Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

It turned out he was lying. ‘I’m not even playing shots in my head,’ he confided to me. ‘This is the emmes — I can’t even imagine how to hit the ball any more.’

We tried one of us standing behind him during practice sessions, moving him about as though he were a marionette. Bit by bit we were able to thaw the stiffness out of him, bringing a smile to his face as we bent him forward, swivelled him on his hips, and steered his strong freckled Esau arm through its old satisfying arc. Plock. ‘There you are, Aishk, you hit it!’

After about an hour of this he would go loose like a scarecrow, as passive as a baby, happy to abandon his impaired will to ours. The moment we left him to his own devices, however, he seized up again, staring at the ball as though it were an object he’d never seen before and comprehending no possible relation between it and the pimply paddle that lay limp in his hand.

‘It’s my neshome,’ he said to me, at the end of a match from which he’d had to retire after watching five serves go past him without his moving a muscle. ‘It’s my soul. My soul is saying no to the ball.’

‘Maybe you should go to see a hypnotist,’ I suggested.

‘Or a rabbi,’ Selwyn Marks said.

Aishky laughed. ‘Maybe I should just see a bird with big bristles.’

He kept trying, though. He kept turning up on match nights, changing into plimsolls and re-adjusting his braces, on the assumption that everything was going to be all right. So when it got to nine o’clock and he still hadn’t shown up for a home tie against Prestwich Maccabi — a grudge match if ever there was one — we began to fear for him. I didn’t want to ring his home. When you rang home you got mothers and when you got mothers you got trouble, especially if you began by asking, ‘You wouldn’t by any chance happen to know where …?’ And I didn’t want to do what the mother would then have done, which was ring the police, the fire brigade, the burial board and every hospital in Manchester. In the end it was a hospital that rung us. Not knowing that you waited for a point to be concluded before you barged into the ping-pong room, Mrs Showman from the front office fell into Louis Marks who was defending twenty feet back from the table, skidded on the highly polished wooden floor, and almost broke her own neck in her urgency to tell us that Aishky was in the Northern Hospital undergoing emergency surgery on his playing hand.

The funny thing was that Aishky had decided not to play against Maccabi even before he had his accident, and it was that decision which caused the accident, not the other way round. He had gone into a phone box on the way home from work to ring me to say he wouldn’t be playing. He could tell already that he was not going to be able to raise his bat to the ball that night and he didn’t want the Maccabi boys laughing at him. Anderers, it didn’t matter. Unserers, well that was different. Verstehes? The only trouble was, the phone didn’t work. He struggled with it for a few minutes, looking for different combinations of change and trying to get the operator. All to no avail. The machine swallowed his change and the operator hung up on him. Then his nerves went. He couldn’t find the door out. He searched all four sides of the phone box, even the one with the phone attached to it, for a handle, for something to pull, he tried yanking at the window frames, but everything was stuck fast. He thought it might be a good idea to knock on the glass to get attention, but few people were passing and those that were thought he was a meshuggener — who else stood inside a phone box tapping on the windows? Phone boxes you tapped on from the outside. He decided to calm himself by sitting on the floor for a while but then grew afraid that he would fall asleep down there and freeze to death. He had one more go at finding the door, felt his heart make an attempt to get out through his throat, and smashed his hand through a pane of glass. Fortunately, someone saw that the meshuggener with his hand hanging out of the phone box was bleeding profusely, and called an ambulance. When they lifted him from the box, Aishky noted with interest that the door opened outwards.

A couple of days after he was released from hospital, I went to see him in his parents’ council flat off Smedley Lane. He was the only one of unserer I knew who lived in a council flat. That he was ashamed of where he lived I guessed because he had never once invited either Twink or me back, and he was most particular, on this occasion, that I should come in the late afternoon when it was dark. Not after six, because then his mother and father would be home, and he clearly didn’t want me to see them either. Say five.

When I got there all the lights were out. But behind the fresh medicinal smells I could pick out damp wallpaper and unaired linen.

Emotions, too, leave an odour. Love you can sometimes smell; hate you always can. What I could smell in the Mistofskys’ council flat was that Aishky was morbidly devoted to his parents.

He too had a record collection. But they were all 78s and all Mario Lanza. He got me to put ‘M’Appari’ on the turntable and we sang along with it together. I knew his musical taste wasn’t as good as Twink’s, and there was no comparison between them when it came to operatic knowledge, but Aishky liked to sing duets with his records, and Twink never did that. Come to think of it, I’m not sure I could have held on to my composure had Twink departed from his customary silent vigil before his record player and suddenly invited me to join him in a singalong. Whereas with Aishky there was somehow never any embarrassment.

All things considered he was remarkably cheerful. He held his bandaged paw out. ‘They reckon I won’t be able to do much with this,’ he said. ‘No table tennis, that’s for sure.’

I couldn’t bear it. First Twink, now Aishky. ‘Maybe they’re wrong,’ I said. My voice was all chocolatey with upset. I felt false too, a kid consoling a man. But I soldiered on. ‘Doctors are often wrong,’ I said. ‘And anyway they don’t know your determination.’

He was in far better spirits than I was. He beckoned me to sit on his bed. He wasn’t wearing his spectacles, which made him unrecognizable up close, but I could tell that he was amused by something. ‘It’s a metsia,’ he whispered, looking upwards. ‘A gift from Elohim. My hand was finished. You saw that. It was oisgeriben. So now I get a chance to learn with the other one — for gornisht — on the National Health.’

And that was what he did. He taught himself to play all over again.

In the meantime, without Twink and Aishky our ping-pong team was looking pretty oisgeriben itself. When you’re all playing well you can get away with going into a few matches a man short. But Selwyn and Louis Marks were abusing each other out of any form, Sheeny Waxman was turning up exhausted (oisgemartet, since we’re on ois words) as a consequence of his own late nights and the daily detours to transport cafés he was having to make as my father’s sidekick, and although I was impregnable, I couldn’t win for everybody. So when Gershom Finkel astonished us all by offering to play while Aishky changed hands we were in no position to refuse.

‘Only one thing,’ he said. ‘I play at number one.’

Number one was my spot this season. I couldn’t conceal my unhappiness. ‘Just humour him,’ Aishky said. ‘The man used to play for England. What’s it to you? Anyway, don’t I hear he’s going to be your uncle soon?’

As yet that was only a moderately offensive thing to say. Gershom had not so far double-dealt my aunties. Not openly. The only charges one could level against him at this stage were all to do with his demeanour — his general slothfulness, his habit of turning up at our house expecting to be fed, yawning when other people were talking, cheating at canasta and jeering at the idea of me as a table tennis player. Whenever he came round he would pick up one of the cups I’d just won, turn it upside down as though to discover the name of the shop from which I’d bought it, and give a little laugh.