The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘I’m listening, I’m listening!’ he was shouting. He was revving the engine hard. I could smell oil and burning rubber. The same smell that hung over Cheetham Hill for weeks after Copestake’s warehouse had gone up in smoke.

  ‘Then do vot I’m telling you. Always look in your mirror before rrreversing out.’

  ‘How can I look in the mirror? I’m concentrating on my driving. If I look in the mirror I crash the car.’

  ‘You’ll crrrash the car anyway. You always crrrash the car.’

  ‘What do you mean I always crash the car? When did I crash the car?’

  ‘Selwyn, look in the mirrror.’

  ‘I’m looking, I’m looking.’

  ‘Now rrelease your chandbrake, slowly. Slowly! Vot gear are you in?’

  ‘I’m in gear, how do I know which, I’m looking in my mirror.’

  ‘Rrelease the chandbrake. You’re rruining your brrakes. Rrelease your chandbrake, Selwyn!’

  ‘Which is the handbrake?’

  And then bang! Into the wall again.

  ‘That’s it,’ Louis said, jumping out of the passenger seat. ‘I cannot teach you! You’re unteachable.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be unteachable if you were any kind of teacher. I can’t understand what you’re telling me. Suddenly you’re talking to me like a Nazi. Vot’s vid de vot? You go to Israel and you come back looking like a shvartzer and talking like Hitler.’

  ‘You’re a lunatic,’ Louis said. ‘You’re a total tsedraiter.’

  ‘I’m the tsedraiter! Who’s the one that’s asking me to do a hundred things at vonce? Take tse brake off, put tse brake on, look in tse mirror, change tse gears …’

  ‘Lig in drerd, Selwyn! I should never chave tried! I should chave stayed in Eilat. Teach yourself to drrrive!’

  And that was what Selwyn did. He looked in his mirror, found reverse, released his handbrake, eased off the clutch, backed into the street, changed into first and then second and then third, easy, sped towards the main road, had no idea what to do next, and plunged into the traffic like the person he had never in his life been, and never again would be, the bravest wildest maddest kid on the funfair dodgems.

  Died on his way to hospital. Mangled. Killed by Christians. Was not how the local Jewish papers reported it. Merely: Selwyn Marks, younger son of Ida and Leon Marks. Tragically. Of multiple injuries. Only a few hundred yards from his home. Driving alone on a provisional licence. His car a seventeenth-birthday present from his loving parents.

  Selwyn Marks, suddenly, to the grief of his distraught family.

  Marks, Selwyn, beloved younger son and brother.

  A flower ripped untimely from its stem.

  Marks, Louis, stayed out in the garden for the whole of that night, howling like a wolf and pulling branches off the trees. My grandfather commented on his demented appearance the next day. ‘Isn’t he that wrestler — Jimmy … ?’

  The noise was so frightening I wouldn’t have dared going out to comfort him even if I’d been able to think of anything comforting to say. But I remained awake, watching from my bedroom window, in a sort of second-best vigil. I couldn’t cry. Everything stopped at my throat. But it wasn’t the stoppage I’d looked for from Lorna Peachley. That was a rapture. A lightness. This was heavy with fascination. Not the unimaginable torpor that followed my grandmother’s death, either: the night that never knows the relief of morning; the grey half-lit dawn that never breaks into the colours of day. No, this was more dreadful because more exciting. I knelt at my bedroom window with my nose to the pane watching Louis tearing up the garden, and was exhilarated.

  That was a big thing that was happening out there. A major event. Beautiful, as are all catastrophes.

  It was only when he’d smashed the ping-pong table and then ripped apart the dustbins it had stood on, one after the other with his bare hands, banging the jagged sections against his chest, making the blood flow, that Louis went inside.

  Inside.

  Not so beautiful now.

  Not so exhilarating suddenly.

  And when I thought of what inside must have been like I was ashamed of myself for not crying for Selwyn and for merely playing at life and death with Lorna Peachley.

  You should not make a tsatske out of mortality.

  If that is not a commandment it ought to be.

  So Lorna Peachley, too, through no fault of her own, became associated with that moral infection of triviality which I was determined to escape.

  But not just yet.

  THREE

  It is definitely harmful to your game to take up a racket unless you are in the mood.

  Victor Barna

  EVERY MORNING AT school assembly, after prayers, the headmaster coughed, looked up like a conductor waiting for his orchestra to settle down, put his thumbs into the lapels of his gown, and read out the names of boys who had achieved something – let it be academic, artistic, sporting or simply in the field of personal development – of which the school could be proud. Stuart Grimshaw had won a place to study hairdressing at Sale College of Advanced Education — well done, Stuart. Mick Hargreaves had saved a cat from drowning in the Irwell — step up to collect your medal, Mick. Doug Swindells had kept a clean sheet in goal for Newton-le-Willows Nebbishkeits, including saving a penalty, and his mother was in hospital having her varicose veins removed — we’re all behind you, Dougie.

  Notice anyone missing? Proud of, and behind whom, the school was not, even though he was currently the fourth ranked ping-pong player under eighteen in the country, holder of nine titles, and owner of more silver cups and medals than Stuart Grimshaw, Mick Hargreaves and Dougie Swindells had had hot dinners?

  In the six years I was at the school only one truly accomplished and successful athlete emerged, and that was me. The rest were just nochshleppers. And yet not one word of my accomplishments did it breathe. Which is why when the Old Boys’ Newsletter arrives, asking for help to build a new gymnasium, I recite a little curse over it and throw it in the bin. Oliver’s revenge.

  I did once summon up the courage to knock on the headmaster’s door, to formally lodge a complaint. ‘What’s your problem, Mr Horsfield — isn’t the game at which I excel shaygets enough for you? Do you have to kick shit out of people before you consider it sport round here? Do you have to roll in mud and shove your face up someone’s arse? Is it too much for you to bear, you yiddenfeit, you anti-Semitic piece of crap, that we should be good at a game and win scholarships to Oxford and Cambridge? Is that more than an erstwhile fucking Church of England grammar school can swallow? Well prepare to swallow more, shithead. Meet the master race. You’re looking at a double starred first and the next World Ping-Pong Champion. Won’t that be something for you to ignore in favour of how Albert Shaygets came last in the All Radcliffe fishing gala with an already dead mackerel measuring a quarter of an inch — we’re all proud of you Albert, you dim-witted freckled little snub nose petseleh, you!’

  What I actually said, or rather what I found a roundabout way of wondering, was whether the headmaster was apprised of the fact that I had just represented my county at table tennis. Yes, he affirmed, looking me up and down as though I might be dripping something offensive and indelible on his carpet, yes he was, and he congratulated me if I had attained to something I had wanted, but the school, the school attached no more value to what I did on a ping-pong table than to what I did on a shove-halfpenny board. Anything else, Walzer?

  You plough a lonely furrow as a ping-pong champion, that’s my point. I’m not surprised I got high on losing. At least people like you when you lose.

  But I didn’t start losing all at once. It wasn’t a matter of going down to Lorna Peachley and her zinging pudendum and immediately dashing out and losing to the whole world. Quite the opposite at first. What worked best was to beat absolutely everybody and then lose to Lorna. You have to be rich to be comprehensively fleeced. You have to have something they want to steal. And you can’t go from high to low in a single sweet
disgusting bat’s cave instant if you’re flat on your belly when you start.

  It was always when I’d just lifted another title that the longing for Lorna Peachley to take me by my handle and wield me was at its strongest. Behold, the conqueror returns – Imperial Caesar, Tamburlaine, Napoleon, wreathed in garlands, god-like, riding in triumph through Persepolis. Now approach, my little soft-limbed silver-throated witch, unbuckle here and make the tyrant tremble at your feet …

  Pure pornography. The sexual history of slaves. The epic poem, as old as religion itself (and we are good at religion, my people), chanting the exultant longed-for fall from high to low. But all pornography must end in death — so did I mean it? Did I really really mean it?

  Of course not. I was tsatskying. Even when I gave her my throat I was only tsatskying. I’d have run a mile had she put a mark on me. But it felt as though I meant it.

  At the last I was only answering a challenge buried deep in the social history of the game itself. It was too small. A parlour game. It suffered from too modest a conception of itself. Ping-pong — what kind of name was that? Table tennis was hardly any better, with its reminder of all the ways in which it wasn’t tennis proper, real tennis, tennis in the open air, tennis under the sun, tennis that bit into your flesh and turned it the colour of maple syrup, big tennis, expansive tennis, jet-set tennis, tennis for grown-ups, tennis which Jezebels rolled up to watch in their thousands, tennis which made heroes and heartthrobs out of tennis players. Name me ten table tennis players for whom your heart throbs. Name me five. Name me one.

  Table tennis. Ping-pong. Gossima … Think of it, gossima! A good name for a condom, what? You won’t even know you’re wearing it. Whiff Waff was another one they tried. Meaning what? Something insubstantial, piffling, neither here nor there, like swatting at flies. You won’t even know you’re playing it. Why didn’t they just call it that – Something Piffling- and have done?

  And what do you do, Mr Walzer? I excel at Something Piffling.

  Doesn’t it make perfect sense to choose to lose, finally, at such a game?

  And what do you do, Mr Walzer? I fail to make an impression at Something Piffling.

  Choose to lose at something small and don’t you as a consequence win at something big? Was that not the paradox embraced by Jesus Christ our Lord? Forgo the whole world and thereby gain eternity? (I’ve said we are good at religion, my people.)

  This is not a rationalization, though I see that it may appear that way. Grandiose in my ambitions I may have been, but in the final analysis I was never comfortable winning. I didn’t like the way it made me feel. And I never liked the way it made other people look. I remain a devoted student of the subject to this day — the illness of winning. I watch it day in and day out on television. I know the personalities — just like my grandfather did. Nastase, McEnroe, Navratilova, Coe, Christie, Lewis, Budd, Klinsmann, Cantona, every member of every Australian cricket team, Tyson, Eubank, Ballesteros, Norman, Hill, Schumacher, Curry, Cousins, Torvill, Dean. A roll call of the psychotic. It’s like having television cameras running day and night in an asylum. Me me me me me me me me me me me me. And I am as transfixed by it as anybody. I can’t get enough. It’s like seeing your own soul out there, your own pumping heart, blood-red like meat in a butcher’s shop, charging around in shorts and running shoes. It’s like watching your own steak and kidney kishkies punching the air.

  The ultimate B-movie. The Horror of the Human Will. Forget the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Forget the Fly. This one’s really sticky. This one’s come out of soup too disgusting to describe. And the telly commentators call it character.

  So am I the only Christian around here? Am I the only one who believes that character is letting the other sinner win?

  Here, have. You want it? You want it that much? Then have it, you sick fuck.

  Geh gesunterhait, as Jesus would have said.

  In an actual life, of course, these things have their own vicissitudinous way of working themselves out; they have a chronology, a history of apparent accidentality, they come off other people like balls off the walls of a squash court. I was destined to throw matches, to give up, to walk away, to storm off the table because my opponent was trying too hard – such an eventuality was written in my blood, it was always going to happen — but it took Lorna Peachley to get me started.

  We were seeing each other again. I’d kept away, after her note, respecting her right not to be given headaches or otherwise made to feel peculiar by me. Up to her to decide what next, if anything. And when. I missed her, but I had no desire to ruin the poor girl’s life.

  She kept me waiting for about a fortnight, then she phoned, her voice slightly chilly, but not downright freezing, reminding me that a match against Hampshire, her old county, was coming up – a needle match for which she was eager to be on the top of her form – and wondering therefore if we oughtn’t to get some serious practice in. We didn’t discuss what had passed between us. We just knocked up for hours, careful never to play an actual game, for fear that I’d lose it and the whole thing would start all over. She kept her tracksuit bottoms on the whole time, too, just in case — I presumed this was her reasoning — just in case the sight of her prancing pudendum got me thinking about death again.

  As if.

  I’m sorry for Lorna Peachley. I’m sorry for all lovely girls. They fear they are the cause of their own troubles, but are never quite sure why. If they cover up a little – if they hide this bit or that bit — will it save them? Will someone then love them the way they long to be loved, without complications, without giving them headaches, just for themselves?

  We won handsomely against Hampshire, paired exquisitely and chastely in the mixed doubles, saying excuse me if our shoulders brushed, and then contrived to stay over in Winchester an extra night. I was driving now. My father had lent me his back-up van, the Bedford dormobile with the sliding doors, on the understanding that I’d pick up a gross of two-pound sugar bags for him on my way out of town and on my way back in. Sugar was his new plunder line. Out they go and out they go! It was part of our war against the food boys. They’d taken to introducing swag lines, so we’d taken to introducing food. Tins of pink salmon at first. Then ham in triangular tins. Then tea. Now sugar. Knocked out at cost, sometimes below cost. Loss-leaders. And we led at losing, we Walzers. We got through mountains of the stuff. The trouble was the food boys had ordered the cash and carries to stop serving my father. As yet they didn’t all know who I was. They didn’t make the connection. So I was the sugar shlepper. Provided I picked up as many two-pound bags of sugar as they’d serve me every time I drove it, I could have the van. Which was fine by me now that I’d learnt from Sheeny the trick of criss-crossing the bags in the aisle between the rear seats so that they made a bed. A sugar bed. A bed of pure sweetness. On which, in a lay-by outside Winchester, Lorna Peachley stretched out all her moving body parts, exhausted from their exertions against her old county, and went to sleep in my arms.

  We woke in the middle of the night, laughing, with granules squirting into us from underneath.

  ‘Great idea, Sheeny,’ I said later. ‘That’s got to be the worst bed I ever slept on.’

  ‘Did you get what you were after or not?’ he asked me.

  A tough question. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I got what I was after.’

  ‘Then don’t complain,’ Sheeny said.

  Did I get what I was after?

  She was beautiful to hold, granulated or not. She melted in my arms. She had that gift. The moving body parts. She fitted everywhere. Her bones folded. She flowed into you like hot wax. And she was more fragrant than a field of flowers. And more flavoursome. Lucozadey, minty, malted milkshakey. Not olivey, as you’d have expected. Not sun ripened. Not sun dark. But sun yellowed. All things white and golden. Honey and yoghurt. I could have drunk her perspiration. I did drink her perspiration. I rolled on top of her and licked it from her neck. Then she opened her mouth, and I was gone, vanished, a sea creatu
re that lived a life of complete happiness, wanting for nothing, in the spaces between her syrup gums. And the one luxury item I am allowed to have with me on my Desert Island, to go with the Bible and the eight records of Schubert Lieder? Lorna Peachley’s mouth.

  And don’t come looking for me, please.

  The gift. Some have it, some don’t. And there’s never any way of knowing until you get in there and find out. The gift of bodily mellifluousness. It’s more than physical. The body alone cannot generate such music. In Lorna’s case it felt ethical. She had a daily beauty in her life.

  So you could say she was my big chance.

  ‘Hold me,’ she said.

  But I couldn’t.

  I could take hold. And of course I could be held. But I couldn’t give hold.

  ‘Love me,’ she said.

  But I couldn’t.

  I could make love. And of course I could be loved. But I couldn’t give love.

  She clutched at me as though she was drowning. I had fucked her head, punched holes in her, and now she was drowning, wouldn’t I save her? If I could have, I would have.

  She sat up, and brushed sugar from herself. ‘Why did you bring me here?’ she asked.

  I shrugged in the dark. ‘Because I wanted to be with you.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  Didn’t I? I shrugged some more.

  ‘I don’t think you know what you want,’ she said.

  She sounded very bitter, weary and without hope, just as my grandmother used to sound.

  I said nothing. I sat with my head between my knees and spun in the blackness like a satellite.

  ‘I think you’re too complicated for me,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand what you’re up to half the time. I can never tell what you want. You make me feel stupid.’