Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘Phil, we’re talking playing for England, here!’

‘It doesn’t bother me.’

Easy come, easy go. Everybody agreed Phil Radic had it in him to be the best senior player in the country. He had all the strokes, a lovely open stance, unusual and dare I say uncharacteristic fleetness of foot, and utter confidence in his own gifts. I loved watching him play. He was spring-loaded. He made ping-pong witty. His sudden accelerations of racket-head speed were like explosions of satire. You didn’t see the punch-line coming. And he used all the expanses of the table in a sardonic manner, economically, pithily, finding angles you’d never have guessed were there, leaving his opponent flat footed and looking stupid. People smiled when they lost to him, appreciatively, knowing they’d been done over. It was like having the piss taken out of you, but by a master, so you knew it wasn’t personal. You weren’t the joke, the game was. Maybe.

But what was most disconcerting about Phil Radic, from the point of view of someone who had cut his teeth on the Akiva, was how unfanatical he was. Twink ate and drank ping-pong. In the days when he had both his hands intact, Aishky lived and breathed the game. The Marks brothers talked nothing else. Before he took up swimming, Selwyn used to walk home from school practising his backhand flick. Whoosh, whoosh! Now he swam home, breasting the air and puffing his cheeks, but every now and then he would forget himself and mix a couple of push shots in with his dog paddles. And as for me, well I saw no future for myself except ping-pong. Even my erotic dreams had a ping-pong component. I would be rewarded for playing well. ‘So that’s your forehand, now show us your in-between,’ Jezebels would beseech me. My night-time anxieties too were all played out on the table. If the Jezebels didn’t claim me, the devil himself did, invisible, invincible, a disturbance of the darkness at the opposite end of the ping-pong table, returning every shot I played. Sometimes ten, twenty, thirty seconds would go by after I had hit the ball, time for it to disappear thousands of feet into the blackness, but always, in the end, it would come back. Always. I still dream this dream. It’s years since I picked up a ping-pong bat, but in the night I am still trying to get the ball past a faceless agitation of shadows at the far end of the table. And not once in however many thousands of nights of struggle, not once have I succeeded.

Will Phil Radic be dreaming this dream? Did he ever? Of course not. Easy come, easy go. He had other things to think about. As did Saul Yesner. As did Sid Mellick. They were men, not nutty kids. There were engaged in serious business. When darkness fell on their moral worlds they were out strangling enemies of the Jewish people with their bare hands.

As for what to do about the new racket, the men of the Hagganah applied a double standard. It was too late for them. ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ Phil Radic said. But they believed it behoved me and even Sheeny, as the next generation — the future of the Hagganah, noch — to re-equip. That there was arrogance in this I had no doubt. We don’t need the ping-pong equivalent of a three-piece suite — that was what they were really saying. We can go on winning fine just as we are. But you kids …

Well, some humiliations you just have to swallow. Others, of course, you can’t wait to gulp down. But I’m coming to those.

You don’t re-rubber lightly. Everyone has heard stories of snooker players whose careers have been halted or ruined because of a broken or mislaid cue. And with snooker we are only talking one stick of wood as against another stick of wood. Imagine if you also had to throw sponge and pimples into the equation. That’s how it was with ping-pong. Make a wrong decision as to grip and you could be undone for a season. Make a wrong decision as to surface and you could be finished for life. The best sports shops understood this and were patient with you while you went through their entire stock twice. Some of them took the imaginative step of installing a table so that you could have a long knock-up before you bought. Alec Watson and Mitchell, where Twink and Aishk had taken me to choose my first tracksuit, actually put up two tables on a Saturday morning. And Saturday just happened to be the day that Sabine Weinberger worked at Alec Watson and Mitchell’s to earn extra pocket money.

The Weinbergers lived on the same street as us, but on the opposite side and on the bend, so it wasn’t easy for either family to see into the other’s windows. This may have been one of the reasons we weren’t on especially friendly terms. That the Weinbergers were fugitives from Berlin rather than Kiev or Odessa was also significant. We from the Bug did not hit it off with them from the Spree. We didn’t like what we saw when we looked at our reflection in their eyes. We saw yokels. Peasants. Shnorrers. People who parked vans in the street. And there lay the prime cause of our strained relations. Mr Weinberger, who ran his jewellery business from his own garage and went everywhere with an eyepiece on his forehead, like a unicorn, was always the first person to sign any petition against my father’s vehicles. I can still see the musty Gothic script on the first line of the top sheet of the complainants’ submission, entangled and intricately woven like the handwriting of a spider. Ernst Weinberger — Jeweller. As though being a jeweller settled the matter as to where vans should and shouldn’t be parked.

‘She’s nice,’ my mother used to say. Meaning Mrs Weinberger. ‘She used to be a Vulvick.’

Being a Vulvick carried weight, because the Vulvicks were one of Manchester’s most distinguished rabbinical families. If you’d been a Vulvick it stood to reason that you were now fallen socially and spiritually: as a Vulvick there was only one trajectory you could take. Just how far Mrs Weinberger had fallen can be measured by the fact of her daughter’s having a Saturday job. No Vulvick who was still a Vulvick had one of those, unless you call being a rabbi a Saturday job.

There were also some questions to be asked about the way Sabine Weinberger deported herself. At fifteen she already had a reputation. ‘Eh, eh, here you go!’ we would nudge one another and say when she turned up late at Laps’ for a bag of chips. Speaking for myself, I had no clear idea what she had a reputation for doing, only that she had a reputation. ‘Her bust is too prominent for a girl her age,’ I remember my mother observing, and I more or less assumed that her reputation began and ended with that. I’d have taken more interest had I found her more to my liking. But she was too unserer for me, too spiked and tussocky, on the one hand too like Phil Radic to look at, and on the other too much of a Becky in her manner — Becky being the name we gave to girls who reminded us of our mothers or even of our mothers’ mothers. I’m not saying she had nothing going for her. If the stone-throwing prefab boys of Heaton Park had been mad for Sabine Weinberger I’d have understood it. It has its adherents, that midnight scaly Lilith look. There are men who love the thought that they might bruise themselves on a woman’s scratchy pelt. But you can only be mad for what’s different from yourself, and from where I stood Sabine Weinberger was too much the same.

Speaking of stone-throwing prefab boys reminds me that Sabine Weinberger also had a glass eye as a consequence of some gruesome playground accident when she was a little girl. That too may have contributed to her reputation. She looked at you strangely.

Just before my grandmother died Sabine Weinberger posted me an invitation to a party at her house.

‘You’ll be going to that,’ my father said.