Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Ah, the scissors and the glue …

On its own, Span was nothing, a half-hearted iniquity no matter how filthy the ever-irked, all-judging proprietor of the soft-porno shop tried to make me feel, refusing me a brown paper bag, daring me to check my change, not taking his eyes off me as I stuffed the magazine into my shirt. What were they to me, these hard-faced yekeltehs with dead eyes and thin lips who resembled no one so much as the mothers of the prefab boys who threw stones at me when I left the house? What they did with their bodies on the other hand, their lewd gestures, the shamelessness with which they bent over or found pretexts for letting you see up their skirts or down their blouses … that was something else. Be strictly logical about it and you’d have to say that their bodily contortions perfectly matched their facial expressions; that only women who looked as though they lived in prefabs and brought their kids up to throw stones could have cared so little for the aesthetics of the human form. But since when did lewdness ever have anything to do with a perfect match? Disparity — that, surely, is where lewdness has always found its home. An elegant woman in an inelegant pose, a demure face on an obscenely splayed body. Where’s the shock of seeing reserve thrown to the winds, if there was never any reserve there in the first place? Well, I was the one to ask. I had lived for twelve years in a reservation of reserve. There were things I understood. As, for example, that there would have been no erotic pay-off whatsoever in cutting out the faces of the women on my father’s side and attaching them to the bodies of the toerags who flashed the lot for Span. This is not to say that they were in any way toeraggy themselves, only that they were already uninhibited rompers. For this to work, it had to be the refined, sensitive oval faces of my mother’s side — faces utterly dear to me — that I desecrated.

Yes, I am saying what it looks as though I’m saying. Much like a sweet little girl playing with her cut-out dolls — except that a sweet little girl will mix and match on the dining-room table or on a sunlit lawn in the company of other ambrosial chits her own age, whereas I was stewing it alone and malodorous in the lavatory — I changed the outfits worn by the women I revered, got them to open their legs and show me the tops of their stockings, the lace on their pants, turned them round and bent them over, enticed them into peignoirs and babydoll pyjamas, cut them into French maids, naughty nurses, leggy belles from St Trinian’s, cowgirls who couldn’t stay on a horse or keep their tushes in their chaparejos.

And I did this even to my little Polish grandmother?

Especially to my little Polish grandmother.

Scissoring with the utmost care, I cut around the contours of her face, freeing her from the gross contingencies of Piccadilly or Cheetham Hill, then slowly, lovingly, I separated her head from her body. Now she was mine to love as only I knew how to love her. Up on to six-inch high heels I hoiked her, fishnetted, frilly-knickered, fingering a cane; out of an upper-storey window I leaned her, a wanton housewife in a scant pinny, shaking out a feather duster and jiggling her introverted-nippled breasts; down on a scarlet bed I laid her, wearing her peasant scarf as always, God-fearing, inconsolably blue-eyed, sixty-five years of age, but in her ‘best’ at last — a gossamer négligé of ankle length, through which, with the help of my magnifying glass, I could just make out where the snatch should have been.

Trying to find some saving grace in all this, I can only thank the Almighty in whom my grandmother placed her trust that split-beaver shots were not around when I was twelve.

I repeat, too, that I never co-opted a single page of Health and Efficiency to my cause. I come from a culture which attaches a near religious significance to the family and sanctifies the old: I wasn’t going to have a grandmother of mine kriching after a volleyball on some beach in Scandinavia.

Exceptionally, strict observance of the prescribed method of service may be waived where the umpire is notified, before play begins, that compliance is prevented by physical disability.

7.7 The Rules

IN FAIRNESS TO them, the Akiva ping-pong players, on whose mercies my father had thrown me, could have given me a much harder time of it than they did.

They could have left me standing there for the whole evening, for example, the way I was left standing on the touchline at St Onan’s, instead of just for the first hour. I wouldn’t have complained. I wasn’t in any position to complain. What rights did I have? It was their table. They were grown men, some of them, sort of. And I was wearing a school blazer enjoining me to take a firm hold of myself, a comic strip bat in my hand.

As it turned out, it was the bat that broke the ice.

When I say they were grown men, some of them, sort of, I mean to render not so much the uncertainties of an unusually apprehensive twelve-year-old, as the approximateness of the company itself. If I were to encounter them again as they were then, myself as I am now, I think I would still be struck by how sort of they were. And it was the most sort of of them all — a tall, baby-bald man in his forties, I reckoned, who neither played nor sat down, but circumnavigated the room the whole time in a buttoned-up blue raincoat and heavy shoes, talking and laughing to himself — who finally addressed me. He’d climbed up on to the little stage, presumably to win attention for his cleverness (there is always a little stage in the room where people play table tennis, just as there is always a scullery where the janitor keeps the mops), and was standing where the comedian would have stood. ‘Someone’s gotta tell you, so I will — you’re in the wrong club, son.’ He had a queer quick stuttering delivery, like an automatic weapon that cut out after every other round. ‘We don’t play lacrosse here. Why don’t you get your old man to take you to the YMCA?’

It pleases me to recall that no one was amused. ‘Nisht, Gershom, nisht,’ I heard one of them say. Leaving me to roast was one thing, being outright rude to me was another.

‘Come and have a hit,’ the ‘nisht, Gershom, nisht’ person invited me, after Gershom had shrugged his shoulders and gone on another self-communing ramble round the room. ‘But not with that bat. You’ll shneid the ball.’

He handed me his bat. A Victor Barna: nipple-brown rubber pimples, medium fast, smooth stubby wooden handle with no tape or strapping around it. It slid into my grip like the hand of an old friend. In an earlier life I must have played with a Victor Barna. Owner of the best backhand there has ever been, and winner of more world championship titles than any other player before or since, Victor Barna first took the men’s singles in 1929—30, lost it the following year to Miklos Szabados, then recaptured and held on to it for four years running, defeating Szabados (in the finals, twice), Kolar and Bellak. Players, from the sound of it, from roughly the same neck of the woods as my father’s side; the Bug, the Dniester, the Danube — Slavs and Magyars whichever way you cut us. In an earlier life could I have been Victor Barna?

I took off my jacket and stood at the table, not daring to pop my head out of my burning shell and look around me, scalded, abashed, suffocating, certain that no one would give me a game. And certainly no one wanted to. The likeliest was the owner of the Barna bat, but then how could he play me if I had his bat? Twink, I’d heard the others call him, when he’d done something worthy of remark, or suffered a reverse, on the table. ‘Shot, Twink.’ ‘Unlucky, Twink.’ Otherwise, Theo. ‘You going to Laps’ later, Theo?’ So he had two names: a social name and a ping-pong name. He was lanky, very thin, sixteen or seventeen years old, with an asthmatic cough, a little face that was all but shut out by a cascade of Tony Curtis quiffs, and good looping attacking shots. Whenever he over-hit or netted, he coughed up something phlegmy from his lungs and banged his bat against his leg. I was impressed by his ability to use the width of the table and find the edges. Not overawed, just impressed.