Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘So what’ll you do?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean what’ll I do?’

What did I mean? Now that you can’t use those wonderful strong red Esau forearms for anything, was what I meant, but how could I say that?

‘For sport,’ I said.

‘Sport? Who’s been doing sport?’

We both laughed. Of course ping-pong wasn’t sport. Football was sport. Cricket was sport. Ping-pong was — But we both knew, without saying, what ping-pong was.

‘Anyway, I’ve got some reading I want to do,’ he said. And then he asked me if I knew the The Scourge of the Swastika by Lord Russell of Liverpool.

So maybe he had been wandering down Cheetham Hill Road at three in the morning worrying about crimes against the Jewish people.

Be that as it may, it was to be forty years before I saw him again, as well.

The final choice as to who among your club mates and friends would make an ideal partner for you will ultimately rest with your own judgment having due regard to your own particularities of style, methods of playing and weaknesses (which you yourself know better than anybody else).

Twenty-One Up, Richard Bergmann

WHY COULDN’T IT have been Gershom Finkel who saw smoke coming from Copestake’s warehouse and thought to verify his suspicions by opening the letter-box and putting his head inside?

Boom!

Much unnecessary suffering might we all have been spared.

But it was too late by then anyway. Both my aunties were already hooked.

Never look a gift-horse in the mouth — that was the worldly wisdom which we subsequently had to pick out of our teeth. Who else was ever going to court my aunty Dolly? For whom else had she ever put on lipstick, straightened the seams in her stockings and learnt dance steps? Gershom Finkel was a one-off, a once-only, a chance in a million. Sure he was freaky, but let’s face it, as my father put it, ‘It took one to love one.’ On top of that — and in the fifties these considerations still counted, whether or not the alternative was ES for eternal spinsterhood — he was one of us, a Bug and Dniester davener with a covenant from the Almighty in his pocket and a snipped-off in-between to prove it. Obscene but true: when the family beheld Dolly on the arm of Gershom — and when I say the family I mean both sides of the family — they made the calculation that while no in-between inside her might have been better than Gershom’s in-between inside her, Gershom’s in-between inside her was infinitely to be preferred to any pale and floppy-prepuced in-between inside her. On such delicate matters of preference does a kinship system based upon religion dwell.

But then as I knew better than anyone, this was the trouble with S for spinsters — by some insalubrious inverse law of non-desire, you couldn’t keep your minds out of their C for cunts.

I don’t think I was jealous of Gershom. I was growing up quickly, even if not quickly enough to satisfy myself, and was putting my aunties behind me. But it’s worth remarking, in the name of honesty, that while I rarely had recourse to my perfumed box of mutilated mishpokheh these days, on those occasions when I did, I excepted, I excused, my aunty Dolly. Sorry Dolly, you just don’t work for me any more. And that could only have been because I didn’t feel she was any longer mine to cut up, which I suppose is another way of saying that I was not prepared to share her, even severed, with Gershom.

Not that Gershom was himself possessive. Far from it. So casual was Gershom in his attentions to Dolly, in fact, that my parents frequently wondered if his real motive for dating her wasn’t simply access to our house, food, warmth, company, shelter. A theory which was lent credence, I have to say, by Gershom’s reluctance ever to visit Dolly in her own house.

‘I can understand that,’ my father said. ‘Your father’s there.’

‘Exactly,’ my mother said.

‘And it’s poky there.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And it’s dark there. Mind you, if I was courting Dolly …’

‘Joel!’

But he was generous, my father, in the matter of our house being the place where everything social happened for my mother’s side, where her mother could escape her husband, where the Violets could bunch together for a Book at Bedtime and a crossword and a bit of fussing over me, and now where the oldest of them could do her canoodling. He’d grown up in a big family himself. He knew how fifteen people could live fifteen separate lives in one room. In fact our living area was probably smaller than the one my mother’s side fled from every day — for we only had what was called a Sunshine Semi, which meant that the sun came in through the front window and went right out again through the back — but at least it was Heaton Park and not Lower Broughton, at least you could sniff the Pennines instead of Poland, and at least my maternal grandfather wasn’t there. Of course it didn’t cost my father much to be generous, since he was out of the house himself most of the time; but he could have had thoughts about wear and tear, which he didn’t, and he could have played up on Sundays when he was home and the house prickled with spinster embarrassments, but he didn’t do that either.

It was the way Gershom Finkel threw himself into Sundays at our place that convinced my father it was us he was after — our food, our company — rather than Dolly. Sunday was bagel day. Now that bagels belong to any-old-place, any-old-time international convenience cuisine, and figure (however uncomfortably) in the vocabulary of the pale and floppy-prepuced, along with chutzpah (with a baby ch for choo-choo train) and shmo (with the open O of the wonder-struck and the unworldly — O gosh! O no!), it may be hard for some people to understand why they once counted for so much. Well, they tasted better in those days, for a start: crisper, nuttier, crunchier, sweeter, saltier, browner, plumper, more burnished, more almondy, more flowery, more boiled, stickier, more elastic; chewier in the dough, sleeker to the touch, more differentiated as to top and bottom, more variegated as to middle and sides, more distinct as to inside and out. The trek to get them was more arduous than it would be now, as well. You had to choose whether you felt like Needhof’s bagels or Tobias’s bagels or Bookbinder’s bagels, then you had to measure that against whether you felt like Needhof’s chopped liver or Tobias’s chopped liver or Bookbinder’s chopped liver, then you had to divide how many they were likely to have left by the time it now was, and get going. They would still be warm when you walked back in with them, too, provided you hadn’t over-extended yourself with the extras. But then if you’d under-extended yourself with the extras no one would have been much pleased either. Chopped liver wasn’t the half of it. There was chopped herring — old-style chopped herring and new-style chopped herring. (The difference? Sugar, aroma, blind prejudice and who could say what subtle variation of uric content.) There was egg and onion — a yellow baby mash, new-laid and salmonella-free, which the aged and the toothless could suck up through a straw. There were cucumbers: in a tin, in a jar, loose; cucumbers plain, sweet and sour, just sweet, just sour, and new green. There were fish balls, and to give the fish balls taste there was horseradish (chrain, pronounced ch rain, an old world ch with a convulsion of the larynx), which we with our soft nursery palates thought was fiery simply because it was red. There were rollmops, not to be confused with Bismark herring. There was Bismark herring, not to be confused with rollmops. There were anchovies. There was smoked salmon. There were latkes. There was pickled meat with a dropped d — pickle meat, as though it was itself in the active business of pickling and might pickle you. And then — the Sunday morning ne plus ultra in our cow-mad house — there was smetana and kez — sour cream and cream cheese, this kind of cream and that kind of cream — which no one ever mixed with more dedication, more feeling for texture and consistency, more of an instinct for what looked alike but wasn’t, than my father did.