Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

We let him have her.

No one could have looked less like us, less like either side of us. From the way he dressed and carried himself you would have picked him for a market gardener, a small landowner in corduroys and green waterproofs, smelling of turnips and rabbit fur. But there was something of the New World pioneer about him too, an optimism in the way he took his time and moved his stringy joints, deceptively pared down, like a nutcracker. He was lightly freckled, with a tumble of pale orange hair and piercing powder-blue eyes. He spoke slowly, and nicely. A Manchester distinction. Doesn’t he speak nice! It was his gentle well-spokenness that had attracted Fay to him in the first place when he’d rung at random to ask the colour of her pants. None of us bore such confident leisureliness in our voices, as though there weren’t a thousand other things happening that you had to be heard over, as though there was no reason in the world to rush your words, because where you lived everything had stayed the same for centuries, and marauding Cossacks were few and far between. And yet here he was, among us, grieving with us, sorrowing for one of us. Forever to miss Fay as much as we would. Maybe more.

And maybe with more reason. Because Fay’s queer unaccustomedness, her absence of all worldly competence, had saved him from God knows what fate. Who else but Fay would have kept the phone to her ear and listened to all that filth in the first place?

So we let him have her, and more to the point, we let her have him. There was the change: we conceded they’d been lucky in each other.

Whenever one of my sisters next took home a floppy-prepuced white man the name of Duncan Fenwick would be invoked to prevent either my father or my mother — depending on whose turn it was — getting the platz. Hadn’t Duncan Fenwick, against all the odds, turned out to be a shtik naches? Hadn’t he shown himself to be a mensch, a gentleman, a person of the deepest feelings, capable of a loyalty to one of us that maybe none of us could match? So why shouldn’t this latest treife gatecrasher turn out to be the same? Duncan Fenwick had adored our Fay, alav ha-shalom, and would have made her deliriously happy: why shouldn’t Gordon le Goy do likewise with our Hetty? And in the end, as though we’d gradually stopped noticing the difference, as though it had ceased at the last to matter, that was precisely who we welcomed into the family — Gordon le Goy. Followed by Benedict von Baitsimmer. My brothers-in-law.

I say ‘welcomed’, but you know what I mean. Didn’t offer a thousand pounds in used flims to vanish out of sight. Didn’t set about with an axe. Didn’t say prayers for the dead over Hetty and Sandra as a consequence.

You know — welcomed .

But even that would have been a welcome too far in the eyes of some. All very well being accommodating, but wasn’t our neighbourliness bound to spell the beginning of the end of the Saffrons and the Walzers?

You know the game: change Walzer to le Goy in four moves, altering only one letter at a time. You have twenty seconds.

Baruch and Channa Weinberger née Walzer’s view exactly. In fact in their view the twenty seconds were already up. The dreaded thing had happened. What Hitler hadn’t achieved in Auschwitz — I know, I know: there’s no bottom to the vulgarity of the Orthodox — we Walzers had done to ourselves in north Manchester.

Well I’m their father and it’s my duty to tell them what I think. Shem zikh in dayn vaytn haldz. You should be ashamed to the depths of your throat.

To be humane means to stay calm and wait your turn. What goes around comes around. The goyim thicken our soup, we thicken theirs.

That’s always been the way of it. How otherwise do you explain the tristful warrior aspect of the Kazakh which you’ve inherited from my side of the family, and that inane insensate Junker expression which you’ve been cursed with from your mother’s? Why do you think you still don’t look like fucking Abraham?

I don’t mind admitting, though, that I’d have liked to see Gordon le Goy married to my Channa, thereby signalling the beginning of the end of the Weinbergers. But what father ever gets to live to see his fondest hopes realized? My little Channa returned full circle whence she’d came and married a Vulvick. I flew in to Manchester from Venice especially for the wedding. The full frummie monty. Bride waiting on the chuppah in her new sheitel, just come from a vaginal scrutiny in the ritual baths, hopeful as a morning flower with all her petals open. Bridegroom wrestled to her side, his fringes flying, putting up a fight — Don’t make me, don’t make me! — the one with everything to lose. How’s a father meant to feel when he sees that? You’re lucky to have her, you kuni-lemele. A boy with pin wheels stuck to his ears is lucky to have anyone, never mind my lovely Channaleh. But then I was lucky to be invited. The whole shlemozzle at the party after, too. Some party! Men on one side of the screen, women on the other, for the women must not be inflamed by the sight of the black hats dancing. But I’m coming to all that. And in mitigation of the horror of it, I must say that if I hadn’t flown to Manchester for Channa’s wedding to Shmuelly, I wouldn’t have known about the Ninth World Veterans’ Ping-Pong Championships, in town at the very same time I was.

But I’m coming to that too.

After Fay, they were lining up to drop.

My grandfather went next, of an infection brought on by ingrowing toe-nails. He had stopped cutting them and was bending them over and pushing them back inside instead. We laughed about it at the funeral.

And a few years after that, Gershom of bowel we don’t say what, quickly followed by poor Dora of loneliness. She’d got to know no one in south Manchester. Gershom had kept her locked up in his ex-boarding house, made her butter bagels and cook lokshen soup for him, made her play ping-pong with him, and once in a blue moon took her out to bingo. Her body wasn’t found until about five days after her death. Still relatively fragrant, apparently, because of how cold her bed was. Gershom had forbidden her to use the heating, except for an hour on the most freezing mornings, and she was still obeying orders.

But then I have reason to be grateful she wasn’t splashing his hard-earned spondulicks about.

Dolly died of fright, like Fay. The t word again. She too didn’t make old bones, but her passing was somehow less upsetting than the others’. Perhaps because we had mourned for her already. ‘I take consolation in this,’ my mother said, ‘she did better than any of us ever expected she would. At least she had a life.’

She had a life. She started her own dancing school in Rusholme in partnership with her shlemiel map-reading husband and was engrossed in Old Tyme every day she was alive thereafter. ‘I’m never bored,’ she told me on one of my visits home. Her voice was like a needle skidding across vinyl. ‘I don’t know what people mean when they say they’re bored. I think boredom is a betrayal of life.’ By life she meant ballroom dancing. Boredom is a betrayal of ballroom dancing. And when my mother said at least Dolly had a life she meant at least she had ballroom dancing. Whether she ever got over Dora’s betrayal of her we never knew. But Dora stopped dancing once Gershom took her south, never swirled under a spinning ball of light again, and that must have made it easier for Dolly.

So they were all gone, all the Shrinking Violets, and my box was empty now. Not an S for spinster Saffron left for me to cut to pieces even in my imagination.

My mother took the passing of her sisters hard. It was an accumulation of grief. With the death of each sister she had to mourn afresh the death of the sister previous, and the death of her mother in all of them. She carried her head slightly aback, like a boxer, knowing only too well where the next blow was coming from, but not knowing when. ‘Aloof,’ some members of my father’s family called her, but no one could have been less aloof. She was punch-drunk.