The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  She was good company for a small boy. She turned Cheetham Hill into a Polish shtetl for me. The street signs said Waterloo Road, Elizabeth Street, St James’s Road, but we were in Sowalki. She wore furry boots in all weathers, and a scarf tied around her head against the wind howling across the steppes from Siberia. We crossed the roads slowly, watching where we put our feet, as though we were traversing muddy fields, our eyes peeled for the wolves waiting to pounce on us from the forest that was Mandley Park. She taught me to krich — to hobble along like a little old peasant with a back bent from years of carrying sacks of matzo meal. We kriched along together. Where she took me, no one spoke English. Or minded when she poked at their merchandise, showing me how you recognized bad fruit, how you opened up a hen’s legs and stuck your nose into its rectum to be certain it was fresh. She held my hand tightly, protected me from all dangers, and filled my head full of alarms. She wasn’t much taller than me either. When she patted me or kissed me I could look straight into her inconsolable blue eyes. It was like having a little girlfriend, ten times my age. And foreign to boot. I adored her.

  I adored them all. Not my sisters. No one adores his sisters. But that still left me with five — a mother, a granny, and three aunties (the Shrinking Violets) — all fine-boned and fluttering. My seraglio.

  One by one, and to everybody’s astonishment, the Shrinking Violets found men who wanted to marry them. But that was much later. When I was growing up they each had the letter S for spinster emblazoned on their chests. I’m not being critical of the single state. They could have worn their S with pride. Instead of being mortified when a baby goo-gooed at them on a bus, they could have taken it in their arms and kissed it. ‘Not for me, though I’m sure you’re nice for someone else,’ they could have told it. Instead of turning crimson when a shop-girl offered to assist them they could have said, ‘No thank you, I will do as I mean to go on doing, and assist myself. What, after all, did they fear that babies and shop-girls had over them? Knowledge of the mystic meaning of the letter S, that’s what.

  Babies and shop assistants behaved irrationally, made sudden movements towards you, like spiders, and a sudden movement is to an S for spinster what a cross rubbed with garlic is to a vampire.

  On Saturdays they used to take me to town, sometimes to buy me a jigsaw, new rubber rings for the hoop-la board, a whole book of crosswords, a new Collins Classic to add to my collection, but in the main to replenish their supplies of S brand haberdashery — yards of spiritless elastic and broken-hearted lace, spinster zips, spinster fasteners, spinster hooks and eyes, all the cheerless wherewithal to repair their lumpy brassieres and granny stockings and God knows what else. That was the fun part. It was the bus journey there and back I dreaded. Did we ever, my three S-emblazoned aunties and I, enjoy a single carefree bus ride? Not that I recall. If there wasn’t a goo-gooing baby to embarrass and frighten us there was a drunk, or a madman, or an invalid we didn’t know how to help, or a jeering gang of prefab boys. Irrational movers, all of them. From whom we had no choice but to leap. As a consequence, we drew notice to ourselves the way black holes suck in the stray matter of the universe. Notice and misadventure. We’d upset the conductor, we’d drop money, we’d lose our tickets, we’d stand on people’s feet, we’d fall into the invalid and spill him off the bus. And the blushing of one of us would set off the blushing of the others. Off we’d go — red, red, red, red — like traffic lights that are running against you. There is no hiding place on a bus. You either jump off or you suffer the exposure. And we were of no assistance to one another. The shy are tyrants. They are consumed by their own appetite for suffering. Nothing else matters. No one else exists. We lowered our eyes and individually burned, leaving the others to die in their own flames.

  Back in my parents’ or my grandparents’ house, where nobody was looking, the ordinary affections could be resumed. I could dote on my aunties and, more to the point, they could dote on me.

  Did they ‘hold me out’? I must be scrupulous here; I owe that to the love we bore one another. I don’t know whether they held me out. I can’t remember and I am not prepared to say I have suppressed the memory. (Why would I want to add the burden of suppression to everything I already do remember?) But that I was capable of being held out they were, if you can understand me, more conscious than I believe they ought to have been. It’s a matter of degrees of awareness. There was another odious euphemism to which I was subjected as a little boy. In-between. Shaming but true — the thing I had that made me not my sisters, the thing the shaking Mohel had taken a dirty-fingered moon-shaped slice out of and which thereafter and for evermore needed scrupulous bathing and talcuming, the thing I was held out by, did not, in our house, go by any of the usual anatomical or nursery-rhyme names — a penis or the intromittent organ, say; a winkle or John Thomas — no, what I had was an in-between. And everybody knew it.

  In the end, the point is not whether my seraglio of women should or should not have enjoyed familiarity with my in-between, understood what it was and where it was — in the end the only point that matters is that with my father away and my grandfather permanently drunk and the Violets shrinking from every approach, mine was the only in-between between them.

  Enough said. Whatever harm I did them, the measure of the harm they had done me was the box of family photographs I was now smuggling into the lavatory as many times a day as I could get away with. And if you think a box of family photographs simply means a box of family photographs, you’ve got another think coming.

  The box itself nags at my conscience like an undiscovered weapon used to commit an unconfessed crime. Is it still where I left it? Will it ever be found? After all this time, should it ever be found?

  It was a chocolate box originally, a de luxe beau monde two-storey coffret, padded, scented, covered in pink velvet and lined with crimson silk. It had once cradled two pounds of the best quality Austro-Hungarian marzipan. An aged and toothless admirer, a fourth or fifth cousin on the non-Walzer side, had embarrassed Fay with it, and she had disembarrassed herself of it on to me. The lid showed a scene from one of Mozart’s operas. I doubt if it was Il Seraglio. Pink ribbons were sewn into the velvet, and with these you secured the lid or released it. When I’d finished what I was doing I’d tie a bow with the pink ribbons, listen to be sure the coast was clear, make a dash across the landing from the lavatory to my bedroom, and stuff the box in a suitcase under my bed.

  Now for the contents. I have said that these were family photographs. Naturally I mean that they were photographs of my mother’s side of the family — photographs of my mother herself, my grandmother, and the Shrinking Violets; some of them studio studies, but, in the main, snaps I had taken with my little box camera during one of our peregrinations around Sowalki, or on a blushing trip to Lewis’s at the top of Market Street. Photographs that had men in them were of course no use to me. Nor were group photographs of any sort. One woman at a time was how I liked it. And not necessarily alive. I had a good one of my grandmother’s mother Cheena, for example, looking pensive in a feathered hat. And another of my great-great-aunt Sophia, come to Bialystok in her rustling finery to pose against a painted forest and gain immortality in the putrefying imagination of a twelve-year-old boy still half a century away from being born.

  Is it such a sin, jacking off, as the Church of England boys put it, over loved ones? In its own clumsy way, doesn’t beating one’s meat over the female branches of the family tree show a certain groping genealogical respect? If you’re gonna spill, spill over your own.

  That would have been my defence, had the marzipan box gone on containing only what I have so far described. But I have, and had, no defence. No defence, no excuse, no rationale, no sanity.

  Soon, satiated with the aplasticity of the photographs themselves, I added to my scented coffret of concupiscence the following: a magnifying glass, a pair of kitchen scissors, a tube of glue, and pages of particular appeal torn from Span, a pin-up magazine I had fallen into the ha
bit of buying, the minute I was able to lose the hand of a Violet, from a soft-porno shop on Deansgate, immediately opposite Manchester Cathedral. All porno was soft then. Girls hitching up their skirts, showing a suspender, looking down at their own disarrangement in astonishment, unable to account for how a breast with an unaroused nipple, or a star where the nipple should have been, had slipped its moorings. No split beavers in those days. No beaver of any sort unless you went for Health and Efficiency and then you had to put up with the volleyball and the rest of the family. Otherwise not a hint of a hair, let alone a labium. That was what the magnifying glass was for. To see if I could detect where a hair had once been. And the scissors … and the glue … ?

  Ah, the scissors and the glue …

  On its own, Span was nothing, a half-hearted iniquity no matter how filthy the ever-irked, all-judging proprietor of the soft-porno shop tried to make me feel, refusing me a brown paper bag, daring me to check my change, not taking his eyes off me as I stuffed the magazine into my shirt. What were they to me, these hard-faced yekeltehs with dead eyes and thin lips who resembled no one so much as the mothers of the prefab boys who threw stones at me when I left the house? What they did with their bodies on the other hand, their lewd gestures, the shamelessness with which they bent over or found pretexts for letting you see up their skirts or down their blouses … that was something else. Be strictly logical about it and you’d have to say that their bodily contortions perfectly matched their facial expressions; that only women who looked as though they lived in prefabs and brought their kids up to throw stones could have cared so little for the aesthetics of the human form. But since when did lewdness ever have anything to do with a perfect match? Disparity — that, surely, is where lewdness has always found its home. An elegant woman in an inelegant pose, a demure face on an obscenely splayed body. Where’s the shock of seeing reserve thrown to the winds, if there was never any reserve there in the first place? Well, I was the one to ask. I had lived for twelve years in a reservation of reserve. There were things I understood. As, for example, that there would have been no erotic pay-off whatsoever in cutting out the faces of the women on my father’s side and attaching them to the bodies of the toerags who flashed the lot for Span. This is not to say that they were in any way toeraggy themselves, only that they were already uninhibited rompers. For this to work, it had to be the refined, sensitive oval faces of my mother’s side - faces utterly dear to me — that I desecrated.

  Yes, I am saying what it looks as though I’m saying. Much like a sweet little girl playing with her cut-out dolls — except that a sweet little girl will mix and match on the dining-room table or on a sunlit lawn in the company of other ambrosial chits her own age, whereas I was stewing it alone and malodorous in the lavatory — I changed the outfits worn by the women I revered, got them to open their legs and show me the tops of their stockings, the lace on their pants, turned them round and bent them over, enticed them into peignoirs and babydoll pyjamas, cut them into French maids, naughty nurses, leggy belles from St Trinian’s, cowgirls who couldn’t stay on a horse or keep their tushes in their chaparejos.

  And I did this even to my little Polish grandmother?

  Especially to my little Polish grandmother.

  Scissoring with the utmost care, I cut around the contours of her face, freeing her from the gross contingencies of Piccadilly or Cheetham Hill, then slowly, lovingly, I separated her head from her body. Now she was mine to love as only I knew how to love her. Up on to six-inch high heels I hoiked her, fishnetted, frilly-knickered, fingering a cane; out of an upper-storey window I leaned her, a wanton housewife in a scant pinny, shaking out a feather duster and jiggling her introverted-nippled breasts; down on a scarlet bed I laid her, wearing her peasant scarf as always, God-fearing, inconsolably blue-eyed, sixty-five years of age, but in her ‘best’ at last — a gossamer négligé of ankle length, through which, with the help of my magnifying glass, I could just make out where the snatch should have been.

  Trying to find some saving grace in all this, I can only thank the Almighty in whom my grandmother placed her trust that split-beaver shots were not around when I was twelve.

  I repeat, too, that I never co-opted a single page of Health and Efficiency to my cause. I come from a culture which attaches a near religious significance to the family and sanctifies the old: I wasn’t going to have a grandmother of mine kriching after a volleyball on some beach in Scandinavia.

  FOUR

  Exceptionally, strict observance of the prescribed method of service may be waived where the umpire is notified, before play begins, that compliance is prevented by physical disability.

  7.7 The Rules

  IN FAIRNESS TO them, the Akiva ping-pong players, on whose mercies my father had thrown me, could have given me a much harder time of it than they did.

  They could have left me standing there for the whole evening, for example, the way I was left standing on the touchline at St Onan’s, instead of just for the first hour. I wouldn’t have complained. I wasn’t in any position to complain. What rights did I have? It was their table. They were grown men, some of them, sort of. And I was wearing a school blazer enjoining me to take a firm hold of myself, a comic strip bat in my hand.

  As it turned out, it was the bat that broke the ice.

  When I say they were grown men, some of them, sort of, I mean to render not so much the uncertainties of an unusually apprehensive twelve-year-old, as the approximateness of the company itself. If I were to encounter them again as they were then, myself as I am now, I think I would still be struck by how sort of they were. And it was the most sort of of them all — a tall, baby-bald man in his forties, I reckoned, who neither played nor sat down, but circumnavigated the room the whole time in a buttoned-up blue raincoat and heavy shoes, talking and laughing to himself — who finally addressed me. He’d climbed up on to the little stage, presumably to win attention for his cleverness (there is always a little stage in the room where people play table tennis, just as there is always a scullery where the janitor keeps the mops), and was standing where the comedian would have stood. ‘Someone’s gotta tell you, so I will — you’re in the wrong club, son.’ He had a queer quick stuttering delivery, like an automatic weapon that cut out after every other round. ‘We don’t play lacrosse here. Why don’t you get your old man to take you to the YMCA?’

  It pleases me to recall that no one was amused. ‘Nisht, Gershom, nisht,’ I heard one of them say. Leaving me to roast was one thing, being outright rude to me was another.

  ‘Come and have a hit,’ the ‘nisht, Gershom, nisht’ person invited me, after Gershom had shrugged his shoulders and gone on another self-communing ramble round the room. ‘But not with that bat. You’ll shneid the ball.’

  He handed me his bat. A Victor Barna: nipple-brown rubber pimples, medium fast, smooth stubby wooden handle with no tape or strapping around it. It slid into my grip like the hand of an old friend. In an earlier life I must have played with a Victor Barna. Owner of the best backhand there has ever been, and winner of more world championship titles than any other player before or since, Victor Barna first took the men’s singles in 1929—30, lost it the following year to Miklos Szabados, then recaptured and held on to it for four years running, defeating Szabados (in the finals, twice), Kolar and Bellak. Players, from the sound of it, from roughly the same neck of the woods as my father’s side; the Bug, the Dniester, the Danube — Slavs and Magyars whichever way you cut us. In an earlier life could I have been Victor Barna?

  I took off my jacket and stood at the table, not daring to pop my head out of my burning shell and look around me, scalded, abashed, suffocating, certain that no one would give me a game. And certainly no one wanted to. The likeliest was the owner of the Barna bat, but then how could he play me if I had his bat? Twink, I’d heard the others call him, when he’d done something worthy of remark, or suffered a reverse, on the table. ‘Shot, Twink.’ ‘Unlucky, Twink.’ Otherwise, Theo. ‘You going to Laps’
later, Theo?’ So he had two names: a social name and a ping-pong name. He was lanky, very thin, sixteen or seventeen years old, with an asthmatic cough, a little face that was all but shut out by a cascade of Tony Curtis quiffs, and good looping attacking shots. Whenever he over-hit or netted, he coughed up something phlegmy from his lungs and banged his bat against his leg. I was impressed by his ability to use the width of the table and find the edges. Not overawed, just impressed.

  It was Theo ... no, Twink ... no, Theo, for this was a social act … yes, but ping-pong related — it was Twink who, having lent me his bat, got me a game. ‘Go on, Aishky, give the teapot lid a knock. What’ll it cost you?’

  Aishky looked like Esau — strong armed, superfluously freckled, an angry mob of red hair overrunning his shirt and fanning out around his neck and shoulders. But it was Esau’s father Isaac who was the short-sighted one as I recall, so in that regard Aishky was more like him. He wore inch-thick bulletproof lenses in his glasses, which he had to wipe between points.

  We fell immediately into a lengthy version of the knock-up, forehand drive against forehand drive, backhand against backhand, no scoring, no one trying to win a point, simply keeping the ball in play. How did I understand this convention, how did I know, without ever having been taught any of the interpersonal skills of ping-pong, not to try to pass or thwart Aishky, not to try to out-fox or out-chop him, but just to keep it going, plock, plock; plock, plock; plock, plock; plock, plock? Reincarnation. In an earlier life I had been Victor Barna. Even if Victor Barna himself was not dead yet.