Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

Enough, Oliver, stop, you’ll make me die laughing. Well, why not. Better that way. Die choking on your own laughter, Dad. Die grinning that big daft boyish shmerkle with which you won the heart of my mother, the one you employed to wow them at the World Machareike Championships that sultry Saturday afternoon in 1933 when you felt that something big was still within your grasp.

The one I didn’t inherit.

So no, I wouldn’t stop.

‘And what about the look on your face,’ I went on, ‘when Copestake called me a you-know-what? And the cops had to come to pull you off him? And what about the time you let me roast at the back of the edge with a nest of suitcases under my jumper? And what about Sheeny’s mad antics when he’d plunder everything and you’d get furious with him …’

But he was asleep now, haggard, ravaged, his breath troubled and uncertain, his cheeks wet.

And now my mother sits alone, surrounded by swag, with her head set further back on her shoulders than ever, tensed, blind-eyed and all-seeing like Tiresias. Yes, she knows where the blow will come from. It will come from us, the children or the children’s children, the only ones she has left. She has the air of someone who now does not expect to die herself. She will be here until we have all gone. It’s her job to be here until we have all gone, to shepherd us out, as she shepherded us in. To bear the scars left by the going of every one of us. So she sits and waits. And counts.

The last time I saw her she apologized for having given me life.

That’s how grave we have become, what’s left of us.

‘Don’t be foolish,’ I said. ‘What can you possibly suppose you have to apologize for? I have loved, I am loving , my life. I would not have been without it. I thank you for it.’

‘Do you?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘That makes me feel better,’ she said. ‘But I know how hard it’s been for you.’

I shrugged, as if hard was nothing. ‘That’s part of it,’ I said. But then suddenly rebelled against the idea that I’d had it hard at all. ‘Not that I’m sure I know what you mean,’ I added.

She looked at me long and evenly, my mother Tiresias. What did she know? I found my colour changing beneath her scrutiny. A phenomenon that had not occurred for forty years. Did she know about my box? Did she know what I’d done to Grandma, and to Aunty Dora and to Aunty Dolly and to Aunty Fay? Did she know about Lorna Peachley and what I’d wanted her to do to me? Some things a mother should not know about her son. Some things a son should not know his mother knows.

But if she did know she kept the details to herself. ‘You’ve had your disappointments,’ she said.

I wasn’t sure I even wanted to concede that. Doesn’t I’ve had my disappointments usually mean I’ve had only disappointments. Whereas I —

‘You’ve nothing to apologize for,’ I said again, backing off. This was all too elemental for me. Another reason I was holed up in Venice — to escape the final act of Families.

‘Well I hope you’re telling me the truth,’ she said.

And that was that.

In fairness to her, it’s hardly surprising her mood was grave. I was over for Channa’s wedding, and a lot of unanswered family questions were suddenly back buzzing around our heads.

Sabine had returned to Manchester with the children immediately we split up. No point hanging around the Christian world once Mr Shaygets himself had pissed off. From a fatherly point of view there was some advantage in this since it meant I could see my children whenever I was home for a funeral. But I suppose that from a filial point of view that was hardly well calculated to give me a good press. How come Daddy only ever comes to see us when someone’s died? Eventually Sabine would have had to tell them. Daddy isn’t a good man.

Herself, the moment she took up her Manchester matronage Sabine reverted to being the good woman it was always in her Vulvick genes to be. No more hiding in cupboards with waiters from the Mogambo whom she was unable to respect. She let it be known that she had her one good eye fixed on an Orthodox marriage the second time around, but there was nothing doing. The Orthodox don’t give second time around. She settled in the end for quasi-mystical Zionist folksie, a freckled Canadian/Israeli who’d seen God at the Wailing Wall and now ran a travel agency on Bury Old Road, specializing in holidays for people desirous of doing likewise, and this was enough to direct my children into a course I would never have chosen for them. By the age of six, Channa (at this time still Charlotte) knew the words of every new Israeli folk song, was starting to be kitted out in those long, ill, shapeless you-can’t-see-my-cunt dresses to which all eerie cults are partial, had turned cross-eyed on account of the amount of Torah reading she was doing, and looked like the mother of ten children herself. Only two years her senior, though he was already more bent and crooked than his great-grandfathers on both sides, little Baruch (at this time still known as Marvin) was as fringed as a sultan’s tent, and as white and furry as a moth. When I lifted him up in my arms I felt I was holding cushion stuffing.

‘This isn’t my wish for them, you know,’ I told Sabine. But there is no repeating her reply.

It was getting time for me to back off anyway. Sabine’s new husband was wanting Marvin and Charlotte to call him daddy, and that’s the point at which you either stand and fight or quit the scene once and for all.

And we all know what a fighter I am.

If I found it undignified to battle for the points at deuce in a game of ping-pong, imagine how I relished the prospect of brawling over who had the right to have my children call him daddy. You want? You want that badly? Here, have, you sick fuck!

I consoled myself, in so far as I allowed myself to think about it once I was back in Saskatchewan or Wellington or wherever, by imagining a time when they would rebel and come to me. I will be in the middle of a class on Silas Marner ; there will be an unexpected knock on my office door; I will shock my students by my trembling; I will rise and go to see who it is who’s knocking, and I will find — yes, them, them, who else, no longer moth white, no longer cross-eyed, no longer flocked and frocked and fringed, two of the fairest and most secular children you have ever seen, bouncing up and down on the balls of their bold bare brown feet, crying, ‘Daddy, Daddy, look at us, we have run away from Yahweh!’ And I will take them in and smother them in kisses.

Well, I was almost right. They did rebel. They did reject their mother and their visionary second daddy. But not for the reasons I’d have liked. They rejected them for not being fervid enough. ‘But Mummy, Mummy, Moshiach is coming!’ they cried, changing their names to you-know-what and flinging themselves down that black well of messianic Hasidism of which Manchester is today as much a thriving battery farm as it once was of Yo-Yoists and Mosley’s Black Shirts. I suppose I should have been flattered. What are Hasids after all but mental orgiasts from our side of the Bug? In their own way Channa and Baruch were turning tail on their cold maternal Junker ancestry in favour of their daddy’s (their real daddy’s) bunch — the whirling Russki Walzers. A compliment to me, n’est çe pas?

Maybe that was why I got my invitation. The bride and groom must have wanted their union enriched by one drop of genuine Ukrainian peasant blood.

I’ve told you what I thought of the wedding. It turned my stomach. I watched my mother ratchet back her head another couple of degrees, then dab her eyes in the fashion of all grandmas; a marriage is a marriage is a marriage. I watched her lose herself in ceremony, shuffle back and forth in time, remember hers, remember mine, remember Fay’s that never was, but in the end I suspect the masculinism must have turned her stomach too. Not that I was able to find out. We weren’t allowed to sit together.