The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, still spinning between my knees. ‘I don’t mean to do that. I don’t think you’re stupid. I think you’re lovely.’

  ‘Lovely isn’t the opposite of stupid,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think you’re stupid.’

  ‘Well that’s how you make me feel. Stupid and useless. Do you think I don’t know that you lose to me on purpose? Why are you trying to make a fool of me?’

  ‘I don’t lose to you on purpose. And I’m not trying to make a fool of you. I like losing to you.’

  ‘There you are! You like losing to me. You do it on purpose. What for? Why are you making me ill? Why do you bring me out here in this horrible van and then go all touch-me-not on me? What are all these games, Oliver?’

  ‘Believe me, Lorna, I have not gone touch-me-not on you. I have never wanted to touch anyone more.’

  ‘You’re not there, Oliver. You’re just not there.’

  ‘I’m here,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, you’re here. But your heart isn’t. That’s if you’ve got a heart.’

  ‘I’ve got a heart …’

  ‘You just don’t feel anything with it.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘What do you feel?’

  I paused. ‘Love for you.’

  No good. I heard it myself. No good. No bass in it. No weight. No heart. Just Whiff Waff. And you don’t get a second go.

  ‘Take me home, Oliver,’ she said. ‘And then please leave me alone. Go and lose to someone else.’

  So I did.

  No reason to do otherwise now. Why win? If there was no eel-slick little witch waiting to unbuckle, and take it all away from me again, why bother to ride in triumph through Persepolis in the first place?

  No more interest in winning for its own sake?

  Couldn’t do it. Now that I was entering the men’s game, putting away childish things, I couldn’t do it. Winning is a test of character, as every sporting commentator will tell you, and I didn’t have any character. Grandiosity, yes. Skills, yes. But character? Bottle? Creature from the Black Lagoon determination, knowing what you want and allowing nothing and nobody to stand in your way? Forget it.

  I dropped myself from the county team so that Lorna could go on playing uncompromised. I suppose you could say that that showed character of sorts. But I was only getting in before they did. My form was shot. I went for six weeks without winning a game for the Hagganah. And serious questions were being asked about my temperament. Even about my manners.

  Things came to a head the night we played the Railways, away. This was never a fixture I’d enjoyed. Even allowing for how little I enjoyed any fixture these days, in the company of the unfanatics, the otherwise engaged who were now my team-mates, the Railways stood out as dismal. The playing conditions were partly to blame. The Railways Social Club was a single room, painted glossy St Onan’s Church of England Grammar cream, through which ran more pipes than I had ever seen and which also housed the staff lockers, banks upon banks of them in pitted tin, like a mausoleum for lunch boxes, each one individually defaced with purple marker for identification purposes. This meant that at any time some sooty engine driver would barge in, regardless of the state of play, in order to change into a clean singlet. And you don’t argue with an engine driver, or with a guard come to that, when he’s just come in off his shift. In an earlier confrontation with the railways I’d hit a ball which landed in a guard’s locker just as he was closing it. ‘I won’t be opening that again, flower,’ he informed me, ‘until I’m back from Doncaster.’ To make things worse the tannoy system had to be on at all times, so that everyone could be made aware of any emergencies, derailments, late arrivals and departures, changes to the roster and so on. And you know what it’s like trying to make sense of anything anybody says into a railway microphone. ‘Is that me they’re calling?’ your opponent would suddenly wonder, if you happened to be playing well; and he’d be off to find out, leaving you standing there like a coitus interruptus, going off the boil.

  Have I said that there were showers in here as well, behind the highest and most precarious burial pyre of lunch boxes? You could hear them singing as they lathered, drivers, guards, porters, furnace men, getting up steam. ‘When your swer-her-heetheart, sends a leh-heh-letter, of goo-hoo-hoodbye …’ You felt close enough to soap their backs.

  ‘Shut up!’ one of the ping-pong players would always shout, feebly, without any expectation of success. ‘We’re trying to concentrate here. It’s match night!’

  Came the invariable reply: ‘Get fucked — this is a play area!’

  The real Hagganah men handled it better than I did. Another night, another fixture, another win.

  But they weren’t in decline. They weren’t terminal either/or merchants. They were just taking a break from what else interested them in life. So it was no skin off their noses how distracting the conditions at the Railways were, or what manner of beast you had to play when you got there. Whereas I was personally affronted by every single member of the Railways team, the thin streaks of piss that they were, with their dowager humps and their ruched reptilian necks and their shorts always too brief and their self-castigations — ‘Rubbish, you clown!’ — and their self-exhortations — ‘Come on, these five! come on, these four! come on, these three!’ – and their cute nicknames for themselves – Royboy, Stanley Roylance called himself, ‘That’s it, Royboy, let’s go, that’s it now’ – lanky, loping, leaping, undernourished, their thin hair stuck up as though electrocuted, their little all-bone tocheses stuck out indomitable as goitres, creatures from the black lagoon of the blind will. What were they doing anywhere near my game, whose subtleties were first revealed by moon-faced pessimistic lugubrious men from Hungary and Czechoslovakia – Barna, Vana, Farkas, Boros, Tsorres — witty hangdog Bug and Dniester losers who played in long trousers and collars and ties?

  ‘I don’t know about you …’ Sheeny whispered as we took our seats.

  ‘Me neither …’ I said.

  ‘They’re so …’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more …’ I said.

  ‘Where do they … ?’

  ‘Say no more,’ I said.

  We both knew where they … The black lagoon.

  ‘Soft hands, let’s go!’ Roylance urged himself. He was a game down against Saul Yesner, and not liking it. ‘What am I doing losing to this twat?’ I heard him asking himself as he towelled off. Icy beads of perspiration ran down his throat, as slippery as mercury, not the tropic springs that burst boiling from our pores. ‘Come on, Royboy, come on now!’

  It sometimes happens that one player has all the luck that’s going. You’re meant to live with it. Your turn tomorrow. Tonight, fortune favoured Saul. First an edge. Then the top of the net. Then another edge. And then another. Roylance couldn’t live with it. ‘How many’s that?’ he exploded. ‘Not again!’ And then under his breath, ‘You jammy twat!’

  Saul Yesner raised his hand in apology each time, but otherwise let nothing disturb his concentration. He played like the three wise monkeys. A model of shrewd discretion three times over. He seemed to inhabit some other sphere, like a holy man. It was as though the god of ping-pong played through him. He merely interpreted, making the word flesh. So don’t blame him for the flukes — he was just the messenger.

  He won easily, without the slightest sign that his victory mattered or came as any surprise to him. Of course he won easily! He no more expected to lose than to feel any of the punches we threw at his stomach.

  Royboy could barely find it in himself to shake hands. I could see his lips forming the word twat over and over again.

  So when it came to my turn against him it was already a grudge match in my heart if not in his. I murdered him, therefore — is that what you expect to hear? I tore him limb from fleshless limb? I made lean mincemeat of him? I feasted on his kishkies?

  It was my match to win, let’s put it that way. I held a five-point lead over him when we changed ends in the final game. O
n my serve. The first of which, a backhand topspin corner to corner sandwich special, I over-hit. Not by much but by enough. It gave him confidence. He hitched his shorts, stuck his toches out and decided to make a fight of it. ‘Come on Royboy, these four. These three.’ He sweated over every point, pilules of ice-cold mercury, lifted his hand to call a let if there was the slightest distraction — and when wasn’t there? — and glowered at me from the other end of the table, as though it mattered, in the end, who won and who didn’t.

  My lead narrowed but I held on to it. 19–16, with me to serve. He caught me at 19 all.

  At which moment someone in overalls walked in to use the phone. Have I said that there was a public phone with an acoustic hood over it in the ping-pong room? This caller was at least aware that he’d chosen a bad moment. ‘I’ll just dial in here,’ he said, disappearing behind the door when his number rang, tugging at the phone lead to get as far away from us as was possible. But we could still hear him describing what he wanted for supper.

  ‘Jesus, Joseph and fucking Mary,’ Roylance said.

  ‘Let!’ called the referee.

  I said nothing. Just bounced the ball on the linoleum floor seventeen or eighteen times.

  Roylance took up his feral crouch. ‘These two, Royboy. Come on, soft hands. These two.’

  And that was when my nerve snapped. If he wanted it that badly then he could have it. If I’d been any kind of fighter I’d have made the opposite resolution. If you want it that badly, you sick fuck, you deranged twat-caller, then I’m going to be the one who sees to it you’re never going to get it. But that would have entailed my sticking out my toches and mixing it with him. Accepting that we inhabited an identical universe of desire and will. And that I couldn’t do. Didn’t have what it took. No character. No bottle. Never was a mixer, as my father would have told you.

  So I did the next best thing. I gave it to him as a gift. I had neither the character to win nor the character to consent graciously to his winning. So I gave it to him. You want it that much? Here, have! Geh gesunterhait, go with god’s blessing. And I very obviously served off the table, two preposterously over-hit forehand topspin serves that missed the table by a half-room’s length, sending the ball soaring high over the lunch boxes into the railwaymen’s showers.

  Now no one had won, except on paper.

  I can’t speak for other sports, but this is not something you do in ping-pong. It’s against the spirit of the game. It’s ungenerous. It creates bad feelings.

  Royboy didn’t so much shake my hand as slap it. ‘A win’s a win,’ I heard him saying to his team-mates. ‘I don’t care how I beat the twat.’ But their captain came over to our captain, and our captain had to make a formal apology.

  He said nothing to me that night, but he was on the phone to me early the next morning. ‘Phil Radic here, Oliver. I’ve been talking things over with the boys, and we’re wondering if you need a few weeks off.’

  ‘Is that a nice way of saying you’re dropping me, Phil?’

  ‘You’re wrong, Oliver. I’m the team captain. I don’t have to find a nice way of doing anything. I think you’ve been playing too much, that’s all. I think you should rest yourself for a match or two.’

  ‘Look, Phil,’ I was surprised to hear myself saying, ‘why don’t you just admit you’re dropping me and call it a day at that?’ I remember being pleased that I had found the social confidence to take no shit. Once you’ve been in a shell, you are never free of it. You are always map reading, measuring how far you’ve ventured out.

  ‘Do you want to come over to the club tonight to discuss it?’ Phil Radic asked.

  Language traps you every time. A different question might have elicited a different answer. But, ‘I don’t really think there’s anything to discuss, Phil,’ just seemed irresistible, somehow.

  And then I put the phone down.

  And never played a game of ping-pong in Manchester again.

  FOUR

  BUT THAT STILL left Cambridge.

  And come to that, as far as warm life went, it still left the Kardomah.

  My two fall-back positions. You cover yourself if you’re grandiose. You can forgo being the best at one thing if you’re confident you can be the best at another.

  Royboy Roylance wouldn’t have been able to find his way to the Kardomah in a blue fit. Point to me. Phil Radic would, but where’s Cambridge, Phil? Another point to me.

  See how it works.

  But it meant that I was necessarily a faithless bastard. Ping-pong? What’s that when it’s at home?

  And what’s home?

  It’s a dangerous game to play. You can run out of fall-back positions in the end. You can be left with nothing to beat anybody with. And then where are you?

  BOOK IV

  ONE

  ‘Ping-pong, Pnin?’

  ‘I don’t any more play at games of infants.’

  Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

  THE KARDOMAH WAS my last throw of the tsatske dice, my last spin of the draidle.

  On a crunching colourless December morning my mother came into my room with a telegram from Cambridge in her hand. I was lying on my bed, looking out of the window, staring into the grim grey space where a sky should have been, waiting. ‘I haven’t opened this, darling,’ she said. ‘But don’t be too downhearted. There’s still Aberystwyth.’

  I grabbed it from her. ‘They’re not going to be sending me a telegram,’ I said, ‘to tell me that I’ve not got in. Are they?’

  ‘They could have made a mistake,’ she said. And she fled from me, unable to bear the sight of disappointment dawning in my eyes.

  They hadn’t made a mistake. Not in her sense, anyway.

  Later, when I got there and discovered what an exclusively muscular college Golem was, it was brought home to me that I’d been given a place chiefly on the strength of my ping-pong. Golem College boasted more rugby blues than any other college, more cricket blues, more hockey blues, more soccer blues; it fielded the entire Cambridge real and lawn tennis teams; half the Cambridge Hunt; and it had been Head of the River since there was a river. Its only shortcoming was in the sphere of table sports: billiards, bridge, brag, shove halfpenny, ping-pong — anything for which you didn’t need to wear a jock. Hence me.

  And I’d thought it was my misogyny that had got me in.

  But a place is still a place.

  What I’d have done had I not got into Golem College I don’t know. It wasn’t just to get me over ping-pong that I’d fallen back on Cambridge in advance; it was also to get me over Lorna Peachley. I don’t recall taking her attack on me as an absent person too much to heart. I knew things about me that she didn’t know. But I missed her. I missed our practice sessions. I missed looking at her across the net. I hadn’t loved her. I’d messed around with my feelings for her too much to be left with anything as clean as love. I was conscious of a lack, though, and I gave it her name. I kept thinking I saw her in the street. Several times I actually ran after and accosted her, only to find it was someone else. And that’s almost love, isn’t it? The KD could compensate, as far as mere animal company went, but it couldn’t replace her. Whereas Cambridge, I fancied, would give me another crack at her, or at least at someone like her. Someone who had a daily beauty in her life.

  In the meantime I had to decide what I was going to do with myself between now and next October, when Cambridge started up for me. I was damned if I was going to stay on at school as a sort of living treasure. Oh yes, Horsey Horsfield was proud of me now — Walzer this and Walzer that — but Horsfield could go to the knacker’s yard as far as I was concerned. Love me, love my bat. Except that I could no longer remember where my bat was. And no longer cared. ‘What you could do,’ my father said, ‘is work with me for the next six or seven months.’ But the gaffs were going down the tubes, as a consequence of the amount of loss-leading we were doing, and I knew my father would have had trouble paying me. There was even a growing feeling that it wouldn’t hurt if I star
ted paying him. So I took a job driving a stop-me-and-buy-one ice-cream van in the hope that there’d be a few shillings left over to help the Walzer family finances after tax and whatever I emptied into the cash registers of the Kardomah.

  In the winter? Well there’s the funny thing about ice-cream. People eat more of it when it’s cold and wet than when it’s hot and dry. They did in the part of Manchester I serviced, anyway. It’s a boredom thing. What else are you going to do in Middleton and Radcliffe when it rains? You stay in, watch the telly, scratch your parts and lick a lolly. This is evening psychology I’m describing. I chose the evening shift. That way I could spend all day at the Kardomah. And afterwards nip into Laps’ so that the younger kids could get a gander at me — one-time flicker and chopper extraordinaire, spieler emeritus, now Cambridge double starred misogynist elect.

  I wore a yellow nylon coat with deep pockets, played ‘Greensleeves’ on my chimes, and had to hop out to serve from the side of the vehicle every time I had a customer. Van? Vehicle? It was barely a car let alone a van. A cut-down mini with a cool-box at the back. A fridge on wheels. But the exercise kept me trim. And there was more intimacy in the contact than you get in the conventional stand-up soft-serve Monteverdi van. It was good for pulling, that’s what I’m getting at. Women like a nice fresh-faced broad-shouldered young matriculant in a yellow nylon coat, who gives them free ice-creams. They did in the part of Manchester I serviced, anyway.

  Make no mistake, those were heady days to be selling icecream. Advances in refrigeration and freezing techniques, to say nothing of innovations in artificial flavouring, meant that there was always some new line to introduce the public to. We would be introduced to them ourselves in the depot every Monday morning, all twenty-four of us, the entire retail sales staff, standing shoulder to shoulder in our deep-pocketed nylon coats, heads down like recaptured truants, waiting for the manager to come out of his office carrying his refrigerated briefcase from which he would draw out, one at a time, one for each of us, the latest wafer, lolly, cornet, ice-pop, tub. Only when we were all provided, and on a signal from the manager, a lordly nod of the head — ‘Now!’ — would we unwrap in unison, and taste. ‘Well, Walzer?’ ‘Extremely good, sir. I especially like the suggestion of caramel, and the contrast between the soft ice-cream and the hard biscuit. It’s like a split with an extra surprise thrown in. I think they’re going to take to it, yes, yes I do. And if I may add one more word — (let Rushdie tell you what he likes: I thought of it first) — ‘naughty, sir, but nice.’ He was an Oxford man himself, our depot manager, but he still admired fluency. ‘Excellent, Walzer. Couldn’t have put it better. The target for this depot is twenty thousand pieces a week. I believe we can beat that. What say you men?’