Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

They even tell jokes.

I knew what was going to happen. I’d watched from my bedroom window as other cortèges had left from our street. I knew that at a certain moment, just before the tailgate of the hearse was closed, the women broke rank, forgot the consolations they’d found in one another’s arms, and hurled themselves on the coffin. Husband, child, parent, it didn’t matter who was in there, the women clung on as though by force of will alone they could hold back time. Sometimes they had to be prised off, finger by finger; sometimes it seemed as though the only way to proceed with the obsequies would be to bury them with the coffin.

I stood on the front lawn, in a covey of matter-of-fact uncles, waiting for the wild screaming to start. At windows up and down the street, other boys also waited, knowing that one day what was happening to us would happen to them. My cheeks burned with self-consciousness. I couldn’t endure anyone seeing me bereaved. Not just crying — though of course I couldn’t endure that either — but actually bereaved. Afterwards it would be all right. Walzer has lost his grandma. No big shame in that. But at the time, in the very process of being bereaved — no, unendurable.

At the same time as my cheeks burned, my heart froze. All morning my insides had been changing places with one another. Nothing was fixed, nothing would stay still. Now I was frozen solid. I knew what was coming and I feared I would be unable to get through it. I didn’t believe I had the warm blood necessary to keep me upright. When it started, first Dolly, then Dora, then my mother, then Fay, each one’s grief fuelling the others’, I felt my stomach cramp, as though I’d been kicked. Whatever blood was not yet frozen in my veins, froze now. Were these the women who had brought me up with such restraint, these furies tearing at the coffin with their nails, making sounds so ghastly it was hard to believe they were human?

Who could I not bear it for most? The tumour that had once been my grandmother? My poor motherless mother? My rapaciously shy aunties, for whom no mortification could ever be keener than their own?

I saw the torn expression on my father’s face. Him? Could I not bear it most for him? For what he couldn’t bear on behalf of my mother? Or was it me, just me, I most couldn’t bear it for?

It was only when I became aware that my uncle Motty had his arm around my shoulder and was giving me his handkerchief and telling me a joke — ‘Jewish bloke goes into a restaurant’ — that I realized I’d gone down on my knees on the grass and was bawling like a baby, huge uncontrollable baby sobs, except that no baby ever had so much to sob about as I did.

No. 16: Don’t let anything upset you.

Golden Rules to Remember, Richard Bergmann

REMEMBER LORNA PEACHLEY, the ping-pong player with the soft Hampshire Ds whose all-moving body parts had given Twink and me so much innocent pleasure on our last afternoon practising drop shots together in the Burnley academy? Well, she re-emerges. Not for long, but to devastating effect. Devastating to me. There is a sense in which I am still devastated by Lorna Peachley, though I’m sure it would astonish her to hear me say that, if anything still astonishes her at her age. But that’s always the way with devastating forces, isn’t it? They pass through, careless of the trouble they cause, looking neither to the left nor to the right of them.

I’m not complaining. I invited her to do her worst. She would not even have known she had a worst in her had I not found it. So maybe it was me who was the devastating force.

But this is to run on ahead. Before we get to Lorna Peachley we have to make a detour through Sabine Weinberger. Which was the order in which I did them. And I’m not sure we can do Sabine Weinberger either without first addressing the issue uppermost in every ping-pong player’s mind at the time I first had dealings with her — to sponge or not to sponge. Every day a new spongiform fantasy was coming in from the ocean beds and rubber plantations of the east — a thicker, softer, more silent and more deadly foam; a more deviously flexuous pimple; sandwich, with the sponge outside and the pimples in; sandwich with the sponge inside and the pimples out; sandwich with the sponge inside and the pimples out but introverted. A pimple which you couldn’t see! — what devils they were out there in China and Japan.

My own inclination was to leave well enough alone, not because I was a purist — how could I be when I’d started off with a Collins Classic? — but because I liked the control conventional rubber gave me, I liked the sound — plock plock, plock plock: like the clatter of high heels on a wet pavement — I liked its associations with my old club and team-mates, and I liked the game as I played it; I liked chopping deep, arresting the ball on my forehand, telling it who was boss, and that you could only do with pimples. No one in their right mind chopped with sponge. With sponge there was no call to chop. If you needed to chop you were using the wrong rubber. And if you were using the wrong rubber you were in the wrong game.

There was the problem. Take a sponge bat in your hand and you felt you were playing with one of the Copestakes’ mattresses. Oof plock, oof plock. Bye-bye all associations with high heels. Wet cots, that was what you smelt now. And who wanted to be reminded of those days? But personal preference didn’t enter into it. Nor did aesthetics. Technology had taken over ping-pong and if you didn’t go along with the new materials you were left behind. Sure, Ogimura lost his title. But who did he lose it to? Tanaka, another Nip. And he won it back from him the next year, anyway. If you were going to have any hope of sneaking their panting little bell-voiced geishas from them there was only one course to take — you had to get yourself re-rubbered.

Had I still been playing for the Akiva I might have hesitated longer before embracing the silent oriental game. Oof plock, oof plock. In the lower divisions you could still make an impression with vellum. But now that I had gone over to the Hagganah with Sheeny I couldn’t count on coasting. Every match was hard these days. Harder to win and harder in the sense of less sociable and easeful. There were no more nobbels in the fog. There was no more tcheppehing sotto voce so that the shaygets opposition wouldn’t understand. No more moodying. No more boxes of broken balls. No more spitting on the floor. No more fun. We were one of the toughest club teams in the country and we didn’t get that way by punching our fists through phone box windows or humming ‘E lucevan le stelle’ at deuce in the final game.

I was with the men now. Phil Radic. Saul Yesner. Sid Mellick. Handsome devils, all of them. Dark, strong, hairy, grizzled like veterans of the Israeli independence wars. If someone had told me that the one thing Phil Radic, Saul Yesner and Sid Mellick had in common apart from playing for the Hagganah ping-pong team was that they’d all killed a man with their bare hands, I’d have believed it. Not any old man — they weren’t criminals — but some enemy of the Jewish people.

Don’t get me wrong: there was no Selwyn Marks paranoia among the men of the Hagganah. They weren’t on the look-out for persecution. Who, after all, would ever have had the balls to persecute Sid Mellick, who could out arm-wrestle anyone in Manchester blindfolded and with his wrong arm? Or Saul Yesner, whose stomach muscles were so well developed that he used to invite all comers to take their turn at using him like a punching bag? But there was a fierce Bug and Dniester patriotism about them. When Phil Radic was selected to represent England he refused on the grounds that he would have to play on a Shabbes. ‘What’s with you?’ his friends asked. ‘You don’t keep Shabbes. You’ve never kept Shabbes. You work a Saturday gaff.’ ‘Not the point,’ he told them. ‘It’s the principle of the thing. If they want to pick Jewish players they have to respect how Jews live. Let them play on a Sunday.’