Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

He was magnificent that night. Going on a hunch, Aishky put him in at number one, which was strictly Sheeny’s spot according to recent form, to say nothing of its being what Aishky had promised me when he’d signed me up. But Twink didn’t let him down. He hit like di Stefano. Full of chest, but sweet. No screamers, just winner after winner stroked sweetly off a thrumming blade, lovely smooth high bouncing legatos, picked up early and pitched perfectly on the line.

His form affected the rest of us. Aishky found the rhythm that had deserted him the week before. He could do no wrong. Even when he was manoeuvred out of position and was forced to try his infamous behind-the-back retrieval — a shot Twink was forever begging him to forgo, because it looked smart-arsed and would upset the goyim — he pulled off an unbelievably acute angled return that left his opponent open-mouthed, with his hands on his hips. ‘The ball’s stuck to my bat,’ he whispered to me, beaming, as he changed ends. ‘It’s on elastic’

Selwyn Marks won handsomely, by his standards, as well. Striking his thigh and sometimes even his head with his bat, and berating himself as always — ‘Make your mind up, play the shot you mean to play, what’s the point of starting to hit if you don’t hit, come on, watch the ball, come ON, COME ON!’ — but actually playing shots tonight, actually trying to get the ball past his opponent instead of just keeping it in play and hoping.

‘Geh, Selwyn!’ Sheeny Waxman called out after a couple of exaggeratedly effective forehand smashes, whereupon a circle of pink appeared in each of Selwyn’s cheeks and he smashed the next five forehands into the net.

‘No,’ he yelled to himself. ‘NO!’ And netted two more.

‘Steady, Selwyn,’ Sheeny called. ‘Take it a point at a time.’ And the crisis was over. Having thrown away a 19–12 lead to end up on 19 all he reverted to what he did best and pushed his way to a 21–19 win. ‘Better,’ he said to himself even as he was shaking hands. ‘BETTER!’

Sheeny, ticking and flicking, won easily. That goes without saying. He should have been playing in a higher division. But that would have meant practising a couple of nights a week, keeping himself in shape. And Sheeny was otherwise engaged. He had an air of wasted brilliance about him. Could do better, they’d written on his school reports. Does himself no justice. Performs below his potential. He carried that one around in his wallet and showed it to the girls he chatted up in the Kardomah. ‘I wouldn’t mind performing below your potential, darling.’ Be careful not to underestimate me — that was the challenge he threw out. I’m not the low-life you take me to be. Not only the low-life you take me to be. I have a say in the matter.

And I? How was I on my first ever home appearance?

I beggared belief. Need I say more? I made a pauper of credulity.

Whatever embellishments Aishky went on adding to the famous story of how I’d turned up at the Akiva carrying a bat as big as the Empire State Building and zetzed my way into club legend, I was never an out-and-out come-what-may hitter. My game was built around control and demoralization. I loved ping-pong most when I felt the fight go out of my opponent. You can hear it sometimes. Hear their self-belief crack, hear their heart break. Like a twig snapping in a moon-frozen forest. The fight goes out of players differently. Some give up in a fit of irritation as soon as you’ve bamboozled them with a couple of spin serves. Others decide you hit too fiercely for them and settle for admiring what you can do. ‘Shot, son. Too good.’ Or they sense the night’s luck is running your way and can’t be bothered to resist it. But nothing hollows out a player more than when you soak up everything he’s got. Think Ali on the ropes against George Foreman. You stand back and let them do their worst, take the lot — go on, hit harder, harder, go on, is that it, is that all you’ve got? — and then kapow! All very well releasing my backhand and thinking I was Victor Barna. I did that only once the ball sat up, begging for it to be over, a superiority I’d achieved at a distance of ten or twenty feet from the table, chopping deep and low in the manner of Richard Bergmann, the little Austrian defender who stood so far back he was almost in the next room, and who had become World Champion at the age of seventeen.

Had he been a bit taller, and looked a little bit less like some of my cousins on my mother’s side, Bergmann would have been my hero. As it was, I’d gone to the trouble of learning many of his reflections on ping-pong off by heart. Such as, ‘You should at all times be able to vary your style of play and go back to defending of your OWN ACCORD.’ In other words, defence wasn’t a recourse, forced on you by the will of your opponent. It was your choice (like Sheeny’s to become a low-life), made in your own time and in reference to no one but yourself. Was that true of Ali, holding on and covering up for so long in that Zaire night? Maybe not. Maybe he defended of Foreman’s accord. In which case little Richard’s will was more fearsome than big Ali’s.

Something else Bergmann said which I’d committed to memory: ‘Practise until you have a feeling of absolute safety, that certain “I can’t miss” feeling.’ He was talking about the backhand defensive chop. Of all table tennis strokes, this is the one it’s easiest to have that ‘I can’t miss feeling’ about. If you don’t have an absolutely safe backhand chop you might as well forget ping-pong as a career. That was true of the game as it was played in my time, anyway. Now — but in every way now’s different.

Precisely because it does (or should) come naturally, precisely because it’s an intimate, easily camouflaged stroke played without discernible risk close to your body, you can’t demoralize an opponent with a backhand chop alone. To break a spirit comprehensively you need to be able to chop with your forehand. Of all table tennis strokes the forehand chop is the loveliest — speaking classically now, speaking of grace and elegance, speaking of music and poetry — and the most deadly. To execute a forehand chop you must leave the sanctuary of your body, go out on a limb, risk your reach and your balance, expose yourself. Get a forehand chop wrong and everyone can see it. Ditto get a forehand chop right. Not just see it either; execute the forehand chop to perfection, take the ball into custody on your forehand, cradle it, coddle it, suspend its trajectory for a millionth of a second, caress it, make it yours, put your name on it, and your opponent will shudder like a patient on an anaesthetist’s table, feeling fingers pulling at his heart. You shudder yourself at that moment of suspension and possession, as though futurity, with its adoring millions, has paused to lay flowers on your grave. Yes, it is the loveliest and the most arrogant of all ping-pong strokes because it infinitesimally arrests the game and controverts its logic. In this way it is crucially different from a counter-hit, however unexpected, for a counter-hit merely answers like with like, whereas the forehand chop refuses your opponent’s entire vocabulary. It is insouciant. Egotistical. Imperious. Soul destroying.

And I played it as though I’d invented it. ‘You must be able to execute this stroke in your sleep, on the roof of a burning house, in a blizzard and on the high seas with a north-west gale blowing,’ Bergmann said. I went one better: I executed it in the face of Gershom Finkel’s sneering.

He missed the first game of my first match. I count that as significant. It meant that I was able to get my chop going, free of the evil influence of his detraction. He wandered round the club on match nights, unable to watch, unable not to watch, unable to stay in the room, unable to leave it, as though an invisible devil with a pitchfork were goading him from one hellish circle to the next. Who knows, had we compared sightings we might have discovered that he was in the ping-pong room at the same time he was in the billiard room, and in the billiard room at the same time he was in the card room, that even as he was sneering at me he was dancing — still in his buttoned-up navy coat, still laughing mirthlessly to himself — with my aunty Dolly.