The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  Had he been a bit taller, and looked a little bit less like some of my cousins on my mother’s side, Bergmann would have been my hero. As it was, I’d gone to the trouble of learning many of his reflections on ping-pong off by heart. Such as, ‘You should at all times be able to vary your style of play and go back to defending of your OWN ACCORD.’ In other words, defence wasn’t a recourse, forced on you by the will of your opponent. It was your choice (like Sheeny’s to become a low-life), made in your own time and in reference to no one but yourself. Was that true of Ali, holding on and covering up for so long in that Zaire night? Maybe not. Maybe he defended of Foreman’s accord. In which case little Richard’s will was more fearsome than big Ali’s.

  Something else Bergmann said which I’d committed to memory: ‘Practise until you have a feeling of absolute safety, that certain “I can’t miss” feeling.’ He was talking about the backhand defensive chop. Of all table tennis strokes, this is the one it’s easiest to have that ‘I can’t miss feeling’ about. If you don’t have an absolutely safe backhand chop you might as well forget ping-pong as a career. That was true of the game as it was played in my time, anyway. Now — but in every way now’s different.

  Precisely because it does (or should) come naturally, precisely because it’s an intimate, easily camouflaged stroke played without discernible risk close to your body, you can’t demoralize an opponent with a backhand chop alone. To break a spirit comprehensively you need to be able to chop with your forehand. Of all table tennis strokes the forehand chop is the loveliest — speaking classically now, speaking of grace and elegance, speaking of music and poetry — and the most deadly. To execute a forehand chop you must leave the sanctuary of your body, go out on a limb, risk your reach and your balance, expose yourself. Get a forehand chop wrong and everyone can see it. Ditto get a forehand chop right. Not just see it either; execute the forehand chop to perfection, take the ball into custody on your forehand, cradle it, coddle it, suspend its trajectory for a millionth of a second, caress it, make it yours, put your name on it, and your opponent will shudder like a patient on an anaesthetist’s table, feeling fingers pulling at his heart. You shudder yourself at that moment of suspension and possession, as though futurity, with its adoring millions, has paused to lay flowers on your grave. Yes, it is the loveliest and the most arrogant of all ping-pong strokes because it infinitesimally arrests the game and controverts its logic. In this way it is crucially different from a counter-hit, however unexpected, for a counter-hit merely answers like with like, whereas the forehand chop refuses your opponent’s entire vocabulary. It is insouciant. Egotistical. Imperious. Soul destroying.

  And I played it as though I’d invented it. ‘You must be able to execute this stroke in your sleep, on the roof of a burning house, in a blizzard and on the high seas with a north-west gale blowing,’ Bergmann said. I went one better: I executed it in the face of Gershom Finkel’s sneering.

  He missed the first game of my first match. I count that as significant. It meant that I was able to get my chop going, free of the evil influence of his detraction. He wandered round the club on match nights, unable to watch, unable not to watch, unable to stay in the room, unable to leave it, as though an invisible devil with a pitchfork were goading him from one hellish circle to the next. Who knows, had we compared sightings we might have discovered that he was in the ping-pong room at the same time he was in the billiard room, and in the billiard room at the same time he was in the card room, that even as he was sneering at me he was dancing — still in his buttoned-up navy coat, still laughing mirthlessly to himself — with my aunty Dolly.

  He turned up — some bodily form of him turned up — just as I was completing victory number one. He ducked in, between points, like a bailiff, stood at the far end of the room where I couldn’t fail to see him, and clapped ironically, dead knuckles on a dead palm, when the match was over. You can always tell when someone from your own side would much rather you had lost. Though it might be stretching language a bit to say that Gershom Finkel was on our side. He wandered off again for Twink’s and Aishky’s second matches. Went dancing, presumably. Put his dead hand between my poor aunty Dolly’s quaking shoulder-blades. How did he know when to come back? Who told him that I was about to go on again?

  ‘I’ll umpire this one if you like,’ he said, testing the net for height, and twanging it for tautness, before sitting down.

  No one likes umpiring. No one undertakes the job willingly. Least of all, my team-mates told me later, Gershom Finkel. ‘The mamzer’s never umpired a game in his life,’ Sheeny reckoned.

  ‘Once,’ Louis Marks corrected him. ‘Three years ago, when Johnny Leach came to play an exhibition match in the club. He called him for foul-serving as well.’

  As well. The phrase tells its own story. ‘When you’re ready, gentlemen … Away call. No, it’s tails. Walzer to serve. Love all. Foul serve, love—one.’ That was about the way it went. I exaggerate only slightly. To be fair to Gershom — though I can’t think of any good reason to be fair to Gershom — he cautioned me about my serve before calling it. Cautioned me once, called me twice, and then, to rub salt in, rose from his chair, stood behind me, breathed into my neck, and showed me what I was doing wrong. My serving palm was not flat, there was the problem. ‘In the delivery of the service,’ the rules stated, ‘the free hand of any two-handed player shall be open and flat, with the fingers straight and together, thumb free and the ball resting on the palm without being cupped or pinched in any way by the fingers.’

  Make a rule and you’ll always find a life-hating pedant who will interpret it ungenerously. Later emendations of the rules — having just such an umpire as Gershom Finkel in mind — removed the emphasis from ‘the precise degree of flatness of the server’s free hand’. What’s so special about flatness, when all is said and done? Illegal spin, that was what the no cupped-palm rule existed to prevent. Sol Schiff’s legacy. Diabolically concealed finger-spin. The thing that had once dashed Gershom’s own hopes. But just because the four fingers of my free hand were not lying dead straight and together, like the corpses of four little Victorian pauper babies, it didn’t mean I was doing a Sol Schiff.

  This could have been the end of me. Mortification in front of friends; mortification in front of strangers; my confidence shot down just as it was taking flight; and a palpable ineptitude demonstrated in the area where I was most sensitive — in the matter of what I did with my free hand. I thought I would burn up. There is nowhere to hide on a ping-pong table. I have said that about a bus, but compared to a ping-pong table a bus is a haven of hideaways. I lost control of my mouth which began to skid horribly across my face. I was within a whisker of throwing my bat down, covering my shame, and running out of the Akiva for ever. So what stopped me? Not my own presence of mind, that’s for sure. I was a shell-skulker, a lavatory-stewer, a secret cutter-up of aunties and grandmas — I had no presence of mind. What saved me was the generosity of my opponent. Dave. They were all Dave or Derek, the Post Office team. Derek Lockwood, Dave Clayton, Derek Hargreaves. This one was Dave Hancocks. I was lucky in him. He let Gershom’s first decision go. Took the point. Not gladly. But took it. You don’t look a gift-horse. But after the second call he deliberately hit his next return off the table and subsequently dribbled his own service into the net. Thereafter, whenever Gershom fouled me, Dave Hancocks threw away the next point.

  But where did this leave me? Ought I to be deliberately netting my returns to thank him for netting his? Where did reciprocity end in a situation like this? I looked to Aishky. ‘Dave Hancocks is one of ping-pong’s gentlemen,’ he whispered to me. ‘He isn’t looking for any favours. Just play your game.’

  Twink too had some advice for me. ‘Don’t insult the guy by holding back,’ he said.

  Easier said than done. I was falling in love with the man. He had saved me from humiliation. He had stuck it to Gershom in the most demonstrative way possible, short of smacking him in the face. And he praised me, on
ce I had recovered sufficiently to be able to play some shots, in a manner that sent little warm shivers — love-warm, not shame-warm — down my legs. ‘Shot, kid,’ he said, and I tingled. ‘Unlucky,’ he said, shaking his head and smiling, and I fear that I tingled even more.

  There was something of the foot soldier about Dave Hancocks. Strong stocky legs, a low centre of gravity, resolution, dependability. You could imagine him walking across the Alps with Hannibal, carrying the General’s sandwiches. He had a Roman profile too. And a head perhaps a little too large for his body. Anyone wanting to be picky about Dave Hancocks’s appearance might have wondered whether he wasn’t too much like a dwarf — not exactly a dwarf but too much like one — to be considered handsome. For my part I can only state that I have always admired the Roman-dwarf look on a man. I suppose I was responsive to the shape because it was a refined and more mobile version of my father’s side. I had been brought up to believe that a big head on a square squat body was a mark of manliness.

  Under other circumstances, later in my career, and without Gershom around to vex the chemistry, I would gladly have lost to Dave Hancocks. ‘Unlucky,’ he would have said, ‘unlucky, kid,’ and I would have gone soft inside his strong consolatory handshake. Of course I didn’t know at the time that I wanted to yield to him. What I am describing comes to a man only after many years of reflection; and I refer to it for no other reason than that it is interesting to me to realize that the corrupt germ of voluptuous defeatism was lodged in my system so early.

  As it was, I had to make do with the lesser voluptuousness of beating him. It was plenty to be going on with. ‘Very well played,’ he said, looking up at me, shaking my hand and bowing. He was wonderfully courteous. A postal clerk by day, a little dark top-heavy troubadour of ping-pong by night.

  ‘Yes, very well played,’ Aishky and Twink chorused.

  We all knew what we knew. That I’d beaten Gershom Finkel as well as Dave Hancocks.

  When he’d finished filling out the scorecard, Gershom Finkel came over to where I was sitting with my towel on my head. I felt it go dark around me. ‘I don’t mind spending a bit of time helping you to get that serve right,’ he said.

  I didn’t come out of my towel. I felt very calm in there. Very calm for me. It was as if I’d been born with ringing ears and suddenly they’d stopped. I could hear the world clearly at last. I heard Aishky taking the net down. I heard Twink zipping up the legs of his tracksuit and humming ‘Che gelida manina’ to himself. Then, ‘Fuck off, Gershom,’ I heard myself say.

  It’s a wonderful moment in the life of a shy young person when he swears at a fully grown adult for the first time. It’s like a miracle cure. It’s like waking up with strong legs on your second morning in Lourdes. Speaking for myself it was as though I had all at once become a man.

  So I stayed under the towel a little longer, just in case it wasn’t true.

  I had a lot to trawl through before I could get to sleep that night. The perfect loveliness of winning. The confirmation of that old Walzer conviction — that I was destined for great things. My storm-resistant forehand chop, which I actually replayed as I lay on my bed, chopping at shadows. The kindness of my friends. My acceptance, signalled by the consideration shown to me by the Roman dwarf, into the affections of men. But most of all I kept saying over and over again, because they were sweeter than any words I had ever previously heard myself utter, Fuck off, Gershom … Fuck off, Gershom … Fuck off, Gershom …’

  SEVEN

  THIRD DIVISION NORTH

  LEADING INDIVIDUAL AVERAGES

  P

  W

  L

  %

  O. Walzer (Akiva Social Club)

  32

  30

  2

  94

  S. Waxman (Akiva Social Club)

  40

  37

  3

  93

  D. Bromley (Freeman, Hardy & Willis T. T. C.)

  42

  37

  5

  88

  D. Lockwood (Prestwich Hospital)

  38

  33

  5

  86

  T. Starr (Akiva Social Club)

  44

  37

  7

  84

  A. Mistofsky (Akiva Social Club)

  44

  35

  9

  80

  D. Flewers (Water Board)

  38

  29

  9

  76

  J. Cartwright (A. J. M.)

  40

  30

  10

  75

  Manchester and District Table Tennis League, Official Handbook,

  Season 1956/57

  THAT WAS HOW the season went for us. Forgive the sin of pride. But percentages are percentages.

  Having come of age against the Post Office I never lost another league match. What the figures don’t reveal is that I was never once taken to three games either. And never once to deuce. I was unbeatable. Until I took my revenge against him at home, Jack Cartwright was sitting pretty on top of the averages. Played thirty, won thirty. All without raising a sweat. The first of those subsequent ten defeats was inflicted by me. 21–5, 21–3. Funny how some scores you always remember. He must have had trouble forgetting too; he made the averages by the skin of his clicking teeth and retired at the end of the season. Fall to your prayers, old man.

  Yes, there was needle in it. Aishky had made the brave but wise decision not to play Sheeny in the return match against Allied Jam and Marmalade. The Miles Platting Affair, for which Cynthia Cartwright had received neither compensation nor apology, still rumbled on. ‘When I see that little pervert Waxman again I’ll break his bloody nose, rules or no rules,’ Jack Cartwright was reported to have been going round saying.

  This confirmed Selwyn Marks’s darkest suspicions. ‘There you are, didn’t I tell you? Nose. “I’ll break his bloody nose.” Didn’t I say they were anti-Semites?’

  ‘Selwyn, everyone’s got a nose,’ Aishky said.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. And everyone’s got a chin too. But he isn’t saying, “I’ll break his chin,” is he? He’s saying nose. Nose.’

  To be on the safe side Aishky rested Selwyn as well. We were running hot, heading the table, certain of promotion. We could afford to risk Louis and go in a man short. We’d forgotten what it was like to lose.

  Even with Sheeny and Selwyn out of the way the confrontation turned ugly. Our opponents came wanting to find fault with us, and to be honest that wasn’t difficult to do. For a start we were never well supplied with match balls. As Club Secretary it was up to Aishky to see to it that there was always a box of new *** balls to hand on match night. Week after week we ran out, discovered that the box was empty, or that it was full of used balls and cracked balls, balls of a lower denomination, two-star, one-star, no star at all, balls with dents in them or with ill-fitting seams, balls through which you could see a pin-prick of light, balls which inexplicably rattled or sighed, balls which seemed all right, which defied the most scrupulous investigation and testing, but which plocked hollow the moment you struck them. It wasn’t meanness that stopped Aishky going out and stocking up with new match balls. It was indifference. He no more understood the reason for a high quality ball than he understood why Twink needed to play in a Fred Perry shirt and short hasen. He himself could have played with a hard-boiled egg and not noticed the difference.

  Two plocks into his knock-up with Twink, Jack Cartwright was asking for a new ball. Aishky emptied a long box of used and grubby pills on to the table. Jack Cartwright rolled each of them in turn with his bat, round and round as though he were trying to get an ancient stain out of the table, his ear cocked like a wise old rat’s, pressing until the table threatened to give way and his pimples squeaked. A golf ball wouldn’t have survived that kind of treatment. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘Nope … nope … nope … nope.’

  ‘Those are all we’ve got,’ Aishky laugh
ed.

  Cartwright went over to the patchwork of leather elbow protectors that was his jacket and brought out the rule book from its inside pocket. It too was well worn, like a miser’s cashbook. ‘Balls …’ he said aloud, leafing through. ‘Balls …’

  It was Twink who felt the humiliation most keenly. He had been skipping around the room during Cartwright’s interrogation of our stock of balls, running on the spot and practising attacking shots, anxious to keep his muscles stretched and his temperature even. Now he was furious with Aishky. ‘How many times have I told you about this?’ he said.

  Aishky shrugged. Tomorrow he would need a long lie down, but tonight he could shrug. ‘If balls are so important to you,’ he said, ‘why don’t you carry some around yourself?’