Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Poor Sabine Weinberger, in that case? I’ve never decided. It’s just possible that Sabine Weinberger had ulterior motives of her own, not the least of them being to kraink me. And what had I done to her? Nothing. That was her complaint. Nothing. Having observed me weeping over my grandmother, Sabine Weinberger had fallen the tiniest bit in love with me. But all I wanted to talk to her about was ping-pong rubber.

And certainly all I wanted to do now I’d got into the Kardomah was experience it through my skin, not look at her. Was I disappointed? Nothing ever lives up to its reputation, especially when that reputation has brewed and festered inside the shell of a clammy introvert — surely I was a bit disappointed? No, no I wasn’t. I couldn’t do much with it there and then but I reserved it. Not as in reserved judgement but as in reserved seats. I wanted it for later. There would be a time for such a place. Kardomah and Kardomah and Kardomah.

There would be and there would have been. For by the time a clammy introvert is ready there is no more Kardomah.

We took Sabine Weinberger to the pictures, talking of reserved seats; straight from the hot cinammon breath of the Kardomah into the conditioned Coca Cola chill of the Gaumont, where Mario Lanza was starring in Serenade. We paid for half her ticket each, Sheeny and I; by way of showing even-handed gratitude for which she sat in the middle, holding both ours, which should have been exciting for me as no female person not a mother or a grandmother or an aunty had ever held my hand before, but the music made me think of Twink and Aishky and most of the time I wished Sabine Weinberger had been either or both of them.

Once or twice, when Lanza was off the screen, I took the opportunity to wonder if she and Sheeny were up to more than hand holding. No woman has so much individual control over her limbs that she can be innocent with one hand while being guilty with the other. Sometimes her fingers would unlace from mine and she would grind an excruciated little fist into my thigh, or she would squeeze my knee, rhythmically, in time to some music that wasn’t Lanza’s, or she would slide a couple of nails inside my shirt and describe an agonizingly trembly circle round my navel, all of which I liked but all of which I realized were probably no more than inadvertent mirror-image reverberations of what she was doing to Sheeny.

Then guess where we took her after that.

No, not Miles Platting.

To Benny the Pole’s place on Wilmslow Road!

The Benny the Pole?

There was only one.

Sheeny had the key. Sheeny had had the key for as long as Benny had been down. ‘But I don’t abuse it,’ he told us. ‘Benny said I could live here, but this place is like a shrine to me.’

Just as Benny the Pole was the first person in Manchester to wear suede and snakeskin shoes, so he was the first person in Manchester to own a luxury flat.

You hear the word luxury and you think of soft textures. Deep-pile carpets. Armchairs that go oof plock. Bubble baths. ‘Luxury!’ I remember my father pronouncing as he punched the kishkies out of the little round Rexene pouffes he used to flog for flompence from the back of his van. ‘Sheer luxury!’ My mother’s concept, of course. Sheer luxury for my father meant more of something. It didn’t much matter what, just more. A cheese sandwich with extra cheese. A lager and lime with extra lime. A liver and onion fry-up with more liver and more onions. My mother was the one forever yearning for softness.

Luxury for Benny the Pole had more in common with my father’s meaning. There was a lot of everything here. A Mancunian lot. A very lot. The placed looked like a swag warehouse. Only of a higher quality than the swag we sold. We didn’t sell writing desks with tooled green leather inlays, for example. Or antique wooden globes of the world. Or brass sextants. Or padded bars. We sold cheap birthday cards for fathers which showed such articles as these in just this profusion, but not the articles themselves. None of our punters in Oswestry or Wrexham would have shelled out for a brass sextant.

And nothing in Benny the Pole’s luxury pad passed the oof-plock test either. Everything squeaked. Eech plock, eech plock. The parquet floor squeaked. The leather settee squeaked. The soda syphon squeaked. The toilet seat squeaked. The water in the taps squeaked. Even the sheets squeaked.

We got to feel the sheets?

Oh yes, we got to feel the sheets.

I married Sabine Weinberger some years later, I might as well come clean on that score here and now. I married her because I was lonely at Cambridge and she was the only woman I knew at the time who was prepared to keep me company. We are not married any longer. We were not married for long. And we were never married happily. Not ecstatically happily. (Name me one ecstatically happy Jewish marriage that began at the KD?) But she is the mother of my children. For what that’s worth. Channa and Baruch — though those were not the names we gave them.

Was that the only reason I married her? Because I was lonely? Probably not. Maybe I also married her to finish some business we’d started that night in Benny the Pole’s squeaky luxury flat on Wilmslow Road.

She lay with us in turn, separately. She was not prepared to have it any other way. No sandwich after all. And she lay with me first. Lay. In the lie down rather than the get laid sense. She kept all her clothes on, slipped under the eech-plock sheets, wished me long life and jerked my in-between. End of story. Or should have been end of story.

I fell asleep immediately. It had been a big day for me. No gaff. Kardomah. Benny the Pole’s pad. And now this: my in-between pummelled by someone not myself. A very big day. The last day of childhood. Would I ever blush again? I doubted it. What was there to blush about? I no longer nursed a terrible secret. My in-between had finally been handled. Not all that well, but handled. I was now like every other man. Goodbye shame! Goodnight the colour red! Oof plock, oof plock — I’d been milked of all reason for embarrassment at last.

A good sleep, then on with the business of passing my in-between along to the next one. The giant had stirred and the great chain of masculinity had begun to rattle …

Two days later I was knocking up with Sheeny at the Hagganah when for no apparent reason he put his bat down, fell into a chair, and started spluttering.

‘What?’ I said.

He was holding his heart now, and shaking. ‘I’ve just remembered. Give me a minute, I’m platzing myself to death here.’

‘About what?’

‘Oy a broch! The bint. Whatsername? Weismuller …’

‘Weinberger.’

I’d started to go tight. I knew Sheeny had had his go after me. That had been part of the deal. First me, then Sheeny. I was cool about it. Sheeny too had his right not to go home unmilked. But what was funny about that?

‘I’m remembering,’ he said. ‘It’s coming back to me. I’m lying there with my shmeckle down her throat, taking my time, trying to think about something else, telling her about the time you zetzed the pig — “You should have seen the size of that fucking pig,” I’m telling her; “Oink, oink!” — when mitten derinnen she starts shaking her head and covering her ears. “Don’t say that word,” she says. I think that’s what she says. It’s hard to tell what a person’s saying when she’s got your shmeckle in her mouth. But I’m kind of picking up the vibrations. If I’d had a microphone strapped to my putz I’d have got everything she was saying. “What word? Fucking?” “Gobble, gobble. No — the other one!” “What other one?” “The other one.” “There wasn’t a fucking other one.” “Gobble, gobble. Yes, there was.” “What? Pig ?” “Don’t say it, don’t say it,” she shreis. So I start nobbling. I can’t help myself. She’s lying there with my shmeckle in her mouth, I’ve had two fingers up her cunt, she’s got a fucking glass eye, and she’s covering her ears because I’ve said the word pig. Is that funny or not?’