The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  If you followed the trail of Sabine Weinberger’s stubble you were soon on a journey whose reason was a mystery to you, and those journeys are always the best.

  But I am getting ahead of myself again. We were here for bats.

  In those days shops in the centre of northern English towns closed at lunch-time on a Saturday. Given that you weren’t likely to make it to a city store on a Saturday morning before about eleven, by which time the sales staff were already getting agitated about knocking off, it’s hard to see why anyone bothered with Saturday opening at all. But northern life was organized around the same principle as desire for Sabine Weinberger. It was the absence of amenities that kept you coming for more.

  Being a Saffron, I suffered greater sensitivities to staff impatience than Sheeny did. ‘I think they’re waiting for us to go,’ I said.

  ‘Are you waiting for us to go?’ Sheeny asked Sabine Weinberger.

  ‘I’m not,’ she said.

  ‘So what do you think?’ Sheeny said to me.

  ‘I still prefer a bat I can hear,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, but think of it this way,’ Sheeny said, ‘if you can’t hear it then they can’t hear it. That’s gotta be worth five points a game.’

  ‘Not if they’re playing with a silent one too.’

  ‘Shmerel! — then it’s worth five points to them if you’re not.’ After which he turned to Sabine Weinberger and asked, ‘Am I right or am I right?’

  She was nothing if not accommodating. ‘I think you’re both right,’ she said.

  Is that what was meant by her having a reputation?

  ‘How can we both be right?’

  ‘By using sandwich. Some people come in here and they feel right playing with sponge immediately. I can see that you two don’t. You’re not natural sponge players. And the only answer to sponge is sandwich.’

  ‘You think I might be a natural sandwich man?’

  ‘I think you both are.’

  ‘What do you reckon, Oliver?’ Sheeny said. ‘You a sponge or a sandwich man?’

  ‘I need more time to decide,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure what sort of man I am.’

  ‘A sandwich just for me, then,’ Sheeny said. And while Sabine Weinberger was taking his money he asked, in an unusually croak-free voice for him, ‘So what will you be doing when you close?’

  She shrugged and looked away, plucking lint from her far too prominent bust.

  ‘Then you’re coming to the KD with us,’ Sheeny told her.

  The KD.

  Not K for King and D for David, but K for Kar and D for Domah.

  Kar Domah, the ancient Hebrew scholar and socialite who had urged resistance against the Romans and held out against them for thirteen years, bare-handed and in his tefillin, on an unfortified mountain top in Market Street.

  The KD.

  I’d be lying if I said I could remember the old Market Street KD with any exactitude, what shape the tables were, what colour the carpet was, whether a waiter or a waitress served us coffee, or a fabled beast that was half horse, half water serpent. I wouldn’t have been any clearer on the details at the time. I wasn’t really looking. Not with my eyes. You used other senses to experience the Market Street Kardomah. You took it in through your pores.

  Of course Benny the Pole wasn’t working his pitch on the pavement outside the KD this Saturday afternoon. Benny the Pole was still repaying his debt to society in Strangeways. Other frog-voiced men past their prime were holding on to their toupees and giving their spiel, but none of them interested Sheeny and so none of them interested me. We went deep into the bowels of the KD, I remember that. As far in as you could go. And every time we approached a table the occupants looked up, looked us over, recognized us or didn’t, but knew everything there was to know about us — from the quality of the shampoo we used to how long it took us to wear down the heels of our shoes — before we’d passed. It was like being at a Walzer wedding. No, it was like being the bride and groom at a Walzer wedding, making your entrance only after everyone was seated, negotiating your way to high table while the Klutzberg Trio played ‘Chossen-kalleh mazeltov’ and all your uncles and aunties banged cutlery. So why, all of a sudden, didn’t I mind the exposure? Because this was the KD, that’s why. The Kingdom of Dreams.

  One thing I hadn’t expected — how many of our women, Bug and Dniester Beckies, the stubble and sparkle gang, I was going to see. You came to the KD looking to form short-term, obligation-free relationships with cory, ladies of other faiths and cultures, that was how I had always understood it. The KD wasn’t a social club. Yes, it was a meat market, but a treife meat market. Now I saw what I saw it all made perfect sense. Our girls were here looking for the same. A non-kosher beanfeast. A pig-out. We kept ourselves clean for them, and they kept themselves clean for us, by doing whatever it was we had to do outside the nest. We played away and they played away. Fine. I can’t say it didn’t come as a shock to me to discover that our girls played at all. Other girls yes, but not our girls. I’d been brought up, by precept and example, to believe that virginity was an exclusively Jewish property. Why would a hymen have been called a hymen if it wasn’t Jewish? I had cousins called Hymen. We all did. Becky and Shoshanna Hymen. I could no more think of our girls without a hymen than I could their girls with one. But if I’d got that wrong I’d got that wrong. That’s what you went to the KD for — to learn. Fine. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but fine. We played away and they played away. It was practical. It was like wishing the bereaved long life. It acknowledged that life was for the living. That some matters had to be attended to. It accepted harsh realities.

  Whether it actually worked, though, is another matter. What you aspired to was a condition of coruscating short-sightedness. When your own walked by you rose and embraced them, but you never thereafter noticed they were there. Even if they took the table next to yours you didn’t see them. Stars danced in your eyes, fireflies flickered on the rim of your Kardomah coffee cup, you glimmered brilliantly, but you were aware of nothing beyond the ring of fire which cut your table off from all the others. And when, despite yourself, you saw your sister making out with a shvartzer? Ah, then …

  Whatever you allowed yourself to see or not see at the Kardomah, the rule that said you didn’t hit on your own was religiously observed. Name me one Jewish marriage that started life in the Market Street Kardomah. One happy Jewish marriage ... So what did Sheeny think he was doing actually bringing Sabine Weinberger in with us? Deliberately flouting protocol, that’s what he was doing. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but I found out later that Sheeny’s exorbitant and exclusively gentile-centred head-jockeying had been attracting adverse comment from two or three of the KD Becky-ravers who really should have known better. Rules are rules. Zeta Cowan and Hilary Fishbein particularly had been giving him tsorres. Ironic, considering how far out of the nest those two were prepared to lean. Sabine Weinberger was his answer. Sabine Weinberger was there to kraink Zeta Cowan and Hilary Fishbein. I’m up for anderer and unserer, Sheeny was telling them. Look! Kuk this! The only thing I’m not up for is you.

  Poor Sabine Weinberger, in that case? I’ve never decided. It’s just possible that Sabine Weinberger had ulterior motives of her own, not the least of them being to kraink me. And what had I done to her? Nothing. That was her complaint. Nothing. Having observed me weeping over my grandmother, Sabine Weinberger had fallen the tiniest bit in love with me. But all I wanted to talk to her about was ping-pong rubber.

  And certainly all I wanted to do now I’d got into the Kardomah was experience it through my skin, not look at her. Was I disappointed? Nothing ever lives up to its reputation, especially when that reputation has brewed and festered inside the shell of a clammy introvert — surely I was a bit disappointed? No, no I wasn’t. I couldn’t do much with it there and then but I reserved it. Not as in reserved judgement but as in reserved seats. I wanted it for later. There would be a time for such a place. Kardomah and Kardomah and Kardomah.

 
; There would be and there would have been. For by the time a clammy introvert is ready there is no more Kardomah.

  We took Sabine Weinberger to the pictures, talking of reserved seats; straight from the hot cinammon breath of the Kardomah into the conditioned Coca Cola chill of the Gaumont, where Mario Lanza was starring in Serenade. We paid for half her ticket each, Sheeny and I; by way of showing even-handed gratitude for which she sat in the middle, holding both ours, which should have been exciting for me as no female person not a mother or a grandmother or an aunty had ever held my hand before, but the music made me think of Twink and Aishky and most of the time I wished Sabine Weinberger had been either or both of them.

  Once or twice, when Lanza was off the screen, I took the opportunity to wonder if she and Sheeny were up to more than hand holding. No woman has so much individual control over her limbs that she can be innocent with one hand while being guilty with the other. Sometimes her fingers would unlace from mine and she would grind an excruciated little fist into my thigh, or she would squeeze my knee, rhythmically, in time to some music that wasn’t Lanza’s, or she would slide a couple of nails inside my shirt and describe an agonizingly trembly circle round my navel, all of which I liked but all of which I realized were probably no more than inadvertent mirror-image reverberations of what she was doing to Sheeny.

  Then guess where we took her after that.

  No, not Miles Platting.

  To Benny the Pole’s place on Wilmslow Road!

  The Benny the Pole?

  There was only one.

  Sheeny had the key. Sheeny had had the key for as long as Benny had been down. ‘But I don’t abuse it,’ he told us. ‘Benny said I could live here, but this place is like a shrine to me.’

  Just as Benny the Pole was the first person in Manchester to wear suede and snakeskin shoes, so he was the first person in Manchester to own a luxury flat.

  You hear the word luxury and you think of soft textures. Deep-pile carpets. Armchairs that go oof plock. Bubble baths. ‘Luxury!’ I remember my father pronouncing as he punched the kishkies out of the little round Rexene pouffes he used to flog for flompence from the back of his van. ‘Sheer luxury!’ My mother’s concept, of course. Sheer luxury for my father meant more of something. It didn’t much matter what, just more. A cheese sandwich with extra cheese. A lager and lime with extra lime. A liver and onion fry-up with more liver and more onions. My mother was the one forever yearning for softness.

  Luxury for Benny the Pole had more in common with my father’s meaning. There was a lot of everything here. A Mancunian lot. A very lot. The placed looked like a swag warehouse. Only of a higher quality than the swag we sold. We didn’t sell writing desks with tooled green leather inlays, for example. Or antique wooden globes of the world. Or brass sextants. Or padded bars. We sold cheap birthday cards for fathers which showed such articles as these in just this profusion, but not the articles themselves. None of our punters in Oswestry or Wrexham would have shelled out for a brass sextant.

  And nothing in Benny the Pole’s luxury pad passed the oof-plock test either. Everything squeaked. Eech plock, eech plock. The parquet floor squeaked. The leather settee squeaked. The soda syphon squeaked. The toilet seat squeaked. The water in the taps squeaked. Even the sheets squeaked.

  We got to feel the sheets?

  Oh yes, we got to feel the sheets.

  I married Sabine Weinberger some years later, I might as well come clean on that score here and now. I married her because I was lonely at Cambridge and she was the only woman I knew at the time who was prepared to keep me company. We are not married any longer. We were not married for long. And we were never married happily. Not ecstatically happily. (Name me one ecstatically happy Jewish marriage that began at the KD?) But she is the mother of my children. For what that’s worth. Channa and Baruch — though those were not the names we gave them.

  Was that the only reason I married her? Because I was lonely? Probably not. Maybe I also married her to finish some business we’d started that night in Benny the Pole’s squeaky luxury flat on Wilmslow Road.

  She lay with us in turn, separately. She was not prepared to have it any other way. No sandwich after all. And she lay with me first. Lay. In the lie down rather than the get laid sense. She kept all her clothes on, slipped under the eech-plock sheets, wished me long life and jerked my in-between. End of story. Or should have been end of story.

  I fell asleep immediately. It had been a big day for me. No gaff. Kardomah. Benny the Pole’s pad. And now this: my in-between pummelled by someone not myself. A very big day. The last day of childhood. Would I ever blush again? I doubted it. What was there to blush about? I no longer nursed a terrible secret. My in-between had finally been handled. Not all that well, but handled. I was now like every other man. Goodbye shame! Goodnight the colour red! Oof plock, oof plock — I’d been milked of all reason for embarrassment at last.

  A good sleep, then on with the business of passing my in-between along to the next one. The giant had stirred and the great chain of masculinity had begun to rattle …

  Two days later I was knocking up with Sheeny at the Hagganah when for no apparent reason he put his bat down, fell into a chair, and started spluttering.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  He was holding his heart now, and shaking. ‘I’ve just remembered. Give me a minute, I’m platzing myself to death here.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Oy a broch! The bint. Whatsername? Weismuller …’

  ‘Weinberger.’

  I’d started to go tight. I knew Sheeny had had his go after me. That had been part of the deal. First me, then Sheeny. I was cool about it. Sheeny too had his right not to go home unmilked. But what was funny about that?

  ‘I’m remembering,’ he said. ‘It’s coming back to me. I’m lying there with my shmeckle down her throat, taking my time, trying to think about something else, telling her about the time you zetzed the pig — “You should have seen the size of that fucking pig,” I’m telling her; “Oink, oink!” — when mitten derinnen she starts shaking her head and covering her ears. “Don’t say that word,” she says. I think that’s what she says. It’s hard to tell what a person’s saying when she’s got your shmeckle in her mouth. But I’m kind of picking up the vibrations. If I’d had a microphone strapped to my putz I’d have got everything she was saying. “What word? Fucking?” “Gobble, gobble. No — the other one!” “What other one?” “The other one.” “There wasn’t a fucking other one.” “Gobble, gobble. Yes, there was.” “What? Pig?” “Don’t say it, don’t say it,” she shreis. So I start nobbling. I can’t help myself. She’s lying there with my shmeckle in her mouth, I’ve had two fingers up her cunt, she’s got a fucking glass eye, and she’s covering her ears because I’ve said the word pig. Is that funny or not?’

  ‘It’s hilarious,’ I said.

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Sheeny said.

  I could have saved myself a lot of trouble later on had I attended to what was salient in that story. Sabine Weinberger had not put to sleep the Vulvick in her. She was still as anti-pig as her mother’s side had ever been. Therefore there would still be traces of virulent Vulvicitis in any children we conceived together. Had I thought of that I would never have risked it. Because who wants a pious chuntering little frummy for a child? It’s some consolation that it’s a long time since either of my chuntering little frummies called me father. But I would still rather not have given them the option.

  What stopped me attending to the most important element of Sheeny’s anecdote was what you might call a side issue. The little matter of his putz in her mouth. She hadn’t done that to me. She hadn’t invited me to put two fingers in her cunt either, come to that. Was that why she’d insisted on seeing to me first? To whether appetite for Sheeny? Was I just the appetizer and Sheeny the main course?

  What’s the expression — out of the frying pan and into the fire? I was out of the shell and into hell. Sexual jealousy in regard
to someone you love is a monstrous thing; but sexual jealousy in regard to someone you couldn’t give two hoots for is far worse. There are no counterbalancing imaginings; you do not look forwards to the time when she will do the things to you she did to him; your mind does not revel in a futurity of forgivenesses and restitutions. You are left entirely to your own devices. Insulted in your own single self. Unpreferred. Just that. The only other time I had felt washed up in this way was when I lost my first ever ping-pong matches to Cartwright and Battrick of the Allied Jam and Marmalade factory. And if I am to be to true to what was going on inside my sick little head I would have to admit that I was luxuriating in the same rotting sweetness of self-pity that came with those defeats. What was the pleasure in that pain? Why did it feel so good to feel so bad? What was it about losing that I liked so much?

  One good thing was that I no longer rummaged in my filthy mutilated-aunty box, otherwise I’d have had Fay out again, in suspenders, kneeling between Sheeny Waxman’s knees. The other good thing was that just as a new week in the league brought a new opponent to beat, so a new day in the street brought a new chance to get even with Sabine Weinberger.

  She must have been a bit of a glutton for punishment herself, because she was the one who came knocking on my door. To wish me long life, ostensibly. My father answered, therefore it must have been a non-gaff day. I’d like to think it must have been a balmy summer’s day too, because he immediately ushered everyone into the back garden so that I could have the house to myself — to myself and Sabine Weinberger — but I know he’d have ordered everybody out even if there’d been ten inches of snow on the ground. Oliver had to have his oats.

  In fact he turned quite nasty soon after this when he suspected that I really was getting my oats from Sabine Weinberger. ‘Not with a Jewish girl, you tsedraiter,’ he told me. ‘Not with someone from across the road. Not with a Vulvick.’