The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  Well, I was almost right. They did rebel. They did reject their mother and their visionary second daddy. But not for the reasons I’d have liked. They rejected them for not being fervid enough. ‘But Mummy, Mummy, Moshiach is coming!’ they cried, changing their names to you-know-what and flinging themselves down that black well of messianic Hasidism of which Manchester is today as much a thriving battery farm as it once was of Yo-Yoists and Mosley’s Black Shirts. I suppose I should have been flattered. What are Hasids after all but mental orgiasts from our side of the Bug? In their own way Channa and Baruch were turning tail on their cold maternal Junker ancestry in favour of their daddy’s (their real daddy’s) bunch — the whirling Russki Walzers. A compliment to me, n’est çe pas?

  Maybe that was why I got my invitation. The bride and groom must have wanted their union enriched by one drop of genuine Ukrainian peasant blood.

  I’ve told you what I thought of the wedding. It turned my stomach. I watched my mother ratchet back her head another couple of degrees, then dab her eyes in the fashion of all grandmas; a marriage is a marriage is a marriage. I watched her lose herself in ceremony, shuffle back and forth in time, remember hers, remember mine, remember Fay’s that never was, but in the end I suspect the masculinism must have turned her stomach too. Not that I was able to find out. We weren’t allowed to sit together.

  One consolation though: later I was allowed to dance with my new son-in-law.

  If I had to compress all my objections into one objection then what I couldn’t forgive most about the thing Channa had done was the colour of her husband’s mouth. No daughter of mine should ever have wanted to put her lips to something as red and wet and unformed as that. That’s if they were ever intending to touch lips.

  Not a subject a father should be putting his mind to? You bet it isn’t! But who were the ones making it impossible for me to do anything else? Who were the exhibitionists inviting me, by that hideous inverse law of demonstrative modesty, to imagine every immodesty known to man?

  As with kindness so with chastity: it only becomes you when you keep the evidence of it to yourself.

  They could of course — and this is their justification, my little ones — have me for dinner morally. They could argue that someone has to respect distance in a family; that my form of shrinking was hardly superior to theirs; that they at least don’t cut one another’s heads off in order to see how they would look on the bodies of trollops. And that they are not intending to abandon their children.

  And they would have a point.

  But then I could just as easily make plain to Channa that her refusal to invite my sisters — her own aunties — to her day of days, put her (as indeed it put Baruch, who should have counselled otherwise) for ever beyond the moral pale.

  I learnt of this omission first on one of my mother’s absorbent sheets of Albanian notepaper. She was deeply wounded on my sisters’ behalf, but she sought as always a practical solution. We wouldn’t tell them.

  ‘T-G they’re not likely to hear of it where they’re living.’

  I wrote back and said that under no circumstances would I dream of attending a wedding, even my own daughter’s, that excluded my sisters on the grounds that they were married to untouchables.

  I also reminded her that my sisters were only living in Bury.

  Back came the Albanian reply — ‘Try looking at it from Channa’s point of view. She’s marrying into a very devout and very well-respected family. If you were in Manchester more you would have a better sense of how well she’s done, and you would be more proud of her. You already have very little to do with her. If you don’t go to her wedding you will end up losing all contact with her completely, G—d forbid.’

  ‘Which won’t unduly worry me,’ I replied by return.

  ‘But it will me,’ my mother answered. ‘I’m her grandmother.’

  So that was how your father came to be there for your noxious nuptials, Channaleh, though it stuck in his craw I can tell you. Yes, you are right, your father is a Godless bastard. But answer me this: if the Creator whom you and that wet-mouth Shmuelly worship holds it as a matter of urgency that the feelings of Aunty Hetty and Aunty Sandra are to be considered of no account because their husbands are defiled by the prepuces which were His fucking invention in the first place, what the Christ are you doing giving credence to a word He says?

  Honouring God isn’t compulsory, you know, even if He exists. You may choose not to.

  That was our big contribution however many years ago. We discriminated. We chose. With plenty to choose from, we chose Him. And because we knew how touchy He was we went along with the pretence that He was choosing us. But it is open to us at any time to go back on our decision. ‘Sorry about that but we’ve changed our minds. Your Own fault. You’ve gone off.’

  Think of it this way: worse by far than a universe without a trace of a divine spark is a universe manifestly driven by One All-Powerful God who happens not to be worth a pinch of shit either as a judge or as an exemplar.

  Receive then as my wedding present to you, my darling, my annual report on your progress in Theology and Human Relations:

  COULD DO BETTER.

  FINALE

  I came back to New York City without a wife … Three years of sunshine and brown grass had left me unfit for the battle zones of Manhattan’s West Side. Taxicabs would dive out of the curbs like so many sharks’ noses: I saw teeth behind the grilles, and I froze, unable to step off the sidewalk. I couldn’t go underground: the scream of subway cars frightened me …

  Isolated, morose, I turned to ping-pong —

  ‘Ping-Pong in New York’, Jerome Charyn

  THEY SPEAK A different language in Manchester today. G-MEX was where I was told I would find the World Veterans’ Ping-Pong Championships. Standing for Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre. Take the METROLINK to G-MEX. It used to be Central Station, but that’s not how they name amenities in Manchester any more. Central Station would be CENTRAX. And the Free Trade Hall? Well there wouldn’t be a Free Trade Hall. Free Trade was an idea, a principle, and who would dare associate a building with a principle these days?

  There is a new concert hall in Manchester. The Bridgewater Hall, named after the canal over which it decorously presides. It could have been worse. It could have been BRIDEX or MANCON. But as a one-time resident and sometime re-visitor I’d have preferred to see it called Edification House, or the Elitism Room, or even Le Grand Theatre des Spectacles Artistiques if the English language is no longer capable of expressing a big idea. Something for Mancunians to be proud of. Something that’s not G-MEX or Boogart ‘Awl Cloof.

  You can see G-MEX from the Bridgewater Hall. Position yourself on one of the upper floors and look across Lower Mosley Street (Lower Oswald Mosley Street?) and you get a good view of the grand rainbow sweep of the glass and iron fantasy that was Central Station. Catching a train meant something in those days. Departure and arrival, too, were ideas, principles, deserving of a Hall. And what a hall! Wonderful, the confidence Victorians enjoyed in their capacity to enclose any space, no matter how vast, and shelter it from nature.

  I made do with the external view for a while, leafing through postcards in the concert hall shop, picking up and putting down items of useless stationery, shmying just like my old man, except that I shmy only in arts-related environments.

  I bought a birthday card with a cello on it, although it was no one’s birthday. I didn’t yet have the courage to cross Lower Mosley Street. I hadn’t seen ping-pong played in Manchester for close to forty years. I wasn’t sure that my heart could take it.

  Would it be like that unforgettable ping-pong virgin’s view of the twenty tables in action at the Tower Ballroom? Would it live up to my first ever tournament when I pushed open the doors to the Sports Hall at Manchester University, and pow! — the Happy Valley, the Garden of the Hesperides, green, green as far as the eye could see, like the foothills to Heaven?

  Reader, it was.

  Reader
, it did.

  Only more so.

  Did they know, the architects of Central Station, when they erected their magnificent vestibule for those arriving in the city of Manchester by train, that they were also designing a ping-pong palace to take the breath away?

  Forget twenty tables going at once. Forget fifty. Forget even seventy-five. One hundred. One hundred — that’s how many matches were in progress when I finally summoned up the courage to cross Lower Mosley Street, negotiate the METROLINK tracks, buy a ticket, pass the bouncer (for that’s what Manchester has come to: it has bouncers even for ping-pong), and go in. Oof plock, oof plock, times one hundred.

  Did I wish I was playing? Did the hand that once had held the racket itch?

  Yes.

  No.

  Yes.

  But itch is not the word. More a longing, if a hand can long.

  Leave the hand out of it. I longed. I wandered between the tables, up this row, down that row, paused, watched, clapped, walked on again, the whole time trembling with longing. Not for the game itself, though, not first and foremost for ping-pong, entrancing as it was to see it played expertly again. First and foremost what I trembled with longing for was the fellowship, the company, the players. I yearned to be among them; I yearned to be of them. Of them again. For they were my age, you see. All of them. My age or older. Veterans. And where do you see large numbers of people your own age when you’re my age? Where else on the planet could I have marched into a room the size of the Piazza del San Marco and found two hundred men and women at one hundred tables, and just as many waiting their turn, not a single one of whom was self-mutilated or self-conscious, zonked one way or another with the difficulties of being young? Leave aside what they were doing. Just concentrate on them. They were of my time. They shared my sense of the ridiculous and the tragic. And for that I loved them with a passion.

  It’s a wonderful provision of nature that we should go on loving people positioned at the same point between life and death as we ourselves are. It’s good genetic economics. It means we look after one another. It means we don’t hanker unseasonably after the young. And when we do, we know it’s an aberration. The same would hold for hankering after the old, but of course no one does hanker after the old. Which is why we need one another.

  Myself I’m picky about the age of the people I mix with these days to within a latitude of about eighteen months. It’s very nearly all I look for. You’re how old? Excellent. Me too. Let’s be friends, lovers, whatever. Let’s go on holiday together, let’s buy a house, let’s start a business, let’s never part.

  My emotional preferences aside, that it actually suited the game to be played by people the age I now was I would never have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. It was as if I had come full circle. Here were my heroes again, the war-torn and the lugubrious, the pallid and the famished, the hollow-eyed indoor nihilists from Prague and Budapest whom I’d got to know from their clumsy black and white portraits in Barna’s and Bergmann’s instruction manuals, come alive half a century later in G-MEX. I am not speaking fancifully. I am not talking resemblances. Some of those very men were actually here. Don’t allow the venue to take away from the eminence of the event. This was a World Championships. You could go away from here in a week’s time and be World Over-Forties’ Champion, World Over-Fifties’ Champion, Over-Sixties’, Over-Seventies’, Over-Eighties’ even. The honours justified the strain on the pension. So it stood to reason that many of the players I’d admired as a boy would be in Manchester, on the glory road again. But what was wonderful was that they had not adjusted to the times; they were not a modern version of themselves; except for the tracksuits which they wore instead of cardigans, and the surgical bandages in which they were ceremented, they were themselves as they had always been — just as morose, just as highly-strung, just as heart-broken.

  The game looked like a pursuit of the jaded intellect once more, that’s what I’m saying. Yes, the fat-nippled spam-thin bats had gone and would never return; yes, the technology had advanced to the point where even the glue with which you attached your rubbers to your blade had become decisive, a matter of subtle preferences and choices, so much so that you could be deemed to have gone too far, to have overdosed your bat, to have submitted it to substance abuse, the merest suspicion of which would have the tournament referee removing it from the hall and feeding it into a glue-sniffing machine positioned in the officials’ area; and yes, one smash with a Yasaka Mark V rubber, which you buy packaged like a CD — ‘Every shot aimed at glory’ it promises on the sleeve — and that was that, point over. But despite all this, the deportment of the veterans themselves restored the game’s Old World raffish European dignity. Every player looked like an academic philosopher again. And played like an academic philosopher too. There was Althusser hitting shots behind his back, and Derrida putting wiggle on the ball. There was Steiner needlessly belting shit out of the softest of opponents. And look — bouncing in a little pleated skirt and Reeboks, Susan Sontag, playing safe.

  Seventh heaven for me. I couldn’t remember when, on behalf of humanity so to speak, I had ever experienced a sweeter mix of melancholy and elation.

  On behalf of myself I was more circumspect. High up on that secret shaming midnight list of all the things I could have been had life only treated me differently was ping-pong player to end ping-pong players. The best the world had ever seen. The Mighty Walzer. Now, in the presence of a thousand and one adroit and plucky competitors from every corner of the globe, I had to swallow a bitter pill. I would never have come close. My talent was not extraordinary. It was not even exceptional. I had only ever been so-so.

  Do I mean it? Even if I’d practised harder? Even if my temperament had been sounder? Even if I hadn’t fallen in love with losing at a susceptible age?

  I mean it. I would only ever have been so-so. It is important to me to open that wound and rub salt in it. So-So Walzer. So-so and no more.

  There was one consolation, should I have been small-minded enough to take it: the game attracted just as little interest among the lay public as it always had. The only spectators, apart from me, were other players not currently engaged in a match or already knocked out. We played for one another. Whatever applause there was came from our own number. No one else gave a damn. So even if I had been in possession of an exceptional or extraordinary talent, it would have blushed unseen, its sweetness wasted on a sour world.

  I was sad for myself all the same. So-So Walzer. Fancy having to face up to that so long after the event. Something else would now have to fill the space on that secret shaming midnight list.

  Because you cannot live without the idea that you are exceptional at something, can you?

  Or can you?

  I retired to the back of the hall where the seating was tiered and empty, dropped my head between my knees and fell into a contemplative mood, lulled by the oof plock, oof plock times one hundred.

  Why had it mattered so much that I be out of the ordinary?

  Why did it always have to be win big or lose big?

  Why had the game been everything and then nothing to me?

  Why had I turned against it?

  Why, in a word, wasn’t I still playing as the vets all were — for the fun and companionship of it, all in it together, content, most of them, not to be out of the ordinary?

  I mustn’t idealize. There was plenty of the old spermed-up tantrum throwing, even among the altie kackers. The bat-slapping, the complaining about injustice, the screams of ‘No!’, the irritation with yourself, the irritation with your equipment, the anger with the ball, the anger with opponents whose games were too leisurely or too rushed, the gracelessness. ‘I know, I lost it,’ I listened to a woman with overlapping thighs saying to her friends, in the hearing of the person who had just beaten her. ‘She didn’t win it, I lost it. I know. It’s my own bloody fault. I’m too fat. I was knackered by the middle of the second game. I’m probably better off in the consolations anyway.’<
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  Especially bad, the women. One match was becoming so ill tempered I could hear it from the top of the tiered seating, even though it was in progress at the opposite end of the hall. I hurried down to see what was the matter. A rather attractively out of focus furry Iranian woman now playing for a club in Middlesex was locked in a bitter point by point dispute with an ostrich of a New Yorker called Rhea. Rhea would put her hand up to say she wasn’t ready every time Shanda crouched to serve. Shanda would then turn her back on the table and make an appeal with her big dark blasted eyes to a personage whom I took to be her husband on the grounds that he looked worn out and kept shouting at her to calm down. Then she would go on a short raging walk, swing around suddenly, and crouch to serve again.

  ‘Are you ready now?’

  Rhea nodded.

  Shanda threw up the ball.

  Rhea put up her hand.

  ‘Stay calm,’ Shanda’s husband said.

  Shanda towelled herself down, threw the towel at her husband and went on another walk.

  ‘Keep calm,’ he said again. ‘You’ll lose it if you don’t stay calm.’

  ‘How you expect me to stay calm? She keep saying she not ready.’

  ‘Take no notice. Just do the business.’

  ‘Every time I serve.’

  ‘Shanda!’

  ‘What else you expect of a damn Yankee?’

  I watched Rhea think about hurling her bat. Had there been an official referee umpiring the match she may well have lodged a complaint. But this was only round one, when any old person does the scoring. She nodded, instead, to signal she was ready.