The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  It’s only love you’re experiencing, when all is said and done. Love with all the schmaltz removed. The house, the kids, the pension fund. It’s only eroticism without the domestic aftermath.

  We’d horseplayed, afterwards, back at her place, fallen into a bean-bag, rolled on to the floor. ‘Beat you, beat you!’ she’d laughed, and I’d manoeuvred myself so that she had her arm round my throat and I could barely breathe. ‘Now finish the job,’ I’d pleaded. The urgency in my voice surprised even me. ‘One little squeeze. That’s all it would take. I won’t stop you. I couldn’t stop you. You’re too strong. I yield to you utterly. Make me nothing.’

  And she’d laughed and squeezed and laughed some more until she realized that I meant it.

  Hence the headaches.

  She pointed her bat at my temples, like a pistol, some days later. After beating me again. Bang bang, you’re dead. ‘Not like that,’ I’d said. And I’d taken the bat out of her hand and put the handle down my throat. Like that.

  Hence the letter.

  Don’t take the bat metaphor too literally. I did for a while, in later years, when I was trying to make sense of it all. I frequented clubs where you could actually be beaten with an instrument resembling a ping-pong bat, that’s if you can imagine a ping-pong bat made of leather and studs and someone in spiked boots wielding it. A paddle, they call it in the business. Fancy a paddling, me duck?

  Altogether too literal. They’re right to call themselves fetishists. They’ve lost the meaning in the means. They worship the mere instrumentation. You know the moment you bend over that that’s not it, not it at all.

  But you go ahead anyway. You slip your wrists into metal rings, consent to a leather strap closing around your throat, shut your eyes and put up with the grinding unimaginativeness of the ritual, so as not to cause offence or distress. For sadists, too, have feelings.

  The last thing I wanted Lorna Peachley to do was hang me from the rafters and paddle me with her bat. Not the very last thing, but one of the last things. The point of the bat was that she should use me as she used it. I didn’t want to suffer the bat, I wanted to be the bat. Let’s be clear — not the ball, the bat. The bat. A bat has a handle, so does a man. Maybe it’s all very simple really and goes back to the days when all those women took turns to hold me out. By the handle.

  Had Lorna Peachley just taken me up by my handle and played a few games with me, all might have been well.

  But Lorna wanted to be loved the way we all do.

  Meanwhile, in the world of the living, that moral infection of triviality to which both sides of my family had always been susceptible had turned virulent. Not just tsatskes. Worse than tsatskes.

  Machareikes.

  My father had discovered battery-operated toys. Nothing wrong with that, if he’d confined his enthusiasm for them as a market line to the markets. But he didn’t. He was carrying them around in his pockets and interrupting conversations with them, setting them up in the middle of a table at a Walzer wedding, or even in reputable restaurants, little battery-operated drummer bears, marching penguins, dogs that lifted their legs and did pee-pees. ‘Joel!’ my mother cried. To me she’d say, ‘I don’t know what to do with him. He’s turning into an idiot!’ Not that she was in any position to talk. Her own resistance to swag had been stormed long ago. A plastic palm tree now graced the steps to our front door. Not even a convincing plastic palm tree; not even green. The doorbell played the Chinese national anthem. A transistorized fish tank changed colours in the hall. There were no fish in it; they’d died of shock the day the water turned blood red. The phone was in the shape of a banana. When it rang a siren went off in every bedroom, and a toy fireman slid down a pole on the landing. ‘I’m sorry but I think that’s great,’ the first of my older sister’s boyfriends said. He supported Manchester City. ‘Do you think they do one in City colours?’ he asked. My father said he’d find out. My younger sister’s boyfriend was a silver wedding and barmitvah crooner, a melter of melodies in the Frankie Vaughan style. Mo Drats was how he liked to be known professionally. Stardom backwards. A variation on those visual run-on names, like Nos Mo King. So why didn’t he just call himself Ima Shmuck? He had a smetana and kez smile and a buttery handshake. (Or Smeta Naandkez?) You had to dry yourself on a tea towel after he’d left. He wondered if they did the banana phone in the shape of a microphone. ‘I’ll find out for you,’ my father said. I could tell he enjoyed having my sisters’ boyfriends around. They weren’t stuck up like me. Though once they stopped being Jewish the temperature changed dramatically. It almost killed him, for all that, having to throw someone out of the house who appreciated his marching bears.

  He’d threatened to do the same when Aunty Dolly brought home her shaygets from the dancing school, but the family rallied around her. Was he mad? Did he think Dolly could survive a second blow? What were we preserving her for anyway? Her womb had walked out on her soon after Gershom, so she wasn’t going to shame us with flat-nosed babies called Graham like their father. And wasn’t it astounding, really, that another chance had come her way? Jesus, Joel, you never expected she’d find one man to take an interest in her, never mind two! Just get her married and off, geshwint, surely that was the priority. He saw the logic of what we were saying. By the time we were through with him a Hottentot could have had Dolly with his blessing, had there been a Hottentot who wanted her.

  So that was more triviality — dancing talk. One two three, one two three. And map reading. Dolly’s shaygets was a map reader. He never came to our house or left our house, though he only lived in Kersal, without marking his route out on an ordnance survey map. And he never once came or left without getting lost.

  ‘Perhaps you can help me here, Oliver,’ he said to me on one occasion. He had about eight maps unfolded on the kitchen table. And a square map-magnifying glass. And a red felt marker. And a pocket compass.

  ‘Why don’t you just get a taxi?’ I suggested.

  He swallowed air. ‘No chance of that,’ he said brightly. ‘Do you know how much I’ve saved in my life by never getting taxis?’

  It goes without saying that he did. He went so far as to show me the actual sum in a cash book he carried everywhere with him. We were talking thousands, even then.

  And then there was my grandfather, the dinky Polski princeling with the Droylesden larynx, whom we’d taken in after the death of my grandmother and stuck in a little extension we’d built specially for him at the back of the house, somewhere he could pick his toenails, watch television, and be spared the company of atheists. We’d hoped we could leave him locked up in there until the devil came to claim him, in the meantime shoving a tray of the Polski pap he liked to eat under his door, and occasionally a racing newspaper, thereby showing him more consideration than he’d ever shown anybody else; but eventually we had to let him out because he was staring into the neighbours’ bedrooms all day and throwing chocolate wrappers out on to their lawns. I thought the sensible solution was to confiscate his spectacles and stop giving him chocolate, or just to board up his windows, but my mother was feeling sorry for him, now that he was no longer just a horrible old man but a hopeless and horrible old man. ‘He is my father,’ she had a crack at wailing, but we all looked at her. ‘Well, he’s a human being.’ But that didn’t wash either. We let him out to watch the downstairs television, anyway, which indulgence he repaid by recognizing the personalities aloud — ‘There’s that Lady Malcolm!’ — and finding ways of getting to cop a feel of my sisters’ girlfriends’ breasts. ‘Excuse me, love’ — that was the giveaway phrase. ‘Excuse me, love,’ he’d croak, like a frog with a tracheotomy, and that meant there was an ashtray he needed to reach, a Radio Times he wanted to consult, a speck of dust he was unable to tolerate, all of them just, but oh so only just, the wrong side of Maxine Shneck’s tit.

  It would have been a matter of the finest discrimination, had anyone bothered to put his brain to it, which of them was copping the greater number of feels that year,
Sheeny Waxman or my grandfather.

  Long term — though I guess you’d need to verify this with Maxine Shneck and others — the only person to suffer any harm from my grandfather’s depredations was me. Every time the privilege was granted me to trace with my fingertips the configuration of a breast, whether a loved one’s breast or a stranger’s, I would hear ‘Excuse me, love’ and see my grandfather.

  Wasn’t it enough that I was connected to him by blood? Did I have to be tied to him by desire as well?

  It finished me for breasts, however you understand it. To this day I cannot go near them, cannot take the risk of seeing that indolent evacuated face loom up at me from the pillow.

  In the end my sisters stopped bringing girlfriends home. That wasn’t too much of a sacrifice: they had reached the age of ratting on their girlfriends anyway. My grandfather stood at our front gate for several months, looking out for them and throwing chocolate wrappers into the street, then went back inside and gave himself to television full time.

  It was not without its satisfactions, seeing him reduced to the nothingness of telly watching. It made me believe in natural justice. He who lives a worthless life shall die a worthless death.

  But until he actually did die he coughed his worthlessness over all of us. ‘Isn’t that that Eamonn Andrews?’

  Which leaves only Aunty Fay. Fay of my perverted cut and paste days. Fay who had watched her spinster sisters slug it out over Gershom Finkel, while no one wondered if it might not be better, on further consideration, to run away with her. And yet she had her attractions, Aunty Fay, if you knew where to look for them. She had startled eyes, like a forest creature’s. She had a dark covering of down on her arms, which perversely — but then I was a perverse boy — made her very feminine. And she looked good in high heels and suspenders scissored from the right page of Span. Some women come up best in filthy boys’ imaginations. Fithy boys or filthy men, it doesn’t matter much which, for filthy boys grow into filthy men. He was a filthy bastard good and proper, the one who got her on our banana phone one sultry summer’s night. She thought it was her own father at first, on account of the gruff breathing. But he had too much curiosity to be her father. He wanted to know what colour she was wearing, so she told him. He meant under her dress, so she told him that too. And the material? A tricky question for Aunty Fay. Was there more than one sort of material? Not in the S for spinster sections of the stores she shopped at. Sacking, what else? Burlap. Was she saying she didn’t own silk? She laughed. Silk? Her? What would she be doing with silk, whatever silk was. So he sent her a pair. Not too saucy either. Bought from Affleck’s and folded genteelly in a white box, a message card attached. With Kind Respects.

  And how did he come to have her address? Why, she gave it to him.

  And the size?

  She probably gave him that too. Not out of coquettishness. Out of naivety. She had no defences, Fay. She didn’t know what from what. She was another one a Hottentot could have carried off.

  ‘How many nights is this?’ my father grumbled, staggering in with a cheese and onion pie wrapped in foil for my mother and finding Fay yet again on the blower, one leg curled under her, one stretched out, legs that joined in swishing silk now, Fay skittish, Fay feminine, Fay fey.

  ‘Shush!’ my mother said.

  A miracle was unfolding. A third spinster was inching towards a husband.

  ‘What’s he going to send her this time?’ my father said. ‘A frontless brassiere?’

  ‘Joel!’

  The things my father knew! What was a frontless brassiere?

  And had they met yet, Aunty Fay and her obscene caller? No. They were taking it cautiously. A step at a time. And was he still asking her about her underwear? In the main he wasn’t. But then he didn’t really have to, did he, since he’d chosen it for her. The perfect riposte, this, to the psychopath who rings you up and badgers you to tell him the colour of your scanties. Get him to go out and buy you your scanties.

  So what were they discussing? Culture. He was a cultured man, her heavy breather. He liked reading, listening to music, going to the theatre and walking. That was when he could. For the last few years, while his late wife was dying of a slow wasting disease, he couldn’t. Hence the loneliness, the wretchedness, the desperation, and as night follows day, the filthy phone calls. Now, though, with his new chum Fay Saffron, he could talk H. E. Bates and Terence Rattigan again to his heart’s content.

  If you could close your eyes to the manner in which he’d introduced himself, he was quite a catch. He even had a house in Alderley Edge.

  ‘Alderley Edge!’ my mother repeated. ‘And he condenses books for the Reader’s Digest!’

  Yes, the moral infection of swag had taken its toll of us intellectually too. How long was it since any of the women in our house had bought a Collins Classic? Austens, Jane; Brontës, Charlotte; Gaskells, Mrs? — all forgotten. They read magazines now, showbiz gossip, tittle tattle about the Royal Family, and condensed books. And they’d stopped listening to Tchaikovsky. Once upon a time we’d sat in a circle in the dark, oying over the Overture to Romeo and Juliet. It had made us all lovesick together. Not any more. I had my own methods for making myself lovesick now and my aunties were getting off on Sammy Davis Jnr and the Melachrino Strings. We were acculturating to a lower class of English person.

  Or they were. By way of compensation I was going far out in the opposite direction. I wanted nothing of anything that anyone I knew liked. It was a good job Twink had vanished from my life, otherwise I would have set about putting him right. Getting him on to Lieder instead of all that Puccini crap. Schubert, Twink, and not Lilac Time either.

  Oh no, swag was not going to get me. I would belong to nothing and to no one rather than to swag.

  But by God I had to fight against its volubility. The noise our culture made as it ran down! The racket!

  We’d been softly spoken when we’d first bundled our belongings over from the Bug. Shush, lie low, keep shtum, and they may not notice we are here. But we’d forgotten our own lessons. Fallen in love with the host culture again, or rather with the lack of it. Even our pronunciation was deteriorating. Boggart Hole Clough, to take an example at random, Boggart Hole Clough where I’d picnicked as a little boy with some of my mother’s friends from the International Brigade, hopping on to a bus at the bottom of Blackley New Road, Boggart Hole Clough which you would have thought was characterful enough already, was now Buggart ‘Awl Cloof. We didn’t hop on to a bus any longer either, we caught t’buzz. Nor did we picnic. We bootered buhns which we shuvelled into our cake’oles in frunt of t’telly. We sooked hoomboohgs. We moonched fuhdge. Soon we’d be throwing stones.

  It was no quieter anywhere else in Kamenets Podolski, north Manchester. We were all racketin’ down t’plug’ole together. Next door, where the Markses lived, was even worse. For his seventeenth birthday Selwyn Marks had been given a secondhand Morris Minor. His brother Louis flew back from Israel to teach him to drive it. He’d only been away a year but he was a different colour now — no longer dun from the Dniester but Negev umber — and spoke with a broken accent. He knocked up with me on the table that was still out in their garden, balanced on a couple of dustbins, rotting, bubbling, whitened by the sun and the rain, curled at the corners. ‘I cannot play tsis game any more,’ he told me. ‘I’m musclebound from drrriving jeeps.’ He was in training to lift for Israel at the next Olympic Games. Which meant that while he could raise five grown men above his head he’d rupture himself if he had to bend down for a ping-pong ball. Selwyn had given up ping-pong altogether. Swimming too. Now he was going to be a racing driver. The only sport in which there was no anti-Semitism. ‘How do you figure that, Selwyn?’ I asked him. ‘It’s the helmets,’ he said. ‘They can’t see how big your nose is.’

  He should never have been allowed to sit at the controls of a car, with or without Louis next to him. He panicked too easily. Just reversing out of the path was more than he could manage without it erupting
into a shouting match with every member of his family.

  ‘I’ve got my left hand down. I’ve got my left hand down. What do you think I’ve got down.’

  ‘Selwyn, go slower,’ his mother called.

  ‘Mother, if I go any slower I’ll be going backwards.’

  ‘Meshuggener!’ his father shouted. ‘You’re already going backwards!’

  ‘I’m meant to be going backwards!’

  ‘So go backwards!’

  ‘But slower, Selwyn. Go slow. Where are you layfing to?’

  ‘Now come up grradually off tse clutch,’ you could hear Louis advising, next to him.

  ‘Tse clutch? What’s tse clutch all of a sudden. My car isn’t fitted with tse clutch.’

  ‘Selwyn, if you don’t vant my chelp I can go back to Israel.’

  ‘Vant! Chelp! Why are you talking to me like a fucking German?’

  ‘Selwyn, wash your mouth out.’

  ‘Wash my mouth out? What about vash my mouth out! How can I vash my mouth out ven I’m drriving. I’m drriving a fucking car here!’

  ‘Selwyn, don’t talk to your brother like that. He’s come a hundred thousand miles to teach you.’

  ‘I’m not talking to my brother.’

  ‘Then who are you talking to? Your mother? You’re swearing at your mother now!’

  ‘Let him swear at me, let him swear. Just make him go slow.’

  Slow? So far the car hadn’t moved more than six inches. But it always ended the same way, with Selwyn snagging the gears, coming up too quickly off the clutch, burning the brakes, and slamming into the front wall.

  ‘If you von’t listen to me …’ I heard Louis complaining one afternoon.

  It was Friday. The early rush hour where we lived. Shabbes looming. Everywhere people returning home, bearing sweet red wine and milky bread, driving into their paths. Only Selwyn still trying to get out of his.