Howard Jacobson - The Mighty Walzer

One consolation though: later I was allowed to dance with my new son-in-law.

If I had to compress all my objections into one objection then what I couldn’t forgive most about the thing Channa had done was the colour of her husband’s mouth. No daughter of mine should ever have wanted to put her lips to something as red and wet and unformed as that. That’s if they were ever intending to touch lips.

Not a subject a father should be putting his mind to? You bet it isn’t! But who were the ones making it impossible for me to do anything else? Who were the exhibitionists inviting me, by that hideous inverse law of demonstrative modesty, to imagine every immodesty known to man?

As with kindness so with chastity: it only becomes you when you keep the evidence of it to yourself.

They could of course — and this is their justification, my little ones — have me for dinner morally. They could argue that someone has to respect distance in a family; that my form of shrinking was hardly superior to theirs; that they at least don’t cut one another’s heads off in order to see how they would look on the bodies of trollops. And that they are not intending to abandon their children.

And they would have a point.

But then I could just as easily make plain to Channa that her refusal to invite my sisters — her own aunties — to her day of days, put her (as indeed it put Baruch, who should have counselled otherwise) for ever beyond the moral pale.

I learnt of this omission first on one of my mother’s absorbent sheets of Albanian notepaper. She was deeply wounded on my sisters’ behalf, but she sought as always a practical solution. We wouldn’t tell them.

‘T-G they’re not likely to hear of it where they’re living.’

I wrote back and said that under no circumstances would I dream of attending a wedding, even my own daughter’s, that excluded my sisters on the grounds that they were married to untouchables.

I also reminded her that my sisters were only living in Bury.

Back came the Albanian reply — ‘Try looking at it from Channa’s point of view. She’s marrying into a very devout and very well-respected family. If you were in Manchester more you would have a better sense of how well she’s done, and you would be more proud of her. You already have very little to do with her. If you don’t go to her wedding you will end up losing all contact with her completely, G — d forbid.’

‘Which won’t unduly worry me,’ I replied by return.

‘But it will me,’ my mother answered. ‘I’m her grandmother.’

So that was how your father came to be there for your noxious nuptials, Channaleh, though it stuck in his craw I can tell you. Yes, you are right, your father is a Godless bastard. But answer me this: if the Creator whom you and that wet-mouth Shmuelly worship holds it as a matter of urgency that the feelings of Aunty Hetty and Aunty Sandra are to be considered of no account because their husbands are defiled by the prepuces which were His fucking invention in the first place, what the Christ are you doing giving credence to a word He says?

Honouring God isn’t compulsory, you know, even if He exists. You may choose not to.

That was our big contribution however many years ago. We discriminated. We chose. With plenty to choose from, we chose Him. And because we knew how touchy He was we went along with the pretence that He was choosing us. But it is open to us at any time to go back on our decision. ‘Sorry about that but we’ve changed our minds. Your Own fault. You’ve gone off.’

Think of it this way: worse by far than a universe without a trace of a divine spark is a universe manifestly driven by One All-Powerful God who happens not to be worth a pinch of shit either as a judge or as an exemplar.

Receive then as my wedding present to you, my darling, my annual report on your progress in Theology and Human Relations:

COULD DO BETTER.

I came back to New York City without a wife … Three years of sunshine and brown grass had left me unfit for the battle zones of Manhattan’s West Side. Taxicabs would dive out of the curbs like so many sharks’ noses: I saw teeth behind the grilles, and I froze, unable to step off the sidewalk. I couldn’t go underground: the scream of subway cars frightened me …

Isolated, morose, I turned to ping-pong —

‘Ping-Pong in New York’, Jerome Charyn

THEY SPEAK A different language in Manchester today. G-MEX was where I was told I would find the World Veterans’ Ping-Pong Championships. Standing for Greater Manchester Exhibition Centre. Take the METROLINK to G-MEX. It used to be Central Station, but that’s not how they name amenities in Manchester any more. Central Station would be CENTRAX. And the Free Trade Hall? Well there wouldn’t be a Free Trade Hall. Free Trade was an idea, a principle, and who would dare associate a building with a principle these days?

There is a new concert hall in Manchester. The Bridgewater Hall, named after the canal over which it decorously presides. It could have been worse. It could have been BRIDEX or MANCON. But as a one-time resident and sometime re-visitor I’d have preferred to see it called Edification House, or the Elitism Room, or even Le Grand Theatre des Spectacles Artistiques if the English language is no longer capable of expressing a big idea. Something for Mancunians to be proud of. Something that’s not G-MEX or Boogart ‘Awl Cloof.

You can see G-MEX from the Bridgewater Hall. Position yourself on one of the upper floors and look across Lower Mosley Street (Lower Oswald Mosley Street?) and you get a good view of the grand rainbow sweep of the glass and iron fantasy that was Central Station. Catching a train meant something in those days. Departure and arrival, too, were ideas, principles, deserving of a Hall. And what a hall! Wonderful, the confidence Victorians enjoyed in their capacity to enclose any space, no matter how vast, and shelter it from nature.

I made do with the external view for a while, leafing through postcards in the concert hall shop, picking up and putting down items of useless stationery, shmying just like my old man, except that I shmy only in arts-related environments.

I bought a birthday card with a cello on it, although it was no one’s birthday. I didn’t yet have the courage to cross Lower Mosley Street. I hadn’t seen ping-pong played in Manchester for close to forty years. I wasn’t sure that my heart could take it.

Would it be like that unforgettable ping-pong virgin’s view of the twenty tables in action at the Tower Ballroom? Would it live up to my first ever tournament when I pushed open the doors to the Sports Hall at Manchester University, and pow! — the Happy Valley, the Garden of the Hesperides, green, green as far as the eye could see, like the foothills to Heaven?

Reader, it was.

Reader, it did.

Only more so.

Did they know, the architects of Central Station, when they erected their magnificent vestibule for those arriving in the city of Manchester by train, that they were also designing a ping-pong palace to take the breath away?

Forget twenty tables going at once. Forget fifty. Forget even seventy-five. One hundred. One hundred — that’s how many matches were in progress when I finally summoned up the courage to cross Lower Mosley Street, negotiate the METROLINK tracks, buy a ticket, pass the bouncer (for that’s what Manchester has come to: it has bouncers even for ping-pong), and go in. Oof plock, oof plock, times one hundred.

Did I wish I was playing? Did the hand that once had held the racket itch?

Yes.

No.

Yes.

But itch is not the word. More a longing, if a hand can long.

Leave the hand out of it. I longed. I wandered between the tables, up this row, down that row, paused, watched, clapped, walked on again, the whole time trembling with longing. Not for the game itself, though, not first and foremost for ping-pong, entrancing as it was to see it played expertly again. First and foremost what I trembled with longing for was the fellowship, the company, the players. I yearned to be among them; I yearned to be of them. Of them again. For they were my age, you see. All of them. My age or older. Veterans. And where do you see large numbers of people your own age when you’re my age? Where else on the planet could I have marched into a room the size of the Piazza del San Marco and found two hundred men and women at one hundred tables, and just as many waiting their turn, not a single one of whom was self-mutilated or self-conscious, zonked one way or another with the difficulties of being young? Leave aside what they were doing. Just concentrate on them. They were of my time. They shared my sense of the ridiculous and the tragic. And for that I loved them with a passion.