Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

I hadn’t noticed him in the audience. That was how deeply Nils Hagtvet had embroiled me in unseemly contest.

‘We were passing,’ he said.

‘We?’

‘Dolly and Dora. We’re on the way to the Ritz, so we thought we’d pop in to see if you needed any encouragement. A good job we did.’

‘Are they here?’

Was that why I’d nearly blown it, because my aunties were in the vicinity?

‘They’re in the car outside. They couldn’t bear to watch. Why don’t you come out and tell them you’ve won?’

He was blowing, himself. Not exactly excited — he was too laconic ever to be excited — but staccato, spluttering, like a wet firework.

‘You tell them, Gershom,’ I said. ‘Say, “Oliver won”. I have to take a shower.’

‘Don’t you want to show them your trophy?’

‘I’ll show them later,’ I said.

‘Can I see, then?’

I gave him my cup. He felt its weight, turned it upside down, laughed and handed it back to me.

‘We’re off dancing,’ he said.

Only later did I realize how disturbed I’d been by the size of that ‘we’.

No, no good had come of my win. It left me feeling too much like my old self. I was Champion of Manchester — never mind the Junior and never mind the Closed — but nothing had changed. I still hadn’t found my way out.

It’s possible I was expecting too much too soon. Bit by bit hope crept up on me again. Next time there would be crowds. Next time I would play without being ashamed because I was good, and then being ashamed because I was bad. Show me a game to love in the future and I would seize it.

My voice began to deepen, that helped. I still couldn’t croak like Sheeny Waxman, but I was on the way. Attacked by a hail of missiles from the prefabs while ambling down Sheepfoot Lane in a dream of glory, I stood my ground and hurled back whatever I could find. A stone struck. The first gentile blood I’d ever drawn. Maddened by the sight of it I threw still more ferociously and struck again. Two of them — I’d winged two of them! I heard a moan, and then the throwing stopped. Game to love. A week later I won a tournament in Barnsley and a month after that I was North of England Champion. Called up for Lancashire, I won both my singles’ rubbers against Cheshire and against Derbyshire. I won in the doubles too, but I didn’t count that: doubles entailed collaboration and I wasn’t by nature a collaborator. Where I was going, a man had to go alone.

The pig episode confirmed my progress. It might not be going too far to say that the pig did even more than ping-pong to bring on that social audacity without which I would never have made it to the Kardomah.

I was working the Bank Holiday fair at Bakewell — home of the Tart — with my father and Sheeny. The summer agricultural fairs were marked with stars in every marketman’s diary; you could be lying on your deathbed but you still didn’t miss an agricultural fair; and if it happened to be a Bank Holiday agricultural fair, you conjured up the already dead to help you work it. Bakewell was the most fabled Bank Holiday agricultural fair of the lot. At Bakewell you took more money in a single morning than you could count in a week.

I loved the place. Half-timbered tea shops, the smell of warm pastry, a meandering stream, shepherds on the cobbled streets, animals in the pens. And crowds such as you’ve never seen. Sheeny loved it too. He rang his little dinner bell, clapped his hands, filled the skies with flying plunder, and pulled an edge that extended into the next county. It looked like Judgement Day on the banks of the Eternal River. ‘Over here and over there …!’ By noon there was hardly anything left in the van. That was all right. Things quietened down after lunch. You ran a better-toned pitch for an hour or so, shifting the classier and more expensive swag — the big shticks, as we called them, for size is everything with swag — and looked forward to being loaded and away by four. One of us could take a break at this time, too. I could sit by the stream and think about playing Ogimura for the geisha; Sheeny could walk around town and pull head jockey material; or my father could grab some shut-eye and a cheese sandwich in the van.

It was during this more sedate afternoon pitch — Sheeny and I working it together while my father was out cold — that the pig escaped. There was no mystery about how he made his getaway: Bank Holiday godforbids messing with the gates of the pens and poking the animals with sticks. But why he chose our edge to charge there was no saying. My theory was that Sheeny’s gravelly patter attracted him. Who knows, to a pig it may have sounded like love talk. ‘I’ll tell you what, darling …’ The music of the heart. Whatever the reason, the pig burst through the crowd, women screamed, Sheeny dropped the bevelled mirror he was holding — ‘Who’s that in there?’ he’d just been asking a punter. ‘You? Thank God, I thought it was me!’ — and I found myself closer to any animal not a dog than I had been in my life. Strange, how much time you have for stray thoughts in moments of emergency. ‘Jesus Christ, look at the size of that pig!’ I heard Sheeny exclaim, but I was more struck by the hairs on its snout. Spinster hairs, I thought. Like those that grew on Dolly’s upper lip and chin, defying all the hours she put in with her tweezers, S for spinster hairs, only Gershom Finkel didn’t seem to mind.

A sweet pinky smell, too, which also reminded me of my aunties. Calamine lotion — that was it. The calamine that used to be brought out whenever there was measles or chickenpox around, little wet dabs of calamine-drenched cotton wool which somehow always ended up in the sink or on the bathroom floor.

So had this pig had the measles lately?

He began to snuffle me. Sheeny called my father. ‘Joel, Joel, there’s a fucking pig out here eating your kid.’ But no noise on earth could wake my father once he was out, and Sheeny did nothing otherwise to help me. Nor did the punters. They were gone.

What I did next affected Sheeny Waxman so deeply that for years afterwards he couldn’t introduce me to anyone without referring to it. ‘This is the ice-cream I told you about, the one who forehand-chopped the pig.’

What else was I going to do? Punch it? I’d never punched anything. I did the only thing I knew how to do and played ping-pong on its snout. In Aishky’s language, I shmeissed it. In the calmer language of the handbooks, I imparted spin.

Would the pig have gone mad eventually and savaged me, had his owner not turned up when he did? I’m not the one to ask. For a short while I’d confused him, that’s all I know. For half a minute or so he had no answer to my game.

This was the turning point of my relations with Sheeny Waxman. When it was all over he lit a cigarette, sat on the side of the van examining his cuffs, and muttered repeatedly, as though the danger were still present, ‘Oy a broch! Oy a broch!’ He was worried about his collar, too, which had suddenly turned itchy on him; and his tie, which he continued to brush all the way back to Manchester — because you don’t go where Sheeny went with pig bristles sticking to your nishmas kol chai.

‘I wish I’d seen it!’ my father kept repeating. ‘I wish I’d been awake to see it! But don’t say anything about it to your mother.’

Later, though, whenever our eyes met, over tea and toast in one of the market cafés, or in the middle of a match at the Akiva, or late on a Saturday night at Laps’, Sheeny would jerk his head back, tick with merriment and say, ‘Oink! oink!’ And I would smile too, and say ‘Oink! oink!’ back.

Thanks to the pig I could already smell Kardomah coffee.

Also thanks to the pig I began to enjoy the gaffs more. Sheeny’s doing. He was prepared to welcome me, now, into that secret confederacy of grafters from which my father had so far protected me. Not the lewd stuff. The old man still stood guard over that. I remember Sheeny introducing a new routine into his spiel one morning in Retford, holding aloft a violently trembling middle finger and begging a buxom woman at the front of the edge to help him stop it shaking. ‘What do you want me to do, duckie?’ the woman laughed. ‘Sit on it,’ Sheeny said. It was the nearest my father ever came to sacking him. ‘Now, I’ve told you before, Sheeny,’ he warned from the floor, one eye turned to me, ‘that’s out!’ But the close, confidential script which marketmen deploy to communicate under the very noses of the punters, the quick contemptuous code by which you are able to identify nudzhes and shnorrers and nutters, warn against tealeafs, shtum up troublemakers, protect yourself against their cunning while keeping them in complete ignorance of yours — that whole iffy dug-in camaraderie of the gaff which I’d previously been deemed too much of a teapot lid to be trusted with was now thrown open to me.