Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘This is very, very nice of you,’ my father said. ‘I really appreciate it. But I don’t think it’s on.’

‘Why not? Have you got a better offer?’

‘I’ll be straight with you, Sheeny — I don’t have any offer. So I’m grateful to you. But I don’t see it.’

‘What don’t you see? It’ll be the same as before. I’ll sleep, you’ll graft.’

‘It can’t be the same, Sheeny. I’ve lost the gaffs, for a start.’

‘We’ll get new gaffs. We’ll get better gaffs. That was half the trouble. Your gaffs were no bottle, Joel.’

Tough words. No gaff worker wants to be told his gaffs were no botde. Not when you’ve put as much work into greasing up the Tobies as my father had. But he had to take it. That’s what going mechullah means. You have to accept the world’s retrospective judgement on you.

‘No gaffs are any bottle these days. The gaffs are over.’

‘We’ll find. We’ll find. You leave that to me. The gaffs are my deigeh.’

‘I don’t think I’ve got the stomach left for it, Sheeny.’

‘You’ve got a stomach left for eating, Joel.’

My father patted himself. ‘Well it won’t do any harm to eat a little less,’ he said.

‘Who’s talking less? If you’re not working soon you’ll be eating gornisht. Am I right? Say you’ll think about it, at least.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

‘No. Reem. Say you’ll seriously think about it.’

‘I’ll seriously think about it.’

‘Good. Don’t take too long, that’s all I ask. I’ll ring you later tonight.’

‘That’s a bit soon, Sheeny. Ring me tomorrow. But you know now what the answer’s going to be.’

‘I’ll ring you in the morning, Joel. Not too early. Sleep on it.’ And he went off, goaded to madness by his turtleneck, jerking and twitching like Houdini in a straitjacket that was finally too much for him.

My father, too, was exercising tact. He hadn’t said, ‘Sheeny, it takes money to start a business. I know how much I’ve been paying you. And I know how much you spend on cuff-links. Forgive me, but you’re dreaming.’

They had to get to that, in the end. ‘I know it’s none of my business,’ my father finally said, ‘but how are you …?’

‘That’s a fair question, Joel. I’ve got a backer. And if you’re worried, I’ll pay you three months’ greens in advance. How’s that?’

How else could it be?

And the backer? Well, as my father said, it was none of our business. But you can’t help being curious. And our curiosity stopped at the door of Sheeny’s father. Who else? Of course Sheeny was being mysterious. He didn’t want to say, ‘My dad. That’s who.’ Whereas a backer had the ring of high finance about it.

But he let the cat out of the bag to me, one night, having got himself uncharacteristically drunk. One thimbleful of sweet red Israeli wine from a squeaky padded bar had done it. Another way in which he was like my father. Shicker at the sight of a corkscrew. We were with keife in Benny the Pole’s pad. Our last night there for the time being. Because in the morning Benny would be out of cheder. Not free, just on highly conditional parole — which, wouldn’t you know, the meshuggener blew, but free enough to stand on the pavement outside the Kardomah again and waylay young women. I made some denigrating reference to criminals and society’s responsibility to lock ‘em all up for life, especially arsonists who fuck up to the extent of making millionaires out of their victims. ‘Well, let’s hope he ends up making millionaires out of us, Oliver,’ he said. I said that I didn’t see how Benny the Pole was ever likely to make anything out of me, and that was when Sheeny blurted out that he’d already made an employed man out of my father.

‘Benny the Pole?’

Benny the Pole.

‘You’re not saying …?’

He was saying.

‘The Benny the Pole?’

‘The geezer whose let you’ve been shtupping in for years, Oliver, yes. The Benny the Pole. The only fucking Benny the Pole.’

There were things about finance and the justice system I didn’t understand. For example that you could give somebody money when you were in cheder. For example that you were allowed to have money when you were in cheder. Didn’t they take it all away from you? Wasn’t that its point as a deterrent?

There was a differece, Sheeny explained, between a bankrupt and a lag. Benny the Pole had never gone bankrupt.

Cheder yes, mechullah no.

It felt like a value judgement. Against my father.

I couldn’t believe it. Hauled out of the shtuck, snatched from penury and starvation, pulled off the cross, by Benny the Pole. A spiv in a toupee. An arsonist. A croaker into the ears of young women. A croaker into the ears of young women, what is more, on behalf of other croakers. What did that make him? What did that make us?

I felt quite sick.

‘Just don’t ever tell my father,’ I said.

But Sheeny only threw me a long strange look.

* * *

Funny the way life works. Thanks to Benny the Pole there was smetana and kez on our table again. And thanks to Gershom Finkel there is bread on mine.

Only partly thanks to, in both instances, but still. And not that much smetana and kez, or bread, but again, still. You don’t look a gift-horse.

They do what they do, these ganovim. They do their best for you. It’s not Gershom’s fault if I don’t live to the standard I would like. And you can hardly blame Benny the Pole for the dejection that settled on my father once he went to work for Sheeny. You can’t be employed by someone who was once employed by you and be happy about it. You can’t fall from high to low and be expected to enjoy it. Unless you happen to be a glutton for punishment. Which my father wasn’t.

One in a family is enough.

I seemed to be forever shrinking into myself, while others around me were forever sliding away.

The Money Player: The Confessions of America’s Greatest

Table Tennis Champion and Hustler, Marty Reismann

WE NOW ENTER an embarrassing phase even by the standards of this history of embarrassments.

You’ve heard me make that claim before. But then I was preparing the ground for nothing more embarrassing than the years I spent locked away in the lavatory cutting up and otherwise defaming loved ones. Pish! What I am about to describe is embarrassment big time. Mortification Grandiflora. First Degree Humiliation with Aggravated Abasement.

We now enter Cambridge.

As a fall-back position for someone of my grandiosity, Cambridge had this and this alone going for it — you had to be there to know how bad it was.

Back home in the Kardomah no one knew from nothing. Cambridge? Gevalt! They stared when I walked in, broke the house rules in the excitement, looked me over with hymeneal eyes. Which in the end was all you could ask.

I remember Alex Libstein, the estate agent’s son, trying to put me down when I was back in Manchester one vacation being seen at Laps’, where they also knew from nothing. We were in the pickle meat queue together. ‘Isn’t Oxford supposed to better than Cambridge?’ he wondered in a loud voice.

‘Depends on the subject, Alex,’ I told him. ‘For economics, languages and law, maybe, but not for spying or any of the moral sciences.’

That’s grandiosity — dropping the phrase moral sciences in Laps’ on a Saturday night.

Grandiosity tinged with sadness though, because I knew even if they didn’t.

So was that what Oliver the Ripper was reading at Cambridge — Moral Sciences? Was that to be my antidote to tsatskying? Hobbes’s Leviathan? Yes and no. What you read at Cambridge, and certainly how you read it, has a lot to do with the college you wind up in. Left to its own devices, Golem College would have preferred its undergraduates not to read anything at all. Sanctuary — that was what Golem provided. A quiet out of the way place by the river for rugby backs and javelin throwers to while their best years away in, undisturbed by thought. As for me, yes, I’m sure of it — they wanted me for my ping-pong and wouldn’t have minded if I’d never written an essay the whole time I was there, so long as I led them to the top of the UCTTC ping-pong ladder at the end of the year and was instrumental, as a Golem man, in turning the tables on Oxford who to date had the wood on us when it came to table games. But every Cambridge college must present a semblance of academic activity. The college had a library; someone had to go in it once in a while and at least pretend to be interested in a book. So Golem wasn’t exactly going to stand in my way, academically. Fine, Walzer, become a farkrimter sour-puss under Yorath and Rubella, if you must have a fall-back position. Just don’t become fanatical. And don’t allow it to interfere with your ping-pong.