The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Sheeny, I think it’s the greatest nobbel on earth,’ I said.

  He pulled off his most spectacular twitch ever, both eyes on a simultaneous sideways roll, the Muslim shirt gulping down the entirety of his neck, one shoulder jerking up as far as the headless partridge which Vidal Sassoon had deposited on his head.

  ‘You know something — I really loved your old man,’ he called out, as my taxi pulled away.

  Aishky was in hiding when we arrived to collect him at the gates of the Allied Jam and Marmalade works.

  The place was silent and ill floodlit, surrounded by high wire fencing, the car-park yard cringeing and cold, even in June, criss-crossed by angular shadows. Belsen, I thought. What was Aishky doing working somewhere that resembled Belsen?

  I’d forgotten that you don’t have that many choices in Greater Manchester, where every workspace has been desolate for decades, waiting to be cleared to make room for that Olympic Village which, thanks to what my father did in 1933, will never be built.

  ‘He’s over there,’ I said to Twink. ‘I can just see him.’

  I recognized the shape of his head peering out from behind a wall, the beaky profile silhouetted like a Pulcinella mask on the factory yard. Remarkable that I should know it after all this time. Remarkable it should have changed so little.

  ‘Aishky, what’s the matter with you?’ Twink called. ‘Oliver’s here to see you.’

  Something else that hadn’t changed — Twink enjoying having a nervous system more fragile than his own to show consideration to.

  ‘Shemedik,’ Aishky called back from the shadows, half amused, but only half amused, by his own bashfulness.

  ‘Shemedik! Since when were you shemedik?’

  ‘Me? I’ve always been shy.’ He had appeared now, come out from his hiding place to see us, beaming, carrying a torch and wearing his security officer’s uniform. A cap, even.

  He was the same. Twink I’d had to piece together again, painfully slowly, never sure that I’d ever really be able to get him to re-form. Now here was Aishky, older to look at than Twink, settling for being an old man, as Twink decidedly was not, yet unmistakably the person I’d known a thousand years before.

  Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing I had no idea.

  As for the kind of security officer he made — well, you’d have thought twice before breaking into any building of which he had charge. You’d have thought twice and then done it.

  But maybe nobody was into stealing jam these days.

  We crossed the road to a dismal pub Aishky claimed to know, though when I asked him what he wanted to drink he was at a loss to remember the name of a single tipple.

  ‘Lager and lime?’ Twink helped out. ‘Shandy? Club soda? Bitter lemon?’

  ‘What are you having?’ he asked Twink.

  Twink turned to me.

  Nice as it was to be back in the fifties I had a yen for a contemporary drink. ‘I’m going to have red wine,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll have that too,’ Aishky said.

  Twink looked worried for him. ‘It won’t be sweet, you know, Aishk.’

  ‘Won’t it?’

  ‘Why don’t we all have whisky?’ I suggested.

  So that was what we did. Whisky we all knew, from weddings and funerals. And of course from circumcisions. That’s your first touch of the hard stuff, a suck of Scotch from your father’s finger to take the pain away from your guillotined little in-between on the eighth day of your first and only life on earth. No wonder we’re not drinkers.

  There was no one in the pub but us, yet the noise was deafening. In the absence of anyone to prompt it, the jukebox played its own favourites. The fruit machines made horrible jeering electronic sounds. The bar staff rattled glasses. Anything not to have to hear silence.

  We sat by the door where it was quietest and raised our whisky glasses to one another. The three musketeers.

  Now what?

  I looked into my glass. Aishky looked up at the ceiling.

  Could it be that we no longer had anything to musketeer about?

  Glory be to Twink. ‘Guess who I saw the other day at G-MEX,’ he said, ‘just before I ran into Oliver? Charlie Williamson. Remember him, Aishk? From Mather and Platt? Used to play in Wellingtons?’

  ‘Very hard to beat,’ Aishky said.

  ‘I’m not kidding you, Oliver, this feller would turn up on a motorbike and come to the table in leather trousers and Wellingtons …’

  ‘A mad defender,’ Aishky said.

  ‘That’s right. Still is. He’d come to the table in Wellingtons, isn’t that right, Aishky? — it was very hard to keep your face straight.’

  ‘The other one that got me,’ Aishky said, ‘was John Smedley who used to play in his socks.’

  ‘Jack Smedley.’

  ‘Jack Smedley, that’s right. Played for the Tax Office …’

  ‘Social Security.’

  ‘Social Security, that’s right. He had this meshuggener backhand which he’d hit while he was sliding about in his socks.’

  ‘Also hard to beat.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying. You couldn’t tell what his feet were doing. You couldn’t hear him.’

  ‘Didn’t you lose to him once, Aishk, in a cup match?’

  ‘Nearly lost to him. Until I changed my game at seven—nothing down in the decider.’

  ‘That’s right. I remember. We were all having heart attacks.’

  ‘What did you do to change your game, Aishky?’ I asked.

  ‘I took my pumps off and played in my socks. So now he couldn’t hear me. It was one of the quietest games of table tennis ever played.’

  ‘That reminds me of Pawel Trepper from the Polish Circle, do you remember him? A mute. Very good-looking guy. He could have been a model. But deaf as a post. If you were umpiring you had to write the score in the air with your finger.’

  ‘Also hard to beat,’ Aishky said.

  ‘Very hard to beat. Though he always liked to win with a smash. Sometimes he’d put five or six off the table trying to clinch it.’

  ‘That’s how I beat him,’ Aishky remembered.

  ‘Mind you,’ Twink continued, ‘even you at one time, right, would think nothing of hitting five or six off the table. Am I right?’

  Aishky waved the recollection away with his hand. For the first time I noticed the missing fingers. Not so bad as I’d remembered. Only the tips were gone. And what was left had healed over nicely.

  ‘Those were the days,’ Twink said.

  Aishky had fallen quiet.

  But not Aishky’s uncle Twink. ‘So do you look back on it all fondly, Aishk, the way we do?’

  ‘Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t,’ Aishky admitted. ‘I’m full of emotions you know.’

  ‘I know,’ Twink said.

  ‘I took the death of my parents very badly.’

  ‘I know you did,’ Twink said.

  ‘When my father was put in the nursing home I went off my rocker.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Eighty-seven.’

  That’s a good age, Aishky.’

  ‘No — it’s what happened to him that made me ill. He finished up with blood dripping in his head. I loved my father. I can’t bear it even now. You’ll think this is mad, but some nights I bang my head against the wall. I say meshuggener things to myself.’

  He was well on the way to saying meshuggener things to himself this night. He had stopped noticing us. We needn’t have been there. I didn’t begrudge him a soliloquy but I already knew the gist of the mantra from our phone call. Next it would be the Holocaust. He was all right so long as we could keep him away from death and the Holocaust — aren’t we all all right so long as you can keep us away from death and the Holocaust? — so I interrupted Twink who was trying to reason him out of it (‘You can get too far in, Aishky, you know that yourself, you can think too much about your parents however much you loved them’) by asking Aishky if he still listened to Mario Lanza.


  It worked. The old shy Esau smile returned to his face. He took his security officer’s cap off for the first time. Not bald, I was pleased to see, stubbly but not bald. ‘Do you remember this one?’ he said. ‘M’appari, tut amor …’

  ‘I’ve got the best recording of that,’ Twink said. ‘Carreras. Before he took ill …’

  ‘O, my babby, my curly-headed babby,’ Aishky half-said, half-sang. ‘I always loved that.’

  ‘Paul Robeson,’ Twink said.

  ‘I’ll tell you who was one of my favourites,’ Aishky said. ‘Peter Dawson. Do you remember “On the Road to Mandalay”?’

  ‘Sing it for us, Aishk,’ I said.

  ‘Isn’t there too much baritone in that for you, Aishky?’ Twink fretted.

  Aishky didn’t think so. Me neither. We were in need of some deep notes. He looked around to see who was listening, saw that no one was, cleared his throat, and sang it for us — Peter Dawson, Peter Dawson as I live and breathe.

  By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin’ lazy at the sea,

  There’s a Burma girl a-sittin’, and I know she thinks of me …

  I drifted off on the extravagant wings of song. Aishky in Mandalay. Aishky gone from Mandalay and the Burma girl a-sittin’, not knowing that her British soldier was in Cheetham Hill, carrying a night watchman’s torch and saying meshuggener things to himself.

  The dawn would have come up like thunder for a second time had the barman not broken all our reveries ringing his accursed bell.

  Aishky jumped. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Last orders, Aishky.’

  He looked bemused. Last orders?

  Is that not wonderful — that you can get to sixty and not know that there is such a thing as last orders? Sixty and never once have been in a public house late enough to hear the bell? I leaned across and kissed the top of his pate, tasting the old ginger stubble which was softer than maybe it should have been and miraculously smelt of newness, like a baby’s.

  ‘Does that mean we have to leave now?’ he asked.

  ‘It means we have to drink up. We’ve just got time to get a couple more songs in,’ I reckoned. ‘One or two from the old Brindisi collection.’

  So that was what we did, even managing to persuade Twink to join us in the odd chorus, though he had always been more the collector than the performer — yes, before they could turn us out on to the blank songless streets of Manchester, a million miles from Mandalay, we bel canto’d one last time with feeling whatever we could remember of our favourite drinking-up songs, the ‘Libiamo’ from La Traviata, the knock-it-back-quick from Cavalleria Rusticana, Lucrezia Borgia’s ‘The Secret of Bliss is Perfection’, and Mario Lanza seizing the day as the carefree student in Heidelberg, destined one day to be a king and never to carouse again.

  Ein, zwei, drei, vier … Libiamo ne’lieti calici, for life is but a tsatske and tomorrow we may die.

  And that ought to have been that. Enough. Enough, even for a glutton for punishment like me. The next morning should have seen me back on Alitalia, scampering for the clear uncluttered blue of my little pigeon loft on the Via Dolorosa, coffined gondolas or no coffined gondolas, as quick as my Walzer shanks would carry me. Enough already.

  But you don’t always have the final say in matters of the heart. You can’t float into your old home town, sleep in your old room among your old shmondries, shove your nose into your daughter’s wedding, pootle along to the Ninth World Veterans’ Table Tennis Championships and not expect some of the shit to stick.

  You can’t monkey around with your feelings and with ping-pong.

  I actually had my ticket in my pocket when I turned up at G-MEX for the finals. My flight was at 5.30 so there was a fair chance I wouldn’t get to see all of the later matches. But I’d take whatever was on offer. It was going to have to last me a long time.

  During the mid-morning break between the two men’s doubles semi-finals and the two women’s, I ran into Phil Radic. I recognized him immediately. Another one who hadn’t changed. We hadn’t met since I’d served off the table to Royboy Roylance in a pet, and we hadn’t spoken since I’d said ‘I don’t think there’s anything to discuss, Phil,’ also in a pet, but I knew he wouldn’t be harbouring a grudge. I’d written glowingly of him in my manual, recommending his game as a model to anyone wanting to play ping-pong the way it was originally meant to be played, with mercurial wit, and although no one ever bought or read that publication, apart from my father who made it to the bottom of the acknowledgements page, I was aware that books had a marvellous way of always landing on the desk of whoever they happened to mention.

  We shook hands. He had his old Irgun tan and looked mighty handsome, shone up like a conker, in a black and grey loose weave jacket and a tie I recognized as Ferragamo from a shop on the Via Veneto. There was a lady on his arm. Not quite his style, I thought. Anderer, for a start. (Phil had refused to play for England on a Shabbes, remember.) And although my age, I guessed, and therefore younger than him, somehow too old for him at the same time. Grey haired, full figured, an eensy bit florid. Someone who had crossed over, in the Italian style herself, from being decorative to being functional. Done lovely, now doing motherly. An admirable portioning out of seasons, it always seemed to me; something Italians did well. A problem for the men, but then what isn’t? She was not someone I could imagine Phil Radic showing off around the pool in the King Solomon’s Palace Hotel, Eilat, that’s all I’m saying. Not any more, anyway.

  ‘Oliver, I don’t know if you ever met my wife,’ he said. ‘Oliver, Lorna.’

  We bowed.

  It did for one mad moment pass through my mind to say, ‘Your wife’s maiden name wouldn’t happen to be Peachley would it?’ But the question was redundant. I had not the slightest doubt it was her.

  Changed beyond recognition, but her. Her. Oh yes, her.

  I surely don’t need to explain how I knew. Magnetism, that’s how. The same way a bird born on the Manchester Ship Canal knows, come September, the quickest route to the Zambezi.

  For a millionth of a second I ceased to be a living person. For a millionth of a second I was medically dead. No human frame could have turned-that cold and gone on harbouring life. But let no one tell you differently — worse by far than the moment of death is the moment of resurrection. A terrible nausea seized me, as though nothing I had ever done or felt had the slightest meaning. I am still not sure how I managed to stay upright.

  And her? From her not a flicker. Had a fly been resting upon her eyelid it would not have registered the slightest encouragement to be gone.

  And had the fly been resting on her heart?

  Ditto.

  ‘Well, good to see you, Phil,’ I said.

  ‘You too, Oliver.’ Then he laughed. ‘Maybe in another forty years.’

  And I laughed. ‘Maybe.’

  Then I bowed to Lorna.

  And Lorna bowed to me.

  Later in the day I was sitting thinking about my plane, looking at my watch and waiting for the men’s singles final to start, doubting whether I’d get to see it all, wondering if I cared, when I became conscious that Mr and Mrs Radic were taking up seats in the row behind me. I didn’t turn about to look. But I sensed them through my back, climbing over knees, fussing. Then I felt a hand — a woman’s hand, full of rings — quickly tousling my hair. No lingering. No pressure. Just the gentlest of ruffles. Such as you might give, without thinking, to a favourite child.

  Denoting, in my view, what?

  That she loved me after all?

  Of course not.

  That she forgave me?

  Not that either.

  Just that she remembered who I was.

  Which is all any of us Walzers has ever asked.

  where dreams and retail collide

  Nike ad

  ALSO BY HOWARD JACOBSON

  Fiction

  Coming From Behind

  Peeping Tom

  Redback

  The Very Model of a Man


  No More Mister Nice Guy

  Non-Fiction

  Shakespeare’s Magnanimity (with Wilbur Sanders)

  In the Land of Oz

  Roots Schmoots

  Seriously Funny: An Argument for Comedy

  Copyright © 1999 by Howard Jacobson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without

  written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles

  or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

  The extract from “Ping-Pong in New York” © Jerome Charyn (published in Antaeus, Special Essay Issue,

  No. 21/22) is reproduced by kind permission of Jerome Charyn and The Ecco Press.

  Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

  ISBN: 978-1-60819-685-2 (paperback)

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1999 by Jonathan Cape Ltd.

  Paperback edition published in the United Kingdom in 2000 by Vintage

  First published in the U.S. by Bloomsbury in 2011

  This e-book edition published in 2011

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-729-3

  www.bloomsburyusa.com