Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

What I couldn’t decide was what I thought of her legs. Ask me what I think today and I still wouldn’t be able to answer. All legs come up better in stilettos, that goes without saying; but a certain sadness attaches to lumpen, stubbly legs in high heels. On the other hand there is something fascinating about them too, by very virtue of the thing that makes you sad. Because in the end, isn’t uncouth more rousing than couth?

If you followed the trail of Sabine Weinberger’s stubble you were soon on a journey whose reason was a mystery to you, and those journeys are always the best.

But I am getting ahead of myself again. We were here for bats.

In those days shops in the centre of northern English towns closed at lunch-time on a Saturday. Given that you weren’t likely to make it to a city store on a Saturday morning before about eleven, by which time the sales staff were already getting agitated about knocking off, it’s hard to see why anyone bothered with Saturday opening at all. But northern life was organized around the same principle as desire for Sabine Weinberger. It was the absence of amenities that kept you coming for more.

Being a Saffron, I suffered greater sensitivities to staff impatience than Sheeny did. ‘I think they’re waiting for us to go,’ I said.

‘Are you waiting for us to go?’ Sheeny asked Sabine Weinberger.

‘I’m not,’ she said.

‘So what do you think?’ Sheeny said to me.

‘I still prefer a bat I can hear,’ I said.

‘Yeah, but think of it this way,’ Sheeny said, ‘if you can’t hear it then they can’t hear it. That’s gotta be worth five points a game.’

‘Not if they’re playing with a silent one too.’

‘Shmerel! — then it’s worth five points to them if you’re not.’ After which he turned to Sabine Weinberger and asked, ‘Am I right or am I right?’

She was nothing if not accommodating. ‘I think you’re both right,’ she said.

Is that what was meant by her having a reputation?

‘How can we both be right?’

‘By using sandwich. Some people come in here and they feel right playing with sponge immediately. I can see that you two don’t. You’re not natural sponge players. And the only answer to sponge is sandwich.’

‘You think I might be a natural sandwich man?’

‘I think you both are.’

‘What do you reckon, Oliver?’ Sheeny said. ‘You a sponge or a sandwich man?’

‘I need more time to decide,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure what sort of man I am.’

‘A sandwich just for me, then,’ Sheeny said. And while Sabine Weinberger was taking his money he asked, in an unusually croak-free voice for him, ‘So what will you be doing when you close?’

She shrugged and looked away, plucking lint from her far too prominent bust.

‘Then you’re coming to the KD with us,’ Sheeny told her.

The KD.

Not K for King and D for David, but K for Kar and D for Domah.

Kar Domah, the ancient Hebrew scholar and socialite who had urged resistance against the Romans and held out against them for thirteen years, bare-handed and in his tefillin, on an unfortified mountain top in Market Street.

The KD.

I’d be lying if I said I could remember the old Market Street KD with any exactitude, what shape the tables were, what colour the carpet was, whether a waiter or a waitress served us coffee, or a fabled beast that was half horse, half water serpent. I wouldn’t have been any clearer on the details at the time. I wasn’t really looking. Not with my eyes. You used other senses to experience the Market Street Kardomah. You took it in through your pores.

Of course Benny the Pole wasn’t working his pitch on the pavement outside the KD this Saturday afternoon. Benny the Pole was still repaying his debt to society in Strangeways. Other frog-voiced men past their prime were holding on to their toupees and giving their spiel, but none of them interested Sheeny and so none of them interested me. We went deep into the bowels of the KD, I remember that. As far in as you could go. And every time we approached a table the occupants looked up, looked us over, recognized us or didn’t, but knew everything there was to know about us — from the quality of the shampoo we used to how long it took us to wear down the heels of our shoes — before we’d passed. It was like being at a Walzer wedding. No, it was like being the bride and groom at a Walzer wedding, making your entrance only after everyone was seated, negotiating your way to high table while the Klutzberg Trio played ‘Chossen-kalleh mazeltov’ and all your uncles and aunties banged cutlery. So why, all of a sudden, didn’t I mind the exposure? Because this was the KD, that’s why. The Kingdom of Dreams.

One thing I hadn’t expected — how many of our women, Bug and Dniester Beckies, the stubble and sparkle gang, I was going to see. You came to the KD looking to form short-term, obligation-free relationships with cory, ladies of other faiths and cultures, that was how I had always understood it. The KD wasn’t a social club. Yes, it was a meat market, but a treife meat market. Now I saw what I saw it all made perfect sense. Our girls were here looking for the same. A non-kosher beanfeast. A pig-out. We kept ourselves clean for them, and they kept themselves clean for us, by doing whatever it was we had to do outside the nest. We played away and they played away. Fine. I can’t say it didn’t come as a shock to me to discover that our girls played at all. Other girls yes, but not our girls. I’d been brought up, by precept and example, to believe that virginity was an exclusively Jewish property. Why would a hymen have been called a hymen if it wasn’t Jewish? I had cousins called Hymen. We all did. Becky and Shoshanna Hymen. I could no more think of our girls without a hymen than I could their girls with one. But if I’d got that wrong I’d got that wrong. That’s what you went to the KD for — to learn. Fine. I wasn’t sure I liked it, but fine. We played away and they played away. It was practical. It was like wishing the bereaved long life. It acknowledged that life was for the living. That some matters had to be attended to. It accepted harsh realities.

Whether it actually worked, though, is another matter. What you aspired to was a condition of coruscating short-sightedness. When your own walked by you rose and embraced them, but you never thereafter noticed they were there. Even if they took the table next to yours you didn’t see them. Stars danced in your eyes, fireflies flickered on the rim of your Kardomah coffee cup, you glimmered brilliantly, but you were aware of nothing beyond the ring of fire which cut your table off from all the others. And when, despite yourself, you saw your sister making out with a shvartzer? Ah, then …

Whatever you allowed yourself to see or not see at the Kardomah, the rule that said you didn’t hit on your own was religiously observed. Name me one Jewish marriage that started life in the Market Street Kardomah. One happy Jewish marriage… So what did Sheeny think he was doing actually bringing Sabine Weinberger in with us? Deliberately flouting protocol, that’s what he was doing. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but I found out later that Sheeny’s exorbitant and exclusively gentile-centred head-jockeying had been attracting adverse comment from two or three of the KD Becky-ravers who really should have known better. Rules are rules. Zeta Cowan and Hilary Fishbein particularly had been giving him tsorres. Ironic, considering how far out of the nest those two were prepared to lean. Sabine Weinberger was his answer. Sabine Weinberger was there to kraink Zeta Cowan and Hilary Fishbein. I’m up for anderer and unserer, Sheeny was telling them. Look! Kuk this! The only thing I’m not up for is you.