Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘I’m frightened of what he’s going to do to him,’ my mother said. ‘You know your father. He forgets his own strength.’

It’s exciting for a boy to have a father who doesn’t know his own strength, or at least it is when that strength isn’t getting to know itself on him. But my sisters too were stimulated. Boy or girl, we all want a father who will put a bit of justice back into the world. We tried to imagine what he might be doing to Gershom now, twenty, thirty, forty minutes after he’d requested a word. ‘That’s a hell of a long time for a word,’ I said.

‘Not if the word’s “Die, you bastard”,’ my sisters said.

‘That’s three words.’

‘Well, you know how Dad always exaggerates.’

‘I don’t think he’ll kill him,’ I said. ‘I think he’s driving him to Miles Platting and is going to dump him there.’

‘Why Miles Platting?’

‘Because Miles Platting is a good place to dump people who won’t collaborate.’

‘Isn’t the problem that Gershom has been collaborating only too well?’

‘That’s enough of that,’ my mother said. ‘How long is it now?’

I looked at my watch. ‘An hour and ten minutes. Maybe he’s gone to get the bagels.’

‘Maybe he’s gone to make Gershom get the bagels,’ my sisters said.

We all agreed that was the start of the perfect punishment. But only if he was going to get Gershom to buy the bagels every week. And all the extras. None of which Gershom would ever be allowed to eat. He’d have to sit, Sunday after Sunday, tied to a chair with his mouth open, and watch while we wolfed the lot. In Gershom hell.

‘Naked,’ I said.

But my sisters drew the line at that.

Two hours later my father returned. Carrying the bagels. But otherwise alone. And wet.

‘Where have you been?’ my mother asked.

‘Get the plates out first,’ he said. ‘And get me a fork for the smetana and kez.’

Only when he’d mixed the cream with the cream, not too much of the one, with not too much of the other, did he tell us where he’d been.

‘The lake,’ he said. ‘Heaton Park Lake.’

‘Oh, Joel, you haven’t,’ my mother said.

He trowelled smetana and kez on to half a bagel, smoothing the surface, taking out all the lumps and bubbles, leaving us to imagine the worst for half a minute more. He was dangerously pleased with himself. I pictured Gershom’s sarcastic head bobbing on the water, in the scummy froth around the island, exactly where I’d found that first ping-pong ball which it wasn’t too fantastical — was it? — to blame for all this. No doubt my mother pictured something far less cheerful.

‘I took him for a little row, that’s all,’ my father said at last.

‘And?’

‘He said he didn’t need any money.’

‘You offered him money?’

‘Of course I offered him money. You’d have expected me to offer him money if he’d been a shaygets. I’m not saying I was going to give him any money. He’s ongishtopt with gelt. But at least once the offer’s made you both know what you’re dealing with. He said he didn’t want money; I said I didn’t want him near my house. He said Dora had her own house; I said I didn’t want him near that house either. He said he had plenty of houses of his own to take Dora to; I said he’d better take her to one of them quick smart. He said he’d come to his own decisions in his own time, thank you; I said I’d throw him into the soup and hold him under if he did to Dora what he’d done to Dolly. He said he saw what I was driving at; I said good.’

‘And?’

‘What and? There is no and. That’s it. The End. He’ll have Dora out of there by midnight. Who knows, maybe he’ll take your old man at the same time. Tomorrow Dolly can go home. The kids can go back to kipping in their own beds. I can go back to kipping in mine. And we can go back to living like a normal family again.’

‘Well that’s fine,’ my mother said. ‘A normal family. That’s just terrific. And what will Dora go back to living? All you’ve done is throw her into his arms.’

‘I thought she’s already in his arms. I thought that’s why you’ve got another sister lying upstairs trying to eat the mattress.’

My mother shook her head. ‘If Dora goes in these circumstances it’ll kill my mother,’ she said. ‘I wish you’d think before you act, I wish you wouldn’t just rush at things like a bull at a gate.’

‘I did this for you,’ my father said.

‘Well you’ve done me no favours,’ my mother said. ‘You’ve done no one any favours. Except Gershom Finkel.’

My father threw his hands in the air and looked long in my direction. It wasn’t hard to understand what he was telling me. ‘These are the thanks you get trying to help your wife’s family.’

It went straight into my Monday-morning school essay, ‘Against Women and Their Matrilineal Kinship Structures’.

My mother was wrong about my father doing Gershom Finkel a favour. Several years later, in the course of attempting to sort out a delicate matter of family business, I called on him in the Didsbury house to which he’d fled with Dora on pain of being drowned like a rat in Heaton Park Lake. Dora I hadn’t lost contact with entirely — funerals kept us in touch — but Gershom I’d seen nothing of. He hadn’t aged much. There was nothing to age. After we’d concluded our business I asked him if he played table tennis still. It was a cruel question. I knew he was out of the game. No one had seen him at a tournament. There was no word that he was playing for any club.

He shrugged. ‘The game isn’t worth a candle any more,’ he said. ‘The new rubbers have killed it. I wouldn’t go to the bottom of the street to watch a match. You?’

‘Yes, a bit,’ I said. I was captain of my varsity team. Which entitled me to a white blazer with light blue braiding which I wore as a dinner jacket at May Balls, or, with a cravat, to go punting in when the weather was chilly and the company worth impressing. Gershom would have learnt of this from Dora — all my aunties had photographs of me in my Blue blazer — and would have loved me to give him the opportunity to scoff at it. Table tennis at Cambridge? What do they play with — rugger balls? My reticence was designed to irk him.

‘Want a knock?’ he asked.

I laughed. ‘Where? The Akiva?’

‘Here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a table. Come. I’ll show you.’

He led me up three flights of stairs. The house was still subject to those sudden shoebox occlusions you get in old mansions which have been turned into flats. Boarded-up passages, doors where there shouldn’t have been any, ceiling decorations vanishing asymmetrically into hollow walls. It’s possible he’d never got rid of all his old lodgers. Certainly there was a stale sitting tenancy smell about the place, as though people had recently been cooking in stairwells and using the lavatory on landings.

I could tell from the wallpaper and carpets that the table tennis room had once been an attic studio flat. A serial murderer might have been comfortable here. But the table was new. A new net, too, strong enough to haul in herring. And good overhead lighting.

‘So who do you play with on this?’ I asked him.

He squinted at me. ‘Dora,’ he said.

‘Dora? Dora plays?’

‘Well, she can hold a bat,’ he said.

I remembered how Dora held a bat. Downwards, on a droop. As though her wrist was broken and the bat was dead.

‘Which is her bat?’ I asked.

There were a number of them lying around on the floor, none in very good condition, along with some cheap noncompetition balls.

‘Whichever one’s on the top of the pile,’ Gershom told me. ‘She’s as happy with sandpaper as anything else.’