The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  I did, though, decide against bringing out Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. It was a wise decision. Not because it was bashed after the years it had served as my de facto ping-pong bat, but because it was written by a man. Books written by men were frowned upon by Yorath and Rubella. We were here to study literature, and literature was written by women.

  I remember my first week in Cambridge, and I remember my last, otherwise it’s a blur. Necrosis of the memory. Nature’s way of being kind. It’s not reality man cannot bear too much of, it’s shame. It’s Cambridge.

  And of my first week it’s the first day I remember most clearly. Everything that was ever going to happen to me in Cambridge, happened that day. Everybody I was ever going to meet, I met then. And everything I was ever going to feel — but let’s leave feeling out of this or hysterical amnesia will swallow up even day one.

  Day One. It Happened On Day One.

  For all the difference the other years made, I might just as well have gone home in the morning.

  I arrived off the Manchester train in the early afternoon, and was immediately suspicious of how everyone appeared to know one another. Not only the returnees, but new boys like me. Where had they met? Was this another of those party situations where you turn your back for two minutes and when you next look around everyone is intimate, in love, and skilful on the ball?

  The taxi driver laughed when he saw my matching suitcases — though even I had thought the compressed cardboard a tolerable imitation of bruised leather, and the polka-dot pattern not lacking in traveller’s chic. When I told him which college I was going to he laughed again.

  ‘Are those dogs or bags, sir?’ the college porter asked me. ‘Because if they’re dogs they’re not allowed in your room.’

  Then he laughed too.

  They could smell swag on me.

  There were three invitations in crested college envelopes waiting for me in my pigeon hole. An invitation to sherry from Lord Neville-Hacket, the Master. An invitation to sherry from the President of GCQ, the Golem College Quaffers, the college sporting club. (This was the moment I realized my reputation as a spieler of distinction had come before me.) And an invitation to sherry from Yorath and Rubella. All three were for 7.30, after hall, that night.

  I succumbed to an immediate migraine. How do you go to three sherry parties simultaneously? For a grandiose emergency-recourse man there can be nothing worse — all your fall-back positions falling at once.

  Rather than think about ordering preferences, I forwent the luxury of taking slow possession of my oak-panelled room and spent what was left of the afternoon at Woolworths instead, choosing a teapot, a toasting fork, two willow-patterned sideplates, and a tea cloth with the University arms on it. I also had to see to personal stationery, decide on a ring-binder, and organize to have one of the old coffee-table Bosch prints framed. Returning along Jesus Lane, absorbed in perturbations not of my own making, I knocked a small elderly gentleman, who on a second glance proved to be E. M. Forster, into the gutter. Too overawed to apologize, I backed into the road and was hit by C. S. Lewis on a bicycle. In the course of neither of these collisions did any party say a word or otherwise signal awareness that anything had happened. For the however many semi-amnesic years I was there — if I was there — this remained the Cambridge way. You didn’t see, you didn’t allude, you didn’t acknowledge. You went everywhere with your eyes down, and if that meant that you rode over your own tutor neither you nor he was going to be uncouth enough to mention it. Practicality lay behind this, partly. I see that. In a small town you can’t keep saying hello to the same person. Nor can you go on apologizing — ‘Whoops! There I go again’ — every time you inadvertently barge him into the river. But shyness had a lot to do with it as well. And shyness, as I knew from my own family, is catching. Already, after only an hour of Cambridge, I could feel the red rush of awkwardness returning to my cheeks. If I wasn’t careful I would soon have a shell on my back again. And it would be no consolation that every other person in Cambridge was carrying one too.

  Not wanting to make anyone’s acquaintance in this condition, I didn’t linger in the main Golem quadrangle — an ugly open-plan classical rehash, like Old Trafford with Doric columns, at present littered with trunks and real leather suitcases which no porter found funny — but returned quickly to my aerie, opened first the first and second the second door, turned on the gas fire, and stretched out on my bed.

  Ah, Cambridge! My Alma Mater. My foster-mother-in-waiting — at last!

  Back home, my real mother and my aunties would be thinking about me. Oliver gone where none of them had ever been or ever dreamt of going. Oliver collegiate. Oliver become a man. Oliver receiving invitations from Lords noch. Oliver confronting his destiny.

  Swish! went the Lady Ogimura’s kimono. From a willow-patterned sideplate she helped herself with dainty fingers to a toasted teacake dripping butter. Snap! went her suspenders.

  At about five someone knocked. I had dozed off, overcome by gas fumes. I wasn’t sure whether to shout ‘Come in!’ or to answer the door formally, so I did both, colliding with my visitor in the airlock between the inner door and the outer.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  He was a black white man. That’s to say he was white but appeared to carry a black shadow of himself around with him. He saw me mystified by his penumbra. Staring.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  ‘I knocked,’ he said, ‘because your oak wasn’t sported.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve disturbed you. You should sport your oak.’

  He had a thick throaty voice which seemed to be a burden to him, like a heavy shopping bag. And a surprise to him too, as though he suspected it belonged to someone else. Maybe even wished it to belong to someone else, since he looked mightily uncomfortable as himself. He had a deep dark cleft in his chin, of the sort my sisters considered manly, which he sawed away at with the side of his thumb, making it ever deeper.

  ‘No, no’ I said, ‘I want to be disturbed.’

  ‘So I have disturbed you. Sorry.’

  ‘No you haven,’t’ I said. ‘Please come in.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. He fell into my room. Sideways. ‘I’ll have dry.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘… Sherry.’

  Damn! Sherry! I had the teapot, I had the toasting fork, but where was the sherry? ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I only got in a couple of hours ago. I’ll nip out …’

  ‘No, no. Buttery’s closed. Anyway, look, why don’t you come to my room.’

  He looked around to be certain it really was him who was talking.

  ‘I could make tea,’ I said.

  Through a thicket of black wrist hairs he consulted his watch. Charily, as though he feared it might jump him. ‘Too late for tea for me,’ he said. ‘Do you have port?’

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Port ditto.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘As with sherry, so with port …’

  ‘Is that a northern expression?’

  ‘No. Just as I don’t have sherry, I don’t have port.’

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be an expression. As with sherry, so with port. Like plus ça change.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la mêmo chose.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘As with sherry, so with port. Plus ça change

  ‘I see it,’ I said.

  ‘So have you got any?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  He looked relieved. Now he could gracefully leave. He’d only just entered but being here was a torment to him. And to me. ‘Then come to my room,’ he said. ‘I’ve got bottles of the stuff.’

  ‘By the way,’ I said as we clattered down a flight, ‘I’m Walzer.’

  ‘I’ ‘know,’ he said. ‘It’s on your door. I’m Rivers.’

  ‘Not St John,’ I laughed, giving him
my hand.

  ‘I am actually, yes. My brother’s Rochester.’

  ‘Rochester Rivers?’

  ‘No. Edward Rochester. He’s my half-brother.’

  ‘The next thing you’ll be telling me,’ I said, ‘is that your mother’s locked away in an attic’

  He shot me an intense look from his whiteless eyes. A black bolt. ‘How did you know that?’ he said.

  I tried for a joke. It was either that or die. ‘As with sherry, so with port,’ I said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘As with sherry — look, it doesn’t matter.’

  I didn’t have a chance. I saw it at that moment, once and for all. Not a hope. I’d never hold out against them. Once a turtle, always a turtle. And I’d come to a turtle farm.

  We were now in his room. He told me he’d come up only yesterday, yet already the room bore the stamp of the man. Dark. Confined. Over-charged. Ominous. Fucking deranged. How had he done it in a day? I looked at his shelves. Austens, Jane. Burneys, Fanny. Brontës, All Of Them. But also Dostoevskys, Fyodor. And Gogols, Nikolai. And Pushkins, Alexander. Not in translation, either.

  ‘You read Russian?’ he asked me. ‘You look as though you read Russian.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Though I come from there, partly, sort of, a long time ago. You?’

  ‘Do I come from there?’

  ‘Do you read it?’

  ‘Read it, speak it, breathe it,’ he said.

  Then he directed my attention to the mantelpiece on which were a number of heavily ornate icon-like frames all containing photographs of the same woman. Plump and peevish and over-painted.

  ‘Yasmin,’ he said.

  ‘She’s very beautiful,’ I lied. No more attic jokes.

  ‘My wife,’ he said.

  ‘You’re married?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘But you’re about to be?’

  ‘Soon. The moment she agrees.’

  ‘She hasn’t agreed yet?’

  ‘She hasn’t met me yet.’

  His hands shook when he poured me port. Mine shook when I lit his cigarette. We affected each other badly. We set each other jumping, like a pair of back to back magnets.

  ‘Not that I’ve got much time to play with,’ he went on. ‘I’m not expecting to live all that long.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It has to be soon because I’ve been told I’m not going to live long. Look,’ he said, showing me his palm.

  There were no lights on in his room, and only the smallest turret window, giving out on to a shaded service yard. So it wasn’t easy to see much. But even in the dark I could make out that he had no life line to speak of. To speak of? Let’s not beat about the bush — he had none. As far as his palm was concerned he was already a dead man.

  ‘How do you mean you’ve been told you’re not going to live long?’ I said, which in the circumstances was as good as changing the subject.

  ‘Fifty years ago my grandfather met a Kazakh fortune-teller on a train from Uzbekistan to Tientsin. The fortune-teller tried to leap from the carriage when he saw my grandfather’s palm, but my grandfather insisted on knowing the worst. “If it’s to be, it’s to be,” he said. “On your own head and the heads of your progeny be it,” the fortune-teller replied, and proceeded to tell him that neither he, nor his youngest son, nor his youngest son’s youngest son, would survive past the age of forty. My grandfather died in his thirty-ninth year. My father died when he was twenty-eight. I am the youngest son of the youngest son.’

  What do you say to that on your first day in Cambridge?

  I wished Sheeny were here. ‘Oy a broch!’

  Without him the best I could manage was, ‘I’m not sure how much trust I would want to repose in a fortune-teller I met on a train in that part of the world.’

  Cambridge prim. And I hadn’t even had my first tutorial with Yorath or Rubella yet.

  ‘Aren’t you?’ St John Rivers said. He’d turned shirty on me. Suddenly he wasn’t two people. Shirty, he was entirely himself. ‘Aren’t you? It would be interesting to hear what my father and grandfather would have to say to that.’

  Whereupon he walked out. Walked out of his own room and left me there in the gloom, to finish my port, gaze on Yasmin and sport his oak for him. When I next saw him he was at the Master’s sherry party, showing his palm around. He affected not to know me.

  I would soon learn that by Cambridge and especially by Golem College standards there was nothing especially untoward in any of this — people were always walking out without a word. Tutors did it as a matter of course. One second you were rehearsing your weekly essay before the sternest of judges, the next you were reading to an empty room. Often you didn’t even see them go. Lecturers practised it too, turning on their heel mid-sentence, their gowns billowing, leaving three hundred of us with our pens in the air. All perfectly commonplace. Not rudeness, shyness. They weren’t up to saying, ‘Excuse me.’ As for affecting not to know you, that was a Golem College speciality. Iaoin Yorath would wonder who you were in the middle of a conversation. I have a dim memory of him dismissing me from his presence on at least two occasions on the grounds that I was an interloper and that he only supervised members of the college.

  ‘Dr Yorath, I am here in your room at your invitation,’ I can just about remember telling him.

  ‘The more fool me!’ was his reply.

  I mention this by way of protecting St John Rivers’s good name. Yes, he was fucking deranged, but they all were. Taken all round he was probably less deranged than the rest of them. At least he wasn’t a fantasist. In the matter of his prognostications about his marriage to Yasmin, for example, he was proved dead right. He’d seen her photograph in a Leningrad paper originally and had tracked her down from that. He was writing to her every few days at the time I encountered him and she was replying with a weekly photo. Finally he went to collect her. Married her in the Christmas vacation with the blessing of her family, posed for a rigor mortis wedding photograph on a bridge on Nevsky Prospekt — the Venice of the East, my arse, St John! — then brought her back to Cambridge. This was in his third year as an undergraduate. Two months later she ran off with the captain of the Golem College croquet team. Not a word. Just wasn’t there any more. The ethos had got to her, too, you see. Didn’t even leave him a photograph.

  Shortly before his finals, St John Rivers threw himself out of his little turret window.

  So he was right about his life prospects as well.

  But I didn’t yet know what was in store for either of us. For Day One, Person One, he was fucking deranged enough.

  By the time I got to the Master’s sherry party, which I reckoned had to be number one priority whatever I did next, I was on shpilkes. If my suitcases were wrong then my Kardomah suit was bound to be wrong. St John Rivers had not understood most of what I’d said to him, thinking I was speaking in Manchester tongues — what if the Master asked me to pronounce Boggart Hole Clough? What if he wasn’t looking where he was going and walked into me? What if I walked into him? What if I made an allusion to a mad wife in the attic and he had a mad wife in the attic?

  I’ve said it’s catching, embarrassment. And I’d caught it. I was in a fever of it.

  We stood in a line and the Master inspected us, like troops. I remember thinking he was going to check behind our ears. We were all freshmen. Welcome to Golem College, that was his message to us. Welcome, men.

  Men? I’d become a man all of a sudden. If I was a man why didn’t I feel like a man? And why didn’t the others look like men?

  Why didn’t the Master look like a man, come to that?

  He didn’t have a young face exactly. In fact, when you got close, you could see that it was coming apart, the jaw precarious, the cheeks dropping, the eyes loose enough to be shaken out of their sockets. But he bore no signs of wear and tear. It wasn’t dilapidation that was at work on him, it was disparity. No two features agreed. His face had simply fallen out with itself.

  H
e walked along the line, asking names and shaking hands. When he came to me something extraordinary happened. He said, ‘Don’t tell me.’ Then he lowered his head, showing me his baldness. Was I meant to kiss it? Was that what you did when you met a Lord? ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me,’ he said again, tapping his temples. Then he came back up smiling. Not one tooth alike unto any other, except in the matter of looseness. ‘Walzer!’ he said. And he played an imaginary ping-pong shot, a scooping backhand drive that would have missed the table by a mile.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Well?’ he waited. ‘What’s your response?’ And when he saw that I was nonplussed he played the shot again, this time from a less cramped position and with more topspin. ‘Well, Mr Walzer?’

  Was I really expected to pretend to hit it back? Were we really going to play a game of shadow ping-pong with everybody watching? And was I required to let him win?

  I chopped. Deep and low. My classy forehand chop from before the days of sponge and sandwich.

  ‘Good man,’ he laughed, moving on. ‘You’ll do.’

  Not keeping it simple, that was always my trouble. Just like my father with his Yo-Yo. ‘Point to you actually, Master,’ I said. ‘I’ve netted my return.’

  He was polite enough to nod. But I could see that already I bored him. Prolix. Pity.

  For my part I was chuffed that he knew my name almost alone of all the line of freshmen, but I had mixed feelings about being here on the strength of my ping-pong. I thought I’d put all that behind me with the swag and tsatskes. To be resurrected, as a fall-back position, only if I flunked Collins Classics. That’s assuming I could resurrect it.

  ‘What was all that about?’ St John Fivers asked. He seemed to know who I was again.