Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Only,’ my mother would get him to repeat. ‘Give it some emphasis. Make it sound as though it really is only for today.’

‘Only … today only.’

It really was a marriage made in heaven.

It’s a funny thing about swag — you begin by being ashamed of yourself for dealing in it, feeling pity and not a little contempt for the discernment of those who buy it, and not only buy it but actually appear to like it and want it, need it even, but in the end you too succumb to it. Swag is viral. I say is but in truth I don’t know how swag is now. I live a long way from any English market. Of course the carnival masks and the plastic gondolas are no different in spirit from the swag we sold, but I have nothing to do with the swagmen in whose shops and on whose stalls you find them. In my swag days, at any rate, the stuff was virulent. If you hung around it long enough you caught it.

At first none of us believed there could be a market for the gear my father was bringing back from the warehouses. ‘Look at these!’ we would say, scampering around in the back of the van, ripping open boxes of ornamental Dutch pee-pee boys with Chinese faces, and flowery wall plates that said ‘Too Grand Ma’, and brass mirrors in the design of a ship’s porthole. Who was this stuff for? In time we came to realize. It was for us.

Bit by bit my mother started to make exceptions, creeping in a line here and a line there. A musical pedal bin — we could do with that. A pouffe in the shape of a grand piano — we could definitely use that. A black resin bare-breasted mermaid, six feet high, riding a dolphin and holding up a trident the prongs of which were each wired to take a seventy-five watt bulb — ‘I’m sorry but I think it’s lovely.’ Latherless soap with sharp edges found its way into the house, talcum powder that smelt of the urine of the Siberian tiger, paper handkerchiefs that blew apart when you sneezed in them. Before long my mother was writing on lined Albanian notepads as a matter of course, she who had once corresponded with the heroes of the Spanish Civil War on the finest scented paper.

(To this day I receive absorbent letters from her which I have to collect personally from the sorting office, no Italian postman being willing to risk splintering himself on her Romanian envelopes.)

I’m not saying we had lived according to chaste design principles in the pre-swag years. Given where we came from, how could we not have been stirred by whatever moved suddenly or shone? It wasn’t so long ago that we’d have swapped an entire bank of the Dniester for a string of coloured beads. So yes, gaudy we had always been. But gaudiness can have its own cultural integrity and consistency. Now, though, under the influence of swag, we became confused.

Aesthetically confused.

Whether we also became morally confused is the big question. I believe it depressed us — I’ll go that far. I believe the ugliness of the tsatskes we sold, and then surrounded ourselves with, demoralized us.

But I was the only one in our family who thought that. And some would say that I ended up the most demoralized of us all. So who am I to insist I was right?

Except that I was.

I am, of course, describing a slow process. We didn’t overnight go down with swag. In the beginning, or at least once my father recovered from his headlong fall into the fireplace, we were in the pink. My mother was delighted that the bus had now gone from our lives. My sisters were pleased to earn a bit of train-to-town and cappuccino money bagging face cloths. Aunty Dolly might just have found herself a boyfriend though no one was betting on anything yet, least of all my grandmother who didn’t count her chickens even after they were hatched. And I had become a famous boy ping-pong player with my picture in the Manchester Evening News most weeks under such headlines as, ‘Winning streak goes on and on for new hope’ and ‘Akiva chopper tipped for bigger things’.

So I was out of my shell?

Don’t rush me. I was coming out.

I had less time to be in there, that’s for sure. Practice at the Akiva on Sunday mornings. Matches mid-week. Maybe more practice with the Marks brothers who had just come to live next door (right next door, amazingly) and had a table in their garden — no more than a couple of sheets of plywood balanced on dustbins, it’s true, but a table none the less, and the better, as far as practice went, for being uneven in bounce and exposed to all weathers. Then there was the occasional evening comparing tenors at Twink’s place. And Saturdays and school holidays doing the markets with Cheap Johnnie.

The old man didn’t expect much from me at first. He was somewhat disillusioned by me, I think, after the Bosch episode. And he already had a floorman, a blond amateur wrestler called Mike Sieff, who was good at helping to get an edge, banging boxes and blowing up and bursting paper bags and pretending to be in a fight with my father over the prices he was knocking stuff down at — ‘What’s the matter with you? Have you gone mad, has the sun got to you?’ — and otherwise clowning and tcheppehing with him in the vein of Abbott and Costello. He knew how to move the gear out as well. ‘Over there and over here and over here and over there and another one over here!’ he’d shout, like a man who had lost his senses himself, clapping his enormous hands together as though they were the bellows that fanned the impulse to buy.

So all I had to do, thank God, was help put the stall up around the van if it was raining and otherwise do the general dogsbodying, fetch tea and sandwiches, open cartons, run for change, buy Mike Sieff a paper for the drive home, and maybe dive into the toilets with a Span from the filthy magazine stall (where there was definitely no shouting ‘Over here and over there!’ — as quiet as the grave, the filthy magazine stall, the owner always in a raincoat, even when the sun shone, so that his punters should feel at ease); or I’d just mope about, dreaming of chopping my way into that exceptional fate that was ticking away, louder and louder now — tick, tock, plick, plock — waiting to explode under me and blow me out of the trivial common into magnificent exceptionalness, pre-eminence, immunity from all things footling.

Some journalists were saying I should be given a trial for the national junior side, never mind Lancashire. Things were moving. By now Ogimura must have been feeling my breath on his neck. I imagined him in a little paper house at the foot of a triangular mountain, troubled in the arms of his geisha, scrutinizing my photograph in the Manchester Evening News. The geisha too was agitated by my photograph. Her kimono fluttered, parted, showing her suspenders. The rain fell on the little blue willow-pattern bridge outside the little paper house. Plick, plock. And pattered on the glass roof of the municipal toilet. I dived out to wrestle with the tarpaulin. But not before I had heard a sword coming out of its scabbard with a scraping sound like a razor scratching at a throat, and seen a stain the colour of dark plum slowly spreading up the paper walls of the little blue house.

There were worse ways of spending a wet Saturday.

Then one Thursday night my father came home looking very white. We all wondered what the matter was. He’d been looking this colour just before he fell into the fireplace with tacks in his mouth.

‘Mike Sieff,’ he said. ‘That’s what the matter is.’

He ate his supper in silence. Cheese blintzes with cauliflower cheese. Followed by macaroni cheese. Followed by cheese and biscuits.

‘I sacked him,’ he said, pushing his plate away, then, changing his mind, ‘Any more cheese?’ he asked.

What had happened was this. He had suspected Mike Sieff of tealeafing for some time. He had no actual proof. He hadn’t seen Mike Sieff take anything. ‘But you know how you just feel it?’ That was how he just felt it. However, you can’t go up to someone and say I feel you’ve been tealeafing from me. And he wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. The Sieffs were from the same bend in the Bug as the Walzers. Besides, the boy was a shtarker, with triangular shoulders and a straight golden neck like a bull’s. My father was built like a brick shithouse, but even a man who was built like two brick shithouses would have thought twice about tangling with Mike Sieff. But the feeling was nagging and nagging at him. He knew Sieff was up to something. And then, late this afternoon, as they were packing up, he distinctly saw a five-pound note go from the hand of a punter into the hand of Mike Sieff and not go from there into my father’s apron. That was it. No more feeling — he’d seen it.