Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

It was Theo… no, Twink… no, Theo, for this was a social act … yes, but ping-pong related — it was Twink who, having lent me his bat, got me a game. ‘Go on, Aishky, give the teapot lid a knock. What’ll it cost you?’

Aishky looked like Esau — strong armed, superfluously freckled, an angry mob of red hair overrunning his shirt and fanning out around his neck and shoulders. But it was Esau’s father Isaac who was the short-sighted one as I recall, so in that regard Aishky was more like him. He wore inch-thick bulletproof lenses in his glasses, which he had to wipe between points.

We fell immediately into a lengthy version of the knock-up, forehand drive against forehand drive, backhand against backhand, no scoring, no one trying to win a point, simply keeping the ball in play. How did I understand this convention, how did I know, without ever having been taught any of the interpersonal skills of ping-pong, not to try to pass or thwart Aishky, not to try to out-fox or out-chop him, but just to keep it going, plock, plock; plock, plock; plock, plock; plock, plock? Reincarnation. In an earlier life I had been Victor Barna. Even if Victor Barna himself was not dead yet.

Since I did understand the convention, though, it was wrong of me to break it. But what could I do? We’d been knocking up for ten minutes and he hadn’t yet acknowledged I existed. He was hitting the ball automatically, with half his eye on it — and half an eye for Aishky was a quarter of an eye for anybody else — continuing his conversation with Twink/Theo and the rest of them about some bird with big bristles he’d been seen dancing with in the Azlap on Oxford Road on Saturday night. (Bristles, notice, not bristols. In fifties Manchester we thought of women as bristling with breast.) ‘What was she like?’ he wanted to know. ‘I had my bins off, I couldn’t see her. Was she fair?’ Plock.

‘Meers,’ the others teased him. ‘A dog. But if you were happy…’

‘Who says I was happy?’ Plock.

‘You had your eyes closed.’

‘I was asleep.’ Plock.

‘Nebach. You missed seeing the bristles to end all bristles.’

‘What do you mean I missed seeing them?’ Plock.

‘She had them out.’

‘On the dance floor?’ Plock.

‘Sure.’

‘Out of her bra?’ Plock.

‘Completely.’

‘You’re moodying me.’ Plock.

‘I’m not.’

‘Moody-merchant!’ Plock.

‘She had them completely out of her bra, Aishky. How many more times?’

‘Both of them?’ Plock.

‘What’s with the both? You think there were only two?’

‘My mazel! I’d been trying to get those bristles out all night. That’s why I was so tired. Now you’re telling me I slept through them.’ Plock. Plock.

Tcheppehing, we called this in those days. Anglicized to chipping. Verbal lumberjacking. I loved it. How much longer before I would be allowed to join in? Be one of the boys at last? ‘What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,’ I thought of contributing. But I didn’t have the balls.

In the meantime my opponent was still taking no more notice of me than if I’d been the plaster whorl I practised against at home; less, because you had to watch a whorl. So when a ball finally did sit up for hitting I hit it, not diagonally in the direction it had come from, making it easy for him to return by reflex, without looking and while still tcheppehing his chinas, and not with a nice high friendly topspin bounce either, but straight down the line and flat — a shot that is all feint and deviance — and faster than the speed of light.

Years later, even after he had lost two fingers from his right hand in an accident in a phone box and had taught himself to play again with his left, right up until the time he lost a further two fingers, this time from his left hand, in an explosion at a retail bedding warehouse, Aishky Mistofsky was still recounting the story of how we’d met. ‘To tell you the emmes, that night I’d gone along to the club for a quiet game of kalooki. I didn’t feel like running around. My nerves were giving me trouble. And I’d just come out of a bath. Yes, I had my bat with me, but that didn’t mean anything. Anyone who knows me will tell you I don’t go anywhere without my bat. Anyway, I get to the card room and no one’s turned up yet, so I think I may as well take a kuk at the table tennis room. How far is it to walk? The usual gang’s there — Sheeny Waxman, Twink Starr, Louis Marks, Gershom Finkel, all nice people. And we’re sitting around, having a knock and a nobbel, when suddenly — and you’ll split your sides at this — in walks this kid carrying a bat as big as the Empire State Building, challenges me to a game and starts shmeissing the ball past me. I’m telling you I’ve never seen a ball hit faster. And this is just the knock-up! I think OK, Chaim Yankel, say your prayers, and I start zetzing the ball myself. Makes no difference. I hit it hard, he hits it back twice as hard. Then he puts a chop on it. Oy! — I see it spinning backwards in the air. And fizzing. Like Superman’s chopped it. That’s it. I put my bat down, look across at Twink Starr, whose mouth has fallen half-way off his face, and I say, “OK, maestro, so you give the teapot lid a knock. What’ll it cost you?” But we both knew a legend had been born.’

Sweet of him. Doubly sweet of him, considering the tragedy of his own career. But the reality was more mundane. They woke up to the fact that I could play a bit, that was all that happened. They took an interest in me. All of them except Gershom Finkel who said, ‘He’s got brawn but no timing. He’s a shtarker, nothing else.’

‘Do me a favour, Gershom,’ Aishky said to him. ‘You know as well as I do that you can’t hit a ball that hard unless you know how to time it.’

‘Depends how it comes to you. You were feeding his strengths. You never played him short.’

‘Easier said than done.’

‘I don’t say what I can’t do. I could clean the kid up with my wrong hand.’

(Where am I while all this is going on? I’m standing there like a kuni-lemele, counting the pimples on Twink’s bat, shell-locked, listening to the patter of my perspiration on the club floor.)

‘So do it,’ Aishky dared him. ‘I’d like to see you.’

‘I’m in my coat,’ Gershom said. ‘I’m not taking my coat off.’

‘Keep it on. If you can clean him up with your wrong hand, you can clean him up in your coat.’

‘I don’t have anything to prove,’ Gershom said. ‘And I don’t give free lessons.’ Whereupon he went walkabout again.

‘Ignore him,’ Aishky advised me. ‘He used to be a great player. Now he’s just a mamzer.’

‘What do you mean a great player?’ Twink put in. ‘One of the greatest. The guy was mustard. He played for England twice. And made it to the quarter-finals in Baden the year Bergmann won. It may even have been Bergmann who beat him. That’s how good he was. Louis’ll know. Louis, who beat Gershom in Baden in ‘39?’

I hadn’t taken much notice of Louis. He hadn’t played, that was why. I hadn’t seen what he was made of. He’d scored a few games and laughed hysterically at the bristle jokes, groaning with pain because he’d hurt his ribs and pulled muscles in his back and chest and laughing made them worse; but I hadn’t otherwise been aware of him. It was hard to tell how old he was. He lifted weights — which was how he had come to have damaged most of the muscles in his body — and this gave him the torso of a man in his twenties. But in the face he was a fifteen-year-old boy, a grinner, almost as shy as I was, with a mass of black hair that had never been combed and that muddy Dniester complexion that put me off my grandmother on my father’s side. Test him with a name or a date, though, and his skin shone like a Yakipak’s.