Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘No you haven,’t’ I said. ‘Please come in.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. He fell into my room. Sideways. ‘I’ll have dry.’

I looked at him.

‘… Sherry.’

Damn! Sherry! I had the teapot, I had the toasting fork, but where was the sherry? ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I only got in a couple of hours ago. I’ll nip out …’

‘No, no. Buttery’s closed. Anyway, look, why don’t you come to my room.’

He looked around to be certain it really was him who was talking.

‘I could make tea,’ I said.

Through a thicket of black wrist hairs he consulted his watch. Charily, as though he feared it might jump him. ‘Too late for tea for me,’ he said. ‘Do you have port?’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘Port ditto.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘As with sherry, so with port …’

‘Is that a northern expression?’

‘No. Just as I don’t have sherry, I don’t have port.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought it might be an expression. As with sherry, so with port. Like plus ça change.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la mêmo chose.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘As with sherry, so with port. Plus ça change

‘I see it,’ I said.

‘So have you got any?’

‘No,’ I said.

He looked relieved. Now he could gracefully leave. He’d only just entered but being here was a torment to him. And to me. ‘Then come to my room,’ he said. ‘I’ve got bottles of the stuff.’

‘By the way,’ I said as we clattered down a flight, ‘I’m Walzer.’

‘I’ ‘know,’ he said. ‘It’s on your door. I’m Rivers.’

‘Not St John,’ I laughed, giving him my hand.

‘I am actually, yes. My brother’s Rochester.’

‘Rochester Rivers?’

‘No. Edward Rochester. He’s my half-brother.’

‘The next thing you’ll be telling me,’ I said, ‘is that your mother’s locked away in an attic’

He shot me an intense look from his whiteless eyes. A black bolt. ‘How did you know that?’ he said.

I tried for a joke. It was either that or die. ‘As with sherry, so with port,’ I said.

‘Sorry?’

‘As with sherry — look, it doesn’t matter.’

I didn’t have a chance. I saw it at that moment, once and for all. Not a hope. I’d never hold out against them. Once a turtle, always a turtle. And I’d come to a turtle farm.

We were now in his room. He told me he’d come up only yesterday, yet already the room bore the stamp of the man. Dark. Confined. Over-charged. Ominous. Fucking deranged. How had he done it in a day? I looked at his shelves. Austens, Jane. Burneys, Fanny. Brontës, All Of Them. But also Dostoevskys, Fyodor. And Gogols, Nikolai. And Pushkins, Alexander. Not in translation, either.

‘You read Russian?’ he asked me. ‘You look as though you read Russian.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Though I come from there, partly, sort of, a long time ago. You?’

‘Do I come from there?’

‘Do you read it?’

‘Read it, speak it, breathe it,’ he said.

Then he directed my attention to the mantelpiece on which were a number of heavily ornate icon-like frames all containing photographs of the same woman. Plump and peevish and over-painted.

‘Yasmin,’ he said.

‘She’s very beautiful,’ I lied. No more attic jokes.

‘My wife,’ he said.

‘You’re married?’

‘Not yet.’

‘But you’re about to be?’

‘Soon. The moment she agrees.’

‘She hasn’t agreed yet?’

‘She hasn’t met me yet.’

His hands shook when he poured me port. Mine shook when I lit his cigarette. We affected each other badly. We set each other jumping, like a pair of back to back magnets.

‘Not that I’ve got much time to play with,’ he went on. ‘I’m not expecting to live all that long.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It has to be soon because I’ve been told I’m not going to live long. Look,’ he said, showing me his palm.

There were no lights on in his room, and only the smallest turret window, giving out on to a shaded service yard. So it wasn’t easy to see much. But even in the dark I could make out that he had no life line to speak of. To speak of ? Let’s not beat about the bush — he had none. As far as his palm was concerned he was already a dead man.

‘How do you mean you’ve been told you’re not going to live long?’ I said, which in the circumstances was as good as changing the subject.

‘Fifty years ago my grandfather met a Kazakh fortune-teller on a train from Uzbekistan to Tientsin. The fortune-teller tried to leap from the carriage when he saw my grandfather’s palm, but my grandfather insisted on knowing the worst. “If it’s to be, it’s to be,” he said. “On your own head and the heads of your progeny be it,” the fortune-teller replied, and proceeded to tell him that neither he, nor his youngest son, nor his youngest son’s youngest son, would survive past the age of forty. My grandfather died in his thirty-ninth year. My father died when he was twenty-eight. I am the youngest son of the youngest son.’

What do you say to that on your first day in Cambridge?

I wished Sheeny were here. ‘Oy a broch!’

Without him the best I could manage was, ‘I’m not sure how much trust I would want to repose in a fortune-teller I met on a train in that part of the world.’

Cambridge prim. And I hadn’t even had my first tutorial with Yorath or Rubella yet.

‘Aren’t you?’ St John Rivers said. He’d turned shirty on me. Suddenly he wasn’t two people. Shirty, he was entirely himself. ‘Aren’t you? It would be interesting to hear what my father and grandfather would have to say to that.’

Whereupon he walked out. Walked out of his own room and left me there in the gloom, to finish my port, gaze on Yasmin and sport his oak for him. When I next saw him he was at the Master’s sherry party, showing his palm around. He affected not to know me.

I would soon learn that by Cambridge and especially by Golem College standards there was nothing especially untoward in any of this — people were always walking out without a word. Tutors did it as a matter of course. One second you were rehearsing your weekly essay before the sternest of judges, the next you were reading to an empty room. Often you didn’t even see them go. Lecturers practised it too, turning on their heel mid-sentence, their gowns billowing, leaving three hundred of us with our pens in the air. All perfectly commonplace. Not rudeness, shyness. They weren’t up to saying, ‘Excuse me.’ As for affecting not to know you, that was a Golem College speciality. Iaoin Yorath would wonder who you were in the middle of a conversation. I have a dim memory of him dismissing me from his presence on at least two occasions on the grounds that I was an interloper and that he only supervised members of the college.

‘Dr Yorath, I am here in your room at your invitation,’ I can just about remember telling him.

‘The more fool me!’ was his reply.

I mention this by way of protecting St John Rivers’s good name. Yes, he was fucking deranged, but they all were. Taken all round he was probably less deranged than the rest of them. At least he wasn’t a fantasist. In the matter of his prognostications about his marriage to Yasmin, for example, he was proved dead right. He’d seen her photograph in a Leningrad paper originally and had tracked her down from that. He was writing to her every few days at the time I encountered him and she was replying with a weekly photo. Finally he went to collect her. Married her in the Christmas vacation with the blessing of her family, posed for a rigor mortis wedding photograph on a bridge on Nevsky Prospekt — the Venice of the East, my arse, St John! — then brought her back to Cambridge. This was in his third year as an undergraduate. Two months later she ran off with the captain of the Golem College croquet team. Not a word. Just wasn’t there any more. The ethos had got to her, too, you see. Didn’t even leave him a photograph.