The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  So what was the problem? The connection. In the end I couldn’t take the connection. Only connect. Well, I’d knocked him into the gutter on Day One. That should have been a warning. I couldn’t connect. I was ashamed of her. Not because of her glass eye. Not because she’d done slut. Not because she was now doing non-slut. And not even because she was a mother, although mother is a serious charge to lay against any woman. No, what I couldn’t hack was that she was unserer. What was I doing with one of ours, one of us? Now that the tarantella fever of the gypsy Jewess music had cooled, now that I no longer listened to her bejewelled thighs clanking faithlessly in the night, I couldn’t see the point of her as a companion for me. She was a backward step. The children were a backward step. We had two. She wanted a third. She’d worked it all out. There was time for a fourth. Maybe a fifth. How many backward steps could I take before I fell?

  What is the meaning of life if it is not escape through ascent? Up out of the dirt, out of the filth, out of the shell, out of the suck and pull of the swag and the tsatskes, up and away into the clear uncluttered blue. Shaygets blue? No, I never wanted to be a shaygets. Just a tree, a good strong healthy Bug and Dniester tree, re-planted in a more clement soil, showing its branches above the others.

  Otherwise I might as well have stayed in Manchester and gone on playing ping-pong.

  So, goodnight Sabine Walzer née Weinberger.

  And the children? Baruch and Channa as they were not as yet called?

  Oh, yes, the children.

  I affect a hardness of heart in relation to my children for reasons that are only partially clear to me. I don’t trust people who are pious about children. I’d go further: it’s my experience that people who are pious about children nurse a malevolence towards the rest of humanity that would make the devil reel. They only have to begin the sentence — ‘The last thing I want to see while I’m sitting watching television with my children …’ — and I know I’m in the presence of unadulterated evil. But that’s not it; that’s not the reason I affect a hardness of heart in relation to my own.

  Somebody has said that you cannot love a child unless you once loved the child in yourself. What do I mean somebody has said it? Everybody has said it! Well, the child in myself was no great shakes. I couldn’t wait to see the back of him.

  And I knew what remained of me well enough, now that I had seen the back of him, to be reasonably confident I wouldn’t terribly miss being a father. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t wait to see the back of them.

  I walked them to school in Clifton on my farewell morning, the three of us enjoying the nip of cold in the air, kicking leaves, smelling the buildings. It was the eternal autumnal school morning. I could taste the leather strap of my old school satchel on my teeth.

  But their satchels weren’t made of leather. Brightly coloured nylon, that was what they carried their books and pencil cases in, because schooldays were meant to be happier now.

  I held each of them by the hand, to stop them skipping into the road. It was like being plugged into two separate sources of warmth. I am deriving pleasure today, I thought, doing for the last time a thing I have never enjoyed doing before. That’s how important pain is to pleasure.

  They were too small still to understand what it meant when I knelt between them at the school gate and said, ‘Now Daddy is going away for quite a long time, but I’ll write to you and send you presents.’

  What’s ‘quite a long time’ when you don’t add up to ten between you?

  They weren’t distressed. They didn’t know to be distressed. As for me, I couldn’t hold my face together, but I wasn’t sure who I was the more distressed for, them or me. At the moment of taking permanent farewell of your children it’s difficult to make those sorts of distinctions: you are more them than you are yourself.

  And then they were gone, swept up into the noise of the playground. The noise I never liked when I was in the midst of it; the noise I now love with a passion when I pass it on the other side of the railings.

  I made it half-way home, my jaw disconnected from my face, my head going from one side to the other, struggling for air like a fading swimmer, until the waters crashed over me and I found myself, I didn’t know how much later, cowering in somebody’s front garden, hiding from the world just as I had when I’d lacked the courage to front up to my children’s mother’s party a thousand years before.

  What’s the opposite to a presentiment? What do you call the sensation — infinitely less spectral than déjà vu, infinitely more behavioural and normalized — of having done a deed a hundred times before, although you never knew you had until now? That was how I felt about this morning’s leave-taking of my children. I knew the scene backwards. It was as if I’d been practising it all my life.

  So, yes, goodnight to them too.

  They were better off without me. The grandiose have no business fathering children. Especially the grandiose who like to lose big.

  That’s no example to set a child.

  FOUR

  There is no such thing as an ex ping-pong player. Years after your last game you go on wondering why you lost, or why you couldn’t have won more comfortably.

  You are never free, no, not even in the grave. As your flesh rots around you in the blackness, you will still be trying to hit the ball past an opponent you cannot see. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand years of striving … and still, through the silent night, the ball coming back …

  Ping-Pong Under the Roman Occupation, Kar Domah

  (Reprinted in Ping-Pong: A Guide to the Perplexed, Oliver Walzer)

  I LEFT THE country. Cleaner that way. Let them hear the twig break. Besides, there were more jobs for Collins Classics men out of the country. Colonies especially good. There was so much interest in the Brontës — any of them, didn’t matter which — that you only had to say you’d read one and the job was yours. Embarrassing, the number of offers that rolled in. But those were simpler times. The women hadn’t yet re-appropriated the women. And French theory hadn’t yet cowed the glorious pragmatism of the Anglo-Saxon mind. You read a book and extrapolated its moral, that was all there was to teaching in those days. You read the novel, you told the story, you animadverted on its adequacy to experience. Full stop.

  Our subject was the book, not the sociology of the study of the book. Babies that we were.

  I should have seen the writing on the wall when my own Ph.D. thesis — The Wound Re-Opened: A Comparative Study of Shyness and Other Social Excruciations in the Novels of Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf — was knocked back comprehensively not only by the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press but by every academic publisher in Britain and America. A methodological problem. I was too old fashioned. I was no good on words as signs. Arkansas University Press liked my prose style and wondered if I had anything more up to the minute in the pipeline. Hence my ping-pong manual. But by the time they got that out into the shops in a language which Americans could understand it too was obsolete.

  Now I hang on by my fingertips. Independently funded colleges, shonky private universities, non-Italian language speaking institutions with the occasional extra-mural this and that for visiting foreigners — I take what I can get. I am yesterday’s man.

  It’s amazing how long you can go on being yesterday’s man and still draw breath. It helps, of course, if you have a little something from Gershom and Dora Finkel to ease the pain. It means you can rent a very small room not quite overlooking the Grand or even one of the Not So Grand Canals, but looking over something every bit as smelly, and afford a sufficiency of pasta and cheap Venetian wine and free light. And it means you can believe you’ve attained the clear uncluttered blue.

  For the Brontës as understood by a man there is now little or no call, but people do want to know what Byron and Ruskin and Henry James did when they were here, to say nothing of Casanova. And I can give them that, not exactly from the woman’s point of view, but as it impinged on women, so to speak.

 
It’s not impossible you’ve seen me on your summer holidays, or in the course of one of those lightning weekend breaks designed to relieve you of your air miles, holding aloft a black umbrella, leading my Asian and American charges from one culture-drenched palazzo to the next, on and off those magnificently unfillable and not at all vaporous pontoons, the vaporetti, halting on this bridge or on that to tell them of murders and seductions and other art-associated gossip. Most of it invented by me.

  The Moody-Merchant of Venice.

  But at least it’s not the Irwell.

  And at least it’s not swag.

  Correction: at least it’s not Walzer swag.

  And the death thing doesn’t worry me? The coffined gondolas, the sudden closures of vista, the menacing shadows, the floods, the fires, the sinking stucco, the feeling you have that the malaria has never really gone away?

  It’s someone else’s death — that always helps. I see or hear one drop almost every week. Sometimes it’s just the sound of one going into the canal you hear. Not a splash, more a thud. Like someone falling on to a sheet of Copestake’s foam. Ooch plock! But you can also get the whole melodrama, such as when I had to lead a group of my charges away from an outdoor restaurant in San Stefano recently, where a gentleman no older than me was springing blood from both nostrils, a pair of crimson jets flooding his basket of bread, his plate of coda di ròspo, stealing over the starched white tablecloth as though from underneath, as though the table itself had been wounded and meant to bleed for ever. It’s a deeper red when it’s more than just a nose bleed. And a heavier downpour. When the brain is bleeding you don’t even try to save the fish.

  But of course for a moment it looked beautiful, like another proof of the ancient Venetian gift for decoration. A bold aesthetic coup — red on white, liquid on cloth, flesh on stone.

  I suppose I ought not to have walked my party in the other direction. Isn’t death in Venice what they have come to see? For certainly no one does it better.

  So no, except in so far as everything worries me now, the death part of Venice doesn’t worry me unduly. There’s been more of it in Manchester. Too much death in Manchester for me ever to go back willingly to the place. The city itself had the heart ripped out of it long before the IRA did its bit. Torn apart to make room for tsatske precincts for the post-industrial poor. Tickle the poor into town with tsatskes and they take over the town. Mate, multiply, bebop, stick needles into themselves, put pistols to your head. Try Manchester after midnight today and you’ll think you’ve walked into the Book of Revelation. I’d say wall it up and forget it exists if there weren’t some of my own still in there. Not many. Not as many as there used to be. The heart has been ripped out of the Walzers and the Saffrons as well. And that’s the only reason I ever return: to bury another of us.

  Fay was the first. Suddenly and in her sleep. Of fright.

  Routine check-up, routine recommendation that she come back in for a second opinion. Just in case what they’d found was a tumour. They named it, you see. They spoke the word. Only just in case, but the word was out and once the word’s out there’s no taking it back.

  She died dreading.

  The old Saffron fear of sphericality — whatever was round and incalculable.

  And the old Saffron horror of our own insides.

  Poor Fay. I know how she must have felt. If only we’d been born hollow. With our giblets in a removable plastic bag.

  I flew back from a conference for her funeral. It was November, as it always is when we bury our northern dead. The ground cold but not yet hard. We die soggy in the North. We come apart like cardboard.

  My mother was scarcely alive herself. She had wept for thirty-six hours. No sleep, no food, just tears and telephone calls.

  ‘I feel as if I’ll cry for ever,’ she told me. ‘Poor Fay. She was just a kid. She was barely older than my own children. She hadn’t started to live yet. I won’t ever get over it.’

  Too cruel when it’s the youngest who goes first. But there was an over-and-above cruelty which no one could bear to put into words. No, she hadn’t lived, but she was just starting to. She died, as though to satisfy some spite at the very core of things, just as she was putting a life together. She was in love, skippingly in love with her nuisance caller and engaged to marry him. For years she’d rejected every suggestion of a face to face encounter, content to go on talking over the blower, afraid of what he would be like in the flesh, afraid of what she would be like in the flesh. Then finally they did it, met for tea and cucumber sandwiches at the Midland Hotel, pink carnations in their buttonholes, a palm court orchestra playing, and my father hiding behind the palms in case of trouble. There was no trouble. How could there be? They were already good friends, knew everything there was to know about each other — favourite book, favourite walk, favourite short piece of music, favourite long piece of music, favourite colour, favourite smell, favourite fear — and had learnt to understand the meaning of every hesitation and intake of breath. The telephone teaches you to listen if nothing else. And they’d been on the telephone a long time.

  Had she lived, she would have changed her name to Fenwick, moved into a house with verandahs on Alderley Edge, woken to the sound of birdsong, and become a stepmother, maybe a mother in her own right. It was all just beginning for her. She wasn’t even forty yet.

  We had to tear my grandfather away from the television for the funeral. Put a suit on him, empty his pockets of sweet wrappers, brush his hair and shove him into the hearse. For a brief moment all sides of our family thought as one: it should have been him we were removing from our sight.

  That we were changed by Fay’s death goes without saying. But what changed us most was the depth of Duncan Fenwick’s grief. He was inconsolable. He hung on to my mother when the coffin was carried out of the house, and then joined the remaining Saffron women when the time came for them to throw themselves upon it. He called her name over and over — ‘Fay, Fay, oh Fay!’ — a bloodcurdling lament which made her unrecognizable to us, not ours at all in death, because at the last she had not been ours but someone else’s in life. We made room for him, even Fay’s sisters parted, so that the last kiss on the coffin could be his.

  We let him have her.

  No one could have looked less like us, less like either side of us. From the way he dressed and carried himself you would have picked him for a market gardener, a small landowner in corduroys and green waterproofs, smelling of turnips and rabbit fur. But there was something of the New World pioneer about him too, an optimism in the way he took his time and moved his stringy joints, deceptively pared down, like a nutcracker. He was lightly freckled, with a tumble of pale orange hair and piercing powder-blue eyes. He spoke slowly, and nicely. A Manchester distinction. Doesn’t he speak nice! It was his gentle well-spokenness that had attracted Fay to him in the first place when he’d rung at random to ask the colour of her pants. None of us bore such confident leisureliness in our voices, as though there weren’t a thousand other things happening that you had to be heard over, as though there was no reason in the world to rush your words, because where you lived everything had stayed the same for centuries, and marauding Cossacks were few and far between. And yet here he was, among us, grieving with us, sorrowing for one of us. Forever to miss Fay as much as we would. Maybe more.

  And maybe with more reason. Because Fay’s queer unaccustomedness, her absence of all worldly competence, had saved him from God knows what fate. Who else but Fay would have kept the phone to her ear and listened to all that filth in the first place?

  So we let him have her, and more to the point, we let her have him. There was the change: we conceded they’d been lucky in each other.

  Whenever one of my sisters next took home a floppy-prepuced white man the name of Duncan Fenwick would be invoked to prevent either my father or my mother — depending on whose turn it was — getting the platz. Hadn’t Duncan Fenwick, against all the odds, turned out to be a shtik naches? Hadn’t he shown himself t
o be a mensch, a gentleman, a person of the deepest feelings, capable of a loyalty to one of us that maybe none of us could match? So why shouldn’t this latest treife gatecrasher turn out to be the same? Duncan Fenwick had adored our Fay, alav ha-shalom, and would have made her deliriously happy: why shouldn’t Gordon le Goy do likewise with our Hetty? And in the end, as though we’d gradually stopped noticing the difference, as though it had ceased at the last to matter, that was precisely who we welcomed into the family — Gordon le Goy. Followed by Benedict von Baitsimmer. My brothers-in-law.

  I say ‘welcomed’, but you know what I mean. Didn’t offer a thousand pounds in used flims to vanish out of sight. Didn’t set about with an axe. Didn’t say prayers for the dead over Hetty and Sandra as a consequence.

  You know — welcomed.

  But even that would have been a welcome too far in the eyes of some. All very well being accommodating, but wasn’t our neighbourliness bound to spell the beginning of the end of the Saffrons and the Walzers?

  You know the game: change Walzer to le Goy in four moves, altering only one letter at a time. You have twenty seconds.

  Baruch and Channa Weinberger née Walzer’s view exactly. In fact in their view the twenty seconds were already up. The dreaded thing had happened. What Hitler hadn’t achieved in Auschwitz — I know, I know: there’s no bottom to the vulgarity of the Orthodox — we Walzers had done to ourselves in north Manchester.

  Well I’m their father and it’s my duty to tell them what I think. Shem zikh in dayn vaytn haldz. You should be ashamed to the depths of your throat.

  To be humane means to stay calm and wait your turn. What goes around comes around. The goyim thicken our soup, we thicken theirs.

  That’s always been the way of it. How otherwise do you explain the tristful warrior aspect of the Kazakh which you’ve inherited from my side of the family, and that inane insensate Junker expression which you’ve been cursed with from your mother’s? Why do you think you still don’t look like fucking Abraham?