The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  Since I did understand the convention, though, it was wrong of me to break it. But what could I do? We’d been knocking up for ten minutes and he hadn’t yet acknowledged I existed. He was hitting the ball automatically, with half his eye on it — and half an eye for Aishky was a quarter of an eye for anybody else — continuing his conversation with Twink/Theo and the rest of them about some bird with big bristles he’d been seen dancing with in the Azlap on Oxford Road on Saturday night. (Bristles, notice, not bristols. In fifties Manchester we thought of women as bristling with breast.) ‘What was she like?’ he wanted to know. ‘I had my bins off, I couldn’t see her. Was she fair?’ Plock.

  ‘Meers,’ the others teased him. ‘A dog. But if you were happy…’

  ‘Who says I was happy?’ Plock.

  ‘You had your eyes closed.’

  ‘I was asleep.’ Plock.

  ‘Nebach. You missed seeing the bristles to end all bristles.’

  ‘What do you mean I missed seeing them?’ Plock.

  ‘She had them out.’

  ‘On the dance floor?’ Plock.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Out of her bra?’ Plock.

  ‘Completely.’

  ‘You’re moodying me.’ Plock.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Moody-merchant!’ Plock.

  ‘She had them completely out of her bra, Aishky. How many more times?’

  ‘Both of them?’ Plock.

  ‘What’s with the both? You think there were only two?’

  ‘My mazel! I’d been trying to get those bristles out all night. That’s why I was so tired. Now you’re telling me I slept through them.’ Plock. Plock.

  Tcheppehing, we called this in those days. Anglicized to chipping. Verbal lumberjacking. I loved it. How much longer before I would be allowed to join in? Be one of the boys at last? ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ I thought of contributing. But I didn’t have the balls.

  In the meantime my opponent was still taking no more notice of me than if I’d been the plaster whorl I practised against at home; less, because you had to watch a whorl. So when a ball finally did sit up for hitting I hit it, not diagonally in the direction it had come from, making it easy for him to return by reflex, without looking and while still tcheppehing his chinas, and not with a nice high friendly topspin bounce either, but straight down the line and flat — a shot that is all feint and deviance — and faster than the speed of light.

  Years later, even after he had lost two fingers from his right hand in an accident in a phone box and had taught himself to play again with his left, right up until the time he lost a further two fingers, this time from his left hand, in an explosion at a retail bedding warehouse, Aishky Mistofsky was still recounting the story of how we’d met. ‘To tell you the emmes, that night I’d gone along to the club for a quiet game of kalooki. I didn’t feel like running around. My nerves were giving me trouble. And I’d just come out of a bath. Yes, I had my bat with me, but that didn’t mean anything. Anyone who knows me will tell you I don’t go anywhere without my bat. Anyway, I get to the card room and no one’s turned up yet, so I think I may as well take a kuk at the table tennis room. How far is it to walk? The usual gang’s there — Sheeny Waxman, Twink Starr, Louis Marks, Gershom Finkel, all nice people. And we’re sitting around, having a knock and a nobbel, when suddenly — and you’ll split your sides at this — in walks this kid carrying a bat as big as the Empire State Building, challenges me to a game and starts shmeissing the ball past me. I’m telling you I’ve never seen a ball hit faster. And this is just the knock-up! I think OK, Chaim Yankel, say your prayers, and I start zetzing the ball myself. Makes no difference. I hit it hard, he hits it back twice as hard. Then he puts a chop on it. Oy! — I see it spinning backwards in the air. And fizzing. Like Superman’s chopped it. That’s it. I put my bat down, look across at Twink Starr, whose mouth has fallen half-way off his face, and I say, “OK, maestro, so you give the teapot lid a knock. What’ll it cost you?” But we both knew a legend had been born.’

  Sweet of him. Doubly sweet of him, considering the tragedy of his own career. But the reality was more mundane. They woke up to the fact that I could play a bit, that was all that happened. They took an interest in me. All of them except Gershom Finkel who said, ‘He’s got brawn but no timing. He’s a shtarker, nothing else.’

  ‘Do me a favour, Gershom,’ Aishky said to him. ‘You know as well as I do that you can’t hit a ball that hard unless you know how to time it.’

  ‘Depends how it comes to you. You were feeding his strengths. You never played him short.’

  ‘Easier said than done.’

  ‘I don’t say what I can’t do. I could clean the kid up with my wrong hand.’

  (Where am I while all this is going on? I’m standing there like a kuni-lemele, counting the pimples on Twink’s bat, shell-locked, listening to the patter of my perspiration on the club floor.)

  ‘So do it,’ Aishky dared him. ‘I’d like to see you.’

  ‘I’m in my coat,’ Gershom said. ‘I’m not taking my coat off.’

  ‘Keep it on. If you can clean him up with your wrong hand, you can clean him up in your coat.’

  ‘I don’t have anything to prove,’ Gershom said. ‘And I don’t give free lessons.’ Whereupon he went walkabout again.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Aishky advised me. ‘He used to be a great player. Now he’s just a mamzer.’

  ‘What do you mean a great player?’ Twink put in. ‘One of the greatest. The guy was mustard. He played for England twice. And made it to the quarter-finals in Baden the year Bergmann won. It may even have been Bergmann who beat him. That’s how good he was. Louis’ll know. Louis, who beat Gershom in Baden in ‘39?’

  I hadn’t taken much notice of Louis. He hadn’t played, that was why. I hadn’t seen what he was made of. He’d scored a few games and laughed hysterically at the bristle jokes, groaning with pain because he’d hurt his ribs and pulled muscles in his back and chest and laughing made them worse; but I hadn’t otherwise been aware of him. It was hard to tell how old he was. He lifted weights — which was how he had come to have damaged most of the muscles in his body — and this gave him the torso of a man in his twenties. But in the face he was a fifteen-year-old boy, a grinner, almost as shy as I was, with a mass of black hair that had never been combed and that muddy Dniester complexion that put me off my grandmother on my father’s side. Test him with a name or a date, though, and his skin shone like a Yakipak’s.

  ‘Baden was ‘37 not ‘39!’ he retorted. Why retort? He had only been asked a question. But I had noticed that no one spoke in a normal voice here. There was no discourse. Everyone shouted. Not in anger, but in a sort of perpetual sorrow that everyone else should be so wrong about everything for so much of the time.

  ‘Does it matter when it was? I’m asking you who beat him.’

  ‘I’m telling you — Sol Schiff, the finger-spinner. 26–24 in the third.’

  ‘So who beat Schiff?’

  ‘Who do you think! Bergmann. But not easily. No one beat Schiff easily. No one could handle his finger-spin service.’

  ‘I thought they’d banned Sol Schiff’s service,’ Aishky said.

  ‘Later — that was later. You’re thinking of the Americans.’

  ‘Why would I be thinking of the Americans?’

  ‘Because they banned it.’

  ‘Louis, do me a favour — was it banned or wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was banned in America, I’ve told you, but not in Baden. It took the International Federation another few years to wake up.’

  ‘That means that if the World Championships had been held in America –’

  Twink saw where Aishky was heading. ‘- And Gershom had been drawn against Schiff there –’

  Louis laughed wildly. It was almost a sob. ‘- He’d have been given a walk-over, yeah. And maybe gone on to take the title. But what’s the point of talking? He didn’t.’

&n
bsp; We exchanged crestfallen expressions, then turned our eyes as one man on the strange loping buttoned-up figure of Gershom Finkel, wispily bald in that manner that suggests the hairs are yet to come rather than that they’ve been and gone, still circumnavigating the room and still muttering and laughing sarcastically to himself. We were all thinking the same thing. Was this any way for a great ping-pong player to have ended up?

  My father was waiting for me as he’d promised, asleep on the wheel of his bus. I’d been in the club four hours. I was surprised I recognized him.

  ‘So how was it?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘They’ve all got something wrong with them,’ I said.

  He let go of the wheel and banged the side of his head with the heel of his hand. An upward brushing movement, as though he wanted to clear unwelcome matter from his brain. They’ve all got something wrong with them. He hated that sort of talk. Judgements, judgements. The stuff I’d picked up from my mother and the Violets. We couldn’t say boo to a goose, any of us, but we knew what we thought of the goose, oh yes.

  ‘I didn’t ask what they were like,’ he said. ‘I asked how it went.’

  ‘It went well,’ I said. ‘They’ve asked me to play for the team.’

  ‘Ah!’ Now he was pleased with me. ‘Thank you.’ He drove on in silence for a few minutes, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. Pride? Did I see pride? Then he asked, ‘And how was the bat?’

  You can’t hurt your own father on the one occasion he’s pleased with you. ‘It was good,’ I said. ‘Better than the book.’

  ‘Ah! Thank you.’ More silence, and then, ‘You had a good night, then?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Why did he keep on thanking me? I can only suppose it was because I’d put him in the right, at last. Proved that I was his true son and heir. Proved that he knew how to do the best for me. There was so much unaccustomed harmony between us, at any rate, that instead of turning left at Middleton Road he turned right, kept on going past the park and the mills and pulled up in front of a detached white-washed cottage by the rubberworks in Rhodes. ‘Home, James,’ he said.

  I had to explain to him that this wasn’t where we lived.

  He took a moment or two to get his bearings, then he said, ‘You’re right. Thank you. Thank you.’

  ‘So how was it?’ my mother wanted to know. My aunties, too, who had stayed around at our place later than usual, waiting for me to come home. Waiting to kvell.

  ‘They’ve all got something wrong with them,’ I said.

  ‘Such as what?’ Tell us, tell us.

  ‘Bits missing.’

  ‘We don’t believe you.’ Love and laughter, for the bright boy. We don’t believe you, but tell us, tell us anyway.

  ‘They have. They’ve all got bits missing. Broken ribs. Tuberculosis.’

  ‘Tuberculosis?’

  This was a tactical error on my part. My mother was all for me playing ping-pong because she believed it was safe. No one got hurt playing ping-pong. Now I was telling her the game was riddled with infectious diseases.

  ‘Well, not tuberculosis exactly,’ I corrected myself. ‘More like asthma.’

  ‘If they’ve got asthma they shouldn’t be playing.’

  ‘Ma, none of them should be playing. One of them’s about a hundred and won’t take his coat off. Another’s blind.’

  ‘Blind?’

  ‘He was the one I beat.’

  How they laughed. They loved it when I was wicked, my mother’s side. It empowered them. We’d get into a huddle and we’d call the goose for all sorts.

  But that always encouraged me to go too far. ‘The other one I beat,’ I went on, ‘was dead.’

  ‘Zei gezunt,’ my mother said. ‘You’re overexcited. Go to bed.’

  By morning the atmosphere had changed. My mother had worked out that playing for a team entailed travelling. ‘I’m not sure I like the idea of you charging off God knows where at your age,’ she said, over cheese on toast. That was breakfast. The entire time I lived in my mother’s and father’s house I ate only cheese on toast for breakfast. We had a corona of melted cheese around our hearts, each of us. My father died of melted cheese in every artery. Yet my mother was worried that I’d come to harm playing ping-pong for the Akiva Social Club.

  ‘I think we travel as a team,’ I told her.

  ‘Travel as a team how? In an aeroplane?’

  ‘Ma, this is the Manchester and District Table Tennis League, Third Division. The furthest we go is Stockport.’ I didn’t know this for a fact. I was guessing.

  ‘Stockport! And how are you supposed to get back from Stockport?’

  ‘In a car, I imagine. One of the team drives us, Ma.’

  ‘Which one of the team? The blind one?’

  Funny she should have guessed that.

  Pending certification by the League Secretary — and it took about ten days for my registration form to be received and scrutinized, my three-shilling postal order to be cashed, and for Aishky Mistofsky, who was Club Secretary, to be given the all-clear — I could practise with the team but not play for it.

  In those days, when ping-pong players grew on trees, before — but let’s not start the Jeremiah stuff; we all know that Greater Manchester is no longer Eden — a team numbered five, with five more clamouring to get a game. Prior to me, the Akiva Social Club — positioned neither at the very top nor at the very bottom of the Third Division North, but enjoying the middle of her favours — consisted of Aishky Mistofsky, Theo/Twink Starr, the Marks brothers — Louis and Selwyn — and Sheeny Waxman. Selwyn, the younger of the Markses, and the nearest to me in age of the whole bunch, I’d met briefly on my first night in the club without realizing he was Louis’s brother. The word met might be stretching things a bit. He’d spoken to no one the whole time, not even Louis, so engrossed was he in rehearsing his shots. He played along in dumb show with whoever was on the table, hitting the ball exactly as they did and punishing himself when they missed. Although in rehearsal his repertory of strokes was prodigious, the moment it came to actual play he lost the nerve to try any of them, and was reduced to the safest of all safe shots, the backhand almost-horizontal shove, which he executed with the greatest deliberation from every corner of the table, never taking his eye off the ball, but to an accompaniment of all manner of insults against himself, as though his own timidity was a lasting shame to him. In appearance he was slight and undernourished; and apart from a premature moustache which grew with cruel disregard for shape or uniformity — a couple of dozen individual spikes of various lengths and colours — he was as white all over as a box of new balls, like a person who had never been seen by the sun.

  Sheeny Waxman, notwithstanding Aishky Mistofsky’s post hoc recollection that he’d been of our company on the night my talent was divulged, was an unknown quantity to me. He was very short, with a pronounced tic, and enjoyed a reputation as a head jockey — that was all I knew about him. A very short twitching head jockey with a terrific forehand. When I asked what a head jockey was they all laughed at me. ‘Something like a linguist,’ Theo confided, whereupon they all laughed again. As for Sheeny Waxman’s forehand, only Louis Marks, on our team, had a forehand that could equal it. And Louis Marks was injured. Hence me.

  I was going round to the Akiva almost every night now. If my father was home he would drive me. Otherwise I caught a local train from Bowker Vale to Woodlands Road, one or other of my aunties accompanying me to the station, just in case the prefab boys thought of launching an assault.

  How anyone could have supposed that the prefab boys would have been deterred by a Shrinking Violet I can’t imagine, but the ploy worked. The one time I was stoned was the one time I’d persuaded my mother I was now big enough to walk to the station on my own.

  Usually Aishky Mistofsky drove me back. I’d promised my mother that if I didn’t have a lift I would ring home and wait for someone to collect me. The trains stopped early and she didn’t want
me wandering in the dead of night. Not through that part of Manchester with all its shaygets perils. I didn’t of course tell her that Aishky Mistofsky was indeed the blind one and that I was never in more danger than when he drove me home.

  I had quickly grown fond of Aishky, in the gooey way a little kid grows fond of a big kid. I liked his gingery beaky face, which he brought very close to mine on account of his short-sightedness, and which he pressed right up against the windscreen of his Austin A40, for the same reason. I liked the way he laughed, throwing his head back and showing the red hairs at his throat — an action that didn’t so much register the funniness or smartness of something someone had said, as the uncomplicated pleasure he took in someone being there to say something to him at all. And I liked the way he played ping-pong, earnestly, with a resolute arm, as though he owed something to the ball. He never defended, not even when that was the one sure way of beating his opponent. He liked to hit, rhythmically, conventionally, the bat starting low down, arcing predictably, and finishing high up, and if that didn’t happen to be what it took to win that night, so he lost.

  In this he was the very opposite of his best friend, Twink Starr, whose great strength was his ability to find the edge of the table, but who would grit his teeth, chew his tongue, alter the whole nature of his game — pushing, chopping, half-volleying, sweating buckets, coughing up phlegm — if that was the only way to win the match. But I’m running ahead of myself. Before there were any matches — at least as far as I was concerned — I had to be kitted out. ‘For starters,’ Twink reminded me, ‘you can’t go on borrowing my bat — you’ll need your own.’