Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Hob saichel,’ my father shouted after him, ‘mit der kinderlech.’

‘Hob saichel! You push my van into the fucking road and you tell me to hob saichel.’

‘No swearing. I don’t care what you do in front of your own family but I’ve told you, no swearing in front of my kid.’

They were both breathing heavily, both panting, and if you had turned up on the scene innocent of what was afoot you would have been hard pressed to decide which of them was chasing the other.

‘You want me to worry about your kid, now? I’ll tell you what I think of your kid, Joel Walzer — Ich hob your kid in toches!’

And that was when the police had to be called, otherwise my father would have torn him limb from limb. As I’ve said, we were biblical.

Spoil it for one, spoil it for all. The police closed London Road to casual traders, and for a number of years not even a barrow boy was allowed to do business there.

It wasn’t a serious blow to us. We could, as I’ve already said, return to one of our old Saturday gaffs. But it set the Copestakes back. It seemed to turn them off the markets too, because suddenly they materialized, cockroach-like, on Cheetham Hill Road as Copestake’s Cash ‘n’ Carry Bedding Emporium — Retail Service At Wholesale Prices. A move that was bound to infuriate Beenstock’s Cash ‘n’ Carry Bedding Emporium — Wholesale Prices With Retail Service, which was only half a block away on the other side of the road.

Ike Beenstock was the brother of Sam Beenstock, otherwise known as Sam Sam the Bedding Man, for whom Sheeny had worked before coming to us. I mention that only because it always seemed to me possible, though I never made enquiries, that it was through Sheeny that Ike Beenstock made the acquaintance of Benny the Pole. But it’s also the case, I admit, that anyone who knew anyone who frequented the Kardomah was in a direct chain of hearsay that led ineluctably to Benny the Pole.

How any sort of glamour or intrigue was able to attach itself to the specific fact of Benny’s being a Pole, given how many Poles there were among us, is a mystery to me to this day. My mother’s mother, as I have already explained, not only came from Poland but made a little Poland around her wherever she went, but we never thought that that lent her fascination or allure. Nor did we once consider referring to her as Granny the Pole. In Benny’s case, though, Polishness was all at once transformed into a sinister and shadowy quality, suggestive not of smoked sausages or peasants who stank of their own animals, but brotherhoods and contraband and seduction. Benny the Pole could fix things. Benny the Pole could find things. Benny the Pole could lose things. But above all, Benny the Pole could pull.

Because not everyone dared venture into the Kardomah — and even those who had successfully negotiated Laps’ sometimes lacked the nerve to make the transition — Benny the Pole put on a free public pulling demonstration on the footpath outside the Kardomah on Market Street every Saturday lunch-time in good weather. Even in the week, provided it wasn’t windy, this was a seething pitch. Need a new watch, cheap? A diamond ring? Tickets to see Manchester City? Tyres for your Jag? Radio for your Jag? The Jag itself? The footpath outside the Market Street Kardomah was the place to go. The talk was good too, if you were of the right age. Burial boards, heart disease, cures for arthritis, facials, tailors, football, horses, cars (especially the rights and wrongs of owning a Mercedes), poker schools, holidays in Rimini, and birds. The facials helped but in the end it was only the birds that kept you young. Tsatskes. Every boy must have his tsatske. Which was why Benny the Pole enjoyed such celebrity. He possessed the secret of eternal youth. And on Saturdays, from about twelve, you could watch him work.

What did he have going for him? Not looks. He was a knobby rather than an aquiline Pole — that’s if he was a Pole at all — with scarred, over-sunbrowned skin and tuberous eyes which lacked even the saving Polish grace of expressing sadness. He didn’t have much in the way of physical presence either, being more on the tall side of short than the short side of tall; though it was hard to gauge the amount of meat there was on his bones because of the way he wore his coat, loose over his shoulders like a cloak, with the sleeves empty but menacingly mobile, giving him the impression of being a man with four arms. His toupee was among the worst I’d ever seen, both for fit and for colouring; yet because of the success with which it was associated every Kardomah frequenter over fifty wore one just like it. (Hence their reluctance to gather on the footpath on windy days.) Discussing him once with a woman who’d yielded to his spiel — by which I don’t mean to imply that there were any women in Manchester who hadn’t yielded to his spiel, only that they didn’t all discuss him — I learned that he had beautiful violin-like feet, small, curvilinear, harmonious, with an almost feminine instep. He was without doubt conscious of this natural advantage, for he was known to spend a small fortune on pedicures and was always sensationally shod. I cannot say that I vouched with my own eyes for the truth of the rumour that he never wore the same pair of shoes twice; I saw him on too few occasions for my observations to be worth anything on that score. But the three or four pairs of shoes I did see him wear I never forgot. Only on Benny the Pole had I ever seen gold heels. Only on Benny the Pole had I ever seen sneakers made from the cheek pouches of the Komodo dragon. So maybe his secret was in his feet, in the lightness with which he approached his victims.

He was the first man in Manchester to jingle. Before Benny the Pole no man resident in the north of England would ever have thought of wearing a chain around his wrist let alone around his neck. Unlike most fashions, which start among the young and slowly catch on with the more conservative generations, the wearing of gold chains in Manchester took off first among the old. Our grandfathers dared before we did. They gathered outside the Kardomah with too much face on show somehow — barefaced, that’s the only word for them, as barefaced as camels — and like camels ready to be mounted, they snorted and showed their brown teeth and jingled. Jingle, jingle, croak: I can still hear the sound of them and see the dust rise as one by one they drew themselves up to their full height — full for them — held on to their toupees, stepped out into the path of a young woman and offered her a shtup. Still shtupping, or at least still offering, at seventy. And for all of that we had to thank Benny the Pole.

The offer of the shtup — the offer of it, not the request for it — was the distinguishing feature of Benny the Pole’s technique. I’m not at all sure that there was anything else. Of course there were bound to have been some crushing refusals in the early days. But by the time Benny the Pole was an accomplished fact, any young woman chancing her arm alone in Market Street would have known who it was that was accosting her, and must have felt a tremendous weight fall from her shoulders. For imagine the insult to your person in walking past the Kardomah at a lunch-time on a Saturday and not being offered a shtup by Benny the Pole.

That there would have been an admixture of fear in many women’s capitulations I didn’t doubt. Benny the Pole could easily have been concealing a sawn-off shotgun in one of those empty sleeves. And that it was a willing fear, an impious curiosity as to where else those dragon shoes trod, a self-demeaning half-readiness to trollop it for a season in whichever underworld the Pole was offering them privileged access to, I also didn’t doubt. I had a low regard for women based on their low regard for me. Not my aunties, of course, but then my aunties weren’t really women. Yes, my sex was responsible for Benny the Pole in the sense that he was made of the same puppy-dog tails as the rest of us. But the all-things-nice sex was still more responsible in the sense that they yielded to him. They could have said no to the shtup. There were other men offering. There were other men too shy to offer. But the women craved the compliment of the insult. In this way what Benny the Pole taught me influenced my misogynistic essays and so helped clear the obstacles between me and Cambridge. And yet — such are the ups and downs of men’s fortunes — when I started university Benny the Pole still wasn’t through his term at Strangeways.