Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

I knew better than to play with my putz before a match.

But in the event, I did something worse.

I went looking for chairs. Not with the intention of carrying them out into the arena myself, I should make plain, but just so as I’d know where they were when the multitude turned restive.

* * *

‘Well?’

My grandmother, my mother and my aunty Fay were waiting for me when I got home.

I shrugged.

‘Never mind,’ they said. My seraglio of despairing counsel. How prompt they were with their siren consolations.

Too prompt, on this occasion.

‘I won,’ I said.

‘You won?’

‘I won.’

‘You won?’

‘I won. Big deal.’

‘Well it is a big deal.’ Now we could reverse roles. Now they could console me for discovering that victory was a trollop. Had my father been here, instead of broken down in the forecourt of a transport café outside Welshpool, he’d have given me a backhander for winning with so little grace. You pays your money …

I showed them my silver cup.

‘Oh, that’s beautiful,’ my mother said.

‘Swag,’ I said.

They passed it from one to the other, peering under and over their spectacles to see if there was an inscription. Not a good eye between the three of them.

‘I take it in to get my name engraved next week,’ I said.

They all said ‘ah!’ as though I’d told them something upsetting.

‘So how many people did you beat?’ Aunty Fay asked.

‘Seven.’

My grandmother shook her head. ‘Seven,’ she repeated. She seemed to see a challenge to the Almighty in it. ‘Seven,’ she said again, meaning no good could come of so big a number.

And she was right. No good had come of it.

I hadn’t won well, then? The crowds hadn’t cheered me to the rafters? The girls hadn’t scratched me with their nails?

Crowds? Girls?

Why did it matter to me that of the two hundred and eleven chairs arranged around the Jacques International Match Play Executive the better part of two hundred remained unoccupied?

Because it made me feel I was in possession of a skill no one valued.

I needed the confirmation of others, then, did I? I placed no philosophical value on the ping-pongness of ping-pong for itself?

Yes and no. Perhaps what had really gone wrong was that my opponent, Nils Hagtvet, was an oaf, and that my ascendancy over him — as a player, and I like to think as a moral being — reawoke section two of my old compound contradictory existential bashfulness, that’s to say my shame at existing so successfully. It was like being back on the kitchen table at home making mincemeat of one of my father’s associates, while Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde smoked in my hand and my cheeks burned with consciousness of my own effrontery.

Nils Hagtvet’s speciality was a freeze serve. Taking up a position as far to one corner of the table as was possible without disappearing from it altogether, he would touch the playing surface with the ball, hitch up his shorts, exaggerate the flatness of his palm, freeze into a crouch, and then in a sudden spasm would toss the ball high enough for him to pass his bat under it twice before imparting what appeared to be the most terrifying spin to it on the third attempt. That he would occasionally miss the ball altogether was not surprising given the complexity of the manoeuvre. Fine, so long as the percentages favoured him. But what you would never have guessed until you faced one of Nils Hagtvet’s serves was that there was no spin on it whatsoever. No spin, no speed, no angle, nothing. How long did it take for him to crouch, hitch, freeze, and spasm? Forty-five seconds? A minute? Humiliating for him, then, when you disdainfully smashed it past him before he’d even completed his convulsive follow-through.

In the first game he never won a single point on his service. And modesty forbids me telling how many I lost on mine. I couldn’t bear it. The contrast between us was too cruel. I kept reminding myself that he’d reached the final, that he’d beaten other players, that I had no reason therefore to be pitying him. But then I’d see him scampering after balls I’d hit at medium pace, falling over himself in a tangle of his own making, his arms in his way, his legs too long and queerly ineffectual in little white cotton schoolgirl’s socks that barely covered his ankles and kept vanishing inside his plimsolls, from which, after calling a let, he would periodically have to retrieve them. Never mind too cruel, it was too farcical. Didn’t it count against me, somehow, to be thrashing someone as inept as this? Wasn’t I inevitably implicated in the farce?

As we approached the conclusion of the first game sadness took hold of him. He began to turn away from the ball as it came towards him, as though wanting to distance himself from his shots, or in the hope that help might come to him from some other quarter. We changed ends, not looking at each other. But I heard his heart beating and I could smell self-disgust on him. It dawned on me that without trying I could win the next game to love. Worse than that even: I would have to try if I was not to win the next game to love.

Had I been all Walzer I surely would have moved in for the kill. But I wasn’t all Walzer. I was part Saffron, too. Part mollusc. Part whelk. Part milksop.

I pretended to be bamboozled suddenly by his serves, raising my hand in acknowledgement of his canny play. I faked bemusement and fatigue. I stopped hitting and began to push. If nothing else that would prolong the match. Spare us both our blushes. And give the thirteen spectators something to get excited about.

It doesn’t pay to tamper with your game. Before I knew it I had pushed a dozen balls into the net (balls I hadn’t meant to push into the net), Nils Hagtvet had sufficiently recovered his composure as to remember how to stay upright and to push back, the umpire was warning us for slow play, and I had lost the second game.

A shame for Selwyn Marks that he hadn’t hung around after his own demise; he would have been in his element now. Told you so, told you so — ‘Walzer, you’re disqualified.’ Same umpire, too. Though there was more even-handedness about tonight’s warning. Wake up or you’ll both be out. But Hagtvet might have seen his salvation in that. At least that way he wouldn’t be going down in the archives as a loser. Title Vacant was what the records would have read, not Winner: Oliver Walzer; Runner-up: Nils Hagtvet.

Except that having nicked the second game, Nils Hagtvet was now dreaming of making history himself. He took up extreme positions, miles back or miles wide, glared fixedly at me, hitched his shorts, and went into freeze posture — and that not just for his service but for mine as well. Ludicrous. All I had to do was serve short or into the opposite corner and he was a goner. Shaming. But he hung on. Actually thought he was in with a chance. Threw menacing glances at me, hurled himself from one side of the table to the other, charged and leapt until I too was having to scramble for every ball. Ludicrous. Shaming. Mortifying.

He implicated me in his folly to the end. At 20–8 in my favour — so I was cruising anyway — he crashed into the table and put his knee out. When they presented me with the cup he was still lying twisted on the floor, howling.

Years later he remained unshakable in his conviction that but for that smashed knee he would have walked all over me.

I could have done without running into Gershom Finkel on my way back to the changing rooms.

It was hot in the Sports Hall but he hadn’t removed his raincoat. He extended his hand. ‘You nearly blew that,’ he said, laughing.

‘Fuck off, Gershom,’ I thought. But what I said was, ‘Nice of you to come.’