The Mighty Walzer

by Howard Jacobson

  ‘Mike, open your hand,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Mike, just open your hand.’

  Mike opened his other hand.

  ‘Not that one, Mike.’

  ‘What is this, Joel?’

  ‘Mike, I saw you take a flim. Open up your hand.’

  ‘That’s a serious accusation, Joel.’

  ‘Just open it.’

  ‘If you’re going to accuse me of something,’ Mike said, ‘I’d like you to accuse me in front of a witness.’

  ‘Right!’ One of my father’s rights. Who would I rather have been at that moment — Mike Sieff with his deltoid shoulders, or my father set on his course? Hard to say. But it’s a formidable thing to be able to say ‘Right!’ — and to mean it.

  My mother quaked for him. My mother’s side had never said ‘Right!’ and meant it in their lives. ‘Oh, Joel,’ she said. ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘Didn’t what?’

  ‘You didn’t accuse him in front of somebody.’

  ‘Dead right, I did.’

  ‘Right!’ he’d said, and leapt down from his van …

  ‘Oh, Joel,’ my mother said. ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t what?’

  ‘Leap from the van.’

  Dead right, he did. ‘And I don’t want you to move a muscle,’ he told Mike Sieff. ‘I want that hand kept where I can see it.’

  Then he called out, ‘Katz!’

  On Thursdays Katz the Kurtain King worked the next pitch to my father’s …

  ‘Oh, Joel, you didn’t?’

  ‘Didn’t what?’

  ‘You didn’t accuse him in front of Katz?’

  ‘Do you think I’m mad?’ Katz had the biggest mouth in Manchester. Tell Katz your troubles on a Monday and the whole town knew about them the weekend before. So avid was Katz to burble out what he knew, his words liquefied in his throat and came out as spray. That was the price you paid for listening to gossip from Katz — you risked blinding by aspersion. Accuse Mike Sieff in front of Katz? No, all my father wanted Katz to do was keep an eye on the stall while he frogmarched that snake in the grass Sieff to the Toby’s office. Not that Katz hadn’t earwigged plenty already.

  Snakes, frogs, earwigs — when my father’s righteousness was engaged, you could hear the moral undergrowth tick louder than my ambition.

  I had a question this time. ‘When you say you frogmarched him …’

  Yep, he frogmarched him. Took him by his pumping arm (‘Oy a broch, you should have felt that arm!’) and led him past the packing-up grafters, past Linoleum Les staggering under the rolls of his floor-cloth as though he were a factory trying to make off with the chimney, past the bedding boys folding up their sheets like housemaids, past the crockery twins from Leeds — Abe and Izzy, impossible to tell apart and always the last to finish pitching because they wanted to sell out and have an empty van to bundle skirt into — past the Span man silent in his mac, past the fruit and veg and flowers, through the café and into the Toby’s den.

  ‘Right, now you can open that hand,’ my father said.

  And Mike Sieff did …

  And … ?

  Empty.

  ‘Oh, Joel, it wasn’t!’

  It was. My father’s eyes told us it was. Empty. Untenanted. Void. And not just any old void. In Manchester just as you can have a very lot you can have a very void.

  So what did he do then?

  ‘I thought I’d seen him bend down just before I collared him. So I told him to take his shoes off.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  He did.

  And?

  Very empty.

  And then?

  And then his socks.

  ‘You didn’t!’

  He did. Empty ditto. Very, very empty. And then his pockets. Empty ditto. And then his shirt. And then his vest. And then his trousers …

  ‘Mr Walzer, are you sure about this?’ the Toby had said. (‘First rule of the gaffs, always look after the Toby.’)

  Sure he was sure. Now the trousers please.

  We were all gathered round by now, the Shrinking Violets and my grandmother as well, all staring at Mike Sieff stripped down to his underpants, wondering where my father would have the courage to search for the missing fiver next.

  He smiled strangely.

  It was the Violets, this time, who said, in one voice, ‘Joel, you didn’t!’

  My sisters had their knuckles in their mouths. I could barely breathe. My mother was on the point of fainting. We didn’t know much about the law in our family, in either of our families, but we guessed that a man accused of theft and made to prove his innocence by baring everything stood to gain a very lot in any civil court. This was leaving aside any payment he might choose to exact with his bare fists.

  We waited.

  We were ruined, were we, was that why our provider and protector had come home whiter than a dead man? We were finished?

  Well?

  ‘Any more of that cheese?’ my father asked.

  ‘Joel, don’t do this to me,’ my mother said.

  He nibbled on a corner of crumbling Caerphilly, taking his time. ‘I think all the ladies should leave the room,’ he said at last.

  ‘Joel!’

  He was only teasing. Well? Well, he’d begun to panic, he didn’t mind admitting that. He was running out of options. Correction — he’d run out of options. But he’d seen what he’d seen, and if you can’t believe the evidence of your own eyes what can you believe? The pants came off.

  We averted our eyes, as much from one another as from the accused.

  Funny, my sisters thought, concentrating to a degree that was unusual for them, funny that Mike Sieff should have agreed to this. He didn’t have to, did he? My father couldn’t make him. The Toby couldn’t make him. The Toby wasn’t police, when all was said and done. My father lowered his head. ‘The lobbess was enjoying it,’ he said. Enjoying my father’s discomfiture, that is. What he didn’t say, but what I know as a fellow sportsman must have been the case, was that Mike Sieff was enjoying parading his own nakedness too, rubbing my father’s nose in it, so to speak. I would have done the same to Ogimura, given half the chance. Cop this, slant-eyes!

  And did the five-pound note in question float down between his golden legs when the wrestler dropped his drawers? Of course it didn’t.

  ‘Satisfied, Joel?’ he said. He stood, in my father’s words, with everything apart. As though to say, feast your eyes all you like and then tell me: 1) where you think I’m concealing your miserable flim now and 2) what someone as magnificent as I am would want with anything of yours anyway. Which, again in my father’s words, was his big mistake. Because my father did feast his eyes on him, took him in from the tops of his fingers to the tips of his toes. Well built, he’d give him that. Not handsome, his eyes were too frog-like, his head was too small for his body (like a snake’s, like the snake in the grass he was) for him to be handsome, and we Walzers liked a big head. But below the neck, sure, well put together. And not the usual colour for someone whose grandparents were born on the Bug but who wasn’t a shaygets. Big yellow feet. Big yellow hands. Big yellow fingers. Wrestler’s fingers. Wrestler’s thumbs even. One of which had been bent back in the ring — a submission hold, he’d told my father — and was protected with a thick roll of bandage. Funny that you needed a bandage on a bent thumb. And funny how long, now he came to think of it, Mike Sieff had been wearing it. Three weeks, was it? Four weeks? Five? Relief leapt like a flame in my father’s heart. He had seen what he’d seen. ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to take off that bandage.’

  No! We didn’t dare believe that the story had a happy ending after all. No! Not the bandage!

  Yes. Oh, yes, the bandage. And that, my friends, was it. Finito. From anguish to joy in a single bound. And vice versa for Mike Sieff. He started to whine. Covered himself — not such a shtarker all of a sudden! — and started to shiver. Pleaded poverty. Illness. Worry. Overwork. Absent-min
dedness. Accident even — the fiver had somehow got in there of its own accord, crawled up his thumb in some way he couldn’t explain. Along with the three others my father found, rolled like cigarette papers and coiled inside the bandage like sleeping adders. ‘On my mother and father’s life, Joel, I’d have paid you back. I intended to. Honest to God.’

  ‘Oh, Joel, maybe he would have.’ Pity time for my mother’s side. After the elation, the compassion.

  ‘Oh, Joel! Do you have any idea how much he must have been ganvying all these months? It’s enough I didn’t call the police. And then do you know what he had the chutzpah to ask me for? Holiday pay. He whines all the way back in the van, gringeing and sniffing and wiping his nose on his sleeve and saying he’s sorry, and he’s never done anything like this in his life before, and please will I not tell his family, and please will I not mention it to his chinas, and then he says will I drop him off at Lapidus’s and can he have his holiday pay now? How do you like it! Holiday pay!’

  ‘Did you drop him off naked at Laps’,’ my sisters wanted to know, ‘or had you given him his trousers back by then?’

  ‘Never mind his trousers,’ I said. ‘What about his bandage?’

  We all wanted to get in on the act.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re looking so pleased about,’ my father said to me. ‘You’ll have to take off school tomorrow. I haven’t got a floorman.’

  ‘Me!’

  ‘You. You’ve seen what you have to do enough times. “A lady over here and a lady over there! And again! And another!” Your mother can write it out for you if you’ve forgotten. I’d go to bed and practise if I were you.’

  ‘It’ll be good for him,’ I heard my father saying, long after I’d retired to my room. ‘It’ll get him out of that shell of his.’

  ‘The boy’s sensitive,’ my mother said. ‘He’ll come out in his own good time.’

  ‘Then it’ll get him off the kazi,’ was my father’s final word on the matter.

  It’s wrong of me to load my bashfulness on to my mother’s side. It’s unfair to them and to me. Some of the things I was shy about I was right to be shy about. Being a child, for example. It was preposterous being a child and having thoughts. The only time being a child is any good, that’s to say has anything of nature about it, is when it’s mindless. Wordsworth’s Idiot Boy. Once the blank misgivings start, those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things, the blushing starts as well. And for some of us the misgivings start sooner than for others. As long as I’d been a child, as I remember it, I’d been ashamed of myself. The short pants, the squeaky voice, the teaty little mouth, the rubbery little in-between, the heat, the untestedness, the all to come and nothing had.

  If I could have felt it looked right, me standing there confronting the edge, clapping my hands and shouting ‘And again, and another, let’s be having you, ooh, Mrs Woman, please …’ I’d have made a better stab at it. I wanted to be able to do it. It passed through my mind sometimes that I had it in me to go all the way, to progress from the floor to the side of the van, to oust my own father who didn’t even write his own material and become the greatest pitcher the gaffs had ever seen, the grafter to end all grafters, a spinner of such quicksilver spiel that people would come to listen to me from all corners of the globe, not just Joe Public but fellow pros — priests, professors, healers, comedians, mountebanks, evangelists, dictators — anxious to see with their own eyes the heights to which rabble-rousing could be raised, and of course the Jezebels with their retractable blood-red nails in legions as limitless as the sea, all with their purple throats thrown back and their soft funnelled mouths open and pulsing, like a thousand baby birds clamouring to be fed.

  But that was in the future, when I would be a man. As yet I wasn’t even ready to start at the beginning. How could I call a grown woman ‘darling’ at my age?’ ‘Ee’are darling.’ Preposterous. How could I look a man old enough to be my uncle Motty in the eyes and address him as ‘cock’? Yes, there were younger boys than me on the markets, working the vegetable and flower stalls usually, prefab sorts of boys, rapscallions, lads (and no one had ever thought of me as a ‘lad’), from whose cherubic lips flowed a stream of loves and dears and wotchercocks and I’ll tell you what I’ll do guvenors — but they were the idiot boys. They suffered no disjunction. It would never have occurred to them to think there was anything amiss in swapping familiarities with grown-ups when you were possessed of no better credentials than a rubbery little in-between. So they were no example to me. They were of another species.

  I tried, but it must have been a ghastly spectacle.

  ‘What was that?’ my father shouted down from his eminence, cupping his ear in a comical exaggerated fashion. He had a whistle in his mouth and wore a stupid striped Wee Willie Winkie hat with a woolly bobble on the end of it. On Fridays he was Mad Jack.

  ‘I think there might be a lady at the back who would like one,’ I repeated, in what I hoped was a slightly louder voice.

  ‘Oh, you suspect we have a lady to the rear who would care to make a purchase? Do we have a lady aft who is considering her position? Well when you’ve made your mind up, Mrs Woman, perhaps you would step forward and have a word with Little Lord Fauntleroy here.’

  Little Lord Fauntleroy. My own father!

  I was meant to be whipping up a frenzy. The phantom lady at the back is always eager to buy what the pitcher is selling long before he’s ready to sell it. Not exactly abstruse psychology. Stay, illusion! If she and the other phantoms like her are prepared to fork out seventeen-and-six for the jardinière in the form of a dying swan, imagine the mayhem — ‘Look, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, I’m not just going to sell one, I’m not just going to sell two, I’m going to clear the whole jolly lot, never mind seventeen-and-six, never even mind fifteen shillings’ — when the price plummets to ten bob for the pair, the pair!

  Over here and over there! All hell should break loose. And did when Mike Sieff leapt up and down and clapped his hands and burst paper bags. But with Little Lord Fauntleroy agitating the edge, selling all at once became a transaction of embarrassments. I communicated my diffidence. Suddenly people were reluctant to shove their hands in the air. Normally thick-skinned punters, regulars who knew the routines and their own roles in them, began to blush when my father chipped them. It was as if the fairy of mortification had waved her wand and hey presto! — the gaff was awash with Shrinking Violets.

  My father did what he could with me. Sometimes, to break the calamitous spell of bashfulness I’d cast, he’d leave me in it, leave me to carry out the nest of cardboard suitcases with the rust-loving hinges to the non-existent punter at the back — ‘Sold!’ — leave me to go wandering at the furthest fringes of the edge and return, if I ever found the courage to return, with the cases concealed somewhere about my person. By turning me into the joke, some of the fun of the fair might just come back. I knew what he was up to. I understood the necessity to tease me. But that didn’t mean I could ever get my face right. I’d give anything, today, to be able to look my father in the eyes and say, ‘Go on, go on, Cheap Johnnie, make a shlemiel of me, let me be your stooge. I can take it, I can take a joke against myself. I have to take a joke against myself, otherwise I am madder than Mad Jack myself’ But it’s too late for that. And anyway, my face would let me down again.

  This would never have gone on for long, even if I’d been good at it. There was no question of my being removed from school and turned into a marketman. Education was God. Education would stop us ever having to be beetroot farmers again. Or swagmen. And my father didn’t want me with him all the time, anyway. I cramped his style. The van was starting to turn up at some strange places, just as the bus once had. He was on first-name terms with the women who buttered the fat wedges of toast in every transport café between Manchester and north Wales, north Wales and Worksop, and Worksop back to Manchester again via Sheffield and the Snake Pass. They knew when he was coming and prepared special treats for h
im, liver and onion fry-ups, cheese and ham pies with double cheese, bread and butter puddings of which they gave him extra portions wrapped in foil to take home to my mother. Ha! Sometimes he’d slip me some loose change so that I could play the pinball machines while he discussed his dietary requirements with them in the kitchens. Sometimes they’d come out from behind the stoves and counters, wipe their hands on their aprons, kiss me and tell me how lucky I was to have such a wonderful father.

  Now it was his turn to look bashful.

  I was in his way.

  Let’s be even-handed about it — we were in each other’s way.

  So when he came to hear that Sheeny Waxman had fallen out with Sam Sam the Bedding Man and was looking for a job he jumped at him. Sheeny was reckoned to be one of the best pitchers in the country. The sizes of the edges he pulled were legendary. London Boys were known to come up just to watch Sheeny work, and to go back whistling through their teeth. His trick was to start sedately, ringing a little dinner bell and engaging individual punters in a confusion of free gifts and part-exchanges, and then turn progressively more demented. In this his natural tics and twitches were of inestimable help to him. As was his fastidious taste in sharp suits, white shirts with detachable collars, and matching ties and handkerchiefs. Short as he was, you could see and hear him from everywhere; whatever else you were doing you dropped, wherever else you were going was suddenly of no account, such an irresistible spectacle was he, frothing and jerking in his downy mohair whistle, one parrot-eye closed, hoarse and golden like an aristocratic dwarf, a scion of some Nordic royal family, gone mad and reduced to knocking out swag on English markets because of centuries of syphilis and in-breeding.