Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

We’d got used to the problem ourselves. We’d spit on the floor between points and rub our shoes in the puddle. For visiting teams we provided a wet cloth. Only tonight Aishky had mislaid the cloth.

‘On my life, Aishky,’ Twink said, the minute Aishky was back from the Maccabi, ‘if you don’t find that cloth I’ll rip the shirt off your back.’

‘Don’t do that, Sonny Jim,’ Jack Cartwright said. ‘Just wait till one of us goes over and breaks a leg, then we can sue you for all you’ve got.’

It was a good job Selwyn had been told to stay at home. ‘Did you hear that? Sue you for all you’ve got!’

And as if the balls and the floorboards weren’t enough, we slipped up on refreshments as well. At the best of times hospitality wasn’t our strong suit. A cup of weak tea and a sweet biscuit each was the most we were usually able to dig up. Once again the problem wasn’t meanness. Aishky just wasn’t a fresser. He liked a big lunch, and there was always something hot waiting for him when he got home to his mother after a match, otherwise he didn’t think about food. ‘You want delicatessen, you go and buy delicatessen,’ he told Twink. But Twink wasn’t much of a picker either.

Tonight though — and what made it worse was that the A. J. M. was famously hospitable: milky Nescafés, PG Tips, hot chocolates, Lucozades, bitter lemons, club sodas and all the jam fancies and marmalade doughnuts you could eat — tonight, though, the element in our kettle had broken and because Passover was in the wind all we had to offer in the way of solids was a box of dry matzos and a bag of kichels. In fact a kichel is a delicacy, provided you have the right expectations of what it is you are eating and are given a strong cup of tea or a glass of sweet red wine to dunk it in. But there was no tea and no wine.

‘Bit hard on your teeth, these,’ Jack Cartwright said, coughing one up. For a minute I thought he was going to go into his rule book again. ‘Kichels … kichels …’ What he actually did was ask where the bathroom was so he could wash his mouth out with water.

But by then he was a spent force. By then I’d taken him out 21—5, 21—3, to pay him back for the misery he’d caused me on Bonfire Night, and the trouble he was trying to make for Sheeny Waxman, and the fuss he’d made over the balls and the floor, and for being an anti-Semite.

The markets were going well, too. My father had given us a couple of weeks of anxiety after we’d found him collapsed one morning with his head in the fireplace. Overwork. He’d been up all night finishing an order for twenty-five coffee tables. Grandiosity again — now he was making for other marketmen! It was a lucky escape. There was a diadem of winking embers around his head when we found him, like a halo round a saint in an illuminated manuscript. And he still had tacks for the beading in his mouth. It was a miracle he hadn’t burned or choked. Or burned and choked. But at least that had put an end to manufacturing on a large and impersonal scale. Now when we gathered round the dining-room table as a family it was to pop together plastic poppet necklaces, or to assemble travellers’ refreshment packs — a sponge, a face cloth, a comb, a tube of toothpaste and a shoe brush — or to weigh out bags of chocolate truffles which my father was able to buy cheaply in bulk on account of their having changed colour. Fershimmelt was the precise term. Anything too fershimmelt we threw away. My father wasn’t in the business of poisoning his punters. But between too fershimmelt and pretty appalling to look at there was some leeway. That was where I came in. I sat half-way down the production line and wiped the discolouration off the so-so truffles with one of the sponges from a traveller’s refreshment pack.

I didn’t have to be over-nice about it. The truffles were only plunder — one of the lines my father tossed out from the side of his lorry for pennies, sometimes even for nothing, depending on how much it took to get the crowd in the mood. Yes, there was a lorry now, and crowds. In no time at all my father had gone from being one of those shtumkopfs who stand behind their stalls with their hands in their pockets waiting for the punters to finger their tsatskes — allow me an exaggeration, I know he was never that shtum — to being a fully fledged pitcher who called the punters to him. Not a mock auctioneer or a run-out worker — he was always strictly above board: ‘Who’s a liar!’ he would laugh whenever he promised them that this ‘really was the last one’ — but a showman who blew whistles and juggled plates and told jokes and confetti’d the crowd with free pens and cheap bags of chocolates (‘Out they go! See if I care!’), and was variously known as Cheap Johnnie, Honest Jo and Mad Jack.

He had come to an understanding of what sort of marketman he was now, too. No more searching around for lines. He was in swag — end of story. And swag took in chalk love-in-a-cottage wall plaques and shepherd and shepherdess figurines and hot-water bottles that burst when you filled them with hot water and torches that didn’t work in the dark and plastic colanders with no holes in them and hula hoops and shockproof deep-sea divers’ watches and jardinières and folding chairs that could kill when they sprang shut and dolls that sometimes said ‘Mama’ but more often than not didn’t and leatherette writing-pad compendiums and dictionaries that had no definitions in them and plastic potties to go under the bed (‘That’s why they’re called gesunders, Mrs Woman’) and pairs of peeling brass candlesticks and salt and pepper shakers in the shape of pelicans and polar bears and sheer nylon stockings for women with short Far Eastern legs (fine for the Walzer women) and three-dimensional paintings of the Last Supper and musical fish-bowls and fountains that played when the phone rang and of course Swan Lake coffee tables (made by someone else) and poppet necklaces and travellers’ refreshment packs and bags of discoloured truffles, ‘ramped and stamped by the British Institute of Public Health and Hygiene’.

Was there such an institution? I never found out. If there was he could only have come to hear of its existence from my mother. She coached him. He was the one with the warm shaygets-loving personality but she was the one with the words. ‘Ramped and stamped,’ though, was his. He must have picked it up in the army. Similarly the joke about there being nothing he wouldn’t do for his wife, and there being nothing his wife wouldn’t do for him, and that that was how they went through life together, doing nothing for one another. He couldn’t tell that one enough. It was as though it surprised even him every time he told it, as though it revealed some paradox at the heart of language itself which he never ever saw coming. He enjoyed a perfect rapport with his punters. They never saw it coming either. They’d stand there half a day, some of them, open mouthed in the Garston or Oswestry rain, listening to the routine repeat itself like di Stefano singing ‘O Soave fanciulla’ on Twink’s turntable, and horse-laughing, if anything the more ungovernably, the better they got to know it. ‘And that’s how we go through life together …’ He’d even wait for them to peer into the jiggery-pokery of language themselves, pounce on the punch-line before it could ambush them. He’d direct them in it, sometimes, like Toscanini. ‘One, two, three … doing nothing for one another.’

Otherwise everything came from my mother. She’d write out his material for him in big letters on a lined absorbent note-pad — made in Albania and selling for sixpence a dozen with a Porker Pen Set thrown in — and he’d sit and commit it to memory. ‘Not two pounds, not one pound, not even ten shillings … Here, I’ll tell you what I’ll do, today and today only …’