky.

  On the night Copestake’s palace of polyester and foam rubber went up like a volcano, Aishky had returned to the hospital which had looked after him so well the time he’d tried to punch his way out of the phone box. The problem on this occasion related to his other hand. He couldn’t feel it. He so couldn’t feel it that he feared he might have lost it altogether. He hadn’t the courage to look. To be on the safe side, he’d thrust the arm into the front of his shirt, where it pumped blood in time with his heart, then he’d walked to the hospital. He held his nerve admirably until he got to Emergency, where the sight of other people’s injuries and the question ‘What have you done to yourself this time?’ caused him to faint clean away. When he came to in the hospital bed he was sans another couple of fingers and the police were waiting to talk to him. At first they were going to charge him with arson. But once the shoe had led them to Benny the Pole they amended the charge to complicity. Aishky was watching the front of the building for Benny the Pole, that was their theory. Aishky was Benny’s look-out. Eventually they dropped that charge as well. Fantastical as was Aishky’s claim that he’d been innocently wandering along Cheetham Hill Road at three in the morning trying to get his mind in order, and that he’d only crossed the road to Copestake’s bedding warehouse because he’d thought he’d seen smoke, which was the reason he’d pushed open the letter-box in the showroom door — an act of wild impulsiveness that could have lost him a lot more of himself than two fingers, considering the amount of fire that leapt out through the letter-box — they believed him.

  ‘Why were you trying to get your mind in order?’ they asked him.

  ‘Because I was worrying. I’m a worrier.’

  ‘And what, on the night in question, were you specifically worrying about?’

  Apparently Aishky didn’t even hesitate. ‘Crimes against the Jewish people,’ he said.

  Would anyone really have attempted to look through the letter-box of a burning building? It was hard to swallow, but nothing otherwise linked Aishky to the crime. He had no record of wrong-doing. He was not known to the Copestakes. He was not known to be known to the Beenstocks. It was impossible to connect him with Benny the Pole, who for his part contemptuously brushed aside all knowledge of such a person and was especially brusque with the imputation that he, Benny the Pole, was unable to put paid to a shmattie warehouse full of foam chips and duck feathers without an accomplice.

  In the end, the only person who thought Aishky Mistofsky could have been implicated in the destruction of Copestake’s Bedding Emporium was me. There was a connection which the police hadn’t made. Aishky and Benny the Pole via Sheeny Waxman. Sheeny was like a son, as we used to say in the days when being a son was the highest measure of human affection we could imagine — Sheeny was like a son to Benny the Pole. He had modelled himself on Benny and probably enjoyed as much of his confidence as anybody did. He was also harsh in his opinion of Aishky. Assuming Benny the Pole had said, ‘Sheeny, find me a shmulke who’ll watch the front of the store for gornisht and ask no questions,’ I could well imagine Aishky Mistofsky being the fi
rst name Sheeny came up with.

  Does this say more about me than it says about Aishky Mistofsky or Sheeny Waxman? Was it me who harboured the low opinion of Aishky? I loved Aishky, I hope I have said nothing that could call that into doubt. I thought he was an entirely lovable man. But I loved my aunties, and my mother, and my grandmother too, and look what I did with them. What if the grandiose are in a trap of their own making and cannot respect where they have decided to love? Tsatskes — that’s how you see those to whom you give merely your heart. Playthings of the feelings. And how can you have respect for a tsatske?

  All that aside, what did anyone’s opinions of Aishky have to do with what Aishky himself chose to do or not do? Was there any reason to believe he’d have gone along with such a deal even had it been put to him? None. And yet I still suspected him. I felt I owed it to him not to not suspect him, that’s the best I can say. One should never be certain of anyone.

  That was the end of the Akiva as a fighting ping-pong force anyway. Aishky joked that he could learn to play pen-hand next, but none of us believed that was ever going to happen. Whether or not the fight had gone out of him, it had gone out of us.

  I made an arrangement to go over and see him — after dark, but not so late that his parents would be home from work — in order to deliver the news that Sheeny had decided to play for the Hagganah, that I was thinking of doing likewise, that Selwyn had taken up swimming with the intention of ridding the sport of its rampant anti-Semitism, that Louis was going to Israel to get away from all the talk about Jews, and that nobody cared what happened to Gershom Finkel.

  He was less upset than I feared he’d be. ‘All good things,’ he said.

  Then, employing his ruined hands robotically, as though they were cake slices, he put Mario Lanza singing ‘I’ll Walk with God’ on the turntable and we sang along with it, hitting the high notes together.

  ‘So what’ll you do?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean what’ll I do?’

  What did I mean? Now that you can’t use those wonderful strong red Esau forearms for anything, was what I meant, but how could I say that?

  ‘For sport,’ I said.

  ‘Sport? Who’s been doing sport?’

  We both laughed. Of course ping-pong wasn’t sport. Football was sport. Cricket was sport. Ping-pong was — But we both knew, without saying, what ping-pong was.

  ‘Anyway, I’ve got some reading I want to do,’ he said. And then he asked me if I knew the The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool.

  So maybe he had been wandering down Cheetham Hill Road at three in the morning worrying about crimes against the Jewish people.

  Be that as it may, it was to be forty years before I saw him again, as well.

  TWO

  The final choice as to who among your club mates and friends would make an ideal partner for you will ultimately rest with your own judgment having due regard to your own particularities of style, methods of playing and weaknesses (which you yourself know better than anybody else).

  Twenty-One Up, Richard Bergmann

  WHY COULDN’T IT have been Gershom Finkel who saw smoke coming from Copestake’s warehouse and thought to verify his suspicions by opening the letter-box and putting his head inside?

  Boom!

  Much unnecessary suffering might we all have been spared.

  But it was too late by then anyway. Both my aunties were already hooked.

  Never look a gift-horse in the mouth — that was the worldly wisdom which we subsequently had to pick out of our teeth. Who else was ever going to court my aunty Dolly? For whom else had she ever put on lipstick, straightened the seams in her stockings and learnt dance steps? Gershom Finkel was a one-off, a once-only, a chance in a million. Sure he was freaky, but let’s face it, as my father put it, ‘It took one to love one.’ On top of that - and in the fifties these considerations still counted, whether or not the alternative was ES for eternal spinsterhood — he was one of us, a Bug and Dniester davener with a covenant from the Almighty in his pocket and a snipped-off in-between to prove it. Obscene but true: when the family beheld Dolly on the arm of Gershom – and when I say the family I mean both sides of the family - they made the calculation that while no in-between inside her might have been better than Gershom’s in-between inside her, Gershom’s in-between inside her was infinitely to be preferred to any pale and floppy-prepuced in-between inside her. On such delicate matters of preference does a kinship system based upon religion dwell.

  But then as I knew better than anyone, this was the trouble with S for spinsters – by some insalubrious inverse law of non-desire, you couldn’t keep your minds out of their C for cunts.

  I don’t think I was jealous of Gershom. I was growing up quickly, even if not quickly enough to satisfy myself, and was putting my aunties behind me. But it’s worth remarking, in the name of honesty, that while I rarely had recourse to my perfumed box of mutilated mishpokheh these days, on those occasions when I did, I excepted, I excused, my aunty Dolly. Sorry Dolly, you just don’t work for me any more. And that could only have been because I didn’t feel she was any longer mine to cut up, which I suppose is another way of saying that I was not prepared to share her, even severed, with Gershom.

  Not that Gershom was himself possessive. Far from it. So casual was Gershom in his attentions to Dolly, in fact, that my parents frequently wondered if his real motive for dating her wasn’t simply access to our house, food, warmth, company, shelter. A theory which was lent credence, I have to say, by Gershom’s reluctance ever to visit Dolly in her own house.

  ‘I can understand that,’ my father said. ‘Your father’s there.’

  ‘Exactly,’ my mother said.

  ‘And it’s poky there.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And it’s dark there. Mind you, if I was courting Dolly …’

  ‘Joel!’

  But he was generous, my father, in the matter of our house being the place where everything social happened for my mother’s side, where her mother could escape her husband, where the Violets could bunch together for a Book at Bedtime and a crossword and a bit of fussing over me, and now where the oldest of them could do her canoodling. He’d grown up in a big family himself. He knew how fifteen people could live fifteen separate lives in one room. In fact our living area was probably smaller than the one my mother’s side fled from every day — for we only had what was called a Sunshine Semi, which meant that the sun came in through the front window and went right out again through the back — but at least it was Heaton Park and not Lower Broughton, at least you could sniff the Pennines instead of Poland, and at least my maternal grandfather wasn’t there. Of course it didn’t cost my father much to be generous, since he was out of the house himself most of the time; but he could have had thoughts about wear and tear, which he didn’t, and he could have played up on Sundays when he was home and the house prickled with spinster embarrassments, but he didn’t do that either.

  It was the way Gershom Finkel threw himself into Sundays at our place that convinced my father it was us he was after — our food, our company — rather than Dolly. Sunday was bagel day. Now that bagels belong to any-old-place, any-old-time international convenience cuisine, and figure (however uncomfortably) in the vocabulary of the pale and floppy-prepuced, along with chutzpah (with a baby ch for choo-choo train) and shmo (with the open O of the wonder-struck and the unworldly – O gosh! O no!), it may be hard for some people to understand why they once counted for so much. Well, they tasted better in those days, for a start: crisper, nuttier, crunchier, sweeter, saltier, browner, plumper, more burnished, more almondy, more flowery, more boiled, stickier, more elastic; chewier in the dough, sleeker to the touch, more differentiated as to top and bottom, more variegated as to middle and sides, more distinct as to inside and out. The trek to get them was more arduous than it would be now, as well. You had to choose whether you felt like Needhof’s bagels or Tobias’s bagels or Bookbinder’s bagels, then you had
to measure that against whether you felt like Needhof’s chopped liver or Tobias’s chopped liver or Bookbinder’s chopped liver, then you had to divide how many they were likely to have left by the time it now was, and get going. They would still be warm when you walked back in with them, too, provided you hadn’t over-extended yourself with the extras. But then if you’d under-extended yourself with the extras no one would have been much pleased either. Chopped liver wasn’t the half of it. There was chopped herring — old-style chopped herring and new-style chopped herring. (The difference? Sugar, aroma, blind prejudice and who could say what subtle variation of uric content.) There was egg and onion — a yellow baby mash, new-laid and salmonella-free, which the aged and the toothless could suck up through a straw. There were cucumbers: in a tin, in a jar, loose; cucumbers plain, sweet and sour, just sweet, just sour, and new green. There were fish balls, and to give the fish balls taste there was horseradish (chrain, pronounced chrain, an old world ch with a convulsion of the larynx), which we with our soft nursery palates thought was fiery simply because it was red. There were rollmops, not to be confused with Bismark herring. There was Bismark herring, not to be confused with rollmops. There were anchovies. There was smoked salmon. There were latkes. There was pickled meat with a dropped d — pickle meat, as though it was itself in the active business of pickling and might pickle you. And then – the Sunday morning ne plus ultra in our cow-mad house — there was smetana and kez — sour cream and cream cheese, this kind of cream and that kind of cream — which no one ever mixed with more dedication, more feeling for texture and consistency, more of an instinct for what looked alike but wasn’t, than my father did.