Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Baden was ‘37 not ‘39!’ he retorted. Why retort? He had only been asked a question. But I had noticed that no one spoke in a normal voice here. There was no discourse. Everyone shouted. Not in anger, but in a sort of perpetual sorrow that everyone else should be so wrong about everything for so much of the time.

‘Does it matter when it was? I’m asking you who beat him.’

‘I’m telling you — Sol Schiff, the finger-spinner. 26–24 in the third.’

‘So who beat Schiff?’

‘Who do you think! Bergmann. But not easily. No one beat Schiff easily. No one could handle his finger-spin service.’

‘I thought they’d banned Sol Schiff’s service,’ Aishky said.

‘Later — that was later. You’re thinking of the Americans.’

‘Why would I be thinking of the Americans?’

‘Because they banned it.’

‘Louis, do me a favour — was it banned or wasn’t it?’

‘It was banned in America, I’ve told you, but not in Baden. It took the International Federation another few years to wake up.’

‘That means that if the World Championships had been held in America —’

Twink saw where Aishky was heading. ‘- And Gershom had been drawn against Schiff there —’

Louis laughed wildly. It was almost a sob. ‘- He’d have been given a walk-over, yeah. And maybe gone on to take the title. But what’s the point of talking? He didn’t.’

We exchanged crestfallen expressions, then turned our eyes as one man on the strange loping buttoned-up figure of Gershom Finkel, wispily bald in that manner that suggests the hairs are yet to come rather than that they’ve been and gone, still circumnavigating the room and still muttering and laughing sarcastically to himself. We were all thinking the same thing. Was this any way for a great ping-pong player to have ended up?

My father was waiting for me as he’d promised, asleep on the wheel of his bus. I’d been in the club four hours. I was surprised I recognized him.

‘So how was it?’ he wanted to know.

‘They’ve all got something wrong with them,’ I said.

He let go of the wheel and banged the side of his head with the heel of his hand. An upward brushing movement, as though he wanted to clear unwelcome matter from his brain. They’ve all got something wrong with them. He hated that sort of talk. Judgements, judgements. The stuff I’d picked up from my mother and the Violets. We couldn’t say boo to a goose, any of us, but we knew what we thought of the goose, oh yes.

‘I didn’t ask what they were like,’ he said. ‘I asked how it went.’

‘It went well,’ I said. ‘They’ve asked me to play for the team.’

‘Ah!’ Now he was pleased with me. ‘Thank you.’ He drove on in silence for a few minutes, looking at me out of the corner of his eye. Pride? Did I see pride? Then he asked, ‘And how was the bat?’

You can’t hurt your own father on the one occasion he’s pleased with you. ‘It was good,’ I said. ‘Better than the book.’

‘Ah! Thank you.’ More silence, and then, ‘You had a good night, then?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Thank you.’

Why did he keep on thanking me? I can only suppose it was because I’d put him in the right, at last. Proved that I was his true son and heir. Proved that he knew how to do the best for me. There was so much unaccustomed harmony between us, at any rate, that instead of turning left at Middleton Road he turned right, kept on going past the park and the mills and pulled up in front of a detached white-washed cottage by the rubberworks in Rhodes. ‘Home, James,’ he said.

I had to explain to him that this wasn’t where we lived.

He took a moment or two to get his bearings, then he said, ‘You’re right. Thank you. Thank you.’

‘So how was it?’ my mother wanted to know. My aunties, too, who had stayed around at our place later than usual, waiting for me to come home. Waiting to kvell.

‘They’ve all got something wrong with them,’ I said.

‘Such as what?’ Tell us, tell us.

‘Bits missing.’

‘We don’t believe you.’ Love and laughter, for the bright boy. We don’t believe you, but tell us, tell us anyway.

‘They have. They’ve all got bits missing. Broken ribs. Tuberculosis.’

‘Tuberculosis?’

This was a tactical error on my part. My mother was all for me playing ping-pong because she believed it was safe. No one got hurt playing ping-pong. Now I was telling her the game was riddled with infectious diseases.

‘Well, not tuberculosis exactly,’ I corrected myself. ‘More like asthma.’

‘If they’ve got asthma they shouldn’t be playing.’

‘Ma, none of them should be playing. One of them’s about a hundred and won’t take his coat off. Another’s blind.’

‘Blind?’

‘He was the one I beat.’

How they laughed. They loved it when I was wicked, my mother’s side. It empowered them. We’d get into a huddle and we’d call the goose for all sorts.

But that always encouraged me to go too far. ‘The other one I beat,’ I went on, ‘was dead.’

‘Zei gezunt,’ my mother said. ‘You’re overexcited. Go to bed.’

By morning the atmosphere had changed. My mother had worked out that playing for a team entailed travelling. ‘I’m not sure I like the idea of you charging off God knows where at your age,’ she said, over cheese on toast. That was breakfast. The entire time I lived in my mother’s and father’s house I ate only cheese on toast for breakfast. We had a corona of melted cheese around our hearts, each of us. My father died of melted cheese in every artery. Yet my mother was worried that I’d come to harm playing ping-pong for the Akiva Social Club.

‘I think we travel as a team,’ I told her.

‘Travel as a team how? In an aeroplane?’

‘Ma, this is the Manchester and District Table Tennis League, Third Division. The furthest we go is Stockport.’ I didn’t know this for a fact. I was guessing.

‘Stockport! And how are you supposed to get back from Stockport?’

‘In a car, I imagine. One of the team drives us, Ma.’

‘Which one of the team? The blind one?’

Funny she should have guessed that.

Pending certification by the League Secretary — and it took about ten days for my registration form to be received and scrutinized, my three-shilling postal order to be cashed, and for Aishky Mistofsky, who was Club Secretary, to be given the all-clear — I could practise with the team but not play for it.

In those days, when ping-pong players grew on trees, before — but let’s not start the Jeremiah stuff; we all know that Greater Manchester is no longer Eden — a team numbered five, with five more clamouring to get a game. Prior to me, the Akiva Social Club — positioned neither at the very top nor at the very bottom of the Third Division North, but enjoying the middle of her favours — consisted of Aishky Mistofsky, Theo/Twink Starr, the Marks brothers — Louis and Selwyn — and Sheeny Waxman. Selwyn, the younger of the Markses, and the nearest to me in age of the whole bunch, I’d met briefly on my first night in the club without realizing he was Louis’s brother. The word met might be stretching things a bit. He’d spoken to no one the whole time, not even Louis, so engrossed was he in rehearsing his shots. He played along in dumb show with whoever was on the table, hitting the ball exactly as they did and punishing himself when they missed. Although in rehearsal his repertory of strokes was prodigious, the moment it came to actual play he lost the nerve to try any of them, and was reduced to the safest of all safe shots, the backhand almost-horizontal shove, which he executed with the greatest deliberation from every corner of the table, never taking his eye off the ball, but to an accompaniment of all manner of insults against himself, as though his own timidity was a lasting shame to him. In appearance he was slight and undernourished; and apart from a premature moustache which grew with cruel disregard for shape or uniformity — a couple of dozen individual spikes of various lengths and colours — he was as white all over as a box of new balls, like a person who had never been seen by the sun.