Howard Jacobson: The Mighty Walzer

By the time such folderols as bats and nets came into the house I was already an accomplished player with every stroke in the game. And I still wouldn’t play with anything except my Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. My mother’s side, of course, presented no sort of test. I could have hit them off the dining table with a bookmark, never mind a book. My father’s side put up a stiffer resistance, but they too had no answer in the end to the amount of backspin I could impart with the leatherette, let alone to the speed and accuracy of my attacking shots. Neighbours were brought in to marvel at what I could do and to try their hand against me. I fancy that my father was even secretly putting money on me. ‘A tusheroon says the kid’ll pulverize you. And he won’t even be using a bat!’

If I’m right about that then he must have cleaned up nicely in the early days. Nobody who hadn’t seen me play could have been anything but certain of beating me, so little did I look like a person who knew how to win, so completely, on the surface at least, was I the child of my mother. Even at the table I was diffident and apologetic, blushing if I happened to lose a point, and blushing even more when I took it.

I blushed with such violence in these years that I must have been in danger of combusting. Heat, that’s what I remember most about being a boy — how like it was to being the kettle that spluttered and steamed all day on my grandmother’s fire. So long as I was only practising on my own against the wall I was able to exercise a measure of control over my temperature — about eighty degrees Fahrenheit in the immediate vicinity of the ball, never more than that. But as soon as I played against another person the ovens came on. It wasn’t fear of losing — I knew I couldn’t lose. It was the exposure. Call it compound contradictory existential bashfulness. 1) — I was ashamed of existing, and 2) — I was ashamed of existing so successfully. Five, six unbeatable backhands on the run and my hand would be on fire with consciousness of its temerity; a couple more and there’d be smoke pouring out of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. At the end of a pasting I’d handed out to Lol Kersh, an older kid with a purple birthmark and a stamp collection from across the street, his father, who had come to watch, demanded a closer look at my unconventional bat. He’d smelt the fumes. ‘I’ve rumbled you, you little mamzer,’ he said. ‘You’ve baked that book like a conker. Show me, show me. I bet it’s as hard as a brick.’ But when he inspected it he found that it was soft — very hot and very wet, but soft. As, in the face of his false accusation, was I.

Shy — even the word is shaming. And I was beginning to shame everyone around me.

One night I overheard my uncle Motty ask my father — it’s still not easy for me to reproduce his words, however long ago he spoke them — ‘When’s that genius kid of yours going to come out of his shell?’

What was I in his eyes — a snail, a tortoise, a whelk?

We were at a wedding. Not a real fresh virginal wedding, but a silver or a ruby wedding. I can’t remember whose. I probably never knew. I kept my head down at family get-togethers. Especially if it was my father’s side that was getting together. I wasn’t equipped to handle their ramping verve.

‘Well halloa dair, Amos,’ was how my grandfather greeted me.

I was never certain that he knew who I was. That’s the terrible contradiction at the heart of shyness. You think everybody’s looking and you fear no one is.

‘My name’s Oliver,’ I said.

He rolled his eyes, retracting the pupils and showing me the whites. Then he pinched my cheek. ‘Oliver,’ he said — as though coining a diminutive, as though my actual name for outside of the family, gentile use was Olive — ‘Oliver, help your Zadie to that chair.’

We were still on the street outside the Higher Broughton Assembly Rooms, waiting to clap in the happy couple. So a chair …?

‘What chair, Grandpa?’

He had me again. ‘Wotcher, Olive ler !’ And he was off, looking for more descendants to torment.

And then there was the dancing …

Considering the shape we were — for the Walzer women, too, were built like brick shithouses — you’d have thought we might have passed on dancing, left it to the Yakipaks who lived in the south of the city, the svelte Sephardim with their slithery Spanish and Portuguese hips. Fat chance. A band played us into the hall and no sooner was the soup served than my uncles were out of their seats, buttoning up their dinner jackets, as though that would somehow make them lighter, steering my aunties around the dance floor the way my father drove his bus, fast on the bends and heavy on the clutch. Thereafter it needed no more than a thimbleful of sweet red wine for us to be back at the convergence of the Bug and the Dniester, throwing glasses over our shoulders and leaping on to tables to dance the kasatske. Make no mistake, a kasatske may sound like a tsatske from Kazalinsk, but there was nothing footling or fatuous about the way we did it, down on the heels of our dancing pumps, our arms folded, our jackets tight across our backs, our short stout Kamenets Podolski shanks going like pistons.

When I say our …

In fact it was what we’d assimilated in Higher Broughton that I dreaded more than what we’d brought from Podolia. The polka and the mazurka had a certain sad elegance of yesteryear about them; the sight of a forebear slapping his thighs and shouting ‘Hoy!’ stirred ancient fertility associations — in these I could almost forget myself. But the hokey-cokey, and worse still, the conga — what were such trashy plebeian tortures invented for but my humiliation? Come on, Oliveler, join the line, join the line!

Join a line, me? Be seen in a line, me?

And who did I think was looking? Irrational, I acknowledge it. Why would anyone have been looking specifically at me? And who was there to look anyway, given that everyone was in the line? But what’s reason got to do with anything.

On the night in question I was standing in a corner at the back of the hall practising ping-pong shots with an imaginary ball and trying to be invisible when the conga suddenly snaked my way, a deadly centipede of Walzers shrieking ‘Ayayayay, conga!’ and kicking its legs out. I turned the colour of Kamenets beetroot and ran for it. At one exit my grandfather was saying ‘Well halloa dair, Amos,’ to a small bewildered square-shouldered brick shithouse of a girl in a frilly pink dress. Close by the other my father was down on one knee, impressing a cluster of cousins by lifting chairs one-handed. The combination of himself in a tight dinner suit and a crowd to watch him was always fatal for my father. Down he’d go and up would come the chair. Nothing remarkable about that? I haven’t finished. Once he’d limbered up lifting empty chairs, he’d start on chairs that had my aunties in them. Not the introspective weightless aunties on my mother’s side, either, but rollicking Walzer aunties with round knees and deep chests. Three inches… six inches… a foot off the floor! One-handed! Oy a broch, Joel, you’ll rupture yourself! ‘Do you want me to tell you something, Oliver? — Solomon didn’t have the kaych your father has.’ I knew who they meant. They meant that Samson didn’t have my father’s kaych. And I also knew what my father did for an encore. A chair with an aunty sitting on it, plus me sitting on the aunty.

I took the only path that was clear, to the men’s room, where I came upon my uncle Motty standing at a urinal, shaking his penis to get the last drop out of it, actually banging it the way you bang a near-empty ketchup bottle. My uncle Motty was the next Walzer brother down from my father. He was more placid than the others. A sofa to put his feet up on, a few quid in his pocket, the odd shtup — nothing serious, as long as it was with someone not his wife — and he was happy. When you looked at Motty’s big blond face you couldn’t understand why anyone found life difficult. Which made it difficult for me to look at him. He winked at me. ‘Jew in a restaurant,’ he said without preamble. ‘Says to waiter — “Hey, you got matzo balls?” Waiter says, “No, I always walk like this.”’ He waited for me to laugh. I couldn’t do it. I wanted to but I couldn’t find the mechanism. Not for a smile either. Where to look, that was the problem. If I looked away it would be rude. If I looked at him I’d be looking at his penis — also big and blond, and still refusing to yield up its last reserves, no matter how hard my uncle Motty shook it. I turned an even deeper red and ran for it again.