The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘You know why,’ Twink said.

  ‘Yeah — because you’re a nudnik. Because you like kopdreinish.’

  Twink shook his head. ‘Believe me, Aishky, if you think this gives me any pleasure …’

  ‘If it doesn’t give you any pleasure, then stop. You look after the balls. I nominate you. Theo Starr, Ball Shamess.’

  ‘Aishky, please. Keep your voice down. You know why I can’t carry balls in my kit.’

  ‘Say it. I want to hear you say it.’

  Twink lowered his eyes. He could be very girlish. ‘The dog.’

  ‘The dog!’ Aishky looked at each of us in turn. Our friend was a madman. Did we hear? ‘The dog!’ Then of Twink himself he asked, ‘What’s the dog got to do with it?’

  ‘You know what.’

  ‘I want to hear you say it.’

  Twink fluttered again. ‘I’m frightened of the dog swallowing a ball,’ he said. ‘You know what happened to Jackie Strulovitch’s dog.’

  ‘Moody-merchant! That was a marble.’

  ‘No it wasn’t, Aishky. It was a table tennis ball. Jackie Strulovitch’s dog choked to death on a Barna ***.’

  ‘So because I don’t have a dog I’ve got to shlepp boxes of balls around with me?’

  ‘Aishky, you’re the team captain,’ Twink said. And then with slow and awful deliberateness, ‘Go. And. Get. A. Box. Of. Balls.’

  He had that wild Bug and Dniester us-and-them look in his eyes. When one of us looked like that it was in the belief that we could magic words and that none of them would hear what we were saying.

  Aishky consulted his watch. ‘It’s eight o’clock at night. Where am I going to get a box of balls? The off-licence?’

  ‘Aishk, get in your car,’ Twink said. ‘Drive over to the Maccabi. And beg them for a box of balls.’

  Aishky threw him the keys.

  ‘Aishky, I’m in my shorts.’

  ‘So? Put your hasen on.’

  ‘Aishky, I suffer from asthma. You’re asking me to go out in the cold in my shorts when I’m sweating?’

  ‘You want the balls, you go for them.’

  ‘Aishky, you know I can’t drive.’

  Now Aishky stood up. ‘Thank you,’ he said. He reminded me of my father. ‘Thank you for admitting there is something you can’t do.’

  And he drove to the Maccabi on Middleton Road and begged them for a box of match balls.

  Then there was the problem of the slippery floor. Why the floor of a room that was used only for table tennis, storing mops, and a once-a-year Chanukkah party had to be so highly polished that even a twelve-year-old could admire his moustache in it, no responsible person at the Akiva was able to explain. They were nice old boards and the caretaker took pride in them. Ask the caretaker … except don’t. The club had never had a caretaker who took better care. Just loz him ein. Leave him alone. Who can understand the mind of a caretaker? What he did, he did. You don’t upset the shaygets.

  We’d got used to the problem ourselves. We’d spit on the floor between points and rub our shoes in the puddle. For visiting teams we provided a wet cloth. Only tonight Aishky had mislaid the cloth.

  ‘On my life, Aishky,’ Twink said, the minute Aishky was back from the Maccabi, ‘if you don’t find that cloth I’ll rip the shirt off your back.’

  ‘Don’t do that, Sonny Jim,’ Jack Cartwright said. ‘Just wait till one of us goes over and breaks a leg, then we can sue you for all you’ve got.’

  It was a good job Selwyn had been told to stay at home. ‘Did you hear that? Sue you for all you’ve got!’

  And as if the balls and the floorboards weren’t enough, we slipped up on refreshments as well. At the best of times hospitality wasn’t our strong suit. A cup of weak tea and a sweet biscuit each was the most we were usually able to dig up. Once again the problem wasn’t meanness. Aishky just wasn’t a fresser. He liked a big lunch, and there was always something hot waiting for him when he got home to his mother after a match, otherwise he didn’t think about food. ‘You want delicatessen, you go and buy delicatessen,’ he told Twink. But Twink wasn’t much of a picker either.

  Tonight though — and what made it worse was that the A. J. M. was famously hospitable: milky Nescafés, PG Tips, hot chocolates, Lucozades, bitter lemons, club sodas and all the jam fancies and marmalade doughnuts you could eat — tonight, though, the element in our kettle had broken and because Passover was in the wind all we had to offer in the way of solids was a box of dry matzos and a bag of kichels. In fact a kichel is a delicacy, provided you have the right expectations of what it is you are eating and are given a strong cup of tea or a glass of sweet red wine to dunk it in. But there was no tea and no wine.

  ‘Bit hard on your teeth, these,’ Jack Cartwright said, coughing one up. For a minute I thought he was going to go into his rule book again. ‘Kichels … kichels …’ What he actually did was ask where the bathroom was so he could wash his mouth out with water.

  But by then he was a spent force. By then I’d taken him out 21—5, 21—3, to pay him back for the misery he’d caused me on Bonfire Night, and the trouble he was trying to make for Sheeny Waxman, and the fuss he’d made over the balls and the floor, and for being an anti-Semite.

  The markets were going well, too. My father had given us a couple of weeks of anxiety after we’d found him collapsed one morning with his head in the fireplace. Overwork. He’d been up all night finishing an order for twenty-five coffee tables. Grandiosity again — now he was making for other marketmen! It was a lucky escape. There was a diadem of winking embers around his head when we found him, like a halo round a saint in an illuminated manuscript. And he still had tacks for the beading in his mouth. It was a miracle he hadn’t burned or choked. Or burned and choked. But at least that had put an end to manufacturing on a large and impersonal scale. Now when we gathered round the dining-room table as a family it was to pop together plastic poppet necklaces, or to assemble travellers’ refreshment packs — a sponge, a face cloth, a comb, a tube of toothpaste and a shoe brush — or to weigh out bags of chocolate truffles which my father was able to buy cheaply in bulk on account of their having changed colour. Fershimmelt was the precise term. Anything too fershimmelt we threw away. My father wasn’t in the business of poisoning his punters. But between too fershimmelt and pretty appalling to look at there was some leeway. That was where I came in. I sat half-way down the production line and wiped the discolouration off the so-so truffles with one of the sponges from a traveller’s refreshment pack.

  I didn’t have to be over-nice about it. The truffles were only plunder — one of the lines my father tossed out from the side of his lorry for pennies, sometimes even for nothing, depending on how much it took to get the crowd in the mood. Yes, there was a lorry now, and crowds. In no time at all my father had gone from being one of those shtumkopfs who stand behind their stalls with their hands in their pockets waiting for the punters to finger their tsatskes — allow me an exaggeration, I know he was never that shtum — to being a fully fledged pitcher who called the punters to him. Not a mock auctioneer or a run-out worker — he was always strictly above board: ‘Who’s a liar!’ he would laugh whenever he promised them that this ‘really was the last one’ — but a showman who blew whistles and juggled plates and told jokes and confetti’d the crowd with free pens and cheap bags of chocolates (‘Out they go! See if I care!’), and was variously known as Cheap Johnnie, Honest Jo and Mad Jack.

  He had come to an understanding of what sort of marketman he was now, too. No more searching around for lines. He was in swag — end of story. And swag took in chalk love-in-a-cottage wall plaques and shepherd and shepherdess figurines and hot-water bottles that burst when you filled them with hot water and torches that didn’t work in the dark and plastic colanders with no holes in them and hula hoops and shockproof deep-sea divers’ watches and jardinières and folding chairs that could kill when they sprang shut and dolls that sometimes said ‘Mama’ but more often than not didn’t a
nd leatherette writing-pad compendiums and dictionaries that had no definitions in them and plastic potties to go under the bed (‘That’s why they’re called gesunders, Mrs Woman’) and pairs of peeling brass candlesticks and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of pelicans and polar bears and sheer nylon stockings for women with short Far Eastern legs (fine for the Walzer women) and three-dimensional paintings of the Last Supper and musical fish-bowls and fountains that played when the phone rang and of course Swan Lake coffee tables (made by someone else) and poppet necklaces and travellers’ refreshment packs and bags of discoloured truffles, ‘ramped and stamped by the British Institute of Public Health and Hygiene’.

  Was there such an institution? I never found out. If there was he could only have come to hear of its existence from my mother. She coached him. He was the one with the warm shaygets-loving personality but she was the one with the words. ‘Ramped and stamped,’ though, was his. He must have picked it up in the army. Similarly the joke about there being nothing he wouldn’t do for his wife, and there being nothing his wife wouldn’t do for him, and that that was how they went through life together, doing nothing for one another. He couldn’t tell that one enough. It was as though it surprised even him every time he told it, as though it revealed some paradox at the heart of language itself which he never ever saw coming. He enjoyed a perfect rapport with his punters. They never saw it coming either. They’d stand there half a day, some of them, open mouthed in the Garston or Oswestry rain, listening to the routine repeat itself like di Stefano singing ‘O Soave fanciulla’ on Twink’s turntable, and horse-laughing, if anything the more ungovernably, the better they got to know it. ‘And that’s how we go through life together …’ He’d even wait for them to peer into the jiggery-pokery of language themselves, pounce on the punch-line before it could ambush them. He’d direct them in it, sometimes, like Toscanini. ‘One, two, three … doing nothing for one another.’

  Otherwise everything came from my mother. She’d write out his material for him in big letters on a lined absorbent note-pad — made in Albania and selling for sixpence a dozen with a Porker Pen Set thrown in — and he’d sit and commit it to memory. ‘Not two pounds, not one pound, not even ten shillings … Here, I’ll tell you what I’ll do, today and today only …’

  ‘Only,’ my mother would get him to repeat. ‘Give it some emphasis. Make it sound as though it really is only for today.’

  ‘Only … today only.’

  It really was a marriage made in heaven.

  It’s a funny thing about swag — you begin by being ashamed of yourself for dealing in it, feeling pity and not a little contempt for the discernment of those who buy it, and not only buy it but actually appear to like it and want it, need it even, but in the end you too succumb to it. Swag is viral. I say is but in truth I don’t know how swag is now. I live a long way from any English market. Of course the carnival masks and the plastic gondolas are no different in spirit from the swag we sold, but I have nothing to do with the swagmen in whose shops and on whose stalls you find them. In my swag days, at any rate, the stuff was virulent. If you hung around it long enough you caught it.

  At first none of us believed there could be a market for the gear my father was bringing back from the warehouses. ‘Look at these!’ we would say, scampering around in the back of the van, ripping open boxes of ornamental Dutch pee-pee boys with Chinese faces, and flowery wall plates that said ‘Too Grand Ma’, and brass mirrors in the design of a ship’s porthole. Who was this stuff for? In time we came to realize. It was for us.

  Bit by bit my mother started to make exceptions, creeping in a line here and a line there. A musical pedal bin — we could do with that. A pouffe in the shape of a grand piano — we could definitely use that. A black resin bare-breasted mermaid, six feet high, riding a dolphin and holding up a trident the prongs of which were each wired to take a seventy-five watt bulb — ‘I’m sorry but I think it’s lovely.’ Latherless soap with sharp edges found its way into the house, talcum powder that smelt of the urine of the Siberian tiger, paper handkerchiefs that blew apart when you sneezed in them. Before long my mother was writing on lined Albanian notepads as a matter of course, she who had once corresponded with the heroes of the Spanish Civil War on the finest scented paper.

  (To this day I receive absorbent letters from her which I have to collect personally from the sorting office, no Italian postman being willing to risk splintering himself on her Romanian envelopes.)

  I’m not saying we had lived according to chaste design principles in the pre-swag years. Given where we came from, how could we not have been stirred by whatever moved suddenly or shone? It wasn’t so long ago that we’d have swapped an entire bank of the Dniester for a string of coloured beads. So yes, gaudy we had always been. But gaudiness can have its own cultural integrity and consistency. Now, though, under the influence of swag, we became confused.

  Aesthetically confused.

  Whether we also became morally confused is the big question. I believe it depressed us — I’ll go that far. I believe the ugliness of the tsatskes we sold, and then surrounded ourselves with, demoralized us.

  But I was the only one in our family who thought that. And some would say that I ended up the most demoralized of us all. So who am I to insist I was right?

  Except that I was.

  I am, of course, describing a slow process. We didn’t overnight go down with swag. In the beginning, or at least once my father recovered from his headlong fall into the fireplace, we were in the pink. My mother was delighted that the bus had now gone from our lives. My sisters were pleased to earn a bit of train-to-town and cappuccino money bagging face cloths. Aunty Dolly might just have found herself a boyfriend though no one was betting on anything yet, least of all my grandmother who didn’t count her chickens even after they were hatched. And I had become a famous boy ping-pong player with my picture in the Manchester Evening News most weeks under such headlines as, ‘Winning streak goes on and on for new hope’ and ‘Akiva chopper tipped for bigger things’.

  So I was out of my shell?

  Don’t rush me. I was coming out.

  I had less time to be in there, that’s for sure. Practice at the Akiva on Sunday mornings. Matches mid-week. Maybe more practice with the Marks brothers who had just come to live next door (right next door, amazingly) and had a table in their garden — no more than a couple of sheets of plywood balanced on dustbins, it’s true, but a table none the less, and the better, as far as practice went, for being uneven in bounce and exposed to all weathers. Then there was the occasional evening comparing tenors at Twink’s place. And Saturdays and school holidays doing the markets with Cheap Johnnie.

  The old man didn’t expect much from me at first. He was somewhat disillusioned by me, I think, after the Bosch episode. And he already had a floorman, a blond amateur wrestler called Mike Sieff, who was good at helping to get an edge, banging boxes and blowing up and bursting paper bags and pretending to be in a fight with my father over the prices he was knocking stuff down at — ‘What’s the matter with you? Have you gone mad, has the sun got to you?’ — and otherwise clowning and tcheppehing with him in the vein of Abbott and Costello. He knew how to move the gear out as well. ‘Over there and over here and over here and over there and another one over here!’ he’d shout, like a man who had lost his senses himself, clapping his enormous hands together as though they were the bellows that fanned the impulse to buy.

  So all I had to do, thank God, was help put the stall up around the van if it was raining and otherwise do the general dogsbodying, fetch tea and sandwiches, open cartons, run for change, buy Mike Sieff a paper for the drive home, and maybe dive into the toilets with a Span from the filthy magazine stall (where there was definitely no shouting ‘Over here and over there!’ — as quiet as the grave, the filthy magazine stall, the owner always in a raincoat, even when the sun shone, so that his punters should feel at ease); or I’d just mope about, dreaming of chopping my way into that
exceptional fate that was ticking away, louder and louder now — tick, tock, plick, plock — waiting to explode under me and blow me out of the trivial common into magnificent exceptionalness, pre-eminence, immunity from all things footling.

  Some journalists were saying I should be given a trial for the national junior side, never mind Lancashire. Things were moving. By now Ogimura must have been feeling my breath on his neck. I imagined him in a little paper house at the foot of a triangular mountain, troubled in the arms of his geisha, scrutinizing my photograph in the Manchester Evening News. The geisha too was agitated by my photograph. Her kimono fluttered, parted, showing her suspenders. The rain fell on the little blue willow-pattern bridge outside the little paper house. Plick, plock. And pattered on the glass roof of the municipal toilet. I dived out to wrestle with the tarpaulin. But not before I had heard a sword coming out of its scabbard with a scraping sound like a razor scratching at a throat, and seen a stain the colour of dark plum slowly spreading up the paper walls of the little blue house.

  There were worse ways of spending a wet Saturday.

  Then one Thursday night my father came home looking very white. We all wondered what the matter was. He’d been looking this colour just before he fell into the fireplace with tacks in his mouth.

  ‘Mike Sieff,’ he said. ‘That’s what the matter is.’

  He ate his supper in silence. Cheese blintzes with cauliflower cheese. Followed by macaroni cheese. Followed by cheese and biscuits.

  ‘I sacked him,’ he said, pushing his plate away, then, changing his mind, ‘Any more cheese?’ he asked.

  What had happened was this. He had suspected Mike Sieff of tealeafing for some time. He had no actual proof. He hadn’t seen Mike Sieff take anything. ‘But you know how you just feel it?’ That was how he just felt it. However, you can’t go up to someone and say I feel you’ve been tealeafing from me. And he wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. The Sieffs were from the same bend in the Bug as the Walzers. Besides, the boy was a shtarker, with triangular shoulders and a straight golden neck like a bull’s. My father was built like a brick shithouse, but even a man who was built like two brick shithouses would have thought twice about tangling with Mike Sieff. But the feeling was nagging and nagging at him. He knew Sieff was up to something. And then, late this afternoon, as they were packing up, he distinctly saw a five-pound note go from the hand of a punter into the hand of Mike Sieff and not go from there into my father’s apron. That was it. No more feeling — he’d seen it.