The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  Meanwhile the money to look after it with was in a brown paper bag in a phone box.

  And did it work? Of course it worked. Hadn’t they all loved my old man for his big heart?

  ‘Thanks for your understanding,’ Twink said.

  It must have been a nice experience, being my old man.

  We caught a taxi back to his place in the wrong part of Prestwich so he could show me his records and CDs. He wanted us to take the METROLINK for which he had any number of concession cards — even one relating to his lazy bowel — but I wasn’t prepared to travel on anything called a METROLINK. ‘I’ll see to the taxi,’ I’d said.

  In answer to my earlier question, yes, the tenors were going as strong as they’d ever gone. Stronger. Opera on record was the beginning and the end of his life. If you wanted to estimate Twink’s material value you would have had to weigh him in a scale against his operas. They were all he owned. The tiny flat was rented. The television was rented. The phone only worked if you rang in. The carpets, he told me, had come from his oldest boy’s house. All the clothes he possessed he was wearing. At the end of nearly sixty years as a son, a soldier, a husband and a father, he was down to just his operas. And the wherewithal to play them.

  ‘What else do I need?’ he said. ‘I come in, I turn on the stereo, I sit down, I listen, I go to bed.’

  The stereo was clearly such as only the most single-minded listeners treat themselves to. ‘Is this a Bang and Olufsen?’ I asked. As if I knew from anything.

  I won’t bother repeating his reply. For a start, Bang and Olufsen wouldn’t like it. And to be honest I didn’t take in very much of what he told me about the rarity and fragility of the valves or whatever on which his system depended. Some of the components were covered with tablecloths when they weren’t in use, I observed that. And there were places Twink was anxious that I didn’t stand. Otherwise I have nothing to report regarding the technical specifications of his equipment.

  That it sounded good goes without saying. La Scala, in the wrong part of Prestwich, that’s where we were. The Metropolitan, just off Sandy Lane.

  But it was the collection itself that took my breath away. Not just the extent of it — though it is not often you see all four walls of a council flat given over to boxed sets of opera from Ariadne auf Naxos to Zauberflöte. And not just the irreproachable library system according to which it was arranged, so that Twink could lay his hands on any single tenor aria sung by any single tenor in a matter of seconds. No, it was the comprehensiveness of the passion it represented which impressed me. There wasn’t an operatic argument that Twink didn’t have the means to put or to refute; not a conceivable operatic comparison, and not a song cycle or cantata comparison either, he didn’t have the source material to mount. It was all here: everything there was and everything Twink felt and thought about it.

  As to the quality of his judgement, as we used to say at Golem; as to whether his mind was rich or poor, musically — I am in no position to comment. My own interest in opera had always been fitful. As a boy I had loved it because Twink and Aishk had loved it. At Golem I had revered Mozart because Yorath and Rubella had revered Mozart. Tenor arias of the romantic sort I had gone on loving independently of Yorath and Rubella because they spoke the language of my soul. E lucevan le stelle? — sure they were, not a star in the heavens that didn’t shine upon the head of the Mighty Walzer. But then came ‘Nessun Dorma’ at the World Cup in Italy, and that pretty well put paid to all tenors and all arias at once. The association of opera and football was too hard to bear. The spectacle of the ignorant suddenly discovering and delighting in an aria the rest of us had been humming since the cradle, simply because it was now bellowed on a football pitch, disgusted me. How could they not have heard it before? And the subsequent transformation of the once sweet-voiced Pavarotti and the once subtly lyrical Domingo into screamers for the masses, competitive sperm-chuckers from the Black Lagoon, was the last nail in my operatic coffin at least. So I was not the one to sit in judgement on Twink’s taste.

  He would not have agreed with me, anyway, that civilization died the day Pavarotti puffed out his barrel chest and skvitshed what no one had ever sung more feelingly than Björling, out of context, out of season, out of place, for the cameras of a lost footy-fevered species. He was not a Yorath and Rubella man. He was not a cultural Domesday merchant. When I caught myself thinking the worse of him for that, I wondered if I hadn’t myself died the day Golem College let me in.

  We sat in the dark, just as we had when we were boys, comparing liebestods — Nilsson good, Nilsson powerful, but oh God, the wine-dark anguish of Flagstad! — and by the flickering lights of his thousand-valved amplifier I could see he was transfigured.

  At last I recognized him.

  When I got home my mother had retired but there was a message waiting for me on my pillow. Sheeny Waxman had rung — Jesus, how much more! — Sheeny Waxman, if I remembered who he was, had rung to say that Phil Radic, if I remembered who he was, had thought he’d seen me leaving G-MEX the day before and had mentioned it to Sheeny on the golf course that morning. If it was me and I was back, would I ring —.

  Sleep on that, Walzer! All I needed now was for Selwyn Marks to enter my bedroom in a winding sheet and we’d have been complete, the Akiva team up and running, ready to take on anybody.

  I woke early, in something of a quandary. Who ought I to ring first — Aishky or Sheeny? It mattered, the order in which I rang, because I believed I would feel differently about the one after speaking to the other. Aishky enjoyed precedence in the sense that his name had cropped up earlier in the day. But Sheeny had rung me. On the other hand, although I had no idea what Sheeny had been up to for the last thirty years or more, I doubted he was working as a doorman. Therefore, I reasoned, he needed my call less.

  I was reasoning needs, now? I was weighing them up like a soup-kitchen ladler?

  Of course I was. We were old men. There was nothing left of us but needs.

  I rang Aishky, because he came earlier in the alphabet.

  He didn’t seem all that surprised to hear from me. ‘Yeah, Oliver, Oliver Walzer, I remember, you had a good backhand.’

  ‘You too,’ I said. ‘You had a wonderful backhand.’

  ‘And I had a good forehand,’ he said, ‘before my accident. You probably don’t know about my accident.’

  ‘Aishky, I was there.’

  ‘No one was there. That was the trouble.’

  ‘I was as good as there. I’ve never forgotten it. But listen, how are you?’

  ‘I’ve had three tragedies. My mother, alav ha-shalom, died. My father, God rest his dear soul, died. And the young lady I was seeing, alav ha-shalom, she died.’

  ‘Aishky, I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yeah …’ His voice went dreamy. ‘I took my mother’s death very badly. My father’s even worse. Elizabeth’s very, very badly. I never did so much crying in my life over three people. It affected me. I had a breakdown. You’re not going to believe this — I’ve had a breakdown every single day since my father passed away.’

  ‘Oh, Aishky –’

  ‘I’m not even well now. I’ve got some meshuggener illness. I say things that don’t make sense. I’m tsemisht. I get a lot of headaches. The doctor says I probably do too much reading. I read all the time.’

  I asked him what he was reading. A Yorath and Rubella question. Was he reading what he should be reading. But when all’s said and done, what else could I ask him?

  ‘The Holocaust. I’ve been studying it for forty-three years. I’ve gone way beyond Martin Gilbert. The only difference is that I don’t have initials after my name.’

  ‘So get initials after your name. Do a degree, Aishky. It’s the age of the mature student.’

  ‘To be truthful with you, Oliver, and don’t take this the wrong way, I’d like to be teaching myself. I know everything there is to know about the subject. The only thing is, I get klogedik sometimes, very very bitter. I have terrible tho
ughts.’

  ‘What sort of thoughts?’

  The phone went quiet for several moments. Then he said, ‘I hate the enemy. I hate the people who murdered our people.’

  ‘You’re allowed.’

  ‘When I say my prayers at night, I have terrible thoughts.’

  I was out of my depth. Prayers floor me every time. Too private, prayers. ‘So listen,’ I said, ‘when are we going to get together, the three of us?’

  ‘Well it’s hard for me because of the hours I work. I work late every night.’

  ‘I was going to ask you about that. Twink said he saw you in Spring Gardens the other week and then suddenly you weren’t there any more. Instead of you there was a shvartzer. He was worried.’

  ‘Was he a tall shvartzer or a short shvartzer?’

  ‘I don’t know, Aishky. Twink never said. Just a shvartzer.’

  ‘It was probably Clive. He’s a very nice person, actually. But, yeah, no, I’ve moved. I’m in Dukinfield, now. You remember the Jam and Marmalade works where we used to play table tennis? — you’ll split your sides at this —’

  ‘That was my first ever league match, Aishk, I’m never likely to forget it.’

  ‘Yeah, well I’m a security officer there now. What do you think of that?’

  ‘I think it’s a long way for you to travel, especially in the fog.’

  ‘It takes me three buses, door to door.’

  ‘Is that mamzer Cartwright still there?’

  ‘The one with the shmatte bat?’

  ‘The one who was always complaining about our shmatte balls.’

  ‘I think he died a few years ago.’

  ‘Listen, Akishky, do you work late every night?’

  ‘Of course. I’m a security officer. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays until midnight. Thursdays and Fridays until 9.30.’

  Today was Thursday. ‘Then we’ll pick you up there tonight at 9.30,’ I said. ‘I know the address.’

  And before he could put any obstacles in my way or add to the list of dead loved ones — dead hated ones, too — I rang off.

  Then I said a prayer of my own.

  My call to Sheeny Waxman was less metaphysically vexing. I reached his secretary. ‘Mr Waxman said that if you called I had to tell you to jump straight in a taxi at his expense and ask to be brought to Gallery W in Wilmslow. He will be here all day. Oh, and he also said to say “Oink, oink.”’

  I rang Twink on his receive-calls-only telephone to tell him what I’d arranged with Aishky, mentioned Sheeny Waxman about whom he was as incurious as he had always been, then did the extravagant thing I’d been told to do and jumped in a taxi. Gallery W? I was unable to make a single reasonable stab at what Gallery W made or sold. Mirrors? Greetings cards? Wedding stationery? Tsatskes, I was certain of that. The higher swag, as befitted the mock-Tudor, mock-Georgian, mock-Edwardian village of Wilmslow. Heavily varnished prints of English country scenes in gaudily gilded frames? Twelve-branched chandeliers? Reproduction antique furniture even? But really I was at a loss. I suppose I was also in shock. Too much of the past in too short a time. Too many memories I couldn’t be absolutely sure were mine.

  And too many I could, come to that.

  I saw Sheeny before I saw Gallery W. He was standing on the pavement looking up and down the street. For me? How touching if that were so.

  We fell into each other’s arms. His doing. I felt slightly overwhelmed by him again, just as I had when I’d first encountered him and he’d put me down for being a kid. And now to go with the alarming tic and the KD demeanour was a killingly contemporary London haircut — parted not quite in the middle, fuller on the top than the sides, like a headless partridge flecked with copper highlights — and an abstemious black curatorial suit, worn over a crisp white cod muezzin shirt with no collar.

  ‘Jesus, Sheeny,’ I said, backing out of his embrace, ‘you look as though you’ve just come from judging the Turner Prize.’

  Had I thought about what I was saying I wouldn’t have said it. What would Sheeny Waxman know about the Turner Prize?

  But then I wouldn’t have said it had Sheeny Waxman not looked like what he looked like.

  ‘You’re talking to a man who’s gone one better than that,’ he said, hoarser than ever. ‘You’re talking to a man who’s just got two of his artists on to the shortlist for the Turner Prize. Eh? Come in and I’ll show you.’

  I looked at Sheeny’s priestly get-up, belied by his festive roistering expression, then I looked over his shoulder into the window of Gallery W where was laid out an installation of sacks of rice and mutilated parts of women together with a bank of video screens showing me looking at those sacks of rice and mutilated parts of women, and in the words of my old friend Twink Starr, I nearly collapsed.

  Sheeny Waxman was become an art dealer! What is more he was become an art dealer at the very cutting edge of the market. Heavily varnished prints in gaudily gilded frames? Ha! — I’d got that wrong in a big way. There wasn’t a frame in sight. And nothing that could be framed. Floor art, that was Sheeny’s passion. Ideational tsatskes. Shmondries you moved around. It looked like the Tate kindergarten in there. So, yes, the higher swag right enough. But never in a thousand years would I have imagined Sheeny this high.

  ‘Well? Is this a good flash or is this a good flash?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a fantastic flash,’ I said.

  ‘Charles Saatchi, eat your heart out!’ he laughed.

  ‘So is that your ambition, Sheeny?’ I asked. ‘To become the next great shaper of the contemporary aesthetic?’

  I heard my own words but could scarcely believe I was uttering them. It was too eerie. Conversations of this sort I did not have with Sheeny Waxman. The subjects of my conversation with Sheeny Waxman were the Kardomah, keife, and pigs. His job was to sit in the back of the van with his shmeckle out, looking not unlike a piece of pork itself, while I drove us to a ping-pong match, slowing down for any bit of skirt we happened to encounter on the way.

  But if I was at a loss to know where or who I was, Sheeny didn’t look troubled. He was the right way up and utterly himself.

  ‘What’s with this “become”?’ he said. ‘I’m already his only serious competitor. I might not have his funds but I’ve got better taste than he has. And I’m more loyal to my artists. You come to Sheeny Waxman, you stay with Sheeny Waxman. What do you think of these?’

  He had linked arms with me, for all the world as though we were a pair of AC/DC Greenwich Village dilettantes in polka-dot bowties, and was walking me around, showing me work which was strictly speaking not for sale, his private collection. ‘These’ were a stand of dripping monoliths, made of something that resembled candle wax, vaguely reminiscent of termite mounds which had started to bubble over.

  ‘They’re interesting,’ I said. ‘I like the way they appear to be humming.’

  (Good, Walzer — now go out there and sell, men!)

  Sheeny’s eyes were dancing. ‘I love this sort of gear,’ he said, reaching over and stroking them. ‘They’re much less grainy than you’d think. Go ahead, touch. Does that get you going, or what? You know, I picked these up for next to gornisht in Switzerland. The artist had gone mechullah. Guess how much I paid for them?’

  I had no idea.

  He pulled me to him and whispered a modest figure in my ear. ‘For all three! Is that cheap or is that cheap?’

  ‘That’s cheap, Sheeny,’ I said.

  He was laughing now. ‘It cost me fucking twice as much to ship them over.’

  But there was no vulgar triumph in his laughter. He hadn’t got the better of anybody. The earth had yielded up its bounty, and he, Sheeny Waxman, adventurer extraordinary, had gratefully accepted.

  If the bargain hunting was important to him, it did not determine how he bought. It simply went with the territory; it was integral to his innocence. He loved the work and should there be a story of adventitiousness attached, well he loved to tell that too.

  You’ll have noti
ced I’m defending him. From whom?

  From Yorath and Rubella, that’s whom. From me, from the me who cleaved to Yorath and Rubella — that’s if there had ever been a me of any other sort.

  But sentiment apart, now, how good was Sheeny’s taste? Was he intelligent? Was his mind good?

  Lig in drerd, Walzer! Lie in the cold earth!

  I spent half the day in his company, my feet never touching the ground. I saw no more than one-tenth of what he showed me — the voluptuously guggling obelisks I was invited to be turned on by, the heads in formaldehyde, the moulds of chairs commemorating places where people had once sat, the videos showing nothing happening (or were they?), the empty spaces filled with sounds of moaning women (labour or orgasm? — aha!), the lifesize mutilated fairies which would have served my purposes admirably in the old cut and paste lavatory days. (Thank God I wasn’t a kid growing up now.) And I heard no more than a tenth of what he told me — the partnership with Benny the Pole (did I remember him?), the Jaguar concession, the marriage to the daughter of a Derbyshire natural form sculptor he’d picked up in the Kardomah, the grand tour of the great European galleries, the awakening, the passion. Too much, too much to take in all at once. I would need to go away and think about this. I would need a further fifty years to sort it out in my mind. I knew how Aishky felt. I was tsemisht. But it was a warm tsemisht, akin to a wet rubber sheet when you’re eighteen months old.

  He gave me another hug before I left and repeated his offer to look after the taxi. I saw that he was relieved when I refused, not because it saved him a few quid but because it signified I wasn’t short. He wanted us all to be having a good time together.

  ‘So what do you think?’ he asked. ‘Is it a nobbel, or what?’

  I knew what he meant. He meant all this, the gantse geshecht — what had become of him, what he was, what he did, the transformation. For he too thought it was a tremendous joke.