Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

‘That’s the whole fucking trouble,’ he said. ‘The way you’re playing I can’t play my fucking game.’

How they swore, those Sri Lankans.

In Fenners too, with people watching. Dignitaries. For it’s not nothing, a Varsity match.

No wonder we lost.

I lost my singles as well. The old trouble. The sick fucks wanted to win too badly. And they’d seen spin before, too, the chazerim.

Oxford 10, Cambridge 0? Probably not. Da Silva must have won his singles. Oxford 8, Cambridge 2 sounds more like it.

After which I gave it away. This time there really was no more ping-pong, let the Master think what the Master liked. Disapprobation — that was where I sought superiority henceforth — in prim disapprovals and disavowals. I became a head-shaker. A nay-sayer. World champion in not having any.

But at least I’d earnt the right to buy a white blazer with light-blue braiding around it. A half-blue — that was all they gave you for ping-pong. For a full blue you had to roll in mud and put your face in another man’s arse. My usual complaint. It’s not sport for the shaygetsim unless there’s toches in it.

Still, a half-blue is better than no blue. And it cut ice in the Kardomah, that’s for sure.

A funny thing, though. Years later, coming out of Harry’s Bar, I ran into a person going into the Hotel Monaco and Grand Canal of whom I had no recollection whatsoever, but who was adamant he had played against me, for Oxford, on the night I had fallen out with da Silva. ‘A thrashing,’ he said.

I hadn’t remembered it as that bad. ‘’Fraid I’ve lost it in the mists of time,’ I said, ‘but didn’t I take you to a final game?’

‘Didn’t you take me ? Ha! I didn’t get ten points in either game. You destroyed me. The spin you put on!’

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘I never destroyed anyone that night. I lost every match I played.’

He shook his head. Bought me a Bellini on the strength of it. I’d been unplayable, he reckoned. Tougher even than that Pakistani chappie. Oxford’s worst defeat by Cambridge in a decade.

‘You’ve got the wrong year,’ I told him. ‘You’ve got the wrong person. I was on the team that went down to Oxford.’

But he insisted on his version of events. Maybe he was drunk. I agreed to giving him my address, at any rate, so he could send me the relevant cuttings. We drank another Bellini to that, watched the Canal plash and the scabby gondoliers toss lira for passing boys, and speaking for myself at least, forgot all about it. A couple of weeks later I heard from him. A nice note. On legal practice notepaper. Lovely to see me again, blah blah. After all these years, blah blah. Still spinning, he observed. Ho ho. Together with copies of the match reports from the Cambridge Evening News and the Oxford Mail Confirming his impression of the result in black and white. Cambridge 7, Oxford 3. Ex-Lancashire wiz Walzer and classy Colombo hitter da Silva too much for Oxford. Team of Walzer and da Silva a delight to cognoscenti of the game.

Explain that.

Can a person be so wedded to defeat that he remembers it even where it wasn’t?

And does that mean I can expect somebody to hail me outside Harry’s Bar one of these days and tell me that my life has been one long success story after all?

Sabine Weinberger came to live with me in my final undergraduate year in Cambridge after I’d met up with her again at a silver wedding. My family, her cake decorations. She had become a silversmith, a fashion jeweller and fabricator of table tsatskes much in demand in north Manchester. Like her father she wore a unicorn micrometer on her forehead which she lowered over her bad eye when she wasn’t working.

Relations had not been good between us following the night I’d forced my disrespect down her throat at her place. That indecorum belonged to another age, but the hurt was still palpable on the occasions I was back in town and we happened to run into each other. When she saw me at a party she’d hurl herself into the arms of the nearest man, gyrating lewdly if there was music playing, throwing her head back and laughing like a gypsy if there wasn’t. See what you’ve lost, that was what she was saying. Everybody wants, and everybody can have — except you! I opened a cupboard at a Christmas bash once, looking for my coat, and found her with her pants off in the company of two Italian waiters from the Mogambo. I’ve never seen anyone more pleased to be disturbed.

Just because you can see through a ploy doesn’t mean it isn’t working. If anything, the transparency made it the more transfixing. And I came to be excited by the idea that my very presence assured her unchastity. Yes, it was a sort of jealousy, but a greedily slow and curious jealousy, biding its time, wondering what lasciviousness next. Was there nothing I couldn’t make her do?

It suited her to be a silversmith. She found herself in her occupation. The micrometer alone was alluring. A marvellous deformity, like a single jewelled eye in the head of a minotaur. All the ornamentation she designed for her own use drew on some monstrous, mythical creature theme or another. I saw her encased from head to toe in a rippling tin foil sheath once, finned like a mermaid. She attached raking witches’ claws to her fingers, ten silver killer-thimbles, and buckled a spiked hell-cat collar around her neck. Long before they became a routine fashion item she was dragging manacles and shackles behind her. But it was Old Testament she did best. Great clanking Bathsheba bangles, gleaming Esther hair-combs, wives of Solomon necklaces coiled as dangerously as snakes, slithering towards her bosom. She clashed like cymbals. I loved that. When she saw me enter a room she fell ringing into the arms of other men.

Slut Jewess, I guess that was what she was doing. The Slut Jewess . The contents of my old box of family mutilations made flesh. She was plain, she was stubbly, she was local (as good as family, almost); but I didn’t have to cut her up to make her lewd. Lewd she could do herself. The Slut Jewess .

Funny how the second syllable of that word changes the first. Say Jew and you think of someone bent and bookish; say Jewess and the desert is suddenly alive with swarthy bangled whores writhing around a golden calf with their brazen tits perspiring.

A silver calf, in this instance.

It’s the ess that does it. It’s the ess that gives it the juice. Jewess .

Ess . Ess for Sarah. Ess for Sahara. Ess for So Who Needs a Shikse. Ess for Slut.

And lonely mid the mirthless and the silent of Golem College, bereft of all totty as I’d been, I finally had no defence against her clanking.

She had the smell of other men on her when I backed her into a cupboard under the stairs at the Broughton Assembly Rooms, attacked her silver clustered pendants like a bell-ringer, and told her I had ears for no one else.

‘You don’t respect me,’ she laughed.

‘They don’t respect you,’ I said.

‘I don’t respect them.’

‘And that’s why you fuck them?’

‘Who said I fuck them?’

‘I can hear you fucking them.’

‘And what does it sound like?’

‘Silver bells.’

‘And that’s why you want to fuck me?’

‘Who said I want to fuck you?’

‘So what do you want?’

‘Your disrespect.’

‘In that case you do want to fuck me.’

‘How so?’

‘Because that’s how I show my disrespect. I let them fuck me.’

‘You must disrespect a lot of men.’

‘I do.’

‘I know.’

‘And that’s why you want me?’

‘That’s why I want you.’

And a year later, reader, in a little uncivil ceremony on the lawn of Golem College, with our bemused families in attendance, I married her.