Of course there was no point hiring someone with Sheeny Waxman’s reputation to work the floor, assuming he’d ever have consented to play second fiddle to another pitcher anyway, but my father made it clear he didn’t in the least mind stepping down in order, in his own words, ‘to defer to a master’.
‘I’m not ongeblozzen with pride,’ he told me, pointedly. ‘I don’t think I know everything. I don’t think I’m too good for everybody. I don’t think there’s nobody I can learn from.’
EIGHT
The principle of becoming better and stronger is very simple. If you improve, you become strong. How to make improvement is very, very difficult, however.
Zoltan Berczic (one-time national coach of the
Hungarian Table Tennis team)
MY FATHER’S POINTEDNESS apart, it gave me a queer satisfaction to have Sheeny Waxman working for us. It altered the relations between this and that. It put my separate worlds in harmony and in some way that I couldn’t properly explain made me feel more important and grown up.
Maybe there was nothing to explain; maybe having Sheeny on the family payroll simply flattered me with the illusion that I’d bought a share in his haunts, that I’d put my name down, so to speak, for the Ritz and the Plaza and the Kardomah, especially the Kardomah where hoarse-voiced men in camel coats croaked lewd propositions to women young enough to be their granddaughters.
The Kardomah had its own unofficial prep school. Laps’. Only after you’d submitted yourself to an undefined period of continuous assessment at Laps’ — social audacity alone was the criterion: volubility, brazenness, wideness as we called it — were you considered up to doing the Kardomah. And even then you may have shot your bolt too soon, in which event it was back to Laps’ for another indeterminate stint. No one I knew could remember when there hadn’t been a chip shop called Lapidus’s on Bury Old Road. It was institutional. Tell your parents you’d been at Laps’ when they caught you creeping up the stairs after midnight and all your sins were remitted. Yes, you could get yourself into deep waters at Laps’, but at least you were swimming between the flags. At Laps’ one of our own, one of unserer, was always there to save us.
Not infrequently, successful graduates of Laps’ — Sheeny Waxman, for one — would drop in to see how we were getting on, leaving the roofs of their cars down and their engines running, acknowledging greetings from juvenile versions of themselves, dispensing advice, alluding briefly to their own apprenticeships, in the manner of great men returning to their old schools on speech days. The closer you were to graduating yourself, the more you recognized these sentimental homecomings for what they were — acts of late-night desperation, the final foray before the lights went out in Manchester and all that remained was the ignominy of an empty bed. Laps’ gave you one more go, there lay the beguilement of the place even for those who thought they had put it behind them; at Laps’ there was always just the possibility of cashing in on someone else’s mishap, or of simply doing a deal. On Saturday nights, especially, the atmosphere of bazaar and barter on the pavement outside Laps’ was so fervid that motorists strange to the area would stop to consult their maps, imagining that they’d taken a wrong turning and driven into the Lebanon. It’s a measure of how miffed Sheeny must have been by Cynthia Cartwright’s refusal to accommodate him on my debut night that he dumped her in the middle of Miles Platting instead of bringing her back to Bury Old Road and exchanging her for someone more amenable at Laps’. Not that there had to be a swap. Sometimes you would simply drop off a non-performer altruistically, as a kindness to a fellow head jockey. Because it was understood that women were a perverse species, who would with some and wouldn’t with others.
So on top of everything else it was, Lapidus’s chip shop was a hotbed of early feminism, too? You could say that. Certainly anyone listening to Selwyn Marks on the injustices suffered by Ruth Aarons would have been impressed by the humanity and understanding a boy his age was able to show towards a woman he had never met.
We were sitting in the back room of Laps’, sharing a big plate of pickle meat, sweet and sour cucumbers, mustard and chips. Funnily enough, Sheeny Waxman happened to pop his head into the room as we were talking. With Sheeny you always saw his stiff snow-white cuffs, and then his gold shield links engraved with his initials, before you saw him. It was a Kardomah thing; at the Kardomah you led with your cuffs, filled your mouth with phlegm, tugged at the lapels of the coat which you wore loose and empty-sleeved around your shoulders, then made your pitch.
‘So who’s this Ruth Aarons?’ Sheeny wanted to know.
‘No one you’ve shtupped,’ Selwyn said.
Sheeny twitched. Maybe he hadn’t. He’d be surprised, but maybe he hadn’t.
‘Anything here?’ He didn’t expect an answer. What would kids like us know, anyway? After checking the room out for himself, he ratcheted his neck up out of his collar, jerked a handful of our chips into his mouth, and left.
‘Big shot,’ Selwyn said.
‘I like him,’ I said. I didn’t go on to say, ‘And my father slips him his pay-packet.’
So who was this Ruth Aarons?
‘Who won the Women’s World Table Tennis Championships in 1935/6?’ Selwyn asked me.
‘Ruth Aarons?’ I hazarded.
‘Correct. And in 1936/7?’
I hesitated. I could feel a trick question coming on. ‘Not Ruth Aarons?’
‘Ha!’ Selwyn banged the table, causing Lotte to look up from behind the fryer. Any trouble in the back room at Laps’ and Lotte had you out. Selwyn, who was already flushed with indignation on behalf of Ruth Aarons, flushed further under Lotte’s stare. ‘Not Ruth Aarons is a very good answer,’ he said. ‘Not Ruth Aarons. Not nobody.’
‘How come?’ I asked. ‘Were there no women players that year?’
‘If there were no women players that year, explain to me how Votrubcova was able to win the mixed doubles with Vana, and Depetrisova was able to win the women’s doubles with Votrubcova.’
I couldn’t.
‘The best women players in the world were there. All of them. Including Ruth Aarons who’d won it the year before and was playing better than ever. But do you know what it says in the record books under Women’s Singles 1936/7?’
‘Not Nobody?’
‘Worse. It says “Title Vacant”.’ He waited for the information to sink in. ‘How do you like that? — TITLE VACANT!’
Was I meant to be amazed by this, or crestfallen, or outraged? I plastered mustard over a slice of pickled meat, folded it around a wedge of cucumber, and tried an expression that was a combination of all three.
‘There was a final, you see,’ Selwyn went on. ‘Between Ruth Aarons and Trude Pritzi, but no winner.’
‘They didn’t finish?’
‘They weren’t allowed to finish. They were disqualified.’
Selwyn’s eyes bulged so violently I wondered what the women could possibly have been disqualified for. Not unladylike behaviour, I hoped.
‘Well,’ Selwyn said, ‘you’re not all that wide of the mark. Pushing. That’s what they were disqualified for. Pushing. After one hour and forty-five minutes of chiselling the umpire looked at his watch, said “Jude Raus!”, and called it a day.’
I was familiar with the one hour forty-five minute rule. Anybody who knew anything about ping-pong had heard of the marathon battle between Erhlich of Poland and Paneth of Romania at the Worlds in Prague in ’36. For two hours and five minutes they pushed the ball back and forth before either of them won a point. Two hours and five minutes and it was 1–0. By 1–1 the crowds had all gone home. Assuming a tight finish, the possibility arose of a five-game match lasting more than a fortnight: a computation that took no account of the need to sleep. Thereafter the International Table Tennis Federation decided on limiting all matches to one hour and forty-five minutes on pain of disqualification.
So Ruth and Trude got theirs. Tough, but rules are rules. However, I had a fair idea that ‘Jude Raus!’ wa
s an interpolation all of Selwyn’s own.
‘But if both girls were disqualified …’
‘Ruth Aarons was the holder of the title. Until someone took it off her it was hers. And if all Pritzi was prepared to do was chisel, what was wrong with Aarons chiselling back. “You want it, Trude? Then come and take it.” Tactics. Suddenly you’re not allowed tactics … If your name happens to be Aarons.’
‘Selwyn …’
‘You know where these Championships were held?’ He looked around the room as though it wasn’t safe to talk about these things still, not even in Laps’. He lowered his voice. ‘Baden.’
I wasn’t the mine of ping-pong information the Marks brothers were but I was in possession of a few essential facts, especially when they related to my nearly-hero Richard Bergmann, as for example that Baden was where the seventeen-year-old Bergmann became World Champion for the first time. ‘Bergmann, Selwyn.’ I rubbed my nose. ‘Bergmann!’
‘Exactly. They couldn’t give both titles to a Jew. Not in Baden. Not in 1937.’
I shook my head.
‘She was a golden girl,’ Selwyn went on. ‘I see what you’re thinking. A golden girl with a name like Ruth Aarons? Girls called Ruth Aarons are dark little meerskeits with a big shnozz and thick glasses. Well that’s your problem. She was a golden girl with blonde ringlets, a beautiful figure and a scintillating personality. But Baden finished her. Trude Pritzi went to London the next year and won the title. Ruth Aarons never played in a World Championships again. The yiddenfeits did for her.’
There turned out to be something prophetic about this conversation. A fortnight later the yiddenfeits did for Selwyn.
Years after the one hour and forty-five minute fiasco an expedite law was devised, of such complexity that it was altogether better for one’s long-term peace of mind to be disqualified and have done. How were you ever supposed to remember which was the twelfth shot on your own service and the thirteenth return of your opponent’s? Now I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that people play with calculators in their pockets. But at the time that Selwyn himself was disqualified from a tournament the Law of Expedition had yet to be hammered out. An umpire suddenly got twitchy and you were a goner, that was how it worked then.
He was right to feel he’d been hard done by, since if he was guilty of slow play so was his opponent. All you could say in the umpire’s favour was that Selwyn’s off the table tactics were slow also. ‘It’s my religion,’ Selwyn complained afterwards. ‘You know what will happen next if we aren’t allowed to practise our religion while we’re playing? They’ll disqualify us because of our names. Starr — you’re disqualified! Mistofsky — you’re disqualified. Walzer — you’re disqualified. The way they did with Aarons.’
But none of us could quite go along with him in the matter of his having to read a ruling from the Talmud between every point, or holding up his hand to re-arrange his fringes just as his opponent was about to serve.
Even his own brother wouldn’t back him. ‘You don’t bother with that stuff at home,’ he said. ‘At home you piss in your yarmulke.’
‘I’ve never pissed in my yarmulke.’
‘And you torture the cat with your tzitzits.’
‘We don’t have a cat.’
‘Did I say our cat? Any cat. I’ve seen you whipping cats with the fringes of your tzitzits. I’ve seen you tying their paws up.’
‘I don’t go near cats. I’m frightened of cats. They’re treife.’
‘What do you care about treife? You sneak bacon sandwiches into your bedroom in your yarmulke.’
‘Is that after I’ve pissed in it or before?’
‘What’s the matter with you? What gets into you as soon as you come out of the house? What are you trying to do — start a pogrom?’
‘Start one? That’s good,’ Selwyn said. ‘Start one! Next you’ll tell me that six million is an exaggeration.’
It was good for me that Selwyn was out of the tournament. We were at opposite ends of the draw. If he’d gone on making it through we’d have been looking at a showdown in the final. No problems about beating him — I’d never come close to losing to Selwyn Marks even in practice — but I didn’t want to win my first title that way. If I was going to be Manchester Closed Junior Champion I wanted to take out someone who wasn’t one of us in the final, someone who didn’t live next door to me, someone who didn’t have the murky waters of the Bug or Dniester flowing through his veins … what am I trying to say? — someone who was white.
Wasn’t Selwyn white? Only in a manner of speaking. Selwyn was pale. White only by default. What I had in mind was white white, foreign white.
It shouldn’t be that hard to understand. My ambition was to be crowned conclusive champion of Somewhere Else, not champion of Our Street.
This was my debut tournament. There’d been others I could have entered earlier in the season but Aishky had advised me to keep myself a secret for the big one.
I was hurt by the idea that I was still an unknown quantity. ‘I’m hardly a secret, Aishk,’ I said. ‘I’m in the papers every week.’
‘Sure, sure, but most of these kids haven’t seen you with their own eyes yet. Think surprise element. It’ll be like Nagasaki. Pow!’
Was Nagasaki where Ogimura lived, I wondered. The paper house breathed and shivered. The champion lay motionless on his futon, staring at the ceiling. Swish went the geisha’s kimono. Snap went her suspender.
If I’d been saving myself for the big one, it follows that I’d been saving the big one for me. Turning out once a week for a league match was one thing, but a tournament! — everyone who was anyone in Manchester ping-pong, the League Secretary, the League Chairman, the League President, for God’s sake (men who had crossed ping-pong bats embroidered on the breast pockets of their blazers), to say nothing of players from higher divisions, strokemakers and tantrum-throwers and rule-benders whose gamesmanship was the stuff of legend, veterans of the sport, scouts, coaches, international selectors, commentators, and who could guess how many members of the ping-pong watching public, all gathered in one place and at one time and with one purpose ... To see me? Of course I did not really think that. But then again, of course I really did.
Within a week of the tournament I’d lost all capacity to sleep. I couldn’t even remember how to shut my eyes. The night before, I climbed into my bed like Cinderella stepping up into her pumpkin, quaking and overdressed, already in my tracksuit in case I suddenly found the trick of sleeping again and overdid it. I needn’t have worried. By six in the morning I was on Oxford Road waiting for the University to open.
I checked and re-checked my registration form. By the Sports Hall, Manchester University, it did mean this Manchester University … ? There was bound to be a Manchester in the United States of America, and another in Canada, and probably a third in Rhodesia, and they were all bound to have a university, but that wouldn’t make any sense, would it, choosing one of those as the venue for our Manchester Closed?
Assuming it was our Manchester Closed.
I walked around Rusholme. Sat on a park bench. Refused one of the dawn whores — I think. Blushed in the event that I hadn’t. Blushed in the event that I had. Then found somewhere to have tea and toast. By the time I made it back to the University I was no longer early. Not late, just no longer early. I registered, nodded to a few people I recognized, pushed open the swing doors of the Sports Hall and pow! like Aishky had said, and I hadn’t even begun yet, pow! — all the exhilaration I’d felt when I first saw a room full of green tables in action in the Tower in Blackpool returned. Green, the green of the foothills to Heaven, wherever I looked. Eden. The Happy Valley. The Garden of the Hesperides. Hush, hear the nymphs — for they too had woken sleepless and turned up early — plock plock, plock plock, plock plock.
Shocking, how small the tables looked when there were so many of them in a single space. But wasn’t that the allure of the game for those of us who loved it? The confinement. No margin for error, and
all the violence of competitive sport bounded by a nutshell. No spillage — there was the fatal beauty of ping-pong. No overflow or exorbitance. So there is no point blaming the players for being repressed. The game is repressed.
Plock plock, plock plock, went the shy Hesperides, and this time the music of the westernmost meadow on earth was for me.
There was my name, my certification, on the draw, accompanied by an asterisk to denote that I was seeded. I’d never before seen a draw, or even thought that as a tangible thing, a physical chart, actual sheets of paper which you could touch and rustle, a draw existed. So that was a draw! I loved it. I was transfixed by the artwork: the grand all-embracing brackets — Me against Him, and then Him gone, dropped from the picture, and Me against Someone Else — the empty dotted lines issuing from the noses of the brackets like spikes from the snouts of marlins, decreasing, narrowing, closing like jaws on that last incontrovertible horizontal. Every time I won a round I took up a seat within sight of the board so that I could verify the written proof of my advance. The mathematics of a draw staggered me. One hundred and twenty-eight players reducible to just one after only seven rounds. In that computation I saw the future, how little it took, sum-wise, to be the last man standing.
I was intoxicated by the tumult. It made me tremble. Made my stomach lurch with apprehension. So many wills, so many separate ambitions, so many arms going, enough piston power to light up the whole of Manchester on a winter’s afternoon. On the green battlefield of my soul the two sides of my family took up their positions. ‘Impossible,’ my mother and my aunties whispered, ‘impossible to expect to prevail against so many. Just do well. Get close. Lose honourably. No shame in that. Sleep, you are going to sleep. We will count to ten and when you awake you will remember nothing, my darling, but the will to lose … nine … ten … lose!’ But then the Walzers grabbed me for a hokey-cokey, conga’d me past the draw where my seeded name kept on greedily coming — Walzer, O*; Walzer, O*; Walzer, O* — emboldening me with the least imaginative, and to tell the truth the least flattering, of all expressions of optimism — ‘Someone has to win, why shouldn’t it be you?’
The Mighty Walzer Page 13