The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘I took him for a little row, that’s all,’ my father said at last.

  ‘And?’

  ‘He said he didn’t need any money.’

  ‘You offered him money?’

  ‘Of course I offered him money. You’d have expected me to offer him money if he’d been a shaygets. I’m not saying I was going to give him any money. He’s ongishtopt with gelt. But at least once the offer’s made you both know what you’re dealing with. He said he didn’t want money; I said I didn’t want him near my house. He said Dora had her own house; I said I didn’t want him near that house either. He said he had plenty of houses of his own to take Dora to; I said he’d better take her to one of them quick smart. He said he’d come to his own decisions in his own time, thank you; I said I’d throw him into the soup and hold him under if he did to Dora what he’d done to Dolly. He said he saw what I was driving at; I said good.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘What and? There is no and. That’s it. The End. He’ll have Dora out of there by midnight. Who knows, maybe he’ll take your old man at the same time. Tomorrow Dolly can go home. The kids can go back to kipping in their own beds. I can go back to kipping in mine. And we can go back to living like a normal family again.’

  ‘Well that’s fine,’ my mother said. ‘A normal family. That’s just terrific. And what will Dora go back to living? All you’ve done is throw her into his arms.’

  ‘I thought she’s already in his arms. I thought that’s why you’ve got another sister lying upstairs trying to eat the mattress.’

  My mother shook her head. ‘If Dora goes in these circumstances it’ll kill my mother,’ she said. ‘I wish you’d think before you act, I wish you wouldn’t just rush at things like a bull at a gate.’

  ‘I did this for you,’ my father said.

  ‘Well you’ve done me no favours,’ my mother said. ‘You’ve done no one any favours. Except Gershom Finkel.’

  My father threw his hands in the air and looked long in my direction. It wasn’t hard to understand what he was telling me. ‘These are the thanks you get trying to help your wife’s family.’

  It went straight into my Monday-morning school essay, ‘Against Women and Their Matrilineal Kinship Structures’.

  My mother was wrong about my father doing Gershom Finkel a favour. Several years later, in the course of attempting to sort out a delicate matter of family business, I called on him in the Didsbury house to which he’d fled with Dora on pain of being drowned like a rat in Heaton Park Lake. Dora I hadn’t lost contact with entirely – funerals kept us in touch – but Gershom I’d seen nothing of. He hadn’t aged much. There was nothing to age. After we’d concluded our business I asked him if he played table tennis still. It was a cruel question. I knew he was out of the game. No one had seen him at a tournament. There was no word that he was playing for any club.

  He shrugged. ‘The game isn’t worth a candle any more,’ he said. ‘The new rubbers have killed it. I wouldn’t go to the bottom of the street to watch a match. You?’

  ‘Yes, a bit,’ I said. I was captain of my varsity team. Which entitled me to a white blazer with light blue braiding which I wore as a dinner jacket at May Balls, or, with a cravat, to go punting in when the weather was chilly and the company worth impressing. Gershom would have learnt of this from Dora — all my aunties had photographs of me in my Blue blazer – and would have loved me to give him the opportunity to scoff at it. Table tennis at Cambridge? What do they play with — rugger balls? My reticence was designed to irk him.

  ‘Want a knock?’ he asked.

  I laughed. ‘Where? The Akiva?’

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a table. Come. I’ll show you.’

  He led me up three flights of stairs. The house was still subject to those sudden shoebox occlusions you get in old mansions which have been turned into flats. Boarded-up passages, doors where there shouldn’t have been any, ceiling decorations vanishing asymmetrically into hollow walls. It’s possible he’d never got rid of all his old lodgers. Certainly there was a stale sitting tenancy smell about the place, as though people had recently been cooking in stairwells and using the lavatory on landings.

  I could tell from the wallpaper and carpets that the table tennis room had once been an attic studio flat. A serial murderer might have been comfortable here. But the table was new. A new net, too, strong enough to haul in herring. And good overhead lighting.

  ‘So who do you play with on this?’ I asked him.

  He squinted at me. ‘Dora,’ he said.

  ‘Dora? Dora plays?’

  ‘Well, she can hold a bat,’ he said.

  I remembered how Dora held a bat. Downwards, on a droop. As though her wrist was broken and the bat was dead.

  ‘Which is her bat?’ I asked.

  There were a number of them lying around on the floor, none in very good condition, along with some cheap noncompetition balls.

  ‘Whichever one’s on the top of the pile,’ Gershom told me. ‘She’s as happy with sandpaper as anything else.’

  Yes, she’d been as happy with sandpaper as anything else in the old dining-table days when I used to beat her blindfold with a bookmark.

  So that was their life together. Dora standing motionless at the top of the house, looking inwards, smiling slyly, ruthless in her diffidence, a sandpaper ping-pong racket limp in her boneless wrist, while Gershom smashed balls past her on both wings.

  And we’d thought Gershom hell was an infinity of bagel-less Sundays.

  But about my grandmother, my mother had been right.

  She’d been on shpilkes throughout Dolly’s courtship, at the mercy of a thousand alarms, afraid it would come to nothing, afraid it would come to something. Now she was ful mit tsores, heart-broken. Heart-broken for Dolly, that she’d lost Gershom. Heart-broken for Dora, that she’d won Gershom. Heart-broken for both Dolly and Dora, that there was a rupture between them. Heart-broken for us all that we were mortal and knew nothing of what the Almighty intended for us. Yet it wasn’t of a broken heart she died.

  A lump, what else. In my family we all die of lumps or cheese. Cancer is unheard of. Say cancer and we become deaf suddenly. My grandmother’s lump was almost the size she was when they found it, and probably bigger than her when the end came. We watched her grow it like a Polish cucumber.

  ‘Mother, you’re killing yourself with worry,’ my mother kept telling her. ‘There is nothing you can do now. Dora will make out and Dolly will get over it. If you let her.’

  ‘Let her!’ my grandmother cried. ‘If I hadn’t let her in the first place none of this would have happened.’

  Fay too tried. ‘Mother, you’re only making it worse for Dolly och un veh-ing all the time. Give her time to realize she’s better off without him.’

  ‘If she’s better off without him, what’s Dora?’

  We weren’t good at comforting. None of us could find it in ourself to tell the He, ‘Better off with him.’

  We tried taking her to the seaside, to Blackpool, Southport, Morecambe, St Anne’s, New Brighton; but she’d just sit on a bench in the rain in her babushka, staring out at the colourless sea, growing the cucumber inside her.

  Among the many foods and other treats the children of Israel missed once they were released from Egypt was the cucumber. To this day it’s one of the ways a Jew registers homesickness: he misses cucumber. Lost and weary, my grandmother grew her own inside her body.

  ‘Which way is Sowalki?’ she asked me once. ‘I’m tsemisht.’

  We were on the promenade in Southport, looking at nothing.

  ‘The other way,’ I said.

  ‘The other way,’ she repeated. She shook her head. What understanding did any of us have of anything? ‘Abi gesunt!’ As long as I was healthy.

  When she was down to five stone we put her in a bed in our living room. My mother and Fay took turns to sleep beside her.

  Occasionally Dolly would come over to do the same, but when she wasn’t gloomy sh
e was so precariously exultant and brilliant, like a twelve-branched chandelier about to come crashing down from the ceiling, that we feared my grandmother would never survive a night of her nursing.

  My mother and Fay supported each other well. Only once do I remember either of them collapsing in the company of the other. And that was when Fay put into words what they’d both known for some time — that my grandmother would never again sleep in her own house.

  We could no longer postpone the hour, hateful though it was to everyone, when my grandfather would have to come and look at her. He was whipped now, in the way of all drunken domestic tyrants past their prime — whipped, whopped, a thing of no account whatsoever. He’d put a suit on, tie, waistcoat, in deference to he clearly didn’t know what – a formal family visit of some kind? – and seemed to be surprised it was only his wife he was visiting, and that she was lying on a bed in our living room, and that there was only half as much of her to see as there’d been the last time he saw her.

  He stood over the bed with his fists clenched in his trouser pockets, not a trace left now of the old sleepily voluptuous Polski princeling, or the bully who used to scare away my mother’s friends.

  ‘E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!’ as Callas used to give us goosebumps, exulting on Twink’s turntable.

  ‘Sit on the bed, Dad,’ Fay said.

  He did as he was told. And waited for his next instruction.

  ‘Hold her hand,’ Fay said.

  My grandmother flickered her eyes at this, and half opened them, which seemed to frighten him. “Ello, love,’ he said. ‘’Ow are you?’

  Just that.

  ’Ello, love, ’ow are you? Want a pint?

  Shocking.

  But why was I shocked? Because that was all he had to say to a woman he’d been married to for almost fifty years? Or because the vocabulary of his feelings, his diction, his demeanour, were that of a man who might as well have been born and brought up in Droylesden? Let’s say both, since the culture of alcohol was to blame in either case. But years later, when the pain of his inadequacy as a husband, father, grandfather, has long past, I still shudder over how he traded his birthright, his ancestry, his foreignness, his freedom from proletarian definition, for a lifetime of drinking northern English beer in a northern English public house.

  If the alternative was to be ale the colour of the sea at Southport, blowing your wages at the races and tolerating no atheists, better we’d have stayed on the east bank of the Bug or the Vistula, pogroms or no pogroms.

  Snobbery? Only if you think I’m talking class. But I’m not talking class, I’m talking self-respect and metaphysics — what you owe your soul. Your neshome, as we used to call it in the days when we talked metaphysics.

  Everything was now happening for the last time. My grandmother would never sleep in her own home again. My grandfather would never see her alive again. And I would never again go with glue and scissors into my scented coffret of concupiscence.

  Did I feel bad about how I’d disfigured my grandmother for sport, now that death was on the point of disfiguring her in earnest? Yes, but not as bad as I’d feared I’d feel. I’d cared about her, hadn’t I? When I was little I’d loved her to distraction. Later I’d entwined her in my most powerful emotions. Entramelled her in jealousy, equivocation, the paradoxes of reserve and shamelessness. It wasn’t my fault that the emotions of a boy my age had to be so ugly. Blame nature.

  I heard her die. It was about four in the morning. November, when everything dreadful happens in the north of England. I went from deep sleeping to wide waking in a single movement, disturbed not by noise but by the cessation of it. Suddenly the house was quiet. A sound I hadn’t realized I’d been listening to for months, the sound of my grandmother tending her tumour, was gone.

  She didn’t lie for long in the house, but I didn’t once have the courage to look at her. Nor could I bear to do more than squint through one eye at the coffin, which was barely bigger than the box I’d kept her in. I stayed in my room. My mother and Fay were no better. My father handled everything. Death was where my father’s side came into its own. My mother’s side could die competently enough – couldn’t wait to die, some of us – but we needed my father’s side to take care of everything that happened afterwards.

  My aunties were all together again for the moment when the coffin was loaded into the hearse.

  ‘Look how small it is,’ I heard my mother cry. I didn’t recognize her voice. She seemed to be wailing through water. ‘It’s too small, it’s too small for her.’ Otherwise weeping deprived them of words. They held on to one another like the limbs of a sea monster in pain. But I had to be with the men. Into the cars with the men. Off to the cemetery with the men. While the great writhing Laocoön of watery women remained behind to wail in the deep. Religious practice. The women stay and howl. The men go off and do the business.

  They even tell jokes.

  I knew what was going to happen. I’d watched from my bedroom window as other cortèges had left from our street. I knew that at a certain moment, just before the tailgate of the hearse was closed, the women broke rank, forgot the consolations they’d found in one another’s arms, and hurled themselves on the coffin. Husband, child, parent, it didn’t matter who was in there, the women clung on as though by force of will alone they could hold back time. Sometimes they had to be prised off, finger by finger; sometimes it seemed as though the only way to proceed with the obsequies would be to bury them with the coffin.

  I stood on the front lawn, in a covey of matter-of-fact uncles, waiting for the wild screaming to start. At windows up and down the street, other boys also waited, knowing that one day what was happening to us would happen to them. My cheeks burned with self-consciousness. I couldn’t endure anyone seeing me bereaved. Not just crying — though of course I couldn’t endure that either – but actually bereaved. Afterwards it would be all right. Walzer has lost his grandma. No big shame in that. But at the time, in the very process of being bereaved — no, unendurable.

  At the same time as my cheeks burned, my heart froze. All morning my insides had been changing places with one another. Nothing was fixed, nothing would stay still. Now I was frozen solid. I knew what was coming and I feared I would be unable to get through it. I didn’t believe I had the warm blood necessary to keep me upright. When it started, first Dolly, then Dora, then my mother, then Fay, each one’s grief fuelling the others’, I felt my stomach cramp, as though I’d been kicked. Whatever blood was not yet frozen in my veins, froze now. Were these the women who had brought me up with such restraint, these furies tearing at the coffin with their nails, making sounds so ghastly it was hard to believe they were human?

  Who could I not bear it for most? The tumour that had once been my grandmother? My poor motherless mother? My rapaciously shy aunties, for whom no mortification could ever be keener than their own?

  I saw the torn expression on my father’s face. Him? Could I not bear it most for him? For what he couldn’t bear on behalf of my mother? Or was it me, just me, I most couldn’t bear it for?

  It was only when I became aware that my uncle Motty had his arm around my shoulder and was giving me his handkerchief and telling me a joke — ‘Jewish bloke goes into a restaurant’ — that I realized I’d gone down on my knees on the grass and was bawling like a baby, huge uncontrollable baby sobs, except that no baby ever had so much to sob about as I did.

  BOOK III

  ONE

  No. 16: Don’t let anything upset you.

  Golden Rules to Remember, Richard Bergmann

  REMEMBER LORNA PEACHLEY, the ping-pong player with the soft Hampshire Ds whose all-moving body parts had given Twink and me so much innocent pleasure on our last afternoon practising drop shots together in the Burnley academy? Well, she re-emerges. Not for long, but to devastating effect. Devastating to me. There is a sense in which I am still devastated by Lorna Peachley, though I’m sure it would astonish her to hear me say that, if anything still ast
onishes her at her age. But that’s always the way with devastating forces, isn’t it? They pass through, careless of the trouble they cause, looking neither to the left nor to the right of them.

  I’m not complaining. I invited her to do her worst. She would not even have known she had a worst in her had I not found it. So maybe it was me who was the devastating force.

  But this is to run on ahead. Before we get to Lorna Peachley we have to make a detour through Sabine Weinberger. Which was the order in which I did them. And I’m not sure we can do Sabine Weinberger either without first addressing the issue uppermost in every ping-pong player’s mind at the time I first had dealings with her — to sponge or not to sponge. Every day a new spongiform fantasy was coming in from the ocean beds and rubber plantations of the east — a thicker, softer, more silent and more deadly foam; a more deviously flexuous pimple; sandwich, with the sponge outside and the pimples in; sandwich with the sponge inside and the pimples out; sandwich with the sponge inside and the pimples out but introverted. A pimple which you couldn’t see! — what devils they were out there in China and Japan.

  My own inclination was to leave well enough alone, not because I was a purist — how could I be when I’d started off with a Collins Classic? — but because I liked the control conventional rubber gave me, I liked the sound — plock plock, plock plock: like the clatter of high heels on a wet pavement — I liked its associations with my old club and team-mates, and I liked the game as I played it; I liked chopping deep, arresting the ball on my forehand, telling it who was boss, and that you could only do with pimples. No one in their right mind chopped with sponge. With sponge there was no call to chop. If you needed to chop you were using the wrong rubber. And if you were using the wrong rubber you were in the wrong game.