There was the problem. Take a sponge bat in your hand and you felt you were playing with one of the Copestakes’ mattresses. Oof plock, oof plock. Bye-bye all associations with high heels. Wet cots, that was what you smelt now. And who wanted to be reminded of those days? But personal preference didn’t enter into it. Nor did aesthetics. Technology had taken over ping-pong and if you didn’t go along with the new materials you were left behind. Sure, Ogimura lost his title. But who did he lose it to? Tanaka, another Nip. And he won it back from him the next year, anyway. If you were going to have any hope of sneaking their panting little bell-voiced geishas from them there was only one course to take — you had to get yourself re-rubbered.
Had I still been playing for the Akiva I might have hesitated longer before embracing the silent oriental game. Oof plock, oof plock. In the lower divisions you could still make an impression with vellum. But now that I had gone over to the Hagganah with Sheeny I couldn’t count on coasting. Every match was hard these days. Harder to win and harder in the sense of less sociable and easeful. There were no more nobbels in the fog. There was no more tcheppehing sotto voce so that the shaygets opposition wouldn’t understand. No more moodying. No more boxes of broken balls. No more spitting on the floor. No more fun. We were one of the toughest club teams in the country and we didn’t get that way by punching our fists through phone box windows or humming ‘E lucevan le stelle’ at deuce in the final game.
I was with the men now. Phil Radic. Saul Yesner. Sid Mellick. Handsome devils, all of them. Dark, strong, hairy, grizzled like veterans of the Israeli independence wars. If someone had told me that the one thing Phil Radic, Saul Yesner and Sid Mellick had in common apart from playing for the Hagganah ping-pong team was that they’d all killed a man with their bare hands, I’d have believed it. Not any old man — they weren’t criminals — but some enemy of the Jewish people.
Don’t get me wrong: there was no Selwyn Marks paranoia among the men of the Hagganah. They weren’t on the look-out for persecution. Who, after all, would ever have had the balls to persecute Sid Mellick, who could out arm-wrestle anyone in Manchester blindfolded and with his wrong arm? Or Saul Yesner, whose stomach muscles were so well developed that he used to invite all comers to take their turn at using him like a punching bag? But there was a fierce Bug and Dniester patriotism about them. When Phil Radic was selected to represent England he refused on the grounds that he would have to play on a Shabbes. ‘What’s with you?’ his friends asked. ‘You don’t keep Shabbes. You’ve never kept Shabbes. You work a Saturday gaff.’ ‘Not the point,’ he told them. ‘It’s the principle of the thing. If they want to pick Jewish players they have to respect how Jews live. Let them play on a Sunday.’
‘Phil, we’re talking playing for England, here!’
‘It doesn’t bother me.’
Easy come, easy go. Everybody agreed Phil Radic had it in him to be the best senior player in the country. He had all the strokes, a lovely open stance, unusual and dare I say uncharacteristic fleetness of foot, and utter confidence in his own gifts. I loved watching him play. He was spring-loaded. He made ping-pong witty. His sudden accelerations of racket-head speed were like explosions of satire. You didn’t see the punch-line coming. And he used all the expanses of the table in a sardonic manner, economically, pithily, finding angles you’d never have guessed were there, leaving his opponent flat footed and looking stupid. People smiled when they lost to him, appreciatively, knowing they’d been done over. It was like having the piss taken out of you, but by a master, so you knew it wasn’t personal. You weren’t the joke, the game was. Maybe.
But what was most disconcerting about Phil Radic, from the point of view of someone who had cut his teeth on the Akiva, was how unfanatical he was. Twink ate and drank ping-pong. In the days when he had both his hands intact, Aishky lived and breathed the game. The Marks brothers talked nothing else. Before he took up swimming, Selwyn used to walk home from school practising his backhand flick. Whoosh, whoosh! Now he swam home, breasting the air and puffing his cheeks, but every now and then he would forget himself and mix a couple of push shots in with his dog paddles. And as for me, well I saw no future for myself except ping-pong. Even my erotic dreams had a ping-pong component. I would be rewarded for playing well. ‘So that’s your forehand, now show us your in-between,’ Jezebels would beseech me. My night-time anxieties too were all played out on the table. If the Jezebels didn’t claim me, the devil himself did, invisible, invincible, a disturbance of the darkness at the opposite end of the ping-pong table, returning every shot I played. Sometimes ten, twenty, thirty seconds would go by after I had hit the ball, time for it to disappear thousands of feet into the blackness, but always, in the end, it would come back. Always. I still dream this dream. It’s years since I picked up a ping-pong bat, but in the night I am still trying to get the ball past a faceless agitation of shadows at the far end of the table. And not once in however many thousands of nights of struggle, not once have I succeeded.
Will Phil Radic be dreaming this dream? Did he ever? Of course not. Easy come, easy go. He had other things to think about. As did Saul Yesner. As did Sid Mellick. They were men, not nutty kids. There were engaged in serious business. When darkness fell on their moral worlds they were out strangling enemies of the Jewish people with their bare hands.
As for what to do about the new racket, the men of the Hagganah applied a double standard. It was too late for them. ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ Phil Radic said. But they believed it behoved me and even Sheeny, as the next generation — the future of the Hagganah, noch — to re-equip. That there was arrogance in this I had no doubt. We don’t need the ping-pong equivalent of a three-piece suite — that was what they were really saying. We can go on winning fine just as we are. But you kids …
Well, some humiliations you just have to swallow. Others, of course, you can’t wait to gulp down. But I’m coming to those.
You don’t re-rubber lightly. Everyone has heard stories of snooker players whose careers have been halted or ruined because of a broken or mislaid cue. And with snooker we are only talking one stick of wood as against another stick of wood. Imagine if you also had to throw sponge and pimples into the equation. That’s how it was with ping-pong. Make a wrong decision as to grip and you could be undone for a season. Make a wrong decision as to surface and you could be finished for life. The best sports shops understood this and were patient with you while you went through their entire stock twice. Some of them took the imaginative step of installing a table so that you could have a long knock-up before you bought. Alec Watson and Mitchell, where Twink and Aishk had taken me to choose my first tracksuit, actually put up two tables on a Saturday morning. And Saturday just happened to be the day that Sabine Weinberger worked at Alec Watson and Mitchell’s to earn extra pocket money.
The Weinbergers lived on the same street as us, but on the opposite side and on the bend, so it wasn’t easy for either family to see into the other’s windows. This may have been one of the reasons we weren’t on especially friendly terms. That the Weinbergers were fugitives from Berlin rather than Kiev or Odessa was also significant. We from the Bug did not hit it off with them from the Spree. We didn’t like what we saw when we looked at our reflection in their eyes. We saw yokels. Peasants. Shnorrers. People who parked vans in the street. And there lay the prime cause of our strained relations. Mr Weinberger, who ran his jewellery business from his own garage and went everywhere with an eyepiece on his forehead, like a unicorn, was always the first person to sign any petition against my father’s vehicles. I can still see the musty Gothic script on the first line of the top sheet of the complainants’ submission, entangled and intricately woven like the handwriting of a spider. Ernst Weinberger — Jeweller. As though being a jeweller settled the matter as to where vans should and shouldn’t be parked.
‘She’s nice,’ my mother used to say. Meaning Mrs Weinberger. ‘She used to be a Vulvick.’
Being a Vulvick carried weight, bec
ause the Vulvicks were one of Manchester’s most distinguished rabbinical families. If you’d been a Vulvick it stood to reason that you were now fallen socially and spiritually: as a Vulvick there was only one trajectory you could take. Just how far Mrs Weinberger had fallen can be measured by the fact of her daughter’s having a Saturday job. No Vulvick who was still a Vulvick had one of those, unless you call being a rabbi a Saturday job.
There were also some questions to be asked about the way Sabine Weinberger deported herself. At fifteen she already had a reputation. ‘Eh, eh, here you go!’ we would nudge one another and say when she turned up late at Laps’ for a bag of chips. Speaking for myself, I had no clear idea what she had a reputation for doing, only that she had a reputation. ‘Her bust is too prominent for a girl her age,’ I remember my mother observing, and I more or less assumed that her reputation began and ended with that. I’d have taken more interest had I found her more to my liking. But she was too unserer for me, too spiked and tussocky, on the one hand too like Phil Radic to look at, and on the other too much of a Becky in her manner — Becky being the name we gave to girls who reminded us of our mothers or even of our mothers’ mothers. I’m not saying she had nothing going for her. If the stone-throwing prefab boys of Heaton Park had been mad for Sabine Weinberger I’d have understood it. It has its adherents, that midnight scaly Lilith look. There are men who love the thought that they might bruise themselves on a woman’s scratchy pelt. But you can only be mad for what’s different from yourself, and from where I stood Sabine Weinberger was too much the same.
Speaking of stone-throwing prefab boys reminds me that Sabine Weinberger also had a glass eye as a consequence of some gruesome playground accident when she was a little girl. That too may have contributed to her reputation. She looked at you strangely.
Just before my grandmother died Sabine Weinberger posted me an invitation to a party at her house.
‘You’ll be going to that,’ my father said.
I told him that I didn’t feel up to a party what with my grandmother dying downstairs and everything.
‘It wasn’t a question,’ my father said. ‘I said you’ll be going to that.’
He made me wash my hair and oversaw my wardrobe. He made me stand still as a tailor’s dummy while he verified that I’d polished my sad never-trodden-upon winkle-pickers and properly buttoned my Italian suit. He even straightened my tie, he who had never in his life known how to decently knot his own. Then he opened the front door and pushed me out.
‘Don’t be late,’ my mother called.
‘Don’t be early,’ my father said.
I never went. I got as far as Sabine Weinberger’s front door, heard the music, saw the dancing, saw the size of the girls, and bottled out. It was the dancing that did me every time. Kids with whom I was completely comfortable, kids I knew from school and Laps’, kids I regularly made pickle meat of on a ping-pong table, were suddenly transformed into sophisticates the minute I saw them dancing. It was with dancing the way it had been with ball-playing: I’d turned my head away for two minutes and they’d learnt how to do it. With big girls, too. How come? How were they always able to steal an advantage over me? The size of those girls! What use would I be with girls as big as that — I with my rubbery little virgin in-between?
I never went. Never knocked. Never showed my face. I knew I couldn’t go back home and suffer my father’s wrath so I crept back into our garden and hid in the privet hedge for three hours, listening to my poor grandmother having trouble with her breathing. When I finally asked to be let in I had soil on my suit and twigs in my hair.
‘I see someone’s been having a good time,’ my father said.
I thought he was going to kiss me.
When I next ran into her in the street, Sabine Weinberger gave me one of those strange sideways glass-eyed looks of hers and reproached me for not coming to her party. I blushed and said I’d wanted to, but that my grandmother was dying. When I ran into her after that I no longer had a grandmother.
She knew. She’d seen the hearse leave from our house. Which meant that she’d seen me sobbing like a baby. She touched my shoulder and wished me long life. ‘I know how much you loved her,’ she said.
I thought she was going to kiss me.
And had she done so, I was suprised to realize, I would not have half minded.
So there was Alec Watson and Mitchell with its stock of oofplock foam and sponges, and there were the Saturday-morning ping-pong tables up and ready, and there was Sabine Weinberger waiting behind the cash register with her prominent bust and glass eye — and there were we, Sheeny Waxman and me, miles away on a gaff at Worksop. Or there we should have been. All very well talking about going to town and re-rubbering, but when do you get the time if you’re a gaff worker and a gaff worker’s son? ‘Do I ever get a Saturday off from this job?’ Sheeny had once asked my father. ‘Yeah, when pigs fly,’ my father had told him. ‘Oink, oink!’ Sheeny said disconsolately.
And then, out of nowhere, pigs flew!
The van broke down. Five o’clock in the morning we were outside Sheeny’s house, ticking over, waiting for his curtains to open, waiting for Sheeny’s mother to show herself, distraught, at his window, and then for Sheeny’s father to show himself, distraught, at another window, and finally for Sheeny to appear in person, coughing and twitching and complaining — ‘Oy a broch, Joel, what time do you call this?’ — when the van went into paroxysms of its own, shook, spluttered, convulsed and died.
‘Nishtogedacht!’ my father said. ‘That’s all we need.’
‘I’m going back in for a kip,’ Sheeny croaked. ‘Honk me when you’ve got her going.’
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ my father said. ‘You’ll sit here and put your foot on the pedal when I tell you to.’
‘You’re not going to push her?’
‘Where am I going to push her? Into your bedroom? Show me a hill, Einstein, and I’ll push her.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
‘Crank her.’
‘Joel, don’t be meshugge. You’ll wake the neighbours. It’s Shabbes.’
‘And some of us have to work on Shabbes,’ my father said.
But there was no cranking the Commer back to life, Shabbes or no Shabbes. My father disappeared under the chassis for an hour. Then he disappeared into the bonnet, just his short Walzer legs sticking out like those of a creature stuck up the anus of another creature in that Bosch picture we had once failed to turn into a commercial enterprise. Then he disappeared into Sheeny’s house, covered in oil, but not swearing, never swearing, to make a couple of phone calls. It was nearly nine o’clock before he could get a mechanic over. And gone ten when the tow-truck arrived.
‘That’s it,’ he finally conceded. ‘You’ve got the day off.’
By that time Mrs Waxman was up and about in a cerise nightie, preparing him Welsh rarebit. She seemed to know how he liked it — lots of cheese.
Sheeny had been asleep in the cab the whole time. Snoring heavily but careful, even while comatose, not to crush his whistle or soil his cuffs. I shook him to tell him the good news.
‘What, what?’ he cried, trying to throw me off. ‘I didn’t!’ Then comprehension returned to his jittery blue eyes. He twitched his head out from his shoulders, a ratchet at a time. I looked away, one tortoise from another. When he was finally free of himself he said, ‘Oink, oink! Let’s go and get some new bats then I’ll take you to the Kardomah.’
‘The Kardomah!’
‘Geshwint. Before the shops close.’
The Kardomah? I was going to the Kardomah! Me?
Oink, oink!
But first we had to do the bats. And Sabine Weinberger.
‘I wish you long life,’ she said when she saw me.
Hadn’t she already said that? It was my understanding that you said it once and that was that. On with life, no more references to death — wasn’t that the point of it? But then she was the one with the rabbinical backgrou
nd, she was the half-Vulvick, she should know.
She looked different behind a counter. Older. Taller. More assured. Maybe even more desirable. Her hair was up in a beehive, which drew attention to the fixity of her glass eye, though even that had a gleam in it I hadn’t seen before. Did she change marbles? One for home, one for school, one for work?
‘This is my friend Sheeny Waxman,’ I said. As though there was anyone in Manchester who needed to be introduced to Sheeny Waxman. ‘We want some help with rubbers.’
Did I see them exchange looks? Or was that just her new glass eye and Sheeny’s tic?
We put an hour in on one of Alec Watson and Mitchell’s tables, delighting mere sublunary shoppers, even signing a couple of autographs between shots. ‘You should pay us for doing this,’ Sheeny joked to Sabine Weinberger. ‘We’re good for business.’
‘I’d pay you if the shop was mine,’ she said.
‘You mean it’s not? Oliver, I thought you told me we were going to Weinberger and Mitchell’s.’
Sabine Weinberger laughed, putting her prominent bust into it.
‘So there’s no discount?’ Sheeny said.
‘I could ask.’
‘We don’t want it if it’s not from you,’ Sheeny said.
Sabine Weinberger made an exaggerated curtsy and squeezed us a glimpse of her tongue.
She was oddly kitted out for working a Saturday morning in a sports shop, in fine steel stilettos (that was why she looked taller) and a tight black jumper (that was why she looked more than usually prominent) and stiff petticoats under a black skirt. Just like Sheeny, she looked as though she’d come to work straight from the Plaza. Though in Sheeny’s case all creases had miraculously fallen out of his clothes, and there was not a speck of dust on him, whereas Sabine Weinberger was as crumpled as a used paper bag and had a serious lint problem.
What I couldn’t decide was what I thought of her legs. Ask me what I think today and I still wouldn’t be able to answer. All legs come up better in stilettos, that goes without saying; but a certain sadness attaches to lumpen, stubbly legs in high heels. On the other hand there is something fascinating about them too, by very virtue of the thing that makes you sad. Because in the end, isn’t uncouth more rousing than couth?
The Mighty Walzer Page 21