Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Mike, open your hand,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Mike, just open your hand.’

Mike opened his other hand.

‘Not that one, Mike.’

‘What is this, Joel?’

‘Mike, I saw you take a flim. Open up your hand.’

‘That’s a serious accusation, Joel.’

‘Just open it.’

‘If you’re going to accuse me of something,’ Mike said, ‘I’d like you to accuse me in front of a witness.’

‘Right!’ One of my father’s rights. Who would I rather have been at that moment — Mike Sieff with his deltoid shoulders, or my father set on his course? Hard to say. But it’s a formidable thing to be able to say ‘Right!’ — and to mean it.

My mother quaked for him. My mother’s side had never said ‘Right!’ and meant it in their lives. ‘Oh, Joel,’ she said. ‘You didn’t!’

‘Didn’t what?’

‘You didn’t accuse him in front of somebody.’

‘Dead right, I did.’

‘Right!’ he’d said, and leapt down from his van …

‘Oh, Joel,’ my mother said. ‘You didn’t.’

‘Didn’t what?’

‘Leap from the van.’

Dead right, he did. ‘And I don’t want you to move a muscle,’ he told Mike Sieff. ‘I want that hand kept where I can see it.’

Then he called out, ‘Katz!’

On Thursdays Katz the Kurtain King worked the next pitch to my father’s …

‘Oh, Joel, you didn’t?’

‘Didn’t what?’

‘You didn’t accuse him in front of Katz?’

‘Do you think I’m mad?’ Katz had the biggest mouth in Manchester. Tell Katz your troubles on a Monday and the whole town knew about them the weekend before. So avid was Katz to burble out what he knew, his words liquefied in his throat and came out as spray. That was the price you paid for listening to gossip from Katz — you risked blinding by aspersion. Accuse Mike Sieff in front of Katz? No, all my father wanted Katz to do was keep an eye on the stall while he frogmarched that snake in the grass Sieff to the Toby’s office. Not that Katz hadn’t earwigged plenty already.

Snakes, frogs, earwigs — when my father’s righteousness was engaged, you could hear the moral undergrowth tick louder than my ambition.

I had a question this time. ‘When you say you frogmarched him …’

Yep, he frogmarched him. Took him by his pumping arm (‘Oy a broch, you should have felt that arm!’) and led him past the packing-up grafters, past Linoleum Les staggering under the rolls of his floor-cloth as though he were a factory trying to make off with the chimney, past the bedding boys folding up their sheets like housemaids, past the crockery twins from Leeds — Abe and Izzy, impossible to tell apart and always the last to finish pitching because they wanted to sell out and have an empty van to bundle skirt into — past the Span man silent in his mac, past the fruit and veg and flowers, through the café and into the Toby’s den.

‘Right, now you can open that hand,’ my father said.

And Mike Sieff did …

And …?

Empty.

‘Oh, Joel, it wasn’t!’

It was. My father’s eyes told us it was. Empty. Untenanted. Void. And not just any old void. In Manchester just as you can have a very lot you can have a very void.

So what did he do then?

‘I thought I’d seen him bend down just before I collared him. So I told him to take his shoes off.’

‘You didn’t!’

He did.

And?

Very empty.

And then?

And then his socks.

‘You didn’t!’

He did. Empty ditto. Very, very empty. And then his pockets. Empty ditto. And then his shirt. And then his vest. And then his trousers …

‘Mr Walzer, are you sure about this?’ the Toby had said. (‘First rule of the gaffs, always look after the Toby.’)

Sure he was sure. Now the trousers please.

We were all gathered round by now, the Shrinking Violets and my grandmother as well, all staring at Mike Sieff stripped down to his underpants, wondering where my father would have the courage to search for the missing fiver next.

He smiled strangely.

It was the Violets, this time, who said, in one voice, ‘Joel, you didn’t!’

My sisters had their knuckles in their mouths. I could barely breathe. My mother was on the point of fainting. We didn’t know much about the law in our family, in either of our families, but we guessed that a man accused of theft and made to prove his innocence by baring everything stood to gain a very lot in any civil court. This was leaving aside any payment he might choose to exact with his bare fists.

We waited.

We were ruined, were we, was that why our provider and protector had come home whiter than a dead man? We were finished?

Well?

‘Any more of that cheese?’ my father asked.

‘Joel, don’t do this to me,’ my mother said.

He nibbled on a corner of crumbling Caerphilly, taking his time. ‘I think all the ladies should leave the room,’ he said at last.

‘Joel!’

He was only teasing. Well? Well, he’d begun to panic, he didn’t mind admitting that. He was running out of options. Correction — he’d run out of options. But he’d seen what he’d seen, and if you can’t believe the evidence of your own eyes what can you believe? The pants came off.

We averted our eyes, as much from one another as from the accused.

Funny, my sisters thought, concentrating to a degree that was unusual for them, funny that Mike Sieff should have agreed to this. He didn’t have to, did he? My father couldn’t make him. The Toby couldn’t make him. The Toby wasn’t police, when all was said and done. My father lowered his head. ‘The lobbess was enjoying it,’ he said. Enjoying my father’s discomfiture, that is. What he didn’t say, but what I know as a fellow sportsman must have been the case, was that Mike Sieff was enjoying parading his own nakedness too, rubbing my father’s nose in it, so to speak. I would have done the same to Ogimura, given half the chance. Cop this, slant-eyes!

And did the five-pound note in question float down between his golden legs when the wrestler dropped his drawers? Of course it didn’t.

‘Satisfied, Joel?’ he said. He stood, in my father’s words, with everything apart. As though to say, feast your eyes all you like and then tell me: 1) where you think I’m concealing your miserable flim now and 2) what someone as magnificent as I am would want with anything of yours anyway. Which, again in my father’s words, was his big mistake. Because my father did feast his eyes on him, took him in from the tops of his fingers to the tips of his toes. Well built, he’d give him that. Not handsome, his eyes were too frog-like, his head was too small for his body (like a snake’s, like the snake in the grass he was) for him to be handsome, and we Walzers liked a big head. But below the neck, sure, well put together. And not the usual colour for someone whose grandparents were born on the Bug but who wasn’t a shaygets. Big yellow feet. Big yellow hands. Big yellow fingers. Wrestler’s fingers. Wrestler’s thumbs even. One of which had been bent back in the ring — a submission hold, he’d told my father — and was protected with a thick roll of bandage. Funny that you needed a bandage on a bent thumb. And funny how long, now he came to think of it, Mike Sieff had been wearing it. Three weeks, was it? Four weeks? Five? Relief leapt like a flame in my father’s heart. He had seen what he’d seen. ‘Mike,’ he said, ‘I’d like you to take off that bandage.’

No! We didn’t dare believe that the story had a happy ending after all. No! Not the bandage!

Yes. Oh, yes, the bandage. And that, my friends, was it. Finito. From anguish to joy in a single bound. And vice versa for Mike Sieff. He started to whine. Covered himself — not such a shtarker all of a sudden! — and started to shiver. Pleaded poverty. Illness. Worry. Overwork. Absent-mindedness. Accident even — the fiver had somehow got in there of its own accord, crawled up his thumb in some way he couldn’t explain. Along with the three others my father found, rolled like cigarette papers and coiled inside the bandage like sleeping adders. ‘On my mother and father’s life, Joel, I’d have paid you back. I intended to. Honest to God.’