The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  Shanda crouched to serve. Threw up the ball.

  Rhea put up her hand.

  Shanda won in the end. On a net cord at 20–19 in the third.

  They did not shake hands.

  Wherever I went for the next hour, there was Rhea biting her ostrich lip, her long neck white with rage, describing her match to whoever was prepared to listen. You could hear her too, from the opposite end of the hall, pawing the ground and rattling her quills. Eventually a loud series of bangs brought a cry of let! from all one hundred acting umpires. Had there been an explosion? No, it was just Rhea throwing everything she owned into a rubbish bin — her coffee cup, her tournament programme, her towel, her plimsolls, even her bat.

  No, I mustn’t idealize. But I mustn’t sell the occasion short either. It was an old persons’ love fest. They had seen a way of entwining ping-pong with their affections, these globe-trotting veterans, of making it a thing of beneficence to themselves and others. They had set sail on a circuit of the emotions, meeting up every other year in a new corner of the ping-pong playing world; shaking hands, embracing, kissing, laughing, sharing news, exchanging photographs. ‘I’m a grandfather now,’ I heard an ex-Romanian international telling a diminutive Taiwanese lady pusher who had butterflies on her skirt. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Oh, oh, oh’ — like little bells going off. Then she put up her hand, just as Rhea had, rummaged in her sports bag, and brought him out a gift, already wrapped and ribboned, just in case. For grandpa.

  There would be a lot of new grandpas and grandmas you had to remember to bring presents for on the veterans’ circuit.

  Sometimes players exchanged gifts after a game — a wine glass from Bavaria, a set of ornamental chopsticks from Japan — even though they’d never met before today. Next time they’d be friends. They posed with their arms around one another for a picture. You finish? Now I take.

  I felt like a ghost at a banquet. Some advantage — being invisible! Some advantage, when the tables creaked with good things and you weren’t able to taste a morsel!

  I was becoming tearful. The elation/melancholy mix was losing its elation. How much more upset could I take? Everything I saw was as though a lesson or a reproach to me.

  Why, there were men here, playing in the over-eighties’ competition, wearing knee-supports and elastic hose and bandages round every joint, so arthritic that they required the assistance of a third party to retrieve any ball for them that didn’t finish up in the net. They had to hold on to the table between strokes, some of them, so that their own momentum wouldn’t knock them over. Could their imaginations still be rioting in futurity, looking forward to the day when they’d be world beaters?

  In Grand Central Station I sat down and wept.

  It was afternoon teatime on the first day of the Ninth World Veterans’ Championships, and there was still another week to go.

  I could, of course, have called it quits and flown back to Venice. I had come to Manchester for a wedding, not to have my neshome ripped out. But I never once considered it. I would take my punishment like a man.

  I stayed with my mother, in my old room, returning late in the evening and going out again early the next morning, so that she wouldn’t have the chance to make another apology for having given me life.

  Two nights in my old room were usually the most I could take. It’s probably not a good idea for a grown man to return to the room he slept in as a boy. Especially when half his old things are still there — the jigsaws and the crossword books my aunties bought me; the dice for the snakes and ladders; a photograph of my grandmother holding my hand outside the butchers on Waterloo Road; my framed letter of acceptance from Golem College; three certificates from the ice-cream company citing me as salesman of the month; those Collins Classics that weren’t suitable to take to Cambridge; my Manchester and District Table Tennis League Yearbooks; albums of press-cuttings; my cups and medals — all on the very shelves my father had put up for me, hyper-heavy-duty planks of eight by two hard-as-it-comes-hardwood — railway sleepers they had probably been — secured to the walls with ten-inch industrial screws and brackets strong enough to hold up the Titanic, just to be on the safe side. Even the old hoop-la board, with the rubber rings rusted to the hook marked 20, was still hanging where it had last been played with in 1950-something, on the same six-inch galvanized nail which my father had hammered into my bedroom door, just to be on the safe side.

  Best never to see all that stuff again. It doesn’t do to have material evidence of the little that goes into making a life.

  Or to be reminded of the impossibility of ever putting any of it behind you. Of ever putting you behind you.

  That was my usual position. Two nights and gone. But this time I was in no hurry. If that’s what makes a life, that’s what makes a life. Look at it, Walzer. Be grateful. Say Got tsedank.

  I was in a softened state. The veterans had got to me. Instead of immediately turning off the light and falling into troubled sleep the way I usually did when I was back in my old room, I sat up late going through the contents of my shelves, blowing away the dust, easing apart pages that had stuck together, wiping the thumb prints off ancient photographs, and where they were torn, putting them back together.

  ‘I’m glad you’re sorting through your old things,’ my mother said.

  I didn’t know about ‘sorting’. All I was doing was looking. Re-acquainting myself. And doing a little repair work.

  I didn’t know about ‘things’ either. Things? Mother, these are the tsatskes of the heart.

  Then it was back every morning to G-MEX for more upset.

  Was it only the third day, was it only midway through the afternoon of the third day while I was climbing to the top of the tiered section of seats to get a commanding overview of one hundred games of ping-pong, that I heard someone trying out my name — ‘Oliver? Oliver Walzer?’

  I swung around. I’d expected to see people I knew from the past here, but so far the ones I recognized hadn’t recognized me. No one important. No one I could realistically have expected to remember who I was; though their failure to do so underlined the bitter discovery I had already made. That as a ping-pong player, to take it no further than that, I had been unmemorable. So-So Walzer. But now it was my turn not to recognize. If the person who was following me up the steps reminded me of anyone it was Placido Domingo, and I wasn’t expecting to see him at the Ninth World Veterans’ Table Tennis Championships.

  I looked harder. He was a person about my own height and possibly five or six years older. Like me he was in civvies, not here to play — unless he’d played already and crashed out of everything. There was something just the smallest bit old-fashioned about his appearance, for the reason that he was kitted out to look cool and that always dates you if you don’t get it spot on. Black leather jacket, black trousers, open-necked striped shirt, circa 1966. He looked tired. Life-tired. Not bitter — that’s too active. But ingrained with disappointment; not on the look-out any more for anything else. And somewhat uprooted. A bachelor, like me. Maybe another bachelor whose children had been brought up by someone else. But I was damned if I knew who he was.

  ‘It’s Theo,’ he said.

  Theo? I looked at him. Theo? Did I know a Theo?

  I was ready to throw open my arms and say, ‘Theo, how the hell are you?’ to save us both the embarrassment. Eventually he’d let slip something which would give me a clue to the particular Theo he was.

  But then he changed his name to make it easier for me. ‘Twink,’ he said. And it was all I could do not to fall at his feet.

  I was right about his being on his own. You can always tell. It’s the air of time hanging heavy.

  He’d been married. Perfectly nice girl. Three children. All boys. All doing well? Listen, these days you’re doing well if you’ve got a job. So touch wood, yes, doing well. The only one who didn’t have a job was him.

  I don’t know why but this made the black leather jacket somehow more affecting. How old was he now? F
ifty-seven, fifty-eight? Pushing sixty and no job, but still in a leather jacket. Didn’t that have to mean that he was not prepared to go quietly? That he was still showing a bit of the old rebel?

  Or was it only because I would soon be a little old man myself that he heroically didn’t look like a little old man to me? Did we both look like little old men to other people?

  I didn’t want to ask what the job was he no longer had, just in case he’d gone back to working his button machine after national service; I didn’t want to embarrass him. But it came out in the saga. He’d lingered in the South-West once they’d demobbed him from the army — for sweetheart reasons, I gathered — managing a record shop in Bournemouth. He came back to Manchester for his father’s funeral and met his wife. Then he went into business with her brothers. Wallpaper. A wallpaper warehouse on Great Clowes Street. Then her brothers had done the dirty on him. You wouldn’t think it, would you, your own brothers-in-law? Yiddisher boys! But they had. They’d taken his money, removed him slowly from his savings, then nothing like so slowly removed him from the firm. How? Don’t ask him how. His wife took their side. Blood’s thicker than water. So that was the marriage kaput too. Listen, there was no point going over it. He’d seen with his own eyes what harbouring a grudge had done to his father. He wasn’t going to go that way. They could rot in hell, he wasn’t going to think about them. You wouldn’t imagine your own brothers-in-law would do that to you, but that was then and now is now. You have to be philosophical. The ganovim!

  ‘I always thought you were much taller than me,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I was then. You were a kid.’

  ‘No, I mean I always thought of you as really tall — over six foot.’

  He shook his head sadly, as though that was something else that hadn’t worked out — his height.

  ‘But your health’s good?’ I said. ‘You look well.’

  ‘Listen — I’ve got a lazy bowel and a hiatus hernia and I’m on Prozac for worry. But think of all the people we used to know who are dead already.’

  I didn’t ask him to name names. I didn’t want to know.

  We hadn’t moved from where he’d found me. Match after match of high-quality geriatric ping-pong had been won and lost before our very noses while we talked, but ping-pong was the hardest subject for us to broach. It was as if we were old lovers meeting in a bedroom for the first time in nearly forty years, not daring to look at the sheets.

  In the end we broke the truce at the same time, applauding a fusillade of exquisitely timed whipped forehand smashes from Marty Reisman, the great American exponent of pimples who would undoubtedly have become World Champion forty years ago had sponge not happened. He’d been robbed by history, everyone agreed about that. ‘Beautiful to see,’ we said together.

  Beautiful to hear, too — the old plock plock, plock plock.

  Reisman touched his familiar black beret in acknowledgement of our acknowledgement of his genius.

  Setting aside the small matter of that genius, he was me with staying power. He was nearly seventy but he could still hear a hand clapping on another continent; his eyes were going but he could still find a fan in a haystack.

  ‘Did you ever make the change?’ Twink asked me.

  ‘Yes, but I was never really comfortable. I think that’s why I gave it away in the end. I was essentially an old-fashioned player.’

  ‘You’re telling me? I remember saying to you, “Oliver, you’re going to have to adapt.” Do you remember when you won the Manchester Closed for the first time? I said then that you’d made too much of a megilleh of beating that Finn. “You’re going to have to learn to mix your game up, Oliver,” I said. Do you remember that?’

  I didn’t, actually, no. But I said yes, of course I did. And I was touched that he’d remembered my first final, even if he hadn’t remembered it as I’d remembered it.

  ‘The thing about your game,’ he went on, ‘is that you were never really a natural ball-player like me. I played football, cricket, squash, snooker, golf. I was good at all of them. You were a one-game player. I sometimes thought that that made you concentrate too hard. You remember me saying that to you, don’t you?’

  I didn’t, actually, no. But I said, yes, and what about you, Twink, did you change your surface?

  It cannot be of interest to anyone else what we discussed for the next hour or more. We had both only ever been so-so players. Every time Reisman wound up his 1949 forehand we fell quiet and thought about our limitations. But the game had been everything to us for a while, and we went through the textures and the thicknesses of our bats, the strengths of our team, the weaknesses of our opponents, the drives to the venues, the scores, the scandals, the nobbels and the moodies, with the passion with which old pals remember the names of their first girlfriends and the tunes they kissed to.

  It was a worry to me that I couldn’t recognize him. I knew him all right, knew his slightly put-upon way of looking at things, knew his exasperated Laps’ drawl, as though every word had an extra half-syllable appended to it (necessary because no one was ever listening), and I recalled what he recalled (except when he was recalling it about me), but I couldn’t place him. If he walked past me tomorrow I would once again not know that it was him.

  Could it be that too much time had gone by? That the stuff on the shelves in my old room was lying and that I was no longer living the life I’d started out on half a century before?

  If I closed my eyes and opened them again would he still be there? Would he ever have been?

  ‘So what about the opera?’ I asked. ‘How are the tenors going?’

  ‘You remember that?’

  ‘What do you mean, remember that? Jesus, Twink, we talked more tenors than we talked ping-pong.’

  ‘I thought that was Aishky.’

  Aishky.

  There, we’d named him.

  I went very cold. Had Twink been looking he’d have seen the chill creeping up my arms, like the mist rolling in over the Grand Canal. So far he had said nothing of Aishky, had been careful to say nothing, it seemed to me, and I’d not dared to ask, fearing what the silence meant.

  But now the name was out, I had to know.

  ‘Me and Aishky,’ I said. ‘The three of us. He was Lanza, I was Björling. And when he wasn’t around I was Lanza and Björling. Are you in contact with him?’

  I had to wait for my answer. One of the great Chinese players of the past, now living in Germany, was about to begin his match. Lesser players on neighbouring tables stopped their games so that they could get a look at him again.

  ‘I saw him at the Free Trade Hall years ago,’ Twink said.

  ‘Aishky?’

  ‘No, Liang.’

  ‘What about Aishky, Twink?’

  ‘It’s funny you should mention him. How often do I see Aishky? You know what he’s like. He says he’ll be in touch and then you don’t hear a word for twenty years. Once in a blue moon he rings me to see if I feel like a game of kalooki. Then suddenly — listen to this — I see him twice in one day! First when I’m visiting my uncle in Marilyn Kaprowitz House —’

  ‘What’s Marilyn Kaprowitz House?’

  ‘It’s the old people’s home on Crescent Road. It used to be Hillel House. Don’t you remember? We played against them a few times.’

  ‘No, I don’t remember. But look, are you telling me Aishk is in an old people’s home?’

  ‘He works there as a porter two mornings a week. The rest of the time — are you listening? — he’s a security man for an insurance company in Spring Gardens. That was where I ran into him later the same day. I nearly collapsed. I’m coming out of Lewis’s and there he is, standing like a shmulke in the rain. Hat, silver buttons, big black boots, the lot. I say to him, “Aishky, you’re getting wet.” He says, “I’m paid to get wet.” I say, “Can’t you stand in the doorway at least?” He says, “I’m guarding the doorway.” How do you like that?’

  ‘Aishky is a security man?’

  ‘We
ll, that’s what I want to talk to you about. I’m worried. You know Aishky. I went past there again last week and someone else was standing outside the door. A shvartzer. Wearing the same uniform …’

  It was all moving too fast for me. ‘A shvartzer wearing Aishky’s uniform?’

  ‘I’m telling you ... I asked him if he knew where Aishky was and he said he’d left. But I didn’t like the way he said it. You know how you get that feeling that something’s wrong?’

  ‘What do you think might be wrong?’

  ‘The usual. Nerves.’

  ‘So have you rung to see if he’s all right?’

  A queer expression passed over his face. ‘It’s not easy for me to ring,’ he said.

  I decided not to look into that one. ‘Have you tried Marilyn Kaprowitz House?’

  ‘If I go there I have to see my uncle.’

  ‘So is Aishky married or what? Is there someone to look after him? Has he got kids? Is he on his own?’

  ‘He had a lady. But I think something happened. He doesn’t talk about it. I get the impression he’s on his own. Ask him yourself’

  ‘Do you think he’d welcome a call from me?’

  ‘What are you talking about? ‘Course he’d welcome a call from you. I’d like to be there with him when he picks the phone up. I’d like to see the look on his face. He won’t be able to believe it. Like me — I nearly collapsed when I saw you.’

  ‘Why don’t the three of us go out one night? Like old times.’

  The same queer expression passed over Twink’s face. ‘It’s a bit awkward for me,’ he said.

  And then I realized what it meant. He couldn’t afford a night out. He couldn’t even afford to make a phone call. He was stony broke. I again took in the still creaking 1960s leather jacket and the carefully pressed striped shirt and I wanted to burst into tears. I touched him on the elbow in a manner I recognized as belonging to my father. When had I acquired that? Had I picked it up years ago and been saving it for a rainy day?

  ‘I’m flush at the moment,’ I said. ‘We’ll all go out and I’ll look after it.’ Pure Joel Walzer. The hand reaching out to take the bill. The big fist closing over it. I’ll look after this.