Howard Jacobson: The Mighty Walzer

It was shortly after this encounter that I overheard him wondering how much longer I was going to cower in my shell. Unfortunately for me, the phrase struck a chord with my father. ‘Hello — are you in there?’ he’d ask, rapping me on the head as he passed me on the stairs — hardly a tactic to get a whelk or a tortoise to show its face, let alone to tickle out a shrinking invert like me. But my father wasn’t a man for gentle coaxing. Having a son in a shell seemed to infuriate him to such a degree that I knew it wouldn’t be long before he resorted to trying to beat me out of it. He was a beater, my father? Let’s just say he had been klopped by his own mother and that these were, as a matter of course, klopping times. In the nineteen-forties and fifties we were all klopped. And are now the better for it? What do you think?

In the meantime, my sisters too wanted to get in on the act. I’d crawl out of bed in the morning and find a plate of lettuce outside my bedroom door. I’d put my foot in a shoe and find it full of broken eggshells. One morning I woke to the sight of a terrapin making eyes at me on my pillow. A gift tag was tied to one of its forelegs. ‘Hi, I’m Tilly,’ it read. ‘Can I be your girlfriend?’

I was twelve now, and spending an increasing amount of time on my own. When I wasn’t knocking a ball against a wall with a book I was running to the toilet where I’d lock myself away for hours on end, also with a book.

‘How long’s he been in there this time?’ — my father, back from work, not even bothering to enquire where I was. He knew where I was.

‘Days!’ — my sisters, wanting to stir it.

‘What’s he doing in there?’

‘Reading’ — my mother, wanting to calm it.

‘Reading? Reading what?’

‘A book, Joel, what do you think?’

‘The time he spends in there he could have written a book.’

‘The time you spend away you could have written twenty books.’

‘It isn’t normal. You can’t tell me it’s good for you, sitting on top of your own chazzerei for that long.’

‘Normal? Let’s not talk about normal. Eat your tea.’

My mother understood the needs of a retiring nature. The way my father’s side could move their bowels and be back out in the world again in sixty seconds flat had always disgusted her. To her way of thinking there should at least have been a cooling-off period, a fifteen-or twenty-minute interregnum between a motion and the resumption of normal activities, much as the laws of sexual hygiene insisted on an interval of pollution separating menstruation and intercourse. The three hours I was taking may have been excessive, she allowed, but then I was a boy and boys had other matters to attend to in a toilet. No names, no details. I’d be over it soon. In the meantime, loz aleyn, leave the boy alone.

Easier said than done. I was in a shell and I was in the toilet. ‘He’s always hiding,’ my father said. ‘He’s always in something. The only time I see him is when he’s giving a ping-pong ball a zetz, and then he’s in a trance.’

Didn’t he like me playing ping-pong? Hadn’t I won money for him? Yes. But he wanted me out in the world more. Why wasn’t I playing in a club? Why wasn’t I playing for a team? Why didn’t I play with a bat now, like a normal kid? Why didn’t I have a girlfriend? Why was I sitting for hours over my own chazzerei? Why was I blushing all the time? Why did I show him up in front of his brothers? Why was I such a kuni-lemele?

Kuni-lemele. If tsatske was my most favourite word as a child, kuni-lemele was my least. In itself it didn’t denote anything much more offensive than oafishness. A kuni-lemele is a rustic simpleton. Not quite the village idiot, more the shtetl shlemiel. There can even be a bit of affection in the word. Not on my father’s lips, though. When my father called me a kuni-lemele he filled his mouth with a quivering kuni-lemele milksop substance, a curdled yellow jelly that shrank from the touch and trailed slime, like the underbelly of a slug.

That was what I heard, anyway.

It was in order to de-kuni-lemelize me, to get me out in the world, whether I shrank from it or not, that my father borrowed the coach one weekend for a family outing to Blackpool, where a boys’ weekly comic just happened to be sponsoring a giant nationwide ping-pong gala. My sisters were jumping up and down on the back seat of the bus, blowing kisses at male motorists on our tail. My mother was sitting with her mother in the seat behind my father, och un veh-ing together, and I was up beside him so that I could smell the diesel and see how the gears and the pedals worked and thereby get a taste for manly things. Mistake. Putting me up there just meant that when we pulled into a petrol station I was in harm’s way. In those days petrol stations weren’t self-service. Nor were those who filled you up merely anonymous pump attendants. Running a garage was a profession then; drive in for a couple of gallons and you were negotiating with men of substance — a retired naval officer who loved cars, a barrister lending a relative a helping hand over the long weekend. It was my misfortune to run into a wing commander. ‘Cheer up,’ he called to me, after switching off the pump and exchanging pleasantries with my father. ‘Cheer up — it may never happen.’

‘It already has,’ I said.

He had a red, raging, humourless face, the way they always do, the homicidal depressives who tell you to cheer up.

He looked bemused. ‘What has?’

This was a longer conversation than I had the courage for. But I was in now. ‘The thing you said may never happen …’

I waited for him to catch up. It’s possible I allowed my contempt for his slowness to show, even through my own intense embarrassment.

‘… it already has.’

‘Has what?’

‘Happened.’

That’s all I said. Happened. Not happened, you shmuck. Not happened, you fucking psychopath. Just it already has, and then happened.

I watched his mouth vanish. So far he had been addressing me from the driver’s side, now he came around the bus and climbed up on to the running-board. My window was open and his face was so close to mine I could count the hairs on his facetious aviator’s tash.

‘See this garage?’ he said. ‘See that workshop? See those fields behind it? See those fences? See those trees? See that grass? See those houses at the end of that lane? All mine. Every stick and stone. Every brick. Mine. I own the lot. All of it. So don’t you think you can be smart with me, son.’

Where is that mysterious far-away realm to which the diffident fly to find courage? Our secret; even from ourselves. ‘What about the birds?’ I was aghast at hearing myself saying. ‘Are they yours, too?’

That did it. All at once I was in a universe of total silence, not broken even by the tweeting of my impertinent birds. A raging silence vibrating fearfully to the throbbing of our hearts. All our hearts — mine, his, my father’s, my sisters’, my mother’s, my grandmother’s. Maybe one of us was going to have a heart attack. Maybe we all were. Then I realized there was a finger in my face. Actually in my face. And that it had a voice.

‘You little snot-nose,’ it said. ‘I could buy and sell you a hundred times over. You wouldn’t make a dent in my bank balance. I spend more on manure in a day than it’d cost me to buy you …’

Then, abruptly, silence again. The finger was gone and my adversary with it. Gone without another word to any of us. Disappeared inside their workshop the pair of them, no doubt, to calculate their value in spanners and jacks.

Now here’s a question: Why, if this incident so incensed my father — and take my word for it, it did, it did — why didn’t he land one on the wing commander who was responsible for it, instead of on me who wasn’t?