Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Yes, she’d been as happy with sandpaper as anything else in the old dining-table days when I used to beat her blindfold with a bookmark.

So that was their life together. Dora standing motionless at the top of the house, looking inwards, smiling slyly, ruthless in her diffidence, a sandpaper ping-pong racket limp in her boneless wrist, while Gershom smashed balls past her on both wings.

And we’d thought Gershom hell was an infinity of bagel-less Sundays.

But about my grandmother, my mother had been right.

She’d been on shpilkes throughout Dolly’s courtship, at the mercy of a thousand alarms, afraid it would come to nothing, afraid it would come to something. Now she was ful mit tsores, heart-broken. Heart-broken for Dolly, that she’d lost Gershom. Heart-broken for Dora, that she’d won Gershom. Heart-broken for both Dolly and Dora, that there was a rupture between them. Heart-broken for us all that we were mortal and knew nothing of what the Almighty intended for us. Yet it wasn’t of a broken heart she died.

A lump, what else. In my family we all die of lumps or cheese. Cancer is unheard of. Say cancer and we become deaf suddenly. My grandmother’s lump was almost the size she was when they found it, and probably bigger than her when the end came. We watched her grow it like a Polish cucumber.

‘Mother, you’re killing yourself with worry,’ my mother kept telling her. ‘There is nothing you can do now. Dora will make out and Dolly will get over it. If you let her.’

‘Let her!’ my grandmother cried. ‘If I hadn’t let her in the first place none of this would have happened.’

Fay too tried. ‘Mother, you’re only making it worse for Dolly och un veh-ing all the time. Give her time to realize she’s better off without him.’

‘If she’s better off without him, what’s Dora?’

We weren’t good at comforting. None of us could find it in ourself to tell the He, ‘Better off with him.’

We tried taking her to the seaside, to Blackpool, Southport, Morecambe, St Anne’s, New Brighton; but she’d just sit on a bench in the rain in her babushka, staring out at the colourless sea, growing the cucumber inside her.

Among the many foods and other treats the children of Israel missed once they were released from Egypt was the cucumber. To this day it’s one of the ways a Jew registers homesickness: he misses cucumber. Lost and weary, my grandmother grew her own inside her body.

‘Which way is Sowalki?’ she asked me once. ‘I’m tsemisht.’

We were on the promenade in Southport, looking at nothing.

‘The other way,’ I said.

‘The other way,’ she repeated. She shook her head. What understanding did any of us have of anything? ‘Abi gesunt!’ As long as I was healthy.

When she was down to five stone we put her in a bed in our living room. My mother and Fay took turns to sleep beside her.

Occasionally Dolly would come over to do the same, but when she wasn’t gloomy she was so precariously exultant and brilliant, like a twelve-branched chandelier about to come crashing down from the ceiling, that we feared my grandmother would never survive a night of her nursing.

My mother and Fay supported each other well. Only once do I remember either of them collapsing in the company of the other. And that was when Fay put into words what they’d both known for some time — that my grandmother would never again sleep in her own house.

We could no longer postpone the hour, hateful though it was to everyone, when my grandfather would have to come and look at her. He was whipped now, in the way of all drunken domestic tyrants past their prime — whipped, whopped, a thing of no account whatsoever. He’d put a suit on, tie, waistcoat, in deference to he clearly didn’t know what — a formal family visit of some kind? — and seemed to be surprised it was only his wife he was visiting, and that she was lying on a bed in our living room, and that there was only half as much of her to see as there’d been the last time he saw her.

He stood over the bed with his fists clenched in his trouser pockets, not a trace left now of the old sleepily voluptuous Polski princeling, or the bully who used to scare away my mother’s friends.

‘E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma!’ as Callas used to give us goosebumps, exulting on Twink’s turntable.

‘Sit on the bed, Dad,’ Fay said.

He did as he was told. And waited for his next instruction.

‘Hold her hand,’ Fay said.

My grandmother flickered her eyes at this, and half opened them, which seemed to frighten him. “Ello, love,’ he said. ‘’Ow are you?’

Just that.

’Ello, love, ’ow are you? Want a pint?

Shocking.

But why was I shocked? Because that was all he had to say to a woman he’d been married to for almost fifty years? Or because the vocabulary of his feelings, his diction, his demeanour, were that of a man who might as well have been born and brought up in Droylesden? Let’s say both, since the culture of alcohol was to blame in either case. But years later, when the pain of his inadequacy as a husband, father, grandfather, has long past, I still shudder over how he traded his birthright, his ancestry, his foreignness, his freedom from proletarian definition, for a lifetime of drinking northern English beer in a northern English public house.

If the alternative was to be ale the colour of the sea at Southport, blowing your wages at the races and tolerating no atheists, better we’d have stayed on the east bank of the Bug or the Vistula, pogroms or no pogroms.

Snobbery? Only if you think I’m talking class. But I’m not talking class, I’m talking self-respect and metaphysics — what you owe your soul. Your neshome, as we used to call it in the days when we talked metaphysics.

Everything was now happening for the last time. My grandmother would never sleep in her own home again. My grandfather would never see her alive again. And I would never again go with glue and scissors into my scented coffret of concupiscence.

Did I feel bad about how I’d disfigured my grandmother for sport, now that death was on the point of disfiguring her in earnest? Yes, but not as bad as I’d feared I’d feel. I’d cared about her, hadn’t I? When I was little I’d loved her to distraction. Later I’d entwined her in my most powerful emotions. Entramelled her in jealousy, equivocation, the paradoxes of reserve and shamelessness. It wasn’t my fault that the emotions of a boy my age had to be so ugly. Blame nature.

I heard her die. It was about four in the morning. November, when everything dreadful happens in the north of England. I went from deep sleeping to wide waking in a single movement, disturbed not by noise but by the cessation of it. Suddenly the house was quiet. A sound I hadn’t realized I’d been listening to for months, the sound of my grandmother tending her tumour, was gone.

She didn’t lie for long in the house, but I didn’t once have the courage to look at her. Nor could I bear to do more than squint through one eye at the coffin, which was barely bigger than the box I’d kept her in. I stayed in my room. My mother and Fay were no better. My father handled everything. Death was where my father’s side came into its own. My mother’s side could die competently enough — couldn’t wait to die, some of us — but we needed my father’s side to take care of everything that happened afterwards.

My aunties were all together again for the moment when the coffin was loaded into the hearse.

‘Look how small it is,’ I heard my mother cry. I didn’t recognize her voice. She seemed to be wailing through water. ‘It’s too small, it’s too small for her.’ Otherwise weeping deprived them of words. They held on to one another like the limbs of a sea monster in pain. But I had to be with the men. Into the cars with the men. Off to the cemetery with the men. While the great writhing Laocoön of watery women remained behind to wail in the deep. Religious practice. The women stay and howl. The men go off and do the business.