Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

This isn’t a marriage story. Everybody knows what happens in a marriage and it happened in ours.

She was an act of recidivism on my part, but I have no regrets or complaints. She may not say the same about me, but I charge her with nothing. She kept her part of the bargain. She was as dirty as I wanted her to be, the Slut Jewess of Cambridge, the totty to end totty, and then when she thought that was enough she had the strength of mind to say so. ‘Now we’ll have children,’ were her exact words.

I cannot even claim that she jeopardized my career as a Collins Classics academic. Rubella liked her, believed he understood her, and even explained her to me sometimes. ‘She’s actually a very shy person,’ he dared to tell me once. What Yorath thought I have no idea. Yorath never talked to actual women. But Yorath Mrs became a friend of Sabine’s through kindergarten, and that was enough. The kinder spoke.

There were no money worries either. Sabine opened a jewellery studio in Kettle’s Yard where she made enough for me to go on with my research and father a hundred Walzers. And then did the same in Bristol when it was time for my researches to continue there. She was the perfect wife. She travelled well. She fitted in. She earned.

So what was the problem? The connection. In the end I couldn’t take the connection. Only connect . Well, I’d knocked him into the gutter on Day One. That should have been a warning. I couldn’t connect. I was ashamed of her. Not because of her glass eye. Not because she’d done slut. Not because she was now doing non-slut. And not even because she was a mother, although mother is a serious charge to lay against any woman. No, what I couldn’t hack was that she was unserer. What was I doing with one of ours, one of us? Now that the tarantella fever of the gypsy Jewess music had cooled, now that I no longer listened to her bejewelled thighs clanking faithlessly in the night, I couldn’t see the point of her as a companion for me. She was a backward step. The children were a backward step. We had two. She wanted a third. She’d worked it all out. There was time for a fourth. Maybe a fifth. How many backward steps could I take before I fell?

What is the meaning of life if it is not escape through ascent? Up out of the dirt, out of the filth, out of the shell, out of the suck and pull of the swag and the tsatskes, up and away into the clear uncluttered blue. Shaygets blue? No, I never wanted to be a shaygets. Just a tree, a good strong healthy Bug and Dniester tree, re-planted in a more clement soil, showing its branches above the others.

Otherwise I might as well have stayed in Manchester and gone on playing ping-pong.

So, goodnight Sabine Walzer née Weinberger.

And the children? Baruch and Channa as they were not as yet called?

Oh, yes, the children.

I affect a hardness of heart in relation to my children for reasons that are only partially clear to me. I don’t trust people who are pious about children. I’d go further: it’s my experience that people who are pious about children nurse a malevolence towards the rest of humanity that would make the devil reel. They only have to begin the sentence — ‘The last thing I want to see while I’m sitting watching television with my children …’ — and I know I’m in the presence of unadulterated evil. But that’s not it; that’s not the reason I affect a hardness of heart in relation to my own.

Somebody has said that you cannot love a child unless you once loved the child in yourself. What do I mean somebody has said it? Everybody has said it! Well, the child in myself was no great shakes. I couldn’t wait to see the back of him.

And I knew what remained of me well enough, now that I had seen the back of him, to be reasonably confident I wouldn’t terribly miss being a father. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t wait to see the back of them .

I walked them to school in Clifton on my farewell morning, the three of us enjoying the nip of cold in the air, kicking leaves, smelling the buildings. It was the eternal autumnal school morning. I could taste the leather strap of my old school satchel on my teeth.

But their satchels weren’t made of leather. Brightly coloured nylon, that was what they carried their books and pencil cases in, because schooldays were meant to be happier now.

I held each of them by the hand, to stop them skipping into the road. It was like being plugged into two separate sources of warmth. I am deriving pleasure today, I thought, doing for the last time a thing I have never enjoyed doing before. That’s how important pain is to pleasure.

They were too small still to understand what it meant when I knelt between them at the school gate and said, ‘Now Daddy is going away for quite a long time, but I’ll write to you and send you presents.’

What’s ‘quite a long time’ when you don’t add up to ten between you?

They weren’t distressed. They didn’t know to be distressed. As for me, I couldn’t hold my face together, but I wasn’t sure who I was the more distressed for, them or me. At the moment of taking permanent farewell of your children it’s difficult to make those sorts of distinctions: you are more them than you are yourself.

And then they were gone, swept up into the noise of the playground. The noise I never liked when I was in the midst of it; the noise I now love with a passion when I pass it on the other side of the railings.

I made it half-way home, my jaw disconnected from my face, my head going from one side to the other, struggling for air like a fading swimmer, until the waters crashed over me and I found myself, I didn’t know how much later, cowering in somebody’s front garden, hiding from the world just as I had when I’d lacked the courage to front up to my children’s mother’s party a thousand years before.

What’s the opposite to a presentiment? What do you call the sensation — infinitely less spectral than déjà vu , infinitely more behavioural and normalized — of having done a deed a hundred times before, although you never knew you had until now? That was how I felt about this morning’s leave-taking of my children. I knew the scene backwards. It was as if I’d been practising it all my life.

So, yes, goodnight to them too.

They were better off without me. The grandiose have no business fathering children. Especially the grandiose who like to lose big.

That’s no example to set a child.

There is no such thing as an ex ping-pong player. Years after your last game you go on wondering why you lost, or why you couldn’t have won more comfortably.

You are never free, no, not even in the grave. As your flesh rots around you in the blackness, you will still be trying to hit the ball past an opponent you cannot see. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand years of striving … and still, through the silent night, the ball coming back …

Ping-Pong Under the Roman Occupation , Kar Domah

( Reprinted in Ping-Pong: A Guide to the Perplexed , Oliver Walzer)

I LEFT THE country. Cleaner that way. Let them hear the twig break. Besides, there were more jobs for Collins Classics men out of the country. Colonies especially good. There was so much interest in the Brontës — any of them, didn’t matter which — that you only had to say you’d read one and the job was yours. Embarrassing, the number of offers that rolled in. But those were simpler times. The women hadn’t yet re-appropriated the women. And French theory hadn’t yet cowed the glorious pragmatism of the Anglo-Saxon mind. You read a book and extrapolated its moral, that was all there was to teaching in those days. You read the novel, you told the story, you animadverted on its adequacy to experience. Full stop.