Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Even though he was given a few years of his own in Strangeways to think about it, Ike Beenstock never recovered from the surprise of learning that Benny the Pole had undertaken the actual arson himself. He talked to me about it once, during one of my university vacations, when I was hungry for Bug and Dniester conversation, and had turned up at his house to collect his daughter Sandra on a date. ‘I always imagined he’d be farming it out,’ he told me. ‘Don’t get me wrong; to this day I consider it a compliment to me and my family that he looked after us personally. But who’d have expected a gantse macher like him, with his connnections and his dress sense, to go kriching around on his hands and knees with a box of matches?’

Maybe he’d meant to farm it out. Maybe he’d had the very man for the job in mind on the day Sam Beenstock, acting on behalf of his brother, brushed past him on the footpath outside the Kardomah and slipped into his coat pocket the sealed envelope containing the bundle of used flims, the address of Copestake’s Bedding Emporium, and the instruction, written in letters cut out of the Jewish Telegraph:

I don’t

care

whether you bomb it or

burn it

or what you do, just

get

rid of it

Maybe the very man for the job had gone missing at the eleventh hour, or maybe Benny the Pole just wanted to do something for himself that didn’t end in a shtup. Whatever the circumstances, alone and without an accomplice Benny the Pole climbed over Copestake’s back wall, made free with a can of paraffin, lit the torch and famously lost the shoe by which he was ultimately and irrefutably identified. Who else in Manchester wore two-toned alligator suede slip-ons with built-up mother-of-pearl inlaid heels?

Alone and without an accomplice… So to whom did the two fingers, which were also found at the scene of the crime, belong?

That they weren’t Benny the Pole’s the police were quickly able to ascertain, by virtue of the fact that he still had five on each hand. Not that they’d ever seriously believed they’d come off the same person who’d lost the shoe anyway, since the shoe was found at the rear of the store and the fingers were found at the front and it was unlikely that anyone would have been nutty enough to run through the building once it was alight, either without his fingers or his shoe.

There was only one person the fingers pointed at. Aishky Mistofsky.

On the night Copestake’s palace of polyester and foam rubber went up like a volcano, Aishky had returned to the hospital which had looked after him so well the time he’d tried to punch his way out of the phone box. The problem on this occasion related to his other hand. He couldn’t feel it. He so couldn’t feel it that he feared he might have lost it altogether. He hadn’t the courage to look. To be on the safe side, he’d thrust the arm into the front of his shirt, where it pumped blood in time with his heart, then he’d walked to the hospital. He held his nerve admirably until he got to Emergency, where the sight of other people’s injuries and the question ‘What have you done to yourself this time?’ caused him to faint clean away. When he came to in the hospital bed he was sans another couple of fingers and the police were waiting to talk to him. At first they were going to charge him with arson. But once the shoe had led them to Benny the Pole they amended the charge to complicity. Aishky was watching the front of the building for Benny the Pole, that was their theory. Aishky was Benny’s look-out. Eventually they dropped that charge as well. Fantastical as was Aishky’s claim that he’d been innocently wandering along Cheetham Hill Road at three in the morning trying to get his mind in order, and that he’d only crossed the road to Copestake’s bedding warehouse because he’d thought he’d seen smoke, which was the reason he’d pushed open the letter-box in the showroom door — an act of wild impulsiveness that could have lost him a lot more of himself than two fingers, considering the amount of fire that leapt out through the letter-box — they believed him.

‘Why were you trying to get your mind in order?’ they asked him.

‘Because I was worrying. I’m a worrier.’

‘And what, on the night in question, were you specifically worrying about?’

Apparently Aishky didn’t even hesitate. ‘Crimes against the Jewish people,’ he said.

Would anyone really have attempted to look through the letter-box of a burning building? It was hard to swallow, but nothing otherwise linked Aishky to the crime. He had no record of wrong-doing. He was not known to the Copestakes. He was not known to be known to the Beenstocks. It was impossible to connect him with Benny the Pole, who for his part contemptuously brushed aside all knowledge of such a person and was especially brusque with the imputation that he, Benny the Pole, was unable to put paid to a shmattie warehouse full of foam chips and duck feathers without an accomplice.

In the end, the only person who thought Aishky Mistofsky could have been implicated in the destruction of Copestake’s Bedding Emporium was me. There was a connection which the police hadn’t made. Aishky and Benny the Pole via Sheeny Waxman. Sheeny was like a son, as we used to say in the days when being a son was the highest measure of human affection we could imagine — Sheeny was like a son to Benny the Pole. He had modelled himself on Benny and probably enjoyed as much of his confidence as anybody did. He was also harsh in his opinion of Aishky. Assuming Benny the Pole had said, ‘Sheeny, find me a shmulke who’ll watch the front of the store for gornisht and ask no questions,’ I could well imagine Aishky Mistofsky being the first name Sheeny came up with.

Does this say more about me than it says about Aishky Mistofsky or Sheeny Waxman? Was it me who harboured the low opinion of Aishky? I loved Aishky, I hope I have said nothing that could call that into doubt. I thought he was an entirely lovable man. But I loved my aunties, and my mother, and my grandmother too, and look what I did with them. What if the grandiose are in a trap of their own making and cannot respect where they have decided to love? Tsatskes — that’s how you see those to whom you give merely your heart. Playthings of the feelings. And how can you have respect for a tsatske?

All that aside, what did anyone’s opinions of Aishky have to do with what Aishky himself chose to do or not do? Was there any reason to believe he’d have gone along with such a deal even had it been put to him? None. And yet I still suspected him. I felt I owed it to him not to not suspect him, that’s the best I can say. One should never be certain of anyone.

That was the end of the Akiva as a fighting ping-pong force anyway. Aishky joked that he could learn to play pen-hand next, but none of us believed that was ever going to happen. Whether or not the fight had gone out of him, it had gone out of us.

I made an arrangement to go over and see him — after dark, but not so late that his parents would be home from work — in order to deliver the news that Sheeny had decided to play for the Hagganah, that I was thinking of doing likewise, that Selwyn had taken up swimming with the intention of ridding the sport of its rampant anti-Semitism, that Louis was going to Israel to get away from all the talk about Jews, and that nobody cared what happened to Gershom Finkel.

He was less upset than I feared he’d be. ‘All good things,’ he said.

Then, employing his ruined hands robotically, as though they were cake slices, he put Mario Lanza singing ‘I’ll Walk with God’ on the turntable and we sang along with it, hitting the high notes together.